However, its catechism was alarmingly simple: despotism and parliamentarism at the negative pole, the pr nciple of authoritarian power' — unlimited power which somehow provides spiritual freedom — at the positive one; rationalism at the negative pole, faith at the positive; individualism negative, collectivism positive; and, linally, cosmopolitanism negative, nationalism positive. When, at the start of che nineteenth century, the formula Freedom = Rationalism + Individualism + Cosmopolitanism appeared bankrupt, proponents of the Russian Idea reshuffled it to obtain a new one: Freedom = Religious faith + Collectivism + Nationalism.
The liberal opposition
The contemporaries of the early Slavophiles, whether liberal western- l/.ers such as Alexander Ilerzen or populists (narodnixi) ike Nikolai Chernyshevskn, well understood the reactionary nature of Slavophilism, but none the less valued the duve for freedom that powered it (much as Western academic fellow-travellers of today's ant -communist Russian Idea understand and value Solzhem'syn and his comrades- in-arms). Herzen wrote: 'We saw in their teachings a new oil for anointing tsarism, a new chain laid on thought, a new subordination of the conscience to the servile Byzantine church.'24 At the same time he admitted, 'Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones: we shared one love with them, but not an identical one . . . "ike Janus or the two-headed eagle, we were looking in deferent directions while our hearts were beating as one.'25 Chernyshevskii, albeit more prosaically, confirmed this view: 'It's too little to say n istification of Slavophilism that its effect is [only] either relative or negative. There are unquestionably some good sides to it as well ... As far as its aspirations are concerned, one has to do full justice to them.'26
By contrast there is nothing sympathelic in ihe attitude of contemporary liberal Moscow thinkers toward the present-day anti- communist Russian Idea. Andrei Sakharov,27 Leonid I nskii,28 Grigorii Pomerants,29 Andrei Siniavsky,30 Valerii Chalidze,31 Boris Shragin32 and Andreii Amal'rik, have all regarded the regenerated Russian Idea with suspicion, if not outright hostility. None of them would say, as Herzen did, that he and the Russophiles (as the new proponents of the Russian Idea are known) together shared 'one love' or that their hearts 'beat as one' with them. Yet they would immediately denounce the Russophiles' ideas as 'a new chain laid on thought' and protest against 'a new subordination of the conscience to the servile Byzantine church'. Why? What has brought about such a change in atl'tude?
None of those named have the slightest sympathy for Communism. On the contrary, they are all opponents of the reg me and many of them made their names in the dissident struggle. It would be tempting to explain their hostility to the regenerated Russian Idea by arguing that the Soviet liberal-intelligentsia is more intolerant than its pre- revolutionary counterpart. However, if we compare what some of the best Russian liberal thinkers of the 1880s and 1890s had to say, such as S. Trubetskoi, M. Stasiulevich, A. Gradovskii, P. Mi ukov or V. Solov'ev, surprisingly we would have to conclude that Russia's present-day liberals are far more tolerant toward the Russophiles than their pre-revolutionary forebears were.
So what was it that critics of the Russian Idea с scovered in the 1880s and again in the 1980s which people of Chernyshevskii's and Herzen's generation could not know and which its Western fellow- travellers do not understand to this day? Why were they willing to raise their swords against it so quickly and without hesitation? What happened to the noble retrospective Utopia after Konstantin Aksakov We will never manage to grasp this unless we return to the Russian Idea's genesis and the process of its ideological development.
Notes
Ivan Aksakov in Teoria gosudarstva и slavianofilov [The Theory of the State in SlavophilismГ St. Petersburg: 1898, pp. 32, 180.
Quoted from Vestntk Evropy, 1894, No. 8, p. 510.
See Alexander Yanov, 'Rahochaia tema', Novyi mil, 1971, No. 3, p 247.
Teoria . . , p. 31.
Vestnik Evropy, 1894, No. 8, p. 510.
lz-pod glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, 1974. [English translation From Under the Rubble. Boston: Little Brown, 1975J, pp. 21, 25
B. Paramonov, Paradoksv i kompleksy Aleksandra Yanova', Kontinent, No 20. 1980. p 241.
Ivan S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochmenii, Moscow, 188t>, v. II, pp 510-11.
V. Maksimov, 'Svoboda dukhovnaia dolzhna predshestvovat s\obodt pohticheskoi' [Spiritual Freedom Must Precedc Political Freedom], Novoe russkne slnvo, 18 June 1978.
Teoria . . p, 49
Ibid., pp. 38-9.
Ibid
Ibid., pp. 32-3.
Ibid , p. 39.
Ibid , pp. 37-8
Ibid , p 41.
Richard Holstadter, The American Political Tradition, Vintage Books, 1948, p. 3.
Ibid
Ibid,, p. 7.
Iz-pod glvb p. 78.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid,, p 23, Emphasis in capital letters is in original.
Teoria . . . , p. 57.
Alexander Herzen, Byloe i dumy [,Wy Past and Thoughts], Leningrad, 1947. p. 284.
Ibid., p. 304.
N. G. Chernvshevskii, Pol noe sobranie sochitienii v. Ill, Moscow, 1947, pp. 85 — 6. Other opponents of the Slavophiles in this generation spoke of them in a similar vein (see, for example, Nikolai Ogarev, Izbrannye sotsml'no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedenia, Moscow, 1952, v. 1, p. 409: Vissarion Belinskii Polnoe sobranie sochmenii, Moscow: 1953. v X. pp. 17-18).
See, for example, A. D, Sakharov, О pis'me Solzhenitsyna vozhdiam SSSR [On Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Leaders of the USSR], New York: 1974.
See N, Lepin, 'Parafrazy i painyatovaniia', Sintaksis. No. 7, 1980.
See, for example, Gngorii Pomerants, 'Son о spravedlivom vozme/.dii', Sintaksis, No. 6, 1980
See, for example, 'Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism', New York Review of Books, 22 Nov. 1979.
See, for example, 'Khomeynizm ili natsional-kommunizm?' [Khomeiniism or National Communism?'], Novoe russkoe slovo, 27 Oct. 1979.
See The Challenge of the Spirit, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978.
The Russian Idea: Genes s and Degeneration
The Russian Idea arose at the height of Nicholas 1 s dictatorship (a regime of counter-reform in my terminology). Of course, political terror was, as always, one of the means this regime used to assert itself. Another, no less important means — perhaps even more important — was its ideology It was the very deology of counter- reform that not only disarmed but even, for a time, attracted to its side almost the whole of Russia's intellectual elite. The Slavoph les were by no means behaving like radical heretics when they called Nicholas dictatorship despotism. The dictator himself took pride in this. es he said with disarming frankness, 'despotism still exists in Russia, for it comprises the essence of my rule, but t is 111 agreement with the nation's gemus.'1
It was this notion of despotism 'agreeing with the nation's genius that was at the heart of the ideology of official nationality' wh.'ch ruled Russia for a quarter of a century. It was, n essence, a kind of powerful secular religion thrust upon a society that had been frozen up after the desperate attempt at reform in 1825 had come to grief It amounted to a deification of the state to the point of political idolatry. The very best Russian minds of that lime — Pushkin. Tiutchev, Belinskii Gogol', Viazemskii, Zhukovski. and Nadezhdin — proved unable to resist its temptation This was the time when Pushkin's "To Russia s Slanderers' and Stanzas' were published and Gogol's intensely nationalistic 'Selected Passages from Correspondences with Friends This was when Belniskii wrote, in the tsar is our freedom because from him comes our new civilization, our enlightenment, just as from him comes our life . . . unconditional obedience to tsarist authority is not |ust useful and necessary, but also the supreme poetry of our lite, it is our national trait |narodnost']'2 and Nadezhdin — most declamatory of all — expressed the general mood: 'In our country there is one eternal unchanging force of nature: the tsar! One source tor all national bfe: sacred love of the tsar! Our history has up to now been like a great poem in which there is one hero, one character. That's the distinctive original characteris с of our past. It shows us our great future predestination as well.'3 Very obviously, an ideology of political idolatry (a cult of personality, in modern terms) was a real, and for some time crucial, fact of Russian cultural Lie.4