The Thinking Reed

When we read Zinoviev’s books, what is most immediately striking is the psychological kinship between the author and some of his heroes. Zinoviev’s own world-view is analogous to that of official statocratic circles — or, more precisely, of a certain section of the statocracy. The key figure at the end of the seventies and in the eighties is not the old Stalinist but the young (not over sixty) careerist of the Brezhnev era, the ‘young guard’ of the statocracy. This man knows all about the system but coexists cynically with it, exploiting its benefits while at the same time sneering at the ‘cattle’ — that is, the masses at whose expense he lives (these masses, in his opinion, deserve nothing better). The readership among whom Zinoviev’s books had a phenomenal success consisted of young people from privileged families who were taking their first steps on the glorious road of a bureaucratic career. They are ironical, but their irony is that ‘drug for the privileged’ of which I wrote earlier. In Zinoviev’s books these young people found their New Testament and guide to action. This it was that created the fashion for ‘Zinovievism’ among Moscow’s elite. Most probably Zinoviev did not plan this turn of events, but it could not have gone any other way. Let us look at him more closely.

There is one small defect in this writer’s satirical works: they are not funny. This quality cannot, of course, be asked of a writer of ‘strictly scientific’ works on Soviet society, and it is not asked. True, Zinoviev’s cynicism is sometimes taken for irony, but that is a mistake. Irony is constructive to the extent that it is self-critical. The history of German Romanticism showed that irony is capable of producing long-lived philosophical ideas and stimulating the development of social consciousness in so far as it brings everything into doubt, itself included, constantly refuting its own conclusion, schemas and dogmas. It is fluid. But Zinoviev’s works, despite the high-flown anti-dogmatist rhetoric, constitute a unique example of pure dogmatism. This dogmatic consciousness, like the Stalinist variety, is self-canonizing. Unlike the ‘run-of-the-mill’ dogmatist, who relies on some past authority (Jesus, Mohammed, Marx, Lenin, Bakhtin, and so on), Zinoviev and Stalin have no need of that, for both utter finished formulas which are held to be great ‘discoveries’ and the highest truth. Each builds an elementary schema which seems to him self-sufficient, and all his further constructions stay within its framework. For any ‘new’ idea to be proved it is enough that it be brought within the already-formulated schema. Arguments, analysis of social processes, generalizing of facts, study of other people’s views and examination of the constructive information contained in them (without which science is inconceivable) — all of that is unnecessary. A different point of view is declared to be false as soon as it fails to correspond to the schema. Such a theoretical ‘model’ is indeed logical in its own way, but Stalin’s works and the official textbooks are very logical! Zinoviev’s ‘logic’ is of the same sort as Stalin’s. It is often said that our official publications are full of absurdity. That is not true. They are extremely logical. They have only one thing wrong with them: they contradict reality, but they contain no other contradictions. Reread Problems of Leninism or any of Stalin’s speeches and compare it with any statement by Zinoviev, and you will see that the one ‘great theoretician’ is like the other. The ‘friend and teacher’ has found a worthy pupil.200

Stalin’s dogmatism is, of course, somewhat more creative — after all, it is the original from which the copy was taken. But Zinoviev’s cynicism turns this dogmatism inside out — or, rather, turns it over and stands it on its feet Just that, for every other Soviet statocrat who began his career after 1953 thinks in this way. In that sense, at least half of our bureaucratic apparatus consists of convinced ‘Zinovievists’.