The Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, but the ideology on which it was based had suffered from utter exhaustion for a long time before. True, the classics of Marxism-Leninism were still ritually quoted when deemed necessary, but the dynamic, revolutionary spirit that had been so noticeable in the 1920s had vanished. What could replace it? Another revolutionary impulse seemed out of the question; a new Left could be detected in American and European universities, but not in the Soviet Union.
Nationalism and religion seemed the obvious answer, as had been the case before the revolution of 1917. But czarist Russia, especially in its last phase, was not an attractive model except for dyed-in-the-wool monarchists (and even they complained about the weakness of Nicholas II). Those in search of a new ideology had to go further back—perhaps to Nikolay Karamzin, who had written about love of country and national pride some two hundred years earlier. In his History of the Russian State, he had glorified its accomplishments. True, Russia had been in chains during long periods, but the same had been the case with other nations in Europe. Anyway, the chains had been broken gloriously. Peter the Great had united Russia with Europe: “We looked at Europe … and at one glance we assimilated the fruits of her long labor.” Russia’s army had defeated the strongest army in Europe. In brief: “What nation in Europe could boast of a better fate?”
But Karamzin as a guide seemed a little remote in 2000. He admitted that Russia’s primary achievements had been in the military field—largely because it had to fight for its existence. Military leaders such as Alexander Suvorov said many profound things (“The bullet is a fool, use the bayonet”), and Mikhail Kutuzov was right in refusing to give battle to Napoleon until late in the day. But the Russian nobility were still talking French to one another. And the intelligentsia was still not happy. In his often quoted “philosophical letter” (1836), Pyotr Chaadayev wrote:
It is one of the most deplorable facts of our peculiar civilization that we are still discovering truths that other peoples, even some much less advanced than we, have taken for granted. The reason is that we have never marched with the other peoples. We don’t belong to any of the great families of the human race, we are neither of the West nor of the East and we have not the tradition of either. Placed as we are outside of time, we have not been taught by the universal education of the human race.
And later on:
We are alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taught it nothing. We have not added a single idea to the sum total of human ideas; we have not contributed to the progress of the human spirit, and what we have borrowed of this progress we have distorted. From the outset of our existence as a society we have produced nothing for the common benefit of all mankind, not one useful thought has sprung from the arid soil of our fatherland.…
This “philosophical letter,” needless to say, was written in French.
The Slavophiles bitterly dissented. The Russian people (Ivan Aksakov wrote) are not interested in politics. For this reason, the government was wrong to continually take measures to prevent a revolution in its fear of a political uprising, an event that would be contrary to the very essence of the Russian people. The Russian people were seeking moral freedom, the freedom of the spirit. Leaving the kingdom of the world to the state, the Russian people set their feet on the path of inner freedom, that of the spiritual life: the kingdom of Christ.
Fyodor Tyutchev was one of the greatest and most underrated Russian writers. Tolstoy put him above Pushkin; Pushkin is broader, he wrote, but Tyutchev is deeper. Having lived abroad many years, Tyutchev followed events in Europe with great interest and reached the conclusion that there were only two parties in Europe, the revolutionary party of the West and the conservative party of Russia. Although he was appointed chief censor, he was not really a conservative. He welcomed the reforms of that time, above all the abolition of serfdom. In “Russian Geography,” he wrote:
But where are their limits, and where are their frontiers?
To the north, the east, the south and the rising sun.
The fates will reveal them to future generations.
From the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China
From the Volga to the Euphrates.
This is the Russian empire and it will never pass away
Just as the spirit foretold and Daniel prophesied.
Tyutchev’s love of Russia burned alongside a persecution mania. He wrote his sister that European countries would miss no opportunity to harm Russia. But his marriages and love affairs were mostly with German ladies, and friends reported that his French was better than his Russian.
What could the old Slavophiles offer to patriots by the year 2000? Even fellow Slavs could not be trusted; the Poles were traitors. One of the leading late Slavophiles despised European consumer mentality and praised Byzantine values. These were the views of Konstantin Leontiev, consul in Albania. Nikolay Danilevsky, who is frequently invoked with Leontiev, was a naturalist (but he rejected Darwin) and became famous because of Russia and Europe, his broadside against the West. Europe was not just strange (alien) to us, but hostile, its interests diametrically opposed to those of Russia.
It is doubtful whether Leontiev and Danilevsky should be considered Slavophiles. They thought the time of that movement had passed. They were antiliberal and anti-Western, and this endeared them to Alexander Dugin and others who adopted them as their mentors. The historical base on which this ideology was constructed was weak, to say the least. For when Russia was dealing with nineteenth-century Europe, the main country was usually Germany, which at that time could hardly have been considered “liberal.”
Danilevsky and Leontiev were also among the discoverers (or inventors) of Russophobia. Leontiev had no time for idealizing the Russian peasant or the other Slav peoples. He was an obscurantist—so much so as to being almost modern and a prophetic realist. Toward the end of his life, he reached the conclusion that Western capitalism and liberalism had no future in Russia—since the Eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) tradition could not be revived, the only future for Russia was in some form of state socialism, which would provide the necessary measure of discipline (and repression), without which the whole fabric of society would unravel. This is an exceedingly modern way of describing the contemporary Russian situation.
Leontiev was a deeply pessimistic thinker and also very honest. He thought the systematic glorification of Russia’s past a delusion, the dreams about Russia’s future a mere chimera. The best one could hope for was to preserve the status quo with all its imperfections. In other words, he was ahead of the thinkers of the radical Right of our time. As a conservative, he despised Slavophilism, which he thought vulgar, democratic, and potentially dangerous. He opposed the aggressive foreign policy of the Slavophiles in the Balkans and the domestic Russification in the Baltic countries and elsewhere. His literary views were quite different from those of his conservative contemporaries. He preferred Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky, both as a writer and as a patriot.
Leontiev had little influence in his lifetime, very much in contrast to Danilevsky, who was widely read. Danilevsky’s magnum opus appeared in the major European languages. His politics were initially liberal, and in some ways he always remained a radical—he was the most eloquent spokesman of a Russian imperial mission. He is often compared with Oswald Spengler and Joseph Stalin, but such associations should not be exaggerated. Like Spengler, he believed in the rise and decline of civilizations. Like Stalin, he envisaged a totalitarian system of sorts. But his perspectives, naturally, were removed from twentieth-century barbarism. He believed in the decay of the West and anticipated a long and bloody struggle with Europe, out of which Russia would emerge victorious. As a scientist, he did not hesitate to introduce to Russia up-to-date technologies and science. He was opposed only to copying alien cultural and political models: parliamentary democracy, the class struggle, and Western plutocratic imperialism. Some of Danilevsky’s beliefs were so ridiculous that they generate doubts about his sanity—for instance, when he wrote that Western statehood was based on violent oppression, serfdom, and enmity, whereas Russian governance was founded on goodwill, freedom, and peace. On other occasions, his comments appear perfectly sane, if somewhat extravagant.
His advocacy of Russian expansion was not motivated by neogeopolitics and other newfangled theories he would have thought utter nonsense; he was inspired by a belief in spiritual values and a world historical mission. Like Dostoyevsky, he believed the Russians were the only God-fearing people and would save the world: They were the body of God. Only the Orthodox had preserved the divine image of Christ in all its purity, and they could therefore act as a guide for other peoples who had lost their way. This much Leontiev and Dostoyevsky had in common.
It is difficult to believe that those who currently invoke Leontiev and Danilevsky have actually read them. If they had, they would be deeply troubled.
According to these anti-Western thinkers, the attitude of the Europeans toward Russia was one of Russophobia. This was imprecise, although not entirely far-fetched. It was not only the European Left that saw in Russia the main enemy to freedom and progress, a hotbed of reaction at home and abroad.
The tradition of seeing in Russia a barbarous (or at least semibarbarous) country despite what Peter the Great tried to do goes back to the early nineteenth century and the publication of the so-called Testament of Peter the Great—which was a forgery by a Polish writer in France. The classic work in this field was the Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839. Custine was a staunch French monarchist and conservative; his sexual orientation would have landed him in trouble in contemporary Russia. (But this was true also of Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education who coined the famous phrase “Orthodoxy, absolute rule, and narodnost.”) However, what Custine witnessed on his trip to Russia exceeded his worst fears. He became the author of the famous phrase about Russia being an absolute monarchy, a system mitigated only by assassination. He was particularly annoyed by the constant and all-pervasive government spying. The Russian people (he wrote) had been turned into a nation of mutes and automatons (robots, in contemporary language); its mentality was one of slaves. Whereas in France this kind of despotism was a transient evil, in Russia it was deep-seated. Custine had several conversations with the czar. Had the emperor the will and the power to change the system of government? He doubted it. Custine’s book (two volumes of some eighteen hundred pages) was banned in Russia, but some copies found their way into the country. It was published in full in Russia in 1996 for the first time.
Was it the superficial work of a malevolent French dandy, unfair and incorrect? It was a book with considerable weaknesses, if only because Custine had spent most of his time in the country’s two biggest cities. But he had by no means arrived there prejudiced; he was a sharp observer, and he did not invent his stories. As George Kennan wrote many years later, if the Custine report was not perfect as a description of Russia in 1839, it was an excellent picture of Russia under Stalin.
What Karl Marx wrote about Russia at the time could be regarded as an excellent example of Russophobia. But Marx was no Russian expert, no insider. For this, one has to turn to the diary of a Baltic German named Victor Hehn, an educated man employed as a lowly librarian. His De Moribus Ruthenorum (1892) was a devastating account of all the bad features of life in Russia, above all the superficiality of even the educated Russians, the inefficiency, the lies, the pretensions, the corruption. He found nothing to like, let alone to admire, in Russia. The book is also less than fair (to give but one example: Pushkin and Lermontov do not appear in it at all, and Gogol is presented as a minor writer with major faults).
Considering that Hehn wrote in the 1860s (by which time more than half of Dostoyevsky had been published and War and Peace had begun to appear, not to mention Tyutchev, Turgenev, and others); that Dead Souls and Revisor were major works by any standard; and that the middle of that century was a poor time in the annals of German literature—this is a display either of profound ignorance or of colossal impertinence. In any case, Russophobia means “fear of Russia,” and neither Custine nor the others mentioned were afraid of Russia. They looked down on it, and this may have caused even greater offense.
Was Otto von Bismarck a Russophobe? He served at the time as Prussian ambassador in Russia. He moved in other circles, and his main interest was not in Russian culture. He was not exactly afraid of Russia, but the warning he left to German foreign policy makers was, “Do not go to war against Russia.” Not surprisingly, Bismarck became a favorite of Russia nationalists, then and now. Such feelings were reciprocated: When Alexander II was assassinated, the conservative Berlin Kreuz-Zeitung published the news under the headline OUR EMPEROR HAS DIED.
There were no political parties in Russia during this period; they appeared fifty years later, just before, during, and after the first Russian Revolution. It is at this time that radical nationalist organizations were born, and it is in this period that some of the present-day ultrapatriots are finding their inspiration.
This trend—of growing militancy and the feeling of a need to be organized—was by no means an isolated Russian phenomenon; it could be observed in all major European countries. It was based on the fear that the Left was making constant progress, that the countries of Europe were perhaps even facing the danger of revolution. In France, for instance, this mood led to the emergence of the Action Française and similar groups. The Dreyfus affair had split the country and created a substantial reservoir of goodwill and support for the Far Right. In Germany, the ultranationalist trend did not lead to the creation of a major political party. Rather, the reaction was cultural: The Conservatives, the leading right-wing party, managed to absorb and integrate this mood in its own ranks. It became more anti-Semitic, more antiliberal and bellicose.
In Russia, a growing terrorist movement and the revolutionary ferment led to the foundation of various groups with names such as the Union of the Russian People (SRN), which attracted people from various sectors of society. Support came from the clergy and the police, from sections of the upper class, but even more strongly from the lower middle class and Okhotny Ryad. This was the name of a street and a small quarter in the center of historical Moscow where the city’s meat market was located. People living there were often recent arrivals from the countryside, rough and of little education, bewildered by town life and the rapid pace of social change. The fairly strong criminal element in these neighborhoods gave rise to the Chernaya Sotnya (Black Hundreds) movement, which played a prominent part in (or was the main instigator of) the pogroms in Russia in 1905–06.
According to the various official declarations issued by the Black Hundreds, they would never call for the murder of anyone, let alone participate in such actions. They simply wanted to mobilize the masses, something traditional conservatives were incapable of doing. Their leaders believed that but for their activities, the czarist regime would have crumbled in the wake of the lost war against Japan.
The Black Hundreds were a halfway house between the traditional conservative/reactionary forces in Russia, which had been assemblies of notables, and modern fascism, capable of mobilizing the masses. It was an inchoate movement; its character and activities varied from place to place. Most of their members believed in violence, and many pogroms took place, primarily in the south, where the majority of Jews resided. According to the “pale of settlement” policy, few Jews were permitted to live in Moscow and the cities of Russia proper.
The Black Hundreds had no charismatic leader and no strong, efficient organization. Its declared aim was to stop the revolutionaries who wanted to ruin Russia. But its most prominent victims were not the revolutionaries, but Mikhail Herzenstein and Grigori Iolles, two parliamentarians of the centrist Kadet party. The unofficial Black Hundreds slogan was “Bei Zhidov, spasai Rossiu” (“Beat the Jews and save Russia”). Perhaps Russia had to be saved, but it was by no means clear that beating the Jews would do the trick. For the Jews were not the main threat.
A few government ministers supported the Black Hundreds, but the majority despised them and thought that the riffraff was doing more harm than good. Even among the clergy, support was by no means total. Of the roughly seventy members of the clergy elected to the Duma, a quarter, perhaps even a third, were liberals of sorts. Even Ioann of Kronstadt, the patron saint of the movement, had condemned the Kishinev pogrom (1903), in which forty-nine Jews were killed. He subsequently retracted this and put the blame on the Jews. He was later beatified.
The czar believed in the Black Hundreds, calling them a “shining example of justice and order to all men.” But the czar was politically unimportant. The Black Hundreds lost whatever steam they had; the SRN still enjoyed the support of about 10 percent of the public, had a few sympathizers in the Duma and a few media supporters. SRN publications were financed in part by the government, which in this way exercised a measure of control over them.
In brief, the SRN and the Black Hundreds were permitted to be more populist than the mainline right wingers, but only up to a certain point. For instance, they demanded that the czar should be closer to the people, less distant—an old demand of the Slavophiles. Occasionally, they criticized local bureaucrats. But they were not permitted to go too far with their racialist slogans—this would have been unwise in a multinational empire.
After the revolutionary fever had subsided, the SRN was no longer of importance and the Black Hundreds became a topic of interest for historians and political scientists. Some of their leaders would cause minor scandals in the Duma, but this was considered entertainment and had no political impact. A few survivors returned in their old age to the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin period. And some émigrés foresaw the decline of internationalism and the rise of a new nationalism inside the Soviet Union. The main figure of this camp, Smenovekhovtsy was Nikolai Ustryalov, formerly a member of the Kadet party and a Slavophile. He returned to Russia and called on his political friends to do the same. But his timing was wrong. He should have waited another fifteen or twenty years to be on the safe side. Ustryalov was arrested and shot in 1937. This was in contrast to General Brusilov’s fate, a World War I hero (who had commanded the famous Brusilov offensive), who also returned; when he died in 1926, he was given a state funeral.
It was in this period, the years just before and after the first Russian Revolution, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the anti-Masonic literature made its appearance. The concept of a worldwide conspiracy by Freemasons went back to such opponents of the French Revolution as the Abbé Augustin Barruel. In the beginning, there was no reference to the Jews because Jews were not part of France’s political life. The connection was established only later in the nineteenth century, when the conspiracy became Judeo-Masonic. But there was a lack of resonance among the public. Very little was known about the Masons in Russia; the lodges had been outlawed in 1822. There should have been a great readiness to believe in the omnipresence and nefarious activities of these hidden forces, but there was not, and it took almost a century for views of this kind to gain wider currency.
It took even longer for the present hysteria about the hidden sinister forces in Russia to materialize. There had been a renaissance of this kind of propaganda in Nazi Germany, but there was an important difference: The Nazis were not really afraid of the occult forces, which they used as a propagandistic stratagem. The Nazis felt themselves infinitely stronger than their enemies, whereas in Russia there seems to have been genuine fear vis-à-vis Zhidomasonstvo.
In most discussions about the emergence of the new Russian anti-Western doctrine, one important protagonist is usually underrated or ignored altogether—the Orthodox Church. Mention has been made earlier of Metropolitan Ioann St. Petersburg and Ladoga, sponsor in the post-Soviet period of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Ioann was a central figure not at the beginning, but toward the end of this particular school of Orthodox theology, which goes back to such leading figures in the history of the Orthodox Church as Seraphim of Sarov, Ioann of Kronstadt, and several others. They have become not just church thinkers of great influence, but objects of a veritable cult. Their eschatological preaching about the coming of the Antichrist, the appearance of a false Messiah, the end of days, the final struggle between the forces of Christ and Satan in which Holy Russia, chosen by God, would play a central, decisive role: These and other elements of paranoia have figured prominently at both the center and the periphery of the Orthodox Church for a long time.
According to earlier versions, the Antichrist (born in Russia) was the son of the devil and a prostitute belonging to the Israeli tribe of Dan, but eventually a secularization and politization took place and the Antichrist came to stand for all the enemies of Holy Russia: the Freemasons, the Enlightenment, the heretic Catholic Church, the Russian agents of modernism, and many others. In this way, the metaphysical “beast” symbolizing the Antichrist became the nonmetaphysical America, concentrating all the forces of evil. To achieve its victorious mission, Holy Russia would have to establish a powerful empire, this being the meeting point of the forces of the Orthodox Church and Russian nationalism.
The idea of the katechon and parousia (the second coming of Christ), the final struggle and the end of days, has appeared and still appears in countless variations in Russia and at all levels of sophistication. It has to do with the second coming of Christ, which would be preceded by the appearance of the Antichrist. It is interesting how certain concepts of New Testament theology, some of them quite obscure, found their way into this kind of modern political mythology.
Ironically, this motif also appeared under communism in “The Internationale,” as la lutte finale—the final decisive struggle. At present, it is put forth by writers such as Arkadi Maler and Mikhail Nazarov, virtually unknown outside Russia but widely read in that country. This school of thought deserves far wider attention than it has received so far, because it is essential for an understanding of contemporary Russian politics. It greatly helps to understand the paranoiac fears and hopes that have become so pronounced in recent years—fears of disasters ahead, hopes of redemption and final victory.
The Russian Party Under the Soviets
When glasnost became official policy with Gorbachev’s ascension to power, among those benefiting from a much greater freedom of speech were the liberals, those who had been persecuted under the old regime. But it soon appeared that the nationalists and especially the “ultras” also received much greater freedom of movement and expression. This first manifested itself in the activities of Pamyat, a group active principally in Moscow and St. Petersburg that had its roots in the movement for the preservation of national monuments. Pamyat (named after a novel by Vladimir Civilichin) in 1982 asked for permission to hold meetings and demonstrations, which it duly received. Headed by Dmitri Vasiliev, a photographer, it was very noisy and received a great amount of publicity. But it was not clear what it stood for, other than anti-Semitism. It left open most questions: What, for example, were its convictions with regard to Stalinism and the ancient regime in general? This lack of clarity, it soon emerged, was not accidental, for it brought together people of very different political convictions. Vasiliev identified himself as nonparty Bolshevik, but it was not clear whether this was genuine and, if it was genuine, what it meant in practice. As one writer noted at the time, the atmosphere resembled the early days of the Nazi movement in Munich.
Flaunting anti-Semitism had certain advantages. First of all, it was almost legal; it had been preached by official Communist Party organs for a long time, as long as it was called anti-Zionism. There had been a wave of anti-Zionist literature, but it had been clear even to people who were politically illiterate that those preaching it had not Theodor Herzl or Israel in mind, but the Jews.
Pamyat soon began to split in various parts, and it ceased to exist well before the death of its leader in 2004, a perfect example of all that was wrong with Russian extreme nationalism. But it is useful to remember that the sharpest criticism came not from foreigners or Jews and Masons, but from Russians, perhaps because they knew it better than people abroad. No one described it more mercilessly than Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote of the nationalist doctrine and practice of the Russian Far Right that it was “barbaric and stupid, pagan and immoral in inspiration, full of Eastern wildness and darkness,” an orgy of the old Russian dissoluteness.
What was not known before glasnost (except perhaps to a select few in Moscow) was that the “Russian party” had much deeper roots going back in time, especially in the middle level of the Communist Party apparatus. It had been known in a general way that in the 1930s there had been under Stalin’s initiative a turn from proletarian internationalism to Soviet patriotism. There had been the Pokrovsky affair in 1936: A veteran Bolshevik, a professional historian, and for a while deputy minister of education, Mikhail Pokrovsky wrote several histories of Russia in an old-style Leninist spirit that debunked all the old nationalist stereotypes. His extreme antipatriotism was probably the decisive factor in the turn in Soviet historiography; as a result of his derision, Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, even other traditional heroes such as Ivan the Terrible, all returned to their rightful place in Russian history.
The turn to patriotism had its limits, however, and it was only under Stalin’s successors that the Russian party gained supporters even at the highest level. One of its chief supporters was Alexander Shelepin (1918–1994), who had made his career in the leadership of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, and had been head of the KGB between 1958 and 1961. He had been a protégé of Khrushchev’s but later became involved in the successful coup against him, hoping (according to some evidence) to succeed him. This had been a miscalculation. Shelepin retained his seat in the Politburo for some time but gradually was squeezed out. Under his leadership, the Russian nationalist element in the party apparatus became stronger and received greater freedom of maneuver—but all within limits.
Transgressing the rules by not paying at least lip service to the party ideology or by contradicting it openly could be dangerous. A few nationalists who had disregarded the rules found themselves in the gulag. But their number was very small compared with those who demanded more democratic rights. Other leading protectors of the nationalists were Yuri Melentiev, also in the Komsomol leadership, and above all several highly placed officials in the top office of the Russian Federation Communist Party.
Whereas under Leonid Brezhnev the Russian party had (almost) a free run because the first secretary had no interest in ideology, its freedom of maneuver was more limited under Yuri Andropov, who disliked these ultranationalist deviationists. But Andropov’s tenure was to be of short duration, and their setback only temporary. There were various indications of a rise in nationalism during the late Soviet period, with the appearance of the pochvenniki, a group of “village” writers from the 1960s, perhaps even earlier. One could mention Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) in this context, but he kept himself very much apart from Moscow group activities and with age became a prima donna. His Tikhiy Don (And Quiet Flows the Don) was a work of outstanding quality and had little in common with the official party line of socialist realism. It was in fact a work so much superior to anything he wrote in later years that doubts (probably unjustified) arose as to whether it had really been his work or written at least in part by others. He was a true conservative who despised the city writers and demonstratively kept himself apart from urban life and anything the city stood for.
The case of Leonid Leonov (1899–1994) was in some respects similar to Sholokhov’s. A major writer in the 1920s and 1930s, he permeated his last novels (such as Piramida, on which he worked for more than forty years) with a mystical nationalism and religiosity to the detriment of their literary merits. They were hardly read. In the age of glasnost, he joined the camp of writers of the extreme Right, protesting against the democratization of the country and other such innovations and reforms that were contrary to his beliefs. It was a sad case of the decline of a major writer, but it is of interest in showing that the Russian party was not an isolated faction but had the support of some writers who had once been thought wholly identified with the Communist system.
The pochvenniki proper began their work in the 1960s and included several writers of genuine talent such as Vasily Shukshin, Vasily Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. Shukshin, perhaps the most gifted of them, died young; he had been engaged in making films as much as in writing books. Belov was anything but a political dissident, but since his topic was village life he could not make a secret of his conviction that the collectivization of agriculture had been a great mistake, in fact a tragedy. It led to urbanization; Belov thought life in the city amoral (and partly blamed the West for it). The true values of Russia had been in the villages—but village life had been degrading in the Soviet period. Belov tended to idealize the prerevolutionary village; he had never known it, and this was probably the inevitable result of his negation of city life. Ironically, Belov was to spend most of his later life in Moscow, having become a political figure in the Writers Union and other organizations.
Belov’s origins were in the Altai region, and he died in 2012; Shukshin came from the vicinity of Vologda in the north. Rasputin was a native of Siberia, and he is still alive as these lines are written and opted for staying in his native region of Irkutsk. Like the other village writers, he had been a fighter for many ecological causes such as opposition to the project to deroute the direction of the flow of the Siberian rivers and the protection of Lake Baikal. With perestroika he became the most politicized of all the surviving village writers, commenting in open letters to the Russian people and its leaders on current events. He became one of the staunchest fighters against liberal and democratic innovations, identifying himself with the policy of the czars and the commanders of the “White” anti-Communist armies in the civil war. Critics charged Rasputin with extreme antimodernism and idealizing pro-revolutionary village life and therefore being hopelessly unrealistic. It is true that Rasputin’s politics involved him in many contradictions; thus he came eventually to praise Stalin, who after all was also responsible for the collectivization of agriculture. But the charges of embellishing village life seem at least exaggerated. His powerful novel Pozhar (The Fire) is in no way in the tradition of romanticism but describes the scene in a very small town in which a fire has broken out—in particular the actions of the townspeople engaging in orgies of drunkenness and pillage instead of trying to combat and extinguish the fire. The narrator, a local policeman having lost all hope for life in his native village, decides to leave his hometown.
Lastly, the Russian party and the movement for the preservation of national monuments. There were such groups, some of them eventually with many members, first in Moscow and later on elsewhere. Historians have been divided in their opinion of how much importance these groups were in the context of the nationalist revival. They abstained from issuing political declarations, but it is beyond doubt that from the beginning most were under the control of Russian nationalists. The main group, founded in 1965, celebrated the six hundredth jubilee of the Battle of Kulikovo. But there was also a meeting devoted to Lenin’s struggle against Trotsky that had nothing to do with the preservation of monuments but gave an opportunity to discuss Trotsky’s invented relationship with the Zionist movement. But since, in truth, they did not care about Zionism either, the real motive must have been anti-Semitism. On other occasions, group visits were arranged to the neighborhoods west of Moscow, where in the year 1941 fighting had taken place.
Seen in retrospect, it would appear that the Russian party did not make significant progress. The same people always attended its meetings, and its message did not reach a wider public. However, certain literary publications were firmly in their hands, notably the monthlies Molodaya Gvardiya and Nash Sovremenik. The former gravitated more toward Stalin and Stalinism; the latter expressed the views of Russian nationalism tout court. In this way, they could reach hundreds of thousands of readers. The ideological contrasts did not disappear, and there were serious differences of opinion, but it appeared they were not unbridgeable. Anatoli Ivanov, the editor of Molodaya Gvardiya, had engaged in antireligious propaganda, whereas Nash Sovremenik, as the organ of the village writers, stood for a rapprochement with the Orthodox Church and was basically anti-Communist. Even such seemingly inoffensive events as the Battle of Kulikovo, in which Dmitry Donskoy had defeated the Tatars, could cause conflicts. For the Eurasianists wanted collaboration rather than strife with Russia’s Asiatic neighbors, of whom they thought highly: Why therefore celebrate war rather than peaceful coexistence with Russia’s closest partners? To a certain extent, the differences could be swept under the carpet—for instance, by making Stalin a Russian nationalist who was not really a Marxist (which was, in fact, half-true).
This trend toward unity in the ranks of the Russian nationalist party continued and became even stronger under glasnost; the differences between (former) Communists and the Far Right tended to disappear, and often it became impossible to say whether a certain writer belonged to one camp or the other.
With the dawn of glasnost, the Russian party could come out in the open. True, the circumstances were not always auspicious. The Soviet Union was falling apart, as was the Russian Empire. What “the gatherers of Russian lands” had achieved over centuries vanished within a few months. The various coups, the attempts to overthrow the new government, failed miserably. But it was precisely because of these disasters that the Russian party received fresh impetus as the conviction grew that the country had to be saved from utter ruin. And there was only one way to save and restore the empire, to regain as much as possible. For as a small, unimportant country, Russia could not survive. Its only hope was to emerge as a great power with a great mission.
“An elite without an ideology is a threat,” Alexey Podberezkin wrote in 2014, in the first issue that year of Zavtra, the organ of the Russian Far Right. Whether this statement is correct is open to doubt. In its history, Russia has been afflicted by many dangers and even disasters, but most have been the result of a surfeit rather than a deficit of ideology. If Podberezkin did not do too well in the presidential elections, scoring only 0.1 percent, this was probably because he offered too many ideas at the same time—a blend of radical nationalism, Orthodox Christianity, and post-Stalinist doctrine. More or less the same mixture was offered by other parties, which made it difficult to decide whom to support. Podberezkin was an adviser to the leader of the Communists, but not a member of his party, and voters perhaps could not make up their minds whether he was a conservative revolutionary or a revolutionary conservative.
But it is certainly true that until recently most Russian political parties tried to keep all options open. And the ideological fare was so rich that everyone could find something appealing. However, of late the search for something more specific and tangible has been going into overdrive. On the initiative of President Putin, all governors and senior politicians in the service of the state were sent three books for Christmas 2013 reading: Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good, Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Philosophy of Inequality, and Ivan Ilyin’s Nashi Zadachi (Our Tasks).
This is heavy fare, and it is doubtful that politicians in any other country have been confronted with such demands. All three writers are theologians, but the books recommended by Putin did not deal with God or Satan.
Vladimir Solovyov was a late-nineteenth-century writer dealing in many fields, who had a powerful influence on both his contemporaries (including Dostoyevsky) and subsequent generations. With his poem “Pan-Mongolism,” he could be regarded as the forefather of Eurasianism. However, he was anything but enamored of what he regarded as the East of Xerxes. He was a religious thinker, but his attitude was ecumenical—he stood for reconciliation between the Eastern Church and Catholicism. This did not make him popular among official Orthodox circles, whose attitude toward other Christian churches was hostile; nor was he admired for regarding pravoslav anti-Semitism a disgrace.
Nikolai Berdyaev hailed from a family of the nobility, many of whom had served in the army. He belonged to the generation after Solovyov and died an émigré shortly after World War II in Paris. A man of great erudition, he was no doubt the best known of the Russian religious thinkers in the West. Having no academic qualifications whatsoever, he became a professor in prerevolutionary Russia, an unprecedented achievement, and had few equals in the field of Russian intellectual history. He was a passenger on the notorious ship on which one hundred sixty Russian intellectuals were exiled to Germany in 1922 on Lenin’s orders.
But the Berdyaev book sent to the politicians was neither on Christian ethics nor on truth and revelation; it was a defense of economic inequality, something in the nature of a Russian predecessor of Ayn Rand. This is surprising for a number of reasons. In his early years, Berdyaev was a man of the Left (he was even exiled for a number of years), and as a theologian he must have known Timothy 6:10 about the lust for money as the source of evil and Mark 10:25 about the rich man, the camel, and the likelihood of passing through the eye of a needle. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice had not yet been published in Berdyaev’s day, but he must have known that while an overdose of equality was bad, too much inequality caused no end of trouble. On the other hand, Putin must have known that the general trend in the world is toward excessive inequality, partly as the result of globalization.
Putin also should have known that economic inequality in Russia is greater than in all other developed or semideveloped economies. About 110 Russian citizens are reported to control 35 percent of household wealth, largely comprising money made in the natural resources sector over the last twenty-five to thirty years. This has become not only a major political problem, but a very serious economic issue, a real obstacle to further economic growth. For if wealth is concentrated in so few hands, demand will be limited. In these circumstances, elementary political and economic common sense would seem to dictate a strategy of spreading wealth more widely. In Berdyaev’s book, America’s great wealth is explained with reference to inequality of property and income.
The third and most troubling ideological authority recommended by Putin is Ivan Ilyin. Putin and his colleagues believe that the long search for a new doctrine has ended and that in Ilyin they have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology.
Ilyin was well-known among Russian émigrés in the 1920s and 1930s, subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered only recently. Widely republished in recent years, he has been frequently quoted by Putin in speeches and articles and also by other leading Russian figures close to him. As the Russian minister of regional development put it: “The demand for his ideas in today’s Russia is so strong that sometimes there is a feeling that Ivan Ilyin is our contemporary.”
Born in Moscow in 1883 a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, Ilyin came from an upper-class family, many of whom served in Russia’s army. He studied law in Russia and Germany (his mother was Russian of German origin) and wrote on Hegel, Fichte, and the philosophy of law. In later years, he became engaged with religious questions, and he too was a passenger on the philosophers’ ship of 160 undesirables expelled from Russia in 1922. Ilyin settled in Berlin, where he worked in the Russian Scientific Institute, primarily as a political lecturer and writer. He was devoted entirely to the struggle against bolshevism, which he saw as the greatest danger to mankind. He edited Mankind on the Brink of the Abyss, a collection of essays devoted to the misdeeds of the Bolsheviks; the book was widely translated and disseminated. However, Ilyin still had difficulties with the Gestapo, was dismissed from his job in July 1934, and found it next to impossible to be employed as either a writer or a lecturer. It is true that the Nazis dismissed him from his job; it is less frequently mentioned that his place of work was part of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. With the help of composer Sergei Rachmaninov, he moved to Switzerland, where he lived up to his death in 1954. Putin personally initiated the transfer of his remains to the Russian capital in 2005, and he was reburied in a Moscow monastery. In the last two decades, almost thirty of his books have been republished in Russia.
What attracts Putin and other leading Russian figures to Ilyin’s writing? What were his ideas for the rebuilding of a post-Communist Russia? Among his generation of Russian émigrés, Ilyin was one of the two theologian/philosophers giving more than routine thought to Russia’s future. While Georgy Fedotov, a major theologian and philosopher, was a humanist and democrat, Ilyin never made a secret of the fact that he stood for a monarchy and autocratic (but not totalitarian) dictatorship. After World War II, Fedotov published an article that argued that czarist Russia could in no way be the model for a post-Communist Russia. What would Russia believe in when bolshevism has died, when the revolution and the counterrevolution were over? Fedotov asked. It would be Russian nationalism, he answered, but what form would it take? As of today, the answer would appear to be Ivan Ilyin, but the counterrevolution may not be over yet. Ilyin was the only thinker whom Putin quoted in his speeches as a president: in his presidential addresses of 2005 and 2006 and in his speech to the State Council the year after. In 2009, Putin went to the Sretensky Monastery to lay flowers on Ilyin’s grave.
Ilyin advocated a strong central power for post-Communist Russia, with few rights for non-Russian regions such as Ukraine or the Caucasus, which may help to explain his popularity among the present-day Russian leadership.
Ilyin’s particular form of solidarism reached Russia through his influence on an organization of the exiled younger generation, the Natsionalny Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS), which adopted him as its master ideologist after World War II; when some of its members returned to Russia after the fall of communism, they carried his ideas to Moscow. It is likely that the messenger was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or the film producer Nikita Mikhalkov (Burned by the Sun and the Barber of Siberia), a man of very right-wing views and the son of the poet who had provided the Soviet anthem that replaced “The Internationale.”
“The Lord allocated to Ilyin the gift of the seer,” according to one Russian minister of regional development, giving voice to the conviction that just as Ilyin’s prophecies concerning the disintegration of the Soviet Union were correct, so are his predictions of hostile attempts to undermine Russia’s sovereignty after the fall.
But not all of Ilyin’s ideas were as seductively influential. Indeed, some were embarrassingly wrong. “What did he do?” he wrote of Adolf Hitler. “He stopped the process of Bolshevization of Germany and with this provided an enormous service to Europe.”
Ilyin, in other words, did not foresee that far from closing the door to bolshevism, Hitler opened it by unleashing World War II.
“Europe does not understand the Nazi movement. It does not understand it and is afraid,” Ilyin wrote. “And the more it is afraid, the less it understands. The less it understands, the more it tends to believe all the negative rumors, all the horror stories of ‘eyewitnesses,’ all the frightening predictions. Radical left wingers in virtually all European nations create an atmosphere of ill will and hatred. Unfortunately our Russian [émigré] press is gradually also drawn into this, the [Jewish-liberal] emotions gradually become categories of good and evil.”
Ilyin wrote that while he understood the emotions of German Jews, he categorically refused to judge national socialism and recent events in Germany from their point of view. Hypnotized by liberal democratic views, Europe was blinded as far as the Bolshevist danger was concerned.
“To this day European public opinion has failed to understand that National Socialism is by no means radical racialism which does not respect the law,” Ilyin asserted. “The spirit of National Socialism does not lead to racialism.” It does not lead to negation, but generates a positive and creative spirit to tackle the tasks that confront all nations. The same calumnies were brought against the Russian émigrés and against Mussolini.
To summarize: Ilyin was not a Nazi, but a strong sympathizer who wholly misjudged its essence. His political judgment was utterly foolish. He was not at all aware of Hitler’s racialism or did not mind his hostility toward Russia or the fact that Hitler regarded Russians as subhuman. Nor did he realize that Nazism was leading to war against Russia and that its motives were by no means mainly ideological. Ilyin was willing to embrace all anti-Communists. But for Hitler, communism was not that much of a threat; his propaganda in this respect was deliberately misleading. Up to a point, he admired Stalin. He wanted to occupy and dominate Eastern Europe and Russia.
Ilyin bitterly attacked the “Jewish bourgeois press” of Weimar Germany, which he accused of being pro-Soviet and never telling the truth about Russia. It is true that the newspapers of the period in Germany were on occasion uncritical, but their sins of commission and omission were small in comparison with Ilyin’s utter misjudgments—indeed, fanaticism.
What could be said in defense of Ilyin? Not much, except perhaps for the fact that these lines (and others in a similar vein) were written early on, in 1933. But it still remains true that while being a monarchist, he considered Nazism a positive phenomenon that with some modifications and adjustments could serve as a model for the future Russia.
Did he change his views after the war? Yes, but not by very much. He preferred to comment on fascism in general, not on Nazism specifically. In an article published in 1948, he maintained that fascism had been inevitable, given Europe’s left-wing chaos and totalitarianism. The healthy forces had to reassert themselves, just like a dictatorship in ancient Rome in states of emergency. This happened in Europe after World War I and would happen in the future, too. Fascism was right inasmuch as it looked for justified social and political reforms and inasmuch as it was based on patriotic feelings, without which no people can survive. However, fascism committed several deep, serious, fatal mistakes that brought about its downfall. Ilyin listed six of them, but the first was the decisive one.
Fascism was not religious—indeed, it was hostile to Christianity. It generated right-wing totalitarianism, while the monopoly of a political party created demoralization and corruption. It also became chauvinist and idolized Caesarism.
Since Ilyin was deeply religious, fascism’s lack of religion was for him decisive. But not all fascisms were antireligious: only in Nazi Germany was there intervention in church affairs and occasional persecution. Nothing of the sort occurred in Italy or other Fascist countries and movements. In some cases, there was a fairly close collaboration between the (Fascist) state and the church.
Did the establishment of a single party create demoralization? Similar questions arose with regard to the other points listed. Ilyin believed that all the deviations, exaggerations, and mistakes were unnecessary. Benito Mussolini understood that he needed the church, but Hitler with his vulgar atheism did not understand that he was proceeding in the footsteps of the Antichrist. Nor was it necessary to establish a party monopoly.
Idolizing Caesarism (Ilyin probably meant the Führerprinzip, the adulation of the Duce) was the greatest mistake of fascism. It was totally opposed to monarchism and inevitably led to despotism, the negation of freedom, and terrorism. Caesarism is immoral, cruel, and demagogic, despises the people, and shows disregard of law and individual rights. Francisco Franco and António de Oliveira Salazar understood this and did not call themselves Fascists, Ilyin suggested. Fascism must not lead to folie de grandeur and an excess of pride and superiority, which would cause its isolation and eventually its downfall.
Ilyin expressed the hope that Russian Fascists would learn from and not repeat the mistakes of their predecessors, which would fatally compromise the patriotic cause. Even after World War II, Ilyin found it difficult to see the difference between a mistake and a crime, a distinction he should have known.
On some points, Ilyin’s views had changed by 1948. The monarchism he preached before World War II was not the constitutional monarchy of, say, the United Kingdom, Sweden, or the Netherlands, but tantamount to an authoritarian dictatorship. Ilyin had never been a Fascist, but in the interwar period he had moved in that direction. His views on monarchy after 1945 became vaguer. The term “authoritarian” was still used, but dictatorship had acquired a bad reputation and was dropped. However, since he was still opposed to a democratic order, what could be the political system of a future Russia?
Ilyin’s views on social and economic policy were never made clear: It was not really his field. He was a solidarist of sorts, but what was solidarism? It meant different things in different countries at different times. It appeared first in France, found its most prominent spokesman in the Austrian academic Othmar Spann, and also had support in many other countries, perhaps most significantly among left-wing Catholics.
Solidarism was against anomie and the breakdown of social cohesion and bonds. It disagreed with socialism but also with free market theorists; some supreme power was needed to control the market and those who benefited most from it. The market could not be trusted to solve all problems, certainly not the most crucial.
Fascism played with solidarism but never quite adopted it. Spann had hoped that his ideas would be accepted by the new rulers in Germany, but the Nazis had no such intention. They instead arrested Spann and removed him from his chair at the University of Vienna. Solidarists were against traditional socialism, but also against laissez-faire capitalism. The present (capitalist) system should be allowed to work as long as it delivered the goods, but only under control and supervision. Solidarists preferred (and continue to prefer) to remain vague: The state is to be in charge, not the market.
Vagueness in this important field did not, however, impede the rise of Ilyin’s reputation in Russia. He became the great authority to be invoked more often than anyone else, whatever the issue. Needless to say, there was occasional criticism and contradiction. Theologians disliked the fact that Ilyin had always talked and written about God—but very seldom about the church. Berdyaev and others had criticized him back in the 1920s and 1930s; as they saw it, his worldview was not really Christian, let alone Orthodox. He used Christianity to back up his political arguments, convinced that his views were right and no other views were credible.
The most extreme attacks on Ilyin, however, came from the most radical voices in the Russian émigré community. Thus Viktor Ostretsov, a Russian émigré specialist on Zhidomasonstvo (the cabal of Jews and Freemasons that was the leading force behind world politics and all the evil in the universe). According to Ostretsov, Ilyin was not really a monarchist or a Christian, but an agent of the Jews and the Masons. The proof was easy to find: Had he been a real enemy of the Bolsheviks, his place would not have been on the philosophers’ ship of those expelled, he would have been sent to Siberia or have been shot. When he came to Berlin, he belonged to the Russian philosophers’ society together with Berdyaev, a type even more suspect than Ilyin among the followers of the Russian Far Right, and Semyon Frank—a converted Jew. Need one say more? The headquarters of this society was in the building that belonged to the Jewish B’nai B’rith Masonic lodge, which had put it at the disposal of refugee intellectuals in the beginning of their stay. We do not know whether Ilyin ever visited this building in Berlin. But it stands to reason that such a concatenation of circumstances could not possibly have been accidental.
The attack by Ostretsov and like-minded crackpots did not affect Ilyin’s authority in contemporary Russia. Why mention it in the first place? Because it shows that the madness and persecution mania mentioned earlier among contemporary writers in Russia did not come like a bolt out of the blue. It had its predecessors. It is impossible to say how far this affliction will spread or has spread already.