This might have seemed like exaggeration or rumour had not Evgenii Evtushenko for the first time given publicity to the phenomenon of Russian fascism in the September 1985 issue of Novyi mir. He describes in verse much the same thing as our samizdat author has described n prose, concluding with the sad question:
How could it have happened that these, as we say, units,
were born in a country of twenty million and more — shadows?
What allowed them, or rather, helped them to appear,
what allowed them to reach out for the swastika within her [Russia]?4
Russian fascism abroad
An emigre observer, describing the emergence in New York of 'Russian
Call' [Russkii Klich], a fascist publishing house which publishes Russian translations of 'rare books, which have been phys cally destroyed both in the USSR and the West',5 asked himself the same question as Evtushenko. Already since 1982 — the same year that the first fascist demonstration took place in Moscow — 'Russian Call' has published 87 titles, including Hitler's Mein Kampf, the speeches of Alfred Rosenberg, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the manifesto of the 'Union of the Russian People' and V. Mikhailov's brochure 'New Judea', which I quoted from earlier. The publisher, a certain Nikola^ Tetenov, explains that, 'the value of these' books is that they expose the TRUE enemies of our people and aid the formation of spiritual and national self-awareness.'6 He asks those 'who love our much-suffer ug people' to despatch to Russia 'via tourists, sailors and even by regular mail', books which 'give a CLEAR impression of what happened to Russia and of what morass of decadence and decay the Western world is floundering '7
The same publisher also produces a magazine entitled Russian Self- Awareness [Russkoe Samosoznanie], which preaches the following maxims: 'The Semites have spoiled our motherland, and only anti-semitism will save her. Revulsion toward kikes is implanted m us by the Lord God himself Anti-semitism is a sacred emotion. He who stifles it in himself is not only sinning, but also ruining both himself and his country.'8 Just like the Moscow fascists, Tetenov leaves not the slightest doubt with whom his sympathies lay in the confrontation between fascism and the West: 'As for Hitler, it was he who brought Germany out of hunger and collapse, who Jiqi .dated unemployment, provided his people with a high standard of liv ng and who showed the predator Jews the door.' According to Tetenov, 'The West with .ts human rights has already, with the help of drugs, sexual perversion, advertising and pop music, transformed its people nto a weak-willed mass of consumers, in the historical perspective good only as fertilizer '9
Unanswered questions
How can one explain the emergence of overt Russian fascism fas opposed to Shimanov's theorizing or even the sanu/dat 'patriotic' reader mail) simultaneously in both Moscow and the emigre community (where, as in Moscow, it was unheard of since the 1930s)? Evtushenko, of course, has no answer to thus question. It is a credit to him just to have posed it. An American journalist David Shipler, who lived in Moscow between 1975 and 1979 understood wry well the power of the degenerate Russian Idea (which he calls Russianism) and vividh relates a discussion he had with an elderly Soviet writer We are ruled now by sated wolves', he was told, 'but among those people [nationalists] there are hungn wolves 10
Shipler's explanation of the phenomenon is, however too abstract. The potential force of Russiai ism, whose best-known apostle is Solzhenitsyn says Shipler, lies in its coincidence with the most powerful impulses of both the political hierarchy and the people As it shares Soviet communism's de4-otion to political unaniniiu it also taps the deepest Russian wellsprings of obedience to authorib and such a visceral aversion to diversity that some liberal dissidents find the Russianists even more frightening than the Communists in power.'11 Like the majority of American intellectuals who have encountered Russian nationalism, Shipler falls back on the fundamental stereotypes of political culture. But these stereot\ pes are age- old and static. They cannot explain the dynamic of the Russian Idea: why it vanished from circulation after the 1920s and then was reborn in the second half of the 1960s; why Shimanov. with whom the author discussed many things, so despises Solzhenitsyn, who is represented in Sh.pier's book as an 'apostle of Russianism'. Moreover these stereot\pes cannot explain why the Russian Idea took to the streets and why its disciples await the year 2000 writh such tragic intensm
The explanation of our samiz.dat author is, of course, much less abstract He observes that, 'today among part}, state, and Komsomol act vists all possible sorts of "reflections" "appeals", and "memoirs printed up on mimeograph machines are being circulated which are unoilicial m form, but openly apologetic and simultaneoush menacing m content It is becomi ig exceedingly fashionable to praise the firmness of the leaders of the Third Reich — Hitler, and Himmler and Bormann even more . Books about the Third Reich are becoming favourites, especially among young functionaries.' The author talks as well about a general 'fascisization of apparatus functionaries', and concludes that, the fascist, radical right movement among various layers of Soviet youth that is arising and gathering strength though containing elements of spontaneous protest, plays into the hands of certain groups in the political leadership of the USSR and [even] if they may not be directly inspiring it. they coverth support it. counting on the possible use of this movement to achieve particular strategic goals 12 But if the fascist movement was not inspired bv 'certain political circles then what did inspire it? Why was the 'fascisization of young functional ies' taking place at this particular time? Why fascism, of all things?
These questions have remained unanswered, not least because the leading American sovietologists simply ignore them, or at best treat them as exotic eccentricities — lunatic-fringe phenomena. Conventional sovietological thought has no place for Russian fascism. For conservati/es, who anyway have difficulty distinguishing between Nazi and Soviet 'totalitarianism', all this fuss about fascism in Moscow is completely trivial. What difference does it make? they would ask. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to ignore the uncomfortable fact because it compromises their general view, according to which Moscow 'functionaries', especially the younger ones, are supposed to become increasingly liberal, not turn fascist. One way or another, neither of these groups of experts wishes to see Russian fascism as a problem that requires serious explanation . Some of them, we have seen, confuse the Russian Idea w'th patriotism, while others mix it up with chauvinism, everybody is satisfied However, the issue cannot be made to disappear like this, and still needs to be explained.
An historical parallel
It is here that the theoretical analysis of the degeneration of the pre- revolutionary Russian Idea might be of some practical help In fact, it is hardly possible to suggest any plausible explanation of the sudden emergence of fascist mobs on the Moscow streets in the early 1980s unless we remember that they were there once before. In 1905, it was precisely the powerful appeal of the degenerate Russian Idea, its logic and argumentation that inspired the 'patriotic masses' to take to Moscow streets under fascist slogans. What it signalled then was the arrival of the 'regime' crisis in the Petersburg empire — as well as the approach of its 'systemic' crisis.