Ihe coiiapse of the Communist Utopia, Shimanov says, has cleared the way for a renewal of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Once the ancient Russian faith is united with the internal, immanent-religious nature of Communism, there will emerge — in place of the faise idol — God The people may have been led along a thorny path to reach him, but it was God who led them. This is the dawn of the new millennium
I sa> that after the experience of a thousand years which has driven humankind into an intolerable impasse,-is" it not clear that only a genuine, reborn Christianity can offer the way out? — that we need a different, new civilization, not pagan-bourgeois, but ascetic and spiritual?11
Where will this new gospel come from, if not from the single source of the true faith which the Lord has preserved and purified by the ordeals of the Tatar yoke, the October Revolution, the Great War, the Gulag and the KGB?
In today's Russia, it seems dangerous to underestimate the political potential of Shimanov's interpretation of history, in which even the Gulag (sacreligious as this may sound) is justified. For is not one of the causes of the fatal isolation of the Soviet dissident movement — a movement which has courageously fougnt to e>pose the pointlessuess of the sacr'fices exacted on three generations of the nation — that the people themselves are not interested in these revelations? Is it an accident that these exposes come up against the obstacle of socio- psychoJog cal stereotypes, perhaps planted in the depths of the nation's consciousness for the purpose of national self-preservation? This instinctive striving of the mass consciousness to make black white, to assign meaning to the meaningless, to turn the shame of the nation into ts glory, becomes a powerful instrument for Shimanov. What Versailles was to Hitler, so the Gulag was to Shimanov.
The Political Concept
The most original aspect of Shimanov's work is his nterpretation of the Soviet system. Shimanov was the first of the 'Rightists to understand that the purely negative, accusatory function of the dissident movement had outlived its usefulness — that from there on only a positive concept could work Rather than accusing the regime, such a conception would use its immanent-religious nature to achieve positive national goals. This is the basis of Shimanov's understanding that the Soviet system is the only political organization which, on the one hand, is capable of withstanding the temptations of -otten Western democracy' and, on the other, can mobilize the people for new historical feats
Today the Soviet system can no longer seriously strive toward the spectre of Communism — but at the same time it cannot yet abandon the grandeur of its tasks, for otherwise it would have to answer for fruitless sacrifices which are truly innumerable. But 1 what then can the Soviet system find its justification? Only in the consciousness that it was unconsciously in the past, as it is now quite consciously, God s instrument for constructing a new Christian world. It has no other justification, and this is . a genuine and great mstification. By adopting it, our state will discover in itself a truly inexhaustible source of Truth, spiritual energy and strength, which has never before existed in history . . . The old pagan world has now finally outlived its era . . In order not to perish with it we must build a new civilization — but is Western society, whose foundations have been destroyed, really capable of this? Only the Soviet system, having adopted Russian Orthodoxy . . . is capable of beginning THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD.12
To achieve this, it is not economic reforms or civil rights which are needed. It is not the Soviet system which must adapt itself to the people, but the people who must adapt themselves to the system, understand it and take it to their hearts as their own native source of authority 'which is from God . For only by accepting and dissolving it into themselves, can it be made truly a people's regime.
Here is the blueprint for the bridge that will span the gulf which m the 1970s separated the intelligentsia of Russian Idea from ts grassroots supporters In all the metamorphoses of modern-day L-National- ism we have considered so far, from VSKhSON's revolutionary theocracy in the 1960s to Solzhenitsyn s apologia for Orthodox monarchy in the 1980s, Communism has consistently figured as a phenomenon alien to Russia and inimical to her historical tradition. Shimanov is the first in the post-Stalinist era to have legitimized Communism by fitting it into the Russian political tradition,13 as one of a series of tribulations — sent by God to save and preserve Russia.
As before, Communism, of course, remains an evil, but an evil that is not just incomparably less than those which threaten the nation from without, but is Russia s own indigenous evil, which can always be reconciled. This evil cannot simply be expunged from Russian life, as the national-liberal sectarians believed, rather it must be transcended through a co-operative effort by the whole nation at the spiritual and intellectual levels.
Shimanov thus provides the theory for the idea Veche s 'Orthodox patriotic' readers were trying to express more instinctively: namely, the reduction of world evil to a single focus. He has managed to construct an ideological justification for the Orthodox masses' intuitive drive to make peace with the regime in the face of the impending nation-wide threat. He pacifies and comforts these masses whom Solzhenitsyn had aroused and then cast out into the wilderness, declar.ng them to be living by lies, He absolves the Orthodox believers of the sin of collaborating with an atheistic regime. To counter the teachers of national-, beralism, who cannot abandon their sectarian anti-Communism, he declares, 'To protest against our regime means to go agL nst God.'14 He persuades 'patriots' that only by collaborating can they make the regime truly national. Shimanov not only writes God with a capital letter, but also Soviet Authority. He understands perfectly that to construct a bridge to the 'patriotic' reader, he must banish the sectarian elusions and utopianism of his predecessors.
ne VSKhSON, we recall, was dedicated to the idea of a 'revolution of national liberation' and the armed 'overthrow of the Communist oligarchy' Veche proposed, not a revolution, but the creation of a second, Orthodox, Russia in Siberia that would be separated geographically from Communism. Solzhenitsyn attempted to realize Veche s plan by appealing to the 'Russian souls' of the Soviet leaders to renounce their 'alien', 'Western' ideology. (Later, at the end of the 1970s, he realized it was imoossible to change the leaders' minds with words, and began to appeal to the 'Russian souls' of the Soviet military instead — thus, 1 a sense, he came back to the ideas of VSKhSON15).
Despite the differences within these approaches, they all originated from the same assumption: that a true Russian renaissance could only begin without the Communists. Nonsense, replies Shimanov in concert with the 'patriotic' masses, Russia is already undergoing a renaissance. Moreover, Communism, far from hindering the process, is aiding it, first and foremost by preserving Russia from the ravages of bourgeoisifica <on and so forming a protective shield around it which makes the renaissance possible. Soviet Authority, says Shimanov, has, since 1917 already 'accomplished an enormous turnaround and cont nucs to change perceptibly before the eyes of those who know how to look.'16 Moreover, Communism, through its immanent relig Dusness, keeps that fl cker of faith alive among the masses, without which any renaissance would be impossible Because ot ihis, ihe Russian people strive not to liquidate Communism, but to take- possession of it. It is also for this reason that the second-hand utopianism with which national liberals seek to d stract the people from their true purpose — that of transfiguring the system in order to transform the world — are extraneous.