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ALEXANDER YANOV AND 'THE RUSSIAN NEW RIGHT'
It isn't clear from Solzhenitsyn's account what the objection to Dementyev's article was but an explanation of sorts is given by Alexander Yanov. The account I gave of the first of the controversial 'Young Guard' articles - Mikhail Lobanov's Educated Shopkeepers - was taken from Yanov's book The Russian New Right which also contained the argument I quoted earlier that Solzhenitsyn's characterisation of the revolutionary Alexander Parvus in August 1914 was antisemitic.
Yanov had been a free lance journalist writing in the 1960s for the legal, censored press, mainly the Komsomol journal Molodoi Kommunist ('Young Communist' - if these articles should come before the eyes of any Russian readers they will quickly see that I'm not a Russian reader and my transliteration of Russian terms and names is very arbitrary). Yanov left Russia in 1974. Solzhenitsyn in an interview with the Latvian journalist, Janis Sapiets, broadcast to Russia in 1979 treats him as a typical representative of the 'third emigration', mostly Jewish and mostly leaving Russia because they wanted to. Although he regarded them as generally without significance, he singled out:
'one dangerous category which perhaps is fulfilling a historical mission. They come here not just as émigrés but as full-fledged interpreters and explainers of our country, our people, history, culture, and so on. A typical characteristic is that they very soon sense the fashion and what people want from them. At the same time, their conclusions are always extremely useful for the Communist regime in the USSR.
'SAPIETS. But can't we assume that they still, to some extent, express their own sincere views and offer their own answers to the crucial issues of Russia's fate?
'SOLZHENITSYN. I will not guess at the real motivations of this category of emigres. But just consider: those who cooperated for decades with the Communists, who were all steeped in their Little Red Book - these people are welcomed in the West as the best of friends and experts, although the academic level of many of them is that of the barber's shop. With some variations, their general line is this: to do everything they can to reconcile the Americans with Communism in the USSR, on the grounds that it is, for Americans, the least evil and even a positive phenomenon. On the other hand, they try to convince people that a Russian national renaissance, even the national existence of the Russian people, is the greatest danger for the West.
'There is a whole string of people like this - too numerous to name. For instance, take Yanov. For seventeen years he was a Communist journalist, but he was not well known to anyone. But here in America, he became a university professor. He has already published two books analyzing the USSR and extremely hostile to everything Russian. The Washington Post devoted a whole column to his article declaring that Brezhnev is a peace lover. The message of his books is: hang on to Brezhnev with all your might, support the Communist regime by trade and diplomacy and strengthen it, for it is advantageous to your Americans ...' (pp.4-5) (1)
(1) Janis Sapiets and British Broadcasting Corporation: Interview with Solzhenitsyn, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 3-11.
Yanov himself, however, claims that, like Solzhenitsyn, he was expelled. The two books Solzhenitsyn is referring to are Détente after Brezhnev (1977) and The Russian New Right (1978). But in 1976 he produced a selection of translations of essays he had published in the USSR. (2) In his introduction ('To my non-Russian reader') he justifies what he was trying to do:
'But just as the nation began to see things clearly again, the Dissident Movement was divorced from its potential mass base, from the Latent Opposition, as I call it. Having recognized Official Authority for the hostile camp that it was, the Dissidents declared themselves in open warfare with it, in dramatic disregard of two fundamental facts.
'First, that Official Authority was not a colossus with clay feet. It was powerful and firmly based, not only because it rested on the bayonets of the army and police but also because it was rooted in the age-long political culture of the people; because the barracks-type welfare system of economics it had created in the country was nothing more than the Soviet counter part of the time-honored Russian feudal cultural tradition; and because, despite all its obvious flaws and the state of semi Asiatic penury to which it had condemned its people, that system suited in principle the masses who were unenlightened and who wished to remain so.
'Second, the Dissident Movement disregarded the fact that to contend with and overthrow such an Official Authority was only possible by creating a countertradition, a counterculture, based on a broad social stratum with a vital interest in changing the political structure and the regime. The origins of every democracy the world has known and the transformation of the Japanese autocracy, the brightest event in modern history, are indisputable proof of this.
'This social base of the opposition may be called a bourgeosie, a managerial class, a farming class, "kulaks," or simply a "lower elite" - its historical form will vary. But it must be created. Otherwise, all protest will be fruitless, all sacrifice senseless, and all suffering in vain.
'The real problem of rebuilding Russia today involves not just the rejection and condemnation of Soviet power but the creation of this social base; and once it is created, helping it to view itself as an integral social whole standing in opposition to the tradition-bound, feudal-welfare mentality of the nation, and finally as a political entity in its own right, representing an alternative to the autocratic regime.
'This social base - and my own existence as its legal representative and advocate is proof of this - exists in Russia today. It is in the process of becoming aware of itself both politically and socially.' (pp.6-7. My emphases - PB)
(2) 'Social Contradictions and the Social Struggle in the Post-Stalinist USSR: Essays by Alexander Yanov', International Journal of Sociology, Vol. 6, No. 2/3, (Summer - Fall,1976), pp. 184-219.
We might remember the interesting argument of Richard Pipes I gave in the first of these articles, that what Tsarist Russia lacked was a class that had a real material/economic interest in radical change, that the 'intelligentsia' had become a caste that, like the dissidents, were motivated by sheer altruism: 'Thus it happened that in Russia the struggle for political liberty was waged from the beginning exactly in the manner that Burke felt it ought never to be waged: in the name of abstract ideals.' (3)
(3) In Church and State, No.122, Oct-Dec 2015, quoting Pipes: Russia under the old régime, p. 251.
Yanov says he was expelled after publishing an article in 'The Young Communist' about the repression of the Polish revolt in 1863 in which the analogy between Poland then and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and between the exile of Alexander Herzen then and of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 was too obvious.
The Washington Post article Solzhenitsyn refers to summarises the argument of Détente after Brezhnev as follows:
'The Yanov model of the Soviet system proceeds from the fact that the gradual development of detente in recent years has given the new class an added interest in maintaining its privileges. Breakdown of detente would lead to the replacement of the present "centrist" Brezhnev leadership by a Communist-nationalist regime, which would follow an isolationist policy and could evolve into a Russian Nazi system. The seeds of some such system were implanted long before the Communists came to power, and have let out a number of clearly discernible new shoots in recent years.' ('Averting a Soviet Drift to Nazism', Washington Post, June 8, 1977)
The theme of the Russian New Right is the emergence of this nationalist and isolationist tendency, continuous with a pre-revolutionary tradition, which could 'evolve into a Russian Nazi system'.The argument is that the tendency exists both in the nomenklatura and in the dissident movement. Among the dissidents, a leading role was played by Vladimir Osipov and his samizdat journal, Veche, which ran from 1971 to 1974 when Osipov was arrested - he had spent most of the 1960s in prison. But there was, of course, also Solzhenitsyn. Within the nomenklatura this tendency was represented by 'The Young Guard'. Hence Yanov's interest in the dispute between 'Young Guard' and Novy Mir.