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The Intellectual Tradition of Pre-Revolutionary Russia: A Reexamination
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11327 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
7,461 Words |
| Author
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A. Walicki
Andrzej Walicki has been a senior research fellow in the
School of Social Sciences at the Australian National
University since 1981. This article was presented at the
Geneva Conference on The Fall of the Soviet Empire sponsored
by the Professors World Peace Academy. |
We are witnessing today a remarkable revival of interest in the Russian tradition. In the years of the Cold War, such interest was alive mainly among Westerners. Today, Western intellectuals have become somewhat less interested in Russia as a problem and are often too easily satisfied with the existing level of understanding about it; among Russians, however, both in the Soviet Union and in the Russian diaspora, the Russian past has once more become a frame of reference for the controversy over Russia's future. We now have the new Slavophiles and the new Westernizers among the Russians. The first follow Alexander Solzhenitsyn in stressing the need to return to "native roots," in trying to prove that all evils have come to Russia from without, and in hoping for a renaissance of truly Russian values--interpreted, as a rule, in national-religious terms with emphasis either on national uniqueness and he need to isolate Russia from the West, or on the universal Christian significance of the Russian heritage and the need for a spiritual crusade. The second group are inclined to follow Western historians like Tibor Szamuely or Richard Pipes, who see the Russian past as paving the way for Soviet totalitarianism and proclaim the need for gradual westernization, insisting, as a rule, that all attempts to revive the national heritage of pre-Revolutionary Russia can only result in such evils as an awakening of the worst forms of Russian nationalism and their fusion with official "Sovietism."
This is, of course, a very simplified picture that deliberately ignores some intermediate positions and complicating factors. Nevertheless, one can safely say that the controversy over Russia's future has once more become inseparable from the controversy over Russia's past. The only major exception to this rule is the work of Alexander Zinoviev, who has revealed the phenomenon of homo sovieticus, explaining it in terms of a quasi-universal theory of society--as a product of pure collectivism, very different from Western man but yet having no traits of a specifically Russian national identity. It is obvious, however, that Zinoviev's views are significantly related, although negatively, to the contemporary debate on Russia's past and future. On the one hand, they try to destroy the distinction between the terms Russian and Soviet, presenting Soviet man as a perfectly normal phenomenon and thereby ruling out any hope of a Russian spiritual and cultural revival; on the other hand, they are even more effective in killing hopes for a gradual westernization of Soviet Russia.
This paper is not an attempt to deal with the problem of the contemporary significance of Russia's spiritual and cultural heritage in its entire scope and complexity. I
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