The Thinking Reed

the stereotypes of required thought, or rather of dictated opinion, dinned into us daily from the electrified gullets of radio, endlessly reproduced in thousands of newspapers as like as peas, condensed into weekly surveys for political study groups, have made mental cripples of us and left very few minds undamaged.148

Alas, all the rest of the symposium, which opened with such a ringing declaration, is written as though to demonstrate, by its own example, how sadly true this is.149 On all serious theoretical questions Solzhenitsyn and his friends speak from the position of the official ideology:

There never was such a thing as Stalinism (either as a doctrine, or as a path of national life, or as a state system), and official circles in our country [!] as well as the Chinese leaders, have every right to insist on this.150

In general, in all controversies, Solzhenitsyn invariably refers to Soviet political textbooks of Stalin’s time as books that contain indisputable truth. How could it be otherwise, if such and such a statement appears in the History of the CPSU: Short Course? Fully in the spirit of orthodox dogmatics he subverts bourgeois democracy, for the Twentieth Party Congress showed its ‘defects’ and today the West is ‘in a state of political crisis and spiritual confusion’.151

Solzhenitsyn directs his hatred against the idea of democratic socialism and Communist reformism, insisting ‘that socialism is inherently flawed, that it is altogether unrealizable in a pure form.’152 Whenever something is said in samizdat that is favourable to Marx or Lenin, he sees in this the ‘thought processes’ of people ‘who write for the censor’ — even though he had acknowledged that for the opposition of the sixties, ‘Marxism was not compulsory ballast required by the censors.’153 Hatred of socialist ideas easily develops into hatred of democracy — which shows very well, a negativo, the profound kinship between the two ideas.

Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich and the national-Christians see themselves as the heirs of Russian religious philosophy at the beginning of this century, but they are mistaken. The Russian religious philosophers were neither nationalists nor anti-socialists. Vladimir Solovev fought resolutely against nationalism. Berdyaev saw in nationalism ‘the alluring temptation of imperialism’ generated by Russian messianic thinking, a temptation which had to be overcome. In general he recognized ‘the Russian idea’ as a fact of national tradition, and tried to include it in a context that was ‘universalist’ (or, as we should say, internationalist). He was not anti-Marxist, for he frequently emphasized that he owed much to Marx.

The outstanding Russian idealists were opposed to anti-Semitism. Berdyaev considered the Jews the people nearest to the Russians in the spiritual sense: ‘it is not merely a matter of chance that precisely in these two peoples there exists a vigorous messianic consciousness.’154 By an irony of fate, the anti-Semitic VSKhSON proclaimed Berdyaev as its prophet. Such contradictions betray imposture, whether conscious or unconscious. Just as the Stalinists try to cover themselves with the authority of Marxism and socialism, the Rights exploit for their own ends the prestige of Christianity and the names of Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Solovev or Dostoevsky. Whether they actually are Christians is not for me to judge, but I am profoundly convinced that Christianity, like Marxism, is incompatible with nationalism, because they both start from the idea of the human personality, not from that of a chosen people. It is just this universalism of Christianity that has ensured its success as a world religion. The lie of the New Right about the ‘Christian’ character of their ideas is akin to the official lie about the ‘Marxist’ character of the neo-Stalinist despotism.

To Solzhenitsyn the ideology of the system is even more hateful than the system itself. In this respect he is a typical exponent of the worldview of the new ‘back-to-the-soil movement’. Agursky, analysing their literature published legally in the Soviet Union, has noted the basic identity of their ideas with those of Solzhenitsyn. This literature ‘is not aimed at those who are trying to change the political system. The political system is a matter of indifference to them.’155 These ideas are not due to the barbed wire of the censorship: