The Thinking Reed

On the other hand, in the course of many centuries of European history, now one country and now another ‘came to the forefront’. That meant that the people of the country holding that position, in deciding their own fate, to some extent also decided the fate of other peoples. This idea was frequently repeated by Marx, as when he said that Poland had to be liberated in Britain, and Italy in France. Italy in the age of the Renaissance, France in 1789, Britain during the Industrial Revolution determined, in some considerable degree, the whole course of European history. It is not out of the question that events in the next few decades in the USSR will have similar significance. Every time a period of expectation began in our country — when the need for changes was obvious to all, but their precise outlines were not clearly visible — nationalist feelings were strengthened among us. There was an objective basis for this — a presentiment of the all-European importance of what would happen in Russia, its supranational dimension.

This does not, of course, signify that the nationalists are right or that nationalism is historically justified. On the contrary, by thrusting the country back and by imposing some ‘higher’, divine mission upon its people, the nationalists hinder the realization of real potentialities. The growth of Russian nationalism stimulates the development of anti-Russian feeling among the smaller peoples of our country, who are alarmed by this turn of affairs. The general effect of all this is to divide the working people, to disorganize the masses, instead of uniting them against the common foe. Increasingly we see exposed the ‘respectable reactionary’ essence of neo-Slavophilism of which Batkin spoke.

As the neo-Slavophil movement gathered strength, the idyllic aspect faded into the background and its Black-Hundred features showed through ever more openly.118 The most reactionary tendency in the ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ was formed as early as 1968, around the journal Molodaya Gvardiya. The chief specific feature of this tendency was its open attempt to unite neo-Slavophilism with Fascism and Stalinism — or, more precisely, to proclaim openly the link between them and to reorientate the Stalinist ideology, strengthening the nationalist and traditionalist motifs in it. What the Stalinist of the ‘classical’ type keeps quiet about and hides between the lines, the Molodaya G vardiya trend proclaimed openly.

It all began with M. Lobanov’s ‘Educated Philistinism’, in which he spoke in a contemptuous way about today’s left-wing intellectuals, giving as an example of an ‘educated philistine’ the distinguished Russian poet Bulat Okudzhava. Complaining of ‘the overflow of so-called education’, he fulminated against the non-Russian producers Meyerhold and Efros, as destroyers of traditional values.119 The dangerous and utterly useless diffusion of knowledge, Lobanov considered, detaches culture from its soil among the people and leads to the destruction of tradition. ‘Will there be an end to this havoc?’ he asked dramatically, forgetting that he himself was acting as an extreme nihilist and vandal, attacking the best representatives of twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Kozhanov usually does, Lobanov recalled that Herzen was disappointed with the West — ‘forgetting’ to mention that, still earlier, Herzen had become disappointed with Russia and never returned to his homeland. Lobanov’s article was a first trial flight. Five months later V. Chalmaev published in the same journal his manifesto entitled ‘Inevitability’.