The Thinking Reed

For all the diversity of oppositional dogmatics, it is possible to discern in them some obligatory basic ideas borrowed from the official dogmatism.

1. The way the world is developing is seen as a conflict between two systems. The world’s future depends on the outcome of this conflict and it is perceived in absolute moral categories, as a conflict between good and evil. This idea has been formulated most categorically by A. Zinoviev, who says that it is a conflict ‘between two powers — the power of civilization (anti-Communism) and the power of anti-civilization (Communism). ’193

2. The USSR is a model of victorious socialism and is its classical model. We can again quote from Zinoviev: ‘Just as England was, in its time, the classical model of capitalist society, so the Soviet Union now presents the classical model of Communist society.’194 Zinoviev stresses that he sees no difference between socialism and Communism. Every assertion that the Soviet system is not fully socialist, or that it is not socialist at all, is, for Zinoviev, ‘either the result of clinical imbecility or else simply a dishonest allegation made in order to secure a more comfortable and prominent position in society’.195 Such ‘delusions’ are punished by the statocracy with compulsory confinement in psychiatric clinics (clinical imbecility) and with imprisonment (dishonest allegation). Fortunately the New Rights have, as yet, no such possibilities available to them.

3. Parliamentary democracy is possible only as part of the capitalist system. V. Sokirko (Burzhuademov) devoted a whole book to supporting this idea — the cornerstone of Stalinist ideology — and showed that socialist democracy ‘cannot exist’.196 There is no democratic road to socialism, and in any country where the Lefts come to power ‘the results will be similar to what happened in our country’ (A. Zinoviev). In short, democratic socialism is inconceivable.

4. The present regime in the USSR is the legitimate heir of the 1917 Revolution and its leaders are ‘true Leninists’.

Under pressure from socialist criticism, the New Rights appear more and more often in the unenviable role of last defenders of the ideological dogmas of Stalinism. All these ideas can be found, in a different formulation, in the official textbook on the Party’s history, and the present state ideology is unthinkable without them. They are all in flagrant contradiction with reality. It is hard nowadays to find serious political scientists who would say that political conflict in the world can be reduced to the conflict between two systems (because new centres of gravity have appeared) or who would doubt that the social processes going on within the societies of East and West are of more decisive importance for the future of mankind than is the opposition between these two societies. But that is not the point. Of Solzhenitsyn it has long been known that his ideology is Stalinism inside out. However, he is not alone in this. The ideas of Burzhuademov or Zinoviev can provide a much more significant example of hopeless dogmatism.

Among the opposition’s ideologues Zinoviev appears rather in the role of sceptic, but his statements excellently illustrate E. Il'enkov’s idea that ‘scepticism is the reverse side of dogmatism.’197 The same thing has happened with Zinoviev as happened once with Proudhon. Marx observed that for the French Proudhon represented ‘German’ philosophy, while for the Germans he stood for French political economy.198 It is like that with Zinoviev. Literary critics say that his books are worthless from the literary point of view, but not a great deal ought to be expected of them because they are not so much literature as sociology; whereas sociologists and historians say that in his works there are, of course, no original or valuable sociological ideas, but, after all, they are not sociology but satire, and one ought not to expect to find ideas in them.199 Here it must be noted that banality does not mean at all an absence of social ideas: banal ideas are the easiest to master, especially if they are presented in an unusual form. Banality is something which is self-evident and has no need to convince the reader of its truth. For Zinoviev it is enough merely to set forth in a more amusing way those very ideas which the state propaganda apparatus already makes it its business to drum into our poor heads.