SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

Excerpts from Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?

 

The Herzen Foundation, Amsterdam, 1970. 

 

 

As I see it, no idea can ever be put into practice if it is not understood by the majority of the people. Whether because of its historical traditions or for some other reasons, the idea of self-government, of equality before the law and of personal freedom — and the responsibility that goes with these — are almost completely incomprehensible to the Russian people. Even in the idea of pragmatic freedom, an average Russian tends to see not so much the possibility of securing a good life for themselves, as a danger that some clever fellow will make good at their expense. 

 

To the majority of the people the very word “freedom” is synonymous with “unruliness”, an opportunity to indulge with impunity in some kind of antisocial or dangerous activity. As for respecting the rights of an individual per se, this idea simply arouses bewilderment. One can respect strength, authority, even intellect or education, but it is preposterous to the popular mind that a human personality should represent any kind of value. 

 

As a people, we have not experienced the European-style period where an individual person could be worshiped. In Russian history an individual person has always been a means and never in any sense an end. It is paradoxical that the term “the period of the personality cult” became to designate the period of the most extreme humiliation and suppression of individuals our people had ever known. What is more, constant propaganda aims to counterpose “the personal” against “the communal”, emphasizing the insignificance of the former compared to the latter. This is why all types of interest in “the private” — which is natural and inevitable — have taken on ugly and egotistical forms. 

 

Does this mean that the Russian people have no positive ideas apart from the idea of “strong government” — the type of government which is right because of its might, and which — "let’s pray” — must never be allowed to weaken?

 

But the Russian people — as one can see both from its history and its present condition — have at least one idea, which seems to be positive: the idea of fairness. 

 

The government — which acts and thinks on our behalf — must not only be powerful, but must also be fair. All people should live according to the rules of fairness, and to behave as their consciousness tells them to. These principles are worth dying for, as opposed to some kind of right to “do what one likes”. But despite the seeming attractiveness of this idea, it is it — if one examines it and where it stems from carefully — which represents the most destructive part of the Russian way of thinking. “Fairness” in practice turns into a wish for “no-one to have it better than me”. It turns into hatred toward everything that is unusual, and which one tries not to imitate, but to force into conformity; it turns into hatred for every initiative, for all kind of higher and more dynamic way of living. Of course, this attitude is more widely spread among the peasants and is encountered much less frequently among “the middle class”. However, peasants and yesterday’s peasants comprise the majority of the population of our country. 

 

As far as I have been able to observe, many peasants find it more painful to experience another person’s success than their own failure. In general, if an average Russian person realizes that their own life is less successful than the life of their neighbor, they will try not to improve their own life to match the neighbor’s, but will try to devise a way for the neighbor to experience the same kind of hardship as them. Some may find my reasoning naive, but I have been able to observe dozens of such instances both in the countryside and in urban areas, and consider this a typical trait of the Russian way of thinking. 

 

Thus, both ideas which are clear and congenial to the Russian people — the idea of “might” and the idea of “fairness” — equally oppose democratic ideas based on individualism. To this one must add other three factors, which are interconnected. Firstly, the continuing low level of culture of the majority of our people, in particular in the area of day-to-day life. Secondly, the prevalence of mass myths, which are being relentlessly spread through the media. Thirdly, a deep social disorientation of the majority of our people. “Proletarianization” of rural areas has engendered a “strange class” — people who are neither peasants nor workers, but who possess a dual mentality of a small-farm owner and at the same time that of a forced laborer at a giant anonymous enterprise. 

 

How these masses of people see themselves and what they strive toward, no one, I suppose, would be able to tell. 

 

Furthermore, a colossal migration of the peasant masses from rural areas into urban areas has created a new type of city dweller: a person who had cut their ties with the old milieu, the old way of life and the old culture, but who finds it very hard to acquire the new ones, who feels uncomfortable among them, and who is both browbeaten and aggressive. It is equally unclear which social stratum they see themselves as part of. 

 

While the old way of living both in cities and in rural areas has been completely destroyed, the new one is only in the process of being formed. “The ideological basis” on which it is being built is rather primitive: it is the striving toward material fulfillment (which a Western person would find rather moderate) and the instinct for self-preservation, i.e. striving for things that are “lucrative”  as opposed to things that are “dangerous”.

 

It is difficult to tell whether the majority of the Russian people possess any kind of moral criteria apart from these purely material considerations, i.e. whether they possess the notions of “fair” and “unfair”, “good” and “bad”, “good” and “evil” which are supposed to be eternally valid, and which should act as restraining and guiding factors when the mechanism of societal pressure is no longer operable and when a person is free to act according to their own will. 

 

I have an impression — which could be wrong — that perhaps the people have none of such moral criteria, or next to none. The Christian model with its notions of good and evil has been knocked out and eroded from the people’s consciousness. Although there have been attempts to replace it with the “class” morality, which can be summed up approximately as follows: a thing is good when it represents something that is required by the government. Naturally, such morality, as well as propagation and fomentation of class hatred and ethnic strife have demoralized the society completely and robbed it of any — non-situational — moral criteria. 

 

The Christian system of values — which in Russia had both a semi-pagan and an administrative character — has perished, but has not been replaced by Marxist ideology. The so-called “Marxist doctrine” has been recast and remolded too many times to suit the daily needs to become a living ideology. Now, as the regime is becoming more bureaucratic, it is becoming even more devoid of ideology. 

 

The need to have some kind of ideological platform forces the regime to seek a new ideology — the Great Russian Nationalism with its cult of strength and expansionist ambitions. A regime which professes such ideology needs to have external as well as internal enemies: not “class” enemies per se, such as, for example, “the American imperialists” or “Anti-Soviets” but national enemies — the Chinese and the Jews. While such nationalist ideology would provide the regime with support for some time, it is nevertheless rather dangerous for the country, in which the Russians constitute less than half of the population. 

 

The need to have a living nationalistic ideology is not only being felt by the regime with increasing strength, but such an ideology is already being formed within the society itself, and first of all within the official literary and artistic circles (where it, apparently, has emerged as a reaction to the role of the Jews within the Soviet official art). However, it spreads also among wider strata, where it has formed a kind of center for itself — the “Rodina” (“Motherland”) club.

 

This ideology can be nominally called “neo-slavophilic” (without confusing it with the “Christian ideology” which we have talked about earlier and which is partially being permeated by slavophilism). It is characterized by an interest in the Russian distinctive originality, by the belief in Russia’s messianic role, and also by extreme contempt and animosity toward anything non-Russian.

 

As this ideology has not been directly inspired by the regime, and emerged spontaneously, the regime treats it with certain suspicion (an example of which is the prohibition of the film “Andrei Rublev”), although there is also a large degree of tolerance toward it, and at any moment it can take center stage.

 

So what does this people without religion and without morals believes in and what is it guided by? It believes in its own national might, which other peoples should be afraid of, and is being guided by its perception of the might of its own regime, which it itself is afraid of. 

 

Naturally, the majority of the people have either approved of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or viewed it with indifference, and, on the other hand, found it painful to accept the “impunity” with which the Chinese have acted during the March confrontation  on the banks of the river Ussuri. 

 

Given these kind of attitudes, it is easy to see which shape a popular discontent will take and what it will result in once the regime outlives its usefulness. The horrors of the revolutions of 1905-1907 and 1917-1920 would seem like idyllic pictures. 

 

One should note that there his another strong factor running counter to any peaceful restructuring of the country and which is equally negative for both strata of the society: it is the extreme isolation of all social strata which the regime had imposed upon the society and on itself. What we are talking about is not just the isolation of the regime from the society, and the isolation of all strata of society from one another, but — first of all — the extreme isolation of the country from the rest of the world. 

 

It engenders in everyone — from the bureaucratic elites to the lowest strata of society — a rather surreal picture of the world and their place in it. However, the more this state of affairs promotes a static state, the quicker and the more decisively will everything disintegrate, when the encounter with reality becomes inevitable.