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PARTISAN REVIEW
the country prose mythology, it was the city that killed the country. For the
country writers, communism itselfwas born in an urban, rationalist mind, and
the Jew is an allegory of this urban spirit, an irresponsible experimenter de–
void of all feeling. According to the country writers, Jewry is not a national–
ity; it is an existential state. For them a Jew is a creature deprived of all
normal biological, lifelike characteristics, in whose veins flows ink instead of
blood. It seems that all the country writers have to do is to substitute for the
word "Jew" the word "communist," and everything
will
fall into its place for
them
The most highly-publicized expression of these sentiments has probably
been the serialized appearance in
Nash Savremennik
of Igor Shafarevich's
tract, "Russophobia." Its main subject is the conflict between the "great peo–
ple" and the "small few," that, according to Shafarevich, manifested itself
during the course of any national history. He sets out to prove that there are
two courses a nation's historical development can take. The first, a progres–
sive one, is always organic in nature: it obeys certain primordial laws of be–
ing and is characterized by the integration of a set of ideas that serves as a
rallying point for the national consciousness. The second is inspired by ab–
stract theoretical ideals forced upon the nation by a select few.
It
is this sec–
ond course ofhistorical development that manifests itself in all sorts of "great
leaps" and revolutions. And it is the "small few," usually a sect of utopians
and political theoreticians far removed from life itself, who serve as the main
instigators of this second, non-organic course. Shaferevich insists that these
"small few" are always a group whose motivation is bound to be purely ide–
ological, distant from the mainstream of the national consciousness. Examples
of the "small few" that he cites include the
philasophes
of the French Revolu–
tion, the young Hegelians, whose ranks included Karl Marx, and the pre-
1917 Russian intelligentsia. Then Shafarevich goes on
to
claim that in the
Soviet Union of today the "small few" are the Jews, and not only the Jews
residing in the country but also those who emigrated abroad and whose in–
tellectual activity undermines and threatens the very existence of Russia:
hence the title of his work, "Russophobia."
In October of 1989 Shafarevich published an article in
Navy Mir,
a
long-time bastion of Soviet liberalism, "Two Roads Towards the Same
Abyss," whose appearance signals
Navy Mir's
own gradual turn to a sort of
cultural nationalism. In the piece, Shafarevich claims that the dominant
characteristic of contemporary civilization, both in the communist and the
capitalist camps, is a certain type of technological utopia and its destructive
results, man's ultimate submission to overwhelming technology and the in–
evitable ecological crisis brought on by this technology. This technological
utopia allegedly deprives man of all motivation to pursue such secondary
goals as political equality and human rights.
Let us, however, return to the country writers. The whole point of the
