The Thinking Reed

‘I consider that our society and our government are healthy phenomena. This does not mean that I like them. Nor that I dislike them,’ says Zinoviev. ‘My attitude to them is that of an observer.. ’201 The existing system is an objective reality. It has to be accepted as it is, and attempts to change it are senseless. Nobody needs such change, either, apart from a handful of intellectuals who have adopted Western ideas: ‘The majority of our country’s inhabitants have no need of that.’202 In the last analysis, what we have is ‘genuine sovereignty of the people’.203 There are ‘no grounds for hoping’ for any changes, and with this system and this society they are essentially impossible.204 Talk to any successful bureaucrat of the post-Stalin generation and you will hear the same, only better put, because Zinoviev’s frightful style makes it rather hard to read him.205 Today’s statocrats are by no means hostile to freedom, in principle. They merely ‘know very well’ that in our country democracy ‘is out of the question’. They are not hostile to the West — indeed, they idealize it. Wolfgang Leonhard has observed that where Soviet bureaucrats of the post-Stalin generation are concerned, ‘nobody thinks about pollution of the environment, alienation and relative impoverishment’ in connection with the West.206 Sometimes they frankly admit that they might prefer to be managing directors of concerns or deputies of some right-wing party in the West rather than members of the CPSU, but since they live here, they have to conform to the rules of the game (it’s all the same, anyway, since no change is possible) — ‘if you live with the wolves you have to howl as they do,’ and so on. Just as in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: we, too, would be good if circumstances were not as they are.

The official ideological schema aspires to ‘a Marxist aspect’, but Zinoviev simply tears off the illusory ‘Marxist’ wrapper and shows us this conception of Soviet society without any celebration-day rhetoric. He deals with Stalin as the young Marx dealt with Hegel. He does this, to be sure, unconsciously and therefore foolishly. It is unfortunate, too, that the material is of different qualities in the two cases, and the level of philosophical knowledge involved is, to put it mildly, not the same.

At first sight Zinoviev is like the boy in the fable who shouted out that the King was naked. But what is specific to the situation is that the King in the fable thought that he was clothed, whereas the Soviet ‘Kings’ ostentatiously stroll about stark naked, although they cannot themselves announce the fact. In the Soviet case the ‘boy’ and the ‘naked King’ think in the same way. What the crowd thinks in this case is another question.

Zinoviev’s initiative is, of course, also useful and proper. But it does not provide us with a spiritual ‘way out, and he does not try to provide this. He argues that the system will last for centuries, nay longer: ‘the thing may go on for thousands of years’,207 because he shares all the illusions of the ruling statocracy concerning the unshakeability of the regime. But even if he is right, even if it lasts for ever — where is the spiritual alternative,208 where is the critical analysis of real social processes, of technology, economics, social structure? Zinoviev, like the Soviet ideologues, is incapable, with the best will in the world, of undertaking that task, because he sees his task as fitting the facts into a preconceived scheme, and not as analysing them. This results in terrible short-sightedness. Discussing the impossibility or the needlessness of ‘a positive programme of change’,209 he omits even to mention how the very acute economic crisis of the 1980s put the question of a reform programme on the agenda not only for the opposition but also for the statocracy. It must again be stressed that this is not due to any feeblemindedness on Zinoviev’s part — that is how he prefers to explain opinions different from his own, by stupidity and mercenary considerations — but to the faultiness of the entire system of thinking he has adopted.

He says much and at length about the difference between the ‘ideology’ and the ‘scientific’ approach (the sole representative of the latter in relation to the USSR is one A. Zinoviev). But he does not even mention the chief difference — namely, that the former relies on intellectual schemas and the second on scientific facts.210 In Zinoviev’s books we simply cannot find any sociological information other than what any of us obtains from everyday life. But such examples taken from the life of a highly paid Moscow intellectual worker are useful as illustrations — no more than that. Such examples and illustrations can always be fitted into practically any schema (life is so variegated). Soviet official ideologues always proceed in this way: as a rule, they do not lie but cite a certain number of selected real facts.