REDISCOVERING THE RUSSIAN SELF

A recent issue of Moscow News (No: 31, 1990) has announced the reprinting in the U.S.S.R. of VEKHI (Landmarks) first published in Russia in 1909. Its joint authors were: 1.Nikolai Berdayev, 2. Sergei Bulgakov, 3. Mikhail Ghershezov, 4.Alexander Izghoyev, 5.Bogden Kistyakovsky, 6.Pyotr Struve, and 7.Semyan Frank. According to Moscow News VJ. Lenin termed it "An Encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy", and A.Solzhenitsyn, "A Message from the Future". The reprint is of 50,000 copies, by Novosti Publishers, and is priced 60 kopeks. The seven authors "believed that class struggle and social revolution were catastrophic for society. According to them, atheist materialism, political radicalism and violence, nihilism with respect to absolute values, maximalism of social and ethnic demands and utter disdain of individual interests were the characteristic features of democratic and socialist ideology which brought Russian society into deadlock".

According to Moscow News, "To oppose such ideology, the seven thinkers put forward their own positive programme which envisaged, in particular, that the democratic intelligentsia should take up responsibility for what was happening. They insist on self-improvement of the individual on the basis of religious and cultural values". Novosti Publishers are also to reprint a sequel to Vekhi by the same authors, first published in Moscow in 1918, and titled "From the Depths: Articles About Russian Revolution".

According to Alexander Tsipko (Moscow News 26, 1990), "No other publication in the Russian language can improve on Landmarks for its concentration of prophesies and ideas. Having brought together contribution by the most brilliant representatives of liberal and democratically minded Russian thinkers, this collection was labelled by Lenin the “encyclopaedia of Russian renegacy". In fact it is a book about our bloody post-revolutionary history written long before the revolution. Landmarks fore-told October 1917 in 1909. It also wrote about the Red terror and Stalin’s terror, and about collectivisation”. Tsipko adds, “No other book can give you a better insight into the Russian mind and soul. No other book can give you greater confidence in Russia’s intellectual potential".

Elsewhere (Moscow News, 24 1990) Tsipko observes that, "The idea of Socialism, or of the socialist choice, can no longer cement the country’s centre. Only a centrist, general democratic ideology can strengthen the centre and bring together the extreme points of view. The future of Russia depends on solving this problem”.

"Take the situation inside the Party. Understandably, the CPSU Platform with its declarations of fidelity to Socialist choice and to Lenin’s principles of Party organisation is unable to unite anybody. To unite the reformers with the democratic forces will require fundamental human values, the assertion of the primary of democracy, progress, the rights, freedoms and dignity of the individual, universal, human values". According to Tsipko, "Marxism did not maintain that the individual was valuable in and of himself", and "so we can do without Marx and his ideas of scientific communism".

But the Vekhi of 1909, or the sequel to it published in 1918, were not the last reservations on the Russian Revolution of October 1917, or the solitary expression of forebodings on the future to come. Forebodings of this future were powerfully expressed, amongs others, by E.Zamyatin in "We" published outside the USSR in 1924, and by A. Platonov in Chevengur (USSR: Social Sciences Quarterly Review, (SSQR), No.1, 1990, pp 141-162). In a large way these Russian writings of the 1920’s seem to have inspired Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World, and George Orwell to write 1984. We and Chevengur have also recently been reprinted in the USSR.

According to SSQR, “throughout (Zamyatin’s) novel runs his persistent thought about what happens when all render obeisance to the ideal of an absolutely expedient and rational existence. He shows what happens to the individual, the state and the human community When liberty is rejected for the sake of this ideal, and happiness is equated with servile subordination".

“In Zamyatin’s work" observes the SSQR, “we were not the masses but a social quality. Any type of individuality whatsoever was excluded in the single state. The very possibility of becoming ‘I’ and in some way separating from ‘We’ was crushed. There remained only the faceless, enthusiatic mob which was easily moulded to the iron will of the Benefactor. The cherished idea of Stalinism was to transform the individual into a ‘bolt’ in the vast machine of state which was controlled by the firm hand of its engineer or driver. Zamyatin showed this idea in practice”.

The SSQR further observes, “Zamyatin is now considered one of those writers who very easily recognised the outlines of the totalitarian system soon to become a reality in several different countries”. Zamyatin even helped Orwell realise, "the main danger presented by modern civilisation: that it demanded a constantly improving technology and values man least of all”.

Platanov’s Chevengur "grows out of the upturned reality of the first post-revolutionary years. Having purified life of all ‘oppressive elements’, the urge to build the road to communism with a single sweep of the hand and make a break with the ‘mysteries of time’ was no flight of the imagination but a widespread desire" of Lenin and his followers. As a hero of Platonov puts it, "people then wanted to become ‘"cleverer than reasons”. According to a student in Chevengur their course teacher told them, "We are stinking pastry but he will make a tasty pie of us”.

The metaphor of the ordinary, and not so ordinary, people being like ‘stinking pastry’ to be transormed into a ‘tasty pie’ by the trainers, the educators, the political cadres and their masters seems to sum up the nature of events which succeeded in the capturing of power by Lenin, the great westerniser even more so than the Tsar Peter, and his adherents in Russia. Historically this was not new to Europe where the Norman conquerors and others had treated people much like ‘stinking pastry’ and had apporpirated all power, resources and wealth into fewer and fewer hands. The main difference seems to be in nomenclature: the 11th century Norman dominance and state structures are classed as feudalism while what happened in post-1917 Russia became state socialism. The other difference may have been that the Normans, etc., did not even aspire to convert the ‘stinking pastry’ into a ‘tasty pie’. They perhaps knew that such conversion could never be made. According to European scholars, ancient Sparta was one of the historical models of state socialism. The number of Perioeci (those inseparably bound with the body of the state) and Helots (those without any protection of law) in BC 371 Sparta are estimated to be 40-60,000 and 140-200,000  respectively in a total population of 190-270,000 (V. Ehrenberg: The Greek State, Methuen, 1969, pp 31-32).

Thus the state which emerged in post-1917 Russia and the few who controlled it, not only appropriated all power, resources and wealth to itself but Russian society also was ‘absorbed, processed and assimilated by the state’. (Moscow News, 21, 1990). According to L.Karpensky, “The meaning of statization consists in the concealed transformation of public property as personified by the state into the private property of the nomenclature, the state’s administrative power". In such a context it was natural that Lenin directed the appropriation of all sources and wealth and even a calamity like the Russian famine of the 1920’s in which more than 30 million people are officially said to have suffered, became an opportunity and excuse to seize the wealth of the Russian orthodox christian church. In March 1922 he sent a message to Molotov which said, "For you, this moment not only is exceptionally favourable but in fact the only moment when we have 99 chances in 100 of utterly defeating the enemy and securing for ourselves the policy we need for many decades ahead. Today there are instances of cannibalism in famine stricken areas and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses. We can (and theréfore must) seize church valuables with mad and merciless energy never yielding to any resistance". (Moscow News, 32, 1990). From this Russian illustration Indians can well visualize the events leading to the Bengal famine of 1769 and its aftermath, in which 1/3 of the people perished, and what happened during later Indian famines till 1943-44.

Yet, strangely, in the same way as the people of Russia have somehow survived this 70 year long holocaust, the Russian church seems to have retained the Russian people’s trust. According to a recent survey, the conclusion of which is said to be applicable to the whole of the USSR, 17.5% of the Russian people have compete trust in the church, 46.8% have trust in it, 24.1% do not trust it very much, and 4.8% do not trust it at all. The corresponding proportion for the Government and CPSU are 4.0%, 24.3%, 42.1%, 22.5%, and 5.4%, 33.4%, 37.0% and 17.3% respectively. The trust enjoyed by the armed forces is more than that enjoyed by the Government or the CPSU, but less than that enjoyed by the church and it is 12.3%, 44.1%, 33.9% and 8.0%.

It is possible that the above writings and reflections on life and society in the USSR since about 1909, and more so as it existed since 1917, are not the only and even the dominant views which are being debated in the USSR today.

A great debate however has been going on in the USSR since about 1955, and though it has had its ups and downs, on the whole it has become more and more vibrant and has so influenced general opinion that ideas and institutions which had been wiped out from the language of the Russian people have come back, perhaps with greater vigour than these had immediately before 1917. It is possible that what are known as market forces will be determining the future of the USSR for decades to come. But it is conceivable and more probable that the primary factors in the reshaping of the USSR would be its own long past, the forging of the broken links with this past a major aim, without, at the same time, any abandonment of the acquisitions, knowledge, technologies the USSR acquired during the past 70 years. Nations and people do not easily give up their acquistions. What they usually do is to find new and less visible and controversial ways and devices to hold what they consider their heritage (however illgotten) and to build upon it and expand it if possible. The search in the USSR appears to be more for “ethics and compassion" without which “a civilised market and a civilised society" are considered unthinkable (Soviet Literature, No.5, 1990, p. 134). According to a Russian literary critic, “it is we who blithely strayed to the edge of the precipice and we who now are trying to crawl trembling away as can be seen from our publications on philosophy, prose, our poetry at its best and most spiritual, and from today’s new literature scouting its way forward into the world of Christianity".

"We are not yet wholly ready to receive this unexpected wealth because we have almost forgotten the words it uses. Estranged from language which was natural for our own forefathers, we wince at words like Faith, the Devil, Orthodoxy, and God (who can now again be printed with a capital letter). We still haven’t got out of the habit of trying to substitute something ‘More readily comprehensible’: the Ideal, Spirituality, Tradition. The realisation is already dawning, however, that these are not synonyms and that we are going to have to recall our native language in all its fullness. Russia’s thought was fully formed and systematised by the 1920's but was forced into emigration, exiled, imprisoned, and buried in ‘Special Depositories’ before it had time to be heard in all its glory throughout Russia. Now, as if too long deprived of its rightful reader, it suddenly cascades upon him from all directions at once and he drinks it down with grateful and perfect attentiveness, every line of it as alive and topical as the day it was written. Our only problem now is to find the time to mark the margins, gasping in amazement as we impatiently copy out excerpts, to rejoice in thought which is so completely up to the minute; and to weep that it could not all have been heard long ago. We glory in the penetrating insights and only hope that now at last, when we have paid so dearly, we shall get to hear and understand every last work and that we shall be able to reconcile it all". And further, "The task of man, of our people, and of mandkind is not to dream ineffectually of absoute perfection; no more is it to devote ourselves to the petty-minded and unworthy service of merely mortal ends. It is to bring that which is below into harmony with that which is above. It is to strive actively for the perfection of every aspect of our personal and collecetive life so that God’s will should be done on Earth as it is in Heaven". (Soviet Literature, No.5, 1990, p.150-151).

As we the Indian elite, even those who daily perform long poojas to the Hindu, Muslim or Christian God, seem to have lost the ability to link the various constituents which go into the making of human life and society, such a Russian analysis may not today be comprehensible to us. Yet if we do not make even an attempt at such understanding the loss in everyway would only be ours. We already are oblivious of what is happening in other parts of the world, and why various people areas, and societies operate the way they do, and what really makes them tick.

A calm consideration of what has been happening in the USSR and in Eastern Europe should lead us to reflect about our own situation, to the derailment during 1946-1950 of our aspirations for rejuvenated India and the hijacking of the Indian state by the alienated westernizers. Its scale, perhaps, was not as vast as of what happened in the USSR, but possibly it has had much more deadly effect on our people, the society and heritage on which it was founded, and on the rejection of their skills and creative capacities. Furthermore, it should take us back to our own 1909 when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi gave utterence to his thoughts and reflections, founded on what he considered as the perennial philosophy and outlook of India in the long dialogue which he termed Hind Swaraj. Despite the different civilizational origins and differing historical experiences and physiological outlooks, we may yet find that in many essential matters there is much in common between the insights and premonitions of Gandhiji and the Russian philosophers like Berdyayev, and writers like Zamyatin and Platonov, and many others who have reflected on the condition of man in modern or ancient times. Even if some of us have reservations about some of Gandhiji’s ideas and actions-such reservations have been around in the air for over 70-years, - it would be admitted that irrespective of all his errors and failures Mahatma Gandhi enabled us and our society to become more courageous, to regain some sense of dignity and that he tried to show us a vision of what we consider as precious in our civilization. Illustrations of the transformation he enabled to bring about are countless.

Much like the people of the USSR and perhaps like most in the modern world we have also to arise from under the rubble. The only difference may be that if not in actual reality, yet at the level of feeling, thinking and believing except for brief periods, like the countrywide attempt at indigenous resurgence by localities, regions, and political communities against an intolerable despotism of Delhi and its Subedars from about 1680-1750, or the sense of freedom and dignity generated during the days of Gandhiji during 1916-1948, we may consider ourselves to be buried under such rubble for much longer. But that one can arise from under this rubble is well demonstrated, if not so convincingly by the changes which have come in the world during the past 40-50 years, then at least quite conclusively by what has recently been happening at unimaginable speed in Eastern Europe and the USSR.