In Search of the Russian Idea

Once again, Russia is in search of a National Idea, something to define Russia’s place in the world, its goals and aspirations, its place in history. Sparked by President Yeltsin’s claim that Russia’s next generation will live under a new National Idea, and egged on by a contest in a leading newspaper, the intellectual competition to come up with an National Idea is in full swing.

Yet this search will be exceedingly difficult for at least two reasons. First, Russia is floating in a moral vacuum. Communism as a National Idea was more than a political system. It dictated a whole set of beliefs about morality and social justice. Rejecting communism has meant discrediting a whole belief system, including notions about right and wrong, about community and civil society. The new, market economy, shorn of the Judeo-Christian harness it enjoys in the West, has offered only moral relativism and a cult of consumerism — hardly the foundations for a healthy national idea.

Second, modern Russia has never existed in the absence of empire or authoritarianism. And yet, both of these ideas have been pillars of any past incarnation of the Russian (or Soviet) National Idea. Russia has always meant more than the Russian nation or the countries where Russian is spoken. Under the tsars, Russia was an adjective modifying an Empire which assimilated all non-Russian cultures. After the revolution, the Soviet adjective was introduced, with Russians and non-Russians alike being assimilated into  a ‘New Soviet Man’. History gives no guide to building a Russian state around pluralism, a market economy, decentralized state powers and democracy.

In short, Russia must construct a National Idea that is more ideal than reality. Any National Idea must be something that Russia must strive for, rather than a reflection of what Russia is.

It is this striving, this search for a national identity, that is the central theme of David Remnick’s new book, Resurrection. Built on dozens of interviews with and profiles of Russia’s movers and thinkers, it offers a luminous portrait of the emerging political landscape of Russia. It is a must read for anyone who wants to make sense out of what Russia has been up to since 1991.

Remnick’s reportage is most compelling when he is describing the worst Russia has to offer. Suffering no fools, he presents portraits of the “colorless, none-too intelligent apparatchik” and communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, of Vladimir Zhirinovsky (“a hater, a crank, a nut”), of the vain, former KGB Chief Vladimir Kruchkov (whose apartment had few books), that are biting and fearlessly on-target. No other journalist or author has provided such up-close and personal backgrounds on these and other “lesser players” in Russian politics. But Remnick is no less fearless in his portrayals of the major players, of the vainglorious, “priggish” and demoralized Gorbachev, of the heavy-drinking Yeltsin, insulated by a bevy of unscrupulous henchmen, of the foghorn-voiced Alexander Lebed, “with a sour expression reminiscent of Lurch the butler.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gets a lot of ink. Remnick has gotten closer to the great author (“the dominant writer of the twentieth century”) than perhaps any journalist, having been welcomed into his Vermont and Moscow homes. His profile reads like the reminiscences of the close friend of a zealot — a believer who is self-consciously gentle and respectful in his criticisms. Remnick sees Solzhenitsyn as “a Russian whose destiny was singular, and, at the same time, nearly identical to Russia’s.” His faithful and frank discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s “somehow Biblical” return to a Russia awash in consumerism becomes an allegory for a Russia striving to resurrect and define itself against the forces of cynicism, corruption and commercialism.

Remnick’s prognosis on this striving is optimistic. While recognizing the essentially oligarchic, corrupt nature of present Russian politics, and the odds which history has placed before Russia, he nonetheless ends on a hopeful note: the present is difficult, but “the Russian prospect over the coming years and decades is more promising than ever before in its history.”

Tim McDaniel is less optimistic. In The Agony of the Russian Idea, he paints a picture of a rising tide of Russian apathy, cynicism and despair. How, he wonders, after five years of reform, “can there still be no authoritative political parties, institutions, or leaders, none that garner even a marginally respectable degree of support?” The answer, he suggests, is that communism, as tsarist autocracy before it, failed to create a viable alternative society “in embryo,” one that could organically replace the old system, building on its past failures. Instead, Russian culture, he argues, “embodies an underlying binary logic of opposition... individuals and groups conceptualize social life in terms of sets of absolute alternatives that admit of no compromise.”

The historical tendency of Russia’s victorious social movements, McDaniel says, “is that the victor, after utterly defeating an opponent, always tries to radically annihilate the past. The past is regarded not as the foundation of organic growth, but as the source of error that must be completely destroyed.” The search for a uniquely Russian idea, McDaniel argues,  has been marred by politically-manufactured amnesia. And recent history is no exception.

Clearly, both Remnick and McDaniel are right. The hope and promise Remnick refers to is mainly socio-economic, and Russia shows all the signs of imminent and explosive economic growth. But unless Russia, as McDaniel shows, addresses the moral and political issues of its past – building on this past, rather than rejecting it wholesale, future reforms will be as tempestuous and difficult as they will be tenuous.

– Paul Richardson

Resurrection (Random House, 1997, $25.95) and The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton University Press, 1997, $24.95) are available through Access Russia (800-639-4301) or through bookstores.