The Russian challenge and the year 2000
- Автор: Янов Александр Львович
- Год: 1987
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Russian challenge and the year 2000». Краткое содержание книги:
It was this sectarian band of Slavophile conservationists that Dn ifeii Shipov headed. Three times over the course of half a century the • programme was rejected by the Orthodox monarchy, and now Solzhenitsyn offers it to us as the means for saving Russia in the nuclear age. To anyone fam'.iar with the historical drama of the Russian Idea, there is cert;, nlv nott ng new in the Sh pov—Solzhenksyn programme. Its kernel is contained in the assertion that the state is not soi ety's poten al adversary (which is the ba^xS of trac t onal Western po/ tical thought and of the founders of the American constitu on), but rather ts potential ally: The Russians from time immemorial have not thought about struggle against authority, but about co-operat1 m with t in order to establish a life patterned after God.'48 The programme, of course, resurrects the Slavophile myth, that The tsars of ancient Rus' believed similarly, not separating themselves from their people . . . Previous sovereigns sought not to impose then will, but to express the collective sobornaia conscience of the people — and it is not yet too late to recreate the spirit of that order.'49 Moreover, Solzhenitsyn says, 'such an order is higher than a constitutional one, since it assumes not struggle between the sovereign and society, not a f.^ht between parties, but the harmonious search for good.'50 Therefore the 'Zemskii Sobor ought to be recreated in a new form, to estab sh a state/land order',51 in other words, a combination of autocracy and local self-government. 'Without mutual trust [between the state and society]/ says Solzhenitsyn, 'success in organ zing the state cannot be expected . . . "Yes, that was what the programme of Sh pov and his minority was about!'52
It doesn't matter that such a 'state/land order' never existed in Russia (or anywhere else for that matter). It doesn't matter that neicher Aksakov, nor Shipov, nor Solzhenitsyn have ever been able to cite a single example to support this Slavophile myth. It doesn't even matter that th s ideological programme combining autocracy with local autonomy, and expl :ly recognized as doing so by all the Slavophiles of the time, has, for the overwhelming majority of third- general on Slavophiles, mingled with the most savage chauvinism, racism and naked imperial ambitions. Finally, it doesn't matter that the very slogan, 'the combination of autocracy and local self- government is our historical path', served as one of the cornerstones of the imperial utop.a of degenerate Slavophilism at the turn of the century. What matters, however, to Solzhenitsyn is that he has a programme and 'smatterers' have nothing to match it. Yet, in view of its banality, it's hardly fair to reproach them for refusing to take it seriously.
But even supposing it is a worthwhile programme, the old question still remains: why didn't Alexander II, or Alexander III, or Nicholas II accept it? Why was it snuffed out by the very same Orthodox monarchy which Solzhenitsyn, after his most recent political recantation, now eulogizes? What grounds have we to expect that, say, an Alexander IV or a Nicholas III would not turn out to be the fascist Fiihrer of a Neues Russland rather than the majestic Russian sovereign of old taken from Slavophile mythology?
Alas, just as August 1914 proved 1o be Solzhenitsyn's artistic Waterloo, so Shipov's programme proves to be his ideological one.
Notes
Ivan S. Aksakov, Sochineniia, Moscow: 1886, v. II, p. 256.
A. I. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., v. 12, p. 146.
Ibid., p. 223.
Ibid., p. 226.
Ibid., p. 223.
Ibid.
Ibid., p 132. In brackets is the part of Bogrov's speech that was omitted by Solzhenitsyn.
L, Losev, op. cit., pp. 314—15.
Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., v. 12, p. 320.
Ibid., p. 287.
Ibid., p. 250.
Ibid., p. 124.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 138.
ibid., p. 141.
Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 143.
Ibid., p. 144.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 158.
Ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 146.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid., p. 249.
Walter Laqueur, op. cit., p. 123.
Ibid., p. 101.
L. Losev, op. cit., p. 315.
Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., v. 12, p. 239.
iU Ш р 232. 31 Ibid. p. 2o2. *2 lb id p 2o5.
fs Ibid ЩР 2ofr —7.
П Ibid ц. 24 * 35 Ibid p I Ibid p l°2. Ibid, p 210. M Ibid p 205 W Ibid p fib,
Ibid, p Hi
Ibid p. 227.
Ibid p 217.
Ibid p 23°
P. A. Z:ionchkovskii, Kricrs samodcrzhavia но rnbtzhc IS70— !SS0 iiodov I Tin- Crisis of Antocracv On the Vvw of 1870— I $80]. Moscow 1°ся p 452.
I.. G 7akharova, Zctnskaia kentnrfonna IS°0$odov[Tlu- lend Counter- rrform of tin- Moscow l^c>8. p. 4o2.
4o Sobhoniuv n, op. oil v, 13 p. 81. 47 Ibid., p. *3.
Ibid, p 40 Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp 84 — 5.
Ibid., p, 8ь.
17
When the Sleeper Awakened
Long before the second edition of August 1914, Veche s reader mail and The Nation Speaks manifesto demonstrated clearly that a gulf had opened up between the national-liberal intellectuals of the Russian Idea and the 'Orthodox patriotic' masses. There are grounds to suppose that some leaders of L-Nationalism and in particular Solzhenitsyn, were troubled by this growing rift and tried to reduce it, moving in a direction to meet the wishes of the masses. Long before the publication of the Gulag Arch.pelago, one of Solzhenitsyn's readers wrote to him with the following criticism: 'In your copious camp digressions one finds no mention that a Natan Frenkel' was the head of die Gulag, a Berman the head of the Belomor canal construction project,[7] a Kogan the head of the Kotlas-Vorkuta road construction project and so on'.1 Subsequently, Solzhenitsyn obligingly introduced all these names (even photographs ) into the text of the Gulag Archipelago. The author of 'Critical Notes' on Veche complained of the absence of Grigorii Rasputin from August 1914.2 Rasputin appears in the pages of the second edition. A reader protested in 1971, 'I don't know who you are
a Russian or a Jew? . . . Perhaps you are a Russian pressured by your em ironment, a Jewish wife ... In that case I request one thing
think for a moment about your own people. Understand that there is no returning to a bourgeois Jew:sh republic, that soviets are the Russian form of rule by the people which will yet find strength.'3 Solzhenitsyn later paid homage toward soviets as a governmental institution in his 'Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union', and the desperate cry 'think for a moment about your own people' was also heeded in the letter. Likewise, he condemned the bourgeois Jewish republic' of February 1917 in 'Our Pluralists'. As far as Solzhenitsyn's credentials as an Aran are concerned, these were to be so eloquently demonstrated by his sorties into diabolerie that even the most sceptical patriot could 110 longer have any racial reservations about him.
Despite all this, however, neither Solzhenitsyn. nor his comrades of liberal Nationalism, nor certainly his Western fellow-travellers, have proved capable of bridging the divide between themselves and the Orthodox patriotic reader. They cannot, after all, follow the advice of the Christian nationalist Archdeacon Varsonofii and 'seek out means of practical rapprochement' with the Communist state Still less can they accept a 'reorientation' of the Communist dictatorship that would put an end to disorderly hybridization and thus 'fulfil its duty before the nation and the race Their Orthodoxy, in contrast to Antonov's, precludes any ui ification with Leninism. Like Osipov before them, they too refuse to campaign for 'percentage quotas for Jews or to denounce I .nstein as a pseudo-scientist (as the theoretical physicist Tiapkln did! They have no desire to rehabilitate Stalin — even on the ground that he loved to discuss things with the patriarch , In short, they cannot overcome their revulsion for 'soul-destroying communism', just as in his time Ivan Aksakov could not share Sergei Sharapov's enthusiasm for 'soul-destroying despotism