1917,
the sudden turn to the NEP, Stalin's second revolution, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the post-war psychosis of high Stalinism, and the sudden thaw after
the tyrant's death.
Looking over the sweep of modern Russian history, one's sense of the ironic is compounded. In the Muscovite period the most extreme statements of the exclusive nature and destiny of Russia came in precisely those periods when Westernization was proceeding most rapidly-under Ivan the Terrible and Alexis Mikhailovich. Indeed, the ideologists responsible for insisting on Russia's special destiny were often Western-educated figures: Maxim the Greek and Ivan Peresvetov under Ivan and Simeon Polotsky and Innokenty Gizel under Alexis. The Muscovite rulers concealed from themselves the incongruity of increasing at one and the same time both their borrowings from and their antagonisms toward the West. The pretense inherent in the historical theology of Old Russia was intensified rather than dispelled by initial contacts with the West. The manic xenophobia of Ivan the Terrible and the Old Believers had an enduring popular appeal, and provided the basis for a modern mass culture that was gilded with scientific sanction by zoological nationalists in the late nineteenth century and by dialectical materialists in the twentieth century.
Against such a background, the tsar-reformers of Imperial Russia found their careers beset with ironies. Theoretically freer than other European sovereigns to rule solely by 'their own strength' (the literal meaning of the Greek autokrates and the Russian samoderzhavie), they repeatedly found themselves in bondage to the superstitions of their nominally bonded subjects. Grants of freedom and toleration often had the effect of calling forth ungrateful if not despotic responses. 'Never did the raskol enjoy such freedom as in the first year of Peter's reign, but . . . never was it to prove more fanatical.'4 Catherine, who did far more than any of her predecessors to gratify the aristocratic intellectuals, was the first to experience their ideological enmity. She, who launched the unending discussion in Russia about the liberation of mankind, probably did more than any of her autocratic predecessors to militarize society and freeze the peasantry in bondage. In the nineteenth century the popularity of tsar-reformers tended to vary in inverse proportion with their actual accomplishment. Alexander I, who accomplished surprisingly little and instituted in his late years a far more repressive and reactionary rule than prevailed even under Nicholas I, was universally loved; whereas Alexander II, who accomplished an extraordinary amount in the first decade of his reign, was rewarded by an attempt on his life at the end of the decade-the first of many, one of which eventually proved successful. Among the many ironies of the revolutionary tradition stands the repeated participation of aristocratic intellectuals, who stood to
lose rather than gain privilege. 'I can understand the French bourgeois bringing about the Revolution to get rights, but how am I to comprehend the Russian nobleman making a revolution to lose them?' asked a reactionary former governor of Moscow when learning on his deathbed of the Decembrist revolt.5
The victorious revolution brought with it a new tissue of ironies. It is ironic that a revolution begun by pure spontaneity in March, 1917, and defended by a wide coalition of democratic forces should be canceled out by a coup engineered by the smallest and most totalitarian of the opposition forces, and one which played almost no role in bringing tsardom to an end. It is ironic that communism came to power in the peasant East rather than the industrial West-and, above all, in the Russia which Marx and Engels particularly disliked and distrusted; and that the ideology which spoke so emphatically of economic determinism should be so completely dependent on visionary appeals and on the individual leadership of Lenin. It is ironic that the revolution in power should devour its own creators; and that many of the very first elements to lend genuine grass roots support to the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg (the proletarian leaders of the 'Workers Opposition' and the sailors of Kronstadt) were among the first to be brutally repudiated by the new regime for urging in 1920-1 substantially the same reforms which the Bolsheviks had encouraged them to demand four years before.
It is ironic that one of the most complete repudiations of democracy occurred at the very time when Russia was formally adopting the seemingly exemplary democratic constitution of 1936; ironic that the Stalinist war on the creative arts should occur at precisely the time when Russia was at the forefront of creative modernism; ironic that those organs of oppression that the people were least capable of influencing should be given the label 'people's.'
It is ironic that the USSR should succeed where most thought it would fail: m defeating the Germans and conquering outer space. It is perhaps most ironic of all that the Soviet leaders should fail in the area where almost everyone thought they would automatically succeed: in the indoctrination of their own youth. It is high irony that the post-war generation of Russians -the most privileged and indoctrinated of all Soviet generations, which was not even given the passing exposure to the outside world of those who fought in the war-should prove the most alienated of all from the official ethos of Communist society. There is the further irony of the Communist leaders' referring to youthful ferment as a 'survival of the past,' and the more familiar irony of partial reforms leading not to grateful quiescence but to increased agitation.
This remarkable situation is not without ironic meaning for the Western observer. Despite his formal, rhetorical belief in man's inherent longing for truth and freedom, Western man has been strangely reluctant to predict (and slow to admit) that such ideals would have any compelling appeal in the USSR. The tendency during the late years of the Khrushchev era to assume that evolutionary modification of despotism would continue without basic change represented the projection into the future of the trends of the immediate past. There was often also an implicit belief that the USSR (and perhaps also the United States) was evolving naturally toward a position somewhere between Stalinist totalitarianism and Western democracy.' Such a balanced conclusion may, of course, be vindicated; but it would take all the cunning away from reason and represent an astonishing victory for the Aristotelian golden mean in a society that has never assimilated classical ideas of moderation and rationality.
A cultural history cannot offer a net prediction; but it must insist on the importance of the national heritage and the vitality of the ferment now at work. This ferment is not like a factor in a mathematical equation that can be resolved on the computers of Eastern political manipulators or Western political scientists. The ferment in the USSR today is more like indeterminate plants appearing on a burned-out field. One cannot tell whether they stem from old roots or fresh seeds blown in from elsewhere. Only time will tell if the landscape will be fundamentally changed. Yet the very appearance of the plants indicates that the soil is fertile; and even if they were to die, their leaves might yet provide humus for a stronger, future growth. The critical condition for growth in the years ahead will be the continuance of the relatively mild international climate of the post-Stalin era. Sustained storm clouds from East or West could have a chilling effect. Gusts of fresh vitality from neighboring countries could greatly stimulate growth in a culture that has always responded to fertilization from outside and in a world that is increasingly interdependent. Already the assimilation into the Russian orbit of such traditional foes on its Western borders as Poland and Hungary has had not the intended effect of silencing these nations but the ironic one of bringing added Westward- looking ferment into the Soviet sphere. There is no telling how important for future Soviet development increasing contact with the West or a renaissance of ideological elan within the West might prove to be.
One cannot wishfully expect automatic evolution toward democracy in the USSR now any more than one should have expected revolution for democracy under Stalin. Forces within one culture do not exist to serve the purposes of another; and the familiar institutional forms of liberal, parliamentary democracy are still incomprehensible to many Russians. But
Russia may well develop new social and artistic forms presently unforeseen by either East or West which will answer the restive demand of its people for human freedom and spiritual renewal. If the West has anything authentic to communicate and has any direct and unpatronizing ways of doing it, it could almost certainly play a key
