The Thinking Reed

Thus Zinoviev alleges, categorically, that most of the people of the USSR prefer the one-party system. It may be that this is indeed the case, although in reality the one-party system causes a good deal of irritation among the working class — which consists (contrary to Zinoviev’s view) not only of idiots — since it crushes more and more painfully their political rights.211 But what is most important is not this but the fact that Zinoviev overlooks something which has been generally known for the last two or three thousand years: that people's views change. On the eve of the 1905 Revolution ‘the majority’ of Russians were supporters of the autocracy, but eighteen months of political crisis radically altered their ideology and even their psychology. In one day, the shooting on 9 January 1905 turned hundreds of thousands of previously loyal subjects into enemies of the throne. We should not wish our people to learn through such bloody lessons, but in any case the political and economic crisis is leading to an immense and rapid social enlightenment of the masses.

But here we have Zinoviev saying:

The overwhelming majority of the Soviet people would reject a system of self-management in the enterprises, even if it were to be imposed on them by force, and such a system would degenerate into an empty formality, or else into a system of gangsterism.212

In reality, experiments in self-management have frequently been carried out in the USSR and have produced excellent results. Even in official circles they recognize that, given the increased cultural level of the workers, it is necessary to tackle afresh ‘the question of their participation in the management of social production’,213 and that without this it will be difficult to count on serious progress in either the economic or the social sphere. The journal EKO wrote about ‘the great social repercussions and growing number of supporters’ of these experiments,214 but admitted that they were usually cut short by the apparatus. At a certain stage of the experiment self-management inevitably comes into contradiction with the existing system of economic and political organization, and is therefore dangerous to the statocracy. Zinoviev is not interested in such facts; for him schemas are enough. Incidentally, note this about the way he writes: he never says ‘from my personal observation’, ‘possibly’, ‘it seems to me’, T am afraid that’, and so on. No, he at once gives a conclusive decision in the name of ‘the overwhelming majority of the Soviet people’. Such clichés seem convincing to us because they are familiar: this is how Pravda speaks.

Every society, of course, generates certain social types in massive numbers. Zinoviev constantly repeats this idea as though he himself had discovered it, although the problem of social character was studied in Marxist social science a very long time ago.215 In complex systems like the Soviet one, however, one is obliged to deal with many different types: all the more because even in simpler systems, a particular type of dissident is always formed. Finally, among the many types shaped by the system, there is also the type of civilized conformist. He cannot fail to be aware of the crying defects in the regime, but conviction that it is impossible to change the system gives him the opportunity for moral self-justification. The ineradicability of social baseness is made the explanation of individual baseness. Consequently, as L. Kolakowski has noted, propagating the idea that the statocratic system is firm and unreformable is not only contrary to the facts but also immoral216 — besides, Zinoviev’s ideology ultimately assumes conservative features217 which ensure its success among the Soviet middle strata and the ‘enlightened’ bureaucracy. Essentially, this is no special ideology but a mere collection of commonplaces.

And so the circle is closed. From denial of the system we arrive at acceptance of it as an accomplished fact. Zinoviev’s views constitute one attempt — God grant that it be the last — to explain what has happened in the USSR by turning the state ideology inside out (in this case, openly and consciously). These intellectual games played with dogmatism are futile. Zinoviev and Solzhenitsyn cannot stand each other, but they have something in common: the official ideology hypnotizes them, as a snake does a rabbit. They approach it from different sides, but cannot tear themselves away from it.