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Russians and ‘Russophobes’: Antisemitism on theRussian literary sceneJosephine Woll aa Associate Professor, Department of German and Russian, Howard University, Washington DCVersion of record first published: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Josephine Woll (1989): Russians and ‘Russophobes’: Antisemitism on the Russian literary scene, SovietJewish Affairs, 19:3, 3-21

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SOVIET JEWISH AFFAIRS, vol. 19, no. 3, 1989

Russians and 'Russophobes':Antisemitism on the Russian

Literary Scene

JOSEPHINE WOLL

There is the word 'antisemitism', there is the word 'Russophobia', . . . there is theword 'chauvinist', there are the words 'nationalist' and 'fascist'. . . . When we throwterms like these around there must always be some kind of basis for it. . . . Where isthe proof of this supposed antisemitism? . . . '

This question was posed by the novelist Iury Bondarev at thesixth plenum of the board of the RSFSR Writers' Union in November1989. As co-chairman of the meeting (the other chairman was SergeyMikhalkov) Bondarev was responding to a note from the floor whichobjected to the chair's encouragement of antisemitic remarks. Hiscomment reflects a conflict that has become increasingly intense inthe last few years and which has recently received much attention inthe West.2 The main arena for the articulation of this conflict are theSoviet literary journals. The combatants include, on the 'right', Nashsovremennik, Molodaya gvardiya and Literaturnaya Rossiya and, onthe 'left', Oktyabr, Yunost, Ogonek and Sovetskaya kultura. Novymix and, to a certain extent, Literaturnaya gazeta, are the only majorliterary journals that can be described as occupying the 'middleground' insofar as they publish views from both sides. Literary topicsoften initiate these polemics; literary genres, such as reviews andcritical essays, often provide the forum for their expression.

There are many reasons for this state of affairs, beginning withthe traditional blurring of political and literary categories in Russianculture and the multiple roles literature has traditionally played in arepressive society. The complexity of this subject is rooted in Russianintellectual discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries andespecially in the traumatic events of the past seventy years. Thespecific literary component of this increasingly polarized polemicsmerits close examination. In this essay I will concentrate on the'right', whose star has risen as popular frustration with the economic

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and political situation in the USSR has mounted. The politics of the'right' embraces views as far apart as monarchism and Leninism andvarious degrees of nationalism and conservatism. The level of argu-ment ranges from personal invective to sophisticated literary analysis.

In the last two or three years prominent members of the RSFSRWriters' Union, the union as a body, and its major print vehicles havebeen accused of promoting a broad antisemitic campaign against ar-tists and writers, living and dead, within the borders of the SovietUnion and beyond. They reject such charges, at the same time accus-ing their critics of 'Russophobia'.

Nationalism, chauvinism and antisemitismRussian nationalism—pride in one's distinctive Russian identity,history, culture and religion—must be distinguished from Russianchauvinism, in which such pride becomes a bellicose sense ofsuperiority over other peoples. And Russian chauvinism, in turn, maybe xenophobic, i.e. directed against all non-Russians or 'aliens' orspecifically against Jews.

Russian chauvinism, sometimes dubbed 'radical Slavophilism',3

combines an often idealized view of Russian peasant traditions andthe . Russian Orthodox Church with a rejection of pro-Westernliberalism. Such chauvinism is expressed, for example, in frequentdiatribes against Western rock music and avant-garde art,4 incriticism of many of the economic reforms being introduced by theGorbachev regime,5 and in advocacy of a revival of 'traditional' moralvalues which will rescue Russia from its supposedly decadent condi-tion.6 Two leading representatives of 'radical Slavophilism', theliterary scholar-cum-polemicist Vadim Kozhinov and the economistMikhail Antonov, promulgate the concept of a Russian economybased on 'Russian national traditions.' For Antonov the goal ofeconomic reform is neither efficiency nor productivity but physicaland 'spiritual' health and well-being as measured by, inter alia,demographic growth, fertility rates, mortality rates, real income,popular morality and crime rates.7

Many Russians, nationalists as well as chauvinists, believe thatthe culture of the Russian people has long been at a disadvantagerelative to the cultures of other Soviet peoples. In its most acute formthis sentiment is manifested in comparing the plight of Russian na-tional culture today, which is said to be under assault by the 'pseudo-democrats' of liberalism, with the state of the Soviet Union in July1941, when it faced the Nazi threat.8 Vyacheslav Gorbachev, deputy

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editor of Molodaya gyardiya, inveighs against the 'liberal' press in totofor its attention to negative aspects of Soviet life, its publication offormerly forbidden works, and its advocacy of 'pluralism' and'democratization'; he imprecates Nabokov's avant-gardism as fervent-ly as he praises 'family' values. For Nikolay Fed Russia, which hasgiven the world more great artists and thinkers than any other andwhich has 'in a comparatively short historical period withstood twobloody wars, created a revolutionary change unprecedented inhistory, and ended man's exploitation of man', is being blackened:'Its traditions, art and literature are debased and insulted . . . Any lieis circulated, even assertions that there is some kind of Russianchauvinism on the rise.'9

None of this—whatever we may think of it—is ipso facto anti-semitic.10 Xenophobia blurs into a specifically anti-Jewish venom onlywhen the forces perceived to be harming Russia are seen as part of anoverall plan and when those behind this plan are believed to be 'theJews,' a unified and self-conscious group. In accordance with thisview, the architects of the terror of collectivization turn out to be notso much Stalin as his Jewish henchmen; Russian Orthodox churcheswere destroyed and vandalized in the 1930s mainly by Jews; and aworldwide Jewish — at times 'Judeo-Masonic'— network is perceived tobe subverting Russian values and achievements."

The distinction between Russian chauvinism and antisemitismoften disappears. When, for instance, Stanislav Kunyaev defends theterror of the 1930s as retribution for crimes against Russia—crimescommitted, he alleges, primarily by Jewish communists—the line iserased. Kunyaev repeatedly identifies those communists by theiroriginal, recognizably Jewish, surnames, implying that they chose toconceal their Jewishness behind neutral or Slavic-sounding names inorder more effectively to destroy Russia. Trotsky is almost invariablycalled by his original name of Bronshteyn or—more contemp-tuously—by his Yiddish first name of Leybke; the Jewish-soundingsurnames of all possible senior NKVD officers of the early.1930s areenumerated.12 Kunyaev refrains from identifying prominent non-Jewish Bolsheviks, who also used aliases, in similar fashion. As theliberal author Tatyana Ivanova writes:

Nash sovremennik artlessly selects as anti-heroes people with non-Russian surnameswhen, for instance, it wants to prove that neither Stalin nor Stalinism was guilty ofmass repressions . . . If the manager of an agricultural narkomat [ministry] had had aRussian surname the famine of 1933 wouldn't have taken place . . . It turns out thathe wasn't really Yakovlev but Epshteyn! Oh, Epshteyn! Well then, everything is clear.Could Epshteyn fail to harm the Russian people?!15

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At the above-mentioned meeting of the Russian Writers' UnionAnatoly Buylov stated that Jews 'appear to be the only nationalitywith an interest in [creating] dissension among us'. Here there are onechauvinistic and two antisemitic assumptions. The Russo-centric, butnot specifically anti-Jewish, assumption is that Russia is the target ofsome kind of malevolent conspiracy. The antisemitic assumptionsare, first, that there exists a monolithic Jewish national hostilitytowards Russians and, secondly, that Jews have the power to effectthis hostility in concrete acts. As 'evidence' of Jewish control of themedia Buylov compared the all-out attack in the Soviet press onPamyat with the silence that greeted the formation of a 'Zionist com-mittee' in August 1989; when Pravda's former editor, ViktorAfanasev, published a small note about this 'Zionist committee',Buylov suggests, the Jews forced his dismissal.

'Big Nation' and 'Small Nation'Some months earlier Nash sovremennik published an article by themathematician Igor Shafarevich. In the way that it proceeds from aset of Russo-centric assumptions to reach a set of antisemitic conclu-sions, Shafarevich's piece exemplifies the reasoning characteristic ofthe radical Slavophiles. Shafarevich begins by attributing to a certaingroup oisamizdat and emigre authors a negative approach to Russianhistory and the Russian national character. From their perspectiveRussian history is seen as uniquely cruel and the Russian nationalcharacter as inherently servile and suspicious of anything foreign onthe one hand and arrogantly nationalistic and messianic on the other.For these authors, Shafarevich writes, 'the cruelty of both the RussianRevolution and the Stalinist period were natural outgrowths of Rus-sian history and the Russian national character. Stalinism is tracedback through at least four centuries of Russian history.'14 InShafarevich's view, such an interpretation is aimed at portrayingRussia as a danger to the world. It sees history as 'inorganic',mechanical, capable of being shaped by human intention, and essen-tially the responsibility of elites; it rejects the 'organic' view thathistory develops through a complex evolution of social, technological,moral and cultural norms which grow out of previous history.

Up to this point Shafarevich's ideas are Russo-centric but cer-tainly legitimate grounds for argument. What happens next? Borrow-ing the concept of a 'Big Nation' (bolshoy narod) and a 'Small Nation'(maly narod) from an analysis by Augustin Cochin of the FrenchRevolution, Shafarevich describes the 'Small Nation' as

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an elitist group whose essential beliefs are antithetical to those of the people as awhole. For the 'Small Nation' regards everything that has organically developed.dur-ing the nation's history—its religion, moral principles, governmental system and en-tire way of life —as alien and ridiculous, as something that must be relentlesslyeradicated. The 'Small Nation' totally lacks any spiritual ties with the people as awhole and any contact with the reality of its surrounding life [emphasis added].

This 'Small Nation' is composed of people who claim to bemembers of the intelligentsia and the dissident movement. In fact,Shafarevich asserts a posteriori, that cannot be —the bulk of the in-telligentsia is at one with the people whereas these individuals arefilled with hatred for the people: 'Since hatred for one nation is usual-ly associated with a heightened sense of belonging to another nation,it is quite plausible to argue that our authors are influenced by apowerful force that is rooted in national feelings.' Not to mincewords, they are Jews. 'Jewish national emotions are putting not justour country but the whole world into a fever, affecting disarmamenttalks, trade pacts and international contact between scholars and pro-voking demonstrations, sit-down strikes, e tc ' Shafarevich argues in-ductively, from results to 'causes.' There are demonstrations andstrikes.. Their causes cannot be objective circumstances (in any event,Shafarevich does not consider that possibility). Therefore they mustbe provoked. Who could benefit from provoking them? Those whohate Russia and wish to see her weak. Who feels such hatred forRussia? Jews. QED.

For Bondarev, no doubt, neither Shafarevich's articles norBuylov's remarks are proof of antisemitism; for most of us they willsuffice.

Opposition to pluralismAntisemitism is not an invariable part of the rich and diverse literarydebate in Soviet publications today. Where it does impinge on thatdebate, however, it consistently appears in connection with a nexus ofinterrelated concepts—pluralism, emigration and the contrastingprinciples of 'cosmopolitanism' and pochvennichestvo, the lattersignifying a sense of belonging to and being rooted in one's native soil.

According to many of the radical Slavophile critics, genuinepluralism is of questionable value in itself if it means the free competi-tion of 'different . . . and entirely contradictory points of view, tastesand predilections and implies rejection of the main idea which unifiesthe Soviet people, of traditional spiritual values, and of deviationfrom the main road of our history.'15 In any event, what is being

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touted as pluralism is in fact despotism. Only certain kinds of thoughtare given free expression. Pluralism—which translates into glasnost inliterary and press matters—is confined only to spokesmen for the'liberals.' They would, if they could, suppress those who disagree withthem and in fact they do: they have managed to keep, for instance,the programme of Pamyat out of the press for 'nearly five years ofsupposed pluralism.'16

One of the younger and more sophisticated spokesmen for theright, the critic Vladimir Bondarenko, rejects the motto of the'pluralists', Inogo putt net (No other way) because it suggests there isonly one path to restructuring, that proposed by a certain group ofeconomists, politicians and historians. Its variant, Inogo ne dano (Noother way is available), is the title of a collection of articles by leadingliberals. It is restrictive, once again imposing a single model ofdevelopment on society, and it is used by supporters of 'elitistdemocracy' and 'elitist glasnost'. For Bondarenko the real division isnot between left and right, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, but betweenthe power of elites and the power of the people.17

No less meretricious than their support of pluralism is theliberals' defence of human rights. They defend only the rights of'their' sort of people, not the rights of Pamyat members or con-tributors to Moskovsky literator, the organ of the Moscow branch ofthe RSFSR Writers' Union. 'They cry "Pluralism!"—and stifle otheropinions. They adorn themselves with the bright clothes of knights ofdemocracy in order to make their public denunciations sound moreattractive. They swear by glasnost — and castrate it.'18

These new censors are people who have at heart 'their ownspecific interests', interests far removed from those of the nation as awhole. They are able to control paper supplies. Thus they allocate toOgonek enough for three million copies while withholding paperfrom Moskovsky literator; they stock the (liberal) House of Cinemaand newspapers of the Jewish cultural centres while depriving theorgan of the Moscow writers' organization; they have the power tokeep Solzhenitsyn out of the press, precisely because he has issuedwarnings about such specious pluralism. (Kazintsev makes no attemptto reconcile this charge with the many 'liberal' defences of Solzhenit-syn, not to mention the publication of substantial portions of theGulag in Novy mir and the forthcoming publication of March 1917and August 1914 in, respectively, the Leningrad journals Neva andZvezda.)

Nikolay Fed, in two lengthy articles on the current state of the

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arts, likewise contends that the vaunted pluralism of the liberals isfraudulent. The liberals, he argues, are the real exclusionists, tolerat-ing only one line of thought. Fed cites as an example an art historian'scall for liberating art from social demands and claims that such ar-tistic pluralism means 'denial of the realistic traditions for the sake ofthe avant-garde and pre-avant-garde and deprives art of its social andnational sources.'19 This argument is used against virtually all non-realist painters, from Kandinsky and Chagall to recent emigres suchas Shemyakin (as well as writers like Nabokov). Fed and critics of histype disregard the fact that those who advocate such freedom fromsocial demands specifically do not seek to exclude other forms of art.

The threat of 'Russophobia'Stanislav Kunyaev, who in August 1989 succeeded Sergey Vikulov aseditor of Nash sovremennik, equates pluralism with 'Russophobia'.He can find no other explanation for the fact that only the Russiannationalist movement is repressed and only Pamyat condemned,while the nationalism of Latvians, Estonians and others is viewed withtolerance and understanding. For Kunyaev Pamyat, despite its ex-tremism, is the Russian equivalent of the Baltic national fronts.

It is the Jews who are to blame for this pernicious threat toRussia. Foreign fads may be innocuous; they may even encourage ap-preciation for one's own culture and tastes. 'But some enthusiasms arenot entirely innocent and can even give rise to mass psychosis . . .'The rock music broadcast by the BBC's Russian Service, for instance,is such a de-stabilizing and noxious influence. And the disc jockeyresponsible for this assault on Russian sanity turns out to be one 'SevaNovgorodtsev, known in real life as Vsevolod Borisovich Levinshteyn. . . Oh you, Seva! Oh you, Levinshteyn!'20

Kunyaev and Kozhinov attribute remarkable power over Russianculture to what in the West would be called the Jewish lobby.Kozhinov claims, for instance, that for virtually as long as the Sovietstate has existed classic Russian literature has been censored of anyantisemitic nuances. So-called comprehensive editions are in fact in-complete: references to the 'Jewish question' are regularly excised.21

Kunyaev condemns censorship of antisemitic lines in, for instance,Pushkin and rightly so. Yet he brands as 'Russophobic' similar linespertaining to Russians and sees nothing wrong with excising them.Thus, when a liberal critic cites Lermontov's bitter characterizationof Russia as 'the land of slaves, the land of masters,' Kunyaev seeks todiscredit the authenticity of the citation: 'Incidentally, there is to this

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day no definite evidence that Lermontov wrote these words.'22

Kozhinov claims that a tradition of silence vis-a-xris Jews took rootin Russian artistic literature, especially after the Bolsheviks brandedantisemitism non-progressive. Citing an article written by DavidZaslavsky in 1923, 'The Jews in Russian literature', Kozhinov con-cludes that Zaslavsky (and later like-minded critics) equated authorialsilence with antisemitism, so that lack of mention became tanta-mount to derogation. Thus do all Russian writers become anti-semites, either by commission or by omission.

Kozhinov finds that these same tactics are used today against the'nationalist' writers —Viktor Astafev, Vasily Belov, StanislavKunyaev, Iury Kuznetsov, Valentin Rasputin et al. 'No one objects,'he writes,

when these and other writers write about pernicious political, ideological and scholar-ly figures or the activities of any other nationality but as soon as the talk turns toJewish figures, accusations of antisemitism, chauvinism, Black Hundredism, evenfascism pour out.25

There may indeed be a higher level of sensitivity towards antisemiticcomments, given the history of Russian-Jewish relations, but Kozhi-nov seems to have forgotten, for example, the outrage evoked notlong ago by Astafev's depiction of Georgians. At the USSR Writers'Union congress in the spring of 1986 the Georgian delegation was soangry it walked out of the meeting en bloc. Thus it turns out that Jewsare the real chauvinists: claiming to be pluralists, they will brook nocriticism directed at them.

'Rootlessness' and pochvennichestvoKozhinov considers it hypocritical for critics to praise the Russianclassics (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, etc.) despite their antisemitism,yet to reproach today's writers for being antisemites. This ismisleading. First, critical admiration for the great Russian writers ofthe nineteenth century does not as a rule disregard their antisemitism.Secondly, by equating modern bigotry with the prejudices common-place a century, or more ago, Kozhinov implies that the role of theJews within the dominant Russian culture has undergone no changes.Kozhinov quotes Chekhov (writing in 1897) to the effect that mostliterary critics are Jewish and therefore alien to the essential Russianspirit. (One can find such comments in Chekhov's writings, as well asremarks wholly different in spirit.) What would happen, he asksrhetorically, if someone wrote something similar nowadays? Kozhinovmakes no mention of the historical context which in 1897, and for

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many decades before, imposed restrictions on where and how Jewscould live, study and work—and therefore their relationship with the'essential Russian spirit.' If, as Kozhinov would have it on Chekhov'sauthority, Jews 'see in the Russian neither more nor less than a boringstranger,' what does he make of Mikhail Gershenzon's seminal workon Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky's on Tolstoy, or Boris Eykhenbaum'son Gogol?

Such tendentious use of quotation is characteristic of the polemi-cal approach of the radical right. 'Let us be objective,' Kunyaevwrites, 'The idea of some sort of unavoidable enmity of the Jewish na-tion towards other peoples originated not only in the heads of fascistsand the Black Hundreds—it originated first of all in the heads of thefounders of Zionism.'24 He cites a fragment of Bialik's lengthy prose-poem Megillat ha-Esh (Scroll of Fire) from a 1914 volume of transla-tions to which the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky wrote aforeword. At the turn of the century there was, of course, a Jewish na-tionalist movement which was sometimes implacably hostile to othernations; Bialik among others gave it voice. But from nine chapters ofa 'complex, occasionally obscure, Romantic allegory of national andpersonal trauma,'25 Kunyaev extracts a twelve-line excerpt and pre-sents it as a paradigmatic cry for vengeance. He ignores the poeticcontext (it is taken from a heavily symbolic section on the conflict be-tween personified figures of Wrath and Hope) and writes as thoughthis poetic call to destruction were a programmatic plank in a politi-cal agenda.

A little later in the same essay Kunyaev describes the Jewishdiaspora as 2,000 years in which all the national energy was dedicatedto preserving the 'national essence'. 'For more than that—for a full-blooded national life, national creation, great music, literature,philosophy—[Jews] simply did not have the strength, living as theydid in conditions of extreme rootlessness.' To support his interpreta-tion Kunyaev quotes Chagall, who in 1935 wrote that 'Our monothe-ism cost us dear. In its name Jews had to refuse to look at nature withtheir eyes, not merely with their souls.' That Chagall was writingabout the paucity of great Jewish visual artists, because of the biblicalinjunction against graven images, is clear even from Kunyaev's ownsubsequent reference to the lack of 'plastic' Jewish art in museums—but he chooses to use Chagall's words as proof of the aesthetic impo-verishment of Jewish culture.26

'Rootlessness', Kunyaev's explanation for such cultural poverty,has as its contrasting principle pochvennichestvo. For the principal

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spokesmen of the radical right, 'rootlessness' and emigration are virtu-ally synonyms. Thus in Aleksandr Kazintsev's view, Solzhenitsyn wasthe only writer, of all those now in the West, who left the Soviet Unionagainst his own will. The others went more or less willingly, taking the'easy' choice that led 'to foreign bread and foreign microphones.'Apart from Solzhenitsyn, Kunyaev admires the writers who took the'other road', leading not abroad but 'deep into the country'—toMagadan, the Altay mountains, Siberia and Vologda. Those are themen —Rasputin, Kuvaev, Astafev, Belov—who showed genuine cou-rage. Selflessly and despite enormous pressure, they chose to 'preservethe living soul of their heroes who, without these writers, would havedisappeared without a trace and a word of farewell . . . '." (Al-though these writers, and others like them, were subject at varioustimes in the 1970s to official criticism, on occasion quite stinging, theywere nonetheless consistently able to publish their work, and usuallyin substantial print-runs. Entirely different conditions existed forthose writers—Vladimov, Voynovich, Gladilin—who ended up leav-ing 'more or less willingly.')

At best, emigration is indifference towards Russia, enjoying herbeauty 'from the window of an Intourist hotel'. At worst, it is hatred.Joseph Brodsky's emigration is a frequently cited case in point. Valen-tin Sorokin is indignant that Brodsky pretends to speak in the name ofRussians yet calls Russia 'my former country,' 'the country where Ionce lived.' This in itself'proves' that Brodsky is not a true Russian forno Russian could write with 'such deathly indifference' about'tormented' Russia.28 (Such circular reasoning is commonplace. Aletter-writer to Moskovsky literator, A. Vladimirsky, explains whyallegations of antisemitism on television are not backed up with one'real fact, concrete guilty parties or participants.' This is because 'anyidea of national superiority or intolerance is alien to a genuine Rus-sian patriot.' There is no antisemitism, in other words, because therecannot be any.) Because Brodsky is a Jew, not a Russian, he feels littleanxiety about his homeland. Truly Russian poets such as Tsvetaevaand Esenin could not have written so calmly about a 'tormented'Russia. Spiritually Brodsky is a tourist, always on the move. Today hiscuriosity is piqued by one area, tomorrow by another, but he is emo-tionally detached and his sense of alienation has aesthetic conse-quences. As he is a Jew writing in Russian his poetry (although not'bad' or 'untalented') fails, whereas had he written 'in his own nativelanguage' he would probably have become 'a real poet, penetrating,universal and vital.'29

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This jumble of political, moral and aesthetic categories hasbecome the norm within such discourse.50 Sorokin claims that thesongs of Aleksandr Galich 'aestheticize' a national tragedy, turn itinto 'amoral belletrization'—presumably because the Jewish Galichwrote them while he was 'getting ready to cast off abroad.' The spare,'uncontrived' stories of the Russian Varlam Shalamov, on the otherhand, create a lament for that same tragedy. (Galich spent his lastfew years in France before dying in a freak accident; Shalamovspent his last years in an old age home in Moscow. It is difficult toderive any special meaning from these two facts.) 'Brodsky's tragedyand Galich's are the woes of individuals,' writes Sorokin, but Esenin's(and Shalamov's) tragedy is 'the blood of a nation.' For Sorokin it isthis contrast between the individual and the national, rather than dif-ferent stylistic choices, aesthetic approaches or talent, that explainsthe mediocrity of most emigre writing: it lacks 'the great language of agreat people.'"

For Stanislav Kunyaev the 'Russian urge towards wholeness' re-jects the very option of emigration. Indeed, he finds misleading theconventional explanation that Jews emigrated in the 1970s because oflow quotas on their admission to higher education institutes:

A government has its own instinct for self-preservation and a nation in such a situa-tion rejects any obligation to work eternally to cultivate intellectuals or specialistswho, feeling no patriotic duty towards their society, leak away over the bordertogether with their educational potential. It was due specifically to this instinct of self-preservation, and not because of any antisemitism, that certain limitations on admis-sion to institutes of higher education, classified jobs and executive bodies were im-posed as a reaction to the massive emigration.32

One need not actually be Jewish to be an emigre. One need notbe Jewish to be a 'rootless cosmopolitan'. One need not even leaveRussia. Igor Shafarevich, in an article on emigration, cites Dostoev-sky's comment that Herzen and those like him were born emigres,even though most of them never left Russia. Rather, they embodiedthe 'emigre attitude towards life,' which may or may not result inphysical departure. It develops when a person —whether a Jew likeBrodsky and Galich or a non-Jew like Herzen and Andrey Sinyavsky— begins to look at life from the sidelines. Even before they left theSoviet Union, Shafarevich believes, writers of this type began to writedifferently, possibly without even being conscious of orienting them-selves to 'other readers and critics.1"

Emigration is not, then, a decision forced on individuals orgroups by circumstances. Writers did not leave because they were

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unable to publish, because they were threatened with arrest, becausethey were cut off from their profession and their audience and oftentheir livelihood. Rather, 'emigration is the path chosen by preciselythose people who are less rooted in life.' They rejoice when theirformer country fails because those failures justify their own depar-ture. They deplore successes achieved by their former homelandbecause such successes demoralize them, demonstrate their own per-sonal failure. And when, as has happened in the last few years, theseemigres visit their former homeland, they are 'like bacteria,penetrating the organism. They become weapons of explosion andrevolution, so effective and so radical in their action that it would beimpossible to create them by internal means, without the mechanismof emigration.' The publication of their works becomes the means ofdisseminating their toxin.34

The Russian Writers' Union and 'Russophobia'Andrey Sinyavsky, a non-Jew, is the paradigm of the 'rootless cosmo-politan' emigre that Shafarevich and many others most fear anddetest. He has become their nemesis, particularly since a fragmentfrom his book on Pushkin was published in the journal Oktyabr. Sin-yavsky wrote Progulki s Pushkinym (Strolling with Pushkin) while hewas in the camps. He considers the book his homage to a beloved poetbut he has been vilified as a 'Russophobe' and blasphemer and isoften compared to Salman Rushdie.

Much of the above mentioned sixth plenum of the board of theRSFSR Writers' Union was devoted to denunciation of Sinyavsky,Ananev, the editor of Oktyabr, and the editorial board of Oktyabr,which permitted not only this scandalous publication but also thepublication of Vasily Grossman's Vse techet {Forever Flowing) andwhich promised publication of the emigre Aleksandr Yanov. SergeyVoronin, speaking for a group of Leningrad writers who broke awayfrom the official Leningrad branch of the union, identified the 'real'problem:

There is a lack of elementary respect towards us, Russian writers, on the part of aRussian-language group of writers, the overwhelming majority of whom are of Jewishnationality. This lack of respect can be explained by the fact that we Russian writerscomprise only 20 per cent of the Leningrad organization. Not more than eighty peo-ple, out of 430 . . . We Russian writers had no choice but to leave the Leningradwriters' organization and create our own association.'35

Voronin asked the plenum to recognize his association,Sodruzhestvo (Community), as the official organization of Leningrad

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writers and to give it the journal Leningrad, which was closed downunder Zhdanov and is now being re-established. His request was sup-ported by many of those present, including Valentin Rasputin.

Anatoly Buylov portrayed the Russian people as having beenreduced to supplicants, pleading for permission to 'worship our owngod': 'A virus has penetrated our system. The virus was injected and ithas spread. The soil was fertile . . . and just look how that virus hasmetastasized!'

Vladimir Arro, the leader of the official Leningrad branch whoearlier made clear his objections to the kangaroo-court atmosphere ofthe plenum, was distressed at Nazi-type categories of purity: 'Com-rades,' he said, 'dividing writers into "clean" and "unclean", "Rus-sian" and "Russian-language", is impossible. Russian culture does notdeserve this.' But no less important a figure than the co-chairman ofthe plenum, Bondarev himself, echoed Buylov: 'The issue is themoral and spiritual atmosphere in your organization. It is sick. Doyou understand the problem? Do you understand what kind ofmicrobe, what kind of epidemic is infecting you? Do you understandwhat kind of virus? That's the problem!'

These attacks on the Jews are accompanied by much personalscore-settling by both sides of the literary polemic. Ogonek's editorVitaly Korotich is regularly accused of spineless opportunism, the 'evi-dence' being his publication of a laudatory review of Brezhnev's me-moirs and a vituperative volume about America. Vadim Kozhinov isparticularly fond of 'setting the record straight' by reporting who signedwhat and when; blemishes on his own record have been pointed out by,among others, Ales Adamovich.56 Generally speaking, the 'right' isquicker to point a finger, and slower to admit its own past transgres-sions, than the 'left', which tends to resort to this tactic defensively."

'Cosmopolitanism' versus pochvennichestvoOne of the most interesting articles which has come from the radicalright begins by addressing precisely this issue, the savagery of currentliterary polemics, and proceeds to discuss the more substantive ques-tion of 'cosmopolitanism' versus pochvennichestvo. The author of thearticle, Vladimir Bondarenko, sees the ferocity of argument as stem-ming from a general deterioration of moral norms and a sense thatany system of sanctions has broken down. He also believes it is a con-sequence of the former domination of chinovniki (officialdom), whotended to divide everything into sides— 'nashi' (ours) and 'ne nashi'(theirs) — categories that are simplistic and inaccurate. '

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Nonetheless, real differences exist between, for instance,Rasputin and Voznesensky, Shalamov and Grossman, Sholokhov andNabokov. For Bondarenko genuine analysis of these differences mustinvolve open discussion of the theme of Jews and Russians in theculture of this century. It must discuss the 'genetic memory' of a na-tion, its 'national traits', which are the means of identifying anduniting national culture. Such identification by no means denies in-terpenetration and enrichment of one culture by others:

But whatever it borrows, any nation creatively reworks a foreign culture . . . Natural-ly the way Jewish, Estonian, Yakutian and Georgian writers look at the world andother nations differs from the way in which Russian writers look at them, if thesewriters express a feeling of their own nation, a feeling of their own national culture intheir works. The Jewish national world of Babel and Chagall excites me, the Georgiannational world of Lado Fudiashvili and M. Dzhavakhisvili . . . '.'8

Bondarenko wishes to restore neutrality to both pochva and'cosmopolitanism'. 'Cosmopolitanism', he feels, must be stripped of itsStalinist shadow, the vestigial spectre of the antisemitic campaign ofthe late 1940s. Why cannot the Soviet press write about 'cosmopolitanvision' as disinterestedly as the Western press? Why cannot Soviet ar-tists calmly admit to being 'cosmopolitan' as many Western artists do?It is not a concept inevitably connected to one or another nationality-— in other words, 'cosmopolitan' is not and need not always beregarded as a synonym for Jewish, just as pochva exists in any culturethat is supported by 'nationhood, tradition and cultural memory.'(Bondarenko may be correct in theory but language surely carrieshistorical baggage, whether we wish it or not. Furthermore, some ofhis colleagues deliberately use the word 'cosmopolitan' preciselybecause of its historical connotations.) Thus for Bondarenko, the JewChagall is the greatest of pochvenniki, the Russian Malevich asupreme 'cosmopolitan'. Bondarenko admits to valuing pochva-basedart more than 'cosmopolitan' art. He grants the latter certainachievements and a high level of professionalism but, because it lacks'native soil', it lacks originality: all avant-garde artists, whatever theirnationality, resemble one another 'like the new buildings in Moscow'.

As Bondarenko develops them, these concepts have politicalrepercussions. A 'cosmopolitan' supports restructuring 'easily and sin-cerely', not because he is an unprincipled hack but because he has theability to change, like leaves with the seasons. (By implication, hecannot help changing). For a pochvennik, on the other hand, peres-troyka is always tragic, just as a change in native soil is a catastrophefor a nation. Thus 'the creative foundations of today's Znamya

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authors and of the songsters of 1939 [those who praised Stalin] are oneand the same—international ideas, which are given priority over na-tional values, and indifference towards the country, milieu and timesin which the hero finds himself.' The bureaucracy of any nation sup-ports at any time artists of 'cosmopolitan' tendencies because bureau-cracy springs not from any particular native soil but from 'worldbureaucratic culture'. The bureaucrat can easily shift from an arm-chair in Kishinev to one in Alma-Ata; he is rootless, whatever he maybe by blood. Thus 'pochva and the bureaucratic mechanism areincompatible . . . "

In Bondarenko's reading of Russian intellectual history both theSlavophile publications of the nineteenth century and the pochva-based publications of the last thirty years were far more cruelly re-pressed than their 'Westernizing' or 'cosmopolitan' counterparts.(Bondarenko specifically mentions the 'constant investigations' ofNash sovremennik during the Brezhnev years. However, the largenumber of RSFSR, USSR and Lenin prizes awarded to the nationalistwriters associated with the journal, and the millions of copies in whichtheir works were published, testify to official approbation, or at leastrecognition, in those same years.39) 'Cosmopolitan' art is congenial togovernments because man is entirely absent from it or is shown out-side of native ties and national environment and thus 'answers onlyfor himself, no matter what negative views he articulates.' (It is dif-ficult to square this interpretation, however reasonable it may ap-pear, with what actually occurred in the Soviet Union between 1929and 1953.) The pochvenniki, on the other hand, proceed from theidea of nation, its needs and its interests: they are therefore feared bygovernments. This explains official hostility to Solzhenitsyn: it is notbecause of his 'anti-socialist' position (as some 'pluralists' claim) butbecause his prose is profoundly Russian. (Actually, most liberals haveconsistently advocated full publication of Solzhenitsyn's works. Ingeneral, the spokesmen of the 'left', though branded 'false pluralists'by their opponents, are more broadly inclusive in their willingness tosee almost anything in print.)

Bondarenko acknowledges that in the hands of the untalentedpochvennichestvo can lead to national egoism. However, 'in its entire-ty pochvennichestvo proceeds from its ideas of one's nation, natureand culture to an understanding of the world as an aggregation of na-tions and cultures.' Hostility to other cultures as a rule 'flies the flag'of international ideas, whether the particular banner representsChristianization, destroying the Inca civilization and heathen Slavic

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tribes or Eurocentrism, which destroys African cultures, or world So-vietization, Americanization and Zionism. Here Bondarenko arguesbackwards from his conclusions. Surely extreme pochvennichestvo,whether in the hands of the untalented or the gifted, can lead —hasled—to doctrines such as national socialism or, more recently, to thecultural coercion of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. One could invert Bon-darenko's thesis and argue with equal validity that the 'flag' of inter-national ideas signifies tolerance towards other cultures.

Bondarenko's final point is that in its emphasis on the human be-ing as individual, the 'cosmopolitan' vision depicts the essential loneli-ness of man —his 'tragedies, misfortunes, complexes, guilt and cele-brations'—as being outside of society, which is regarded as somethingalien and hostile. Free will is the linch-pin of the 'cosmopolitan' view.Yet acts of free will can be offensive not only to other individuals butalso to entire nations. The denial of the very concept of nationalhonour and pride, for example, is such an offence, of which SalmanRushdie, for one, is guilty. A protest against all forms of terrorismcannot at the same time arrogate to itself the right to 'verbal ter-rorism', to verbal mockery. 'Any nation has the right legally to defendits citizens, national virtues and sacred images from insult.'

Instead of the familiar ur-texts of 'Russophobic' insult — Progulkis Pushkinym, Vse techet—Bondarenko chooses the 1988 film Malen-kaya Vera (Little Vera) to illustrate his thesis. Malenkaya Vera is agritty portrayal of the petty-bourgeois pretensions, alcohol-relatedviolence, and bottled-up frustration of life in a provincial Soviet city.Towards the end of the film the heroine's father, a truck driver whobecomes maudlin and violent when drunk, badly beats up his daugh-ter's boyfriend. Bondarenko claims not to idealize the way of life ofVera's parents in the film, but he believes that because it is their wayof life it does not deserve mockery and insult by snobs and'smatterers', like the boyfriend and the team of director Vasily Pichuland scenarist Mariya Khmelik, all of whom are in their mid-to-latetwenties. Bondarenko is outraged by what he portrays as 'liberal' de-mands: 'What are you asking for, comrade liberals — that a daughtershould drag her own father off to prison? After all, something of thesort did happen. They dragged off their fathers, and their mothers,and their brothers. Isn't that enough!' Bondarenko refers to the end-ing of the film Pokayanie (Repentance) in which the corpse of thetyrant Varlam is thrown over a cliffside by his son:

That's the way it is —one hero tosses the body of his own father on to the garbageheap. From another, testimony against her own father is demanded. What is

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this— the ethics of perestroykdi Or conscious striving for the total liquidation of alltraditions?

The fact is that neither the film-makers nor the critics 'call upon'Vera to inform on her father, nor is her boyfriend any kind of'positive hero,' as Bondarenko claims. In a film about victims, Vera isthe primary victim —young, powerless, emotionally torn. Moreover,Bondarenko makes no distinction between Malenkaya Vera's hyper-realistic style and the surrealism of Pokayanie. Pitching the corpseover the cliff is an externalization, the only credible externalizationwithin the film's set of images, of the son's rejection of his father'sactions.

Perhaps the most serious implication of Bondarenko's analysis isthat by calling the deracine man (here, Vera's boyfriend) a 'cynicaldestroyer and provocateur', Bondarenko equates 'rootlessness' (or'cosmopolitanism') with the will, and capability, to damage. If the'cosmic' man —by which Bondarenko means the man who rejects thepriority of national, religious and social values — is the 'naked' man,torn from accustomed ties and from any kind of pochvennost, he canlay waste to those values, precisely because they are meaningless, tohim. Bondarenko does not use the term 'cosmopolitan' as a synonymfor 'Jewish' but the qualities he attributes to 'cosmopolitan' art and tothe 'cosmopolitan' man are those to which his colleagues —Kunyaev,Kazintsev, Fed—elsewhere firmly affix the label 'Russophobic' andwhose source they unhesitatingly identify as Jews. Thus the fact thatneither the film nor Bondarenko's comments have anything to dowith Jews per se is unimportant. However dubious the validity of Bon-darenko's premise, its implications—whether tacit or explicitlyformulated—serve to confirm the 'dangers' of 'cosmopolitanism'.

ConclusionAs I noted at the outset, I have focused almost exclusively on ideas putforward by 'rightist' Russian authors. I do not wish to create the im-pression that these ideas go unanswered, let alone that they holdsway. It is true that polarization of intellectual debate, and perhaps ofconcomitant political controversy, has intensified in the USSR. It istrue that chauvinistic attacks in conservative periodicals on in-dividuals identified with glasnost and perestroyka, and on the artisticworks that symbolize them, have increased in frequency and venom.At the same time, discussion of these issues is open and ongoing. Nostatement goes unanswered, no prejudice stands unchallenged. Ifevery issue of Nash sovremennik and Molodaya gvardiya carries at

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least one or two variants of the point of view described above, mostissues of Ogonek, Moscow News, Knizhnoe obozrenie and otherliberal publications carry either direct responses or indirect comment.Television and radio programmes broadcast live and lively debates onthese subjects. A long and distinguished roster of liberal critics andscholars continuously and eloquently defends not only the publicationof works they prize but the right to enshrine freedom of the press forall works. After decades of programmed reactions, pre-scripted 'dia-logues' and orchestrated discussions, this kind of free discussion canonly be welcomed. As for its ugly aspects, all free societies have had tofind ways and means to deal with them.

Notes

1 "Scenes from the sixth plenum of the board of the Russian Writers' Union, 13-14 November',Ogonek, no. 48, 1989, 5.

2 See, for instance, Walter Laqueur, 'From Russia with hate', The New Republic, 5 February1990; Liah Greenfeld, 'The closing of the Russian mind', ibid.; Bill Keller, 'Russian na-tionalists: Yearning for an iron hand', The New York Times Magazine, 28 January 1990.

3 See, for instance, Yitzhak Brudny, 'The heralds of opposition to perestroyka', SovietEconomy, vol. 5, no. 2, April-June 1989. Brudny's is an informative and thoughtful analysisof the conservative literary journals, especially Nash sovremennik and Molodaya gvardiya.

4 Mikhail Dunaev, 'Rock music', Nash sovremennik, nos. 1-2, 1988; Aleksandr Kazintsev,'Purification or vilification?', Nash sovremennik, no. 2, 1988. See also remarks by ValentinRasputin and Iury Bondarev at the First Congress of People's Deputies, Izvestiya, 6 June1989.

5 Anatoly Salutsky, in Nash sovremennik, nos. 9 and 12, 1987; ibid., nos. 6 and 12, 1988;Mikhail Antonov, in Lite Taturnaya Rossiya, no. 31, 1987; Moskva, no. 9, 1987; Molodayagvardiya, no. 10, 1987 and no. 1, 1988, etc.

6 Apollon Kuzmin, 'Answers which give rise to questions', Nash sovremennik, no. 5, 1986;Vadim Pigalev, 'What are they looking for from the Slavophiles?', Nash sovremennik, no.10, 1986.

7 Mikhail Antonov, 'Non-existent people', Nash sovremennik, no. 2, 1989.8 'If this deviation continues and the equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad doesn't come soon,

it will end with the abandonment of national values and everything that constitutes thespiritual pride of the nation', Nikolay Fed, 'Message to a friend, or letters about literature',Nash sovremennik, no. 5, 1989, 185.

9 Fed, 176.10 Walter Laqueur compares the anti-intellectualism and fear of 'Russophobia' with the

'volkisch' tradition in Germany. See 'The reemergence of the Russian right' in The LongRoad to Freedom (New York 1989), 125-45.

11 Vadim Kozhinov, 'The greatest danger', Nash sovremennik, no. 1, 1989; Igor Shafarevich,'Russophobia', Nash sovremennik, no. 6, 1989.

12 Stanislav Kunyaev, 'It all began with labels', Nash sovremennik, no. 9, 1988.13 Tatyana Ivanova, 'What hurts whom', Ogonek, no. 22, 1989, 22.14 See Greenfeld.15 Aleksandr Fomenko, 'The most important thing', Molodaya gvardiya, no. 9, 1987, 280.16 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ' "Maskony"—Reflections on press clippings', Nash sovremennik, no. 7,

1989, 143.17 Vladimir Bondarenko, 'No way back', Molodaya gvardiya, no. 5, 1989, 218-19.18 Kazintsev, 144.19 Fed, 173.20 Ibid, 172.

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21 Kozhinov, 170-1.22 Stanislav Kunyaev, 'Two ends of a stick', Nash sovremennik, no. 6, 1989, 158.23 Kozhinov, 171.24 Kunyaev, 160.25 David Aberbach, Bialik (New York 1988), 75. I am indebted to Dr Max Tictin for his

knowledge of and help with the Bialik poem.26 Kunyaev, 161.27 Aleksandr Kazintsev, 'The new mythology', Nash sovremennik, no. 5, 1989, 145.28 Valentin Sorokin, 'One's own strangers', Nash sovremennik, no. 8, 1989, 168.29 'Where is the "Fifth Wheel" rolling?', Moskovsky literator, nos. 17 and 18, 1989, 2.30 Sergey Averintsev comments on a group of articles and letters by the philosopher Vladimir

Solovev: " . . . One side exposes foreigners and not genuine Russians, indicts them for everymisfortune and refuses them the right to represent Russian culture. The other side—ourside—shouts as loudly as it can: this is immoral, this is unchristian, this is zoology, this is im-possible for a communist, this is unthinkable for an intelligent. And —the last argument —this is not Russian', Novy mir, no. 1, 1989.

31 Sorokin, 170.32 Kunyaev, 160.33 Igor Shafarevich, 'The phenomenon of emigration', Literaturnaya Rossiya, 8 September

1989.34 Ibid.35 These and other relevant citations are from the transcript published in Ogonek (see fn. 1).36 See Kozhinov, 'Position and understanding", Literaturnaya Rossiya, 28 July 1989, where he

suggests that Adamovich was unconcerned about the pre-war victims of Stalinism, and thatAdamovich's books about the suffering of Byelorussia under the Nazi occupation were aseasy to publish as 'attacks on Ronald Reagan.' Adamovich replies in 'How to thin out thecarrots', Ogonek, no. 25, 1989. He recalls Kozhinov's indifference towards the murder ofmembers of the intelligentsia in the 1930s: Kozhinov had compared the murder to "thinningweak plants so that the strong ones won't choke.'

37 For an interesting discussion of this issue see Alla Latynina and Sergey Chuprinin's 'dialogue''The key to what' and 'Left, right —where are the sides?', Literaturnaya gazeta, 12 and 19April 1989.

38 Vladimir Bondarenko, 'Discovering kinship', V mire knig, no. 7, 1989, 12. Surely this over-simplifies the issue. I cannot judge the Georgians, whose work I do not know. But thegreatness of Babel lies in the overlap and tension between his 'Jewish' world and its Russian/-Ukrainian context. The excitement of Chagall's paintings stems at least in part from the'new' forms in which the old world (whether Jewish shtetl or Russian village) is portrayed.

39 See Klaus Mehnert, The Russians and Their Favorite Books (Stanford 1983).

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