victim of Communist dictatorship'.18
The call was heard. A year later the new American administration restructured the staff of Radio Liberty and the Voice of America in order to adapt American radio broadcasting into the USSR to ihe ideas of the Russian New Right. This is what resulted.
At the end of January 1985 the New York Daily News asked its readers: 'Did you know your tax dollars were being used to transmit Antisemitic broadcasts into Russia? . . And instead of spreading the message of freedom and democracy that President Reagan declared to be our contribution to the modern world, Radio Liberty is often pro- tsarist as well?'19 According to ihe Lus Angeles Times, anti-semitism and tsarist ideas were disseminated, specifically, in the broadcast of 'a passage of Alexander Solzhenitsvn's book August /914, dealing with the 1911 assassination of a tsarist prime minister by a Jewish anarchist. The broadcast picked up several phrases that have been traditionally used by Russian anti-semites ana even quoted a passage from the Protocols of the Elders of lion,':o
According to an editorial in The New Republic, all this began in 1982, when the Reagan administration appo'nted George Bailey, a close associate of Solzhenitsyn's, as Radio Liberty director. Bailey, in turn, the editorial continues, 'installed a group of Russian emigre broadcasters who share Solzhenitsyn's particular Russian nationalist views. To be sure, this ideology is anti-Communist Bui it also glorifies Czarist Russia and regards both Bolshevism and parliamentary democracy as equally decadent "Western" ideologies wilh no place in Russian society, and it has historically contained a strong element of anti-semitism '21 The Christian Science Monitor was more concrete:
During the two and a half year tenure of RI director George Bailey, the bS-funded and directed station claimed on the air that: Western democracy is corrupt and unsuitable for the Soviet Union US pressure on right-wing authoritarian regimes to observe human rights is counterproductive and unmoral.
Liberal opponents of the tsarist autocracy were in error and contributed to the Bolshevik takeover.
Jewish revolutionaries bear direct responsibility for the destruction of the old re;.' Line.
Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine during the Civil War — however unfortunate — should be understood in the context of Jewish support for the Reds.
The SS division Galitchina, whose Ukrainian volunteers fought for Hitler in France, among other places, represented the commendable aspirations of freedom-loving Ukrainians.22
Moreover, the same newspaper reported that, 'one of the editors of Radio Liberty (an old associate of Bailey's) asked rhetor :ally in an interview in his piesence: "And who has established that anti-semitism is wrong?'"23
There is an old African proverb that says: 'If a crocodile wants to eat your enemy, that does not mean he s your friend.' Hitler, who in his time aspiied to devour both Communist Russia and parFamentary Europe indiscriminately, showed how true this is. But have we learned very much from it?
Russia vs. Russia
What is the point of the lesson offered by the Russian New Right to the American administration, which was just trying to make use of its anti-Communist potential? How, one wonders, was this administration to know that the Russian New Right stands not for the Russia of Pushkin and Tolstoy, but for the Russia of Purishkevich and the Union of the Russian People, which has been hostile to the other Russia since time immemorial? It was that Russia which, in the very first months of Alexander Ill's regime of counter-reform, oegan the first era of mass Jewish pogroms in modern history, and which, in the struggle against reform, launched the first mass-based proto-fascist party on to the world. It was that same one which, in its further struggle against reform, fabricated the vile and vicious anti-semitic document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Clearly the American administration was unaware of all this, since these events took place long before the Communist Revolution, in the days of the tsarist and thoroughly anti-Communist Russia which the Russian New Right seeks to restore.
Could the ideological approach to the USSR, which, one must assume, inspired the bulk of the Reagan administration, have warned it of the dangers of an alliance with the party of Russian counter-reform0 It could not The people who believe m this approach don't even suspect the existence of the struggle Russia vs. Russia, reform vs. countei-reform that constitutes the essence of Russian history. Could the administration's opponents have warned it ot its mistake, given that their geopolitical approach ignores this struggle ust as much as its ideologically oriented counterpart does'1 Clearly, they could not.
In truth, without an alternative, historical approach toward Russia, the West is simply not in a position to evaluate the intellectual and political complexity of the problem that confronts it in the second half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the complexity of the problem cannot be fully grasped without coming to grips with the nature of the Russian New Right and its role in Russian history. It is for these reasons that the mid-1980s call for a new book about Russian nationalism. With each year that passes, Russia's new historical decline is becoming more obvious The path that she chooses to escape this decline as the year 2000 approaches, will affect the fate of the world
Notes
Quoted in Robert Scheei, With Enough Shovels, Random House, 1982, p. 5.
Imperial nationalism significantly differs from what is commonly understood as 'nationalism' in the social sciences It expresses the interests not of small oppressed nations struggling for liberation from the imperial yoke (such as contemporary Poland), but of the dominant 'imperial' nation — in other 4\ords. not the object, but the subject of oppression. The late Andrei Amal'iik described this difference ,n the following words 'The nationalism of small peoples is understandable as a means of self defence for the people and their culture, though e\en in these cases it sometimes takes on unattractive forms. But the nationalism of a great people is a means not of defence, hut of pressure applied both inwardly and outwardly.' (Zapiski dissidcuta).
Newsweek, 19 Nov. 1979, p 147,
U.S. News and World Report, 6 Sept. 1982, p. 35.
Quoted in Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels, p. 28
Atlantic Monthly, July 1983 p. 34.
Quoted from Veche No. 5, 1982, pp 10. 12.
Atlantic Monthly, op. cit., p. 34.
Over the course of a decade of reform (1953 — 64) the Sowet Union abandoned its military bases in Finland, Austria and China, relinquished its territorial claims on Turkey, significantly reduced the size of its armed forces, refused to take part in the strategic arms race, normalized diplomatic relations with Israel, Yugoslavia and Japan, and so forth. Not
a square inch of new territory under direct Moscow control has been added to the empire during the entire Khrushchev decade.
See Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy, Univ. of California Press, 1981.
Nikolai Berdiaev, Novoe Srednevekov'e [The New Middle Ages],Berlin: Obelisk, 1924.