Melent'ev's fate seems especially odd in comparison with that of another official of the Central Committee, who i 1 his day soared even h;gher I have in mind A. N. Yakovlev, who for several years was the act ng head of the Central Commntee Propaganda Department — that is to say, was the Party's chief .deologist,
The Yakovlev Affair
Yakovlev, who stood on the left flank of the Brezhnevist Centre, was concerned not only with deological considerations, but also, one must assume, with personal matters. He was in effect performing the functions of a Department head though he did not carry that title He was too far to the left for that. His reputation carried along with it certain obligations. In order to justify his 'leftism', Yakovlev tried to move the centre of gravity of the Brezhnevist faction to the left. The most handy political lever for doing this was the struggle against Russopfplism As far back as 1968, Yakovlev had been trying to transform Russophiiism mto an object of political struggle higher up He was behind the crmcal salvo fired at Chalmaevism; he was behind the article in Kommunist; he was behind the session of the Secretariat at which the fate of Molodaia gvatdia s editor was decided.
However, at this point he ran into a brick wall. Resistance to the attack on Molodaia gvardia was coming from the Cultural Department of the Central Comm^tee itself Shauro was clever enough to deflect Yakovlev's attacks so that they did not pass from the realm of permissible ideological debate to the fatal realm of political deviation.51 After several years of unsuccessful manoeuvring and intrigue, and having tri ed all of the behind-the-scenes approaches and methods of inc rect attack, Yakovlev was compelled to stake everything on a single card. Like Melent'ev, he too put his career on the line; but un ^ke Melent'ev, he was well and truly burned.
The moment he chose for h*. attack seemed appropriate On the one hand, the 50th anniversary of the multinational Soviet Union was due shortly; on the other, detente with the West was n full swing. It was a matter of prov lg, rst, that contrary to Shauro's assertions, Russophi' sm was not a lyrical nostalgia for the rural past but a wholly political, anti-Marxist and even 'counter-revolutionary' phenomenon; second, that Russophilism stimulated nationalist sen <ments m the non-Russian republics of the USSR; and third, that it was incompatible with the 'course of the XXIVth Congress' — the Congress of Detente.
On 15 November 1972, an enormous article by Yakovlev, taking up two newspaper pages, appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta under the title Against Anti-Historicism'. 'In essence,' Yakovlev wrote, 'there ; behind all this an ideological position which is dangerous in that objectively it contains an attempt to bring back the past.'52 As if this didn't go far enough, Yakovlev added, 'The polemics [of the Russophiles] deal not only with Chernyshevskii, but also with Lenin.' No one in the USSR — not even Stalin — had ever permitted themselves to argue with Lenin (or with Chernyshevskii for that matter) — except the Russophiles, that is. It follows therefore that Russophilism must be an extraordinary phenomenon, by no means confined to the 1 nits of permissible debate. One has to have lived one's life in the Soviet Un;on to understand how ominous accusations such as Yakovlev's sounded — even in 1972.
To support his case, Yakovlev laid out a vast, truly alarming, panorama of the penetration of Russophilism into all fields of1 terature and the social sciences — from 'Shevtsov's hysterical writings' to the Soviet Encyclopedia. He uncovered Russophilism in historiography, in belles-lettres, in poetry, in literary scholarship — everywhere. Very carefully, but persistently, he tried to present Russophi1 ism as a diversionary alien ideology, of a kind unheard of since the destruct. m of all the Party opposition groups, which was especially dangerous in that it helped 'bourgeois propaganda' to spark off conflicts between the nationalities of the USSR It is well known wrote Yakovlev. 'what an active campaign is being waged by our class antagonists in connection with the 50th anniversary of the multinational Soviet state.'53 Furthermore, unlike Dement'ev's, there were no slip-ups in Yakovlev's article; it was one huge, smooth, dogmatic monolith.
The Party's chief ideologist is not a Novyi mir author. One cannot reply to him by a letter in Ogonek. No one dared indulge in polemics with Yakovlev — no one. that is, except the samizdat journal — Veche (Assembly). In an editorial entitled 'The Struggle Against So-Called Russophilism, or the Road to Suicide for ihe State', it subjected Yakovlev to a devastating critique. Only the Dissident Right could permit itself a critique whose methodology was so elementary: You rely on Lenm? All right. Then be consistent Lenin wrote about national self-determination, about the 'smothering of the Ukraine So why don't you suggest, along the lines of Lenin, that we stop smothering the Ukraine' right now"5 And further: If comrade Yakovlev doesn't like the union of Central Asia with Russia, then why, on the occasion of its anniversary, doesn't he propose the dissolution of the Soviet Union? 54 In other words, quoting Lenin as Yakovlev does can lead in Veche's opinion to 'suicide for the state,' and hence outright anti-Sovietism 'In 1918,' accuses Veche, the So\ iet Republic was reduced to the dimensions of the Muscovite kingdom during the time of Ivan III. This is what the Russophiles persecutor dreams of '5S
One would think the chief Party deologist could hardly be toppled with arguments like this — let alone arguments that issued from a semi-underground samizdat journal. Nevertheless toppled he was. Like Dement'ev, he suffered for having written an orthodox Marxist article, a 'refutation of anti-Partv ideology. Who was behind the fall of this high-flying ideologist, suddenly demoted to the rank of ambassador (and sent off to Canada)? Once agani, we can only guess.56 We know one thing though with his fall the campaign against Russophilism not only ceased being a political arena, but the arena was totally closed off Clearly, very powerful forces on high were concerned not to let the edi tonal board of Molodaia gvardia go under (the way the editorial board of Novyi mv did) and to assure ihat. the Establishment Right retained its forces intact for better times. These forces however, could not be allowed to remain a threat to the Brezhnevist Centre. The highly placed patron of Molodaia gvardia, Poliansk i was quietly dropped from the Politburo and ultimately shared the fate of Yakovlev (he was sent to Japan).
The true lesson of the 'Yakovlev affair was something entirely different. It was that someone would not allow the Establishment
Right to share the fate of the Establishment liberals, or let the Melent'ev affair end in the same way as the Yakovlev affa.r. Somehow, the editorial board of Molodaia gvardia, which was politically defeated, nevertheless retained its personnel, its position and its ideological ammunition What for? Only the future can answer that.
Summary of Young Guardism
Bringing to the centre of the contemporary world drama — in place of the struggle of 'socialism' against capitalism' — the conflict of 'spirits': the Russian vs. the bourgeois (which is embodied in 'Americanism').
Bringing to the centre of the contemporary Russian drama the conflict of 'the people' versus the 'diplomaed masses' of 'cosmopolitan shopkeepers'.