The Thinking Reed

Yanov’s book reflected very well the panic that seized the liberal intellectuals when the nationalists came on the scene. This was primarily an ideological panic, due to the helplessness of the ideas of 1956 in the face of a new situation and a new danger. The fear of the Neo-Slavophils felt by some left-wingers, though well founded, was greatly exaggerated. It is typical that Yanov is disposed to see the incident in the restaurant of the Central Writers’ Club and Soloukhin’s escapade, or statements made by the mediocre artist Ilya Glazunov, as events of almost planetary or at least national significance. Highly unconvincing, too, are Yanov’s arguments to the effect that Russia’s entire history is cyclical and a period of mild rule, such as Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s, is bound to be followed by a terrorist reaction in the spirit of Stalin and using nationalist slogans. There are no special laws of Russian history, nor can there be. The causes of political ‘thaws’ and ‘frosts’ have to be sought in concrete social processes, in political and class struggle. Abstract speculations are jejune, for history cannot be explained by any general schemas assembled through arbitrary combinations of facts. In order to understand the past and conceive the possible variants of the future one has to think concretely, taking into account social, economic and political conditions, the level of technological development and actual class interests. Otherwise, the construction of general schemas remains a mere futile pastime.

Any arguments concerning the new danger from the right are senseless in so far as they ignore the qualitative difference between the present industrial and consumer society in the USSR and Stalin’s totalitarianism, or such important economic factors as the Soviet economy’s dependence on the world market (which was not at all the case in Stalin’s time),78 the specific features of present-day science and technology, and so on.

It must not be concluded from what has been said that the nationalists are not dangerous. They may enlist the support of the declassed section of the population, the numerous Soviet lumpenproletariat, but only if the masses are not mobilized behind a different banner. In the struggle for the masses, the tendency which offers the clearest social and economic alternative will triumph. And it is precisely an economic programme and social ideas capable of mobilizing the masses that the neo-Slavophils lack.

Nevertheless, the development of the ideology of the New Right and their popularity are symptomatic. The crisis of the official ideology after 1968 occurred, as I have said, simultaneously with a crisis of the opposition, which had come out precisely for the purity of this official ideology. For intellectuals who had experienced 1956, 1966 and 1968, the crisis of ideas was extremely serious. The growth in the popularity of the New Right was evidence that the Russian intelligentsia was undergoing, in the seventies, the most profound spiritual crisis in its history. The situation that arose after the crushing of the ‘Prague spring’ can be compared only to the spiritual crisis that followed the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. But the crisis of the seventies was deeper and more acute. The earlier crisis produced only Vekhi, but this one produced a whole number of similar tendencies: with this difference, that the Vekhi writers were very much more profound in their ideas than are the lost intellectuals of today.

The collapse of the liberal ideology of ‘true Marxism-Leninism’ led to a deep division among the intelligentsia. While one section gave up its mythological illusions of liberal pseudo-Marxism in favour of scientific Marxism — and, on the political plane, of a conception of class struggle quite alien to ‘the children of ’56’, who had at first supposed that ‘ideas rule the world’ — the other section turned sharply to the right.

The strongest tendency ‘to the right of the government’ is indeed Russian nationalism. This, however, cannot be considered in purely political categories, for the nationalists, as a definite tendency, are also organized around problems of culture. At the centre of attention this time is the question of Russia’s originality and its alleged Sonderweg.