500
PARTISAN REVIEW
Russian book or a Soviet book written in the Russian language.
We know that if the latter is the case, thi s book could have been
written in Estonian or in Uzbek, and it would have been exactly
the same book.
This ideology is dead in the sense that it is not independent,
viable, influencing the political decisions of the rulers of this
empire, and in the sense that nobody takes it seriously, as a real
reason for loyalty towards this regime or its leaders.
It
is true, on
the other hand, that the Soviet leaders apparently do not know
any other idiom in which to express themselves besides this
Leninist-Stalinist jargon. They use this jargon naturally and
automatically without thinking of its grotesqueness when con–
fronted with reality-a reality that they simply call "annexation."
They call liberation "dynocide, " "class struggle," and so on. In
this sense, they internalize the Leninist-Stalinist jargon, but the
poverty of the language has not much to do with, I would say,
the viability of the ideology . Bes ides, Al exander Zinoviev, the
famous Russian writer and philosopher now in Germany, argues
that the Soviet population accepts this ideology without resis–
tance-not, of course, because it really believes in its content,
but because, as he himself put it, the Soviet system really has
succeeded in producing what is called "the Soviet man" or " the
socialist man, " an empty, will-less, ignorant mannequin who
accepts without resistance this ideological noise-a noise whose
only real meaning consists in showing the people who is in
power.
But Zinoviev 's assessment of the situation is too pessimistic.
The picture is not as bleak as that.
If
what he says is true, then
we could expect the ideology to remain rigid and unchanged.
Nor would there be the slightest effort on the part of the political
apparatus to adjust it or adapt it for the purpose of reaching a
minimal level of communication with the population, because
the content in this case would have no importance.
The present, the actually binding, official state ideology–
and I don ' t have in mind only what we can read in the editorial
pages of
Prav da
or in the textbooks of "Diama t" in the Soviet
Union, but also the ideology tha t is served to the people through
various means, such as films-not only is this ideology not
codified, in contrast with the Stalinist one, not only are its borders
unclear, but also and above all , it is different in content. It is
really, one may say, a synthetic ideology-something that the
