BORIS PARAMONOV
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end
Nicholas Berdyaev had written earlier that socialism actually is an ex–
tension, or a different version, of that same notion of a bourgeois society.
Socialism's value system, according to Berdyaev, is not very different from
that of bourgeois society: it differs only in its ostensible concern with ajust
way of distributing material wealth. For the Frankfurt School, however, the
idea of socialism as a derivation from the essence of the bourgeois never
surfaced. Their leftist leanings made them blind to the actual results of
socialist practice. It was Russia that really got to feel the effects of this
practice, most of all the Russian countryside, sacrificed for the myth about
progress as a "struggle against the forces of nature," a myth similar to that of
the "bourgeois logic of domination." It was not necessary for Rasputin, Belov,
and Astafiev to read Horkheimer and Adorno to see that same motif in
totalitarianism - hostility towards the organic structure of existence, towards
the very soil itself, towards Marx's so-called "idiocy of the village." For them,
this realization is not a result of some academic exercise; it is the stuff of their
childhood nightmares, the memories of the horrors of collectivization. For the
country writers, communism (socialism) is not so much a political program as
a painfully obvious hatred toward the earth, its rivers, people, and creatures.
It
is a phenomenon of an ontological not a political dimension. For them, the
Soviet agricultural crisis did not come about through bad management; it was
a result ofcommunism's innate hostility toward the primordial sources of life
itself. In their understanding ofcommunism's most basic nature, its priorities
and results, the country writers are unquestionably correct. In support of
their argument are the very real sufferings of those who lived under
communism, as well as the sophisticated theories of those who studied it.
Why then does the ideological platform of the country writers include
an anti-Semitic streak? Does a position that opposes the excesses of modern
civilization have to be "organically" supplemented by a healthy dose of anti–
Semitism?
It
is ridiculous to even ask these questions in the light of the history
of German fascism, which hid behind a myth about "blood and soil," but
actually exhibited a fanatical devotion to the practice of technological expan–
sionism. Albert Speer says in his memoirs that Hitler's tyranny outdid all
other tyrannies simply because he came to possess the actual technological
means to promote his cause. Persecution of the Jews as the hypothetical
carriers of the spirit ofa groundless, "non-national" civilization (here we must
recall
Spengler's differentiation between civilization and culture) turned into a
hysterical manifestation of that same "non-organic," life-alienating spirit the
Jews were accused of possessing.
It
would seem that we would have learned
from this experience; but as we all know, you do not learn from someone
else's mistakes.
What do the Jews represent for country writers? They are the em–
bodiment of everything urban, urban civilization, mindset, and character. In
