This shrewd observation provides the best explanation of an ideological phenomenon which could be called ‘anti-ideas’.
The expression may seem somewhat artificial, but in my view it defines precisely enough the essence of a whole series of ideological systems which arose in the dissident movement and which were openly proclaimed in samizdat while also influencing legal literature. What was common to them all was their close links with the official ideology, so that they appeared as its shadow, its counterpart and its ‘reverse side’, but in no case an alternative to it. This is most noticeable in the case of Solzhenitsyn and the Russian nationalists who came to the front politically at the very end of the sixties and in the seventies.
The intelligentsia suddenly began taking their vacations in the village at the graves of ancestors instead of in the Crimea, the Caucasus or the Baltic,’ Alexander Yanov recalls.
Suddenly everyone noticed that the peasantry of north-western Russia — the cradle of the nation — was disappearing. Young people began to wander around the dying villages collecting icons, and soon there was almost no intellectual’s home in Moscow which was not decorated with symbols of Russian Orthodoxy. The writer Vladimir Soloukhin appeared in the House of Writers wearing a signet ring which carried the image of Nicholas II. An insane demand arose on the black market for books by ‘White Guardsmen’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who had died in emigration.76
The numerous nationalist manifestations of this order naturally shocked and frightened the democratically inclined intellectuals, all the more because the ‘Neo-Slavophils’ of the seventies behaved aggressively and enjoyed — at first — obvious tolerance by the authorities. This caused Yanov to fear that Russian nationalism was developing ‘an alternative strategy which the autocratic regime could use for its survival under conditions of crisis.’77 Unfortunately, the representatives of the traditional left-wing intelligentsia failed to note the important fact that the nationalists remained almost as much isolated from the masses as the ‘Lefts’ themselves. Whereas the drama of Novy Mir had been played out before millions of people, the ‘thaw’ had affected the country’s entire population in one way or another, and tens of thousands of workers took part in the strikes of the sixties and seventies, the comedy of the ‘Slavophil Renaissance’ was performed within a relatively narrow circle of the intellectual elite and part of the middle strata.
Yanov’s book reflected very well the panic that seized the liberal intellectuals when the nationalists came on the scene. This was primarily an ideological panic, due to the helplessness of the ideas of 1956 in the face of a new situation and a new danger. The fear of the Neo-Slavophils felt by some left-wingers, though well founded, was greatly exaggerated. It is typical that Yanov is disposed to see the incident in the restaurant of the Central Writers’ Club and Soloukhin’s escapade, or statements made by the mediocre artist Ilya Glazunov, as events of almost planetary or at least national significance. Highly unconvincing, too, are Yanov’s arguments to the effect that Russia’s entire history is cyclical and a period of mild rule, such as Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s, is bound to be followed by a terrorist reaction in the spirit of Stalin and using nationalist slogans. There are no special laws of Russian history, nor can there be. The causes of political ‘thaws’ and ‘frosts’ have to be sought in concrete social processes, in political and class struggle. Abstract speculations are jejune, for history cannot be explained by any general schemas assembled through arbitrary combinations of facts. In order to understand the past and conceive the possible variants of the future one has to think concretely, taking into account social, economic and political conditions, the level of technological development and actual class interests. Otherwise, the construction of general schemas remains a mere futile pastime.
Any arguments concerning the new danger from the right are senseless in so far as they ignore the qualitative difference between the present industrial and consumer society in the USSR and Stalin’s totalitarianism, or such important economic factors as the Soviet economy’s dependence on the world market (which was not at all the case in Stalin’s time),78 the specific features of present-day science and technology, and so on.
It must not be concluded from what has been said that the nationalists are not dangerous. They may enlist the support of the declassed section of the population, the numerous Soviet lumpenproletariat, but only if the masses are not mobilized behind a different banner. In the struggle for the masses, the tendency which offers the clearest social and economic alternative will triumph. And it is precisely an economic programme and social ideas capable of mobilizing the masses that the neo-Slavophils lack.
Nevertheless, the development of the ideology of the New Right and their popularity are symptomatic. The crisis of the official ideology after 1968 occurred, as I have said, simultaneously with a crisis of the opposition, which had come out precisely for the purity of this official ideology. For intellectuals who had experienced 1956, 1966 and 1968, the crisis of ideas was extremely serious. The growth in the popularity of the New Right was evidence that the Russian intelligentsia was undergoing, in the seventies, the most profound spiritual crisis in its history. The situation that arose after the crushing of the ‘Prague spring’ can be compared only to the spiritual crisis that followed the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. But the crisis of the seventies was deeper and more acute. The earlier crisis produced only Vekhi, but this one produced a whole number of similar tendencies: with this difference, that the Vekhi writers were very much more profound in their ideas than are the lost intellectuals of today.
The collapse of the liberal ideology of ‘true Marxism-Leninism’ led to a deep division among the intelligentsia. While one section gave up its mythological illusions of liberal pseudo-Marxism in favour of scientific Marxism — and, on the political plane, of a conception of class struggle quite alien to ‘the children of ’56’, who had at first supposed that ‘ideas rule the world’ — the other section turned sharply to the right.
The strongest tendency ‘to the right of the government’ is indeed Russian nationalism. This, however, cannot be considered in purely political categories, for the nationalists, as a definite tendency, are also organized around problems of culture. At the centre of attention this time is the question of Russia’s originality and its alleged Sonderweg.
It is well known that both the Marxists and the Westernist-minded liberal intellectuals reacted with great hostility to the upsurge of nationalism. This attitude was most sharply expressed by the brilliant polemicist and culturologist L. Batkin, when he remarked that ‘some people feel a “nostalgia for the East” which, though worthy of respect, is reactionary and therefore doomed.’79 Batkin reproached these people for fearing to assume responsibility for their own actions and choice of direction, preferring to rely on ready-made absolute ‘truths’ — that is, clichés. A quest for one’s own path and spiritual freedom, he insisted, does not mean a fall from grace. Some Christians, too (for example L. Pinsky and G. Pomerants), reacted negatively to the new nationalism even though the nationalists usually claim to be religious. Before starting to criticize Russian nationalism, however, we must note its heterogeneous character. Among the representatives of the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’, as the nationalists like to call themselves, there are moderate, liberal-minded people like S. Likhachev, the author of Zametki o russkom. There is a whole group — among whom are numbered our ‘village prose’ writers V. Belov, V. Rasputin, G. Troepol’sky and V. Soloukhin — who are mostly connected with the journal Nash Sovremennik, which, in the words of W. Kasack, ‘has gradually become the organ linking the Russophil authors with the countryside.’80 They see in their link with tradition, with popular culture, an alternative to official pseudo-populism, and turn to the values of the past in order to counterpose them to contemporary ‘consumer society’.