Hough and Pipess duet convinced me that there is a chasm between how the term Russian naiionalism is used in Washington and how it is used in Moscow. This rift seemed all the deeper to me when I learned that, m certain run-of-the-mill courses on the subject at American universities, the Westernism of the last century is calmly interpreted as a component part of Russian nationalism, thus confusing the Sakharovs of Russia's past with her Solzhenitsyns, just as American sovietologists had done in Washington, before my eyes with respect to modern times. Then, after another conference in Washington in October 1985, 1 became almost despairing when the American politicians and experts present concluded almost unanimously U was the sole exception) — and entered into the conference record!
— that Russian nationalism is 'the operative ideology' of the present- day Soviet government. The conceptual language of my readers dearly had nothing in common with the language in which my book was wrtten.
As a rule, this conceptual language does not view Russian nationalism as a particulai ideology, or even as a political doctrine. It sees it more as a feeling or seni ment which is merely expressed by ideological symbols. These symbols can either be positive (and then this nationalist sentiment is called patriot >ra) or negative (in which case it is called chauvinism). For what lies between these two emotional poles — nationalism as such, the deology of nationalism — there is no symbol. It is a kind of no one's land, a blank spot on the ideological map, lacking political substance of its own and therefore accepting any content the observer brings to it.
There is no doubt that the Soviet leadership, as long ago as the 1930s, incorporated symbols of patriotism into its own deology in order to exploit people's patriotic emotions. However, though this may have confused Western observers, it did not fool Russian nationalists. The ideological explosion of the 1960s described in The Russian New Right was the most convincing ev: Jence of the gaping chasm between the 'emotional' exploitation of ideological symbols in Soviet propaganda and the genuine ideolog} of Russian nationalism If nationalism really were serving as the 'operative deology' of the Soviet government, the revolt of Russian nationalists that erupted in the 1960s almost simultaneously in both the dissident samizdat and the officially censored Soviet press, would defy explanation. Russian nationalists graphically and unambiguously refused to recognize the official Soviet ideolog> as their own, regardless of how many patriotic symbols it expropriated. The Soviet government, for ts part, liKewise refused to recognize the Russian nationalists as their own. On the contrary, it unleashed its KGB on them, hustling some off to pi *son and forcing others to fall silent. Why?
Neither Jerry Hough nor Richard Pipes can pro\ ide an answer to this decisive question They confuse patriotic emotions (or, 'n the other interpretation, chauvinist excesses) with the ideology of Russian nationalism, and that has made it impossible for them to understand the nature of the phenomenon.
This, apparently, would explain the unexpectedly different reactions of readers to The Russian New Right. Some saw it as an attack on Russian patriotism and were duly offended. Other interpreted it as an assault on Russian chauvinism and duly rejoiced. In reality, however, the book was neither one nor the other. Generally, it was not intended to have any relation to emotions whatsoever It described the — at first glance — inexplicable resurrection of the ideology of Russian nationalism in the modern-day Soviet Union (where, according to all sovietological cliches, such a thing could not happen). It dealt with Russian nationalism's revolutionary origins in the mid-1960s, its split into a dissident faction and an establishment faction toward the end of that decade, and the transformation of the latter into the USSR's unofficial shadow ideology. It went on to describe how ihese two factions grew ideologically closer and how they were repressed by the police in the mid-1970s. The book also offered an hypothesis about the potential political consequences for Russia and the world in the event of a new, and this time victonous, resurrection of the ideology of Russian nationalism at the end of the second Christian rii llennium.
I tried to show the reader how Russian nationalism's main tiaits were formed, its militant anu-Westernism, rendering it similar to the .deology of the Ayatollah Khomeini- ts dogmatism and ntolerance. bringing it closer to contemporary Soviet Marxism; its extremism and explosive potential, resembling Bolshevism abroad at the beginning of the century However, even those re\iewers most well disposed toward the book did not take all this seiiously. For the majority of them it was a book about a bizarre chauvinist uing (the 'lunatic fringe ) of Soviet dissidence, a kind of Russian Ku Klux Klan; interesting and even entertaining, with a mass of exotic details, but lacking any immediate political significance
Suppose, right at the start of the twentieth century, immediately after the emergence of Bolshevism, someone had written a book about the sudden birth in Russia of a potentially powerful ideological alternative to the then ruling, and seemingly unshakable, tsarist regime Suppose the author of this book had warned that, in the event of Bolshevism's triumph, it could totally transform Russia's role in the world and restructure the entire political arena of the twentieth century. Suppose, furthermore, that well-wishing critics had interpreted the phenomenon of Bolshevism described in this book as a marginal wing of contemporary Russian dissidence — unpleasant, perhaps ominous, but not of any immediate political interest. There would, of course, have been other critics too, Bolshevism's 'fellow-travellers', who might have accused the author of painting Bolshevism black and reducing it to a lowest common denominator, when in fact, they may have argued, there are good Bolsheviks and bad ones. The good ones should be supported, they might have said, because they are selfless fighters against accursed tsansm, (which suppresses human rights and organizes Jewish pogroms) and are thus our natural allies.
This was very similar to the position I found myself in after the publication of my Russian New Right in 1978. The only difference was that I had written not about Bolsheviks, whose role has become somewhat clearer over the past seven decades, but about Russian nationalists, whose role as yet remains just as dark as that of the Bolsheviks in 1903. In just the same way, those crtics who wished me well and were full of revuls ,»n for Russian chauvinism failed to take this new ideological phenomenon se ously as a real political alternative to the existing regime. At the same time, the nat'.onalist Western 'fellow-travellers' attacked me- for slandering Russian patriotism, because there are good nat.-onal.'sts too — selfless fighters against accursed Communism (wf ch suppresses human rights and hinders Jewish emigration out of the Soviet Union) and are thus our natural allies.