No one who is born a slave can be held responsible for that fact. But the slave who not only avoids striving for freedom, but justifies and embellishes on his slavery (for example, he calls the suffocation of Poland, Ukraine, etc. a “defense of the fatherland” of the Great Russians), such a slave is a lackey and a boor who elicits a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing.194
For Lenin, it is the duty of Russian social democrats to despise Russia’s “slavish past” and her “slavish present”—the latter most prominently exemplified, in Lenin’s opinion, by Russia’s role in the ongoing First World War. The best thing is for tsarist Russia to be defeated, because tsarism enslaves Russians and other nationalities. The best way to “defend the fatherland” is to revolt against one’s own monarchy, landowners, and capitalists. They are, after all, the “worst enemies of our motherland [khudshikh vragov nashei rodiny].”195
One can of course reach one’s own conclusions as to whether the subsequent defeat of Russian monarchism resulted in a lesser or greater quantity of “overt and covert Great Russian slaves.” I think, however, that anyone acquainted with the history of the Stalin period would estimate that the sheer quantity grew.
Custine would have agreed. He would have asserted that, in principle, the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 could not eradicate the Russian slave mentality:
Tomorrow, in an insurrection, in the midst of massacre, by the light of a conflagration, the cry of freedom may spread to the frontiers of Siberia; a blind and cruel people may murder their masters, may revolt against obscure tyrants, and dye the waters of the Volga with blood; but they will not be any the more free: barbarism is in itself a yoke.
The best means of emancipating men is not pompously to proclaim their enfranchisement, but to render servitude impossible by developing the sentiment of humanity in the heart of nations: that sentiment is deficient in Russia.196
Custine understood that political revolution is not enough. There also has to be a change in the way people think, in their very psychology. Otherwise political repression just comes back. The “iron tsar,” Nicholas I clamped down (and got away with it) after the Decembrist uprising. In our century it was Stalin and his henchmen who managed to re-enslave the Russian nation after the bloodshed of the late teens and early twenties. In George Kennan’s opinion, even if we grant that Custine’s book is not a very good characterization of Russia in 1839, it is nonetheless “an excellent book, probably in fact the best of books, about the Russia of Joseph Stalin.”197 This statement, we should keep in mind, comes from a former ambassador to the Soviet Union who had extensive dealings with Stalin. Kennan adds: “Whatever else may be said about Custine, and whichever of his many weaknesses may be held against him, his readers of the present age must concede that he detected, in the glimpse he had of Russia in the summer of 1839, traits in the mentality of Russian government and society, some active, some latent.”198
An external, political yoke will always be possible as long as the Russians are weighed down with their internal, psychological yoke, that is, their masochism together with any reactive antimasochistic strivings. Custine understood this implicitly. He stepped right up to the brink of psychoanalysis.
Recent Developments
During most of the Soviet period it was impossible to discuss Russian masochism openly in Russia. Abroad, however, discussion was possible (e.g., Berdiaev, Fedotov, and some others, as we have seen). Particularly interesting are the publications of Russian dissidents in the West from the 1970s. Julia Brun-Zejmis has recently analyzed the works of such thinkers as Andrei Amal’rik, Igor’ Shafarevich, Iurii Glazov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dmitrii Dudko, Vasilii Grossman, and others in light of their highly diverse views of “Russian subservience” and “Russia’s martyrdom under the Soviet regime.”199 Brun-Zejmis finds fascinating parallels between the writings of these thinkers and the works of Chaadaev long before them. I will have more to say about some of these writers below. Here it is sufficient to quote one of the dissidents Brun-Zejmis discusses, namely, O. Altaev, who makes a very interesting argument about the “dual consciousness” of the servile Soviet intelligentsia:
The intelligentsia does not accept the Soviet regime, it tends to shun it and at times even despises it. Yet, on the other hand, there is a symbiosis between them. The intelligentsia feeds the regime, it cherishes it and fosters it. It awaits the collapse of the Soviet regime and hopes this collapse will come sooner or later, but it also co-operates with it. The intelligentsia suffers because it is forced to live under Soviet rule, yet it strives toward prosperity. We have here a combination of the incombinable. It is not enough to call it conformism, for conformism is a completely legal compromise of interests by means of mutual concessions accepted in human society everywhere. It is also not enough to call it opportunism. That would be a narrow interpretation, for opportunism is a result of deeper processes. It is servility, but not of an ordinary kind, but an ostentatious servility with suffering, with “a Dostoevskian touch” to it. Here we have at the same time a horror of the fall and enjoyment in it; no conformism, no opportunism knows of such refined torments.200
Such suffering is clearly an example of moral masochism, although Altaev of course does not use the psychoanalytic term and tends to emphasize its collective aspect.
Within Russia it became possible to consider the question of Russian masochism openly only after the mid-1980s. The reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev were the key to this process. Whether Gorbachev intended to or not, his institution of glasnost stimulated intellectuals to grapple with the issue of Russianness itself.
One of the first to publicly recognize the traditionally slavish attitude toward authority in Russia during this period was the noted poet Evgenii Evtushenko. Writing in a 1988 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta, Evtushenko argued that “slavish blood” has accumulated to such an extent in his culture that “…today it must not be squeezed out drop by drop but pumped out by the bucketful.”201
In his article Evtushenko attempts to explain the recent Russian coinage priterpelost’. According to Evtushenko, priterpelost’—rendered as “servile patience” by the resourceful Antonina W. Bouis202—is an attitude which has for many decades allowed Russians to tolerate chronic shortages of ordinary consumer goods and services:
Priterpelost is capitulation before “infinite humiliations” [Pasternak’s phrase]. First we humiliate ourselves [unizhaemsia] to get an apartment. We humiliate ourselves hunting in the jungles of commerce for wallpaper, faucets, toilet bowls, latches. The sight of a Yugoslav lamp fixture or a Rumanian sofa bed brings fireworks to our eyes. When a child is born, we humiliate ourselves to obtain day care and kindergartens, finding nipples, crawlers, disposable diapers, carriages, sleds, playpens. We humiliate ourselves in stores, beauty parlors, tailor shops, dry cleaners, car-repair garages, restaurants, hotels, box offices and Aeroflot counters, repair shops for TVs, refrigerators and sewing machines—stepping on our pride, moving from wheedling to arguing and back to wheedling. We spend all our time trying to get something. It’s humiliating that we still can’t feed ourselves, having to buy bread and butter and meat and fruit and vegetables abroad.203