In this degenerate Russian Idea, nothing remained even of the second of the Slavophiles' original hatreds, parliamentarism. Its devil became 'The Protocols of the Riders of Zion'. Its rallying cry became smashing the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. To the new Slavophiles the principal confrontation of the contemporary world, seen by Danilevskii in the second generation as 'Russia versus the West seemed hopelessly outdated. 'Not in the past', wrote Volzhskii, n what is finished and done, but in what's to come, in what the future holds, is Russia, according to common Slavophile thought, called upon to reveal the Christian truth about the earth.'29 This truth consisted in the view that the fundamental confrontation of the contemporary world was Russia versus Jewry
Sharapov's vision
There is an astounding document at our disposal which leaves absolutely no doubts as to how Slavophile ideologues of the last pre^ revolutionary generation saw the 'Christian truth about the earth. The most vivid and prolific among them was Sergei Sharapov, who expressed his vision through a novel entitled Cherez polveka {Fifty years on), which was published in 1901.
'I wanted,' the author explains, 'to give to the reader in imaginary form a practical collection of Slavoplv'e dreams and ideals, to show what could be if Slavophile views became the guiding ones in society.'30 Here's how Sharapov saw Moscow in the year 1951. A Muscovite of the 1950s meets a person from the past and answers his amazed questions
'Is Constantinople really ours?'
'Yes, it's our fourth capital.'
T beg your pardon, and the first three are?'
The government is in Kiev The second capital is Moscow, and the third is Petersburg.'31
'What are the borders of this new Russia?'
'Persia is our province, just as Khiva, Bukhara, and Afghanistan. The western border is by Danzig, fit includes 1 all of F.ast Prussia further [along] Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, [it runs] past Salzburg and Bavaria and then goes down to the Adriatic Sea, surrounding and including Trieste. This Russian Empire contains the Polish Kingdom with Warsaw, the Western Ukraine and Galicia with L'vov, Bohemia with Vienna, Hungary with Budapest, Serbo-Croatia, Rumania with Bucharest, Bulgaria with Sofia and Adrianople, and Greece with Athens.'32
Doesn't one get the feeling from this astounding prophesy that — paradoxically — the true heir to the degenerate Russian Idea proved to be the Communist emperor Josef Stalin? We will return to this later. For now, let's just say that in some details Sharapov was, of course, in error. Austria and Greece were off the mark, as were Se^bo- Croatia and Trieste. Iran was never part" of the Soviet Slavopl le empire, and as for Afghanistan, measures were undertaken only later. However, the general vision of an empire dominai ng Eastern and Central Europe as well as central Asia, proved exact, but how does this compare with Danilevskii's lea of a Slavic Federation?
'We dreamed', says the Russophile from the past, 'that a Slavic Ur on would form and the Russian empire would be dissolved in it.'
'Listen, that's laughable. Look how immense Russia's greatness is and how tiny an appendage western Slavdom is to it. Would it really be fair to us, to the victors and folk first in Slavdom, and now the world, to have to squat for the sake of some kind of equality with the other Slavs?'33
It proved to be so easy for 'the folk first in the world' to d icard not only the Slavophile but also the Pan-Slavic mask And behind that mask turned out to be the naked drive for world hegemony. It is hardly surprising that 'autocracy not only was maintained, but was extraordinarily strengthened and finally acquired the appearance of the most freedom-loving and most desirable form of rule ' Of the ancient Slavophile devotion to the one-time 'freedom formula' a single vague recollection was all that remained: 'Our historical road is the harmonious combination of autocracy and self-government.'34
But by way of compensation, a large part of the novel is devoted to the battle that would be raging in Moscow in 1951 around the most urgent problem of the modern world. 'The topic was the inordinate growth in Moscow of the Jewish and foreign element which was turning the old Russian capital into a completely international Jewish city.'35 It had become so bad that 'at all institutions of higher and middle education the percentage quota for the number of Jews permitted to study there was abolished.'36 Even set in an imaginary future such liberal depravity horrified the author. As we now know, however, there was no need for him to be appalled. In accordance with the first commandment of the degenerate Russian Idea, the percentage quota was in fact piously restored in Moscow. Even more importantly, if we recall the campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitanism' and the Jewish 'doctor-poisoners" that truly did shake Russia in 1951, then the main part of Sharapov's prophecy really did come true. The Communist emperor did indeed transform the Jewish question into the most urgent issue in Moscow a half-centurv later. As we now know, only death prevented him from implementing its 'final solutior in Russia
The key point, however, is that for Sharapov as well as Stalin the solution to the Jewish question in Russia was only the obverse of the global struggle against world evil To both. Russia s Europeamzation, which her 'smatterers' had been carrying on over for an entire century, meant in fact its Judaization. The fundamental postulate of the Russian Idea has emerged again as before. Russia stood n opposition to the rotten West. Only, in the new reformulated doctrme of world evil, the West's rottenness was rooted not in its pai'iamentarism, as the naive first generation of Slavophiles had imagined nor even il capitalism, as the naive Bolsheviks had believed, but in Jewry, which had been responsible for forcing parliamentarism and capitalism upon the world.
According to Sharapov, the final solution of the Jewish question was to be achieved rather simply, by a gigantic na on-wide boycott of all of Jewry on the part of 'native Russian people, who finally had come to feel themselves masters in their own lane .37 Jews were simply not to oe hired for any kind of work except undei the table. The degeneration of the pre-revolutionary Russian Idea was at last complete It had merged with the Black Hundreds.
Hitler s mentors
How did such people react to their resounding defeat in 1917? Earlier, they had been full of euphoric anticipation of the empire's mininent and final victory over what they considered to be the last ban ler to world supremacy — Jewry. Not surprisingly they felt their defeat to be a disaster of apocalyptic proportions that portended the end of the world. But, above all, they saw what had happened as a tr umph of the world Jewish conspiracy They simply were incapable of interpreting it otherwise without having to reject their own doctrine, from which it logically followed that Russia had been conquered by Jewry. The following extract by one of the emigre earners of the Russian Idea is not untypical.
Now Russia in the full and literal sense ot the word, is Judea, where the ruling and dominant people are the Jews and where the Russians are allotted the pitiable and humiliating role of a conquered nation that has lost its national independence ... To summarize everything that has been argued up to this point, one can plainly say that the Jewish yoke over the Russian people is an established fact which can be denied or unnoticed only ei.her by perfect cretins or scoundrels who are completely md:'tferent to the Russian nation, its past, and the fate of the Russian people . . . Vengeance, cruelty, human sacrifice, and streams of blood is how one could characterize the methods the Jews use to rule over the Russian people. There can be no hopes for humaneness compassion or human mercy for the victims of Jewish despotism, for these sentiments are beyond the Jewish people, who for centuries have nourished an insatiable hatred toward other nations, a folk whose whole essence thirsts for blood and destruction.38