When we read Zinoviev’s books, what is most immediately striking is the psychological kinship between the author and some of his heroes. Zinoviev’s own world-view is analogous to that of official statocratic circles — or, more precisely, of a certain section of the statocracy. The key figure at the end of the seventies and in the eighties is not the old Stalinist but the young (not over sixty) careerist of the Brezhnev era, the ‘young guard’ of the statocracy. This man knows all about the system but coexists cynically with it, exploiting its benefits while at the same time sneering at the ‘cattle’ — that is, the masses at whose expense he lives (these masses, in his opinion, deserve nothing better). The readership among whom Zinoviev’s books had a phenomenal success consisted of young people from privileged families who were taking their first steps on the glorious road of a bureaucratic career. They are ironical, but their irony is that ‘drug for the privileged’ of which I wrote earlier. In Zinoviev’s books these young people found their New Testament and guide to action. This it was that created the fashion for ‘Zinovievism’ among Moscow’s elite. Most probably Zinoviev did not plan this turn of events, but it could not have gone any other way. Let us look at him more closely.
There is one small defect in this writer’s satirical works: they are not funny. This quality cannot, of course, be asked of a writer of ‘strictly scientific’ works on Soviet society, and it is not asked. True, Zinoviev’s cynicism is sometimes taken for irony, but that is a mistake. Irony is constructive to the extent that it is self-critical. The history of German Romanticism showed that irony is capable of producing long-lived philosophical ideas and stimulating the development of social consciousness in so far as it brings everything into doubt, itself included, constantly refuting its own conclusion, schemas and dogmas. It is fluid. But Zinoviev’s works, despite the high-flown anti-dogmatist rhetoric, constitute a unique example of pure dogmatism. This dogmatic consciousness, like the Stalinist variety, is self-canonizing. Unlike the ‘run-of-the-mill’ dogmatist, who relies on some past authority (Jesus, Mohammed, Marx, Lenin, Bakhtin, and so on), Zinoviev and Stalin have no need of that, for both utter finished formulas which are held to be great ‘discoveries’ and the highest truth. Each builds an elementary schema which seems to him self-sufficient, and all his further constructions stay within its framework. For any ‘new’ idea to be proved it is enough that it be brought within the already-formulated schema. Arguments, analysis of social processes, generalizing of facts, study of other people’s views and examination of the constructive information contained in them (without which science is inconceivable) — all of that is unnecessary. A different point of view is declared to be false as soon as it fails to correspond to the schema. Such a theoretical ‘model’ is indeed logical in its own way, but Stalin’s works and the official textbooks are very logical! Zinoviev’s ‘logic’ is of the same sort as Stalin’s. It is often said that our official publications are full of absurdity. That is not true. They are extremely logical. They have only one thing wrong with them: they contradict reality, but they contain no other contradictions. Reread Problems of Leninism or any of Stalin’s speeches and compare it with any statement by Zinoviev, and you will see that the one ‘great theoretician’ is like the other. The ‘friend and teacher’ has found a worthy pupil.200
Stalin’s dogmatism is, of course, somewhat more creative — after all, it is the original from which the copy was taken. But Zinoviev’s cynicism turns this dogmatism inside out — or, rather, turns it over and stands it on its feet Just that, for every other Soviet statocrat who began his career after 1953 thinks in this way. In that sense, at least half of our bureaucratic apparatus consists of convinced ‘Zinovievists’.
‘I consider that our society and our government are healthy phenomena. This does not mean that I like them. Nor that I dislike them,’ says Zinoviev. ‘My attitude to them is that of an observer.. ’201 The existing system is an objective reality. It has to be accepted as it is, and attempts to change it are senseless. Nobody needs such change, either, apart from a handful of intellectuals who have adopted Western ideas: ‘The majority of our country’s inhabitants have no need of that.’202 In the last analysis, what we have is ‘genuine sovereignty of the people’.203 There are ‘no grounds for hoping’ for any changes, and with this system and this society they are essentially impossible.204 Talk to any successful bureaucrat of the post-Stalin generation and you will hear the same, only better put, because Zinoviev’s frightful style makes it rather hard to read him.205 Today’s statocrats are by no means hostile to freedom, in principle. They merely ‘know very well’ that in our country democracy ‘is out of the question’. They are not hostile to the West — indeed, they idealize it. Wolfgang Leonhard has observed that where Soviet bureaucrats of the post-Stalin generation are concerned, ‘nobody thinks about pollution of the environment, alienation and relative impoverishment’ in connection with the West.206 Sometimes they frankly admit that they might prefer to be managing directors of concerns or deputies of some right-wing party in the West rather than members of the CPSU, but since they live here, they have to conform to the rules of the game (it’s all the same, anyway, since no change is possible) — ‘if you live with the wolves you have to howl as they do,’ and so on. Just as in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: we, too, would be good if circumstances were not as they are.
The official ideological schema aspires to ‘a Marxist aspect’, but Zinoviev simply tears off the illusory ‘Marxist’ wrapper and shows us this conception of Soviet society without any celebration-day rhetoric. He deals with Stalin as the young Marx dealt with Hegel. He does this, to be sure, unconsciously and therefore foolishly. It is unfortunate, too, that the material is of different qualities in the two cases, and the level of philosophical knowledge involved is, to put it mildly, not the same.
At first sight Zinoviev is like the boy in the fable who shouted out that the King was naked. But what is specific to the situation is that the King in the fable thought that he was clothed, whereas the Soviet ‘Kings’ ostentatiously stroll about stark naked, although they cannot themselves announce the fact. In the Soviet case the ‘boy’ and the ‘naked King’ think in the same way. What the crowd thinks in this case is another question.
Zinoviev’s initiative is, of course, also useful and proper. But it does not provide us with a spiritual ‘way out, and he does not try to provide this. He argues that the system will last for centuries, nay longer: ‘the thing may go on for thousands of years’,207 because he shares all the illusions of the ruling statocracy concerning the unshakeability of the regime. But even if he is right, even if it lasts for ever — where is the spiritual alternative,208 where is the critical analysis of real social processes, of technology, economics, social structure? Zinoviev, like the Soviet ideologues, is incapable, with the best will in the world, of undertaking that task, because he sees his task as fitting the facts into a preconceived scheme, and not as analysing them. This results in terrible short-sightedness. Discussing the impossibility or the needlessness of ‘a positive programme of change’,209 he omits even to mention how the very acute economic crisis of the 1980s put the question of a reform programme on the agenda not only for the opposition but also for the statocracy. It must again be stressed that this is not due to any feeblemindedness on Zinoviev’s part — that is how he prefers to explain opinions different from his own, by stupidity and mercenary considerations — but to the faultiness of the entire system of thinking he has adopted.