The Thinking Reed

In this sense, Molodaya Gvardiya acted very unwisely. By depicting Stalinism as ‘the embodiment of the Russo-Byzantine tradition’131 it revealed what others had hidden. The nationalists were strong in so far as they presented themselves as bearers of a spiritual alternative and tried to show the liberal Westernizers and Marxists as incapable of breaking with the system. That was why the Orthodox and oppositionist ‘back-to-the-soil movement’ of Nash Sovremennik had such success. True, Molodaya Gvardiya also won supporters among the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn liked their statements, although he had a number of reservations: the national idea had been ‘wrenched into an officially acceptable form’, and it was bad to see ‘the author now and again rehearsing the Communist oath of loyalty’.132 Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn counted eleven (!) points of agreement with Molodaya Gvardiya (that is, let me emphasize, with open Stalinists who had even suffered for praising Stalin in their publication — not under Khrushchev but under Brezhnev!132). The first of these was common hostility to the revolutionary democrats, ‘the whole carnival procession from Chernyshevsky to Kerensky’, and also contempt for ‘this educated rabble which has usurped the title of the intelligentsia’.134 Later he expressed his attitude to members of the intelligentsia still more sharply, saying that they ‘labour day after day, conscientiously and sometimes even with talent, to strengthen our common prison.’135 This view of the intelligentsia was due mainly to Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that all ideas of progress and freedom, democracy and liberalism merely pave the way that leads to totalitarianism and terror. Solzhenitsyn is also indignant at the intellectuals’ indifference to ‘the national idea’, their ‘cosmopolitanism’, and so on.136 Curiously enough, many intellectuals applauded this charge, confirming once more the old truth that antiintellectual sentiments can be fully developed in the minds of intellectuals as well.137

On the whole, according to Solzhenitsyn, Molodaya Gvardiya had failed to grasp only one thing: ‘it is impossible to be both a Communist and a Russian.’138 Consequently the accents should be changed once more, and this nationalism ‘purged’, for ‘their hybrid of “Russianness” and “redness”’ was a ‘cross between a mongrel and a pig’.139 Solzehnitsyn seems actually not to have noticed that this ideological miscegenation was not originated by Molodaya Gvardiya — that the combination to which he refers is the very essence of Stalinist propaganda. The Molodaya Gvardiya tendency merely changed the proportions a little, trying to increase the element of Russian-nationalist swinishness.

In 1969, however, Solzhenitsyn was still an exception. In that period the programme of Molodaya Gvardiya was too reactionary and — most important — too frank to win any sympathy from the intelligentsia. During the seventies the ideas of the New Right assumed a different form, more attractive to the intelligentsia. This anti-democratic ideology developed quite fast, in both legal and illegal publications.

As early as the sixties an underground organization was formed in Leningrad with the name All-Russia Social-Christian League for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON). It preached nationalism and Orthodoxy and sought to base itself on the ideas expressed by Berdyaev in the twenties.140 In the sixties an organization of this kind was, by general agreement, an exception, much more typical of the period being another Leningrad group — the ‘League of Communards’ of V. Ronkin and S. Khakaev (the neo-Communists). In the seventies, however, the nationalists already held stronger positions. It is highly instructive that their samizdat journal Veche was founded by a former socialist, V. Osipov. He still tried to give it at least an outward appearance of liberalism, but suffered defeat, and the journal was taken over by an openly Fascist group — which Yanov considers should be a lesson to moderate neo-Slavophils, if they still cherish ‘the illusion that it is possible to combine their nationalism with liberalism.’141