American scholars say that Stalinist pseudo-Marxism is the ‘secular religion of Soviet society’.92 Here we find its trinity, its saints and apostles; here are ‘the holy scriptures of the Soviet belief system: the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin’.93 Even such an Eastern rite is practised as the mummifying of the remains of saints — Lenin, then Stalin. ‘The so-called Red Corners (displaying the pictures of leaders and founding fathers, slogans and banners) are reminiscent of small shrines,’ writes Hollander. ‘Masses of people assemble to listen to secular sermons (at speeches and rallies). All these are among the quasi-religious manifestations of the Soviet belief system.’94 Recently the Red Corners received a series of pictures which tell the life story of Saint Brezhnev. A Soviet person can count thousands of examples of this sort of thing, and it was not accidental that even after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Yu. Karyakin spoke of the link between Stalinism and religion.
That such critical thinkers as Marx, Engels and Lenin should have become objects of worship is one of history’s many bad jokes. What matters more to us now is that a crude pseudo-religion cannot, of course, compete on equal terms with the centuries-old tradition of Christianity. But when he rejects Stalinism in the name of Orthodoxy, a dissident intellectual is not making such a decisive turn as he thinks. It was precisely Stalinist pseudo-religiosity that fostered his inclination towards the religiosity of Orthodoxy. The new ideas turn out to be suspiciously like the old. It is typical that many are drawn to religion not by moral preaching or Christian internationalism (in this respect people like G. Pomerants and L. Pinsky are rather exceptional) but by ceremonies, rituals and authority — in short, not by those features that contrast religion to Stalinism but those in which they are akin. This is particularly noticeable when we consider the Orthodox nationalists.
Among them are very many notorious reactionaries like Glazunov, anti-Semites like Pikul, monarchists and Fascists. It is the very absence of a clear-cut demarcation between the different tendencies in the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ — and their common orientation upon the past makes such a demarcation extremely difficult — that has transformed this movement, as a whole, into a dangerous reactionary phenomenon. The attractiveness and spirituality of the ‘traditionalists’ in the cultural sphere can be exploited in politics by ultra-reactionaries. One of the dissidents compared the country’s rulers to ‘satiated wolves’ and the monarchists and nationalists to hungry ones: ‘idealists can be such good terrorists. If these nationalists come to power, it would become very dangerous.’95 Disquiet is caused, too, by the fact that extremist groups among the nationalists find support among certain strata of the ruling statocracy.
One of Batkin’s comments is very much to the point here. In circumstances when the old ideology has outlived itself and no longer attracts anyone, when ideological hunger appears, the desire grows to ‘lean against’ something — to find justification for one’s conduct, moral support, in some sort of absolute values. The national-religious idea may serve as such a support. It becomes all the more attractive because on the one hand it has its heroes and martyrs and is oppositional, while on the other the rulers look indulgently upon it and indirectly encourage the growth of Russian nationalism. It is symptomatic that for some time now attacks on Solzhenitsyn, who has become since his exile to the West the chief ideologist of the nationalist reaction, have practically disappeared from the official press.
All this, of course, does not exhaust the question. The polemic around the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ in the USSR has revived the old debate between the Slavophils and the Westernists. The mere fact that after a hundred years the old problems again start to be discussed with the same fervour — and not at all as problems of the past, but as relevant to the present time — tells us that they have not yet found their solution in history. At the beginning of the 1980s Russia finds herself once more in an extremely uncertain situation. The question of her path in history has risen again.
The acuteness of the problem was already apparent during the 1969 discussion about the Slavophils in Voprosy Literatury. The discussion was opened with an appeal from the editors to ‘look calmly and thoroughly’ into the heart of the matter.96 No calm debate took place, however, nor could such a thing have been managed. ‘Ideological rather than literary issues come under discussion,’ notes M. Chapman in the American journal Studies on Soviet Thought.97 Opening the debate, A. Yanov, in a critique of the Slavophils’ populism, said that this proceeded from the principle: ‘before you know “the people” you must love them.’ Otherwise, ‘you may unexpectedly notice in them not at all what you need to find, you may insult their divine holiness and purity.’98 On the whole, though, Yanov called for an objective approach to Slavophilism. It was, after all, an oppositionist movement, counterposing ‘Russia’ and ‘the people’ to ‘authority’, which it treated as essentially ‘un-Russian’. (Soon Solzhenitsyn was to speak in the same way about the Soviet period, although the Petersburg period would seem to him perfectly national.)
But, as has often happened in history, one religion called another into existence. Slavophilism, having joined battle with despotism under conditions when there was no strong political opposition, counterposed to it a utopia which consisted essentially of a deification of ‘the simple people’, a hypertrophied, distorted democratism, a cult of social idolatry… A false and impoverished sociological model of reality led to an enormous general mistake in estimation of the political situation and the relation of social forces. This also led to rupture with the real political opposition, inability to achieve unity with the progressive forces, that unity which Herzen strove for so unsuccessfully with the Slavophils. This sort of religion of ‘the simple people’ ruled out the intelligentsia as a positive force and fatally led its adherents into the ranks of the chief adversary of the intelligentsia — the Black Hundreds, who became, in the last analysis, the heirs of Slavophilism.99
Yanov was well aware that the questions being discussed were contemporary when he emphasized that it was because it underestimated democracy and European humanism that Slavophilism degenerated. Although it began as an oppositionist ideology it gradually acquired conservative, pro-status-quo characteristics.
The neo-Slavophils made their voice heard through the notorious critic V. Kozhanov. He began with the wonderful statement that even in olden times the supporters of the idea ‘Moscow is the Third Rome’, which gave ideological justification for the ‘right’ of the Russian state to world domination, were ‘the most advanced people of their time’.100 Russian ‘originality’ was ‘not in the least identical with conservatism’, Kozhanov affirmed, and one ought not to make nasty parallels with the Black Hundreds.101
A. Yanov sees the main flaw in Slavophilism as the utopian character of their social programme. But was not the Westernists’ idea of transplanting European ways on to Russian soil utopian? Or is A. Yanov saying that the revolution of 1905, and, still more, that of 1917, transformed Russia in the image of Western Europe?102