The Thinking Reed

The ideas of the Smena Vekh group were somewhat heterogeneous, having in common only the principle of collaboration with the Soviet power for the good of Russia. However, they were sharply split into a left and a right wing, though neither Agursky nor Soviet scholars show the true significance of this split. The ideas of the left-wing Smenovekhists are summarized clearly enough by Trotsky. They understood that

Russia’s salvation lies in the Soviet power, that, in present historical conditions, no power but the Soviet power is capable of preserving the unity and independence of the Russian people against aggression from without.119

Without the Bolsheviks Russia would simply have ceased to exist as a unified state in 1917 or 1918.

The right-wing Smenovekhists reasoned a little differently, for their aim was to transform the Bolshevik dictatorship into a nationalist one. It is clear that while for former ‘White’ ideologues and monarchists Smena Vekh was closely linked with their hope for a nationalistic degeneration of the Soviet power (a hope which was to some extent fulfilled), for many liberal intelligenty Smenovekhism was above all an appeal for collaboration with the Bolsheviks on a national — that is, non-party — basis. In his study Agursky pays insufficient attention to this contradiction between the ‘ideologues’ and the ‘masses’ of the intelligentsia, the dual nature of Smenovekhism (which also explains why Trotsky’s support for Smena Vekh in 1921 mystifies him). In this matter, strange as it may seem, the semi-official publicist Kuvakin turns out to be somewhat more profound than Agursky when he notes that the doctrine proclaimed by the ideologues of right-wing Smenovekhism — Ustryalov and others — coincided with in many ways, but in many other ways differed from, the new tendencies ‘which were noticed among the broad “lower” groups of the intelligentsia who ensured a degree of popularity for Smenovekhism at the beginning of the 1920s.’120 However, Agursky shows us something which Kuvakin does not wish so much as to mention: that while left-wing Smenovekhist ideas were taken up by certain strata, right-wing Smenovekhism, with its aggressive nationalism, evidently influenced the views of Stalin and the Party bureaucracy which followed him. To each his own…

Pokrovsky pointed to the many-sidedness of Smena Vekh immediately after the symposium appeared: ‘their psychology is more or less the same, but there are several ideologies among them.’121 Willingness to collaborate with the Bolsheviks united them, but their aim and ideals differed. Isai Lezhnev, who was then one of the leaders of the left-wing Smenovekhists inside Russia, wrote frankly that Smena Vekh was trying to reconcile and unite positions that were ‘diametrically opposed to each other not only in ideas but even in their basic feeling’.122 Undoubtedly the left Smenovekhists also hoped to see the Soviet power evolve, but they, unlike the rights, believed that this evolution would run in the direction of a gradual democratization, and certainly not towards a nationalistic Thermidorian dictatorship. These ideas of the left Smenovekhists were not at all to the liking of Zinoviev, who organized a persecution of Lezhnev’s Novaya Rossiya, trying to get it suppressed, but was unable to succeed in this owing to Lenin’s opposition. As a result, the publication was renamed and restarted in Moscow. Nevertheless, despite even the indirect support given to Lezhnev’s tendency by Lenin and Trotsky, the democratic hopes of Novaya Rossiya could not fail to irritate many activists who spoke in the Party’s name. N. Meshcheryakov, comparing the right-wing Smenovekhists of the Ustryalov type and the left-wingers of Novaya Rossiya, wrote that the former no longer believed in the ‘fetish’ of democratic liberties, whereas the latter were ‘full of yearning for those constitutional liberties’,123 for which Meshcheryakov, of course, sharply rebuked them, presenting Ustryalov as the example to be followed. Ustryalov was, indeed, a nationalist — that was his shortcoming — but as Meshcheryakov put it, ‘shortcomings have their merits’, and this nationalism of his was not so bad if his desire for Russia to be a great power ‘helps him to abandon the camp of counter-revolution’.124

The left-wing Smenovekhists often emphasized that their support for the Bolshevik government ought not to involve a loss of independence. Lezhnev wrote: