Ideas Against Ideocracy

Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991)

Mikhail Epstein

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501350610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures (awarded by the Modern Languages Association) This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of culture and scholars of Russian philosophy gives for the first time a systematic examination of the development of Russian philosophy during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein provides a comprehensive account of Russian thought of the second half of the 20th century that is highly sophisticated without losing clarity. It provides new insights into previously mostly ignored areas such as late-Soviet Russian nationalism and Eurasianism, religious thought, cosmism and esoterism, and postmodernism and conceptualism. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian thought, now freed from the bonds of Soviet totalitarianism and ideocracy but nevertheless dangerously engaged into new nationalist aspirations and metaphysical radicalism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of recent Russian intellectual history, but also the opportunity to rethink our own philosophical heritage.

Part I

The Philosophy of National Spirit. Conservatism, Eurasianism, and Traditionalism

1. The Search for National Identity. Traditions and New Challenges

The search for national identity, or natsional’naia ideia, is central to Russian thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If we attempt to single out one concept that has united the majority of intellectual trends, this concept would be “Russia” itself, not merely as a geographical or historical reality, but as a philosophical idea that remains to be properly defined or embodied. In a certain sense, the concept of Russia plays the same unifying role in Russian philosophy as do Tao, Logos, and Geist in the Chinese, Greek, and German traditions, respectively. Beginning with Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856), considered to be the first truly original Russian thinker, the most pertinent question has been: “Who are we?” What is the ultimate destination of the Russian people, its mission in the world?

This question famously divided Russian intellectuals into two opposite camps: Slavophiles, who believed in the particularity of the Russian spirit and mission as superseding an older, disintegrating European tradition; and Westernizers, who advocated the historical achievements of the West as a model for Russian development retarded by her semi-Asiatic past. This polarity of “introverted” and “extroverted” orientations can be traced from the 1830s–1840s onward. However, with the October Revolution of 1917, both Slavophilism and Westernism took new directions, sometimes even merging in unexpected syntheses. Being a militantly internationalist platform, communism initially provoked strong opposition among nationalist adherents of the old regime, including the White Guard movement, but the most original trends of postrevolutionary nationalistic thought attempted to reappropriate communism as an organic part of Russia’s historical destiny, as the hope for its spiritual revival and ascent to future political dominance.

Among the postrevolutionary movements that anticipated the resurgence of late-Soviet Russian nationalism, the first was the Scythians, a branch of left-populists led by the philosopher, journalist, and historian Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946). Immediately following the October upheaval, these thinkers identified it as a radical break with Western civilization. The name “Scythians” refers to the ancient tribes of nomadic warriors who from about the ninth century BCE until the fourth century CE had extended their influence all over Central Asia, from China to the northern Black Sea. The northeastern-most corner of the Roman Empire that they inhabited would become the southernmost region of the Russian Empire. According to the cultural myth propagated by Ivanov-Razumnik, Russians, as the offspring of the Scythians, symbolize both barbarous opposition to the refined and decadent West and its eventual successor in the progression of world civilizations. The October Revolution eliminated (at least formally) two of the three principles upon which the Russian Empire was founded, autocracy and Orthodoxy, but the third, narodnost’, “folk spirit,” not only survived but revealed its messianic potential as the destroyer of individualistic European societies. Hence Aleksandr Blok’s defiant challenge to the West in his poem “The Scythians” (dated January 30, 1918) was inspired by the movement of that name: “Come, fight! Yea, we are Scythians, / Yea, Asians, a squint-eyed, greedy brood.”¹

The next postrevolutionary movement to anticipate late-Soviet Russian nationalism was Smenovekhovstvo (“Change of Landmarks”), founded in 1921 by Nikolai Ustrialov, a professor of jurisprudence with a Hegelian philosophical disposition.² Though a member of the liberal party of Constitutional Democrats and an enemy of the Bolsheviks, he came to believe, with Hegel, that everything that is real is rational and therefore that the Bolshevik Revolution could not but result in the historical advancement of the Russian people. From this point of view, history has its own morality, distinct from the notions of individual virtue and sin; thus it is the duty of the Russian intelligentsia to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, despite any personal disagreements with their violent methods. The goal of politics, according to Ustrialov, is the creation of a powerful state, and the Bolsheviks’ professed internationalism, he felt, masked a welcome will to Russian global dominance under the slogan of proletarian solidarity. Change of Landmarks emerged in émigré circles, but in the 1920s it became popular also in Soviet Russia itself among members of the intelligentsia who, despite many reservations, tried to justify their collaboration with the Soviet regime on the basis of national rather than class solidarity. It has even been speculated that the official ideological shift in the late 1920s, from an internationalist revolutionary strategy to the internal politics of socialist construction “in one country,” was due in part to the influence of the Change of Landmarks.

Another movement, Eurasianism, albeit less overtly political than Change of Landmarks, was intellectually more profound and proved more enduring in its influence. It was founded by philologist Nikolai Trubetskoi, geographer Petr Savitsky, theologian Georges Florovsky, historian Georgii Vernadsky, and philosopher Lev Karsavin.³ Eurasianists put a greater emphasis on the Orthodox Christian identity of the Russian people and accused Change of Landmarks of a political compromise with Bolshevism. They based their views on the specificity of the Russian Empire as a geographical and historical formation different from both Europe and Asia. Russia is not a mono-ethnic but a supra-ethnic unit—a whole continent, encompassing a community of nations, of mostly Slavic and Turkic origin, in the same way that Europe encompasses the community of Roman and Germanic nations. It should not be perceived as a single country, comparable to England, France, or China, but as a continental conglomerate, on a par with Europe or Asia. Eurasianists criticized both monarchic and democratic types of government, advocating instead ideocracy, “a regime in which the ruling stratum is selected by the quality of loyalty to one overall ruling idea [obshchaia ideia-pravitel’nitsa].”⁴ Categories of “class” or “nation” are too narrow to serve as a basis for ideocracy, since they divide the state rather than unite it; the idea of “humanity” is too broad, since it does not justify the existence of a distinct state. What is needed is the concept of a “separate world,” Eurasia, that embraces a variety of classes and nations but remains self-enclosed in its distinction from other worlds, namely Europe and Asia.

Eurasianists assessed the Soviet Union as an imperfect ideocracy, divided by class polarities. They condemned its materialistic and atheistic doctrines but recognized the organizational power of communism and collectivist ideals. “Under ideocratic structure, the last remnants of individualism will disappear and the human being will realize not only himself but also his class and nation as fulfilling certain functions within an organic whole united in a State.”⁵ One of the peculiarities of the Eurasian state would be the subordination of the socioeconomic sphere and property relations to the dominance of ideas, unlike the West in both its capitalist and socialist variants, where the ideological and political spheres are derived from economic conditions. Many Eurasianist concepts would prove to be close to the ideology of Italian fascism and German national socialism, especially the glorification of a state, governed by a one-party system and based on the priority of national or transnational ideas, which interferes in all spheres of economic, cultural, and religious life and subjects the individual to the “symphonic” personality of the state itself.

The Eurasianists’ original intellectual impetus was exhausted by the mid-1930s, but on the whole they demonstrated a better potential for adaptation to late- and post-Soviet ideological needs than did traditional Slavophilism. The main difference between the two movements can be formulated as the opposition between “back-to-the-soil” romanticism and an ethnically motivated will to political and technological domination. Eurasianism succeeded in freeing Slavophilic ideals from their dreamy nostalgia for a pious and patriarchal Rus, integrating them rather into a broad futurist project of a powerful totalitarian state. Early Slavophilism exalted the spirit of communality as exemplified by the Orthodox Church, while Eurasianism found its most alluring ideal in the collective will of the state. Eurasianism, as an attempt to mediate the opposition between nationalism and communism, between religious traditionalism and technological pragmatism, between the Asian and European constituents of the Russian historical identity, proved to be a common denominator for many of the ideological tendencies arising with the erosion of official Soviet Marxism. The far left and far right, former communists and new nationalists, technocrats, and nativists, adherents of Orthodox and Islamic fundamentalism—all could potentially find a middle ground in the Eurasianist synthesis.

The period of the 1930s–1950s was marked by increasing nationalist tendencies, both in Soviet society and in émigré circles; in the latter, several minor pro-fascist parties formed. The prophecies of Change of Landmarks and Eurasianism about a nationalist reorientation of Soviet communism came true, especially with Stalin’s ideological campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, condemning the internationalist stance of earlier communism under the name “bourgeois cosmopolitanism.” These nationalist tendencies, apart from their narrow political motivation, lacked theoretical novelty or philosophical depth, as their fundamentals had already been formulated in the wake of the revolution.⁶

Nationalism reached its nadir during Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” when, with the revival of communist ideals in full swing and with the establishment of communist regimes in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Cuba, internationalism was at its most fervent stage since the time of Lenin. In the philosophical context of this period, structuralism was showcasing the insights of scientific analysis, and the triumphs of the Russian space program served to reinforce the motivations of technological progress with its global appeal.

A new impetus for Slavophilism can be observed in Russian thought beginning in the mid-1960s with the exhaustion of the Thaw and of the impulse for social and intellectual innovation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella Matrena’s House (1963) and Vasilii Belov’s Business as Usual (1966) laid the foundation for the new literary movement of “village prose,” which was echoed in aesthetics and cultural theory. The celebration of scientific reason, penetrating deeply into the humanities as well, provoked resistance on the part of some conservative scholars. Opposition gradually arose within the younger generation of traditionalists, who identified the wave of rationalism as a symptom of Western influence and who, in their polemics against it, for the first time in Soviet intellectual history openly employed Slavophilic arguments. Even at the height of the campaign against cosmopolitanism, with its glorification of everything genuinely Russian, Stalin’s ideologists never made recourse to the Slavophile legacy, which was unanimously condemned as reactionary and archaic. Notably, from its nineteenth-century outset, Slavophilism had stood in intellectual opposition to governmental policy, reproaching Peter the Great and all the emperors who succeeded him for their Westernist orientation, and it was characteristic that the resurgence of Slavophilism in the 1960s likewise took the form of opposition to Westernist tendencies in Soviet ideology. Thus the pattern of evolution of the “Russian idea,” from Slavophilism to Eurasianism, is repeated in condensed form in the 1960s–1980s: the Slavophile revival of the 1960s–1970s, which culminated in the programmatic writings of Solzhenitsyn, gives way to Eurasianism as the prevailing form of nationalist ideology of the 1980s and especially of the post-Soviet epoch.

2. The Neo-Slavophile Revival in Aesthetics and Criticism. Petr Palievsky and Vadim Kozhinov

The nationalist revival found its first academic expression in the writings of a group of young researchers at the Moscow Institute of World Literature whose point of departure was the rejection of structuralism as applied to literary studies.⁷ Petr Palievsky (b. 1932), the initial spokesperson of this “anti-positivist” trend, was the author of several articles devoted to the image (obraz) as the central unit of artistic creativity.⁸ For him, the sign (znak), which structuralists held up as the primary element of the semiotic approach to language and literature, is deficient as an instrument of analysis, since it presupposes an arbitrary and conventional connection between the signifying and the signified. Palievsky points instead to the image, to its integral relationship to reality: the image, in his view, is not merely the representation of external being but is at the same time the full-fledged being of this representation. The image, then, is not a variety of sign (e.g., an “iconic sign”); rather, signs are degraded images, reduced to conventional and instrumental usage. Palievsky accuses structuralists of bleeding literature of its unique vitality by turning it into a system of signs, hence failing to distinguish literature from language and its pragmatic functions. And indeed, structuralists could be said to subscribe to the famous formalist assumption that literature is merely a particular use of language, its “poetic function” (Roman Jakobson).

For Palievsky, structuralism is a reductive methodology which, in relegating literature to a substratum of verbal signs, undermines its aesthetic specificity. In his view, structuralism “does away with individuality by establishing it as a simple combination of general principles …. From the very start, in undertaking to dismember ‘artistry,’ structuralism dismembered it into such elements as were not elements of art. Setting out in search of the specific, it came to obtain the most nonspecific.”⁹ Rather than taking literature as an extension of syntactic and lexical structures, Palievsky views its essence as transcending the referentiality of pure semiotics. By its use of the image, literature imparts to signs an extralinguistic significance, which overcomes the arbitrariness of the designation. For example, the word “blue,” as a linguistic unit, signals a sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Philosophy, the State, and Plato-Marxism
• Part 1: The Philosophy of National Spirit. Conservatism, Eurasianism, and Traditionalism
• Part 2: Religious Thought. Orthodox Christianity
• Part 3: Mysticism, Universalism, and Cosmism
• Part 4: Postmodernist Thought. Conceptualism
• Epilogue: The End of Soviet Philosophy and Strategies for the Future
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Imprint