The Thinking Reed

This began with a crude mistake by the writer, when he called Faust ‘a youth’ who ‘was ready to make a pact with the Devil’.120 All that followed was in the same spirit. I do not know whether the millions of Russians who have fallen during the twentieth century in wars, revolutions and modern Thermidors would agree with Chalmaev, but with truly cannibalistic optimism he wrote: ‘Fortunately, the history of our homeland is indeed filled with great volcanic eruptions.’121 Later on we learned (as you see, the nationalists’ books are full of discoveries) that everything harmful to us was brought in from the West, that ‘realm of everything alien’.122 Subsequently he summoned to his banner Lenin, Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Dmitri Donskoy, Nekrasov, Yermak, the Patriarch Hermogen, Stenka Razin, Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Peter I, Ivan the Terrible and, of course, that singer of reaction Konstantin Leont'ev. Even such mutual enemies as ‘the clever Patriarch Nikon’ and ‘Archpriest Avvakum who suffered death by fire’ are together here, all expressing the greatness of the Russian soul, before which the European appears petty and ‘bourgeois’. Over there they have parliaments, democratic movements and other ‘amusing happenings’, but in our country, ‘once in a hundred years the Russian peasant, coarsely clad and flogged with the knout, stepped forward’, and in one day so acted that the whole world was turned upside down.123 In this, it must be said, there is some truth, but is it only a matter for rejoicing?

Chalmaev also calls Marx to his aid. It turns out that he did not write Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century against Russia’s Tsarist despotism (which is why this book has, to this day, not been published in the USSR) but, on the contrary, spoke ‘with profound respect’ of ‘the soaring genius of the Russian state’.124

The main danger, according to Chalmaev, comes from the Left, from the Novy Mir crowd. ‘Demagogic “progressive” slogans’ seduce healthy youngsters, turning them into ‘voluntary, selfless cannon-fodder for cynical corrupters’.125 The struggle between the two systems is presented as a struggle between the Russian principle (which is also Communist) and the Western. Under Stalin and his successors we followed ‘that historical track’ along which, down to the revolution of 1917, our people ‘marched for centuries’ and ‘are now on their way to Communism’.126 So that if we are to believe Chalmaev, we have been moving towards Communism since the time of Ivan the Terrible, and Stalin was a great man precisely because he embodied this ‘Russian idea’. There is an element of truth in Chalmaev’s notions. Stalin was indeed much closer to Ivan the Terrible than to Marx, from whom he took only phraseology. It is to Chalmaev’s credit that he was the first of the Stalinists to boast of this openly, but it was on this very point that the Lefts tried to take him at his word. A. Dement'ev, in Novy Mir, called Chalmaev & Co. anti-Marxists, and in reply came a collective letter signed by eleven reactionaries of various sorts, published in Ogonyok.127 Yanov wrote that the statement in Ogonyok might have created an ‘alliance of right-wing factions’, but this did not come about, owing to the ‘furious polemics’ by the classical Stalinists of Oktyabr against the national-Bolshevism of Molodaya Gvardiya.128

That may be true, but this explanation is insufficient. The essence of the problem was not that nationalist and even Fascist ideology was growing stronger in Russia. That is not a new danger for us: the Black Hundreds appeared in Russia long before Italian Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. The distinctive character of the new danger lies in the fact that out of disappointment with socialism, nationalist and even antidemocratic ideologies have, for the first time in history, found support among some groups of our intelligentsia.129 And it is a question of a struggle for the intelligentsia, because in their struggle to win the masses, the Black Hundreds choose different means from the writing of literary criticism. Today they have turned their attention not to the declassed elements or even to the extreme reactionaries among the statocracy,130 but to the intellectuals. In order to succeed among the intelligentsia they have, from time to time, to demonstrate opposition and independence. If, in 1969, the neo-Slavophils had united openly with the Stalinists, that would have been suicidal for them. On the contrary, the spiritual kinship between the two groups was carefully concealed.