Dan Mahoney on Russian Politics, Past and Future

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Hello and welcome once again to the close read, your official podcast of the Claremont Review of Books ORG. I'm your host, Spencer Claven, the associate editor of CRV ORG, and it's my privilege to sit down each new issue that comes out with the few authors just to discuss their essays and their reviews a little further. We are on now to the Winter, 2023-24 edition. This is for those keeping track at home, volume 24, of CRB ORG. for those keeping track at home volume 24 number one of CRB ORG. And it's my pleasure this episode to be joined by Daniel J. Mahoney PERSON. I bet for a lot of our listeners, he needs no introduction,but I will just say, as a matter of course, that he's Professor Emeritus at Assumption University and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute ORG. He's got a book coming up, one of his many books, which I'm really looking forward to this one called the persistence of the Claremont Institute WORK_OF_ART. He's got a book coming up one of his many books, which I'm really looking forward to this one called The Persistence of the Ideological Lie WORK_OF_ART. It's from Encounter. And in this issue, he's got what I thought was just a fascinating and informativeessay on Russian politics. It's called Up from Bolshevism WORK_OF_ART. It cuts through a lot of the alarmism and sort of broad brushstrokes you'll find in

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the media now that Russia GPE is constantly under their public scrutiny to give a larger history and a more subtle kind of topography of how conservatism and liberalism tend to work in Russia GPE. Dan PERSON, welcome to the show.

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Oh, my pleasure, Spencer PERSON.

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Great to have you.

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So as I mentioned in the introduction, I learned a lot from this essay in part because, as I said, you know, you've got this kind of these over-the-top narratives about Russia GPE that have been a staple, really, of our media diet, at least since 2016, perhaps longer. And it really pays, as you show in this essay to pay more granular, detailed attention to the political landscape in Russia GPE, both because it, as a matter of truth, but also because it helps to give a more sober and clarifying assessmentof what's going on right now. You're reviewing here two books by a University of Ottawa intellectual historian in Paul Robinson PERSON, and one is called Russian NORP conservatism, the other is called Russian liberalism. So between the two of them, you get kind of a map. And I thought maybe we could start here. The way that you tell it, it seems to me that Russian conservatism, which is really the more robust tradition, is defined in the 18th and 19th centuries by the search for what you call a Zondervig, which is this German term for a special Russian route into modernity out of whatever went before the Industrial Revolution and into what was then emerging. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means and how Russian NORP conservatives sought thatspecial route? Sure.

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Of course, the German term Sondervig is not peculiar to Russia GPE. I think there are a whole series of romantic thinkers, especially in the 19th century, German in particular, but also East Central European and Russian NORP, who were by no means reactionaries. They understood the distinctive features of political and philosophical modernity. But on the other hand, they resisted the idea that there was a single path of development that their nations and cultures were required to follow.And in often cases, some of the best thinkers in these respective national traditions, literary, political, cultural, resisted the identification of a modern path forward with, you might say, the most progressive courage in the Western NORP world. And that meant scientism, utilitarianism, atheism, progressivism, broadly understood. The kinds of things that Dostoevsky so brilliantly takesa mat in the underground man, notes on the underground man, you know, or the Dostoevsky had a kind of a, well, it wasn't really an obsession, but he used the image of the Crystal Palacein London in 1859, you know this peon to scientific progress. And he saw that there was something stultifying about the westernizers appealing for Russia GPE, in particular,

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just to follow the least sober, most inebriated currents of Western NORP modernity.

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So the path for a Sonderweig PERSON is not necessarily a problem. If I think the best currents, the Slavlophiles, for example, in 19th century Russia GPE, they managed to keep a dialogue going with the civic cultures of the West. They were suspicious, as I said, a moment ago of what we might broadly call intellectual progressivism, the radical enlightenment, but on the other hand, they were deeply influenced by Western NORP philosophy, by German idealism. And so they wanted Russia GPE to be part of modernity withoutjettisoning her own faith traditions and perhaps finding ways that could protect the Russian NORP people from the excesses of autocracy and authoritarianism without necessarily following the liberal constitutionalism of the West. So the Slavifies, for example, were the first people to speak in Russia about the paramount importance of Glasnost, a word that became widely known during the Gorbachev PERSON, openness, publicity, free intellectual life.They were against the death penalty. They wanted the Russian Orthodox Church to play central and healing and constructive role in Russian national life without giving the church inordinate political power. So today, you know, I mentioned in my piece that a movement like the South Loviles will have their strengths and will have their limits, but if one reads their principal theorists, Komikov, Askov PERSON, and others, they're quite interesting men, quite civilized, quite moderate. And yet in the West, the term Slavophile NORP is used as if it's the Russian equivalent of the Ayatollah Khomeini, you know? I know from my work on Solzhenitsyn PERSON that a lot of his culture despisers just say, well, he's a slavophile and close off the conversation.

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Of course, the interesting thing about Solzhenitsyn PERSON, he gave a press conference when he was in

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Japan in 1983 and at the Tokyo airport and somebody asked Slavophile NORP. And he said, you know, I've never really closely studied the Slavophiles NORP. But he said, my big difference with the Slavophiles NORP is they romanticize the mere, the traditional peasant commune. And Solzhenitsyn PERSON following his bow ideal of a statesman, Piotr Stelipin, the conservative liberal reformer of the early 20th century, and a great statesman by any universal criteria, the last man who might have saved Russia GPE from Bolshevism.Solzhenitsyn Stilipin PERSON both thought that the mere kept the Russian peasantry down, that there were resources of hard work and industriousness that were, you know, that were kept down by, you know, really sort of a romantic cult. You know, there was a tendency of people like Dostoevsky and the Slavophiles NORP to, you know, in a way, romanticize the people in the form of the peasantry and not to understand that if the Russian NORP peasants were 80, 85% of the country were to be full citizens in a Russia GPE that was moving forward,they needed to have a stake in the political order. And that meant land ownership, that meant the unleashing of industriousness and all of that. And by the way, one of the ironies, as I point out in my piece, is that Salyp PERSON and largely succeeded. And that class of, he once said to the Duma ORG, we must take a chance on the industrious and the sober and not the lazy and the drunk.

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But it was sounds a lot like some certain American NORP conservative theorists, I know.

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But yeah.

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And so I'm going to say that those were those Kulaks NORP.

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And by the way, that was Bolshevik and socialist propaganda, that the industrious, the hardworking, the successful, those who were less dependent, you might say, and the sort of collective will of the mere, they became a prosperous peasant class, and it was precisely them now labeled Kulaks by the Bolsheviks, who were the principal victims of collectivization in the early 1930s.

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Yes. You do point out in this piece, and it's something that maybe goes underappreciated about Soljnitsyn that he's known as this scathing critic of the autocracy and tyranny of the Soviet Union. But that doesn't come at the expense of realism about the genuine problems of Zara GPE's

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Russia GPE and the injustices inherent in the mirrors, as you say.

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Meanwhile, you mentioned Dostoevsky PERSON's sort of contempt or scorn for the Crystal Palace

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idea of modernity that we're all going to charge forward

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into these sunlit uplands of material welfare and spiritual poverty. At the same time, that

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Crystal Palace was the kind of the emblem of all that was good and great for Cherneushchevsky PERSON,

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who was Vladimir Lenin's PERSON favorite novelists who would hear nothing against this beautiful idea

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of the technological utopia

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we were all supposed to be headed for.

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We know, with the hindsight of history,

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how that all worked out, but alongside these careful, sort of studious thinkers about how to bring Russia GPE into modernity, there were also, throughout the 1800s, there were terrorist movements that kind of staged uprisings prior to the Bolshevik NORP revolution.Can you talk a little bit about those movements, and especially perhaps the one that ended up killing these famous Tsar, Liberator, Alexander,

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and what their objectives were? What did they hope to achieve with these violent uprisings? Yeah.

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Dostoevsky PERSON is the greatest literary and philosophical critic of revolutionary nihilism, of just the unremitting neolism of the Russian NORP intellectual class. And that's why I think among other things, demons or the sometimes translated English LANGUAGE as the possessed or the devil's remains an indispensable book because that current of the utterly irresponsible, hate-filled intellectual, dedicated to the destruction of the present world, not just destruction of aspects of it, but the replacement of the existing world with all its imperfections,but also of all its goods and the principles of fairness and justice that informant. That spirit of negation was at the heart of the Russian NORP revolutionary temptation. Gary Saul Morrison, the great Russian NORP student of literature and the author of the wonderful recent book, Wonder Confronts Sertitude WORK_OF_ART, he points out that to be a Russian NORP intelligent, you had to be an atheist, a utilitarian, a neelist. In other words, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and if we added the 20th century, people likePosternak, Grossman PERSON, Solzhenitsyn would not be considered intelligence precisely because the definition of intelligent

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had to do with one's commitment to revolutionary and neolithic ideology. So, I mean,

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of course, many intellectuals in the West are Russian NORP-style intelligence, whether they know it or not. But the very definition of an intellectual is not reducible to radical, neolithic, left-wing progressivism. So that's something you know.

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Although the association remains, you might say, that there's a kind of a bias in favor of those more extreme strains. Whereas if you countermand them, you know, that automatically almost counts against you even now, I think, you know, sort of makes you a little bit suspect in the eyes of our intelligence.

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Well, you know we know of authors, writers who, John Dos Passos, the writer of the great trilogy 1919 and others, acclaimed as a great modernist writer, he was a man of somewhat not a predictable left-wing views. And when he turned on communism and became a American NORP conservative and a writer for National Review and a man who continued to write wonderful novels, he more or less ceased to exist as part of the American NORP literary canon. So yeah, Dostoevsky PERSON had this, I would say, one has to approach Dostoevsky in a very agated way. Why? Because as a critic of chivalgism, you know, the character Shagalloff and demons who says, you know, 100 million people must perish and we must cut off Cicero's tongue and take out Shakespeare PERSON's eyes and all of that.As a critic of that ethos of radical destruction, he's unsurpassed. And he sees, I think, the pathologies of the intelligency and the revolutionary nihilists is primarily a spiritual sickness. His positive alternatives are more problematic, not completely problematic, but he was not, I think, in the end, very much of a political thinker. He hoped for the spiritual rejuvenation of Russia GPE. He placed great hope in the ordinary people. If you read, let's say, notes from the House of the Dead FAC. He sort of discovered that many of these prisonersthat he met who had done some terrible things, murders and robbing and so much. But in their heart, they were open to repentance. They represented something about the Russian NORP soul that was admirable. And one thing Dostoevsky PERSON had in common with his revolutionary opponents, you know, in the 1860s, the members of the populist movements and the people's will, the quite neolithic terrorist group that would end up assassinating. On their fifth attempt, I think, the czar liberator, Alexander I first PERSON, who would reallytransform Russia in the years between 1860 and 1881, all the great reforms, opening up the universities, the army, pried by jury, the abolition of serfdom. And he was just on the verge of establishing at least a early version of representative institutions for Russia GPE. So the murder of Tsar Alexander was a real calamity. an early version of representative institutions for Russia GPE. So the murder of Tsar Alexander PERSON was a real calamity. And that's exactly what the revolutionaries wanted. They wanted to get in the way of salient reform, as they always do.But one thing Dostebsky and the populace had in common was this sort of confidence in the good sense of the Russian NORP people. So there was a movement in the 1860s and 70s of revolutionary intelligence going into the Russian NORP countryside. It was called Going to the People WORK_OF_ART, and they were going to soak up the wisdom of the Russian NORP peasants. But it turns out the Russian NORP peasants were loyal to the Tsar, not revolutionaries, not atheists.

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They would throw stones at the revolutionary populace and a populace and essentially told

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them to go home.

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So, Dostoevsky, I think, was closer to the spirit of the Russian NORP people, but not without

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a very strong dose of romanticism. But the revolutionary intelligentsia somehow thought that the ordinary Russian NORP people were, you know, they were somehow proto-revolutionaries or, you know, on the cutting edge of, you know, some kind of populist revolution, which really only existed in the minds of Russian NORP intellectuals. But there are sometimes one thing that's, I think, it is some of the Slavophiles NORP and the Popovychi, the sort of populist Christian writers that Dostoevsky PERSON belonged to, what they had in common.They didn't have that much in common, but they had a kind of anti-Borgeois NORP ire. They didn't like the materialism and the maybe religious and moral indifference of part of the Russian NORP middle classes. They were too modern. They were too unrealistic. And so in some of his letters and in some of his contributions in the writer's diary, Dostoevsky PERSON speaks with more respect for the revolutionary nihilus. In this sense, at least they're open in their absolute disdain of God

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and spiritual values, while the emerging urban Russian NORP middle class is marked by too much

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religious and a moral indifference. So one was satanic openly, and the other one just didn't care about the most important questions.

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You may remember in a Dosteving novel, I think it's in Karamazov PERSON, where there's a description of how

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Russian NORP boys get together in the darkest pubs and taverns and, you know, and then talk about

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the greatest metaphysical and really, that's, you know, that was the Russian goal for Dostoevsky PERSON.

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And he, yeah, yeah.

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And so I never think of Dostoevsky PERSON.

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Seltian-Itsin, I think, had extremely,

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gave a good deal of thought to Russian NORP politics and history,

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constructive paths forward.

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He was much more sympathetic toward a kind of bringing together of the best of Western style civic culture and political liberty with Russia GPE's own faith traditions.

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Dostoevsky PERSON, I think his political reflection is probably a little too utopian.

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But he was absolutely right in his view that what mattered in the end was respect for the human person

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and not some kind of utilitarian effort to, you know, he thought the regnant scientism of the age ignored things like beauty, spiritual elevation, the reality of sin, of the power of evil. You know, Dostoevsky PERSON was obsessed as many of his novels show with all the terrible things that had done by perverts and others to young children. You know, so Dostoevsky is less helpful as a prudent political thinker, but is prophetic and powerful as a critic of just the absolutely distorted spiritual conceptions and worldview of the Russian NORP intelligentsia.

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So I'm curious, you've laid out for us now, sort of a map and your essay goes into

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greater detail, which people can go away and read as they should.

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But you've got on the one hand a complex and variegated group of conservatives wrestling with this very real problem of prudence, how to move a czarist Russia GPE into modernity. You've then got a pretty irresponsible radical left abetted by some apologists among the so-called liberals or the moderate left, which sort of, you know, reaps the whirlwind in the horrors of the Soviet Union GPE. I'm wondering if now you could tell us a little bit about how that topography has endured

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or how it shifted into modern Russia, the Russia of Putin PERSON, which, as you say, has been a, has had a conservative shift. The liberal tradition remains kind of anemic. You, you write in this essay that Putin's domineering presence has crowded out real political life. His rule has become more authoritarian and heavy-handed, less autocratic

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in the traditional Russian NORP sense that is responsibly autocratic and principled in its leadership. And this is sort of compounded by the facts that if there's a really visibly energetic alternative to Putin PERSON, it probably lies in some sense to his right, that it represents even a more kind of strange confection of brown shirts and red shirts. Since you wrote this, I think we've had the death of Alexei Navalny, who was famously Putin PERSON's major kind of rival if he had one. Where now, if, you know, 20, 30, 40 years down the line, who are the Russian NORP thinkers, if any,that are kind of representing the more responsible strain of liberal in the true sense Russian NORP conservatism that you identify in this piece? Are there errors to that?

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Well, Russian NORP liberalism is pretty more among or senescent. Russian conservatism that you identify in this piece. Are there airs to that? Well, Russian NORP liberalism is pretty more among or senescent right now for reasons I'll discuss in a moment. Russian NORP liberalism, as I point out at the beginning of my article, emigre scholars, Western professors, Russianists, Sovietologists NORP tended not to pay much attention to the Russian NORP conservative tradition after 1970for a very simple reason, or a couple of simple reasons. One, they tended to be left liberal progressives themselves. And so for them, the only viable alternative to communism might have been in social democraticand left currents that were anti-Lennon or anti-Stalin, but were still within the broad socialist and Marxist NORP tradition, the Mensheviks NORP, the social revolutionaries. But the majority of emigrate thinkers in the West were white. The white opponents of the Reds NORP, they were not all hindbound reactionaries by any means. And by the way, among the Russian NORP emigration, the liberals have been completely discredited. First of all, the cadet party led by Paul Milikov PERSON, who becameForeign Minister of Russia GPE during the short-lived provisional government after the February Revolution of 1917. Milikov PERSON, who was a great historian, but he was not a typical, he was not really, he was to the left of liberalism. The cadet party never once condemned revolutionary terrorism. never once condemned revolutionary terrorism. Thousands upon thousands of people had been killed by the populist and the revolutionaries of the 19th century, something like 10,000 Russians, government officials, but also just ordinary citizens, were murdered by social revolutionaries and Bolsheviks and other terrorists in the years between 1905 and 1909 until Stolipin GPE managed to crush the terrorist insurrection.The Russia's leading liberal party, the constitutional Democrats, the cadets, K-A-D-E-T-S ORG, as they recall, never once condemned that terror. They were so desperately afraid of being outflanked on their left. So their motto, their animating impulse and spirit was, padena me a gauche. This has always been the problem with liberals in the 20th century. They have very little princi principal ground for standing up to and resisting, you might say, the self-radicalization of liberalism into radicals.Why did so many liberals and progressives apologize for communist totalitarianism in the 20th century? As Solzhenitsin PERSON said, they didn't really have a principal ground for saying no, since the revolutionary movements were more consistently modern, progressive, irreligious, etc. And some of them, of course, lack courage. Courage for the George Orwells PERSON of the world and others, men of the left, to say, nonpossum, I cannot. I cannot go along with this, right?So that was, that's part of the picture. The conservative movements, there's some very interesting conservative currents of thought that had nothing to do with the nastier forms of nationalism that were, I mentioned Ivan Illian, the Wright-Hagallian professor of law at Moscow University ORG, who became the leading thinker of the emigration in the interwar period. He wrote a book, a kind of response to Tolstoy PERSON's pacifism in 1925 entitled Resisting Evil with Force. And he argued why it was necessary for Christians NORP,not to simply withdraw from the public field or adopt an attitude of passivity and withdrawal, but to fight back and to win back Russia GPE. Tim Snyder, who is a Russophobe of the First Order at Yale University ORG, he wrote a book after Trump PERSON was elected president, the 20 steps toward tyranny that compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in January 1933. But he's written these articles from the New York Times and elsewhere saying Ivan Elyan PERSON was completely opposed to the rule of law.Ivan Eelian was Russia's 20th century greatest theoretician of the law. He was right Hegelian PERSON. And that means he saw the rule of law, the Rexcott, as the pillar and the building block of a reconstituted, free, and decent Russia GPE. So we have a politically, media savvy American NORP professor telling us that the leading anti-communist, Russian NORP political philosopher and legal theoristin the Middle Period, who was in fact a preeminent advocate, the preeminent advocate for the importance of rule of law, that he in fact was a fascist who was against the rule of law.

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It's true like many emigres, Eelian had been in Berlin, others were in Prague, others were in Belgrade, others were in New York, many, many more in Paris GPE. But he, Ileon left Berlin for Switzerland in 1938 because he was appalled by the National Socialist regime. At the beginning, he thought, well, maybe all this rhetoric is overwrought. They'll just turn out to be an anti-communist

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force, but he very quickly realized that this was a inhuman revolution of neelism, as bad as the Bolsheviks NORP themselves. So I gave you a good example how Western scholars completely ignored, continue to misconstrue currents of thought that have real power and impact in contemporary Russia GPE. For example, if you go to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow GPE, as I have, who's buried there? Illion PERSON.

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Earl De Nican, the leader of the White Army, Solzhenitsyn PERSON, you know.

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And whether we like it or not, those are, along with Vladimir Soloveyev, Nikolai Berdjayev PERSON,

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many of the thinkers associated with the anti-nealist intellectual manifesto, Jews and Christians NORP,

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Vecchi, signposts or landmarks that came out in 1909, Vieki, signposts or landmarks that came out in 1909 and that excoriated the neolithic utilitarianism and the cult of revolution that inspired the Russian NORP intellectual class. These were from 2000 to 20 till the war, really. These were the thinkers Putin PERSON tended to quote. He never quoted Bolshevik

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figures or Soviet NORP leaders and all of that.

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So that's not to whitewash Putin PERSON because I think Putin, as you quoted me, saying, has stayed in power in too long, has been rather too heavy handed of late. too heavy-handed of late. I think the regime has moved from a traditional Tsarist NORP-style autocrity to having some real police state features, even if it's not undergirded by an ideology. There's certainly no mass terror or anything like that, and there's political opposition of sorts and some intellectual opposition, although everything has hardened quite a bit since the war broke out. But I think we would do ourselves an immense favor by jettisoning all our cliches.

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And if our approach to Russia GPE is the facile, lazy, unsurious one of saying this is just an Oriental despotism, and there's never been lively, thoughtful, intra-Russian debate about Russian nationhood or how Russia might move forward on her own path to civilized liberty.

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And to come back to something you said before, if we don't realize that there are many currents in Russia GPE today that are far more illiberal, nasty, anti-Western than Putin PERSON, I think we also miss the boat. anti-Western than Putin PERSON, I think we also miss the boat. Now, that could not just be an excuse for saying, well, Putin PERSON's better than a lot of other guys, so he needs to be there forever and ever. That's certainly not my position. But I do think most, even decently informed Western commentators on Russia get a lot of big things wrong. There was no public commemoration in 2017 of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.Well, no one commented on that.

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A giant monument was built around the ring wall of Moscow with the names of millions of victims of communist repression.

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The church has canonized, 3,000 martyrs who died under common. These are things that are not well-known. They're certainly not written about or publicized because they don't fit the regnant narrative. The regnant narrative is complicated. And the real truth is complicated. I certainly don't think that Putin has any plans to restore the Russian or Soviet NORP.I don't even think has plans to occupy all of Ukraine GPE.

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I think the concern is over East Ukraine and NATO ORG expansion.

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That makes a big difference. If Putin is a neo-red who wants to restore the Warsaw Pact LAW and who has his eyes on Poland

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and the Baltic states in Sweden, as dominant opinion says today, that's a very different

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story than the one I'm laying out. But I'm not uncritical of... Navalny, by the way, is not a major figner in Russia GPE.

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And he's ideologically unsavory in a way. He had more extreme views on Ukraine GPE and other matters until quite recently.

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And he did. Navalny really made a choice about seven or eight years ago to push for something like, you know, street demonstration, something like an eventual orange revolution. I think that Dundan PERSON was terrible. He was clearly the victim of a poison attack. And I, there's no evidence the Soviet NORP, the Russian regime murdered him. But sticking this man with health problems in a prison north of the Arctic Circle LOC was, I don't think it was in Putin's interest for Navalny PERSON to die.And so I think that move was irresponsible, immoral, and politically counterproductive. and politically counterproductive.

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Well, the place to go, I think, to start getting a handle on a more detailed and helpful kind of assessment of how Russian NORP politics works and has worked. Place to start is up from Bolshevism, this book review by our guest, Dan Mahoney PERSON. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us.

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Those who are listening in can get this essay and a whole lot more from the winter issue of CRB at Claremont Review of Books.com ORG where these articles are online. And you can also get them delivered to your mailbox with the increasingly rare benefit of the actual physical copy of the magazine. Dan PERSON, as always, it's a delight talking to you, and thanks for joining the show. And let me just second. Every issue of the CRB ORG is delight. A delight.

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You've got two weeks or more, depending on how you read, wonderful reading ahead of you, and

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writing of a very high quality. So I thank you. Got a second recommendation. Horific. It probably means more coming from you in part

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because it's my job to recommend it. I'm going to be able to be.