The Thinking Reed

Among them are very many notorious reactionaries like Glazunov, anti-Semites like Pikul, monarchists and Fascists. It is the very absence of a clear-cut demarcation between the different tendencies in the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ — and their common orientation upon the past makes such a demarcation extremely difficult — that has transformed this movement, as a whole, into a dangerous reactionary phenomenon. The attractiveness and spirituality of the ‘traditionalists’ in the cultural sphere can be exploited in politics by ultra-reactionaries. One of the dissidents compared the country’s rulers to ‘satiated wolves’ and the monarchists and nationalists to hungry ones: ‘idealists can be such good terrorists. If these nationalists come to power, it would become very dangerous.’95 Disquiet is caused, too, by the fact that extremist groups among the nationalists find support among certain strata of the ruling statocracy.

One of Batkin’s comments is very much to the point here. In circumstances when the old ideology has outlived itself and no longer attracts anyone, when ideological hunger appears, the desire grows to ‘lean against’ something — to find justification for one’s conduct, moral support, in some sort of absolute values. The national-religious idea may serve as such a support. It becomes all the more attractive because on the one hand it has its heroes and martyrs and is oppositional, while on the other the rulers look indulgently upon it and indirectly encourage the growth of Russian nationalism. It is symptomatic that for some time now attacks on Solzhenitsyn, who has become since his exile to the West the chief ideologist of the nationalist reaction, have practically disappeared from the official press.

All this, of course, does not exhaust the question. The polemic around the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ in the USSR has revived the old debate between the Slavophils and the Westernists. The mere fact that after a hundred years the old problems again start to be discussed with the same fervour — and not at all as problems of the past, but as relevant to the present time — tells us that they have not yet found their solution in history. At the beginning of the 1980s Russia finds herself once more in an extremely uncertain situation. The question of her path in history has risen again.

The acuteness of the problem was already apparent during the 1969 discussion about the Slavophils in Voprosy Literatury. The discussion was opened with an appeal from the editors to ‘look calmly and thoroughly’ into the heart of the matter.96 No calm debate took place, however, nor could such a thing have been managed. ‘Ideological rather than literary issues come under discussion,’ notes M. Chapman in the American journal Studies on Soviet Thought.97 Opening the debate, A. Yanov, in a critique of the Slavophils’ populism, said that this proceeded from the principle: ‘before you know “the people” you must love them.’ Otherwise, ‘you may unexpectedly notice in them not at all what you need to find, you may insult their divine holiness and purity.’98 On the whole, though, Yanov called for an objective approach to Slavophilism. It was, after all, an oppositionist movement, counterposing ‘Russia’ and ‘the people’ to ‘authority’, which it treated as essentially ‘un-Russian’. (Soon Solzhenitsyn was to speak in the same way about the Soviet period, although the Petersburg period would seem to him perfectly national.)