The Fundamentalist Utopia of Gennady Shimanov from the 1960s-1980s

Abstract

During the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev between 1964 and 1982, Soviet cultural ideology underwent barely visible yet crucially important ideological changes. The staunch Marxist-Leninist paradigm succumbed to a more pragmatic orientation. Self-sustaining existence at cold peace with society became a principal objective of the ruling elite. Evaporation of an official ideology prompted a compromise with the upper levels of society, and drove the regime toward a reluctant recognition of some new ideological schemes, combining Leninism and nationalistic populism. (1) There are various points of comparison between late Imperial Russia, modern Russia after 2000, and the advent of nationalism during the Brezhnev era. In the late nineteenth century, when the model of the enlightened monarchy was exhausted in Imperial Russia, the tsar and his camarilla were impelled to increasingly employ populist rhetoric and promote an ideological model of the people's monarchy, exemplified by Slavophiles and their followers. (2) The decrepit Soviet Empire reflected a similar intellectual context in its final decades. In both cases, a tangible opposition from the right appeared, painfully observing what it saw as pernicious changes and large-scale societal decline. The revolutionaries from the right, (3) both in late Imperial Russia and in Brezhnev's USSR, manifested a blend of xenophobia and Orthodox pietism under the ideological umbrella of Slavophilism. The latter served as a referent ideology and a guiding star for many dissidents. (4) In Russia today, the agreement between the siloviki (security and military) group, certain oligarchs, church hierarchy, and radical right-wing ideologists is obvious. (5) The Eurasian Movement, headed by Aleksandr Dugin, has been especially influential among top political leadership, and is becoming popular in academia and the mass media. (6) The most recent resurgence of modern Slavophilism can be seen Mikhail Iur'ev's provocative text The Fortress Russia (2004), which suggests economic and political isolationism, closure of cultural and academic ties with the West, introduction of an old nonmetric system of measure, rejection of the principle of separation of powers, implantation of a military perspective and rigorous Orthodoxy, and promotion of the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome. (7) Iur'ev is no political outsider, but the President of Eurofinance Group, one of the richest Russians, former Deputy Speaker of the State Duma, and an active member of Dugin's Eurasian Movement. All different tendencies of modern traditionalism, Slavophilism and religious fundamentalism can be grouped together under the banner of the Russian idea, (8) or, more specifically, the Russian Doctrine, as formulated in 2005 and supported by conservative intellectuals of Orthodox background such as Egor Kholmogorov, Mikhail Leont'ev, Dmitri Rogozin, and Natalia Narochnitskaia. (9) This ideology is based on the revised fundamentals of Messianism: uniqueness, the spirituality of the people in contrast to the character of the West, the need for a strong state, economic autonomy, Orthodoxy as the spiritual core of the people, and Russia as the Northern--the Eurasian--civilization, challenging the corrupt Atlantic civilization. The Doctrine movement, having amassed considerable economic and political capital and provided itself with the quasi-academic school of studies on conservatism, is a serious political player, which gives another chance to Soviet underground fundamentalists. (10) Since 2000, former conservative dissidents like Gennady Shimanov, Leonid Borodin and Vladimir Osipov have become noticeably more active in political journalism and politics and have published memoirs and collections of articles. (11) This present study concerns the ideological stirrings of this movement during the Soviet period. The Setting for Fundamentalist Revival Slavophilism and nostalgia for old rural Russia were espoused by Soviet intellectuals shortly after Nikita Khrushchev's dismissal from power in 1964. …