Genesis
The Russian Idea emerged in the early nineteenth century, out of the noble aspiration to liberate Russia from 'soul-destroying despotism and a 'police state,'1 and Europe from 'parliamentarism, anarchism, unbelief and dynanmc'.2
Out of the very dual character of this messianu task emerged the primordial duality of the Russian Idea's philosophical doctrine. If it's true that the problem of the devil (or, if you like, the antagonist) .s a kind of theodicy for any ideological construct, the justification of its god.3 then the Russian Idea's duality, its own peculiar trap, was that it had two devils. It was condemned to toss and turn between two hatreds, since the evil from which Russia was to be saved was completely unnke the one from which it ntended to save Europe. Russia was to be saved from too little freedom and Europe from too much of thereof.
First let s turn to the second of these devils. 'Look at the West', wrote Ivan Aksakov, 'The peoples [there] have become carried away by vain motives, [they have] put their faith in the possib'litv of governmental perfection, made republics, bu'It constitutions — and impoverished their souls, they are ready to collapse at any moment.'4 Similarly, 'The messianic significance of Russia with respect to the West is beyond doubt . . . Slavophilism alone can yet save the West from parliamentarism, anarchism, unbelief and dynamite.'5 Today [1974] Western democracy is in a state of political crisis and spiritual confusion . crawling on its hands and knees, its will paralyzed, in the dark about the future, spiritually racked and dejected . . . powerless before a pack of snotty terrorists. 6 This is happening because the West 'hasn't realized that freedom is rooted in religious depth in religion, and not m political institutions'.7 'In our country', Aksakov complained, 'they often clamour for guarantees and see these precisely in the western European legal order. But if the latter serves as the foundation of the guarantee, then what is it that guarantees ihe legal order itself, in other words: what guarantees the guarantee? 8 Europe naively believes in the capacity of good constitutions to protect it from catastrophe, believes in po tical variety, in pluralism.
Dcmagoguery about pluralism grows from a political understanding of freedom. We in Russia evaluate freedom above all as a deeply spiritual phenomenon. A person must be free internally in order to become free politically. And this again comes out of the teachings of the gospele: Know the truth and the truth shall set you free.' Thus, if we find freedom in our own souls, I assure you, society will be free politically as well. If we begin with political freedom, we shall unfailingly arrive at spiritual slavery. And that is what is taking place in the West at every step.9
Four generations of adherents of the Russian Idea have passed before us from 1850 to the 1970s. All of them have identified the evil that is leading the West to catastrophe in the same way: as the supplanting of the religious by the political, the fatal confusion of 'external' (political) freedom with 'internal' (spiritual) liberty and the resulting faith in parliaments, constitutions and republics. This is the devil from which the Russian Idea intended — and still intends — to save the West. In short, parliamentarism was the Russian Idei s 'European' hatred.
The devil which confronted it at home, its principal Russiar hatred, looked completely different. 'Where does the internal depravity, corruption, robbery and falsehood that overflows Russia emanate from?'10 asked Konstantin Aksakov, the most remarkable spokesman of nineteenth-century Slavophilism. Why does 'Russia's contemporary condition present a picture of internal depravity, concealed by shameless falsehood . . . why does everyone He to each other, see it, and continue to lie, and who knows what it will lead to?'11 Why, on top of this 'internal discord', has a 'shameless toadyism grown up, which seeks to assure everyone we are living in universal prosperity'?12 Because, Aksakov answers with courage worthy of Solzhenitsyn, 'th government has interfered in the moral life of the people . . . [it has] thereby passed over into soul-destroying despotism, oppressing the spiritual world and human dignity of the people and, finally, signifying the breakdown of moral fibre in Russia - and public corruption. That is why, he says, 'the government, despite all the lack of limitations on its power, cannot achieve truth and honesty ... the univeisal corruption and weakening of the moral foundations of our society has reached enormous proportions ... it has already turned from a private sin into a public one and has come to represent the entire social structure's immorality. 14
Thus 'soul-destroying despotism' (or totalitarianism, |udging from how Aksakov describes it) threatens Russia with catastrophe. " he longer the Petrine governmental system goes on,' Aksakov warns, making out of the subject a slave, the longer principles alien to Russia will continue to enter into her . . the more threatening will be the menace of revolutionary attempts finally shatter.ng Russia, when she ceases to be Russia 15
This letter of Aksakov's to the tsar differs, of course, from Solzhenitsyn's letter to the leaders of the Soviet Union. Naturally. Solzhenitsyn did not describe Russian despou'sm as 'the Petrine governmental system' nor did he refer to 'soul-destroying despotism' but rather a 'black whirlwind from the West' and .deology . The chronology does not correspond either. Aksakov says, for example, that 'the people wish . the state not to interfere in the independent life of their spirit, in which [the state] has interfered and which the government has oppressed for 150 years,'16 while Solzhenitsyn says sixty-seven years'. Given that Aksakov wrote his letter ) 20 years before Solzhenitsyn and that in his opinion soul-destroying despotism existed in Russia at least 150 years before that, he could not have described despotism as having been carried n by that same olack whirlwind' from the West. Aksakov, however, would not have objected to Solzhenitsyn's 'black whirlwind in pnnciple. Like Solzhennsyn, he too was sincerely convinced of the Western origins of Russian evil and was also a prophet of the Russian Idea. The only difference is that, according to his calculations, the whirlwind struck Russia somewhere around 1700.
However, all that is detail What is important s that n both letters despotism (tsarist in one case, Communist n the other) is leading Russia to disaster, and that in both nstances the Russian Idea, as expressed by its leading proponents, promises to save the country from this awful fate.
Could it be that Solzhenitsyn is silent today about his spiritual forebears because the Russian Idea failed to fulfil the solemn promise it gave its people and the world a century and a half ago?
The test of history
Horace White once observed that the Constitution of the United States 'is based upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvni. It assumes that the natural state of mankind is a state of war, and that the carnal mind is at enmity wich God.'17 Whether that is good or bad is beside the point It cannot be denied, however, that on the basis of this religious-philosophical attitude was founded a qu'te practical political doctrine (parliamentarism) which managed to survive all the great crises of the twentieth century — political, n li :ary and economic — and consequently escaped the calamity foretold for it by the Slavophiles one and a half centuries ago. The men who drew up the Constitution in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 . . . did not believe in man,' Richard Hofstadter notes, 'but they did believe in the power of a good political constitution to control him.'18 They didr t expect from us a spiritual rebirth or moral revolution — in a word, a miraculous transformation into paragons of virtue. 'It was too much to expect that vice could be checked by virtue; the Fathers [of the Constitution] relied instead upon check ng i\ ice with vice.'19