The Anti-Communistic Communism of Alexander Zinoviev

Abstract

In the article the author attempts to study the phenomenon of paradoxical inner contradiction of many texts (both scholarly and literary) written by Alexander Zinoviev – outstanding Russian thinker of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Principal of paradoxical combination of incongruous statements, what could be seen as mere violation of the basic law of formal logic, seems rather astonishing even though A. Zinoviev himself was an outstanding and word-recognized logician. The use of this principal is demonstrated in his public self-presentation that allows to identify him as “an anti-communistic communist”, though he sometimes called himself “romantic communist”. It is important to remember that A. Zinoviev never considered himself to be either denouncer or apologist of the social order that he called “real communism”, having in mind the USSR. He viewed understanding as independent intellectual process equally distanced from emotional approach and moral assessments.