This little masochistic fantasy is then dispelled by Solzhenitsyn, who is trying to capture Stolypin’s thought processes: “Thinking that way makes action impossible. Stolypin was always a realist.”73 In the meantime, however, Solzhenitsyn has given the reader a very effective summary of the broad psychological issues (“beyond Russia itself”) involved in an individual’s willing submission to a collective.
Aleksei Losev: Masochism and Matriotism
The most extreme Russian patriots are matriots at heart. By this I mean that their devotion to “Mother Russia” is so intense that the underlying maternal fantasy basis of patriotism comes to the surface as maternal imagery, while paternal imagery fades away. At the same time there is a willingness to indulge in or act out masochistic fantasies with respect to the maternal image.
For the Russian matriot Russia is nothing if not a suffering collective, a maternal icon in pain. But she does not suffer alone, she calls on her own to suffer as well—or at least she seems to for those who emulate her or find it difficult to distinguish themselves from her.
The philosopher Aleksei Fedorovich Losev (1893–1988), who had served time in a Soviet labor camp during the 1930s and lost loved ones during the German bombing of Moscow in 1941, expressed what it meant to suffer willingly “on the maternal bosom of the Motherland [na materinskom lone svoei Rodiny].” As Nazi troops pressed close to Moscow, he wrote:
The very concept and appellation of “sacrifice [zhertva]” sounds elevated and exciting, ennobling and heroic. This is because we are born not just by “being,” not just by “matter,” not just by “reality” or “life”—all this is non-human and supra-human, impersonal and speculative—but we are born by our Motherland [rozhdaet nas Rodina], by that mother and that family which are already worthy of existence, already something great and bright, something sacred and pure. The dictates of this Motherland [Veleniia etoi Materi Rodiny] are indisputable. Sacrifices for the sake of this Motherland are inevitable. A sacrifice to a faceless and unseeing force of a community is meaningless. However, this is not a sacrifice, either. It is simply a meaningless, unnecessary and absurd conglomeration of births and deaths, tedium and bustle of a universal, but at the same time bestial womb. A sacrifice for the sake of the glory of our Motherland is sweet and holy. This sacrifice is the only thing that makes life meaningful…. either there is something above us that is our own [rodnoe], great, bright, common for us all, intimately and innately ours, essentially and eternally ours, namely, our Motherland, or our life is meaningless, our suffering irredeemable, and human tears interminable.74
Losev’s desire to suffer is explicit, that is, the masochistic attitude is not even unconscious: “suffering, struggle, and death itself are nothing but desirable and full of meaning.”75 But the masochism is not a gratuitously individualistic enterprise. It is in the service of union with a collective maternal figure. A true “son of the Motherland” does not distinguish his own interests from those of the Motherland. Indeed he is one with her. This is the meaning of matriotism:
We know the thorny path traversed by our country; we know the long and agonizing years of struggle, shortages, and suffering. But to a son of his Motherland [dlia syna svoei Rodiny], this is all his own [svoe], inalienably part of his flesh and blood [rodnoe]. He lives and dies with it; he is it, and it is him.76
The virtual synonymy of mother and child is also clear from the ease with which Losev moves back and forth between child-imagery and mother-imagery. At one point he says that what draws us on, what is worth sacrificing ourselves for is “you, Motherland-Mother,” while two paragraphs later he asserts that what is worth dying for is “something dear [rodnoe] and lovely, something child-like, even infant-like.” It is as if Losev were looking into his suffering mother’s eyes and seeing himself, as child, reflected. The sacrificial death is itself a fusion of mother and child:
He who loves dies peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort [uiutno], if not for her, then at least in her, like a baby falling asleep in its warm and soft cradle—whether that be death in combat, or the death of a pilot who has fallen thousands of meters to the rocky earth. Only our Motherland is capable of giving internal comfort [uiut] because everything that is of the Motherland [rodnoe] is comforting, and comfort alone is triumph over fate and death.77
The “comfort” Losev’s Motherland offers is, to say the least, severe. To an outside observer it looks more like punishment. A violent death for the Motherland can be characterized as “comforting” only because mothers typically comfort children in distress. But a child may get into trouble precisely in order to be comforted by a mother with whom it is having a problematical relationship. It may, in other words, behave masochistically. Losev is in a position to recommend masochism on behalf of the all-important Motherland because every child has experienced moments of masochism in dealing with the all-important mother. This is not to make a moral judgment of Losev’s recommendation, but to point to the ontogenetic origin of its appeal. Indeed, the extreme patriotism, that is, matriotism of Soviet citizens may have saved the world from German Fascism.
Berdiaev’s Prison Ecstasy
Nikolai Berdiaev was a very different kind of philosopher from Losev. He would have rejected Losev’s extreme Russophilia. He was not a particularly masochistic individual by Russian standards. Yet masochistic episodes did occur by his own admission. They were connected with the terms he served in both tsarist and Soviet jails, and they reveal something of his attitude toward the collective: “during arrest and at interrogations, as in all the catastrophic events in my life, I was characteristically disinclined to experience depression. On the contrary, I was always animated and in a bellicose mood.” “With no exaggeration,” Berdiaev declares, “I can say that prison felt very pleasant to me.” The “near ecstasy” that Berdiaev experienced upon being arrested, that is, his masochistic ebullience, was in part determined by his escape from himself or his merger with the collective: “I never experienced so fully such a feeling of oneness with the communauté, I was in a less individualistic mood than ever.”78
Here it is curious that Russia’s greatest philosophical advocate of freedom (“svoboda”) should be claiming to achieve happiness precisely at those moments when he was deprived of his freedom, that is, when he was masochistically welcoming imprisonment.
The profound contradiction between the individual and the collective was of lasting concern to Berdiaev. Soviet communism and West-European fascism, for example, constituted unacceptable domination of the individual by the collective, for they treated the individual as a mere object, not a subject, not a person (“lichnost”’). But, as we have just seen, Berdiaev was also very interested in the potential fusion of the individual with the collective. His prime example of this was the phenomenon of sobornost’ (or what he sometimes called “kommiunotarnost’,” i.e., “communitarianism,” not to be confused with “communism” or “collectivism”—both negative, authoritarian phenomena for Berdiaev). Sobornost’, in the original sense of Khomiakov,79 was for Berdiaev an acceptable, even desirable way for the individual to come under the complete sway of the collective.