The Thinking Reed

However, it is not Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky and Shafarevich who ought to be blamed here, but the system that disfigured their minds. Given the personal qualities of each of them — bravery, frankness, resolution — we should have preferred to have these men on our side. Reactionary ideas are often upheld by honest and talented people. As Yanov has written, ‘for people in Russia, Solzhenitsyn was — and for many remains — the conscience of the nation.’189 ‘Isaich’ can be happy: he has managed to do what Vekhi could not do — turn rightward at least a section of the Russian intelligentsia. But that was possible only when a despotic state was striving with all its might to present itself as ‘Left’, ‘progressive’, and so on. I have already said a great deal here about the limitedness of the ideology of ‘true Communism’ and the fact that it was just that limitedness of the opposition’s ideas in the sixties that prepared for the growth of the New Right ideology in the seventies. It needs only to be added that in a certain way the ruling ideas of the opposition in the seventies were already a step backward in comparison with the previous period. ‘True Communism’ was connected with East European ‘revisionism’ and questioned, first, the legality of official practice and, later, some elements of official theory. There was a critical principle at work in it, even if this was insufficiently developed. The new anti-Communism lacks that critical ‘sense of questioning’. It may therefore be the case that, in fact, the liberation of consciousness played a greater role in the sixties than in the seventies. Among the illusions of the sixties there was evidently the illusion of victory over dogmatism. The Brezhnev era showed that dogmatism was still powerful in the minds of the opposition intelligentsia.

What is worst is that the dogmatist has been convinced only of the practical and outward collapse of his dogma. This does not always lead to his recovery, for the dogma may easily assume a new form. The difference between official and oppositional dogmatism190 is that the former is more fully worked out and, if you like, richer in ideas. Down below, several different antagonistic forms of dogmatism are found. Thus, a single official ideology engenders several shadow ideologies at the same time. Such pluralism is said to be a positive phenomenon, but dialogue is impossible between the opposition dogmatists and theoretical discussion always degenerates into ill-tempered squabbling (only Western observers, it seems, cannot understand ‘why Russians quarrel so much’). The diversity of the opposition’s dogmatisms can, in its turn, be explained by the specific character of the official dogmatism.

The revival of Russian nationalism, for example, is not — as Yanov supposes — connected with a survival into our time of the tradition of Leont'ev and Pobedonostsev, but with the crisis and break-up of the official ideology. A. Lim wrote that Stalinist ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was in fact a ‘complex conglomerate’ of various ideological elements — nationalism, autocracy, socialism, Russian religiosity and so on,

cemented into a whole by hatred of the representatives of all the listed tendencies to liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Stalin and his doctrine were dethroned, this caused a deep crack to appear in the conglomerate, and the Stalinist ideology quickly began to break up.191

During the ‘purges’ of the thirties and the ‘struggle against cosmopolitanism’ the official doctrine absorbed elements of Pobedonostsev’s national demagogy, the idea of ‘the Russian soul’ and ‘popular’ despotism (glorification of Ivan the Terrible, and so on). In the period when the official ideology was breaking up, losing its integral character, those elements recovered independent existence, detaching themselves and acquiring new life. A ‘Thermidorian’ ideology cannot, by virtue of its historical nature, be anything but an attempt to synthesize revolutionary and reactionary ideas. ‘True Communism’ tried to separate out the revolutionary ideas, while the New Right tries to develop the reactionary part of the official ‘heritage’. But both try to find an alternative to the ruling ideology within the framework of that ideology. Both groups look back and see a golden age in the past, ‘some before Stalin, some before Lenin, yet others before Nikolai, and still others before Peter, or before the Tatars, or even before Prince Vladimir in the tenth century’.192 Solzhenitsyn, for example, blames a lot on Patriarch Nikon and the church reform of the seventeenth century, which undermined old-time piety.