After the October revolution more than a million people left Russia. The exact number of emigr6s remains unknown. Lenin spoke of "emigr6s numbering probably from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000. "97 An emigr6 Russian historian refers to approximately a million.98 A recent Soviet historian gives the figure 860,000." According to statistics published by the League of Nations in 1926, 1,160,000 people left Russia after the revolution. Approximately one fourth were officers and soldiers of the White armies, including about 100,000 in Wrangel's army evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople. Civilian emigr6s came from all classes and professions, but especially from those the Soviet government considered inimical. A substantial number of the emigres were from the intelligentsia. All political parties were represented, from the extreme right to the extreme left, from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists. The varied political complexion of the emigr6 community was convincing proof that political life inside Soviet Russia had been stifled. All political parties other than the Communist party ended up in the anti-Soviet camp, some willingly, others driven to that position by the one-party dictatorship.
The emigres had been dispersed to all parts of the world (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, Latvia, France, China). A great many believed they would soon return to their homeland, that the Bolsheviks were on the verge of collapse. However, defeatist tendencies also arose among the emigr6s and were reinforced from within Soviet Russia. 'The 'changing landmarks9 trend [smenovekhovstvo] began to appear among the old intelligentsia inside the Soviet Republic as early as 1918," one Soviet historian has noted.100 There are many similarities between the policies of the Soviet government toward priests who were willing to risk a schism in order to collaborate with the regime and its policies toward those members of the intelligentsia who were willing to make peace with the conquerors.
In the spring of 1920, after the Polish invasion of the Soviet Republic, patriotism became respectable again and provided the basis for the initial conception of "a change of landmarks" (that is, a reorientation). That summer a certain Professor Gredeskul, a former leader of the Cadet party and a noted legal expert, went on a nationwide speaking tour, with the approval and support of the authorities. He then wrote a series of articles for Izvestia based on his lectures. His main argument was as follows:
It becomes clearer every day that we are not facing a dead end of history or an accidental episode but a broad, smooth, well-lighted road down which the historical process is moving. And this process, which is being guided this time by the conscious efforts of far-sighted leaders, is taking us toward the greatest transformation ever seen in human history.101
The idea of a change of orientation arose spontaneously among the emigres as well as being influenced by Gredeskul and his supporters. It was also in the spring of 1920 that E. A. Efimovsky, the editor of Slavyanskaya zarya (Slavic dawn), an emigre newspaper published in Prague, voiced the opinion that the Bolsheviks were defending the national interest of the Russian state. In one of his articles he spoke of an inevitable conflict between Europe and Soviet Russia. "In this conflict we will be on the side of Soviet Russia. Not because it is Soviet but because it is Russia."102 In
Paris a dramatist named Klyuchnikov gave a reading of his play Ediny kust (which might be rendered "From a Single Bush"). Among the guests were a number of leading Russian writers: Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Kuprin, Alek- sei Tolstoy, Mark Aldanov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who had recently fled from the Crimea.103 They all agreed on the play's deficiencies. Kuprin said it was dull as khaki; Tolstoy, that it was mediocre as a rusty nail. But the important thing, said Tolstoy, was the idea behind it. The theme of the play was that "the motherland is all one bush, and its many shoots, including those that grow crooked or off to the side, are fed by the same vital juices." Tolstoy drew a conclusion: "Back there in Russia the harsh wind of rejection is blowing, but here in the West there is nothing but decay, hopeless, narrow-minded materialism, and total demoralization."104
In the fall of 1920 a collection of articles was published in Harbin, a center of Russian emigration in Manchuria. Its author was Nikolai Ustryalov and it was entitled The Struggle for Russia. This book contained the essence of what was to be the changing landmarks ideology. When the anthology bearing that title actually appeared in Prague in July 1921, it provided a name for the movement but introduced nothing essentially new in comparison to Ustryalov's contributions of 1920.
Nikolai Ustryalov, a talented writer who emerged as the chief ideologist of the new movement, dedicated The Struggle for Russia "to General Bru- silov, a courageous and loyal servant of Great Russia, both in its hour of glory and in its troubled times of suffering and misfortune." On May 30, 1920, during the Polish invasion, Brusilov had published an appeal in Pravda urging his readers to forget "selfish feelings of class struggle" and to remember instead "their own native Russian people" and their homeland "Mother Russia." To Ustryalov Brusilov's action seemed the model of genuine patriotism.
Ustryalov argued in his book that the defeat of the White armies had to be recognized. It was time for the defeated to make their obeisance, to go to Canossa. He called on Wrangel, who was still holding out in the Crimea, to "convert" voluntarily, to accept "the other faith" and hail the example of Brusilov.105 The Russian intelligentsia, Ustryalov held, fought against bolshevism for many reasons, but its nationalist motives were the main ones.106 The intelligentsia had opposed the revolution because it was destroying the state, causing the army to fall apart and bringing humiliation to the motherland. Without this nationalist inspiration, Ustryalov felt, the struggle against the Bolsheviks would have been senseless and would not have occurred.
The defeat of the White armies, said Ustryalov, had opened his eyes.
He confessed that, along with most of the Russian intelligentsia, he had misjudged bolshevism. Ustryalov's new outlook could be reduced to three points. First, the Russian revolution had in essence been a nationalist one. Its roots went back to the Slavophiles, the pessimism of Chaadaev, Herzen's revolutionary romanticism, and Pisarev's utilitarianism. Among its ancestors were Chernyshevsky, the Jacobinism of Tkachev, Dostoevsky, the Russian Marxism of the 1890s, "which was led by those whom today we consider the exponents of the authentic Russian idea—Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and Peter Struve,"107 Maxim Gorky, the followers of Vladimir Soloviev, Andrei Bely, and Alexander Blok. This nationalist revolution had "been fueled by a quintessentially Russian 'blind revolt, senseless and merciless.'" Us- tryalov saw a certain justice in this elemental outbreak but suggested that the revolution had done its job and it was time to stop. Only bolshevism, "despite all its shortcomings, its painful and somber practices," was able to do what the old Russian nationalist theoretician Konstantin Leontiev had advocated: "to freeze the disintegrating power of the revolutionary flood- waters."108
It was Ustryalov's belief that the Soviet government had now frozen the revolution and was proceeding to carry out the country's national tasks. This was the second point in his new theory. The Bolsheviks had turned out not to be anarchists, as everyone feared, but statists, supporters and builders of a strong state. Only the Bolsheviks, said Ustryalov, as the third point in his program, "are capable of restoring Russia as a great power."109 By this he meant restoring the Russian empire. Ustryalov was an unconditional supporter of "Russia one and indivisible." He was convinced that "Bolshevik centralism" was tainted only on the surface with the demagogy of "free self-determination for the peoples."110 It was in the interest of this revived Russian state that the struggle against bolshevism cease. In the name of empire Ustryalov condemned the peasant revolts, "the blindly destructive anarchistic wave," which if victorious could transform "great Russia into a hodgepodge of 'liberated nationalities'—an 'independent Siberia' in the east, a 'self-governing Ukraine' and a 'free Caucasus' in the south, a 'greater Poland' and a dozen 'lesser' nationalities in the west."111 The national destiny of the Russian revolution was so evident to Ustryalov that he categorically denied any foreign inspiration: