CIAO DATE: 11/98

From the Russian Idea to the Idea of a New Russia: How We Must Overcome the Crisis of Ideas

Igor Chubais

Translated and Edited by J. Alexander Ogden
July 1998

Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project
John F. Kennedy School of Government

Table of Contents

Preface
Author’s Introduction
I.	The Russian Idea: What is It and Can We Return to It?
		On Russian History and the Gathering of the Lands
		Folk Sayings about Fundamental Russian Values
		A Portrait of Russia in Poetry
II.	Why is the Communist Idea Incompatible with Communist Ideology?
		The Relationship between the Russian Idea and the Communist Idea
		The Communist Idea and Communist Ideology
III.	The New Russia as an Idea
		Current Issues: Corruption, Accountability, and the Ruling Class
		The Idea of a New Russia
		Values From the Past
		Values for the Present
		Values for the Future
		A New System of Values: The Central Idea

Preface

This monograph continues the series of publications of the “Whither Russia?” project of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, based at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The goal of the “Whither Russia?” project is to illuminate for the international community the ongoing debate in Russia about the country’s identity, security, and interests. Our central question is: what will emerge as the dominant conception of Russian identity, Russian security, and Russian greatness? More specifically, we hope this project can help clarify: competing images of Russia across the political spectrum; how these competing images are reflected in policy; the shape of the debate in specific arenas; the views of the political elite and the public about the debate; differences between views in the regions and those at the center; common threads in the competing images of Russia; and, based on the conclusions drawn, Russia’s fundamental geopolitical and national interests.

As part of the project, we are publishing important works by leading Russian policymakers and academics addressing a set of three broad questions:

1. Who are the Russians? Authors are examining competing ideas and components of the Russian nation, Russian nationalism, and Russian national identity.
2. What is the nature of the Russian state? Monographs are analyzing competing images of the state, Russia’s status as a “Great Power,” Russia’s national interests, and conceptions of Russia’s friends and enemies.
3. What is Russia’s Mission? Looking at Russia’s relations with the outside world: specifically with the Newly Independent States, the coalition of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the West, and its orientation toward action, including its stated foreign policy and general international conduct.

The author of this monograph, Igor B. Chubais, is a professor of philosophy at the Russian Academy of Dramatic Arts and is the author of numerous publications on issues of philosophy, sociology, and political science. He was a leader of the Democratic Platform group that formed within the Communist Party in 1989–1990. His writings are often highly critical of the post-Soviet ruling elite, a group that prominently includes his brother, Anatoly Chubais, the former Russian First Deputy Prime Minister. Professor Chubais consciously places himself in the Russian tradition of philosophical and moral inquiry that includes the Slavophile and Westernizer debates of the mid-nineteenth century, the religious quests of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov, and the insistent social criticism of the writers associated with the 1909 Landmarks (Vekhi) collection. Like these predecessors, he struggles with large issues of Russia’s identity and its future.

This monograph confronts the current confusion about Russia’s identity and provides the author’s blueprint for unifying and strengthening Russia for the future. Russia’s situation is like that of an amnesiac who has lost his identity. Such a person can accomplish nothing without first seeking to orient himself by restoring his memory. By turning to the pre-Revolutionary “Russian Idea” and defining how it can be revised to fit a “New Russia” today, Professor Chubais provides a grounding in historical memory for the country as a whole.

Section I specifies the most important components of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Idea: expansionism, collectivism, and Orthodoxy. Professor Chubais uses an investigation of history, folk sayings, and images of Russia in poetry to reveal the nuances of these features of the Russian Idea. Analysis of Russian history starting from medieval times shows that the expansionism inherent in Russia’s “Gathering of the Lands” was a healthy phenomenon and created a vast and wealthy empire, but it exhausted its natural course by the nineteenth century. Like expansionism, collectivism and Orthodoxy are also limited in what they can contribute to the New Russia. Collectivism evolved out of necessity in coping with a harsh climate—modern agricultural technology, however, makes it no longer necessary. Folk sayings and poetry amply demonstrate the role of Orthodoxy in traditional Russian life, but in the multi-confessional New Russia emphasis on religion would be divisive and it should not be mixed with politics.

Section II examines the distortions of the Russian Idea in the Soviet period. Expansionism was senselessly and artificially revived, enforced collectivism transformed life “into an absolute hell,” and Orthodoxy was systematically annihilated. The Communist Idea must be distinguished from Communist Ideology, however. The former is “a collection of deeply positive values” and “a combination of all that is finest and most attractive.” But Soviet reality dealt exclusively with Communist Ideology, while the Communist Idea remained “as curious and as unattainable as, say, the idea of heaven.”

In Section III, Chubais confronts the effects of corruption and the problem of the nomenklatura (ruling elite) inherited from Soviet Russia, and then he turns to the system of values that must be built to unite the past and present, integrate today’s Russia, and bind Russia together for the future. Analyzing the role of the past, Chubais asserts that a “cult of Russian history” will restore Russians’ sense of identity. In the present, ethnic divisions must be overcome and language can help unite the nation. The future requires liberalism and democracy, and for the central idea of the New Russia Professor Chubais coins the term obustroistvo: “internal, qualitative growth, a stage of intense development.”

J. Alexander Ogden, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies, has translated and edited this monograph for Professor Chubais. It condenses Professor Chubais’s Russian-language book of the same title (Moscow, 1996) and introduces material from several of his more recent articles on the same topic. Funding for the “Whither Russia?” project has been provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The opinions expressed in this monograph are those of the author and do not represent the views of Harvard University, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, Davis Center for Russian Studies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, or the translator and editor.

 

Author’s Introduction

“Frankly, even the name of your course makes me uncomfortable—the Russian Idea, the New Russia, a philosophy of Russia. What are you? A national-patriot or something even worse?” “Of course not. I hold democratic convictions. But you’re right, the democrats up to this point have hardly concerned themselves at all with Russia. Nevertheless, for ninety years our country was in a state of crisis, and the only true way out was through democracy. You can’t farm out your problems to the authorities or to various fringe elements, whether Red or Brown. In Russia there is a democratic society, a democratic intelligentsia, a democratic social science. All of us must, as soon as possible, concern ourselves with the resolution of our problems.”

—From a conversation with a student

The discussion about the new Russian Idea that has unfolded in the national mass media in the last two years has, by force of circumstance, turned out to be unproductive. Even the initial question itself—why such an idea is necessary—has remained open and not entirely clear. Therefore I want to start with several considerations about the crisis of ideas that our country has suffered. This problem has various manifestations, and when we talk about the search for a new idea, or about the loss of identity, or about the crisis of a value system, we are talking about basically one and the same thing. So someone who decries searching for an idea to unite the country because he is justly apprehensive about the appearance of a new official ideology or has some similar concern acts like a person who throws out, along with the dirty bath water, the newly-washed baby sitting in it.

Psychology reveals the extreme complexity of any situation in which a person, as the result of certain stresses or traumas, loses a concept of himself, forgets who he is, or loses his identity. If a person has forgotten his own name, age, sex, language, etc., he cannot do anything, since all activity must be directed toward the realization of one’s own “I”, one’s own ego-concept. In the case of identity loss, one must begin by restoring it. This is true in relation to an individual, and it is true in relation to a society and a state as a whole.

Contemporary Russia is not a direct continuation of the USSR. It is not an ideological state, nor a totalitarian nor Soviet Communist one. The New Russia is also not a direct continuation of the Russian Empire. After all, we are not living in a monarchy. So how, then, should contemporary Russia act? What is its philosophy? What are its internal and external rules, rights, and responsibilities? There is not yet an answer to these questions. I will clarify this theoretical problem with one concrete example. Why do millions of Russians not receive the salaries and pensions due to them? In the Soviet Union this was impossible; in pre-Revolutionary Russia things were arranged completely differently; the West, which certain people want to copy, is unacquainted with such a practice. So in what country, then, do we live? The authorities try to answer this question by introducing the euphemism “reforms.” This term is used in reality to explain the abolition of the old rules—often unacceptable but sometimes fair—and the failure to accept any new norms at all. In the current situation, the term “reform” has become a synonym of the concept “chaos.” However, such a situation is dangerous for the country. It cannot continue too long. Put differently, the state is undergoing a very complicated, systemic crisis, which has struck the economy, education, the army, medicine.... But the deepest crisis we are enduring is a crisis of ideas. Until we restore our identity, until we figure out our own value system, until we find our own idea, we will not really be able to solve a single other problem.

Let me note immediately that a new system of values cannot simply be thought up by someone or artificially constructed. We have already been through such options. The history of Russia has lasted more than 1000 years; ours is one of the oldest states on the planet. We must search for a common Russian idea by analyzing our history and our culture.

We can approach the idea of a new Russia only after having carefully examined both pre-Revolutionary Russian and Communist ideas. This book presents such an investigation. This subject takes a new direction of investigation, which may be called a philosophy of Russia, studying the genesis, evolution, and transformation of the deep ideals of the Russian people. In its most general aspect, my method of investigation is a comparative analysis, juxtaposing the fundamental values that have succeeded one another in our country.

 

Section I. The Russian Idea: What is It and Can We Return to It?

The phrase “The Russian Idea” first emerged from the pen of Fyodor Dostoevsky in the 1870s. The phenomenon he defined became the subject of many publications and discussions that appeared in our country at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Later, due to well-known circumstances, both the concept and many of its investigators found themselves beyond the borders of their homeland. The term “The Russian Idea” was not used in the Soviet popular press or in philosophical-ideological literature. Seven decades later our age-old legacy began to return to us. Articles, collections, monographs, and even periodicals appear in greater and greater number, all with one and the same designation that is already familiar and well-known—The Russian Idea. However, in spite of the concept’s wide distribution, it is quite difficult to give it a precise and clear interpretation. One can precisely and clearly say only that this term has been understood in various ways, both in the past and in the present. No single, commonly-accepted interpretation exists. However, most Russia experts trying to seek out a positive meaning of the concept would include in its interpretation a relatively stable and limited collection of characteristics. In it, as a rule, are included sobornost ₁ and collectivism, monarchism, Orthodoxy, eschatologism, and patriotism.

Let me also note that the term “The Russia Idea” has at least a dual meaning. First, this is what was and remains a subject of the discussions and arguments of a range of our nation’s thinkers. Second, it is those values which in reality formed our country, which existed not so much in philosophy as in reality itself, making Russian society resemble itself and not some other society.

However, the features that investigators wanted to bring into reality might not correspond with what actually existed in reality. Can we, dear reader, understand this problem independently? Perhaps for a philosophizing archeologist the one hundred, three hundred, or five hundred years separating us from the Russian Idea are really not such an insurmountable barrier after all. What if we base our searching on more than the texts of experts in culture (although we must acquaint ourselves with them as well)? Why not set out on an independent search into Russian reality itself? To do this, I propose to carry out three independent investigations that mutually supplement one another: an analysis of our nation’s history; an investigation of proverbs and sayings from the very rich wellspring of ideas and concepts found in folklore; and an analysis of the portrait of Russia found in Russian poetry. By relying on these three mutually-supplementary investigations and taking into account the work of Russian philosophers, we should be able to resolve three interwoven tasks:

1. Come closer to a more correct conception of Russia, a concept that to this day remains extremely deformed and corrupted;
2. Establish which ideas in reality unified the country in the course of many centuries;
3. Define whether the Russian value system we reveal has only historical significance or whether it can be integrated into contemporary Russian culture.

On Russian History and the Gathering of Lands

First I want to underline that today we know and understand the history of Russia very poorly. I have in mind not simply our forgetting a formal succession of events and dates—that, in the end, is not so fundamental. I mean the lack of understanding or incorrect understanding of our history’s crucial nuances, its basic tonality, and even its underlying meaning. Such a situation is hardly surprising. The Communist State, wishing to exalt itself, tried by all means possible to discredit the authority preceding it. Therefore previous history was continually corrupted, falsified, or simply not discussed. The real image of the country, its people, and its government was consciously deformed, sometimes through an extreme over-simplification about exploiters and exploited that sets one’s teeth on edge, sometimes by the creation of a multitude of false stereotypes. In order to gain an understanding of all of this no little work is necessary, and time is necessary.

Soviet ideologues so insistently corrupted conceptions about the country they inherited that as a result the caricature put down roots and the mask grew onto the face. On an almost subconscious level, an extremely negative evaluatory scale was formed. And today numerous people, among them writers and cultural figures, if they run up against various minor or major problems, readily generalize without stopping to think, saying “how could it be otherwise? This is Russia—here nothing was the way it is for others.” These myths are readily preserved in the new Russia as well. But stop, for God’s sake! Isn’t it finally time to stop and think?

When I turned to the works of Russian historians, I realized that these very stereotypes could not help but influence me as well, and therefore I very much wanted to escape them. Having read through the works of many famous and not so famous pre-Revolutionary Russian authors, in the end I felt that a new and, I hope, more objective image of the road already traveled had coalesced for me.

Every organism, while it is young, active, and energetic, strives toward expansion. The history of states and peoples is a typical example. The Mongols and Turks, the Danes and Swedes, the English and French, the Germans and Americans very much wanted to expand their domain to increase their influence. But the Russians succeeded more than anybody, creating the biggest state in the world. The name of Ivan Kalita evokes the period of Russian history known as the Gathering of the Lands around a single, stable center. ₂ An epoch of energetic, extensive growth began. Understandably, such a state-political concept demanded enormous exertion of manpower. A large and powerful army—and thus high taxes; readiness to defend existing borders and to make new conquests—and thus constant exertion (the Cossacks, a special social class unique to Russia, arose, whose main task was guarding the borders)—these are some of the peculiarities of such a way of life. Non-standard people, people unlike others and not wanting to act like everyone else, were uncomfortable here. A different sort was needed. There is a well-known story of how Ivan the Terrible first sent two talented young people to study in Europe and how they, having hardly left their native parts, immediately announced that they would never go back. It was necessary to pay for enormous territorial expansion with enormous exertion of strength and self-restraint. Not everyone understood this, and not everyone was ready to agree with this.

Extensive growth, however, cannot be endless, if only because inexhaustible resources are necessary to accomplish it. Peter the Great, in order to realize his plans, had to introduce more and more new requisitions; in particular a tax was introduced for the first time even on serfs. For the sake of strengthening autocratic power, Peter encroached on the independence of the Orthodox Church, drawing it into a single system of state administration and subordinating Orthodox believers not so much to the Patriarch as to the Chief Procurator. The bronze horseman bridled his steed Russia with the utmost exertion.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Russia’s expansion toward the West practically ended, and, after the inclusion of the Caucasus and Central Asia into the Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, significant territorial conquests were already unrealistic in any direction. Further, the sale of Alaska in 1867 showed that movement reversing the Gathering of Lands was possible. (The dismal results of the Crimean War plunged the Russian authorities into doubt: could they, if necessary, effectively defend a region so distant from the center?) Leaving the walls of the Moscow Kremlin, Russians inspired by the Orthodox-Imperial idea sooner or later came into contact with peoples who were either controlled by other powers or who had their own equally strong state-building ideas and therefore were not willing under any circumstances to take on foreign ideas and banners.

The gathering of lands and extensive growth are a very important component of the Russian Idea. But this component exhausted itself after five or six hundred years of constant activity. At this point the next period of Russian history should have begun—a period of “obustroistvo,” or internal, qualitative growth, a stage of intensive development. As a matter of fact, Russian policies of the nineteenth century moved in this very direction, sometimes more assuredly and sometimes less so. Opposition from those advocating the traditional approach and attempts to move toward qualitative, internal obustroistvo can be easily observed in Russian history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similar impulses can be found even earlier. Even Catherine the Great, after all, gave freedom to the nobility (charter of 1775), thereby helping it to become the first independent estate of the Russian Empire. A significant class of citizens free in economic and political affairs thus appeared. Later, by order of Emperor Alexander I, his friend Professor Speransky prepared a range of new law codes and some of them were adopted. In particular, his project for a Russian constitution was discussed with the Emperor. A new, more modern look to the state was formed by the long-prepared, carefully debated, and yet somewhat overdue abolition of serfdom, which completed the process of social and political liberation of all estates of the Russian State. Stolypin’s reform was supposed to play an enormous role in moving the state onto a new path; this was begun but was not fated to be carried through. The program’s originator dreamed that for its realization Russia would earn twenty years without war or revolution. But such a time never came in our country.

To this day both beyond our borders and within our country you can hear the assertion that democracy is not natural or necessary to Russia. Here, there are other rules and traditions. Let me clarify for these skeptics that in a period of extensive growth, democracy is not necessary for anyone, but it is completely necessary for a move toward internal, qualitative growth. Therefore today one can assert that Russia, through its suffering, has won its democracy like no one else, and without actual democratization real advancement along the path of progress will be impossible. I will return to this theme in more detail in the concluding section of this book, but for now let us continue our search for the Russian Idea.

Folk Sayings about Fundamental Russian Values

The goal of this part of the investigation, as of the previous one, is twofold. On the one hand, this is an attempt to draw closer to an untarnished and authentic image of Russia, something important and interesting for us in and of itself. At the same time, we continue our investigation to approach an understanding of the Russian Idea and to define its interaction with contemporary culture.

First, a word about what we will analyze and how. Proverbs and sayings are a relatively stable and deep-rooted component of spiritual culture, little subject to political fads of the moment. Like underwater minerals extracted from ocean depths, preserving for centuries the imprint of vanished animals on their surface, folklore, independent of any overlay of censor and ideology, has preserved the values and ideas of the folk. That is why it is interesting and useful to look into this wellspring of wisdom.

In front of me is a book of 30,000 parables collected by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal. ₃ For many days I grappled with it, leafed through it, and searched for appropriate solutions. I was certain that soon I would be able to compose some sort of table of the values of the Russian people (almost like Mendeleev). If for the Soviets the most important thing was the World Revolution and the interests of Socialism, then for Russians, in the first place, probably, would come God, then Homeland, Tsar, land, and, somewhere around tenth place, money, etc.. In fact, I never succeeded in arranging things in such strict order and formalizing all the experience, wisdom, and suffering of previous generations. Perhaps someone else will be able to do this. In the end, after sorting through mathematical, logical, semantic, and other methods of investigation, I decided to adopt the method of content analysis. This was, by the way, the first time it has been applied to Russian sayings.

Content analysis allows one to expose a text’s deep content that is not noticeable on the surface. And after all, what interests me is the essence or, as they say, the “salt” of the proverb. More precisely, from the wide variety of methods used within the range of content analysis, I turned to the method of generalized-content expression of meaning. I will clarify the essence of the method with a concrete example. In Dal’s collection, we find the proverbs “Praise what’s overseas, but stay home,” “Do not take praise from afar, but do take knocks from nearby,” “One’s own sadness is dearer than another’s joy,” “Paris is fine, but Kurmysh gets along, too,” etc.. The content of all of these expressions can be generalized as one principle: it’s always better in one’s own parts than in foreign ones. More can be learned about this method in M. Gasparov’s introductory article to the collection of Aesop’s Fables (Moscow, 1968).

And so, let us return to Dal. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was the first to divide the parables he collected into categories, although many collections of proverbs had been published before his time. I chose for investigation the six most extensive and significant thematic divisions: God and Faith, Agriculture, Man, Homeland and Foreign Land, Truth and Falsehood, Riches and Prosperity. In all, more than 1,000 parables are included in these sections. Provided below is a full analysis of the section God and Faith, and a summary of observations from three of the other sections.

Let me suggest that before you the reader learn the results of my analysis you should independently write down three, five, or seven characteristics indicating how, in your opinion, one or another social phenomenon was understood in Russia of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Then compare your predictions with the results obtained in this work. I will bet that contemporary commonplace perceptions of Russians’ mentality of those times will substantially differ from the actual picture. I think that the greatest discrepancies of all will be among today’s city-dwellers, fewer for rural residents, and even fewer among the old Russian colonies preserved in the Central Asian republics of the CIS and in other countries.

God and Faith. Using the method described above, the spiritual experience of Russians can be reduced to seven key judgments.

1. God is a high and all-encompassing positive force. Here we find proverbs of the type “Great is the name of the Lord on Earth,” “God is in the small, and God is in the big,” “God’s water runs over God’s land”; or the same thought but by way of negation: “Without God, even a worm will eat up by gnawing,” etc.
2. God is in all ways higher than man. This thought is conveyed by all parables constructed on the opposition God/man. Observe, for example, “Not even a father to his children is like God to people,” “Everyone is for himself, but the Lord is for all,” “You can’t be bigger than God,” “Man walks, but God rides,” etc.
3. Man should strive toward divine, Orthodox norms and rules of life. Proverbs of the type “Pray to God and prove useful ahead” speak about this.
4. With God’s help, everything will come out better for a person, but when acting foolishly do not call out to God: “God will love and won’t be your undoing,” “If you pray to God, you won’t be taxed,” but “If you think evil, don’t pray to God.”
5. God punishes, but God also supports. This conclusion may be considered a certain elaboration and concretization of the previous principle: “God gave, God also took,” “God drenches, but God also dries,” etc..
6. In all affairs man must himself take pains, and not simply put faith in God: “Pray to God, but don’t slip up in your affairs,” “Have faith in God, but don’t slip up yourself,” and others.
7. A certain portion of the parables mildly reproach the layfolk for a certain laziness and unorthodoxy. At the same time, in Dal’s collection, although very rarely, one can meet with pronouncements condoning a certain religious laxity. Let me show on what basis these conclusions are made: “In need, we go to God, but afterward, we forget about God,” or “Priests sit at their books, layfolk at their pastries.”

Let me now provide general commentaries to this thematic category as a whole. Aside from authors of Soviet textbooks on scientific atheism who were convinced that godlessness was our age-old tradition, it seems that everyone knew that at the basis of Russians’ worldview lay their concept of God, and that Orthodoxy was a basic component of the Russian Idea. But from analysis of the parables we receive new, fuller impressions of this problem. Now we can better understand, more concretely imagine, what Orthodoxy signified for Russians. Faith was not fanatical or super-orthodox here. Russian Orthodoxy is characterized by a depth, a wholeness, an organicity, and at the same time a naturalness, a liveliness, and in ways even a self-irony, and thus once again a flexibility and, therefore, vitality. Skipping forward, I will note that adherents of the Communist Idea, the heroes of Socialist Realist art and literature, nearly always sacrificed themselves, spilled blood, perished and killed for their Communist Idea. For Russians, the idea of God never meant any kind of conflict, rending, or breakdown. It was deep, natural, and organic at the same time. Relying on this idea, a Russian strove to organize his worldly life in such a way as to exclude any sacrifices and bloodshed within the community, to live in harmony with himself and his neighbors. Orthodoxy ensured internal integration, but was also able to call forth external confrontation with those of other faiths. The Communist Idea first and foremost corroded society from within, seeking enemies within the house itself, although they were found outside the house as well.

Agriculture. Most proverbs contained in this category let us draw the conclusion that our ancestors felt themselves to be an inseparable part of nature, conscious of their all-sided oneness with it. Adapting to nature, blending with it, people could preserve and enrich themselves. Agricultural work and, more broadly, existence in Rus [old Russia] demanded maximal exertion of strength—it was necessary to work both much and correctly, relying on faith in God, on common sense, and also on pagan traditions that had not disappeared. Russia remained within European agriculture but was located at its very edge. How these conclusions contradict certain stereotypes formed even to this day! The well-known Moscow humorist, M. Zadornov, tries to show in a popular routine that, in contrast to Americans, Russians never wanted to work. And here are some of our proverbs: “Work is not a wolf...,” “Work loves a fool,” etc.. If you sat for a while with a volume of Dal, you would understand how high the norms and rules of work were and would also understand which proverbs are Soviet and which are Russian.

Homeland and Foreign Land. The image of a poor and God-forsaken Russia formed by Soviet propagandists does not correspond to the image created by the folk (narod) itself and expressed in its folklore. The conclusion is different: one notes man’s deep sense of affinity and link with the place where he lives. Proverbs show not a rigid integration, not an absolute centralization of the Russian Lands, but, so to speak, their gentle coexistence. The country as a whole looks more like a multitude of homelands dear to various people, and less like a single Homeland and country. Both what is over the hill and what is in Paris are foreign. In past centuries the concepts “border” and “foreign land” did not have that fateful sense that is so deeply ingrained in each Soviet person. Proverbs preserve a motif lost in the years of Communism—a knowledge of foreign lands and a tempered approval of them.

Truth. Truth is presented as the highest value, without which everything loses meaning. The Russian folk did not compose sayings contradicting this. And thus Russia, the climatic periphery of Europe, may be considered its moral center.

Thus, analyzing Dal’s collection of folk sayings, we have heard the voices of our distant ancestors. We have interacted with those generations of Russians whom none of us ever saw. This interaction allows us to see more precisely the values that compose the Russian Idea. What has our analysis of folk proverbs shown? We are convinced once again that Orthodoxy was a very important unifier for Rus. But speaking more concretely, we must note that Christianity entered Russian culture first and foremost through its moral teachings and norms. Folklore never contradicts, and in part supports, the thesis formed earlier about the immensity of territory and constant gathering of lands, although it does not show this as vividly as the historical analysis. Echoes of this theme are heard distinctly in the section “Homeland and Foreign Land” and somewhat more weakly in other categories.

Meanwhile, investigating folklore, I would like to turn to one further subject. Practically all who have concerned themselves with the Russian Idea have written about our communality, sobornost, and collectivism. However in Dal’s The Proverbs of the Russian Folk there is no such category, and even the terms themselves are hardly used. But on the other hand the theme of life and survival is in essence a leitmotif running through all sections and categories. Our complex folkloric-historical-philosophical analysis can reconcile these observations and put forward a definite interpretation of the problem.

The commune (obshchina) or village community (mir) was in fact preserved in Russia until the beginning of our century. And this was linked not so much to the adherence of our ancestors to Communism as with the harshness of the Eastern European climate. An agricultural occupation required mutual help and cooperation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, new agricultural technology and methods appeared, and the productivity of peasant labor noticeably increased. These processes called to life the Stolypin reform and the migration of peasant communes to family farmsteads. By the beginning of the twentieth century the commune had exhausted itself and the idea of mutual support lost its social basis, although it did not disappear.

Must we conclude that this component, too, of the Russian Idea cannot be restored today? I think that the decision is not so simple. True, an economic basis for collectivism in Russia has not existed for a long time, and the laments of certain contemporary authors concerning sobornost arouse as much sympathy as the sighs of some sentimental grandmother who has stumbled in her closet across her garish young girl’s little skirt, long ago outgrown. A market economy in all countries leads to more or less strict individualism and competition, and if the Russian economy will be a market one, it cannot also be a collectivist one. However, people do not live by work and production alone. Collectivism as a daily social-psychological tradition may yet maintain and preserve itself for more than one future generation of Russians.

A Portrait of Russia in Poetry

At first I intended to approach the “authentic visage of Russia” through a look at the fundamental works of Russian literature. If you excerpt the important characteristics, goals, and values of the positive heroes and negative characters in the works of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, you can get necessary “information for reflection.” Later, I nevertheless came to the conclusion that such a path would entail more than just the necessity of completing a huge volume of work. Worse, it could lead to nothing. The fact is that the role of the Russian writer can be likened to the role of a doctor, but in no way to that of a sociologist or portrait painter. Literature tells about what’s sick and disturbing, and it almost never narrates what is good and successful. If in Gogol’s Dead Souls there is not a single positive hero, and in Chekhov’s stories not one happy love story, this hardly means that there were none in life itself. A direct literary analysis could give a corrupt picture of society. In this regard folklore is incomparably closer to life.

However, in contrast to prose, poetic texts, with their more concentrated content, present an interesting object of study for the reason that they allow us to reconstruct an image of Russia not through secondary indications or through the characters of heroes, but directly, without mediation. What about collecting and analyzing all poems by Russian poets about their Homeland?

My work began with a survey of nearly one hundred collections of nineteenth-century Russian poetry; from them I chose all the poems that were dedicated to Russia. In those rare cases when a poet had composed two or even three poems on this theme, I chose the one that seemed to me most expressive and significant. All others without any further selection were gathered, so to say, in one data bank. Fifteen compositions were included in all, by Aleksei Merzlyakov, Evgeny Baratynsky, Aleksei Khomyakov, Mikhail Lermontov, S. F. Durov, Ivan Nikitin, Vasily Kurochkin, Fyodor Tyutchev, A. K. Tolstoy, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Bunin, A. N. Budishchev, Pyotr Vyazemsky, and Nikolai Yazykov. As can be seen, the list includes authors representing various tendencies in literature, philosophy, and even politics; it includes the most well-known authors as well as the names of less popular or influential ones. Thus as a whole the resulting list can be considered “representative,” as sociologists say.

Can these visions of Russia be transformed into some general portrait? How, using slender pieces of poetic lace, is it possible to weave strict formal characteristics that can be subjected to objective, rational investigation? The linguistic method of semantic field analysis allows us to do this. Turning to each of the fifteen poems, each time I copied out those judgments with which the author characterizes his homeland. Each such judgment is unique and individual. However, by conducting minor but necessary generalization and grouping the judgments contained in the texts into positive, negative, and neutral ones, I filled the semantic field of “Russia.” Among the positive results: “Russia is an enormous expanse, very rich in nature—a mighty country” (a thought expressed nine times); “Russia is Homeland, that which is close, linked to favorite recollections, that which descendants, too, will value” (six times); “The merit and value of Russia is in its faith, in Orthodoxy” (twice); “Russia’s charm is not in monumentality but in its everyday life, with rural vistas and the customs of simple people.” Some of the negative results (which were rarer): “Russia is a country of the numerous foreigners who have wandered here, especially Germans”; “In 1000 years of history Russia has almost never had order”; “Russia is a country of severe nature and general disorder, of wretched people, stupidity, and absurdity.”

I will turn to an analysis of the results and comment on them. The first thing that comes to mind is something not yet discussed: the thought of freedom. What I find in poetry contradicts the image of a downtrodden people and a downtrodden country, an image formed in Soviet times and often reproduced to this day.

The non-totalitarian nature and non-absolutism of the Russian State’s authority follows from many causes. With some hyperbole one can say that every Soviet poet had to compose a minimum of a dozen poems about the beloved Homeland and the party of Lenin–Stalin. But on thousands of pages of pre-Revolutionary Russian poetry we find only 15 works about the native land. The non-totalitarian nature of the state is clear also from these poems’ open portrayal of the characteristics of Russian life, both positive and negative, with no need for Aesopean language. ₄ You will find nothing similar among Soviet poets.

Positive characteristics in the semantic field of Russia quantitatively predominate over negative characteristics. The poetic image of the country is a very positive one, although the sharp poetic eye of course cannot help seeing various sorts of problems and imperfections. And if these presentiments are not heeded and reacted to in time, the problems could grow and swell like a snowball. Summing up, we can say that in a healthy state not without its problems there existed a healthy and deep love for one’s native land, but not a blind love, love with criticism and without apologetics—without, so to speak, the touch of a Mikhalkov. ₅

Let us turn back to one further component of the Russian Idea: Orthodoxy. Analysis of poetry, as well as investigations of folklore and the study of history, all speak about religion’s role as a very important spiritual integrator of the country... Russian thinkers both in the past and in the present have pointed constantly to this. Moreover, many if not the majority of contemporary authors in the country and abroad are convinced that only by returning to Orthodoxy can we revive the country. We all understand the purpose of rebuilding hundreds of churches in today’s Russia, as the Church of Christ the Savior is reborn in the center of Moscow. ₆

In fact, if we can no longer continue territorial expansion, if sobornost and collectivism have lost the meaning they had a century ago, maybe then the Russian Orthodox Idea could work full-force in Russia today? Alas, no. Our ancestors did in fact gather new lands and new peoples under the banners of Russian Orthodoxy and did actually succeed at this. But every coin has two sides. The idea of Orthodoxy turned out to be so strong that in several centuries it united in a common state Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews, Catholics, pagans and atheists. Given that diversity, if we begin to peddle the Orthodox idea we will only work toward the breakup of the country along confessional lines. Those whose ancestors were Orthodox can embrace Orthodoxy; historical memory is not fully destroyed. But traversing this territory could well induce great strain.

To summarize, the analysis of history, folklore, and poetry and their juxtaposition has allowed us to obtain a new conception of Russia, differing significantly from the image of the country created in Soviet period and unlike the stereotypes that have been preserved to this day. This analysis brought us closer to an understanding of the system of values that existed in Russia in previous centuries. We singled out three very important concepts which composed the basis of the Russian Idea—Orthodoxy, Sobornost, and the Gathering of Lands. All three of these ideas, having worked for many centuries toward the formation of the first Russian state, in today’s new Russia take on a different meanings and resonance, and they cannot be used in their previous form without taking into account the radical social changes that have taken place.

 

II. Why is the Communist Idea Incompatible with Communist Ideology?

“The attempt to build Heaven on Earth invariably leads to Hell.”

—Karl Popper

If a stormy polemic continues even today around the Russian Idea, around the Communist Idea there is no noticeable agitation, not even a slight stirring. Total calm descends in only two situations: when everything is clear and when everything is unclear. And that is exactly how it is with us: it would appear that for the authorities everything is clear, while for society almost nothing is clear. But if society does not want a repeat of the past, a question arises: is it possible to move forward without even trying to understand those fetters that kept us from living normally for more than seventy years? It is not so easy to avoid this recent heritage; we will obviously still be struggling for a long time to understand it.

The Relationship between the Russian Idea and the Communist Idea

The question of the relationship between the Russian and Communist Ideas is not so complex, and in connection with this I want to pause to deal with several circumstances. Speaking of the Russian Idea, we singled out its three basic components: the gathering of lands, communality, and Christianity. How do these three bases interact with the Communist Idea and with Soviet practice? Let us examine this problem point by point, beginning with Russian communality and Soviet collectivism, invariably lauded by Soviet ideology. Approaching the question superficially, it is possible show that collectivism is a direct continuation of the Russian tradition and is a basic feature of the Soviet man. But in fact the one differs fundamentally from the other. The Commune grew up from below, and as I have already written it was a means for man’s adaptation to our natural conditions. Collectivism was imposed from above, in as much as it was one of the basic forms of daily control of the authorities over people. All Soviet people were raised according to the principle “The individual comes last,” ₇ or as one proletarian poet wrote, “a ’one’ is nonsense, a ‘one’ is nothing...”; the collective was most important. And in so far as there were undercover informers in every production cell and in every educational, military, and other kind of collective—and everybody knew this—the Communist state transformed the Soviet collective into an absolute hell, into a evil twin and antipode of the commune. Everyone here was unfree and everyone was under an invisible bell jar. Our nation’s first artistic work which showed the confrontation of the individual and the collective and the innocence of the former was apparently V. Zheleznikov’s tale Scarecrow and R. Bykov’s film of the same name, which appeared only in the mid-1980s. Thus it is unjust to speak of Soviet collectivism as the continuation of Russian sobornost. Of course this question needs more detailed study; here I present only a brief verdict on a question of principle.

And what of another of the components of the Russian Idea, the gathering of lands and expansionism? Nothing is more obvious; they were the cornerstone of Soviet policy. Belief in the World Revolution apparently began to propagate itself even before the storming of the Winter Palace. “We fan a world conflagration, razing churches and prisons to the ground; From the taiga to the North Sea the Red Army is strongest of all!” sang the Red Army soldiers. Viktor Suvorov’s idea—that (1) Stalin nudged Hitler toward fanning war in order, (2) on the shoulders of an overthrown Fascist aggressor, to seize the world and subjugate it to himself—if debatable on the first part of the thesis, is absolutely uncontested on the second. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, when Socialism was built in areas from Tirana to Hanoi and from Havana to Ulan-Bator, even this seemed too little. Communist expansion continued in the 1970s and 1980s. Its victims included—or were supposed to include—Angola and Afghanistan, Portugal and Indonesia, Nicaragua; Namibia and Ethiopia were desired too, and yet more and more! The creation of Communist groups and sects was financed in more than ninety countries of the world. Communist China and the USSR had the most numerous power-structures in the world; the whole Soviet Union worked in the military-industrial complex.

However, to consider all this a direct continuation of the Russian Idea and the traditional gathering of lands is impossible under any circumstances, since, as shown earlier, the idea of expansion had already exhausted itself in the last century, and Russia was fully conscious of that. The result of Communist expansion was tragic and self-evident: colossal and senseless human sacrifices, the burning up of fantastic and irreplaceable resources, the downfall of the Socialist bloc, and the collapse of the USSR. In the end, history has its hidden harmony, and for breaking it you have to pay sooner or later....

Now let us pause on the relationship between Communism and Orthodoxy. The Soviet order inflicted its first blow precisely on Orthodoxy, the spiritual basis of the Russian Empire. Around a half million Orthodox priests were repressed, and of them 200,000 were shot, drowned, or buried alive in the earth. Over the years, Soviet authorities closed more than ninety percent of all parishes; of 80,000, only seven thousand were preserved. The blows against other faiths were no less harsh. The Communists did something that no conqueror had ever tried to do. Even the 240-year Mongol Yoke in essence came down to a system of extortion and tribute. It scarcely touched the Church. Monasteries, as Pushkin once noted, remained the most important centers of Russian culture, which was thus saved and preserved by Orthodoxy. But then Communist rule annihilated Russia’s living soul—her Church. This was accomplished completely consciously and intentionally, so as to drive in the Communist Idea in place of the burnt-down Russian Idea. A duality of faith or any hint at pluralism was absolutely incompatible with Communist rule; the dissemination of Red idols could take place only after or concurrently with the destruction of Christian relics.

And so we see that the Communist State literally did violence to Russia’s spiritual heritage as no invader or occupier ever had. One component of this heritage—an exhausted and outmoded expansionism—was reanimated with its last bit of strength; a second—sobornost—was turned inside out and transformed into its opposite; and the third—the thousand-year flourishing tradition of Orthodoxy—burned up and was annihilated.

Such an insult to a country and its people, unheard of in history, could be carried out only through force, more precisely through bloody force, and more precisely yet, through bloody sacrifice of the people on a mass scale. This replacement by force of the Russian Idea with the ideology of Communism is the main reason for the most terrible Catastrophe of the twentieth century, many times more massive even than the nightmare of the Holocaust. Yet all of this to this very day is often meekly referred to as “illegal repressions of the period of the cult of personality.” To establish its regime, Soviet power killed from 50 to 110 million of its citizens from 1917 to 1956. The official figure is not named and is hidden to this day. In the immortal words of Anna Akhmatova:

“Before this grief, mountains bow, And great rivers do not flow...” 8

After everything that’s been said, by whom other than the contemporary Communists could language be twisted to assert the natural and organic nature of Russia’s turn to Communist ideology and say that our history itself led to this process? If it is so accepted among us to rejoice at the victory over Fascism, how can we reconcile this with our grave-like silence concerning our own self-destruction? But the current authorities make us observe November 7 as a state holiday to this day!

Now is the time to explain my opinion of the argument put forward by Nikolai Berdyaev and other theorists, who asserted that Socialism had its roots in the Russian past. ₉ I agree that Socialism did in fact have roots in our nation’s history. Socialism was among the main tendencies of the Russian intelligentsia’s intellectual investigations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with Slavophilism and Westernism, Liberalism and Conservatism. To what other tendency could one relate the concepts of Herzen, Chernyshevsky, or Belinsky? ₁₀ The roots were there, but that is not the point at all. To answer the question of who roused Herzen is not difficult: the Decembrists. But then to answer the question posed by the poet V. Korzhavin—“What bitch roused Lenin? Whom did it bother that the kid was sleeping?”—is very embarrassing. The fact is that the Leninists, having seized power, completely turned the Socialist tradition upside-down and did nothing to develop it. Russian Social-Democrat Number One, G. V. Plekhanov, already clearly understood the point I’m making on 25 October 1917. Therefore he never identified with the Bolsheviks and considered the October coup to have nothing in common with a Socialist revolution. Communist Number 1.5, Leon Trotsky, came to a similar conclusion—true, it took him a whole decade after the Revolution. In his works published in the 1930s, he wrote about the complete bureaucratic degeneration of the proletarian project, calling the USSR a country of “revolution betrayed.”

The Communist Idea and Communist Ideology

It is time to show that in the USSR there was never any kind of Socialism—not developed, not real, not one that has fully conquered. Moreover, the form of government that existed here was simply incompatible with Socialism. According to Marx and Engels, Socialism is the first stage in history that is free from exploitation, and therefore it was worth struggling for the new order, stopping at nothing. Under capitalism, working for a factory owner, a proletarian worker who produced an output of, say, 1000 units per month actually received 500, while the owner took away half; exploitation could constitute one part in two. Under classic theoretical socialism (leaving aside the question of whether it is possible at all), everything produced returns to the producer, and exploitation is gone. In the Soviet Union the portion of what a worker produced that he actually received was several times lower than in the West. Therefore it is completely impossible to speak of socialism in the USSR. Power in the land of the Soviets was never located in the hands of the workers and peasants. Products of the people’s labor passed through a closed system of privileges and distributors and were appropriated by the party and state bureaucracy and most of all by a certain part of it, the nomenklatura. Only meager leftovers fell to the lot of the producers themselves. This type of state, existing in the Soviet Union for nearly seventy years, was not socialism but a totalitarian regime of the nomenklatura with an ideology.

Soviet mythology becomes even more transparent if we further define two of its central concepts: the Communist Idea and Communist ideology. I will note at once that they are not only not synonymous, as is commonly thought, on the contrary they are mutually exclusive. The Communist Idea is a collection of deeply positive values, among them social justice, the withering away of the state, “he who doesn’t work doesn’t eat,” “land to the peasants,” etc.. And an absolute majority of Russians, from V. Novodvorskaya to A. Ampilov, would subscribe to this. But Communist ideology? There’s the rub. Its inventor was Lenin; Marx felt extremely negatively about ideological consciousness, as if it were a false and deformed consciousness. For all Soviet leaders and for the nomenklatura, ideology was arch-important and vitally necessary. After all, promising humanity a bright future, the authorities never intended actually to move toward Communism; the latter, as was known, existed only within the Kremlin walls. Therefore the rulers desperately needed a mechanism to maintain the myth of building Socialism, a myth that would help them hold on to their own power. Ideology was thus a gigantic machine of total control over the minds and actions of people, a mechanism of management and censorship of all information circulating in the country. Its role was more than simply important—it was ceaselessly growing. Ideology became the peculiar state opiate. It was not accidental that Stalin put forward the thesis that the class struggle intensifies in relation to the proximity of Socialism: the greater the ideological terror today, the bigger the dose needed tomorrow, when it might become clear that the ship of state was moving ever further away from the desired shore.

A number of conclusions can be drawn from these points. We must clearly and definitively recognize that the social-democratic movement in Western Europe and the Communist party in today’s Russia are elements of different systems. Therefore, for example, a success for the socialists in elections somewhere in Italy gives no basis for exulting the continuers of Lenin’s project somewhere in the Pskov region. Likewise the downfall of Soviet socialism should not be linked with the ups and downs of international socialism. The situation within the country needs to be regarded differently. For a long time our news media, urged on by the authorities and directors of commercial organizations, have broken society up into Reds and Democrats. But in essence elderly Russians waving Soviet flags differ little in the fundamentals of their world view from the democratically-oriented part of society. The veterans truly believe and support not a Communist ideology, but Communist ideas, which are nearly always indistinguishable from Christian ideas. These are honest people at heart, although perhaps they don’t understand everything.

The current conflict—although everything is done to hide this—exists between society and the nomenklatura that remains as before at the helm. The ideologues of the Communist Party and the current authorities simply use different methods to try to subordinate the people. But both the former nomenklatura, which left their posts but kept in full the cash-box of the Communist Party, and the current nomenklatura that settled back into still-warm armchairs, worry not at all about the people or the state, but only about their personal and clan interests.

In the Soviet period, Marxism was just a mask. In a different situation, had it been necessary, the nomenklatura could have announced its adherence to the ideas of Confucius or the Pope; it could have proclaimed the inevitability of World Revolution and world war or the necessity of peaceful coexistence and friendship with the USA. It could have urged the building of Buddhism or of democracy.

In the foundation of the state that they seized, the Leninists planted a bomb in the form of a deepening fissure between the Communist Idea and Soviet reality. Sooner or later this bomb had to explode, and this happened in the 1990s. Having begun to regain consciousness after a sound ideological sleep, the country once again unavoidably had to return to the problem that arose at the end of the last century and that was solved incorrectly for seventy years. We have once again entered a period of discussion about a Russian system of values, and we must finally resolve our ideological difficulties correctly. Only then will we have the opportunity to leave behind the whole systemic crisis that our country has endured.

 

III. The New Russia as an Idea

Thus the collapse of Communist ideology and the consequent disintegration of the so-called Union of Socialist Republics have left society facing the problem of creating a new Russian state, the third on our territory. Reliance on Orthodoxy and the Russian Idea allowed our fellow Russians to create the biggest power in the world, lasting more than a thousand years. The Soviet State, founded on Communist ideology, subordinated a third of the planet’s population to its influence, and it succeeded in painting almost as large a part of the earth’s landmass in rosy-red colors. However the triumph of the Communist Empire on the scale of historical time turned out to be insignificantly short, lasting 50–70 years. And today, not as a result of theoretical debate, but as the result of the destruction of our social and political processes, an unexpected question has arisen before the country: one that asks not how to continue expansion and begin new enlargement, but how and on the basis of what ideas and values to stop the disintegration and move toward rebirth.

Current Issues: Corruption, Accountability, and the Ruling Class

An unbroken chain of tragedies accompanied the domination of Communist ideology, and its collapse is linked to new and serious shocks. A quarter of our previous territory has been lost forever. (During the Second World War the Nazis managed to gain control of less than ten percent of Soviet land.) The break-up of the USSR meant that half of the Soviet population remained in Russia, and, just as at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a quarter of Russians live outside Russia.

Located under the debris of a collapsed ideological building, society neither wants nor is able to reenter it, and it also cannot return to the no longer extant system of values of the Russian Empire. Without leaving our house, we find ourselves homeless. The absence of values provided by a coherent worldview—an absence that has been given the name “chaos”—leads to a general degradation but acts most negatively on the authorities themselves. Casting off its red, Communist cloak and easily hiding behind a mask labeled “freedom,” “market,” and “Orthodoxy,” the ruling caste does not in essence hide its true interests and intentions: power, money, and privileges. These interests are placed at the center of attention of all the branches of power at all its levels, because they simply don’t have anything else, anything ennobling, any idea for the state as a whole. Meanwhile, the current elite is totally uninterested in Russia itself. The populace is just as uninteresting for the current rulers—they are simply an annoying, unpleasant burden, which for some reason or other still needs to be paid a salary. Our history has never seen a period like this.

Meanwhile the all-encompassing corruption is not the result of a chance coincidence; it has its peculiar explanations and, strange as it may seem, fulfills an important role in society. One such function lies in the fact that corruption has replaced ideology. In the absence of other regulating factors, it has become one of the country’s main unifying features. Only at first glance is it an absolute evil that a bureaucrat can be bought. If a businessman or any other average citizen knows precisely the cost of this or that state service, certificate, quota, license, visa, etc., then he will know his bearings and can act decisively in the situation that has arisen. Different segments of society and the state become interconnected and gain mutual interests. They overcome isolation and become capable of functioning somehow at least. Let me repeat once again: in normal countries there exist philosophical, legal, moral, religious, financial, and other factors regulating relations. For us, corruption has replaced almost all of this—everything and everyone can be bought.

The problem is that corruption is, without a doubt, one of the worst regulators. And not only for moral reasons. It makes a bureaucrat inert, lacking in initiative, and absolutely unreceptive to innovations. One can never know where various changes and reforms are leading, and one could lose one’s clientele. So it’s better to change nothing and keep receiving. Furthermore, in our particular circumstances, corruption itself becomes degraded, in that the greed of those bribed and their number is constantly growing. The numerical strength of the new Russia’s bureaucracy has already exceeded the numerical strength of the Soviet bureaucracy, although the population is half the size, while the majority of our enterprises either stand idle or work at less than full capacity. The numerical strength of the governed does not greatly exceed the numerical strength of the governing. Such a mechanism of government is extremely expensive, and it is beyond the strength of society. The consequences of this situation are clear—nonpayment of salaries, strikes, a growing strain on society...

In the Soviet Union, a pseudo-dialogue existed between the people and the authorities, and in democratic countries a direct and broad dialogue between society and its rulers is maintained. In today’s Russia, the dialogue between the people and the authorities is reminiscent of a discussion between a normal person and a person making himself out to be deaf-mute, who, gradually being cured, is transformed into a liar. Is there democracy here? No. At first glance it looks like it, but in fact this is a new post-Communist ideology that transforms promises into emptiness and idle gossip. It certainly seems that it was devised in the offices of the well-known democrat and ideology specialist A. Yakovlev.

The Communist regime that existed here for 70 years constantly strove to take control of the whole world. This aspiration had no connection to the interests of the workers. Such a political system was quite simply economically ineffective, but the ruling class was constantly striving to increase its privileges. It already lacked sufficient resources, and more and more new countries were shoved into the dressing room of the public bath of socialism, where we tried to undress them completely. Now there is no longer a socialist camp, but the ruling elite is still the same. Its existence is incompatible with the existence of a developed, effective economy. But now they have only their own country to exploit. What has taken place and intensified, then, is not differentiation but polarization. The ruling elite shares billions while the children of miners fall into famine-induced faints. Exploitation increases not by percentage points, but by whole orders. The concept of “fairness” has disappeared from the political lexicon, and the impoverishment of society will intensify still further. Even if the economic slump comes to an end sometime society will gain nothing, since fair pay for work done does not exist.

By the way, it is necessary to remember that the abolition of the semi-freedom of speech that has existed so far is possible, since society has no social guarantees of the irreversibility of the changes that have taken place.

Meanwhile, looking over the corrupt leadership that has succeeded Communist ideology, it is vital to understand one further crucial circumstance. Why has our government functioned abnormally for the past eighty years, in a way tragic even for itself? Is this the result of a chance coincidence or, perhaps, is some external secret conspiracy at work? Or does someone want things to be for the best but somehow constantly miscalculates?

The answer is as follows. The master of our state, its real owner and manager was and remains a particular segment of society, which was given the name of “nomenklatura.” This segment can be defined in the following way: the “nomenklatura” is a semi-legal class, existing outside the space delineated by existing laws, that in practice rules the country and acts in the name of its own interests and against the interests of the country and of society.

A parasite on the body of the country, the nomenklatura lives fully at its expense. Forcing half-starving North Koreans, poor Albanians, smiling Cubans, or pensive Russians to shout slogans in honor of their dear party, forcing them to believe that a bright future is drawing near, the nomenklatura thereby had something to keep itself busy. Its tasks included organizing the work of the government so as to ensure a constant weeding out of society, proclaiming anyone who did not shout or believe to be an enemy of the people and sending them away to a place not so very far away. After the collapse of ideology it’s not required to shout anything. In a certain sense ideology was an unpleasant but compulsory burden even for the nomenklatura. After all, the bureaucracy’s actual aim was not, of course, the formation of Communist convictions, but rather their own maximal personal well-being. It has turned out that in the present post-Communist state, the nomenklatura has not only preserved itself, but has preserved and increased its power. This has been done by way of a unique kind of pseudo-legal regulation and so-called national privatization.

If the idea of “art for art” is as ridiculous as it is amusing, then the idea of a state for the sake of state workers is criminal and tragic. Sooner or later it leads to either the gobbling up of the state by the bureaucracy or the de-nomenklaturization of the entire country. One must of course keep in mind that actual states always differ from ideal concepts. Even in the most democratic countries there is, so to speak, a certain percent or portion of “nomenklaturization,” in other words of opacity, of work for one’s own sake and not for society. The difference is that while elsewhere one can speak of percentages, here the issue is a decisive and all-defining portion. This difference is linked to the fact that a democratic state is controlled by society, and not only government but also civil organizations play an important role in it. In Russia, there is no such civil society, since there is no economically independent subject. Of course in the ten years of Perestroika and its aftermath, a little has changed, but not in the way citizens wanted it to change. Strictly speaking, the process of reform, begun in 1985 in a country broken in two parts, had basically two different goals. The elite wanted to modernize the nomenklatura, rejuvenate it and dust it off, preserving the favorite easy-chairs from which they ruled for the benefit of their fat-assed kids. The democratic revolution that rolled across the country—as soon as the authorities weakened the strangle-hold of their control—had as its goal the dismantling of the structures of the nomenklatura, the de-bureaucratization of the country, and the creation of open institutions of governance controlled by society. What resulted from these processes was something that no one had initially expected. The people were not strong enough to eliminate the nomenklatura and succeeded only in breaking it up into Reds and Democrats. A part of the ruling class went through a moral defeat, but the other part quickly underwent mimesis, sat back down in their chairs, and increased their privileges.

If the country is to preserve itself in spite of this and move along a democratic path, it must unavoidably undergo a de-nomenklaturization. It is impossible to put things in perspective without resolving two very important and interrelated tasks: on the one hand, the democratic formation of the idea of a New Russia, and on the other hand the dismantling of a degenerate bureaucracy destructive to the country and the formation of a new class of qualified, high-principled administrators dedicated to it. (The connection between these problems follows from what was discussed earlier. In the absence of authentic democracy, the predominant world view is that of the predominant social class.)

The Idea of a New Russia

Let us turn to what is for us the important and central problem: let us begin to build and formulate an idea of the New Russia. To begin let us try to understand on what principles and by what canons and rules a new value system must be built. For the biggest country in the world and for such a diverse society, the integrating system will by no means be a simple one. It is appropriate to speak of a whole tree of ideas, a multilevel system of principles. I will outline here two approaches to which I will adhere.

1. The unifying system must have three levels: (1) ideas uniting each separate region, (2) symbols integrating the state as a whole, and (3) values uniting the country with the world community.
2. Integrative ideas must unite Russia in three directions: (1) integrating it in time—the past’s connection to the present, (2) integrating its present socio-cultural space, and (3) again unifying it in time from today forward toward tomorrow, allowing us to move correctly and with assurance from the present into the future. In all these cases it is crucial to adhere to a general methodological principle: new ideas are formed not out of nothing but on the foundation of those higher values that already existed for us. New principles must one way or another take into consideration previous ones; in our case “taking into consideration” means a great deal—developing, and surmounting, and directly continuing, and exceeding the limitations, and so on and so forth.

Values From the Past

If we want to reconstruct and find support in all the experience garnered by our ancestors over 1000 and more years, a cult of Russian history must be established in our intellectual and spiritual life. More precisely, what is needed is not only history as chronology, but also a specific concept of history—a historiosophy of Russia.

This means that all segments of the adult population, especially our youth, must as a minimum have the possibility of receiving varied historical information through educational media and educational institutions. If from childhood a baby became familiar with the topics and heroes from our past, if besides schools with an emphasis on physics, mathematics, biology, etc. every school also had a historical emphasis, if on TV and in other mass media we encountered not so much a cult of entertainment as a cult of our own history, and if in our literature and art more and more new works were added to the ranks of our classics (The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, Prince Serebryany, Boris Godunov, Peter I, War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, Life and Fate...) then there would be a chance to recover the knowledge and experience of our ancestors, and there would be a chance to understand who we are and restore our self-identification. If inner historicism—each person’s interest in and respect towards the previous generations of his family—can combine with broad historicism—interest in the whole country’s past—then we will have an opportunity to rise firmly on our own feet, without repeating earlier mistakes. Without real, serious study of our country’s history, moving forward is as absurd as the absurd conduct of a billionaire who forgets his credit cards at home and therefore stands for a week by the church door begging alms.

The cult of a unified history will without a doubt help us return to ourselves and attain stability. But what else should we be taking from the past into the cache of new values? Here we must not pass by things that unified the country in the past. We must look into the problems of both the Russian Idea and of Communist ideology.

Beginning with the former, let us turn to two of its components, Orthodoxy and communality. First Orthodoxy. In a multi-confessional country, if equal rights are to be observed, no faith can be central and predominant over others. This is all the more just in relation to contemporary Russia, where a significant part of society has no religious convictions at all. Anyone who does not recognize this fact rips up the country rather than unifying it.

Meanwhile, it is impossible not to acknowledge that the authorities’ attempt to revive Orthodoxy is supported by society and is perfectly reasonable. It is only necessary to define its role and place correctly. Orthodoxy can fulfill an important socio-cultural mission if the clergy and state authorities will observe a number of rules and conditions. A democratic state is obliged to treat all religious organizations in the country equally. And then Orthodoxy will indeed help the integration of that part of society that adhered to it in earlier generations. With the revival of other creeds—Buddhism, Islam, etc.—an analogous process will take place in other segments of society.

Orthodoxy, like all other creeds, must be beyond politics. It cannot be a part of the mechanism of the state. Meanwhile, intensified attempts to subordinate the Church to the state in one way or another are obvious to everyone. They are extremely dangerous, for a honey-cake from the state is as destructive as its whip. ₁₁ At the beginning of our century, Orthodoxy was already not in the best state but apparently certain politicians are trying to demonstrate that at the end of the century the Church will be even more engaged. It is enough to remember that then Leo Tolstoy was excommunicated, while today Pavel Grachev is publicly christened! The repetition of such actions could inflict irreplaceable losses on one of our most important and sacred institutions. In brief, religions are not the ruling elements of the party; the more independent they are from the state, the more they can integrate society.

A second consideration. I will express a thought here that will probably provoke dissatisfaction among the conservative Orthodox elite. Anyone familiar with Russian history knows that Orthodoxy’s special and even exclusive role in the establishment and development of statehood is tied to a significant degree to the fact that our ancestors, having adopted this faith, joined the cultural process of the world. A certain detachment and isolation were overcome, and Orthodoxy united us with centers of world culture—Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the subsequent development of Russian Orthodoxy led anew to, perhaps, excessive cultural autonomy, to a certain religious isolation. Of course it is inappropriate to call for turning Catholics Orthodox or for latinizing the Orthodox. But I am certain that if these branches of the Christian faith drew nearer and on some level joined forces, overcoming at least a part of their difference of opinion and concluding an agreement as equals, this would be useful for everyone. And then once again, on the eve of a new millennium, as it was 10 centuries ago, the Orthodox Church would become an important means of international cultural integration, and its status in this regard would become similar to the status of other faiths acting in Russia.

And finally, a third condition: for various faiths to act together in forming a new value system, they cannot be the only or the most defining component of the new world view, even as they remain society’s highest religious and spiritual institutions.

It is worth saying a few words about another indispensable component of the Russian Idea—communality and collectivism. Can they be included straight out in a future system of values? Well do we know what a pleasant social atmosphere and what psychological comfort and self-confidence are engendered by the sense of collectivism that has become ingrained in society. On the contrary, if a person does not receive necessary help from his surroundings, he often experiences stress.

Meanwhile, contemporary Western market societies could scarcely attain significant economic successes if they did not cultivate a sense of individualism leading to constant struggle and competition with one’s surroundings. Counting on personal initiative and activity does not put brakes on the market but on the contrary develops it.

The economic roots of the commune lay in conditions of a harsh climate and a low crop yield. Collectivism and mutual aid were society’s answer, helping people preserve themselves. By the beginning of the twentieth century new technology made the commune unnecessary, and the Stolypin reforms and re-settlement onto farms began. From then on, collectivism has been a social and psychological tradition in Russia, not an economic necessity.

Put briefly, a formula for the New Russia could look like this: support of collectivism and mutual aid in the affairs of private daily life, but a gradual assertion of individualism in professional and industrial spheres. In other words, in professional activity let everyone win his place under the sun in proportion to the size and quality of his individual contribution, but in private life we would do well to remain in solidarity, ready to come to one another’s aid. Taken as a whole, our attitude toward Old Russia and the Russian Idea could resemble our attitude toward a dear, fairy-tale childhood—something we have outgrown and to which unfortunately we can never return.

On the path from the past to the present we do not encounter only good things that must be taken with us. The heritage of seven Communist decades also awaits us, and overcoming this is harder than mining a tunnel through a granite monolith. I have shown that the Communist idea by itself is a combination of all that is finest and most attractive, but no one had anything directly to do with it; therefore it remains as curious and as unattainable as, say, the idea of Heaven.

Communist ideology, however, has left the deepest of traces in the lives of several generations of Soviet people. From this ideology—constructed on demagogy, deception, prohibition, and force—nothing can be salvaged; it only remains to overcome it. The problem lies in the fact that all of society went through ideological processing; while a minority simply sat or held their tongues, the remainder fulfilled themselves, strove to succeed, and made careers for themselves. At the same time, a revival of state and society is possible only by way of the path of spiritual cleansing and a realization of the criminal nature of the regime that existed in the USSR.

A return to the past will become impossible and Russia’s true revival will begin only once each person realizes that he bears blame for what we did or did not keep from being done to our country. It seems to me that for today that is all that should be said about the problem of guilt. It would be good to hear other opinions and to begin a discussion. By the way, I will put forward another proposal. In post-war Germany it was possible to find quite a few people who thought that Hitler’s regime had had its pluses and advantages. Hardly having begun, the discussions died down of their own accord after the opening of the sorrowful memorial museums at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. We all know that some people do not react to theoretical arguments. When we open documentary museums in several of our former mental institutions and camps, arguments about the “father of all peoples” will end of their own accord, and the mausoleum will be closed forever.

As already noted, the task of emerging from the Communist tunnel is one of the most complicated. However, faith in the possibility of overcoming difficulties and in salvation has been firmly established from time immemorial in Rus. It is not accidental that the main holiday in the West is Christmas whereas for us it is Easter, in other words rebirth after crucifixion. Eschatologism—recognition of imminent severe ordeals and faith in overcoming them—is our characteristic feature, and this should help in the building of a new Russia.

True, here we need to keep in mind one circumstance and not repeat earlier mistakes. The old ideology, among other things, fulfilled the role of a peculiar replacement for reality: what people did not have and did not see in life itself they received in the form of propagandistic abundance in movies and on television. Therefore accepting the idea of overcoming difficulties does not mean a call for endless and boundless patience. Patience is appropriate only when positive changes begin to take place in life itself.

Thus, as we break out of the Communist tunnel, it is useful to ponder our own guilt, to remember eschatological confidence and the ability to overcome difficulties and not to accept in the new authorities the things they have preserved from the old authorities. Concluding this part of my discussion, I would say that ideally the attitude toward Communist ideology would be reminiscent of a person’s attitude to some nightmare from which he has saved himself and from which he will now keep himself as distant as possible.

Values for the Present

The next coordinate in our search for a unifying value system is not something integrating different generations but rather something that can unite everyone currently living on the still-boundless expanses of our country, something providing integration in the present. It is obvious that all of us are united by language, whether we are living within Russia or are outside it but linked deeply to it. Often people don’t value what they already have. But we should create, on an equal footing with the cult of history, the same priority in our attitude toward our native language, with special attention to it in the educational system, with special time set aside for this theme in the mass media, and with national and regional competitions and prizes.

Why is this necessary? Have you ever had to leave home for a long time? Did you take a snapshot or a favorite book with you? There, far from familiar places, you turn to these objects with special feeling. They let you remember and establish a mental connection with your normal surroundings. And when abroad, haven’t you noticed that someone you meet by chance can become your best friend, all because he speaks the same language you do? Language is the fundamental form of connection with everything that is one’s own; it is the strongest factor of self-identification.

Moving now to the next subject, its essence may be expressed by the formula “a Russian first, and then....” The second factor that directly influences the unity of our country is the integration or disintegration of society itself. Only recently all of us were considered Soviet people, best in everything. With the collapse of ideology, it turned out that the Soviet people had also ceased to exist. Ethnic affiliation assumed top priority, and now an invisible boundary divides people of different nationality. A wave of inter-ethnic conflicts has swept across the country.

The peculiar role of ethnic relations in our country is due to a range of circumstances. The fact is that Communist ideology formed a society that was homogeneous not only in a political sense, but also in the majority of its other characteristics. Ideologues strove to level social differences, to make people maximally resemble one another, and, consequently, make them easily ruled and manipulatable. In income, level of education, stereotypes of conduct, Soviet society was made uniformly faceless, and that little bit that the Party did not succeed in abolishing was precisely the ethnic particularities and specific generational character. The result of the Party’s policy was that all the diverse conflicts that arose in society took on an ethnic tinge, since all other arteries and channels were stopped up.

What relationship do these facts have to our theme? A direct one. If the social structure becomes more fully developed and differentiated, and if social relations become more democratic and equitable—then ethnic groups will stop playing the role of scapegoat, and inter-ethnic differences will stop playing such a hypertrophied role. And if problems do arise, it will be possible to solve them outright and not indirectly by way of the issue of ethnic identity. If the democratic process develops, specific ethnic characteristics will probably recede far into the background. And if social equality is maintained in Russia for centuries, then these differences might entirely.... But for now it is not yet time to finish that sentence.

We tend to emphasize the diversity of peoples living here, but one must keep in mind that Russia is not an exception in this regard, surpassing all other countries. Americans have mostly succeeded in resolving their ethnic problems, even though on the territory of the U.S. not simply different ethnic groups but all the races that exist on the planet coexist peaceably! And every citizen of the U.S.A. calls himself an American.

It is helpful to remember our own history as well. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyev, two of our country’s best thinkers, put forward the thesis of complete responsiveness and complete openness as crucial features of the Russian people. “For what is the spiritual strength of Russian national identity, if not the aspiration in its ultimate aims toward universality and complete humanity? ... To become truly Russian, to become fully Russian, maybe means simply (and, in the end, underline this) to become the brother of all people—a complete human being, if you will” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pushkin: A Sketch, in the collection The Russian Idea [Moscow, 1992] 144–145).

Of course it is true that in the past century such ideas were expressed primarily with an orientation toward the outside world, toward everything that remained beyond Russia’s borders. But it is all the more fitting, then, to speak of the possibility of rapprochement within Russia itself.

Values for the Future

We must acknowledge that the values uniting us in social space, uniting the past and the present, are not of themselves sufficient for new movement. Therefore we will consider a third vector of values—that which paves the way from the present to the future. Moving to this level of the analysis, we encounter a problem that is categorically new and different. At the very beginning of my investigation I promised that the system of values put forward for the New Russia would be taken from an analysis of our history and culture. A man can hardly be taken seriously who acts on the principle “here I’ve pondered this and figured it all out; you all will have to do such and such...” etc.. Subjectivism is the least desirable component when problems of a national and historic scale are being discussed.

However, something else must also be kept in mind. If we are constantly going to refuse anything new, seek the solution of any problem only in our own history and only in our own past, and learn only from our own mistakes, then in the end we will exhaust ourselves and will not be able to respond to the challenges of the time. Today we must not only gather all our previous experience, not only overcome the tragedy of Communism, but also, while gathering, move confidently forward. “Forward” means toward the market, toward a diversity of forms of ownership, toward freedom and the assertion of civil rights, toward a stable government that reacts flexibly to the needs of various social groups. Here it is impossible not to take into account the experience of contemporary Western democracies, which have attained much by relying on the ideology of liberalism.

Let us pause on the question of how liberalism arises or why freedom is not an absolute value. We must begin from afar, although I will try to give an answer that is maximally short. Primitive cultures did not know and did not need any kind of democracy. People could survive, protect themselves, simply by observing strict rules and norms, which allowed a certain degree of stability. The people embodying these rules became prophets and leaders, and all the others tried to fulfill the orders of “Number One” as carefully and conscientiously as possible. The need for freedom arose only when many truths that earlier had seemed highest and absolute turned out to be shaky. In a certain sense freedom is a form of disillusionment, as when a person reaches maturity and realizes that he has overrated his spiritual fathers, that they unfortunately did not and do not know anything special, and that he must therefore take his affairs into his own hands. By the way, the move toward independence and freedom is in no way the same as a move toward anarchy. In the first case a number of rules and mechanisms are preserved, enabling, considering, and coordinating the interests of various people and various social groups—mechanisms that acknowledge and preserve for each of them the right to be free.

Liberalism is an aggregate of rules enabling everyone who recognizes them to be maximally free while remaining members of a particular social communality. Liberalism introduces and affirms in society a spirit of openness, independence, and individual dynamism. It is the surmounting of musty bureaucratic barriers, without which the nomenklatura cannot exist. Liberalism is a fresh breeze, open space, and the triumph of freedom, for which our society so yearns after being poisoned by the mendacity of bankrupt leaders. Liberalism means deep-rooted pluralism, in other words patience, tolerance, overcoming the phobias inculcated by the nomenklatura in relation to ethnic, professional, and other social groups that it has chosen for the role of scapegoat.

Liberalism presupposes not only a combination of democracy and the market; it is possible only in a state functioning under the rule of law. At the beginning of Perestroika, Gorbachev’s party apparatus formulated directly the problem the country faced: a transition toward a state ruled by law is essential. The authorities thereby openly acknowledged that for seventy years the people had lived in a state without rights. (What an insult was given to society by unhurried individual rehabilitations! The punishments of an illegitimate government are illegitimate. Russian public consciousness assimilated this circumstance deeply and for a long time, as seen in the invariable popular love toward anyone persecuted by the state.) The transition to a state under the rule of law is not taking place now, either—chaos has taken hold in the country. Conflicts of various sorts are being resolved not through the courts, but through so-called criminal “sorting out,” through bribes and payoffs or simply through supplanting social groups that are weak and not represented in the structures of power. The transition toward legal regulation, built on checks and balances of the interests of all groups in society, is an absolutely crucial condition for establishing the New Russia and moving it forward.

Liberalism as a whole does not contradict the Russian cultural tradition (especially considering that everything said thus far about the past, present, and future still needs to be correlated and subordinated to a fourth crucial factor that will be discussed below). In the details, there are divergences and disjunctions. In particular, liberalism encourages individualism and personal initiative, and for us the collective approach in many respects prevails. However, if we follow the path of combining these principles, and one, as noted, prevails in daily life and the other in the sphere of production and business, then adopting a liberal traditional seems possible.

Another circumstance raises a more complicated problem. Does anything prevent the establishment of liberalism in practice? Discussions about various value systems without discussions about the bearers of those values remain incomplete. I do not intend in this work to discuss the problem of the interrelation of existence and consciousness, but I will note that such a connection indubitably exists. Without the formation of a middle class the adoption of liberal values in Russia will be extremely difficult. The problem of the transition from a government by nomenklatura to a society with a middle class has arisen before the country in all its diversity and acuteness. Here I am not pointing out a path for solving the problem, but I cannot refrain from pointing out the existence of the problem itself.

To the list of new problems that have appeared in many countries and have become global we must add the problem of ecology when considering our future. The fact that in the next century our planet could run out of both fresh water and oxygen is not sufficiently recognized at present. But to resolve ecological problems we need more than new technologies for purification and conservation. We need a new value system and a new type of thinking. In various countries it has different names: neohumanism, ecologism.... Maybe, taking our traditions into account, we will call it neo-paganism. Why? Contemporary culture tends to find and perceive a strict division between humans and nature: “everything in the name of man,” “man as king of nature,” “the world is given to man to serve him....” But if we look with modern eyes at ancient pagans’ model of the world, it turns out that there are very timely and deep ideas. The world is more than just a noosphere or biosphere alone. ₁₂ Is it not true that the world as a whole is one, and man is not king but a part of nature and the world? Everything living has something in common; maybe this should be called a biome, maybe something else. Even more can be claimed: in this world there is nothing at all that is absolutely unliving—everything is to one extent or another animate. Following the images of the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, we can say that there in the grass crawls not simply a worm, but my brother-worm, that straight in front of me grows not a tree, but my brother-tree, and that the granite monolith lying in the forest is my brother-stone. One of the American astronauts who flew to the moon asserted that he saw the biome of our whole planet. This idea is not unexpected within our tradition, either. It has returned to us from pre-Christian times and already existed in the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; are not Chekhov’s The Seagull and Arsenyev’s Dersu Uzala about this? ₁₃ Nikolai Gogol expressed an idea that is astonishing in its depth: “our temple is Russia.” Today one wishes to add “and the whole planet as well.”

A New System of Values: The Central Idea

Russia must, finally, begin the next period of its history: having gone through the stage of searching for its place (eighth to fourteenth centuries), having traversed the path of the gathering of lands (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries), now it is necessary to begin the most active obustroistvo and assimilation of those lands. And there must be no expansionism. The words “war” and “aggression” must be forbidden and excluded from our lexicon! The time to gather stones passed 150 years ago already, and if now we, finally, do not begin something new, then we may not succeed at all. Internal qualitative growth must become the main component of our development. It is impossible to put off further the matter of obustroistvo, to try in the present difficult situation to conduct war and seizures. At the end of the twentieth century, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has correctly noted, “the Russian question stands very unambiguously: for our people to be or not to be” (A. Solzhenitsyn, “The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century [Moscow, 1995] 108). Take heed! If you don’t want to, take a look at our neighbors. The Danes or the Swedes had an unheard of spirit of expansionism in centuries past, but they were able to stop in time and focus their energies on internal obustroistvo. Two hundred years without war made Sweden a developed and well-to-do country, happy as a fairy-tale. Today is, probably, our last chance. We, perhaps, find ourselves at the last frontier; behind us is not only Moscow, but all of Russia, all of its twelve centuries. MAY GOD KEEP US from crossing that border.

What would it mean in practice to reject expansionism? Economy and obustroistvo mean a different attitude to people and to the state, a different type of relationship between them, and a completely different type of life. This means different income, different taxes, and a different budget. We cannot maintain such power structures, we do not need so many generals, and we must not pitilessly destroy so many young men and turn them into spiritual and physical cripples. Why do we still have a war in Tajikistan? Without understanding the causes or resolving the problems that led to the collapse of the USSR, how is it possible to work toward its reanimation? Money must be spent on road building, communications, housing, culture, education, science, and ecology. We do not need drawn-out fights about the Black Sea fleet, and only the utmost scoundrel would call for washing our boots in the Indian Ocean. We do not need so many military parades; wouldn’t it be better to celebrate public holidays and festivals, as in Europe? NATO expansion toward the East is, of course, a response to the continuation of imperial policy. If a threat from Moscow is not felt, there will not be unease in Tallinn, Warsaw, and Budapest.

In a strict sense, our country always worked at obustroistvo, but this was never the important thing. The resources of a huge Empire made it possible not only to concentrate military might, but, from time to time, to switch to the creation of a great cultural, spiritual, and intellectual potential. It is no accident that the biggest and richest museums in the world are ours, that the most formidable scientific centers are ours, that the biggest and best theaters are also ours.... The matter of obustroistvo must be taken up in earnest and for a long time.

Gogol’s image of Rus as a bird-troika, flying no one knows where, is replaced by Grebenshchikov’s image of the whole Soviet setup as a burning train that has no where left to run. ₁₄ But in order to create the New Russia, WE MUST RETURN HOME.

“This train is on fire And we have no buttons left to press, This train is on fire And we have nowhere left to run... And around us burn torches— They’re collecting the pieces that perished, And people who shot at our fathers Make plans for our children... And the earth lies all rusted, Churches mixed with cinders. If we want to return, IT’S TIME TO GO HOME!”

If we solve the problem of our own rescue—and it must be solved—if we build up our country—and no one other than us is going to build it up—then we will truly impart real direction to the idea of the New Russia. For five hundred years our ancestors searched for their own place, and the gathering of the lands went on for five hundred years. Probably, after five hundred years of obustroistvo we will be able to help and support others more energetically. The expansion of our ideas, culture, and technology must exclude forever the expansion of force.

At the beginning of the section I wrote about a proposed three-layered value system: on the levels of region, nation, and civilization as a whole. I cannot now focus on this issue in detail. I will note simply that implicitly, so to speak, it is already resolved. After all, speaking of Russian history, it is necessary to take into account that every land and every region has its own history; alongside the Russian language, the peoples of Russia have their own languages; in different regions there are different faiths.... This problem can be solved most fully, of course, on the level of each region individually. Each can have its own symbols, shields, and flags that among other things preserve elements of symbolism common to all Russia. The proposed tree of values also presents ideas that bring us together with other countries and peoples: this concerns rights, ecology, and other issues.

Let us sum up. Answering the question “What is happening to us?” we have shown that the ruling class in the USSR and in contemporary Russia is one and the same—the nomenklatura. Therefore no fundamental change or improvement in the people’s condition can take place. The myth of Socialism has been replaced by the myth of democracy. In place of Communist ideology we have not freedom but a new ideology. The country’s advance forward can begin only after discussion and the acceptance of the concept of the New Russia, and after a de-nomenklaturization.

The value system of the New Russia includes the following components: a historiosophy of Russia, tempered collectivism, religious freedom for traditional faiths, overcoming the burden of Communist ideology, native language, a concept of the Russian people that includes all citizens, the rule of law, neo-paganism, and liberalism. The central idea of the New Russia is the idea of obustroistvo—of qualitative, intensive growth.

 

---

Notes

Note 1: The concept of sobornost was developed by Aleksei Khomyakov (1804–1860) and became one of the central ideas of the Slavophile movement. It signifies a religious collectivity encompassing all Russians in a free association of faith, love, and harmony. (Ed.) Back.

Note 2: Ivan I or Ivan Kalita (“Ivan the Moneybag”) ruled Muscovy from 1328 (or 1332) until 1341. He greatly expanded the state’s territory and is often seen as one of the founding fathers of the Moscow-centered Russia that emerged from under Mongol domination. (Ed.) Back.

Note 3: Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801–1872) was a scholar, writer, and collector of folklore. He is best known for his collections of fairy tales and proverbs and his four-volume dictionary, still one of the best dictionaries of the Russian language. (Ed.) Back.

Note 4: A term referring to the technique used by many Russian writers of avoiding censorship by expressing ideas in allegorical language. (Ed.) Back.

Note 5: Movies by the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov (such as Burnt by the Sun) have been criticized for treating the Soviet past too lightly and with too much nostalgia. (Ed.) Back.

Note 6: The original church, built to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon, was blown up by Stalin in 1931 and eventually replaced by a swimming pool. In the 1990s, the entire huge edifice has been rebuilt following the original plans. (Ed.) Back.

Note 7: This slogan is based on the fact that “ya,” the last letter of the Russian alphabet, is also the word for “I.” (Ed.) Back.

Note 8: The lines come from the often-quoted Dedication to Akhmatova’s poem cycle Requiem, the poet’s masterful attempt to capture the Stalinist Terror in words (written 1930s–1960s). (Ed.) Back.

Note 9: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948), Russian religious philosopher whose numerous books included The Russian Idea (1946). Berdyaev was a contributor to the Landmarks collection (1909). (Ed.) Back.

Note 10: Nineteenth-century Russian writers, adherents of the “Westernizer” tendency in Russian thought. Back.

Note 11: This saying plays upon the Russian version of the “carrot and stick” combination. (Ed.) Back.

Note 12: Noosphere: “(from Greek noös, ”mind“), in theoretical biology, that part of the world of life that is strongly affected by man’s conceptual thought; regarded by some as coextensive with the anthroposphere. The noösphere... is the level of the intellect, as opposed to the geosphere, or nonliving world, and the biosphere, or living world” (“noösphere,” Britannica Online). (Ed.) Back.

Note 13: The classic Dersu Uzala by Vladimir Arsenyev (1872–1930) describes travels in the Ussuri River region between Russia and China. (Ed.) Back.

Note 14: The often-quoted troika image is the last paragraph of Part I of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Boris Grebenshchikov founded Aquarium, the premier rock band of the late Soviet period, and has also released many albums as a solo performer. (Ed.) Back.