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Vladimir Zelinsky is a philosopher, religious writer, publicist, and translator. His father was Korneliy Zelinsky (1896 –1970), a leading Soviet literary critic (chief theorist and literary critic of constructivism), whose circle of acquaintances included such luminaries of Russian litterature as Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Vsevolod Ivanov and Maksim Gorky; his defense of Alexander Solzhenitsyn cost him his high-ranking position at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. In the 1970s and 1980s, his son Vladimir Kornelevich Zelinsky wrote on religious, philosophical and social topics, publishing abroad in the famous Vestnik RHD (the equivalent of the French journal l’Esprit) in the "Samizdat Archive" (Munich) and becoming a major figure of underground illegal publications in the USSR. This cost him to be dismissed from the Academy of Sciences and being under tight police surveillance. In the second half of the 1980s, Vladimir Zelinsky participated in the creation of the Moscow samizdat magazine "Choice", as well as in the work of the group "Church and Perestroika", the purpose of which was to protect believers in the USSR. From 1988 to 1991 he was the permanent correspondant for one of France's major daily newspapers Ouest-France. In 1991, he was invited to teach at thee University of the Sacred Heart in Brescia, Italy, where he resides to this day. In 1999, he was ordained as a priest of the Orthodox Church. He was one of the drafters of a letter from Orthodox theologians calling for an Orthodox-Jewish dialogue. In September 2019, he signed the Open Letter of Priests in defense of prisoners in the "Moscow case", and in March 2022, he was among the almost three hundred priests of the Russian Orthodox Church who expressed their opposition to the war in Ukraine. A member of the Sapientia et Scientia Academy (Rome) since 2013, he received a Doctorate of Theology from the Theological Academy in Chernivtsi (Ukraine) in 2017. Member of the Ambrosian Academy in the Department of Slavic Studies (Milan), since 2022. The following are reflections on the legacy of Gorbachiov written in the typical spoken-language virulent style of the underground writers and activists of his generation.
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translated from Russian by Oleg Kobtzeff
1.8.22
THE CASE OF M.S. GORBACHIOV
A day has not passed since his death, that all seems to have been said and written about him. It was as if everyone was waiting to convey what they all had known for a long time and had been pondering for many years.
He brought freedom. He destroyed. He liberated. He abolished censorship. He heralded the beginning of a new era. He staged a massacre in Vilnius and not only there. He even poisoned the people with moonshine vodka.[1]
It was all his fault.
It is as if, there is nothing more to add. But what if you push the boundaries of even such a huge phenomenon as Gorbachiov, look at him from the point of view of the country that he supposedly destroyed? It was not at all an age-old, unchanging Russian village-state, in which Brezhnev was smoothly succeeded by Andropov, Andropov by Chernenko, Chernenko by Grishin[2] or Kunayev[3], and where everything remained stable, firm, and peaceful although with a few drawbacks. Yes, somewhere there was a war in Afghanistan which could have lasted for a long time, students passed exams on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the portrait of Lenin, food was delivered in industry and business establishments for the joy of the working people, television announced victorious accomplishments in industriousness and sports, the platforms of communists and non-party members were celebrated as they won nationwide elections, and underneath all this, without disturbing anyone in particular, rustled the samizdat[4] ... and suddenly out of nowhere appeared Gorbachiov to everyone's misfortune?
Well, to be precise, it's not like he came "out of nowhere." Gorbachiov came from the depths of the party apparatus and could not have emerged from anywhere else. And "God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."[5] Moreover, such a phenomenon was already predetermined from the very beginning inside the apparatus itself. The same could be said about Khrushchiov, in whose place there could have been a Beria[6] or anyone else.
For indeed, the system of utopian, ideological mania, on which Lenin and the Party built our USSR, was loaded with a counterweight. The abolition of the freedom of the press in December 1917 already carried in itself the vague promise of glasnost’. The Gulag, built to make this system as solid as reinforced concrete, nurtured a perestroika that would eventually shatter the system. The country was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin. The country was destroyed by them because they erected what was destined to collapse; in the end it was given only a slight shove by Gorbachiov, which is what I keep repeating all the time with my unheard voice. It’s the founding fathers who planted a time bomb under the structure and made the structure air-tight as to prevent any breath of air to escape but which was able, in the end, nevertheless, to pierce even reinforced concrete. The origin myth of the formation of the Soviet state had itself long been dispelled; its living juices had left it, and it stood like a dry tree without roots, able to stand for a long time, but threatened to be knocked down by the slightest of winds. Among those who mourn in chorus the ruined country, lies an implicit conviction that it could be thoroughly frozen, as Leontiev[7] once predicted, that the ice would never melt again, and that slavery is eternal. Oh but, it could only happen in the past, though, not in our own age!
As today, the restoration of the empire with missiles and propaganda is fraught with the inevitable¾no one knows the timing¾which is its collapse.
Among all Gorbachiov's deeds, the good, as well as the evil which are known to all, I remember the main thing that no one seems to have noticed. It was the release, starting in January 1987, of all prisoners of conscience jailed under Articles 190 and 70, imposed upon the Politburo and probably not without difficulty. They were only three hundred, and their names almost no one knew. I didn't know the names, but I sensed, that since someone else's conscience was released, then ours, a conscience of three hundred million, can now, slowly, carefully observing what is around us, crawl out of the closet. And you could start speaking out for all to hear... about almost everything. First it was about almost everything, then it was about just everything. And an avalanche was set off. How it tumbled down, upon whom it fell, and the attempts to stop it, is another story. But it was set off.
"A prominent statesman and party figure". From such stylistic turns of phrase, a person of my generation and experience immediately feels a lump of nausea in his throat. But in this case, what is most surprising is that the "doer" was a really kind, lively, open person, miraculously preserved in the apparatus. He turned the course of history, but what he turned around returned to its place. He died after seeing the destruction of everything that he had created in his time. But this does not mean at all that it was destroyed forever.
I have a personal debt to him. In 1987, I should have definitely been imprisoned. Leontieva the female investigator in charge of the case of my friend Felix Svetov who was arrested in January 1985, insisted on it. After Felix, I was next. But it was to affect me no more than a chill running down my back before it went away. It was blown away by Gorbachiov.
"Give thanks for all." Do not anger God with ingratitude.
May the Kingdom of Heaven receive you, Mikhail! And my prayer is with you.
3.9.22
SEEING OFF M.S. GORBACHIOV
In 1974, A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the collection of essays From Under the Rubble published an article "On the return of breathing and consciousness". The return was made possible by the awakening of free, oppositional thought, the news of which was the collection of essays itself. After its release by the publishing house YMCA-PRESS in Paris, one or two hundred copies reached Russia, mainly Moscow, where there were foreign embassies and diplomatic channels.
What Solzhenitsyn could in no way admit, was that the initiative for such a return could have come from the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. For him, like many other heroes of the resistance, this was unthinkable. And, in general, unthinkable it remained. "Can anything good come from Nazareth "? Gorbachiov had the innate defect of being born a communist. He continued to be faulted for this even when he was no longer a communist. I was once among those critics who, no longer under threat, wrote about it in Russkaya Mysl’. [8]
In the 70s, if not earlier, dissidents, prompted by the initiative of A. Yesenin-Volpin challenged Soviet power with the following slogan: abide by your own constitution! It didn't save anyone from arrests, but from a legal standpoint, it sounded almost flawless. In fact, Gorbachiov followed, without knowing it, the same path. He decided to apply the meaning of the words upon which the system was built to deceiving citizens. He stepped over, I don't think quite consciously, through the wall of doublethink. He didn’t fully complete crossing the line, but still went far enough. He took the key words of the regime: freedom of speech and conscience, elections, democratization and so on and so forth, and suddenly in front of everyone began to treat them in their original meaning. After all, it is impossible to compare the solemn promises of the Constitution of 1936, of which there was an abundance, with the same words in the mouths of Gorbachiov and the foremen of perestroika. But these empty words started filling up with substance and somehow became workable. For the Secretary-General to immediately use such words in the sense that they might have in the UK's House of Commons would have been frivolous, to say the least. It was simply impossible. Even their ambivalent use in the spirit of the Constitutions of 1936 and 1977 and, at the same time, in their universal, literal meaning, would have collapsed the system.
The collapse, just as it was written about, was a horror. But could those who accompany Gorbachiov to his grave with this horror in mind, answer which exactly of his initiatives lead to the collapse of the country? Can they answer concretely, specifically, in detail? They will not answer. Many do not know, others do not remember, others remember and know but, for that very reason, will not answer. After all, if all the innovations were to be listed (the first semi-free elections, public debates, the lifting of restrictions on all religions, the opening of borders, the abolition of censorship, the emergence of cooperatives, etc.), then we would have to admit that the poison for the system leaked from there and how otherwise good, peaceful and glorious it was to live in a totalitarian state: you had a job, a modest income, well-deserved rest, and if anyone was imprisoned, well, it wasn’t you. And the fact that many millions once died at the hands of this state, well, that’s history, something that happened long ago and has been greatly exaggerated ...
Few people want to admit it directly: “We don't need your freedoms”. Freedoms are good in the form of constitutional mummies—let them be admired in a museum, the main thing is not to consider them as something alive. Who needs them to be alive? You can always go abroad, if you cannot do without them. But who will admit such reasoning? If you still have to blabber about it, it can be confined to a very pious type of conversation: "freedom is only in the soul, where there is struggle with passions; the authorities will deal with worldly affairs without us".
History did not spare Gorbachiov. No one knows who ordered the massacres in Vilnius and Tbilisi, there are no documents about it. But since he was at the head of the country, they hung it on him, perhaps rightfully so. As for the economic collapse, where, I ask, did this not happen during the transition of a state-planned, already collapsing economy? It happened in Poland with the shock therapy of Balcerowicz, in Moldova, where a third of the population moved to the West, in Ukraine, from where millions left (much less from Russia), in the Baltic countries---I will not forget the words of one Estonian minister: "In winter, it is only warm for me in the car when I go to work. And it's cold at home, and I tolerate it in the ministry." It happened even in the Eastern part of Germany, with all the massive assistance from the West (I remember Hamburg in 1993, where at every turn, there were beggars from the former GDR, not old pensioners, but healthy and young individuals). The worst of all, it seems, befell upon Gamsakhurdia-Shevardnadze’s Georgia, the most prosperous and corrupt of the republics in Soviet times. The salary could be 5 dollars or less. "Imagine," one friend told me at the time, "even wine has disappeared from our stores. Probably, since the time of Adam, this has not happened in Georgia." And in Gorbachiov's Russia, the economic decline became even more evident when the aging of the system was fought against by attempts to rejuvenate its old socialist economy. Was it all worth it? Maybe the horror didn't start in 1987, but much has been programmed 70 years earlier?[9]
I can very well understand the iron fisted patriots, heralds of unfreedom, the jubilation of being all as one, except for a few renegades. You read and just hear the latent roar that makes its way through the pathetic denunciations: "we don't need your rights; one boss is good enough for us and has always been. The boss is strict, but look at how fair he is, almost like a father." So just say it. Don't force any other song down our throats. When reproving a clumsy reformer, do not hide behind the criticism of his ineptitude, do not hesitate to say what is really bursting from your chest ...
"For you brothers are called to freedom..." [10]
10.9.22
THE LOGIC OF THE SYSTEM
Two of my texts about the late Mikhail Gorbachiov provoked the approval of some and the condemnation of others. There were more of the former than the latter, but only because of the peculiarities of my thread,[11] where it is not easy to find those who still believe that their home address is the Soviet Union, which Gorbachiov "collapsed". Especially since I don't have any Stalin fans. It's not that I would noisily slam the door on them----as long as the civilizational code of communication persists, let them worship themselves---it's just that they didn't enter my door.
I never got to the point. The essence is in the spiritual basis behind people and events. You may not believe it, but this is my position and I can't have it any other way. It is quite clear to me, not intellectually even, but internally, existentially, that the entire history of the Soviet Union was a play of transcendent forces that took root in the supposedly scientific myth of propaganda.[12] The Marxist-Leninist shell of it is only the surface. The myth erupted like lava (or passionarism, if you prefer) from the vent of an underground volcano, spilled over a sixth of the earth, infected almost half the planet with its religion, swept like a tsunami, throwing thousands of factories and collective farms to the surface, sweeping away millions of lives, and then just cooled down on his own, dissolved, and sat down in front of the TV set to watch the program it ordered. This transformation took place before my eyes, in the experience of the generation born under Stalin. I remember everything. For the previous generation, everything was still being taken very serious, but for the next generation it was already more difficult to imagine that this was actually a real faith (albeit a false faith) in some extraordinary future, which was gradually replaced----I am talking about what it was like for loyal citizens----by a patriotic set that included the Great October, the fairness of the socialist system, and the idea of being surrounded by enemies. But the faith itself, disappearing behind the horizon , faded, melted, and there was nothing to replace it.
And with the next generation, even with the same ideological set, the history of their country was reduced to a tug-of-war between politicians, to their glorious or vile personalities and deeds. The faith, for the sake of which everything was supposedly initiated and accomplished, was pushed away into the distance, was simply forgotten, written off as something that has never been. It is still perceived as a never-has-been. At the same time, the faith was very real when it made history, not only by the will of Stalin, but also by the hands and hearts of the countless Pavlik types---- Pavlik Korchagin and Pavlik Morozov[13]. The fist one became a fanatical investigator, a holy believer in the fact that the confessions he knocked out of people during the interrogations is the most final truth, later becoming a victim of this same “truth”; the other, having matured, led a column of honest informers, confident that he was serving the brightest future and his superiors. But the future belongs to time, and time has come and gone, so when the future has come, what were those now elderly Pavliks who survived, supposed to do? They themselves cannot understand what happened to them since their youth. Church raiders[14], they are now humbly standing with Easter candles, and if I were nearby, I would not even refuse to give them a light.[15]
They have not become dissidents (though some came to it close enough because they had the inclination in their souls), but where the flame once burned in these persons, in these pensioners, where hope would turn into a certitude, the willingness to make sacrifices by setting oneself up and killing others still survived. Thus Stalin's iron time, together with all the Pavliks and their era, flowed into the perestroika-Gorbachiov era. The mania, not a personal one, but a collective one, that determined the history of the country, together with the country, seeped into the ground. For isn’t it a mania striving to live under one universally binding ideology of the promised happiness of all mankind and making incalculable bloody sacrifices for its sake or justifying them?
Two of the leaders acted, in fact, according to the immanent logic of the system. In its initial period, the system was meant to grow stronger, filling itself with power, swelling with the blood it drunk, so it bought in Stalin. But then came time for the system to die, so it invited Gorbachiov. He wanted to save it through rejuvenating procedures, by means of "universal values", but for some reason everything went against his intentions. The mythocratic state organism was worn out. After all, it wasn't out of philanthropy that Khrushchiov launched de-Stalinization (Beria who represented a kind of quintessence of Stalinism, could have been in his place), but it was because he followed the same logic of saving the system. For it is not the leaders in the final analysis, however powerful they may be, who determine the system entirely, but the internal laws of developing myths. One of them, with his 30-year reign,[16] I can't even take as human; I see it rather as a boa constrictor not fully aware of the deadly contraction of its bone-breaking muscles. Now Gorbachiov personally evokes only respect and sympathy in me, but each of the two leaders, like the other leaders, like millions of people, carried out their historical mission, being inside a regime of mania, or if you prefer, inside a long-lasting case of collective insanity. This does not mean that Stalin or Beria were personally suffering from insanity. They were just following the ideological flow or were caught in its hurricane of energy, remaining pragmatists, cynics, hedonists.
At the initial stage, the state was built on the mania, in the last stage, it began recovering from it. Passionarism dried up, but the form of the state held on as if nothing had happened. There could be no other outcome than a contradiction that was doomed to become fatal for the entire construction. In the place of the country as a religion parodying Christianity, now stood only a dry skeleton, a skeleton without muscles. The system tried to build them up, dismantling its foundation, rebuilding itself in the name of already forgotten passionarist ideals. However, no peaceful dismantling of such a regime could take place except from above or from within; anti-Gorbachiov activists on the left still cannot understand this.
In Stalin's place, it is actually possible to imagine another one, similar to him (even a freak spawned by Trotsky, Robespierre-Dzerzhinsky[17], Bonaparte-Tukhachevsky[18], the icy Molotov[19], the enemy of the people Kosior[20]... with each individual retaining his personal characteristics, of course), as well as anyone else in the role of Gorbachiov, because ideology, the leading role of the party and so on, whatever was perceived as convention, cannot rule forever in a petrified condition. A myth is born as a living thing, grows, becomes stronger, then stagnates, and dies. Someone was expected to kickstart this dry skeleton, hoping that it would work, move, rush forward, but it staggered and collapsed. Only Marxist-Leninists, professing the eternal change of the world according to dialectic materialism, and we, Orthodox Christians, who look at the high stars, are always sure that history can be staked out at one fixed point.
Except that it is difficult to imagine anyone else in Lenin's place. He was a truly classic obsessive maniac with a full-blown program of utopian madness that infected the entire country. But for the duration of only one human lifetime.
Strangely, the teachings have changed radically, but the mania has waited in the shadows. Otherwise how, without having fallen into insanity, in full rationality, can one agree with the physical destruction of a neighboring country, with which so much is connected and intertwined? Or of any country, as a matter of fact? Explain to me, how?
Here's how. From the dark cellar of the collective soul, a familiar set of ideas-emotions that in the past held together and supported the Soviet system, ideas such as: a bright goal beyond the horizon, a hostile environment that never slumbers and wants to destroy us, demonization of an enemy brought out of the depths of the subconscious, rallying around a leader who is never wrong, the belief that we can only do good for we ourselves are undoubtedly good people, and even the obligatory emphasis on compassion for the oppressed brethren (the working class under capitalism, now Donbas and brothers in Russian-speaking Ukraine), which serves as an emotional nourishment. Add the persecution of national-traitors,[21] the fifth column, recruiting the Church, even though it was persecuted in the past, into the workings of the enforced policy, which is happening today on a national scale. This program is part of a well-oiled, fat propaganda machine, and it will spin until the wounds of war become too sore and festering.
No matter how it all ends, even a complete military victory of this "antichrist’s good", such a victory cannot last forever. It will fall apart, and its fall will be great. Everyone will be ashamed, like the many hundred-year-old Pavliks have been made uncomfortable. Another perestroika will come, and a new glasnost will occur. But the demons will lurk again. Until they find a new role and a workable form. Which could also become the hatred of the vanquished, which sooner or later will break through. And how.
But what objections can be heard by whoever wants to believe that the Lord once descended upon the land of Israel to make Russia a stronghold of traditional values and tank building, subduing under its foot all enemy and foe?
THE CASE OF M.S. GORBACHIOV
A day has not passed since his death, that all seems to have been said and written about him. It was as if everyone was waiting to convey what they all had known for a long time and had been pondering for many years.
He brought freedom. He destroyed. He liberated. He abolished censorship. He heralded the beginning of a new era. He staged a massacre in Vilnius and not only there. He even poisoned the people with moonshine vodka.[1]
It was all his fault.
It is as if, there is nothing more to add. But what if you push the boundaries of even such a huge phenomenon as Gorbachiov, look at him from the point of view of the country that he supposedly destroyed? It was not at all an age-old, unchanging Russian village-state, in which Brezhnev was smoothly succeeded by Andropov, Andropov by Chernenko, Chernenko by Grishin[2] or Kunayev[3], and where everything remained stable, firm, and peaceful although with a few drawbacks. Yes, somewhere there was a war in Afghanistan which could have lasted for a long time, students passed exams on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the portrait of Lenin, food was delivered in industry and business establishments for the joy of the working people, television announced victorious accomplishments in industriousness and sports, the platforms of communists and non-party members were celebrated as they won nationwide elections, and underneath all this, without disturbing anyone in particular, rustled the samizdat[4] ... and suddenly out of nowhere appeared Gorbachiov to everyone's misfortune?
Well, to be precise, it's not like he came "out of nowhere." Gorbachiov came from the depths of the party apparatus and could not have emerged from anywhere else. And "God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."[5] Moreover, such a phenomenon was already predetermined from the very beginning inside the apparatus itself. The same could be said about Khrushchiov, in whose place there could have been a Beria[6] or anyone else.
For indeed, the system of utopian, ideological mania, on which Lenin and the Party built our USSR, was loaded with a counterweight. The abolition of the freedom of the press in December 1917 already carried in itself the vague promise of glasnost’. The Gulag, built to make this system as solid as reinforced concrete, nurtured a perestroika that would eventually shatter the system. The country was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin. The country was destroyed by them because they erected what was destined to collapse; in the end it was given only a slight shove by Gorbachiov, which is what I keep repeating all the time with my unheard voice. It’s the founding fathers who planted a time bomb under the structure and made the structure air-tight as to prevent any breath of air to escape but which was able, in the end, nevertheless, to pierce even reinforced concrete. The origin myth of the formation of the Soviet state had itself long been dispelled; its living juices had left it, and it stood like a dry tree without roots, able to stand for a long time, but threatened to be knocked down by the slightest of winds. Among those who mourn in chorus the ruined country, lies an implicit conviction that it could be thoroughly frozen, as Leontiev[7] once predicted, that the ice would never melt again, and that slavery is eternal. Oh but, it could only happen in the past, though, not in our own age!
As today, the restoration of the empire with missiles and propaganda is fraught with the inevitable¾no one knows the timing¾which is its collapse.
Among all Gorbachiov's deeds, the good, as well as the evil which are known to all, I remember the main thing that no one seems to have noticed. It was the release, starting in January 1987, of all prisoners of conscience jailed under Articles 190 and 70, imposed upon the Politburo and probably not without difficulty. They were only three hundred, and their names almost no one knew. I didn't know the names, but I sensed, that since someone else's conscience was released, then ours, a conscience of three hundred million, can now, slowly, carefully observing what is around us, crawl out of the closet. And you could start speaking out for all to hear... about almost everything. First it was about almost everything, then it was about just everything. And an avalanche was set off. How it tumbled down, upon whom it fell, and the attempts to stop it, is another story. But it was set off.
"A prominent statesman and party figure". From such stylistic turns of phrase, a person of my generation and experience immediately feels a lump of nausea in his throat. But in this case, what is most surprising is that the "doer" was a really kind, lively, open person, miraculously preserved in the apparatus. He turned the course of history, but what he turned around returned to its place. He died after seeing the destruction of everything that he had created in his time. But this does not mean at all that it was destroyed forever.
I have a personal debt to him. In 1987, I should have definitely been imprisoned. Leontieva the female investigator in charge of the case of my friend Felix Svetov who was arrested in January 1985, insisted on it. After Felix, I was next. But it was to affect me no more than a chill running down my back before it went away. It was blown away by Gorbachiov.
"Give thanks for all." Do not anger God with ingratitude.
May the Kingdom of Heaven receive you, Mikhail! And my prayer is with you.
3.9.22
SEEING OFF M.S. GORBACHIOV
In 1974, A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the collection of essays From Under the Rubble published an article "On the return of breathing and consciousness". The return was made possible by the awakening of free, oppositional thought, the news of which was the collection of essays itself. After its release by the publishing house YMCA-PRESS in Paris, one or two hundred copies reached Russia, mainly Moscow, where there were foreign embassies and diplomatic channels.
What Solzhenitsyn could in no way admit, was that the initiative for such a return could have come from the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. For him, like many other heroes of the resistance, this was unthinkable. And, in general, unthinkable it remained. "Can anything good come from Nazareth "? Gorbachiov had the innate defect of being born a communist. He continued to be faulted for this even when he was no longer a communist. I was once among those critics who, no longer under threat, wrote about it in Russkaya Mysl’. [8]
In the 70s, if not earlier, dissidents, prompted by the initiative of A. Yesenin-Volpin challenged Soviet power with the following slogan: abide by your own constitution! It didn't save anyone from arrests, but from a legal standpoint, it sounded almost flawless. In fact, Gorbachiov followed, without knowing it, the same path. He decided to apply the meaning of the words upon which the system was built to deceiving citizens. He stepped over, I don't think quite consciously, through the wall of doublethink. He didn’t fully complete crossing the line, but still went far enough. He took the key words of the regime: freedom of speech and conscience, elections, democratization and so on and so forth, and suddenly in front of everyone began to treat them in their original meaning. After all, it is impossible to compare the solemn promises of the Constitution of 1936, of which there was an abundance, with the same words in the mouths of Gorbachiov and the foremen of perestroika. But these empty words started filling up with substance and somehow became workable. For the Secretary-General to immediately use such words in the sense that they might have in the UK's House of Commons would have been frivolous, to say the least. It was simply impossible. Even their ambivalent use in the spirit of the Constitutions of 1936 and 1977 and, at the same time, in their universal, literal meaning, would have collapsed the system.
The collapse, just as it was written about, was a horror. But could those who accompany Gorbachiov to his grave with this horror in mind, answer which exactly of his initiatives lead to the collapse of the country? Can they answer concretely, specifically, in detail? They will not answer. Many do not know, others do not remember, others remember and know but, for that very reason, will not answer. After all, if all the innovations were to be listed (the first semi-free elections, public debates, the lifting of restrictions on all religions, the opening of borders, the abolition of censorship, the emergence of cooperatives, etc.), then we would have to admit that the poison for the system leaked from there and how otherwise good, peaceful and glorious it was to live in a totalitarian state: you had a job, a modest income, well-deserved rest, and if anyone was imprisoned, well, it wasn’t you. And the fact that many millions once died at the hands of this state, well, that’s history, something that happened long ago and has been greatly exaggerated ...
Few people want to admit it directly: “We don't need your freedoms”. Freedoms are good in the form of constitutional mummies—let them be admired in a museum, the main thing is not to consider them as something alive. Who needs them to be alive? You can always go abroad, if you cannot do without them. But who will admit such reasoning? If you still have to blabber about it, it can be confined to a very pious type of conversation: "freedom is only in the soul, where there is struggle with passions; the authorities will deal with worldly affairs without us".
History did not spare Gorbachiov. No one knows who ordered the massacres in Vilnius and Tbilisi, there are no documents about it. But since he was at the head of the country, they hung it on him, perhaps rightfully so. As for the economic collapse, where, I ask, did this not happen during the transition of a state-planned, already collapsing economy? It happened in Poland with the shock therapy of Balcerowicz, in Moldova, where a third of the population moved to the West, in Ukraine, from where millions left (much less from Russia), in the Baltic countries---I will not forget the words of one Estonian minister: "In winter, it is only warm for me in the car when I go to work. And it's cold at home, and I tolerate it in the ministry." It happened even in the Eastern part of Germany, with all the massive assistance from the West (I remember Hamburg in 1993, where at every turn, there were beggars from the former GDR, not old pensioners, but healthy and young individuals). The worst of all, it seems, befell upon Gamsakhurdia-Shevardnadze’s Georgia, the most prosperous and corrupt of the republics in Soviet times. The salary could be 5 dollars or less. "Imagine," one friend told me at the time, "even wine has disappeared from our stores. Probably, since the time of Adam, this has not happened in Georgia." And in Gorbachiov's Russia, the economic decline became even more evident when the aging of the system was fought against by attempts to rejuvenate its old socialist economy. Was it all worth it? Maybe the horror didn't start in 1987, but much has been programmed 70 years earlier?[9]
I can very well understand the iron fisted patriots, heralds of unfreedom, the jubilation of being all as one, except for a few renegades. You read and just hear the latent roar that makes its way through the pathetic denunciations: "we don't need your rights; one boss is good enough for us and has always been. The boss is strict, but look at how fair he is, almost like a father." So just say it. Don't force any other song down our throats. When reproving a clumsy reformer, do not hide behind the criticism of his ineptitude, do not hesitate to say what is really bursting from your chest ...
"For you brothers are called to freedom..." [10]
10.9.22
THE LOGIC OF THE SYSTEM
Two of my texts about the late Mikhail Gorbachiov provoked the approval of some and the condemnation of others. There were more of the former than the latter, but only because of the peculiarities of my thread,[11] where it is not easy to find those who still believe that their home address is the Soviet Union, which Gorbachiov "collapsed". Especially since I don't have any Stalin fans. It's not that I would noisily slam the door on them----as long as the civilizational code of communication persists, let them worship themselves---it's just that they didn't enter my door.
I never got to the point. The essence is in the spiritual basis behind people and events. You may not believe it, but this is my position and I can't have it any other way. It is quite clear to me, not intellectually even, but internally, existentially, that the entire history of the Soviet Union was a play of transcendent forces that took root in the supposedly scientific myth of propaganda.[12] The Marxist-Leninist shell of it is only the surface. The myth erupted like lava (or passionarism, if you prefer) from the vent of an underground volcano, spilled over a sixth of the earth, infected almost half the planet with its religion, swept like a tsunami, throwing thousands of factories and collective farms to the surface, sweeping away millions of lives, and then just cooled down on his own, dissolved, and sat down in front of the TV set to watch the program it ordered. This transformation took place before my eyes, in the experience of the generation born under Stalin. I remember everything. For the previous generation, everything was still being taken very serious, but for the next generation it was already more difficult to imagine that this was actually a real faith (albeit a false faith) in some extraordinary future, which was gradually replaced----I am talking about what it was like for loyal citizens----by a patriotic set that included the Great October, the fairness of the socialist system, and the idea of being surrounded by enemies. But the faith itself, disappearing behind the horizon , faded, melted, and there was nothing to replace it.
And with the next generation, even with the same ideological set, the history of their country was reduced to a tug-of-war between politicians, to their glorious or vile personalities and deeds. The faith, for the sake of which everything was supposedly initiated and accomplished, was pushed away into the distance, was simply forgotten, written off as something that has never been. It is still perceived as a never-has-been. At the same time, the faith was very real when it made history, not only by the will of Stalin, but also by the hands and hearts of the countless Pavlik types---- Pavlik Korchagin and Pavlik Morozov[13]. The fist one became a fanatical investigator, a holy believer in the fact that the confessions he knocked out of people during the interrogations is the most final truth, later becoming a victim of this same “truth”; the other, having matured, led a column of honest informers, confident that he was serving the brightest future and his superiors. But the future belongs to time, and time has come and gone, so when the future has come, what were those now elderly Pavliks who survived, supposed to do? They themselves cannot understand what happened to them since their youth. Church raiders[14], they are now humbly standing with Easter candles, and if I were nearby, I would not even refuse to give them a light.[15]
They have not become dissidents (though some came to it close enough because they had the inclination in their souls), but where the flame once burned in these persons, in these pensioners, where hope would turn into a certitude, the willingness to make sacrifices by setting oneself up and killing others still survived. Thus Stalin's iron time, together with all the Pavliks and their era, flowed into the perestroika-Gorbachiov era. The mania, not a personal one, but a collective one, that determined the history of the country, together with the country, seeped into the ground. For isn’t it a mania striving to live under one universally binding ideology of the promised happiness of all mankind and making incalculable bloody sacrifices for its sake or justifying them?
Two of the leaders acted, in fact, according to the immanent logic of the system. In its initial period, the system was meant to grow stronger, filling itself with power, swelling with the blood it drunk, so it bought in Stalin. But then came time for the system to die, so it invited Gorbachiov. He wanted to save it through rejuvenating procedures, by means of "universal values", but for some reason everything went against his intentions. The mythocratic state organism was worn out. After all, it wasn't out of philanthropy that Khrushchiov launched de-Stalinization (Beria who represented a kind of quintessence of Stalinism, could have been in his place), but it was because he followed the same logic of saving the system. For it is not the leaders in the final analysis, however powerful they may be, who determine the system entirely, but the internal laws of developing myths. One of them, with his 30-year reign,[16] I can't even take as human; I see it rather as a boa constrictor not fully aware of the deadly contraction of its bone-breaking muscles. Now Gorbachiov personally evokes only respect and sympathy in me, but each of the two leaders, like the other leaders, like millions of people, carried out their historical mission, being inside a regime of mania, or if you prefer, inside a long-lasting case of collective insanity. This does not mean that Stalin or Beria were personally suffering from insanity. They were just following the ideological flow or were caught in its hurricane of energy, remaining pragmatists, cynics, hedonists.
At the initial stage, the state was built on the mania, in the last stage, it began recovering from it. Passionarism dried up, but the form of the state held on as if nothing had happened. There could be no other outcome than a contradiction that was doomed to become fatal for the entire construction. In the place of the country as a religion parodying Christianity, now stood only a dry skeleton, a skeleton without muscles. The system tried to build them up, dismantling its foundation, rebuilding itself in the name of already forgotten passionarist ideals. However, no peaceful dismantling of such a regime could take place except from above or from within; anti-Gorbachiov activists on the left still cannot understand this.
In Stalin's place, it is actually possible to imagine another one, similar to him (even a freak spawned by Trotsky, Robespierre-Dzerzhinsky[17], Bonaparte-Tukhachevsky[18], the icy Molotov[19], the enemy of the people Kosior[20]... with each individual retaining his personal characteristics, of course), as well as anyone else in the role of Gorbachiov, because ideology, the leading role of the party and so on, whatever was perceived as convention, cannot rule forever in a petrified condition. A myth is born as a living thing, grows, becomes stronger, then stagnates, and dies. Someone was expected to kickstart this dry skeleton, hoping that it would work, move, rush forward, but it staggered and collapsed. Only Marxist-Leninists, professing the eternal change of the world according to dialectic materialism, and we, Orthodox Christians, who look at the high stars, are always sure that history can be staked out at one fixed point.
Except that it is difficult to imagine anyone else in Lenin's place. He was a truly classic obsessive maniac with a full-blown program of utopian madness that infected the entire country. But for the duration of only one human lifetime.
Strangely, the teachings have changed radically, but the mania has waited in the shadows. Otherwise how, without having fallen into insanity, in full rationality, can one agree with the physical destruction of a neighboring country, with which so much is connected and intertwined? Or of any country, as a matter of fact? Explain to me, how?
Here's how. From the dark cellar of the collective soul, a familiar set of ideas-emotions that in the past held together and supported the Soviet system, ideas such as: a bright goal beyond the horizon, a hostile environment that never slumbers and wants to destroy us, demonization of an enemy brought out of the depths of the subconscious, rallying around a leader who is never wrong, the belief that we can only do good for we ourselves are undoubtedly good people, and even the obligatory emphasis on compassion for the oppressed brethren (the working class under capitalism, now Donbas and brothers in Russian-speaking Ukraine), which serves as an emotional nourishment. Add the persecution of national-traitors,[21] the fifth column, recruiting the Church, even though it was persecuted in the past, into the workings of the enforced policy, which is happening today on a national scale. This program is part of a well-oiled, fat propaganda machine, and it will spin until the wounds of war become too sore and festering.
No matter how it all ends, even a complete military victory of this "antichrist’s good", such a victory cannot last forever. It will fall apart, and its fall will be great. Everyone will be ashamed, like the many hundred-year-old Pavliks have been made uncomfortable. Another perestroika will come, and a new glasnost will occur. But the demons will lurk again. Until they find a new role and a workable form. Which could also become the hatred of the vanquished, which sooner or later will break through. And how.
But what objections can be heard by whoever wants to believe that the Lord once descended upon the land of Israel to make Russia a stronghold of traditional values and tank building, subduing under its foot all enemy and foe?
All footnotes have been added by the translator.
[1] Alcoholism having reached the proportions of a mass epidemic by the mid-1980s, Gorbachiov imposed a form of prohibition. An illegal commerce of moonshine vodka developed as a perverse effect, with some traffickers selling a poisonous product.
[2] Several high-ranking Soviet leaders had this name.
[3] One of the most powerful and long-lasting old-guard Soviet leaders, member of the Politburo of the USSR for decades and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan between 1960 and 1962 and 1964 and 1986.
[4] The clandestine press.
[5] Gospel according to Mathew, 3: 9.
[6] Georgian leader Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953) was the longest-lived and most influential head of Stalin's security police services. At the death of Stalin, He formed a triumvirate with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov that briefly led the USSR before being removed by the more liberal Khrushchiov.
[7] Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), was a well-known ultra-conservative monarchist philosopher.
[8] The author no longer was at risk when he published in Russkaya Mysl’, because he was living and publishing abroad. Russian Thought (Russian Mind or Russian Reflection), was the major weekly newspaper in the Russian language outside of the Soviet bloc. Originally a liberal magazine published in Russia since the 19th century, then in exile until 1927, it was relaunched in Paris, in 1947. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the more scholarly quarterly Vestnik RHD (Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement) and Posev, Russkaya Mysl’ became the beacon of independent critical thinking, litterature and political journalism in the Russian language. Dissidents and intellectuals such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sakharov, Mikhail Koryakov, Vladimir Maksimov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Mikhail Geller, Sergey Dovlatov, Alexander Nekrich, Victor Suvorov, French Slavist Alain Besancon and the author of this article left a mark on the history of Russkaya Mysl’. The publication, now a monthly magazine is still published in Paris but has become much tamer towards power in Russia.
[9] The author alludes to the NEP, the New Economic Policy introduced by the Soviet Government in 1921 that replaced the campaign of collectivization of all private property and businesses with a mixed economy allowing private individuals to own small and medium sized enterprises. Stalin abandoned the policy in 1928 when he started planning aggressive, violent collectivization of businesses and all lands.
[10] Epistle of Paul to the Galatians 3: 13.
[11] Posted on the author’s pages in social media.
[12] Soviet propaganda took the Marxist affirmation of its science-oriented philosophy to the point that the Soviet education system and media claimed on almost every occasion that every one of its affirmations---above all its interpretation of history, politics and and society---was based on science.
[13] Pavlik Morozov was a boy who was made into an iconic hero of the Soviet Union for helping arrest his father, allegedly a criminally subversive element, then being murdered by vengeful relatives of the father. Statues of Pavlik Morozov, presented as a model to all Soviet children, were erected to the boy-“martyr” throughout the country. Except for cooperating with the authorities when interrogated about some illegal activities conducted by a relative, most of the official myth of Pavlik Morozov was revealed to be a fiction. Pavel (or Pavlik) Korchagin is the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky's 1932 novel How Steel Was Tempered and several films based on it. Immediately after the publication of the novel, Pavel Korchagin, whose youth during the Civil War and the NEP was spent in the struggle for communism and the happiness of the working people, became an ideal for several generations of Soviet people to emulate. The novel, considered one of the most influential works of Communist literature, is very autobiographical. The author, Ostrovsky fought during the civil war in a combat unit of the Che-Ka (ancestor of the NKVD and the KGB) and became a commissar.
[14] Members of youth organizations or other teenagers were unofficially encouraged by the state to organize riots outside of churches to mock and harass believers as they walked in and out of a religious building. These kind o raids were carried out systematically during the Holy Week services and Easter night .
[15] During the rare services when everyone holds a burning candle (memorial services for the dead, and several Holy Week services, especially Easter matins), the people closest to candle stands light their candles on those candles already burning there aand pass on the light to the people behind them and those persons pass on their light to others and so on.
[16] It is Stalin who is alluded to.
[17] Founder of the TCHE-Ka, ancestor of the KGB.
[18] General of the Soviet army (nicknamed « the Red Napoleon » by the foireign press and executed in 1937 with three out of five Soviet Field Marshalls).
[19] Born 1890 and died 1986, he was one of the USSR’s longest serving cabinet members (1930-1957) remembered more as head of Soviet diplomacy.
[20] Stanisław Kosior was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), executed during the Great Purge in 1939.
[1] Alcoholism having reached the proportions of a mass epidemic by the mid-1980s, Gorbachiov imposed a form of prohibition. An illegal commerce of moonshine vodka developed as a perverse effect, with some traffickers selling a poisonous product.
[2] Several high-ranking Soviet leaders had this name.
[3] One of the most powerful and long-lasting old-guard Soviet leaders, member of the Politburo of the USSR for decades and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan between 1960 and 1962 and 1964 and 1986.
[4] The clandestine press.
[5] Gospel according to Mathew, 3: 9.
[6] Georgian leader Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953) was the longest-lived and most influential head of Stalin's security police services. At the death of Stalin, He formed a triumvirate with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov that briefly led the USSR before being removed by the more liberal Khrushchiov.
[7] Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), was a well-known ultra-conservative monarchist philosopher.
[8] The author no longer was at risk when he published in Russkaya Mysl’, because he was living and publishing abroad. Russian Thought (Russian Mind or Russian Reflection), was the major weekly newspaper in the Russian language outside of the Soviet bloc. Originally a liberal magazine published in Russia since the 19th century, then in exile until 1927, it was relaunched in Paris, in 1947. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the more scholarly quarterly Vestnik RHD (Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement) and Posev, Russkaya Mysl’ became the beacon of independent critical thinking, litterature and political journalism in the Russian language. Dissidents and intellectuals such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sakharov, Mikhail Koryakov, Vladimir Maksimov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Mikhail Geller, Sergey Dovlatov, Alexander Nekrich, Victor Suvorov, French Slavist Alain Besancon and the author of this article left a mark on the history of Russkaya Mysl’. The publication, now a monthly magazine is still published in Paris but has become much tamer towards power in Russia.
[9] The author alludes to the NEP, the New Economic Policy introduced by the Soviet Government in 1921 that replaced the campaign of collectivization of all private property and businesses with a mixed economy allowing private individuals to own small and medium sized enterprises. Stalin abandoned the policy in 1928 when he started planning aggressive, violent collectivization of businesses and all lands.
[10] Epistle of Paul to the Galatians 3: 13.
[11] Posted on the author’s pages in social media.
[12] Soviet propaganda took the Marxist affirmation of its science-oriented philosophy to the point that the Soviet education system and media claimed on almost every occasion that every one of its affirmations---above all its interpretation of history, politics and and society---was based on science.
[13] Pavlik Morozov was a boy who was made into an iconic hero of the Soviet Union for helping arrest his father, allegedly a criminally subversive element, then being murdered by vengeful relatives of the father. Statues of Pavlik Morozov, presented as a model to all Soviet children, were erected to the boy-“martyr” throughout the country. Except for cooperating with the authorities when interrogated about some illegal activities conducted by a relative, most of the official myth of Pavlik Morozov was revealed to be a fiction. Pavel (or Pavlik) Korchagin is the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky's 1932 novel How Steel Was Tempered and several films based on it. Immediately after the publication of the novel, Pavel Korchagin, whose youth during the Civil War and the NEP was spent in the struggle for communism and the happiness of the working people, became an ideal for several generations of Soviet people to emulate. The novel, considered one of the most influential works of Communist literature, is very autobiographical. The author, Ostrovsky fought during the civil war in a combat unit of the Che-Ka (ancestor of the NKVD and the KGB) and became a commissar.
[14] Members of youth organizations or other teenagers were unofficially encouraged by the state to organize riots outside of churches to mock and harass believers as they walked in and out of a religious building. These kind o raids were carried out systematically during the Holy Week services and Easter night .
[15] During the rare services when everyone holds a burning candle (memorial services for the dead, and several Holy Week services, especially Easter matins), the people closest to candle stands light their candles on those candles already burning there aand pass on the light to the people behind them and those persons pass on their light to others and so on.
[16] It is Stalin who is alluded to.
[17] Founder of the TCHE-Ka, ancestor of the KGB.
[18] General of the Soviet army (nicknamed « the Red Napoleon » by the foireign press and executed in 1937 with three out of five Soviet Field Marshalls).
[19] Born 1890 and died 1986, he was one of the USSR’s longest serving cabinet members (1930-1957) remembered more as head of Soviet diplomacy.
[20] Stanisław Kosior was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), executed during the Great Purge in 1939.