sneered Kozhanov, thinking that Yanov would be unable to answer him in the censored press. What was utopian, argued this champion of ‘originality’, was not the idea of a special Russian road but the hope of bringing European democracy and political freedom on to Russian soil. Kozhanov lauded ‘the thousand-years’ tradition of Russian thought’ whose exponents were the Slavophils, with their anti-individualism, their ‘people’s idea’. Western observers noted with interest that ‘the religious aspects of Slavophilism were certainly not dismissed by the contributors to the symposium.’103 It was typical that nobody here took it upon him- or herself to criticize the Slavophils on that account — so great was aversion to the official atheist propaganda.
Finally, Kozhanov drew the general conclusion that it is Western thought, which has given birth to existentialism, that is based on an ‘irrationalist, anti-scientific disposition’, whereas ‘Slavophilism, in contrast to the existentialist philosophy, was imbued with the sense of historicism.’104 Hitherto it had been supposed that the idea of a possible return to the past which was cultivated by the Slavophils was anti-historical, but for Kozhanov — fully in the spirit of Stalinism — it was the nationalist utopia that was to be declared the only scientific and historical one.
Nevertheless, Yanov contrived to answer Kozhanov’s provocative questions by referring to Lenin, who considered the 1917 Revolution not at all a manifestation of Russian ‘originality’ but rather a product of very distinctive capitalist development, a retarded and uneven Europeanization. ‘Lenin was right,’ said Yanov categorically, and this time it was his opponents who had to refrain from comment. In the pages of Voprosy Literatury, at any rate…
On the whole, it must be said that despite Yanov’s subsequent complaints, the neo-Slavophils of 1969 were as yet too weak and too few to give battle to the left-wing intellectuals in the pages of Voprosy Liter atury, and there is no reason to consider that Yanov suffered defeat. But the ‘originalists’ did not lay down their arms, and the social situation favoured them. At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties neo-Slavophil ideas were being proclaimed by that same Kozhanov even more openly than during the discussion in 1969.
It is, in general, very easy to rethink the history of our literature so as to make it correspond better to ‘the Russian idea’. All that is needed is ‘slightly’ to disregard obvious facts. Thus the pessimist Chaadaev, with his revolt against Russia’s history, becomes for Kozhanov a crier of the ‘supreme superiority of Russian culture over all [!] others’.105 Arbitrarily plucked-out quotations, assembled without any respect for Chaadaev’s spiritual path and ideological striving, are summoned to support this ‘stunning’ discovery. But the repainting of Chaadaev as a Slavophil is, so to speak, a private hobby of Kozhanov’s. Much more interesting are his general theoretical statements. The Russian people — and here Kozhanov refers to Metropolitan Illarion — is the bearer not of ‘law’ but of ‘grace’. Law, Kozhanov explains, means ‘spiritual slavery’, whereas grace ‘is the embodiment of spiritual freedom’.106 Here we see displayed the superiority of the Russians — free in the ‘highest’ sense — over the ‘limited’ Western Europeans. Lest any doubt remain, Kozhanov explains that ‘it is not so much a question of Christian as of Russian consciousness.’ Further: ‘Illarion expressed not a strictly Christian idea, but a Russian one.’107 He who possesses grace has, in essence, no need of law, so that there is nothing bad about the fact that Russian history is for the most part a history of lawlessness (Kozhanov says nothing about the fact that it is also a history of self-sacrificing struggle for law).
Kozhanov’s arguments were not original. The idea that Russia has no need of laws because it possesses a higher freedom was familiar to the old Slavophils — to K. Aksakov, for instance. In this connection Berdyaev wrote that such a theory ‘is blatantly incompatible with historical reality and reveals the unhistorical character of the fundamental ideas of the Slavophils about Russia and the West.’108 True, this sort of contempt for law was propagated in Russia for centuries and entered into the ideology of official Orthodoxy and the Muscovite autocracy. Thus, for Ivan the Terrible legality was something base and secondary, and lawlessness was not to be reckoned among the worst of sins: ‘For if my transgressions are more numerous than the sand of the sea, yet I trust in the grace of God’s mercy: he can drown my transgressions with the depths of his mercy.’109 Instead, revolt, dissidence, variance from the ideology of the Russian state was unpardonable and unjustifiable, and ‘the dread Tsar’, who believed in the impunity of his transgressions, warned Prince Kurbsky that in denouncing his sovereign’s lawlessness he had surely ‘destroyed [his] soul’ and even ‘risen against God’.110 A similar contempt for law as something beneath consideration is characteristic also of Stalinism.
It has to be admitted that law-consciousness was not able to develop to the Western level in the Russian people, either. But it was precisely against this anti-humanist, anti-law thinking, implanted by the ruling class, that modern Russian democratic culture fought unremittingly. Kozhanov not only presents that barbarism to us as a model, but even depicts it as the overcoming of the ‘narrowness’ of Western humanism.
The theme of ‘spiritual freedom’, in contrast to ‘law’ and ‘right’ — in short, to civic freedom — is a favourite idea of the Russian ‘back-to-the soil’ writers who, instead of combating slavery, seek freedom in it. In Kozhanov we find everything — eulogy of the ‘living’ Byzantine culture, abuse of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and Zionism. In general cosmopolitans are, theoretically, ‘persons without a homeland’, while Zionists are those who call on the Jews ‘to find a homeland’. Kozhanov calls Zionism a form of cosmopolitanism. It is not hard to explain this strange use of words. ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘Zionist’ were both terms used under Stalin as synonyms for Jews… Anti-Semitism was concealed under phrases about anti-Zionism and anti-cosmopolitanism.
Here we learn that Batu’s empire, which destroyed great civilizations, was no worse than the empire of Charlemagne, which laid the foundations of modern Western civilization. According to Kozhanov there was ‘no fundamental difference between them’.111 Generally speaking, the Tatar yoke did no particular harm to Russia, but unfortunately ‘the Tatars…fell under the influence of cosmopolitanism’! Consequently, it became necessary to fight against ‘the cosmopolitan horde’.112 Thus Kozhanov is able, with a clear conscience, to justify Russian nationalism, because it developed ‘under the pressure of cosmopolitan tendencies’.113 (The writer forgets to mention that for the last 400 years nationalism was the ruling ideology, and there was no ‘pressure’ on Russian thought except that of the nationalist state.) Later, Kozhanov makes two or three more historical ‘discoveries’ — that Russian history is less sanguinary than that of the West, that there was always more creative freedom here than in Western Europe, and so on. In general, as he sees it, Russians were more complete persons than Westerners. Over there were ‘handicapped’ people, whereas here we had ‘personalities’ (‘blessed with grace’): ‘It is impossible not to see that the fullest freedom enjoyed by a handicapped person has nothing to offer a personality whose aim is a way and meaning of life that lies beyond that freedom.’114