The Thinking Reed

But, as has often happened in history, one religion called another into existence. Slavophilism, having joined battle with despotism under conditions when there was no strong political opposition, counterposed to it a utopia which consisted essentially of a deification of ‘the simple people’, a hypertrophied, distorted democratism, a cult of social idolatry… A false and impoverished sociological model of reality led to an enormous general mistake in estimation of the political situation and the relation of social forces. This also led to rupture with the real political opposition, inability to achieve unity with the progressive forces, that unity which Herzen strove for so unsuccessfully with the Slavophils. This sort of religion of ‘the simple people’ ruled out the intelligentsia as a positive force and fatally led its adherents into the ranks of the chief adversary of the intelligentsia — the Black Hundreds, who became, in the last analysis, the heirs of Slavophilism.99

Yanov was well aware that the questions being discussed were contemporary when he emphasized that it was because it underestimated democracy and European humanism that Slavophilism degenerated. Although it began as an oppositionist ideology it gradually acquired conservative, pro-status-quo characteristics.

The neo-Slavophils made their voice heard through the notorious critic V. Kozhanov. He began with the wonderful statement that even in olden times the supporters of the idea ‘Moscow is the Third Rome’, which gave ideological justification for the ‘right’ of the Russian state to world domination, were ‘the most advanced people of their time’.100 Russian ‘originality’ was ‘not in the least identical with conservatism’, Kozhanov affirmed, and one ought not to make nasty parallels with the Black Hundreds.101

A. Yanov sees the main flaw in Slavophilism as the utopian character of their social programme. But was not the Westernists’ idea of transplanting European ways on to Russian soil utopian? Or is A. Yanov saying that the revolution of 1905, and, still more, that of 1917, transformed Russia in the image of Western Europe?102

sneered Kozhanov, thinking that Yanov would be unable to answer him in the censored press. What was utopian, argued this champion of ‘originality’, was not the idea of a special Russian road but the hope of bringing European democracy and political freedom on to Russian soil. Kozhanov lauded ‘the thousand-years’ tradition of Russian thought’ whose exponents were the Slavophils, with their anti-individualism, their ‘people’s idea’. Western observers noted with interest that ‘the religious aspects of Slavophilism were certainly not dismissed by the contributors to the symposium.’103 It was typical that nobody here took it upon him- or herself to criticize the Slavophils on that account — so great was aversion to the official atheist propaganda.

Finally, Kozhanov drew the general conclusion that it is Western thought, which has given birth to existentialism, that is based on an ‘irrationalist, anti-scientific disposition’, whereas ‘Slavophilism, in contrast to the existentialist philosophy, was imbued with the sense of historicism.’104 Hitherto it had been supposed that the idea of a possible return to the past which was cultivated by the Slavophils was anti-historical, but for Kozhanov — fully in the spirit of Stalinism — it was the nationalist utopia that was to be declared the only scientific and historical one.