Desarrollo del Planteamiento de Solución del Riesgo 3:

1. From the perspective of Russian revolutionary tradition, the party model illustrated in What Is to Be Done? seems to be little more than a refined version of the many secret societies of “new men” established by the more extreme Populist movements. The same basic elements are present: absolute centrali-zation, a military vision of the class struggle, Jesuit-type discipline, “amoral moralism.” And, in fact, the more authoritative Russian Marxists considered Lenin’s strategic-organizational plan to be a form of unconscious populism, based typically on a Jacobin vision of the relationship between the e´lites and the masses.¹

“After driving socialism away from the masses and the masses away from socialism [wrote Plekhanov in 1904] Lenin declared that the socialist intellec-tuals were the demiurges of the socialist revolution and himself, and his devoted docile followers, the socialist intellectuals par excellence, the ultra-intellectuals, so to speak. Whoever dissents he accuses of anarchy and individualism and, in the struggle to oppose them, he appeals to the masses whose function, in his theory, is to act as inert matter.”²Along the same lines, Martov’s criticism: Lenin has “imbibed to the marrow the psychology of the conspirator: a politically passive proletariat is the necessary foundation for him to develop his active revolutionary role; cannon fodder that goes to battle under the command of a solid organisation of professional revolutionaries. Yet, he claims that it is he who stimulates the workers to organise themselves, that he is defending the workers by making sure that they are prone to the specific organisation he preaches, and that he considers workers, not as the actors of a complete political activity, but rather as the objects of the simplistic political action of the com-mittees of professional revolutionaries, as passive tools in the hands of these

committees.”³Trotsky accused “Maximilien Lenin” of proposing a “flat cari-cature of the tragic Jacobin intolerance” that was absolutely “foreign to the spirit of Social Democracy” and would lead, not to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but to “dictatorship over the proletariat” by an oligarchy of cruel and pure revolutionaries,⁴ with the inevitable result that “party organisation would substitute the party, the central committee the party organisation, and, finally, the dictator, the central committee.”⁵

Plechanov, Martov, and Trotsky’s harsh words were an extraordinarily lucid prognosis of the liberticidal outcome of the type of revolution Lenin had in mind. Yet, the founder of Bolshevism was perfectly right when he stated that the only way to revive the original revolutionary charge of the European socialist movement was to revive the Jacobin spirit of Marxism, which had been diluted by the leaders of the Second International and had become a generic democratism. Given that the workers’ class, despite the obsessive pro-paganda of the “modern tribunes of the plebs,” tended to integrate with the structures of the capitalist society spontaneously and that, moreover, this so-ciety was obviously not moving toward the ineluctable self-destruction pre-dicted in Capital, the only way to destroy the bourgeoisie was to create a political actor willing to undertake the mammoth task of stopping and over-turning the course of history, which was an indirect way of saying that Tkachev’s solution was the revolutionaries’ only option.

Naturally, Lenin, being (or liking to think he was) an orthodox Marxist, could not publicly admit that his program was simply an updated version of the policy developed by the revolutionary accused by Engels of not even knowing the “a b c of socialism”;⁶nor could he explicitly declare that the manner in which capitalism had actually developed had pulled the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary movement, without going against one of the essential theorems of Marxism and, above all, without making his program pointlessly voluntarist.

The fact is that, if it is true that What is to Be Done? constituted the only realistic response to the “Bernstein challenge,” it is also true that its success relied on extremely unlikely circumstances. In other words, Lenin had no alternative but to hope for a miracle. On the basis of his diagnosis of the situation of the revolutionary movement at the start of the twentieth century, it was obvious that the demise of capitalism was virtually impossible. This did not escape the acute eye of Parvus, who rightly accused Lenin of uninhibited idealism: his plan claimed nothing short of “changing the nature of the his-torical process.”⁷

Yet, Lenin’s appeal did not fall on empty ears, for the fundamental reason that the invasion of Western culture had generated in Russian society an

“enormous mass of cultured, thinking people who were deprived of any status, any career, any prospects: the clergy, the offspring of small landowners and petit bourgeois, the offspring of clerks and ruined nobles.”⁸In other words, the plethora of proletarianized intellectuals who felt like foreigners in their

own country and looked upon the official Russia with hatred and resentment.

This “alienated class” was a natural “sociological reservoir” for recruiting what Bakunin called the “chief of staff of the revolutionary army.” Their situation of material and moral deprivation had rendered them “men of denial,” ob-sessed by the desire to destroy the perverse and degrading “rule of Baal.”⁹

Hence the importance of focusing our analysis on the Russian intelligentsia.

Had it not existed in such massive proportions, it would be impossible to explain the generation of a polemo-hierocratic order of professional revolutionaries, whose objective was to conquer the world and return it to a new life.

2. “To grasp the sources of Russian communism and render the true nature of the revolution intelligible [wrote Nikolai Berdiaev] it is necessary to know who represents that original Russian expression intelligentsiia.”¹⁰The starting point for understanding the real nature of the intelligentsiia is the impact of Western civilization on Russian civilization. The intelligentsia was an induced social phenomenon, the product of the coming together of two distinct civi-lizations—the European civilization and the Russian civilization. With its for-midable radioactive power, the former forced the latter to make constant autoplastic adjustments.

Contrary to a widespread but absolutely misleading opinion, Russia came into being not as a peripheral part of our civilisation¹¹ “but (as part) of the Byzantine sister civilisation, of the same Greek-Roman lineage as ours, but nonetheless distinct and different from ours.”¹² This explains why Russian history, starting from the early eighteenth century, was the history of a process of “massive acculturation,”¹³whose outcome was the formation of a sui generis type of civilization, within which the Byzantine spirit and the European spirit coexisted in conflict with each other.¹⁴This explains why Russia, in the last three centuries, has been the stage of a permanent cultural war. This permanent cultural war must be our starting point, if we are to understand the role of the intelligentsia and the historical significance of Bolshevism, which was one of the more typical products of the intelligentsia.

Even a superficial glance at the Byzantine world—of which Russia, as of its evangelization, was a politically independent but culturally tributary divi-sion—reveals that it has typically oriental features. Caesar-papism has always prevailed; that is to say, spiritual power has always been subordinate to tem-poral power. The latter was considered sacred because the emperor was con-sidered to be “Anointed by the Lord, chosen from birth to fulfil God’s will.”¹⁵ In compliance with this hierocratic function, his authority “extended to the clergy,”¹⁶ which had no autonomy, not even on theological issues. On the other hand, autocracy was also a sort of royal priesthood and its summit—

the Autokrator—the supreme priest “in direct relationship with God . . . and the object of a special political-religious cult.”¹⁷ Consequently, the will of Basileus was “final in both the spiritual and the temporal domain.”¹⁸Nothing escaped his control, not even the sacred sphere, where it was considered

ab-solutely legitimate, indeed, his duty, to intervene for the precise reason that the Byzantines considered “religion and politics to be indissoluble”¹⁹and the-ology to be a “State matter.”²⁰Hence the huge, disproportionate power con-centrated in the hands of the Basileus—a power before which not only the masses but even the governors had no means of defense. Even the private property of the aristocracy was “precarious in the face of the eminent rights of the Basileus, just as human life was precarious in the hands of God.”²¹So it came to pass that the emperor “ruled and actively supervised industry, . . . leaving no room at all for free labour or individual initiative and . . . enforced everywhere an iron regime of protectionism and inquisition.”²²

Karl Wittfogel has rightly listed a civilization based on such institutional foundations among the “Asiatic societies.”²³ It was as if imprisoned in the

“steel cage” of a bureaucratic managerial state with the supreme chief exer-cising a “triple monopoly.”²⁴Conversely, from the fifth century, with the dis-integration of what remained of the Roman Empire, Europe had become a

“stateless society.” The consequences of what has been referred to as “feudal anarchy” were to have an enormous impact on European society, which de-veloped in a manner that was structurally and culturally quite different from the Byzantine world. Precisely because the power of the state was far weaker, the Western sacerdotium escaped the fate of its Oriental equivalent (who was a victim of the autocratic will of Basileus), acquiring complete autonomy and the right to question the imperium, while the “aristocracy of the sword” be-came a hereditary nobility that the monarchs were never able to bend to their will completely. In the end, a huge network of autocephalic cities developed—

the communes—that harbored the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and that spe-cific self-propulsive mode of production—capitalism—that it had created over the centuries.

All these factors contributed to Europe becoming a civilization where di-alogue between the state and civil society was the distinctive feature, and essentially, therefore, the permanent conflict among the various social forces, none of whom ever managed to attain absolute rule. The state was never able to model society at will. With rare exceptions—for example, the empire of Philip II in which there emerged strong Caesar-papist tendencies and the Inquisition, which greatly reduced the autonomy of civil society—even in an age of so-called absolutism, the pluralistic-competitive logic prevailed in the historical existence of Western civilisation.²⁵Precisely because of its particular structure, Western civilization was able to unleash a heterogenetic creativity and was free to conduct all sorts of experiments in all fields, from science to economy. As a result, Europe embarked upon a process of modernization and secularization and became a dynamic and individualistic “open society,” while Byantium—caught in the vice of the bureaucratic managerial apparatus of a state that had successfully granted itself a sacred and virtually unlimited reg-ulatory jurisdiction—remained a rigorously traditionalistic society²⁶hostile to the typical values of modernity, that were meanwhile germinating and

grad-ually asserting themselves in what had been the pars occidentalis of the Roman Empire.

In looking at the Russia of that period, one is immediately struck by “the almost total symbiosis between the State and the Church . . . The tsar and his subjects are defined by their belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose precepts fulfil the function of an ideology in an extremely modern sense. Not surprisingly, discussions or conflicts concerning the rights and the precepts of the Church had profound repercussions on the public and cultural life of the country and directly threatened the national identity and spiritual unity of society.”²⁷In other words, tsarism was simply a variation of the Byz-antine system, with which the Russian e´lites had been in contact since the conversion of Grand Duke Vladimir of Kiev. Not only did they try to shape the institutions of their country according to those that existed in Constan-tinople, but “under the influence of the Greek Orthodox church, they grad-ually became accustomed to considering fundamentally heretical everything from Western Europe and rejecting it as such.”²⁸ The result was that the Russian civilization isolated itself from European civilization and for centuries did not participate in its political, economic, and cultural development. It became a world apart. “Seen from Europe [it] looked Asian and seen from Asia, European.”²⁹

The “Asian” features prevailed over the European ones at least until the end of the seventeenth century, in part because, with the sole exception of Novgorod and Pskov, Russia had been ruled by Mongolia, which had prac-tically nothing feudal about it and was based on the unconditional submission of inferior to superior instances, and secondly because the functional imper-atives linked to the struggle for independence drove political centralization to its extreme limit and led to the creation of an almighty state.³⁰The con-sequence: Russia reconquered its independence and became a great and pow-erful state, thanks to the autocratic power of the princes of Moscow, but at an exorbitant price: the “suffocation of anything free that existed within it.”³¹ The great trading cities that had managed to preserve numerous economic and cultural ties with Western Europe, even during the Mongolian rule, were subject to the rule of the Muscovite State just when the hereditary nobility—

the boyars—was being eliminated from the picture and substituted with a service nobility ( pomeshchiki) whose members were “nothing more than the servants, if not the slaves, of the sovereign.”³²The same fate befell the church, degraded to the “level of ideological apologist of the autocratic regime.”³³

Ivan the Great was responsible for creating the preconditions for the uni-versal slavery of all citizens, including those holding the highest offices of the state and the church. The process was completed by his grandson, Ivan the Terrible, who ruthlessly exterminated all social forces—landed gentry, entre-preneurial bourgeoisie, free communes—that might have successfully curbed the power of the tsar. In compliance with the specific logic of despotism, Russian society was also completely sealed off from the rest of the world, to

prevent contamination of its traditional lifestyles. In the end it became a kind of “besieged fortress”³⁴in which every contact with the external world was considered an act of high treason and punished as such.

The underlying philosophy of this monolithic, compact structure was that the Russians were the “custodians of an uncontaminated orthodoxy,”³⁵and that for this reason Moscow was the Third Rome. “The Church of Ancient Rome fell due to its heresy; the doors of Second Rome, Constantinople, were destroyed by the hatchets of the infidel Turks [wrote the monk Philotheus in a famous letter to Basileus III]; but the Church of Moscow, the new Rome, shines stronger than the sun over the whole universe. You are the ecumenical sovereign; you must hold the reins of government in fear of God. Beware of He who has entrusted it to you. Two Romes have fallen, but the third will stand; there will be no fourth. Your Christian kingdom will never be given to any other sovereign.”³⁶

If Russia’s grandiose soteriological mission was to protect the “real faith”

from heresy and spread it all over the world, to save humanity from paganism and heresy, then Russia was a special land, and the Russians the “new chosen people.” Equally extraordinary was the authority of the man who had received the reins of government from God in person. Like the land and the people, he too was sacred and therefore his word was final. If it was his charismatic mission to prevent orthodoxy from being contaminated,³⁷it was his duty to vigilate over everyone and everything so that the lifestyles inherited from the past were in no way changed. The conclusion: citizens had no rights at all before the all powerful state, which could and indeed should “intervene also in the minor details of private life”³⁸to make sure that the “new chosen peo-ple” did not move away from unchangeable sacred tradition.

3. A society that was structured in this way was, by choice, an immobile, closed macrocosm, hostile to everything from without: men, ideas, values, institutions. It lived in the cult of a spiritual superiority confirmed each day by loyalty to “pure and uncontaminated orthodoxy.”³⁹Not surprisingly, Eu-ropeans traveling to Russia discovered a civilization that was quite different from their own civilization and more like the Islamic world than the Western world.⁴⁰

They effectively were two distinct cultural worlds: Russian society was antithetic to Western society. In the West, society was autonomous; it had developed counterpowers that pursued an “experimental” policy in every domain. Not only did it not fear the “new but it actively searched for it in every sphere, endeavouring to end the inertia of tradition and questioning its sacredness and functionality.” In other words, it was a society that imbibed what Marx has called the “permanent capitalist revolution” that advanced in every direction, generating major changes, through regular growth crises.

Charismatic despotism instead had prevented society from evolving in Russia

and kept it under an inquisition-type regime, cut off from the outside world to avoid contamination from ideas and values foreign to orthodoxy.

Of course it was no easy matter for Russia to preserve its traditional lifestyle when the radioactive power of Western civilization was increasing daily.

Moreover, Western society had developed a method for the constant growth of technology, and the e´lites of Moscow inevitably felt a frustrating sense of inferiority. It was obvious that Europe’s technological superiority constituted a permanent threat. If Holy Russia was to avoid the danger of becoming a colony of “heretical Europe,” it had to abandon the strategy of isolation.

The terms of the new relationship between Russia and Europe were ana-lyzed for the first time by Iury Krizhanich in his work Politika. Krizhanich was a Croatian priest who had been appointed political counselor by Tsar Alexis. He looked upon Russia “with the eyes of the first panslavist”:⁴¹though acknowledging that Russia was enormously ignorant, corrupt, and inefficient, he praised it for its great spirituality, which was in contrast with the West’s crude materialism. The essence of Krizhanich’s message was this: Russia’s destiny was to save the world; therefore it had to preserve its national tradi-tions. At the same time it had to become familiar with foreign arts and science.

Thus, it should open to Europe, but only to steal the secret of its material power and not to borrow and adopt its lifestyles, which were spiritually

Thus, it should open to Europe, but only to steal the secret of its material power and not to borrow and adopt its lifestyles, which were spiritually