The answer to this question is far beyond the purview of a book about the resurrection of imperial nationalism n Russia Yet the subject presents us with a chance to examine this question in greater detail and at least to try to offer a hypothetical answer
The Battle of Metaphors
Let's first take an overview of the intellectual confrontation at the time. The prognosis of Senator Daniel Patrick Movnihan was, m effect, that once having placed Europe on its knees ('Fuilandized' it) and isolated the United States, Russia intended to undertake a fateful assault on the Persian Gulf: 'The short run looks good [for the USSR], the long run bad Therefore move. It was the calculation the Austro- Hungarian Empire made in 1914.'3 Movnihan's Austro-Hunganan metaphor was opposed by another, suggested by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. 'The Soviet Union is similar in character to Nazi Germany: a revolutionary totalitarian power bent on establishing a new world order in which it would enjoy hegemony.'4 Out of this naturally followed an unambiguous prognosis world war is inevitable and therefore negotiations senseless; 'appeasement' is criminal; the policy of detente is tantamount to the Munich agreement. For those who accepted the German analogy, t. was hard to escape its logical conclusion. Thus Frank R. Burnett asserted that, 'The U.S. today is about where Britain was in 1938 witn the shadow of И tier's Germany darken' lg all over Europe.'5
Practically the whole intellectual debate in America at that time was reducible to the conflict between these two positions. As James Fallows explained later, 'The fundamental intellectual d ference between the sides is the historical prism through which their perceptions are bent. When the berals look at the 1980s, some of them see 1914. When the conservatives look it the 1980s, nearly all of them see 1938/6
I will return once again to this debate n my conclusion. Suff1 ce it to say, here, that in principle the outcome of this struggle did not change the apocalyptic mood of those years: both the 1914 and the 1938 comparisons signified the terrible mminence of a final world conflict — between Russia and the West, between Commur sm and anti- Communism. The fatal 'window of vulnerab ty' was supposed to open up sometime in the mid-1980s As always, this apocalyptic mood was expressed at its most extreme by the Russian emigre press. Each minute we live,' wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'no fewer than one country (sometimes two or three at once) is gnawed away by the teeth of totalitarianism. This process never ceases and has already been going on for almost forty years. . . . Each minute we live, somewhere on earth one, two, or three countries are b ng freshly ground up by the teeth of totalitarianism. . . . The Commur sts are already on the march everywhere — in Western Europe, and in America. And all today's distant viewers will soon be able to see it all w ithout a television set, and then they will feel it personally — but only after they've already been swallowed.'7
If we estimate the number of minutes in forty years as roughly twenty million and the number of countries as 150, then, arithmetically speaking, each country in the world has already been 'gnawed away' and even 'freshly ground up' by the Communists at least 133,333 times. But few care about emigre arithmetic when speeches such as the following are made on the floor of the US Senate. 'I guess Ronald Reagan is a warmonger just like V\ nston Churchill. . . . And we can find lots of examples of Neville Chamberlains, the appeasers of this world who never seem to learn the lessons of history (Jake Garn of Utah); or: 'Don't tell me there is no lesson to be learned there' (John Tower, Texas).8
Russia s Historical Choice
Just one detail was omitted from this impassioned debate in which the lessons of German (or Austro-Hungarian) history were discussed, the lessons ot Russian history. For this reason alone the examples cited were academic to the questions that really mattered. Had the senators followed their own advice and turned to the only history whose lessons are essential for a proper understanding of Soviet behaviour in world politics at the end of the 1970s, the picture perceived by them would probably have been different. In The Russian New Right I tried to sketch out this picture, tracing the long-term patterns of Rassian political change over the last half-millenium, since the time when Russia became a nation-state.
According to this perception, the degree of Rassia s aggressiveness and expansionism in world politics generally depends not so much on tne character of the dominant ideology (as the stereotype holds) as on the character of a particular regime. The tsarist dcologies of Russia as the Third Rome' or 'Orthodoxy. Autocracy and Nationality' did not prevent Russia from being transformed ^to a gigantic empire occupying one-sixth of the earih's land surface, any more than the Communist ideology hindered Nikita Khrushchev from curtailing territorial expansion.9 The Soviet government of the 1970s, which overturned Khrushchev's regime of reform but was not prepared to pass the whole way into becoming a regime of counter-reform, represented, according to this picture, merely a temporary and transitional regime of political stagnation. In this sense, and only in this sense, was it reminiscent (if we must draw analogies with other countries) of the Weimar Republic. It could have led Russia into a new counter-reform or into a new reform, but ч was 'ncapable of leading it into an all-out confrontation with the West. Historically, the only thing such a regime has been able to accomplish is to steer the nation into a profound political, cultural and economic decay at home and grab whatever is lying in temptation's way abroad
This is why, according to the metaphor of transitional or Weimar Russia, the world could not have been approaching a global crisis in the late 1970s. Instead, it was Russia which was once again approaching the same fateful historical crossroads where, as always after a regime of stagnation, she is faced with a choice — between radical reform and no less radical counter-reform.
Russia is the only European country which, time and again, over the course of her entire tragic history, has been forced to make this choxce. It began as long ago as the 1550s when her first grandiose effort to join world civilization, 'to seek and >nd herself in mankind' as Petr Chaadaev was later to say, suffered a crushing defeat and ended instead in the grandiose counter-reform and fierce garrison- state dictatorship of Ivan the Terrible.10 Since that ime, over the course of centuries both Russia's reformist efforts as well as her counter-reforms have taken on the greatest variety of ideological integuments. Her reforms have always been attempts to join civilization while her counter-reforms have always been efforts to perpetuate her split with civilization. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the choice before Russia - still the same — desj te all her ICBMs, computers, and other outward attr jutes of modernity. Russia has never come out of the Middle Ages', Nikolai Berdiaev insightfully remarked as long ago as 1923.11 Therefore she may now once again try to 'open up' to the world, as China has been doing over these last years, or, alternatively, issue another challenge to civlization, escaping from her present historical decline at the cost of once more transforming herself into a garrison-state empire.
Perhaps the most widespread illusion of the past seven decades has been that the Communist metamorphosis of 1917 somehow broke the long-term patterns of Russian political change and thus struck from the agenda of world history the issues raised by Russ a as 'the sick man of Europe' and the progressive degeneration of the world's last empire. The 1980s should have brought with them the ins ght that Communism, just like Ivan the Terrible's 'Orthodox tsardom' or Peter the Great's garrison-state empire, was in fact only a postponement, a temporary remission for 'the sick man of Europe', a mere detoui by which Russia — at the price of unheard-of sacr: "ices and trials — has returned to the same 'accursed quest;ons' wh ch 1917 had promised to rid her of for ever. Once again she is in decline and once more she faces her old traditional choice.