Resize Text: D uring the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev between 1964 and 1982, Soviet cultural ideology underwent barely visible yet crucially important ideological changes. The staunch Marxist-Leninist paradigm succumbed to a more pragmatic orientation. Self-sustaining existence at “cold peace” with society became a principal objective of the ruling elite. Evaporation of an official ideology prompted a compromise with the upper levels of society, and drove the regime toward a reluctant recognition of some new ideological schemes, combining Leninism and nationalistic populism.
There are various points of comparison between late Imperial Russia, modern Russia after 2000, and the advent of nationalism during the Brezhnev era. In the late nineteenth century, when the model of the “enlightened monarchy” was exhausted in Imperial Russia, the tsar and his camarilla were impelled to increasingly employ populist rhetoric and promote an ideological model of the “people’s monarchy,” exemplified by Slavophiles and their followers. The decrepit Soviet Empire reflected a similar intellectual context in its final decades. In both cases, a tangible opposition from the right appeared, painfully observing what it saw as “pernicious changes” and large-scale societal decline. The “revolutionaries from the right,” both in late Imperial Russia and in Brezhnev’s USSR, manifested a blend of conservatism, xenophobia and Orthodox pietism under the ideological umbrella of Slavophilism. The latter served as a referent ideology and a guiding star for many dissidents.
In Russia today, the agreement between the siloviki (security and military) group, certain oligarchs, church hierarchy, and radical right-wing ideologists is obvious. The Eurasian Movement, headed by Aleksandr Dugin, has been especially influential among top political leadership, and is becoming popular in Russian academia and the mass media. The most recent resurgence of modern Slavophilism can be seen Mikhail Iur’ev’s provocative text The Fortress Russia (2004), which suggests economic and political isolationism, closure of cultural and academic ties with the West, introduction of an old Russian non-metric system of measure, rejection of the principle of separation of powers, implantation of a military perspective and rigorous Orthodoxy, and promotion of the concept of Moscow as the “Third Rome.” Iur’ev is no political outsider, but the President of Eurofinance Group, one of the richest Russians, former Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, and an active member of Dugin’s Eurasian Movement.
All different tendencies of modern Russian traditionalism, Slavophilism and religious fundamentalism can be grouped together under the banner of the “Russian idea,” or, more specifically, the “Russian Doctrine,” as formulated in 2005 and supported by conservative intellectuals of Orthodox background such as Egor Kholmogorov, Mikhail Leont’ev, Dmitri Rogozin, and Natalia Narochnitskaia. This ideology is based on the revised fundamentals of Russian Messianism: Russian uniqueness, the spirituality of the Russian people in contrast to the character of the West, the need for a strong state, economic autonomy, Orthodoxy as the spiritual core of the Russian people, and Russia as the “Northern”—the Eurasian—civilization, challenging the corrupt Atlantic civilization. The Russian Doctrine movement, having amassed considerable economic and political capital and provided itself with the quasi-academic “school of studies on conservatism,” is a serious political player, which gives another chance to Soviet underground fundamentalists. Since 2000, former conservative dissidents like Gennady Shimanov, Leonid Borodin and Vladimir Osipov have become noticeably more active in political journalism and politics and have published memoirs and collections of articles.11 This present study concerns the ideological stirrings of this movement during the Soviet period.
Mikhail D. Suslov is a researcher in the department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute (Florence), and at the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow). In the summer of 2009 he was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. This paper has been written with the kind assistance of the Open Society Archives at Central European University in Budapest.
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