Anti-Stalinism will not, in itself, make someone either a humanist or a democrat. ‘The anti-hangman’, wrote Pomerants, ‘bears within himself a charge of fury that will tomorrow produce a new hangman… In the realm of the soul, anti will not do at all.’179 Rebels themselves feel the need for some positive idea. It is natural for human beings to strive towards ideals, and when an ideal collapses the world begins to seem insipid and meaningless. ‘It is difficult’, writes the British philosopher-economist Schumacher,
to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion — political or otherwise — which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time.180
There have been people like Bukovsky who have tried to get by without any ideology at all, but the experience of Bukovsky himself, who eventually turned into an ideologist, showed that this does not work. Spasmodic attempts are begun to find or construct such an idea, but naturally, it is constructed from the ideological and philosophical material that is to hand. ‘Primitive people, without intellectual needs,’ writes Bukovsky,
are inclined to interpret the Soviet newspapers simply a rebours, as though seen in a mirror, so to speak. If somebody is denounced, that means he must be a good man, and if he is praised, he must be bad… All of which is partly true, but such over-simplification deprives the reader of much of the news, leaving only the bald fact. What remains important are nuances, scales, degrees — in short, information.181
Although Bukovsky is trying to better his world-view, he takes the official propaganda as his starting point. If you reverse this, you see ‘the bald fact’, and later you can improve on this with ‘nuances, scales, degrees’. He ‘knows’ how to read the newspapers, and is sure that he can extract correct information from them. Here he shows himself to be a slave to propaganda, for he agrees to form his view of the world on the basis of the picture presented to him. He does not think about the world but, instead, rethinks propaganda. In this respect the ordinary Soviet person, who believes some things he reads in the paper but not others, is much more of a critic than is a dissident of the Bukovsky type, who believes everything, but in his own way. In starting to form his ‘new’ ideology in this way, the dissident resembles those thinkers of whom Marx wrote that in their revolt against the dominant theory, they ‘contest it from its own standpoint’.182
The logic of the history of ideology — and, more precisely, the inertia of thought — means that although dogmas fall, dogmatism remains. The dogmatic type of thinking proves highly tenacious of life, and new dogmas arise to replace the discredited ones. Thus criticism of ideology is accompanied by the creation of dogmas, the creation not of new ideas but of an anti-ideology which lives by that same logic of unilinearity as the official doctrine. In place of the ‘absolute’ values consecrated by the state we get anti-values, and as an ideal of human conduct, instead of the Semitic commissar of 1918, the anti-Semitic Black-Hundred-ist of 1908.
What is this dogmatic style of thinking? Its main feature, in my view, is an endeavour to understand the world by starting from some readymade general formula which ‘explains everything’ and cannot be doubted. It is impossible to refute such a formula by rational arguments, because any rational information that contradicts the dogma is re-thought from the standpoint of that dogma and thereby rendered harmless to it. Debates with a dogmatist are fruitless: in his own eyes, at least, he always emerges from them victorious. The formula must be simple and extremely general. For example: ‘all Jews are dishonest’, or ‘all Bolsheviks are scoundrels’. You may adduce as many counterarguments as you like — talk about Jews who were renowned for their honesty, or about Bolsheviks who never committed any scoundrelism. In reply you hear that of course, the Jews mentioned were just hypocrites who carefully concealed their dishonesty and the Bolsheviks of whom you spoke simply committed their scoundrelly acts in such a way that nobody noticed. No rational arguments can take effect in such a debate.183
Here, for example, we have Bukovsky, who is convinced that ‘Stalin, with all his brutality, was an organic consequence of Leninist ideas and of the very idea of socialism itself.’184 If that formula is beyond question, then all the ideas of ‘Eurocommunism’, the ‘Prague spring’ and so on, are so much idle chatter and dangerous demagogy.185 Hence the ‘self-evident’ conclusion, which is specially formulated in Bukovsky’s book Pis' ma russkogo puteshestvennika,186 that the Western socialists, and even Social Democrats, are no better than the Communists: they are all tarred with the same brush! Here we have a generalization of the ‘You’re-all-swine’ type, and here lies the root of the evil. This is, if you like, the methodological foundation of foundations of dogmatism, its ‘cage’: all ideological phenomena that are alien to you are thrown into one heap and without further analysis, without proof, are wiped out. It is the same logic that enabled Stalin and his assistants to set up the ‘amalgam’ trials. If you do not agree with the Party line, you are not a Communist. If you are not a Communist, that means that you are a supporter of capitalism. A supporter of capitalism — that means an enemy of the people, and… to the execution wall with him! We see the same logic in the case of the Russian New Right, only now ‘all the other way round’. Every Communist without exception bears, for them, responsibility for the crimes of Stalin: between Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Togliatti, on the one hand, and Stalin, Beria and Yezhov on the other, there is no difference. ‘Socialism with a human face’ is based, as they see it, on the same principles as the Gulag, and Western socialists are preparing ‘an easy transition to Communist rule’.187 All Lefts are Communists, all Communists are hangmen, and… to the wall with them! He has yet to reach that final generalization which was made in the immortal novel by Ilf and Petrov, Diamonds To Sit On: ‘All Jews are lefties’, although some people are even now ready to draw that conclusion, too. To be sure, nobody has gone to that wall yet; nor, God grant, will they. But Maksimov is already threatening to put the Social Democrats on trial. One is made a little uneasy when one reads in Bukovsky’s book how he and his friends, when young, dreamed of being issued with ‘brand-new machine-guns’.188 To tell the truth, I should not want to see a machine-gun in Bukovsky’s hands.
However, it is not Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky and Shafarevich who ought to be blamed here, but the system that disfigured their minds. Given the personal qualities of each of them — bravery, frankness, resolution — we should have preferred to have these men on our side. Reactionary ideas are often upheld by honest and talented people. As Yanov has written, ‘for people in Russia, Solzhenitsyn was — and for many remains — the conscience of the nation.’189 ‘Isaich’ can be happy: he has managed to do what Vekhi could not do — turn rightward at least a section of the Russian intelligentsia. But that was possible only when a despotic state was striving with all its might to present itself as ‘Left’, ‘progressive’, and so on. I have already said a great deal here about the limitedness of the ideology of ‘true Communism’ and the fact that it was just that limitedness of the opposition’s ideas in the sixties that prepared for the growth of the New Right ideology in the seventies. It needs only to be added that in a certain way the ruling ideas of the opposition in the seventies were already a step backward in comparison with the previous period. ‘True Communism’ was connected with East European ‘revisionism’ and questioned, first, the legality of official practice and, later, some elements of official theory. There was a critical principle at work in it, even if this was insufficiently developed. The new anti-Communism lacks that critical ‘sense of questioning’. It may therefore be the case that, in fact, the liberation of consciousness played a greater role in the sixties than in the seventies. Among the illusions of the sixties there was evidently the illusion of victory over dogmatism. The Brezhnev era showed that dogmatism was still powerful in the minds of the opposition intelligentsia.