No one has explained this better than Vladimir Solov'ev, himself a former Slavophile and leading religious thinker:
Russian patriotism; they all join together too in the most graphic
application of this pseudo-nationalist principle — anti-semitism.[1]
The most striking of Solov'ev's articles dedicated to the nationalities issue in Russia is even called 'Slavophilism and its Degeneration'. The term degeneration' applied to Slavophilism became standard usage in the Russian liberal press in the 1880s. This is testimony that Russian ihinkers at the time superbly understood the essence of this process and wrote about it with a lack of inhibition that far exceeds anything present-day critics of the Russian Idea permit themselves They used expressions Ьке 'tooth-gnashing obscurantism' (V. Solov'ev) and mysticism with a crude predatory lining' (M. Stasiulevich).2 We can find nothing similar among today's opponents of the Russian Idea.
The cr.tics of that tinee naturally wished to understand the sources of this degeneration and thus carefully examined the Russian Idea's initial catechism, trying, as Solov'ev said, to find 'in old Slavophilism rhe imp) .nt of today's jingoism'3 They unanimously discovered this 'imprmt in the duality of the Slavophile catechism As S Trubetskoi said for example, in his article 'A Disillusioned Slavophile', in Slavophilism 'there were both progressive, highly humanistic and universalist tendencies as well as conservative retrograde nationalism
. . The Slavophiles' ideal was a Panslavic Orthodox culture of the future that would renew the world and, at the same time, pre-Petrine Russia ... in her a.'ienation from Europe.'4 In Slavophilism and its Degeneration' Solov'ev says essentially the same thing, only in religious terms 'The contradiction is between the universal ideal of Christianity and the pagan tendency toward aloofness. 5 He denies the Slavophiles even the genuineness of their Orthodox faith, accusing them of being a 'tribe of Russian Orthodox heathens He puts Slavophile Orthodoxy in quotation marks because, he says, 'according to its psychological motif, [it] was more a faith m the people than a people's faith.'6
S. ''rubetskoi dedicated another article, Protivorechiia nashei kul'tury'7 ['The Contradictions of Our Culture'], to this same duality in Slavophilism's initial catechism, as did Pavel Miliukov in his famous lecture 'The Disintegration ot Slavophilism'.8
The duality problem
The hypnotic power ot the classical critique of the Russian Idea, based on its 'duality formula', was strong When in 1969 I began a debate about Slavophilisn in a Moscow academic journal, this formula still seemed to me not only adequate, but the only possible approach to the problem. It formed the basis of my fi st art ;le, 'Zagadka slavianofil'skoi ki tiki' [The Enigma of the Slavophile Cr ique'], wh (jjfe opposed both orthodox Marxists and proponents of born-again Slavophilism insp: ed by the Russian Idea.9 However, already in the course of the debate I understood — and this was reflected in my concluding article, 'Reply to My Opponents' — that such a meta- ideological cr1 1 [ue of the Russian Idea, lumping together sociology with historiography, and politics with religion, is unsatisfactory. It proved to be too easy for my Marxist opponents to stretch the argument of Slavophile political doctrine nto the realm of soc;'^logy ('they were all landlord serf-owners'), and for the Russophf'es to argue on grounds of cultural philosophy and religion ('Slavophii-sm was not a political but a religious and cultural doctrine'). Switching back and forth 1:ke this, the debate soon lost its focus, which the duality formula did not help, but rather hindered it from finding.10 Obviously, something very important — perhaps even decisive — was lack ig, but at that time I did not know quite what it was. I was therefore not in a position to formulate precisely my object on to the class1 jal ci.1 que.
Only in tne course of working on my three-volume A History of Political Opposition in Russia, which saw the light of day — if one could call it that — only in Soviet samizdat,11 did I manage to define what seemed to be lacking in the classical duality formula: it was devoid of a political dimension.
Of course, the classical authors were right. The duality of inii lal Slavophilism (as of today's Russian New Right that follows in its footsteps) is beyond doubt. Trubetskoi proved its philosophical duality and Solov'ev its religious duality. It also contained a duality, as Miliukov had shown, in its ideological goals as vvell. Yet in its political doctrine this dual у was missing.
From the very beginning (and completely unambiguously), it opposed to both native despotism and Western parliamentarism its 'principle of authoritarianism', which repudiated the doctrine of the separation of powers, that is, the only mechanism known to humankind for limiting the state's arbitrariness. Thus from the very start it was reduced to having to rely on the Russian Orthodox church as the sole guarantor of this constraint. It thereby supplanted, in essence, politics with religion, and the separation of powers with the principle of separation of functions between spiritual and temporal authorities. This, in turn, rendered it incapable of developing a political mechanism to prevent either the occurrence of periodic catastrophes in Russian history or its own degradation. From the very beginning it considered political parties, constitutions, republics — everything that was focused for it in the hated term parliamentarism' — as unconditional evils. Thus from its inception it built a political trap into its own world view J Its arguments served it superbly m the deological struggle, but proved useless n the political arena In fact, what was such a doctiine supposed to do when in a crisis situation it was faced with a purely political choice and was lirmly restricted to only two possibilities — either for or against parliamentarism? In such an event wouldn't it naturally prefer despotism as the lesser evil?
Thus, despite the formula of the classical critique, it was precisely the absence of duality in Slavophilism's political docti ine, precisely its singularity (as opposed to duality), that proved to be the decisive factor that lay behind its degeneration. II this is so, then the drama of the Russian Idea was first and foremost a political drama. In a land where the combat between despotism and liberalism had dominated the political tradition for centuries, it sought to be the deology of the authoritarian 'middle'. Sooner or later there had to come a time when it would become clear that, at the height of a national crisis in Russia, «11 Aksakov's famous expression, 'there is no middle. For early Slavophi'ism, this moment of truth occurred n the 1870s. Thus the real enigma of the Russian Idea is that i»:s own political doctrine invariably paralyses it just when it is faced with the k'nd of political choice that proves imperanve at a moment of crisis. Here hes the seed of its degeneration. And, once degenerated, it is transformed into its own opposite — an ideology of 'soul-destroying despotism' and counter-reform.
Contemporary critics of Russian nationalism cannot know when such a moment of truth will come for Ш present heirs the Russian New Right They only know, on the basis of historical precedent and analysis of its political doctrine, that this moment will one day come. They have no reason to suppose that today's New Right will behave any differently when it does than Slavophiles have done in the past