VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
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young men and seven maidens. The Phoenician Moloch, the
Chinese dragon, and almost all other kindred monsters also required
human sacrifices. But the KGB is different: it needs not only human
victims but ideological fuel as well to keep its motor running. With–
out such fUel- for example, in the Khrushchev era and in the early
phase of the Brezhnev period - that monster's motor has often idled
and given signs of stopping.
The KGB is the kind of machine that cannot function produc–
tively without inspiration. Communist ideology, the type of fuel
consumed by the KGB's predecessors, yielded a marked growth of
productivity in the late thirties. But it had lost much of its potency by
World War II, and Stalin, by way of emergency procedure, tried to
replace it with another kind of ideological fuel: great-power national–
ism. He died, however, before the switchover was fully effected, and
his successor sharply reduced deliveries of ideological fUel- not only
to the KGB but to the nation as a whole.
It is from the KGB's natural and inevitable ally among the
right-wing oppositionists - the Russian nationalist chauvinists - that
it is making ready to get (and is already beginning to get) its
ideological fuel. In and of itself, neo-Stalinism cannot serve as such a
fuel, if only because in the Stalin era people were sacrificed in the
name of an ideology which no longer inspires anyone. In the view of
the Russian nationalists , that ideology-along with other ideas of
Western origin - is contraindicated for Russia. So it is that in the
current attempt to rehabilitate him, the Stalin one hears about is
only the Stalin of this last ten years: the military leader and the con–
sistently reactionary anti-Semite ("Black-Hundreder") who fought
the good fight against Zionism and cosmopolitanism. In the current
situation in the USSR, the very fact of an alliance between two
kindred opposition groups-one political (the KGB, the Armed
Forces, the neo-Stalinists, und the Party Central Committee) and
the other ideological (the Russian Party, as the modern-day Russian
chauvinists prefer to label themselves) - means that that alliance is
the most likely successor to the current Soviet regime. And already,
in the present-day Regency period, its influence is almost total.
It is precisely this dual sovereignty - the alliance between the
old, weakened evil and the new evil gathering strength - that was
not taken into account by American political leaders at the turning
point in Russian history . The futile gestures of the Carter-Brzezinski
administration were aimed at old Russian leaders who were no
