It all began with M. Lobanov’s ‘Educated Philistinism’, in which he spoke in a contemptuous way about today’s left-wing intellectuals, giving as an example of an ‘educated philistine’ the distinguished Russian poet Bulat Okudzhava. Complaining of ‘the overflow of so-called education’, he fulminated against the non-Russian producers Meyerhold and Efros, as destroyers of traditional values.119 The dangerous and utterly useless diffusion of knowledge, Lobanov considered, detaches culture from its soil among the people and leads to the destruction of tradition. ‘Will there be an end to this havoc?’ he asked dramatically, forgetting that he himself was acting as an extreme nihilist and vandal, attacking the best representatives of twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Kozhanov usually does, Lobanov recalled that Herzen was disappointed with the West — ‘forgetting’ to mention that, still earlier, Herzen had become disappointed with Russia and never returned to his homeland. Lobanov’s article was a first trial flight. Five months later V. Chalmaev published in the same journal his manifesto entitled ‘Inevitability’.
This began with a crude mistake by the writer, when he called Faust ‘a youth’ who ‘was ready to make a pact with the Devil’.120 All that followed was in the same spirit. I do not know whether the millions of Russians who have fallen during the twentieth century in wars, revolutions and modern Thermidors would agree with Chalmaev, but with truly cannibalistic optimism he wrote: ‘Fortunately, the history of our homeland is indeed filled with great volcanic eruptions.’121 Later on we learned (as you see, the nationalists’ books are full of discoveries) that everything harmful to us was brought in from the West, that ‘realm of everything alien’.122 Subsequently he summoned to his banner Lenin, Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Dmitri Donskoy, Nekrasov, Yermak, the Patriarch Hermogen, Stenka Razin, Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Peter I, Ivan the Terrible and, of course, that singer of reaction Konstantin Leont'ev. Even such mutual enemies as ‘the clever Patriarch Nikon’ and ‘Archpriest Avvakum who suffered death by fire’ are together here, all expressing the greatness of the Russian soul, before which the European appears petty and ‘bourgeois’. Over there they have parliaments, democratic movements and other ‘amusing happenings’, but in our country, ‘once in a hundred years the Russian peasant, coarsely clad and flogged with the knout, stepped forward’, and in one day so acted that the whole world was turned upside down.123 In this, it must be said, there is some truth, but is it only a matter for rejoicing?
Chalmaev also calls Marx to his aid. It turns out that he did not write Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century against Russia’s Tsarist despotism (which is why this book has, to this day, not been published in the USSR) but, on the contrary, spoke ‘with profound respect’ of ‘the soaring genius of the Russian state’.124
The main danger, according to Chalmaev, comes from the Left, from the Novy Mir crowd. ‘Demagogic “progressive” slogans’ seduce healthy youngsters, turning them into ‘voluntary, selfless cannon-fodder for cynical corrupters’.125 The struggle between the two systems is presented as a struggle between the Russian principle (which is also Communist) and the Western. Under Stalin and his successors we followed ‘that historical track’ along which, down to the revolution of 1917, our people ‘marched for centuries’ and ‘are now on their way to Communism’.126 So that if we are to believe Chalmaev, we have been moving towards Communism since the time of Ivan the Terrible, and Stalin was a great man precisely because he embodied this ‘Russian idea’. There is an element of truth in Chalmaev’s notions. Stalin was indeed much closer to Ivan the Terrible than to Marx, from whom he took only phraseology. It is to Chalmaev’s credit that he was the first of the Stalinists to boast of this openly, but it was on this very point that the Lefts tried to take him at his word. A. Dement'ev, in Novy Mir, called Chalmaev & Co. anti-Marxists, and in reply came a collective letter signed by eleven reactionaries of various sorts, published in Ogonyok.127 Yanov wrote that the statement in Ogonyok might have created an ‘alliance of right-wing factions’, but this did not come about, owing to the ‘furious polemics’ by the classical Stalinists of Oktyabr against the national-Bolshevism of Molodaya Gvardiya.128
That may be true, but this explanation is insufficient. The essence of the problem was not that nationalist and even Fascist ideology was growing stronger in Russia. That is not a new danger for us: the Black Hundreds appeared in Russia long before Italian Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. The distinctive character of the new danger lies in the fact that out of disappointment with socialism, nationalist and even antidemocratic ideologies have, for the first time in history, found support among some groups of our intelligentsia.129 And it is a question of a struggle for the intelligentsia, because in their struggle to win the masses, the Black Hundreds choose different means from the writing of literary criticism. Today they have turned their attention not to the declassed elements or even to the extreme reactionaries among the statocracy,130 but to the intellectuals. In order to succeed among the intelligentsia they have, from time to time, to demonstrate opposition and independence. If, in 1969, the neo-Slavophils had united openly with the Stalinists, that would have been suicidal for them. On the contrary, the spiritual kinship between the two groups was carefully concealed.
In this sense, Molodaya Gvardiya acted very unwisely. By depicting Stalinism as ‘the embodiment of the Russo-Byzantine tradition’131 it revealed what others had hidden. The nationalists were strong in so far as they presented themselves as bearers of a spiritual alternative and tried to show the liberal Westernizers and Marxists as incapable of breaking with the system. That was why the Orthodox and oppositionist ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ of Nash Sovremennik had such success. True, Molodaya Gvardiya also won supporters among the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn liked their statements, although he had a number of reservations: the national idea had been ‘wrenched into an officially acceptable form’, and it was bad to see ‘the author now and again rehearsing the Communist oath of loyalty’.132 Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn counted eleven (!) points of agreement with Molodaya Gvardiya (that is, let me emphasize, with open Stalinists who had even suffered for praising Stalin in their publication — not under Khrushchev but under Brezhnev!132). The first of these was common hostility to the revolutionary democrats, ‘the whole carnival procession from Chernyshevsky to Kerensky’, and also contempt for ‘this educated rabble which has usurped the title of the intelligentsia’.134 Later he expressed his attitude to members of the intelligentsia still more sharply, saying that they ‘labour day after day, conscientiously and sometimes even with talent, to strengthen our common prison.’135 This view of the intelligentsia was due mainly to Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that all ideas of progress and freedom, democracy and liberalism merely pave the way that leads to totalitarianism and terror. Solzhenitsyn is also indignant at the intellectuals’ indifference to ‘the national idea’, their ‘cosmopolitanism’, and so on.136 Curiously enough, many intellectuals applauded this charge, confirming once more the old truth that antiintellectual sentiments can be fully developed in the minds of intellectuals as well.137