How does all this square with our own notion of a supposedly uniform and immutable 'Soviet ideology'? In fact, I devoted a section in one of my previous books to this last question.4 The main point is that, just as we are dealing with a 'meta-regime' in the analysis of the Soviet political process, so in analysing the Sov et ideological process, we must deal with a notion of 'meta-ideology', — one that contai-is mutually exclusive denominations (or sub-ideologies) which are antithetical to each other
There should hardly be anything surprising m this interpretation. After all, we know just as well as Shimanov does, that Soviet ideolog) is a secular religion, only he thought this notion through while we did not For him it is a living truth, an instrument of analysis and for us merely a dead stereotype. For if we were to think it through, the complexity of the issue would be as obvious to us as it is to hnn. Aren't ali major religions in fact meta-ideologies? Catholicism. Protestantism and Greek Orthodoxy are all denominations of Christianity: they share some fundamental beliefs, for example, in Jesus as the son of God. or the Holy Trinity. But that did not bmder chem from becoming sworn enemies during the Middle Ages (as happened in Islam too). Why should Soviet secular religion be any different"5 Table 1 of the Appendix shows the crucial difference between its major denominations- the dictatorial (which I call National Communism), with its ascetic, paternalistic and isolationist values and a mystical belief in the revolutionary transformation of the world, and post-dictatorial (which I call Soviet Protestantism) with its belief in butter over guns, in the imperative of economic reform, in consumer satisfaction ('satiety'") and peaceful coexistence.
Somehow we overlooked this great religious schism 'n Moscow in the 1950s. We didn't appreciate the role of Khrushchev as a Soviet Luther who introduced and legitimized the new denomination of Soviet Protestantism into the Soviet meta-ideologv. The proponents of the Russian New Right understand it, however. They are preaching what, in the Soviet ideological context, is a religious counter- reformation — just as they preach counter-reform ">n the political context. What I call the 'denomination change' s just as important to them as 'regime change'. They fully understand the importance of Soviet secular religion (even if it calls itself Marxism — Leninism) as the most powerful resource of pre-modern system ruled by a secular church (even if it calls itself Communist party) at the end of the twentieth century. Unlike them, we sovietologists go 011 repeating ihe old stereotypes without even suspecting what denomination change or a 'regime change' really mean — just as we don t disti iguish between 'systemic' metamorphoses in the Russian empire and its ordinary regime' crises.
Perhaps here is ihe answer to the question asked at the end of the last chapter: Why is today's Western intelligentsia as nsensitive to the signals of an approaching 'systemic' ci isis ,11 Russia as they were to similar omens at the beginning of the century? Mow, however, we are able to formulate this question more exphcilly: Why is it that not a single majoi American game plan for the end of the millennium takes into account the possibility of a new systemic metamorphosis in Russia similar to the one n 1917?
Admittedly, its previous metamorphoses, those of the 1560s and 1690s which ushered in the empire's Muscovite and Petersburg periods, are too remote for the public to recall or for the experts, in their 'flight from history', to take into account. But 1917 cannot yet have been so completely forgotten. The majest с spectacle of the 200- year-old Petersburg autocracy collapsing in a matter of weeks and being transformed into an almost unrecogi zable Soviet empire, reminiscent more of its Muscovite grandmother than its immediate predecessor, could not, it would seem, have vanished from the minds of experts so soon. Yet somehow it did.
Unlike sovietology, the Russian New Right has never subscribed to the Soviet secular church's central dogma, which denies the USSF 5 political relation to Russia's imperial past. In fact, the opposite is true: the entire game plan of the Russian New I ght is based on the assumption that what happened to the Petersburg emp e might just as easily happen to its Soviet reincarnation. In other words, the Soviet period, along with the Muscovite and the Petersburg eras, are all, for the Russian New Right, merely transitory phases of one and the same 'meta-regime', not separate, let alone unique, political systems. Which of these two interpretations is correct?
The intellectual poverty of the Soviet secular church is legendary In all truth one would sooner have expected sophisticated and secular Western experts, not the religious preachers of the Russian Idea, to have seen through its dogmas. Still, sovietology preferred to st.ck with Soviet orthodoxy rather than side with the heresy of that orthodoxy's opponents. But again, how do we know that the deologists of the Russian Idea are right and Western experts (and the Soviet secular church) are wrong? To help answer this, let us just look briefly at the history of Russia's political crises over the last half-millennium to see what this can tell us about the nature and potent al of these crises. Do the centuries-old patterns still hold?
Imperial Crises: An Attempt at a Typology
The principal difference between crises in Russian history seems to be that some of them (which I have called 'regime' crises) left the system's leadership the choice of regime change while others ('systemic' crises) did not. For example, it was the 'regime' crisis of 1905 that brought Stolypin to the helm (just as the 'regime' crisis of the early 1980s did so for Gorbachev), whereas it was the systemic' crisis of 1917 that led to the metamorphosis of the Petersburg empire into the So1 .et one. One could cite other examples.
No matter how sharp or painful Russia's many 'regime' crises may have been, and irrespective of how the circumstances under which they occurred may have varied, in every case the leadership retained the option of a 'regime change' On some occasions, this led to the establishment of a reformist regime, as happened in the early 1550s and the lb80s during the Muscovite period, in the Petersburg empire in the 1760s, 1801 and 1855, and in the Soviet empire in 1921 and 1953. It is happening again in the mid-1980s. In these cases the Russian leadership, faced with a crisis which didn't reach 'systemic' oroportions and which it could control, chose the path of reform, thus opening the system up for political modernization. As Russian history shows, however, this wasn't the only path the leadership could have followed. In the 'regime' crises of 1796, 1825 and 1929, it opted for the alternative — counter-reform — closing the system to political moderniza on and establishing 'soul-destroying despotism'. Finally, in a number of other 'regime' crises (again covering the Muscovite, Petersburg and Sot et periods) such as those of 1503, 1613, 1812 and 1964, the leadership chose 'stabilization', which resulted in what I call regimes of political stagnation, where the system stands still, gradually rott 'ng at the root.
Though we talk about the leadership 'choosing', it should be stressed that even in 'regime' crises the leadership's freedom of choice is somewhat limited by certain general rules of political change, as can be seen from Figure 2. For example, only a reform regime may follow a reg' ne of counter-reform, whereas a regime of political stagnation may be succeeded by either reform or counter-reform. Furthermore there have so far not been more than two reformist attempts in any one of Russia's historical cycles. The collapse of the secon of tfees ; ha|s always, up to now, been accompanied by a regime of dictatorship. Finally, a failed reform may be succeeded by either a regime of political stagnation (as in 1730) or a counter-reform (as in С :tober 1917), but not by a new reform (similarly, no dictatorship in Russian history has ever been followed by another dictatorship).