WRITERS IN EXILE
499
Stanislaw Baranczak, and Erazim Kohak have made attempts to
identify the phenomenon of opposition, or the dissident move–
ment, in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, I will
try rather to concentrate my brief remarks on the phenomenon
of the ideological empire. We have no experience, no historical
analogies, on the basis of which we might make predictions with
any degree of plausibility-predictions about how long a social
organism, an empire whose only basis of legitimacy is its ide–
ology, can survive in conditions where this ideology is almost
completely evaporated and nobody takes it seriously any more.
It was, to be sure, a tremendous achievement to reconstruct a
multinational empire on a completely different basis. Lenin, in
this respect, might be compared to St. Augustine, who, as it
were, ideologized the empire, gave it a doctrinal basis. Certainly, I
don't want to stretch this analogy. After all, St. Augustine was a
great philosopher and a great writer, whereas Lenin, as a philo–
sopher and a writer, was rather an inept mediocrity-to put it
charitably-though he was certainly a great genius of ideological
manipulation. And whereas, as a practical politician, St. Augus–
tine was a minor figure, Lenin was indeed the real founder of an
empIre.
Now, it's a curious thing to observe that the empire-or,
rather, empires-whose legitimacy and claims were explicitly
based on the Christian doctrine have all fallen apart. But the
doctrine itself-Christianity as an idea-has not died out at all.
On the other hand, the great empire dominated by a sect pro–
fessing the Marxist ideology has not fallen apart, but its doctrine,
we may fairly say, is dead. And the price, or a part of the price,
for this reconstruction of the empire was really to deprive this
empire of its Russian nature. I think it is fair to say that it is a
Soviet and not a Russian empire. Even so, it is perfectly true that
it is destroying the national characters of Lithuania, of Georgia,
of Armenia; it is also true that it has destroyed the Russian charac–
ter as well-and very thoroughly. At a certain moment we even
believed that this empire had managed to destroy completely
the autonomous, spiritual forces of Russian life-the life that
Russia had inherited from the Tartar political tradition.
It
is
important to remember this distinction whenever we think of
Russia's future destiny.
If
we take any book written in Russian,
we know immediately after the first few sentences whether it is a
