The Thinking Reed

the intellectual traditions are so poor that the nonconformist intellectuals are forced to draw from the official ideology from time to time: they try to make themselves an image of idealism on the basis of manuals on ‘dialectical materialism’, to work out the essence of Trotskyism or Populism on the basis of manuals on ‘scientific socialism’. Instead of creating true conceptual alternatives, they thus simply give real life to the phantom enemies of the official manuals.75

This shrewd observation provides the best explanation of an ideological phenomenon which could be called ‘anti-ideas’.

The expression may seem somewhat artificial, but in my view it defines precisely enough the essence of a whole series of ideological systems which arose in the dissident movement and which were openly proclaimed in samizdat while also influencing legal literature. What was common to them all was their close links with the official ideology, so that they appeared as its shadow, its counterpart and its ‘reverse side’, but in no case an alternative to it. This is most noticeable in the case of Solzhenitsyn and the Russian nationalists who came to the front politically at the very end of the sixties and in the seventies.

Nationalist Currents

The intelligentsia suddenly began taking their vacations in the village at the graves of ancestors instead of in the Crimea, the Caucasus or the Baltic,’ Alexander Yanov recalls.

Suddenly everyone noticed that the peasantry of north-western Russia — the cradle of the nation — was disappearing. Young people began to wander around the dying villages collecting icons, and soon there was almost no intellectual’s home in Moscow which was not decorated with symbols of Russian Orthodoxy. The writer Vladimir Soloukhin appeared in the House of Writers wearing a signet ring which carried the image of Nicholas II. An insane demand arose on the black market for books by ‘White Guardsmen’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who had died in emigration.76

The numerous nationalist manifestations of this order naturally shocked and frightened the democratically inclined intellectuals, all the more because the ‘Neo-Slavophils’ of the seventies behaved aggressively and enjoyed — at first — obvious tolerance by the authorities. This caused Yanov to fear that Russian nationalism was developing ‘an alternative strategy which the autocratic regime could use for its survival under conditions of crisis.’77 Unfortunately, the representatives of the traditional left-wing intelligentsia failed to note the important fact that the nationalists remained almost as much isolated from the masses as the ‘Lefts’ themselves. Whereas the drama of Novy Mir had been played out before millions of people, the ‘thaw’ had affected the country’s entire population in one way or another, and tens of thousands of workers took part in the strikes of the sixties and seventies, the comedy of the ‘Slavophil Renaissance’ was performed within a relatively narrow circle of the intellectual elite and part of the middle strata.