Therefore, for centuries the empire cemented over all cracks that could potenually lead to peasant differentiation. In chis sense, Joseph Stalin, with his kolkhoz slavery, was a worthy successor to Ivan IV and Peter I, under whom Russia s peasants owed their slavery to the landlords and the commune. In this sense Nikita Khrushchev, with his peasant reforms, was continuing the work of Alexander II and Petr Stolypi a to dismantle serfdom and the commune, and hence — consciously or unconsciously — the medieval empire.
Russia's tragedy
It has been Russia s great tragedy that, whereas her reformers have always suffered defeat, her counter-reformers, whether in the context of Orthodox monarchy or its Soviet incarnation, have always been triumphant. The most fundamental question in Russian history is, I believe, why Russia has proved to be the only country in Europe where — w thout excepl on — all attempts at reform aimed at clearing the way for peasant differentiation have failed. Following the dicta of the Russ in Idea, Solzhenitsyn doesn't even notice this problem. Nevertheless, n describ Tg the defeat of one of Russia's reformers, he inadvertently casts some ght on the mechanics of the constant fa;,ure of Russian reform.
In dozens of pages of liny print he informs the reader of the details of Stolypin's 'state programme', his reformist plans. Nowhere, however, does the author or his hero g re us as much as a single word about how these plans were to be implemented: i ia which pc tical coalitions, with the help of which institutions, what manoeuvres would be necessary, and what kind of poli cal base would be needed. Very quickly, the reader starts to doubt whether Stolyp i had any kind of overall political strategy at all, or any political base. Solzhenitsyn then convinces us that indeed he had neither.
Here again, contrary to his intent >ns, the author points up the fatal weakness of all Russia's reformist leaders. They had 'state programmes' all right, yet none of them had developed a realistic and serious political strategy for the realization of their programmes. Unlike, for example, Bismarck or Cavour, none of them knew how tc mplement their ideas. But even given this general weakness of Russian reformers, Stolypin was outstanding in his desperate political helplessness. Repeatedly, Solzhenitsyn tells the reader that with Stolypin 'a radically new period in Russian history could have begun and was beginning.'37 'The 3rd of June was the start of the great reconstruction of Russi'i.'38
However, from the facts he introduces, the reader is persuaded that the opposite is true: Stolypin was utterly dependent on the whims of a worthless tsar, to whom his 'state programme' meant nothing and who at any moment could easily step back and betray his minister ,9 At the same time, the tsar, according to Solzher itsyn, was a puppet of 'the upper military and court aristocracy," people about whom Stolypin thought 'there are so many dozens — or hundreds? — of these self- seeking careerists that make up the ruling strata in Russia. +0 The 'ruling strata', naturally, resented him in much the same way. To them, Stolypin was a 'schemer who had bewitched and beguded his Majesty and so succeeded in hanging on to his post for too long — but by all accounts it was time for him to clear off! 11
Betrayal
Already by the autumn of 190b, that is, three years before he was assassinated, Solzhenitsyn's Stolypin was not unlike general Jaruzelsk in today's Poland. He had disbanded the Duma (as Jaruzelsk" aid with Solidarity), earning the hatred of Russian liberals and the West (also like Jaruzelski). In the eyes of the right-wing dinosaurs of his time, Stolypin was a 'traitor' and schemer though he had saved them from the 1905 revolution. (Similarly, Jaruzelsk. is seen as a schemer by Poland s party dinosaurs, whom he rescued from Solidarity in 1981 ) But as soon as he had managed this, Stolypin's polit cs became intolerable and impossible to them all . them all . the court camarilla, who under a constitutional structure would have nothing left to do but disappear; the ret'red bureaucrats, all of them failed rulers, who thronged the right wing of the State Council (it was overflowing with retired idlers who had come to a standstill, as the blood stops in a senile organism), and — those die-hards among the nobility who imagined they could dominate Russia for centuries to come without yielding an rnch 42
Politically, the difference between Jaruzelski and Stolypin is that the former is kept afloat by Moscow while the latter was not held up by anyone That's why, even as early as autumn 1908, Stolypin was already politically dead, This produced m him eventually 'an almost total sensation — of utter defeat, and not just in the matter of his reform law. but n his whole five years of rule, m all his life's plans'.43
Once again we see that same freak show, that same menagerie of monsters of the Orthodox monarchy which led the Russian army to its devastation in August 1914 — only it was the generals who dominated
Russia's military policy, while it was the court camarilla', the 'retired idlers' and the 'die-hards' who dominated the Orthodox monarchy's state policy. It was they who crushed Stolypm, just as 53 years later it was their successors who annihilated Khrushchev. They steered Russia on to the reefs of counter-reform, just as her military monsters Г Solzhenitsyn's 'sacks of shit') led her into the debacle of August 1914 In vain, it would seem, has Solzhenitsyn profaned his muse by heeding the deceptive one-hundred-year-old calling of the Russian Idea. In vain, has he forced hundreds of pages devoted to the perfidious liberals and satanic Jews into the new edition of August 1914. In vain, has he defiled his work with yet another sortie into diabolerie, resurrecting the biblical for Nazi?) image of the serpent. Just as the Orthodox monarchy betrayed its heroes Vorotyntsev and Stolypin, so has the Russian Idea betrayed Solzhenitsyn. The new edition of August 1914 was destined to become Solzhenitsyn's own personal and artistic August 1914
Shipov's programme
Solzhenitsyn, in his words, borrowed his 'state programme for Russia's future from Dmitrii Shipov. It was by .gnoring this programme that his opponents so offended him. ('Is the print too tiny? Don't their eyes pick it up?' he asked bitterly about the 'smatterers'.) I can't speak for the others, but my eyes p:ck up only Aksakov's old programme for a 'State of the Land' (a Zemskoe gosudarstvo — which the reader will recall was a hopeless anachronism even in the 1860s). Later, in 1881, Ivan Aksakov once again dragged it out of the Slavophile attic in a desperate attempt to convince Alexander III to assemble a Zemskii Sobor[6], 'capable of putting all the constitutions in the world to shame'.44 Aksakov did not conceal his concern that, 'this is a last gamble: should it not pay off, but fail totally, there will be no more salvation.'45 However, this 'last gamble' did fail in the 1880s, just as a similar one failed two decades ago. It met with a final failure in 1904, when the Russian Idea, you may recall, veered off in another direction, leaving those Slavophiles of the 'immobile Aksakov cast' (as Leont'ev characterized them), or 'the zemstvo Mensheviks', (as Solzhenitsyn calls them), by the wayside. In Solzhenitsyn s words, they represented a minuscule mino ty',46 'a r inority frail'47 even among those involved in the early tweni sth-century lemstvo movement itself.