The Shadows of False Messiahs Mikhail Agursky and the relationship between Russian nationalism and Zionism from the Brezhnev era to the present

MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam

Samuel Finkelman 11104473

Main Supervisor: Michael Kemper Second Supervisor: Uladzislau Belavusau

July 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments and Contact Information, 4 Introduction, 5 An Unlikely Gathering, 5

Chapter One: A Loaded Spring, 7

Chapter Two: Between Two Nationalisms, 9

Chapter Three: A Changing of Signposts, 16

Chapter Four: The Shadows of False Messiahs, 22

Chapter One: A Loaded Spring, 27 1.1 The roots of Agursky’s dissidence, 27

1.2 The Ash of Klaas: Samuil Agursky’s influence on his son, 28

1.3 Mikhail Agursky’s early encounters with anti-Semitism, 33

1.4 Agursky’s encounters with pre-revolutionary Russian culture, 35

1.5 The beginnings of dissent during “the Thaw” years, 37

1.6 Alexander Men’ and Agursky’s involvement with the Church, 38

1.7 Conclusions, 42

Chapter Two: Between Two Nationalisms, 44 2.1 The rise of anti-Semitism, Zionism, dissidence, and Russian nationalism during the early Brezhnev era, 44

2.2 The dawn of dissidence, 48

2.3 Agursky’s review of Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism! 49

2.4 Agursky’s open letter in the samizdat journal Veche, 54

2.5 Agursky and Solzhenitsyn, 59

2.6 From Under the Rubble, 61

2.7 The Yanov hypothesis and Agursky’s disagreements with Solzhenitsyn, 67

Chapter Three: A Changing of Signposts (1975-1991), 71

3.1 The Russian messianism debate in early 1970s samizdat, 71

3.2 The many meanings of ‘national Bolshevism’, 76

3.3 Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism, 78

3.4 Agursky’s place in Soviet historiography, 88

3.5 Critiques of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism, 91

3.6 The origins and aims of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism, 93

3.7 Agursky’s reading of history as a vindication of left wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism and Zionism, 95

Chapter Four: The Shadows of False Messiahs, 99

4.1 Introduction, 99

4.2 Agursky’s Nash Sovremennik Zionism Debate with Vadim Kozhinov, 101

4.3 Agursky, Alexander Dugin and the contemporary relationship between Zionism and national Bolshevism, 110

4.4 Messianic tendencies in Agursky’s Zionist writings, 123

4.5 Conclusion: Agursky’s larger view of history and important distinctions between Agursky and Dugin’s messianisms, 136

Conclusion, 139

Bibliography, 144

3

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for the following reasons: my supervisor Michael Kemper for all of his help in formulating the structure and content of this paper and his edits along the way; Erik van Ree for his intellectual guidance; Christian Noack for his help with pragmatic concerns; my second supervisor Uladzislau Belavusau for obliging to read a long thesis; all of my professors at Universiteit van Amsterdam for everything they have taught me this year; and the staff at UvA’s libraries and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam for helping me access source material.

I would also like to thank everyone at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen who showed me such warm hospitality; provided me with a research space; and helped me navigate their vast collection of samizdat, tamizdat, and archival materials, without which this thesis would not have been possible. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the center’s archivist of Soviet materials, Maria Klassen, who tried to warn me «Нельзя объять необъятное» and to whom this thesis is dedicated.

Contact Information

Samuel Finkelman Post address: 408 Willowbend Court Hockessin, Delaware 19707 USA

+1-302-690-2951

[email protected]

Michael Kemper (Supervisor) Office address: Oost-Indisch Huis Kloveniersburgwal 48 Amsterdam Kamernummer: D2.08A Post address: Kloveniersburgwal 48 1012 CX Amsterdam

[email protected] 0205254370 020525228

4 Introduction Mikhail Agursky: the White Raven of Soviet Dissidence

An Unlikely Gathering

On April 5, 1975 a crowd of five hundred artists, intellectuals, and activists gathered in an apartment in the Beliaevo–Bogorodskoe neighborhood of Moscow. Much of the party could be split into two wholly discrepant groups: a faction of ultra-nationalist Russian Orthodox thinkers on the one side; and dozens of Jewish dissidents, refuseniks, and human rights activists on the other. If the guests did not notice the irony themselves, two posters hung in opposite corners of the flat to remind them: one read, “Corner for Jews,” the other, “Corner for anti-Semites.” On that evening, two common denominators united this diverse crowd. The first was their active opposition to the Soviet system. The second was their acquaintance with Mikhail Agursky (1933-1991), who had just been granted permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel. He was leaving in a matter of days. This unlikely mix of Zionists, Russian nationalists, human rights activists and artists had gathered to see him off.1 As the eclectic crowd present at his goodbye party suggests, the dissident, human rights activist, and historian Mikhail Agursky was something of an anomaly. While most Jews of Agursky’s generation had grown up speaking Russian, and during their younger years they had identified not as Jewish but as Soviet, the increasing hostility of both popular and official attitudes towards the Jews during the late 1960s, alienated many of them from any remaining loyalty to either Soviet socialism or Russian culture. Jews were left with two ideological choices: Western-oriented liberalism or Zionism.2 Especially after the events of the Six Day War and the ensuing campaign of official anti-Zionism in the Soviet press, the latter became the increasingly popular choice. Esther Markish, the daughter of Yiddish-language Soviet poet Perets Markish, recalled in her memoirs: “When the threat of war loomed over Israel, many Russian Jews made the unequivocal choice: ‘Israel is our flesh and blood. Russia is, at best, a distant relative, if not a total stranger.’”3 Agursky, however, rejected this “unequivocal choice.” Notwithstanding his ardent commitment to the Zionist cause and his immigration to Israel in 1975, Agursky never abandoned his Russian identity. He saw nothing incompatible between his Judaism and his Russianness, always seeking cooperation and

1 Mikhail Agursky, Pepel Klaasa: Razryv (Jerusalem 1996), 397. 2 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton 2004) 341. 3 Esther Markish, Stol’ dolgoe vozvrashchenie (Tel Aviv 1989), 338.

5 reconciliation between Jews and Russians. In the early 1960s he even converted to Russian Orthodoxy, although he later returned to his native Judaism. Never shying away from an intellectual argument, his works are marked by a sympathetic fascination with right-wing Russian nationalism. His “favorite interlocutors” were anti-Semitic intellectuals, and he eagerly threw himself into polemics on the pages of far-right samizdat journals.4 Publicist Mikhail Bolotovsky explained: “For most Jews, if the word ‘anti-Semite’ was addressed to someone this became sufficient grounds to remove that addressee from the list of people worth shaking hands with. But not for Agursky. ‘Anti-Semite? Why do you say anti-Semite? And in general–is he really an anti-Semite?’ In such a way, one might roughly formulate his approach.”5 Agursky’s sympathy towards right-wing Russian nationalism can be explained by his belief in Russian nationalism’s compatibility with Zionism. For Agursky, Russian nationalism and Zionism shared a common enemy: the atheistic Soviet system that had attempted to extinguish both cultures. What is more, in his eyes, they shared a common goal: national self-preservation. Since Zionism sought to preserve the Jewish nation on a territory far away from Russia, there could be no conflict of interest. Nevertheless, Agursky was painfully aware that much of the nationalist dissident movement did not agree with him regarding the compatibility of the Jewish and Russian national movements. Dismayed by Russian nationalism’s chauvinistic tendencies, Agursky refused to remove himself from Russian culture, as most Zionist activists did. Instead, he tried to persuade ideological opponents that Zionism and Russian nationalism shared common interests, sources and goals. This thesis serves to explore the roots, content, and contemporary relevance of Agursky’s unconventional belief in the potential for cooperation between Zionism and Russian nationalism, two ideologies commonly believed to be anathema to one another. This work does not strive to be a biography in the traditional sense, although it might be classified as an intellectual biography. The arguments of this paper will center on analyses of Agursky’s articles, books, and other writings – not on his life. Nevertheless, certain biographical information is crucial to understanding Agursky’s ideological formation, and the first chapter of this thesis will focus on how early developments in Agursky’s life impacted his later worldview. In the second chapter we will explore Agursky’s dissident activity and the development of the Jewish Question in his samizdat writings

4 Mikhail Bolotovsky, “Agursky i Rossiia: Istoriia pechal’nykh sovpadenii,” Polit.ru (date of publication not provided) accessed at http://www.zhurnal.ru/polit/articles.html?agursky 5 Ibid.

6 from the mid 1970s. We will pay particular attention to his grounds for belief in future Russian-Zionist cooperation and the utopian program he advanced in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s collection From Under the Rubble [Iz pod glyb]. In the third chapter, we will look at Agursky’s work as a historian in Israel and investigate the conception of ‘national Bolshevism’ he advanced in his two major historical works: his 1980 Russian-language Ideologiia natsional-bolshevizma and his 1987 English-language adaptation of that work, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR. In the final chapter we will explore the contemporary relevance and implications of both Agursky’s ‘national Bolshevik’ reading of Soviet history and his belief in the ideological compatibility of Zionism and Russian nationalism. This final chapter will focus on how and why Agursky’s ideas have been appropriated by the chief ideologue of the Russian New Right, Alexander Dugin, in his 1997 work Templars of the Proletariat. In this introduction we set out to present the central arguments to be found in each chapter and to introduce the reader to important biographical information and terminology that will inform the paper’s argumentation.

Chapter One: A Loaded Spring (1933-1967) The young Agursky’s path to dissidence

Mikhail [born Melib, often referred to as Melik] Agursky was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1933. His father was a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and party historian who was arrested in the Great Terror and exiled to Kazakhstan, where he died in 1947. Even though his father had been deemed a traitor, Agursky’s familial connections secured him access to excellent primary and secondary education. For many years, Agursky perceived his father’s arrest to be something of a mistake. He was a dedicated and mostly well-behaved student and participated actively in the Komsomol; in his youth, he was a convinced Marxist and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he deeply respected Stalin. But as he grew older, he began experiencing discrimination. His Jewish ethnicity and his father’s pariah status prevented him from attending the most prestigious Soviet institutions of higher education, and he decided to pursue a degree in engineering. After graduating from the Stalin Machine-Tools Institute in Moscow (STANKIN) in the mid 1950s, he worked for the Experimental Research Institute of Machine Tools (ENIMS). In 1965 he became a PhD candidate [aspirant] at the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1968 he began working for the Scientific-Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering (NIITM), which produced rockets and spaceships. In 1969 he defended his dissertation in cybernetics and received his doctorate.

7 Agursky’s disillusionment with Soviet communism was slow and gradual, and took many intellectual turns and detours. He wrote in his memoirs that it was not until 1958 that he lost faith in the Soviet system. It was around this time that Agursky turned towards religion. Interestingly, the Jewish-born Agursky converted to Russian Orthodoxy. This is not as strange as it might seem, and was actually something of a phenomenon for intellectual Moscow Jews of Agursky’s generation.6 Like many Soviet Jews of his era, the young Mikhail understood his Jewish identity in ethno-national rather than religious terms. In many ways, Agursky – who understood but did not speak the Yiddish of his parents – felt just as much Russian as he did Jewish. In 1955, he had even married a Russian woman, Vera Kondratieva, who was to remain his wife until his death. Searching for truth after his break with Soviet communism in the late 1950s, Agursky fell under the spiritual influence of the notable Orthodox priest, Father Alexander Men’. It was with the church that Agursky’s work as a historian began. Working closely with high-ranking clergy, he researched early Soviet anti- religious policy and helped with the publication of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarch (ZhMP). As we will see, Agursky’s involvement with the Orthodox Church also instilled in him a love and veneration for the values and institutions his father’s generation had spurred: religion and national tradition. Moreover, Agursky’s Church activity provided him a bridge by which he returned to his native faith and nationality. In the first chapter we will set out to show how these and other important biographical and historical developments in Agursky’s early life (1933-1967) influenced his belief in grounds for Russian-Jewish cooperation. Our main source for this chapter will be Agursky’s fascinating memoirs of his years in Russia (1933-1975), The Ash of Klaas [Pepel Klaasa].7 In this chapter we will strive to show how various biographical and historical developments during these years contributed to Agursky’s disillusionment with Soviet communism and compelled him to turn towards religion, and eventually Zionism. We will pay particular attention to the tragic fate of Samuil Agursky, and the young Mikhail’s experiences with anti-Semitism and encounters with intellectual and religious

6 See Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison 2004). 7 A number of chapters that did not go into the published version have since been printed in Ierusalimskii zhurnal and Studiia, Russian-language journals based in Israel and Germany, respectively. The content of these chapters and the history of Pepel Klaas’s publication will also be addressed in Chapter One. These originally unpublished chapters of Pepel Klaasa can be found in the following two places: “Epizody vospominanii” Ieusalimskii zhurnal Nos. 2-5 (1999-2000): 189-234; 161-210; 231-274; 197-240; and “Pepel Klaasa: Glavy, ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia Nos. 4-14 (1998-2010), accessed online at http://magazines.russ.ru/studio/ on 5 March 2016.

8 counterculture. Introducing important historical developments in Soviet-Jewish relations that will be referred to throughout this paper, the first chapter endeavors to explain how history allowed a Jewish-born Soviet boy named after Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht [Melib] to convert to Russian Orthodoxy before becoming a dedicated Zionist.

Chapter Two: Between Two Nationalisms (1967-1975) Agursky’s dissidence and samizdat writings

In the early 1970s, Agursky became increasingly involved with dissident Zionist circles. Largely fueled by the rise of popular and official anti-Semitism in the late 1960s, a concentrated neo-Zionist movement emerged, advocating the Jewish right to leave the Soviet Union and make aliyah [i.e. immigrate to Israel]. Under Western pressure, the Soviet Union dramatically increased emigration quotas for Jews in 1970. During this time Agursky began attempting to obtain an exit visa, but his first couple of requests were denied. While at first Agursky refrained from open dissident activity for fear that it would ruin his chance of obtaining an exit visa, his increasing closeness with dissident figures and his growing frustration with the regime, who kept denying his requests anyway, compelled him to speak out. From 1972-1975 Agursky penned a number of articles in foreign publications and underground samizdat journals, defending the Zionist movement and calling for increased Russian-Jewish cooperation. The second chapter will investigate these writings of his dissident years, in which he clarified his ideological position and explained his belief in the future cooperation between the Jewish and Russian national movements. In dealing with Agursky’s dissidence we will attempt to clarify his position on the major samizdat debates of the early 1970s. To do so, we must first identify the prominent trends of Russian nationalism during this era. When referring to the late Soviet period, Russian nationalism is quite a vague umbrella term that incorporates a number of different ideologies, ranging from Christian populism to neo-Nazi fascism. As Agursky himself wrote about Russian nationalism, “the analyst has to be very cautious in his handling of this explosive political material. The different trends must be carefully distinguished and not mixed to make a witches’ brew.”8 As the distinguishing factors of these major trends of Brezhnev- era Russian nationalism inform this paper’s main arguments, terminological clarification is immediately necessary.

8 Mikhail Agursky, “Contemporary Russian Nationalism,” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Soviet and East European Research Center, Research Paper No. 40 (January 1982), 3.

9 Various trends in Brezhnev-era Russian nationalism and patriotism

Following Walker Connor we will use the word ‘nationalist’ throughout this thesis to refer to ethno-nationalism, or identification with and loyalty to “a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related.”9 As Wayne Allensworth noted in his discussion of Connor’s conception of ethno-nationalism, “The tie that binds is not the territory or the polity itself but the sense of common ancestry that is given concrete reality in national mythology, religion, art, customs, language, and folkways.”10 Loyalty to the political entity of the state we will label not ‘nationalism’ but ‘patriotism.’11 Thus, in purely theoretical terms, dedicated Marxists were neither patriots nor nationalists in that their loyalties were with the international workers of the world. This is not to say, however, that a large number of such dedicated Marxists, if any, filled the ranks of the Communist Party by the 1970s, or to suggest that official Soviet ideology had not incorporated extremely nationalistic aspects, but rather to say that the Soviet state was at least still laying claim to a fundamentally anti-nationalist ideology. Having established the distinction between patriotism and nationalism and having excluded the Platonic ideal of a pure, internationalist, classist Marxist from either camp, we can divide the various movements of Brezhnev-era nationalists and patriots into the following categories: 1) the official Russian nationalists Soviet, who represented Russian ethno-nationalist concerns in the party apparatus, such as Politburo members Dmitry Poliansky and Alexander Shelepin; 2) the patriotic but anti-nationalist neo-Westernizers, famously represented by Andrei Sakharov; 3) the nationalist but anti-étatist neo- Slavophiles, best represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and finally, 4) the patriotic-nationalist dissident far-right neo-Slavophiles, whose ideas were something of a hybrid between those of categories 1 and 3, best represented by rather obscure actors, like the Orthodox thinker Gennady Shimanov. Many scholars have labeled this first trend – which accepted and endorsed the Soviet system as a protector of Russian ethno-national concerns – with Agursky’s favorite term: national Bolshevism.12 This term, however, has

9 See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton 1994), xi. 10 Wayne Allensworth, The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia (Oxford 1998), 11. 11 For the ‘confusion interutilization’ of the key terms nation and state, see Connor (1994), 39-42. 12 For such a usage of ‘national Bolshevik,’ see John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton 1983), 242-265. Dunlop contrasted between the étatist national Bolsheviks and the dissenting vorozhdentsy. Besides the imprecision and conflation of the term ‘national Bolshevik,’ we have rejected Dunlop’s model because it is an oversimplification. Applying his terminology to our own: trend 1 would be the ‘national Bolshevik,’ trend 3 would be

10 undergone serious conflation. Because it has been applied to various political trends and has been used differently by various scholars and historians – including Agursky – we will use the term étatist nationalism when referring to this trend.13 Étatist nationalists were “the supporters of a strong state who rejected Marxist class analysis but glorified alike the Soviet State and tsarist Russia.”14 Proponents of this ideology were willing to sacrifice important national values and institutions (e.g. a powerful Orthodox Church, traditional Russian village life) in the name of Soviet modernization and expansion. Yet despite their acceptance and veneration of the Soviet system, these étatist nationalists sought to downplay the internationalist aspect and class analysis of communist ideology, lobbying instead for a culture, economy, and military that would promote and serve Russian national interests. At the same time, they sought territorial expansion and saw a large Russia as a strong Russia. In the sense that national Bolshevism was a movement that valued rapid modernization and heavy industrialization and militarization as guarantees of Russia’s greatness, it might be labeled a “progressive” nationalism. Those patriots and nationalists opposed to the Soviet system would include the above categories 2, 3, and to a much lesser extent 4. As will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, Soviet dissidence became an important intellectual force during the years of Agursky’s intellectual formation. We can split many of these dissidents into two large, opposing typologies that reproduced the central debate of 19th century Russian political thought: ‘neo- Westernizers’ and ‘neo-Slavophiles.’ The neo-Westernizer trend (2) can be labeled a progressive patriotism, in that it lobbied for a modernized Russia. However, unlike the national Bolsheviks, the neo-Westernizers vehemently opposed the violent methods and arbitrary nature of the Soviet regime, and saw Russia’s adoption of Western capitalism and liberal democracy as the nation’s only salvation. Valuing Western concepts such as rule of law, freedom of information, and a democratic political system, these patriots saw the state, and not the Russian people, as the safeguard of the nation’s interests. We cannot, however, label this trend a type of nationalism, in

the vorozhdentsy, and trend 4 would be something of a hybrid. Since trend 2 was not a nationalist movement its adherents were obviously neither vorozhdentsy nor national Bolsheviks. 13 For a critique of the ambiguity and imprecision of the term ‘national Bolshevism’ see: Erik van Ree, “The Concept of ‘National Bolshevism’: An interpretative essay,” Journal of Political Ideologies (2001) Vol. 6, No. 3, 289-307. Peter J.S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London 2000), 97 suggests the term “gosudarstvennik ideology” to refer to those who glorified the USSR from a statist point of view. 14 Duncan (2000), 3.

11 that the Westernizers placed relatively little stock in the cultural, historical, and mythological Russian heritage. Opposing this liberal trend were the conservative left-wing neo-Slavophiles (3) who stressed Russia’s distinctiveness from the West. Using a content definition of ‘conservatism,’ as will be done throughout this thesis, the neo- Slavophiles was a conservative trend, in that it rejected many of the fundamental assumptions of post-Enlightenment modern thought. The neo-Slavophiles argued that instead of seeking answers in communism or Western liberalism, Russia must look backwards in order to move forward. These neo-Slavophiles, best represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, called for an imperative return to a society centered on tradition, community, custom, and Judeo-Christian ethics. They placed immense importance in the Orthodox Church and the Russian village. This typology liked to conceive of itself in apolitical terms, focusing more on the spiritual and moral regeneration of the nation than political reforms. Thus, diametrically opposed to the neo-Westernizers, we can label this typology nationalistic but distinctly unpatriotic. Despite their traditional and religious agenda, left wing neo-Slavophiles such as Solzhenitsyn also stressed the importance of basic human freedoms (e.g. freedom of speech and press) and supported a tolerant internal cultural policy. Moreover, this trend was non- expansionist and rejected imperialism, chauvinism, and xenophobia.15 Finally, there existed the right-wing dissident conservative neo-Slavophiles (4) that will be referred to throughout as the dissident far right. The dissident far right blamed most of Russia’s problems on external forces. Adherents to this brand of nationalism, just as the left wing neo-Slavophiles, sought a national return to Orthodoxy, but instead of focusing on morality, spirituality, and the individual, these nationalists lobbied for an aggressively expansionist and autocratic Russia. This reactionary movement was chauvinistic, imperialistic, and anti-Semitic. The far-right fringes of this movement were even open to the idea of cooperation with the Soviet regime, so long as that regime rethought its policy regarding religion. In mixing patriotic veneration of the state and nationalistic veneration of the Russian ethnos, this movement found itself in a fairly similar ideological position as the national Bolsheviks. Really, the only thing separating them was approval of the Soviet regime. These various typologies of nationalism and patriotism will be used throughout this paper. This is not to imply any direct influence of 19th-century Russian political ideological structures on Soviet-era thinkers. To be sure, the

15 For more on Solzhenitsyn’s position see Allensworth (1998), 57-97.

12 Soviet-era thinkers to be discussed below were developing unique and original ideas in a particular historical context. Moreover, as Wayne Allensworth noted, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas differed on some key points from those of the Slavophiles,16 just as Sakharov’s ideas differed greatly from Belinsky’s Westernism. Nevertheless such terms are justified because enough obvious structural parallels do exist between these original ideologies and their latter day echoes.17 Furthermore, such labels are convenient in establishing the structural continuity of certain worldviews in Russian politics that have persisted throughout Russian history and continue to this day. This convenience is especially informative for our purposes in the fourth chapter, when discussing contemporary Russian nationalism in regard to Agursky’s ideas formed during the Soviet period. Lastly, these terms allow us to avoid confusing terminology such as “liberal conservative” or “liberal neo-Slavophilism” when discussing backwards-looking ideologies that are, on the whole, anti-liberal. Nevertheless, the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ are somewhat misleading given that left wing neo Slavophiles can hardly be considered ‘leftists’ given their veneration of many ‘rightist’ ideas and institutions (i.e. tradition, religion, and the nation). Likewise, ‘right wing’ neo-Slavophiles were actually open to many ‘leftist’ ideas, especially on economic questions. These terms are rather used to stress the differences between the two trends’ attitudes towards non-Russians, their ideas on the state, and their foreign policy visions. In chapter four, during our discussion of various Zionist trends, we will apply the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ as historian Mark Sedgwick has noted they are normally applied in Israeli usage: “principally denoting approaches to the Palestinian question: the left favors land for peace, and the right does not.”18

Agursky’s dissident position

A central task of Chapter Two will be to ideologically locate Agursky’s work from the early to mid 1970s in relation to these aforementioned trends. This is a rather difficult task given that Agursky’s work is not only frequently characterized by a beguiling ambivalence, but also changed over the years and depending on his audience. Generally, however, we can place Agursky within the left-wing Slavophile camp. Opposed to both the excessive materialism of Western capitalism and the violence and arbitrariness of Soviet socialism,

16 Ibid, 84-85. 17 Ibid, 84. 18 Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2004), 239.

13 Agursky believed that society must return to a spiritual and moral foundation. This notion illuminated both his Zionism and Russian nationalism, and he believed that the two national movements were in a unique position to work together in order to achieve this end. Upon leaving Russia, Agursky delivered the following words during an interview with The Jerusalem Post: “I am leaving Russia not as her enemy, but as her true friend, who is concerned with her present and future. I tried to do everything possible for the collaboration between the Jewish and Russian national movements.”19 Agursky’s dissident activity in early 1970s occurred during a period when chauvinist nationalism was gaining ground both popularly and officially. Books such as Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism! (1970) recycled the old myth of a global Jewish conspiracy and became bestsellers.20 Increasingly, Russian nationalists perceived their main enemy not to be the Soviet regime, but Zionism and world Jewry. While the regime’s crackdown on official nationalism at the end of the decade served to drive Russian nationalism underground,21 certain Soviet politicians – such as Politburo members Dmitry Poliansky and Alexander Shelepin – represented the interests of this reactionary brand of Russian nationalism in very high places for much of the early 1970s, constituting what historian Nikolai Mitrokhin has referred to as the ‘Russian party’.22 Confident that such men might hear their voices, far-right nationalist dissidents like the aforementioned Gennady Shimanov (one of the guests at Agursky’s goodbye party) began advancing aggressively anti-Semitic programs that called for a marriage between Marxist-Leninism and Orthodoxy.23 In the early 1970s, many, including Agursky, feared the “convergence of this ‘dissident New Right’ with the ‘establishment New Right.’”24 Agursky’s central task in promoting cooperation between the Jews and Russians was to save conservative Russian nationalism from the rising influence of the anti-Semitic far right. Agursky dedicated his intellectual career to dismantling anti-Semitic myths embraced by chauvinist Russian nationalists. In his eyes, anti-Zionist Russian nationalists were not so much evil as they were prisoners of a dangerous myth. With their ideas they were rashly empowering their actual enemy, the Soviet system. Because Agursky’s own path to Zionism

19 Agursky (1996), 401. 20 Mikhail Agursky, “Selling Anti-Semitism,” The New York Review of Books, 16 November, 1972 accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/11/16/selling-anti-semitism-in-moscow/ 21 See Dunlop (1983), 43-49. 22 See Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaya Partiya: Dvizhenie Russkikh Natsionalistov v SSSR 1954-1985 (Moscow 2003). For more on Shelepin and Polianksii see 98-118; 119-123, respectively. 23 See Ibid, 113-131. 24 Richard Löwenthal, “Foreword” to Alexander Yanov, The New Russian Right (Berkeley 1978), xi.

14 and dissidence was largely informed by his early intellectual encounters with dissident Russian nationalism and his conversion to the Orthodox Church, he was personally sympathetic to many aspects of the far right’s agenda. By pointing out the commonalities between the goals and worldviews of the Russian and Jewish national movements and exposing the erroneous nature of anti- Semitic myths popular among right-wing nationalists, Agursky hoped to purge conservative Russian nationalism of chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Yet in his flirtations with the far right, some might argue that Agursky went too far. Like Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in his 1973 Letter to the Soviet Leaders – a letter that Agursky passionately defended – that Russia would have to accept an authoritarian regime during its transition out of socialism,25 one could accuse Agursky of advancing the very anti-democratic ideas promulgated by his étatist anti-Semitic nationalist opponents. A year before his emigration to Israel, Agursky’s dissident activity reached its zenith with his contribution to Solzhenistysn’s samizdat collection From Under the Rubble (1974), a veritable manifesto of neo-Slavophile thought. Agursky’s article in the collection, “Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their Future Prospects,” criticized the excesses of both western capitalism and Soviet socialism. In the article, he outlined a utopian plan for a future society, to be based on small-scale enterprise and “a foundation of spiritual and moral values.”26 Although fundamentally democratic, Agursky’s decentralized utopia paradoxically contained certain totalitarian elements, such as state control of the media.27 Alexander Yanov has suggested that such neo-Slavophile utopias were practically unrealizable, yet nonetheless very ideologically dangerous in that they stimulated the Right opposition and galvanized its radicalization and inclination towards cooperation with the authoritarian Soviet regime.28 In the second chapter we will investigate how Agursky’s left wing neo- Slavophile position and his Solzhenitsyn-esque vision for Russia’s future enabled him to petition for increased cooperation between Zionists and Russian nationalists, who both sought a return to native religion and tradition. We will pay particular attention to the views on Jewish-Russian relations Agursky espoused in his 1972 review of Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism!, and an open letter he published in 1974 in the nationalist opposition’s samizdat journal Veche.

25 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, trans. by Hilary Sternberg (London 1974) 51-54. 26 Mikhail Agursky, “Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their Future Prospects,” From Under the Rubble, translated under the direction of Michael Scammell, (Boston 1975), 67-87, 81. 27 Ibid, 86. 28 Yanov (1978), 36.

15 But we will also address Yanov’s hypothesis that left-wing neo-Slavophile dissidents like Agursky contributed to the very chauvinistic forces they sought to vanquish. For this purpose, Agursky’s contribution to From Under the Rubble is a very important document that will be discussed at length.

Chapter Three: A Changing of Signposts (1975-1990) Agursky’s conception of nationalism Bolshevism

Had Agursky’s career ended with his immigration to Israel in 1975, it would have been abnormal enough. To my knowledge, no other Soviet Zionist engaged in such serious polemics with anti-Semitic Russian nationalists. Yet Agursky’s work as a historian after his emigration from the USSR further complicates our understanding of this unique thinker. On March 28, 1975, Agursky was granted an exit visa and given nine days to leave the USSR.29 Presumably, the regime decided that he was causing more trouble for them in the USSR than he would be if his wish to emigrate were granted.30 For the last sixteen years of his life Agursky lived in Jerusalem, working as a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had achieved marginal fame with his dissident writings – especially his contribution to From Under the Rubble – and was frequently invited by western scholars to take part in conferences across Europe and the USA. He traveled frequently and spent much time in Paris, where he collaborated with other Soviet émigrés, contributing and helping with the publication of various journals, including Vladimir Maksimov’s Kontinent. Agursky’s primary vocation during these years, however, was an intensive study of the Bolshevik Revolution and early Soviet history. In 1983, he completed a second doctorate, this time not in cybernetics but in Slavic studies, at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. His doctoral dissertation was a French version of a 1980 book he had published in Russian, The Ideology of National Bolshevism [Ideologiia natsional–bolshevizma; hereafter referred to as Ideologiia]. In 1987, he published an adaptation of this work in English, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR [hereafter referred to as Third Rome]. Agursky wrote many articles in a number of languages in the years between his emigration and death, but Third Rome and Ideologiia are his most comprehensive works, presenting the most complete picture of his understanding of Soviet history. A number of thematic focuses can be identified in Agursky’s other

29 Agursky (1996), 393. 30 Agursky’s bureaucratic battle for his exit visa is documented in detail throughout the last fifty pages of his memoirs; Agursky (1996), 342-393.

16 historical essays and articles: Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East, the history of Zionism in Russia and the USSR, Maxim Gorky’s relationship with Judaism and Russia’s Jews, the Orthodox Church, the Soviet military industrial complex, and the political significance of popular trends in post-Stalinist Soviet literature (i.e. Village Prose). Yet as the titles of his two major works suggest, the central focus of his historical work that serves to unite these sub-themes into a coherent nexus of thought is without a doubt his conception of national Bolshevism, which will be the focus of the third chapter. A major reason we have chosen to refer to Brezhnev-era étatist nationalists as such and not as ‘national Bolsheviks’, is because we have reserved the term ‘national Bolshevik’ to refer to Agursky’s unique conception of this term, advanced in his Ideologiia and Third Rome, among other writings. The quintessence of Agursky’s historical thought and his conception of national Bolshevism can be more or less condensed in the following sentence: from the onset, the Soviet political system had been primarily legitimized from a Russian étatist point of view and not, as the system would have one believe, from a Marxist ideological point of view. Phrased differently: theoretical Marxism has served as “a historical camouflage” masking the Soviet system’s nationalist essence and its nefarious objectives of world domination, or at the least, the establishment of a strong Russian superpower.31 Understood yet another way, national Bolshevism is the term Agursky used to characterize the Russian chauvinistic attitude that he believed Bolshevism had embraced and exploited since the pre-revolutionary era. In his conception, this Soviet-masked Russian chauvinism had reached its zenith during Stalin’s last years, but persisted in the post-Stalin era, sometimes in disguised form, sometimes openly. Agursky was hardly the first historian to approach Soviet history from a nationalist departure point. In the third chapter we will discuss his historiographical place and compare his work to other historians who focused on the nationalist aspects of the USSR. Nevertheless, his works – especially Third Rome – represent something of a historiographical extreme. When historians cite Agursky it is frequently to provide an example of a scholar who has exaggerated the nationalist dimension of the Soviet project.32 To borrow one of his own favorite phrases, Agursky has become something of a “litmus test” on the

31 Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder 1987), xv. Hereafter referred to in citations as Agursky (1987). 32 See for example Alain Besançon, “Nationalism and Bolshevism in the USSR,” published in The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future, ed. Robert Conquest (Stanford 1986), 1-14, 4. Or Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge 2011), 7.

17 question of national Bolshevism: an extreme point of view by which other historians may measure their own views regarding to what extent far-right étatist nationalism influenced Soviet history. The extremity of Agursky’s views – especially those found in Third Rome – drew serious criticism from a number of reviewers. In the third chapter, we will address these critiques. Both John Dunlop and Erik van Ree have criticized Agursky for his lack of “a theoretical framework” and his conflated usage of the term ‘national Bolshevism’.33 Various reviewers also criticized the work as “oddly vituperative,”34 “emotionally motivated,”35 and “excessive.”36 In Third Rome, the history of the USSR is presented as a giant tragedy. Lenin is depicted as a nefarious megalomaniac bent on Russian world domination, who sought to exploit the nationalities question rather than solve it. Direct comparisons are drawn between the early USSR and Nazi Germany.37 This is particularly intriguing because in the 1980 Russian-language Ideologiia, Agursky presented a more moderate and sympathetic conception of national Bolshevism – albeit still a negative one in our opinion. Like his samizdat writings, Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism changed with time and according to his intended audience. In the third chapter, we will address the following questions: how did Agursky’s extremely nationalist interpretation of Soviet history advance his attempts to promote cooperation and understanding between Zionism and Russian nationalism? Why would he castigate Russian nationalism, the very movement with which he was seeking cooperation, as the essential feature of the immoral communist system? This complex question warrants a complex answer, but the central argument to be found in the third chapter is that Argusky’s attacks are not leveled against all manifestations of Russian nationalism but rather a particular brand of étatist nationalism that eschewed morality and often rationality in justifying the Soviet system as the surest protector of Russian ethno-national interests. Agursky believed national Bolshevism to be the unfortunate product of a number of intellectual and political trends of late 19th century Russian thought, that had perverted Russian nationalism, exchanging morality and tradition for imperial grandeur and great power chauvinism. These were also the features of the dissident far-right nationalism adhered to by

33 See Dunlop (1989) and van Ree, (2001), 290-291. 34 John Dunlop, Review of The Third Rome, Slavic Review (Winter 1989), vol. 48, no. 4, 670-671, 670. 35 Ibid, 671. 36 Robert McNeal, Review of The Third Rome, The Journal of Modern History (March 1990) vol. 62, no. 1, 220-221, 220. 37 Agursky (1987), 300-304.

18 Agursky’s samizdat interlocutors, and his historical works can be read as an investigation in the early-Soviet roots of this étatist brand of Russian nationalism. Thus we will argue in the third chapter that Agursky’s goal with his historical works, despite appearances to the contrary, was consistent with that of his samizdat writings and his larger life mission: to save a morally grounded, left- wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism that gave primacy to religion and small-scale communities from the forces of an aggressive imperialistic nationalism that eschewed traditional morality and bestowed primacy to the state. Two concepts that will be discussed at length in chapter three require some clarification: Russian messianism and gnosticism. As we will see, a defining aspect of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism was that the Soviet project represented a secularization and nationalization the idea that Russia had been divinely chosen to realize the eschatological end of history and save mankind. Russian messianism is historically tied to the idea that after the fall of Constantinople, Moscow became the Third Rome. In a famous 1511 letter from the monk Filofei the Elder to Tsar Vasily III, the former proclaimed, “For two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others.”38 Titling his major work on national Bolshevism The Third Rome, Agursky drew direct comparisons between Russia’s Orthodox messianism, and the utopian Soviet project, which he saw as a secular perversion of Russian messianism. Agursky’s belief that materialistic, atheistic Bolshevism was in fact a secular manifestation of Russia’s religiously rooted national messianic complex is rooted in his rather idiosyncratic understanding of the gnostic dimension of Soviet society. Generally, gnosticism is a loose term applied to a wide range of ancient religious movements that “emerged along the fringes of developing orthodoxies,” including Christianity and Judaism.39 Gnostics believed that our material world was a flawed creation, but via gnosis, or mystical enlightenment, one could gain access to the spiritual world. Agursky’s conception of the mystical, gnostic elements of national Bolshevism is largely indebted to the work of two thinkers: the German-born Israeli philosopher/historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem and the French historian Alain Besançon. In the preface to Ideologiia Agursky wrote that Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism had served “as a benchmark for discussing

38 See Duncan (2000), 11-12. 39 Alain Besançon, The Intellectual Origins of Leninism, translated by Stanley Matthews (Oxford 1977), 10.

19 the role of Russian mysticism on national Bolshevism.”40 Scholem defined gnosticism as any “religious movement that proclaimed a mystical esotericism for the elect based on illumination and the acquisition of a higher knowledge of things heavenly and divine.”41 He explored the developments of early Jewish gnosticism, which need not concern us here. But in a 1977 work Les origines intellectuellles du Leninisme, Besançon wrote on the similarities between gnosticism and Bolshevism, which was to influence Agursky’s work.42 Besancon clarified that there existed hardly anything in common between the doctrines of gnosticism and Bolshevism, but he claimed that there were striking similarities between the two doctrines’ general structures of thought, states of mind, and psychological dispositions. In both Soviet ideology and ancient gnosticism, Bescançon observed something of a middle ground between science and religion. Naturally gnosticism – which rejected the material world – denied science, but it also distinguished itself from religion by rejecting traditional religious morality and faith. Instead gnosticism held the divine plan was knowable, and that the morality of any action was defined not objectively but rather according to what extent it served this plan. As Besancon wrote,

There is no just in itself. The just if relative to the execution of the cosmic plan as it is revealed by gnosticism, and thus is relative to gnosticism itself. Conformity to the good is thus not marked by the fulfillment of justice, but by the fitting of conduct to the realization of the cosmogonic scheme. This is where gnosticism separates from religion. That is why . . .[it has been accused] of ignoring virtue.43

Besançon argued that Leninism, which embraced Marx’s teleological view of history, similarly blurred the lines between science and religion.

When Lenin declares that the materialist interpretation of history is not a hypothesis, but a scientifically demonstrated doctrine, it is doubtless a belief, but a belief he imagines proved, and based in

40 Mikhail Agursky, Ideologiia natsional bolshevizma (Paris 1980), accessed online at http://historic.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000026/ on 4 March 2016, “Ot avtora.” Because Ideologiia was accessed online and page numbers cannot be provided, the part and chapter numbers where each passage can be found are provided (e.g. 2.1 refers to Part 2, Chapter One; “Ot Avotra” refers to Agursky’s Preface). Ideologiia hereafter cited as Agursky (1980). 41 Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York 1960), 1. 42 See Agursky (1980), 2.3 and Agursky (1987), 57. Agursky also mentioned along with Besançon how the Italian historian Luciano Pellicani’s work I revoluzionari di professione (Florence 1975) also developed the gnostic element of Bolshevism; unfortunately, I could only find his work in Italian. 43 Besançon (1977), 12.

20 experience. At the basis of the ideology, lies something known. Lenin does not know that he believes. He believes that he knows.44

Naturally, Besançon also argued that Lenin’s dogmatic belief that the development of history could be known led him to follow in the gnostics’ footsteps by eschewing traditional morality. Building on these comparisons, Besançon observed the following similarities between ancient gnosticism and Soviet ideology, among others: “a locked encyclopaedic system of cosmology and soteriology [the doctrine of salvation–S.F.]; the over-interpretation of history; a morality deriving from the doctrine;. . .the relativization of man to his contribution to salvation; . . . and the geo-historical dualism between regions which are ontologically damned and regions which are saved.”45 As we will see, these observations had a profound impact on Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism. In order to construct an argument that Bolshevism represented the secularization of Russian messianism – promulgating the belief that Russia could solve the end of world history by building a communist utopia on earth – he appealed to the gnostic dimension of Soviet ideology that Besançon had identified. We will examine in chapter three Agursky’s discussion of how important Russian nationalist thinkers and writers originally horrified by the Bolshevik Revolution came to embrace Bolshevism as a manifestation of “holy sin.”46 In other words, they took a gnostic approach, recognizing good within evil, welcoming the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution as the development of the divine plan, the unfolding of Russia’s eschatological mission. Thus, when using the word ‘gnostic’ in regard to the USSR and national Bolshevism throughout this paper, we are not implying a direct influence of gnostic doctrine on Soviet socialism, but rather talking about an orientation by which history is read as a secret set of illusive symbols and the world is split into two opposing camps of good and evil47: in the Soviet model, those fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, contrasted with those fighting against it. Finally, in chapter three, we will argue that Agursky’s work on national Bolshevism – despite certain contradictions from work to work – is consistently a negative condemnation of the secular and chauvinistic perversion of Russian religious-national ideas. In portraying national Bolshevism as the political and cultural secularization and nationalization of Russian messianism, Agursky

44 Ibid, 9. 45 Ibid, 16. 46 Agursky (1987), 177. 47 This was the belief of Manichaeism, an Iranian gnostic religion that preached a dualistic cosmology of good and evil.

21 called on Russian society to return to the traditional, religious morality that he believed national Bolshevism had so tragically distorted. At the same time, we will explore in this chapter how Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism served to historically vindicate Zionism. By portraying a vehemently anti-Semitic Soviet society, and arguing that ethno-nationalism will always trump civic nationalism, Agursky hoped to expose the fallacy of Soviet internationalism and justify a Jewish nation state in Israel.

Chapter Four: The Shadows of False Messiahs (1975-present) Agursky’s contemporary relevance

Agursky died a premature death, the circumstances of which were somewhat mysterious. In August of 1991, he was personally invited to take part in a conference in Moscow in association with the newly created Congress of Compatriots. His visit coincided with the August Putsch that lasted from August 18-21. On the last day of the Putsch, the day that the Soviet Union effectively collapsed, Agursky was found dead of a heart attack in his room at the Hotel Rossiia.48 Those who have written on Agursky’s death tend to stress its symbolic nature.49 Even after making aliyah to Israel, Agursky’s work focused almost exclusively on Russian and Soviet themes. Despite his vehement opposition to the Soviet system, its very existence provided him with a ubiquitous ideological opponent and gave purpose to his intellectual activity. Once that opponent disappeared, Agursky was left without an enemy, and his heart gave out. Yet perhaps even more tragic than his death is the fact that Agursky never really received his due posthumous credit. As a dissident, Agursky was one of the most important and active advocates for the Zionist cause. His attempts to cooperate with those who held entirely disparate views challenge some of the most fundamental understandings regarding Zionism, Russian nationalism, and Soviet dissidence. As a historian Agursky became one of the pioneer scholars in the field of national Bolshevism, which was to become important in the context of yet another renaissance of Russian nationalism during the post-perestroika era. A voracious reader, Agursky sparked new public interest in a number of

48 Deutsch Kornblatt (2004), 73 also wrote – based on her interviews with Agursky’s widow, Vera – that Agursky returned to the USSR to recover the body of his son who had died in a skiing accident in Southern Russia, and to investigate the murder of his spiritual mentor Father Alexander Men’, who was assassinated in 1990. 49 See for example Alexander Dugin, Tampliery Proletariata, “L’age d’or ou l’age Mordoree: Mikhail Agursky,” (Moscow 1997) http://arctogaia.com/public/templars/agursk.htm; or Mikhail Gorelik, “Roman zhizni Mikhaila Agurskogo,” published in Agursky (1996), 402-415, 413- 414. As Dugin’s books were accessed online, chapter and section titles are provided instead of page numbers.

22 Russian, Jewish, and Soviet writers and politicians who had been buried under the rubble of Soviet repression. Even those scholars who critiqued Agursky’s biases and lack of terminological clarity praised his erudition and his exhaustive study of vast source material.50 Finally, as a Soviet, Orthodox Christian, Jewish Zionist cyberneticist turned human rights activist turned historian, Agursky existed somewhere in between a multitude of political, cultural, linguistic, disciplinary and geographical worlds and thus makes a fascinating subject of study for the historian of the postmodern age. At once an Israeli and a Russian, he wrote and read in a number of languages, including Russian, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and French. Politically, he was sympathetic to the right and extremely critical of Soviet communism until the end, but he nevertheless remained committed to leftist economic ideas and social justice. Despite the anti-democratic tendencies of some of his samizdat writings, his work as a historian is marked by a strong belief in democracy’s superiority to other forms of government. In 1991, he even ran for the Knesset on the Israeli labor-party [Avoda] ticket. Bolotovsky has suggested that it was precisely this ideological itinerancy and fluidity that has ensured Agursky’s lack of posthumous recognition:

Agursky’s name hardly means anything for the general reader . . . Nevertheless, there are few modern Zionists who made more of an impact than Agursky in the struggle for [Soviet] Jews to immigrate to Israel. But the Moscow human rights defenders have remained silent, as has the Israeli intelligentsia—the right wing of which cannot, even seven years after Agursky’s death, forget about his closeness to the Labor Party–and the leftists, in their turn, still treat him with some caution, mindful of the ‘inexplicable’ sympathies of the scholar towards Russian nationalists. ‘Of course’, opponents agree, ‘Agursky was an outstanding scholar and a most honest man. But . . .’ Everybody has a ‘but.’51 Yet it would be unfair to say that Agursky has left no legacy. Many Western scholars working on nationalism in the USSR frequently cite him, albeit often only as the representative of an extreme historiographical position.52 But more interesting than his legacy among academics is his legacy among contemporary Russian nationalists. Perhaps the most intriguing assessment of Agursky’s work as a historian comes from the ultra-nationalist ideological father of neo-Eurasianism,

50 See for example Dunlop (1989). 51 Bolotovsky. 52 See for example Besançon (1986), 4; van Ree, (2001), 290-291.

23 Alexander Dugin. In his 1997 book Templars of the Proletariat, Dugin called Agursky’s work as a historian “the most serious work dedicated to the Soviet period of Russian history, helping us to understand its deep, spiritual meaning.” Moreover, Dugin strangely believes – or at least pretends to believe – that Agursky’s work betrays “a deep sympathy towards Soviet national- Bolshevism.”53 What appeals to Dugin most about Agursky’s historiographical position is without a doubt the centrality Agursky gives to Russian nationalism. In many ways, Agursky subscribed to what is often referred to as the ‘single stream’ [edinii potok] theory of Russian/Soviet history, which is a useful position for Dugin to cite. Allensworth described this theory in a way that sheds light on both Dugin and Agursky’s reading of Soviet history:

. . . the ‘single stream’ interpretation of Russian history. . . [is] a version of the Russian past that merges the victory at Kulikovo and the messianism of the first Great Patriotic War with the long march to Berlin during the Second, the Russian empire with the Soviet Union, and Peter the Great’s legacy with that of Stalin. The October Revolution did not represent a sharp break with the past . . . but rather a metamorphosis of the Russian derzhava [great power].54

While Agursky generally presented this continuity as a negative phenomenon – and even this is debatable, depending on the work in question – his assertion that Russian nationalism superseded Marxist ideology during the Soviet period is a very useful position for Dugin to cite in his attempts to unite Russian nationalists of all economic persuasions in a concentrated front. Even more unexpectedly, despite definite tendencies of anti-Semitism in his work, Dugin has cooperated with far-right Zionist groups and has praised the traditional and conservative aspects of Israel and Judaism.55 Interestingly, such an ideological position seems representative of much of the Russian political elite these days, as contemporary Russia and Israel both pursue nationalistic agendas while enjoying better relations than ever. Dugin’s willingness to even consider Israel an ally of Russia’s in the ideological war between Eurasianism and Atlanticism represents the realization of Agursky’s hopes that Russian nationalists and Zionists would strengthen their ties and increase cooperation.56 Yet, while Agursky hoped this increased cooperation would weaken both the

53 Dugin (1997), “V komissarakh dukh samoderzhav’ia,” (Moscow 1997) http://arctogaia.com/public/templars/agursk.htm 54 Allensworth (1998), 146. 55 Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Alexander Dugin’s Views on the Middle East,” Space and Polity, (30 June 2008) vol. 12, no. 2, 251-268 and Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: Ideology of Empire (Washington D.C. 2008) 135-136. 56 Mikhail Agursky, “We Mustn’t Shun the Russian Right,” Jerusalem Post, 15 August, 1991.

24 Israeli and Russian étatist far right, contemporary headlines and scholarship suggest that the opposite has taken place. It is in no way the aim of this paper to suggest that the Russian right has abandoned anti-Semitism.57 Some of the most aggressively anti-Semitic political developments in Russia occurred during the years immediately following the death of Agursky and the demise of the Soviet Union.58 Nevertheless, ideas such as Dugin’s that suggest the potential compatibility of Russian nationalism with Zionism seems not to have fallen on deaf ears, as Vladimir Putin manages to couple an agenda of Russian nationalism with an unprecedented friendliness towards Judaism and Israel.59 In an increasingly globalized and multicultural world both Russia and Israel have taken a nationalist stand, asserting that nations reserve the right to distinctively develop in their historical homelands. Many scholars comment on how the persistent ‘Russia Idea’ – the notion that Russia is fundamentally distinct from the West and has a special historical mission to realize – continues to play a significant role in contemporary Russian socio-political life.60 Likewise, certain Israeli scholars have warned that in Israel today, “politico-messianic enthusiasm is growing and gaining increasing recognition.”61 In the last chapter of this thesis we will investigate these rather troubling developments. We will argue that the primacy his reading of history gave to nationalism left his work open to exploitative interpretations such as Dugin’s. Moreover, Agursky and Dugin not only stressed the same nationalist aspects of Soviet history, they also both did so in order to advance nationalist projects: for Agursky, the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, for Dugin the establishment of a modern-day Russian-led Eurasian empire. While the former project is much more historically justifiable than the latter, in my opinion, it is a central irony of Agursky’s work that while condemning national Bolshevism as the secularization and nationalization of Russian messianism, he defended Zionism, which could be seen as exactly that: a utopian attempt to realize on earth a divine eschatological covenant. In wrestling with whether or not there exists in this irony an irreconcilable contradiction, we will look at Agursky’s Zionist writings from his

57 For an interesting article on the role of anti-Semitism in contemporary Russian political culture see Walter Laqueur, “Anti-Semitism and the Russian Idea,” Mosaic Magazine, 25 June 2015, accessed online at http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/06/anti-semitism-and-the- new-russian-idea/ on 28 June 2016. 58 See Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (New York 2001). 59 See Mark N. Katz, “Putin’s Pro-Israel Policy,” The Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2005), 51-59. 60 See for example Laqueur (2015). 61 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “‘On the Right Side of the Barricades’: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism,” Comparative Literature (2013), Vol. 65, No. 3, 363-381, 367.

25 years in Israel, and clarify his Zionist position, paying particular attention to his attitude towards the messianic dimension of Zionism. To do so, we will return to the influential work of Scholem, who drew sharp distinctions between Zionism and messianism. We will conclude that while Agursky did embrace certain messianic ideas in his Zionist writings, his messianism differed fundamentally from Dugin’s. Where Dugin believes that we are living in the end times and that Russia must embrace certain political doctrines to usher in the eschatological end of history, Agursky believed that the divine process is a mystery. In his view, while we wait for the end, we can only try to implement God’s will on earth to the best of our abilities. In other words, Dugin’s approach is gnostic in that it holds Russia’s messianic task to be knowable and realizable, while Agursky’s approach is religious, in that he saw Jewish messianism as a distant, unknowable ideal towards which his nation must faithfully strive, but could never realize or know. In drawing this distinction, we will explore the two major historical types of Jewish messianism, national and universal. But as we will see, the lines between these two types of messianism are quite blurry. Agursky’s case brings forth no clear answers. Finally, we must clarify two more unconventional terms that will feature prominently in the argumentation of the fourth chapter: ethno-differentialism and ethno-pluralism. Ethno-differentialism is the idea that various cultures and nations have a “right to difference.” The European New Right’s global vision based on this principle is referred to as ethno-pluralism. Arguing that western- led multiculturalism, diversity and globalization are destroying nations’ precious cultural distinctiveness, the New Right maintains that nations should be equal, but remain separate and rooted to their historic soils. We will see not only how this idea is embraced by Dugin – whose postmodern Russian nationalism incorporates many European New Right ideas – but also implicitly advanced in much of Agursky’s work.62

62 For more on ethno-pluralism see Alberto Spektorowski, “The New Right: Ethno-regionalism, ethno-pluralism and the emergence of a neo-fascist ‘Third Way,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2003, 111-130.

26 Chapter One: A Loaded Spring (1933-1967) The young Mikhail Agursky’s path to dissidence

I learned how to be a Zionist from the Gentiles. -Ze’ev Jabotinsky1

1.1: The roots of Agursky’s dissidence

Like many of the sons and daughters of the Old Bolsheviks and the early Soviet intelligentsia, Agursky grew up an unquestioning communist and an active member of the Komsomol. His path to dissidence was rather typical for someone of his generation, the shestidesiatniki [“the men and women of the sixties”]. As youths, members of this generation were generally enthusiastic Soviet citizens, and they rationalized the injustices of the Stalinist period. But as the shestidesiatniki came of age during the years following Stalin’s death, disillusionment with the Soviet system became a widespread generational phenomenon. Many members of this generation, including Agursky, were to contribute to various Soviet dissident movements that gained ground throughout the 1960s. In this chapter, we will look at Agursky’s case to determine how important historical developments compelled these children of Bolshevik revolutionaries to reject the socialism their fathers had set out to build.2 Paradoxically, it was Khrushchev’s rapid, inconsistent and often half- measured liberalizations that served to alienate many of these shestidesiatniki from their former faith in the Soviet system. In releasing millions of Gulag prisoners and exposing Stalin’s crimes at the Secret Party Speech of 1956, Khrushchev instilled hope in many young Soviet citizens that a new era of freedom was on the horizon. Yet Khrushchev also immediately made clear the limits of liberalization by violently quelling the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, led by Imre Nage. For Agursky, it was neither the 1947 death of his father, in exile as a political prisoner in Kazakhstan; nor his repeated encounters with anti- Semitism in the Soviet education system and the Komsomol; nor his numerous experiences with corruption while working in Soviet factories, but instead the 1958 execution of Imre Nage that marked his final break with Soviet ideology.3 While Khrushchev’s policies may have provided the catalyst for the emergence of various dissident movements, this was only the straw that broke the camel’s

1 Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York 2011), 175. 2 For more on the shestidesiatniki see Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge 2009). 3 Ibid, 258.

27 back. Agursky’s memoirs attest to the fact that the terrors of the Stalin years served to slowly erode many young people’s faith in the Soviet system. They simply came of age during the Khrushchev era and were finally able to process and respond to what they had lived through. As a youth, Agursky was unconscious of his budding dissidence. Later, however, he was to comment on how he internalized his disappointment during those years: “I turned into a loaded spring, compressed throughout my whole life, only then to painfully strike my oppressors.”4 In understanding the views on the compatibility of the Jewish and Russian national movements that Agursky was to form during his dissident years, and the “painful strike” he was later to deliver to the regime, we must first explore the influential aspects of his formidable years: namely, his father, early encounters with anti-Semitism, and exposure to pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual thought and the Orthodox Church. Moreover, many aspects of the biography of Agursky’s father and the events of Agursky’s youth are quite representative of the general trajectory of Soviet Jewry during the first few decades of the Soviet Union. As such, this chapter provides important historical background relevant to both Agursky’s work and its appraisal, to be discussed in the following chapters.

1.2: The Ash of Klaas: Samuil Agursky’s influence on his son

The influence that Mikhail’s father’s Samuil had on his son’s ideological development cannot be overstated. Samuil’s tragic fate convinced Mikhail that Marxist internationalism was nothing but a deception, and that Jewish assimilation into Russian society was not a viable option for Jews. Both of these beliefs are not only salient features of Agursky’s historical work, but also major reasons for his eventual embrace of Zionism. Ironically, Agursky’s father had been on the exact opposite side of the ideological battle between Zionism and communist internationalism. Samuil, or Shmuel, Agursky was born to a poor Orthodox Jewish family in 1884 in Grodno, Belarus, which was then a “big Jewish center” in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement.5 He was educated at a cheder, a traditional Jewish elementary school where children were taught the fundaments of Hebrew and the Jewish religion.

4 Ibid, 136. 5 The following biographical information on Samuil Agursky was gathered from Agursky (1996), 1-96; “Agurskij, Shmuel,’” Elektronnaiia evrejskaia entsiklopediia (1976-2016), accessed online at http://www.eleven.co.il/article/10075 on 6 May 2016; Arkadi Zeltser “Agurskii, Samuil Khaimovich,” The Yivo Encloylopea of Jews in Eastern Europe, Vol. 1, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven 2008), 119; and in various passages found throughout Zvi Y. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton 1972).

28 Samuil’s father Chaim was a stern man who had served a full term in the tsarist army. Chaim had no education and beat his son for reading anything but Hebrew religious texts. After turning twelve, Samuil became a laborer. He worked various industrial and construction jobs before becoming a tailor. Like many young Jews in late 19th century Russian Empire, Samuil was attracted to revolutionary social democratic movements. At that time, Zionism was still rather unpopular. As populist trends in Russian socialism gave way to the ideological ascent of Marxism, Jews – who were as a whole undergoing modernization “faster and better than anyone in Russia” – found themselves increasingly eager to participate in revolutionary movements. In 1897, the Jewish Bund became the first Social Democratic (i.e. Marxist) party in the Russian Empire. Yuri Slezkine explained that “the Bund prospered briefly in the least urbanized and Russified parts of the Pale, where it tended to appeal to secularized Jews who had not yet entered the all-Russian youth culture.”6 This was the exact world to which Samuil belonged, and in 1905, he became involved with this party. The Bund was a secular socialist party, seeking to preserve Jewish nationhood and protect Jewish interests in the Russian Empire. Along with the Austro-Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, the Bund leaders Vladimir Mendem and Vladimir Kosovsky were key figures in developing the principle of national- cultural autonomy, which conceived of nations not organized according to territorial lines, but instead “in simple associations of persons.”7 Detesting the backwards, Orthodox world of their parents, yet still valuing their Jewish culture and Yiddish language, young Jews like Samuil hoped to achieve integration without complete assimilation. In believing their Jewish nationalism to be compatible with Marxism internationalism, the Bund provoked the anger of other Marxist parties, especially Lenin’s Bolsheviks.8 In 1905 the Bund played a particularly active role in the revolution, with Samuil contributing to the cause in the Suvalskaia Governorate. He fled Russia in 1906, and for the next eleven years he participated in various revolutionary movements in the United Kingdom and the United States. In Chicago, he became close with anarchists and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”). He also contributed frequently to Yiddish-language socialist

6 Slezkine (2004), 148. 7 See Gertrud Pickhan, “Yiddishkayt and class consciousness: the Bund and its minority concept,” East European Jewish Affairs (August 2009) Vol. 39, No. 249-263, 251 and 256. 8 For a particularly heated Bolshevik polemic against the Bund see: J.V. Stalin, “The Bund, its nationalism, its separatism,” Marxism and the National Question (London 2012), 44-57.

29 publications. In 1916 he co-founded the Chicago Jewish Worker’s Institute, which taught English to recently arrived immigrants. In 1917, the success of the February Revolution called Samuil back home. By that time, Bundism’s popularity had decreased among the Jews. Instead, many began rejecting the Bund’s particularistic program in favor of universalist socialist ideologies like Menshevism and Bolshevism that drew “no distinction between Jew and gentile, in the spirit of true equality and brotherhood.”9 In 1921, the Bund dissolved, and most members joined the Bolsheviks.10 Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Samuil had made that transition a few years earlier. After a few months working as a journalist in Krasnoyarsk and volunteering with the Red Guard, Samuil traveled to Petrograd in the beginning of 1918, where he co- founded the Evsekttsiia [the Jewish Section of the Communist Party], under the jurisdiction of the Nationalities Committee, which was then headed by the young Joseph Stalin. Historian of Soviet Jewry Benjamin Pinkus wrote that “There is no doubt that of all the Jewish bodies established in the Soviet period, the Jewish section (Evsektsia) was the most important and representative.” It was the responsibility of the Evsektsiia to promote the revolution among the Jewish masses. This took the form of the active destruction of traditional Jewish life, including the seizure of synagogues, and a vicious propaganda war against Zionism, Hebrew, and religious life. Naturally, the Bolsheviks endorsed Yiddish, the Jew’s secular language, and condemned Hebrew, the religious language of the Jews.11 As the editor of one of the first Bolshevik Yiddish-language newspapers, Der frayer arbeter, and a commissar of Jewish affairs in Vitebsk Governorate, Samuil took an active role in this destruction of Russian Jewry’s traditional and religious past. Looking back many years later on his father’s zealous revolutionary activities in his memoirs, Pepel Klaasa, Mikhail Agursky tried to justify them:

. . . in distinction from many Jewish revolutionaries, who had been assimilated for quite some time and did not consider themselves Jews, my father never broke ties with his Jewish environment. He could have chosen any work, but chose to work among Jews, founding the Evsektsiia . . . True, the Evsektsiia took an anti-traditional position, fighting against Zionism, Hebrew, and religion. But they did not

9 Slezkine, 149. 10 See V.I. Lenin, “To Members of the Politburo of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.),” Lenin Collected Works (Moscow 1971), vol. 42, p. 187 accessed at Marxists Internet Archive (2003) at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/18.htm#fwV42E9210 11 For more on the Evsketsiia see Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge 1988), 58-66, and various sections throughout Gitelman (1972).

30 separate themselves from the Jewish masses, like the absolute majority of Jewish communists did during that time.12

Despite his son’s later rationalization of his father’s anti-religious activity, any cultural affiliation the members of Evsektsiia may have felt towards their nation was not to save the traditional shtetl life of the Pale. In 1918, Samuil even co- signed an order with Stalin that liquidated the central leadership of Jewish religious communities. In 1920, Samuil was sent on a secret party mission to rally support for Soviet communism in the United States. Upon his return, despite his lack of formal education, Samuil became a party historian. For the next fourteen years he occupied a number of prominent academic posts in the Communist Party bureaucracy. In 1933, while working in Moscow as the Director of the Institute of Party History, Samuil’s wife Bunya gave birth to the couple’s only son. In the spirit of the times, Samuil named him Melib – although most of the family began calling him Melik13 and he would eventually embrace the name Mikhail. Three years later, Samuil was named a corresponding member to the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. In his memoirs, Mikhail recalled how happy his father was during those years. One New Year’s Day he was drunk with wine and began dancing on the table. When neighbors called to complain he shouted, “Happy people live here!” Yet, Mikhail also wrote how during these years, the “thunder clouds” of the purges appeared on the horizon. Not surprisingly, it was not long before the storm reached Samuil.14 In 1938, Samuil Agursky was arrested for belonging to a Jewish fascist organization and for sabotage against the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. Acquitted of the former charge, but convicted of the latter by an NKVD troika, he was sentenced to five years of exile in northeastern Kazakhstan. Fortunately for young Melib and the rest of the Agursky family, World War Two allowed them to evacuate to Kazakhstan and join Samuil from 1941-1944. Later, Mikhail wrote about those war years with great sadness. His parents fought frequently, and he witnessed the physical deterioration of his father. In 1947, Samuil travelled to Moscow illegally in the hopes of appealing his case. There he saw his family one last time. After returning to Kazakhstan, he received a rejection to his request for an appeal. He died on August 19th of that year.

12 Agursky (1996), 15. 13 Close friends and acquaintances continued to refer to him as Melik throughout his life. 14 Agursky (1993), 30.

31 The story of his Samuil’s rise and demise in the Communist Party was immensely influential on Mikhail’s intellectual development, especially with the passage of time. The fate of Samuil served to deliver the first blow to the young Mikhail’s faith in the Soviet system and Marxist ideology. Growing up among the sons and daughters of Moscow’s old Bolsheviks, many of who were ethnically Jewish, Agursky noticed that many of his peers’ fathers had suffered the same fate as his. What the young Agursky was witnessing was a process that the émigré scholar Nicholas Timasheff would later famously dub the “Great Retreat.”15 During these years (beginning in 1934) Stalin “brought Russian domestic policies in line with the implications of [his] policy of ‘socialism in one country,’ which had first been advanced a decade previously.”16 Part of this process was the Russification of the Communist party. During the “Great Retreat,” which overlapped with Stalin’s Great Terror (1936-1938), many high-ranking non- Russian communist party members, like Samuil, were murdered or sent to the camps. That Samuil, a man thoroughly dedicated to socialist internationalism and among the most eager to break ties with the past, had been deemed a fascist and a saboteur, signaled to the young Mikhail that Marxist internationalism was not the only ideology guiding Soviet decision-making. It opened his eyes to the powerful presence of Great Russian Chauvinism, which often went hand in hand with anti-Semitism. In a word, Samuil’s death marked Mikhail’s first encounter with what he would later call national Bolshevism. Agursky himself looked back on his father’s death as the beginning of his slow, gradual break with Soviet socialism. Around the time of his father’s death, Mikhail was reading a Russian translation of Till Eulenspiegel. He later wrote,

I remembered only one thing from that book, but that one thing has always flashed in my mind during critical moments of my life, forcing me to change life decisions, reminding me that I have my own special life purpose, my own role. “The Ashes of Klaas beat at my heart!” says Till Eulenspiegel, after the cruel Duke of Alba orders his father [Klaas] burnt at the stake. These words struck me. I identified with Till and decided, although still in some unclear form, to make sure that my father had not suffered . . . in vain. It was not yet a revolt. I remained a loyal member of Soviet society. In any case, it in no way destroyed my principally communist orientation. I was not thinking then about how to avenge my

15 See Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York 1946). 16 John Dunlop, (1983), 12.

32 father . . . like Till avenged [his], but I was sure that somehow I must contribute to the restoration of trampled justice.17

This perceived mission was to fuel Agursky’s intellectual activity until his death.

1.3: Mikhail Agursky’s early encounters with anti-Semitism

Despite Samuil’s pariah status, certain familial connections allowed Mikhail to attend an elite school in the center of Moscow where children of writers and government officials studied.18 Many of Agursky’s peers were Jewish, and he wrote that by the time he graduated, one third of them had parents who had been arrested during the Purges.19 Nevertheless, he felt quite comfortable in this insular community of like-minded, intellectually engaged children. This contrasted starkly with his summer experiences at Leninist Pioneer camp, where, he later wrote, “from the first days, I became a target for anti-Semitic mockery . . . Every step I took brought laughs and mockery.”20 Most likely because his school’s administration was Jewish, Agursky wrote that the “system of political discrimination, and official anti-Semitism was hardly felt in our school. But it appeared when we all applied to institutes.”21 Much of the middle section of Pepel Klaasa documents the Kafkaesque experiences Agursky underwent in finding universities that would accept him. According to these pages, during entrance exams Jewish applicants were arbitrarily given impossible questions, and even when they scored higher than their gentile counterparts, they were categorically denied acceptance to prestigious universities. This happened to Agursky and he reluctantly settled for an off-campus [zaochnoe] education at the Energy Institute. During this time, he also worked a particularly grueling factory job.22 In his attempts to transfer out of the Energy Institute, he encountered more of the same arbitrary anti-Semitism, documented in the following passage from his memoirs:

My appeal to the Faculty of Electrical Equipment Industrial Enterprises led to the same results. I went to the general admission committee of the Energy Institute. The chairman of the commission Filippov . . . shot me a despiteful glance. I began to deliver my entirely legitimate request to him. Filippov, not saying a word, got up, walked to the door, opened it and asked loudly, “Who’s next?” . . . Fillipov didn’t know anything about my father. He looked only at my

17 Agursky (1996), 95. 18 Ibid, 80. 19 Ibid, 100. 20 Ibid, 91-92. 21 Ibid, 123. 22 Ibid, 123-140.

33 physiognomy and saw my Jewish name. That was enough. They did not only deceive us. They tried to ingrain in us the idea that we were in fact mentally deficient and inferior. They wanted to mentally castrate the Jews – an entire people, that had given statesmen, soldiers, diplomats, writers, academics – and wean us from the idea that we were capable of anything other than second-rate work.23

Eventually Agursky was able to transfer into a second-rate university, the Stalin Machine-Tools Institute in Moscow (STANKIN). The institute was filled with Jews who, like Agursky, had been denied admission to superior institutions. Agursky later deemed the institute a “grave of Jewish talent.”24 Agursky’s years at STANKIN coincided with the period of late Stalinism, a time Ronald Grigor Suny called “the classic moment of the totalitarian model.”25 During these years, Stalin’s cult of personality and anti-Semitism reached its zenith. Beginning in 1948, the regime’s increasing anti-Westernism resulted in a campaign of ‘anti-Cosmopolitanism,’ which was really a thinly veiled anti-Semitic purge. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jewish intellectuals were viciously targeted in the official press and the last remaining Jewish schools, theaters, and libraries were destroyed. The anti-Semitism of late Stalinism culminated with the Doctor’s Plot, in which Stalin used the premise of the 1948 death of his cultural watchdog Andrei Zhdanov to arrest nine prominent doctors, six of whom were Jewish, and accuse them of sabotage and involvement with international Jewish nationalist organizations. Stalin then edited a letter, which he forced a number of leading Jewish intellectuals to sign, that called for the deportation of the Soviet Jewish population eastwards.26 Many historians, including Agursky, who published an article on the Doctor’s Plot in 1985, believe that had Stalin not died, the Doctor’s Plot would have been the start of a nationwide Holocaust. Agursky was to go even further, arguing that the Doctor’s Plot marked the first step in Stalin’s very real plans to take over all of Western Europe. In Agursky’s opinion, the internationally minded Jews represented the greatest source of potential disloyalty in regard to Stalin’s increasingly expansionist agenda. As Stalin embarked on bringing about a new world order, the Jews would have to be taken care of first.27

23 Ibid, 135. 24 Ibid, 143. 25 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York 1998), 383. 26Ibid, 374. 27 See Mikhail Agursky, “The Abortive Plan to Persecute Jews in 1953 and its Political Background,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies (1985), Vol. Division B, Vol. III, 197-204.

34 Agursky’s fairly conspiratorial reading of the Doctor’s Plot doubtlessly stemmed from his own harrowing experiences at STANKIN during the years of high Stalinism. His memoirs describe how Stalin’s totalitarianism and anti- Semitism were echoed in all levels of society. The administrators at STANKIN subjected the mostly Jewish student body to draconian disciplinary measures and a climate of fear pervaded the institute.28 And then suddenly, Stalin died. In the words of Agursky,

Stalin, however, died together with the plan, in which we Jews at STANKIN were supposed to have played such a key role. We, the witnesses of impending catastrophe . . . only realized after a few years had passed, when rumors began to leak, what, in fact, was being prepared. I froze inside, remembering my own carelessness on the verge of the Gulag, and perhaps even death.29

While it may have taken Agursky a few years to acknowledge the severe import of the Doctor’s Plot, these events marked his break with Stalinism. Later he recalled, “During the anti-Cosmopolitan campaign I understood that Stalin could not have been unaware of it and that he even personally allowed it to transpire. This was the first doubt I felt towards Stalin. I withdrew from myself and from his surreal cult.”30 During this time, Agursky recognized that the show trials and purges of the 1930s had all been a sham. He realized that Trotsky, Bukharin, and Zinoviev had not been enemies of the people and refused to believe that Josip Broz Tito was a traitor. Like many future dissidents, despite these harsh realizations regarding Stalinism, Agursky remained convinced of the correctness of Marxist ideology and the future victory of world communism. As he later wrote, “All this [communist ideology] seemed unshakeable, while the rest [the excesses of Stalinism] was a retreat that could be remedied.”31

1.4 Agursky’s encounters with pre-revolutionary Russian culture

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt astutely noted that “the Russian policies of separation of Jewish national and religious identity, ironically supported by the Jewish intelligentsia in the late imperial period and continued in the Soviet period [e.g. Samuil Agursky –S.F.], successfully allowed, or even required, Russian Jews to identify as ‘Jewish’ without an association whatsoever with an

28 Agursky (1996), 157-164. 29 Ibid, 162. 30 Ibid, 138. 31 Ibid, 139.

35 earlier historical or religious meaning of the word.”32 Despite the fact that most of his friends and his entire family were culturally and ethnically Jewish, growing up Jewish in the Stalinist Soviet Union in no way instilled Agursky with any semblance of religious faith. Save for a few trips to the shtetl in Belarus where his mother’s family lived and Agursky saw Orthodox Jews and met rabbis, he hardly ever encountered Judaism as a religion. On the contrary, his father had been a militant atheist! For the young Mikhail, even the Yiddish spoken by his older relatives and the sthetl in Belarus were vestiges of a quickly disappearing past. Hebrew was not even considered. To be sure, Agursky would later place immense value in his Jewish faith. Yet, like many future Zionists, Agursky’s intellectual “return” to traditional Judaism and his eventual embrace of Zionism were not to occur in earnest until the late 1960s. Well before this, Agursky started digging into the past of a Russian culture that he in many ways felt more attached to than Judaism. In 1955, at the age of twenty-two, Agursky married a Russian woman named Vera Kondratieva. In his memoirs, Agursky wrote that one of “the most important consequences of his marriage” was getting to know his new neighbors at Vera’s communal apartment.33 Among these neighbors was the artist Nadezhda Rozanova-Vereshchagina, the daughter of the controversial pre- revolutionary philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Taking Agursky under her wing, Rozanova gave him a cultural education during his frequent visits to her apartment. Simultaneously, she opened up for Agursky three new intellectual worlds that were to greatly influence his later work. Firstly, she introduced him to a great deal of pre-revolutionary, implicitly anti-Soviet, Russian literature including Dostoevsky and Merezhkovsky. Secondly, she brought him into the avant-garde art world in Moscow. Rozanova was impressed by Agursky’s knowledge of art when they met, and she continued his education by taking him to underground art shows throughout the city. Thirdly, and most importantly, Vera introduced Agursky to the world of faith. When Rozanova introduced Agursky to a reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, he asked her, “How can educated people believe in God? Tactfully, N.V. [Rozanova] made me understand, that religious belief [vera] and education are not incompatible. I pondered on that.”34 In addition to inspiring Agursky to question his atheism, she also brought his attention to some controversial Russian perspectives on “the Jewish question” (i.e. what is to be done with the

32 Deutsch Kornblatt, (2004), 48. 33 Ibid, 187. 34 Ibid, 190.

36 Jewish population in Russia?) by introducing him to the works of her father, Vasilii Rozanov. Agursky later wrote that for Rozanov, “the Jewish question had…central importance, and he wavered from Judeophilia to rapid anti- Semitism.” Without a doubt, Agursky’s later samizdat polemics against anti- Semite nationalists had begun formulating themselves in his head while he read Rozanov. As he later wrote, “That I crossed paths with Rozanov’s family was, probably [the result of] a mysticism that powerfully invaded the rest of my life.”35 . 1.5 The beginnings of dissent during “the Thaw” years

In Pepel Klaasa Agursky recalled how the rehabilitated Gulag prisoners began returning to Moscow in 1953. Inspired by these changes, he petitioned for his father’s posthumous rehabilitation, which was granted in 1956, after much bureaucratic back and forth.36 By that time, as he later wrote, Agursky “was already a dissident,” although he “was still far from breaking with the system.”37 This quote exposes a fundamental ambiguity of Soviet dissidence that has been noted by Ann Kamromi, among others: Soviet dissidence was a project that was political, yet not understood to be political, particularly by those themselves involved.38 It is clear that Agursky’s self-identification as a dissident in 1956 stemmed not from his active political opposition to the regime at that time, but rather his increasing participation in subversive subcultures and avant-garde intellectual movements. During this time he began attending the youth club Fakel [“Torch”], where poets and musicians, including a young Bulat Okudzhava, read performed. In the spirit of the times, Agursky himself wrote a few Aesopian stories of a somewhat subversive nature.39 He befriended artists like Oleg Prokofiev, the famous composer’s son, and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, whose work was to be criticized by Nikita Khrushchev at the infamous Manezh Exhibition of 1962, a moment many believed to symbolize the end of Khrushchev’s cultural thaw.40 Working during these years as a sound engineer,

35 Ibid, 188. 36 Ibid, 178-179 202. 37 Ibid, 222. 38 Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics,” Slavic Review (Spring 2012) vol. 71, no. 1, 70-90, 72. 39 See Mikhail Agursky, “Tri rasskaza,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal (2011), No. 40 accessed at Zhurnal’nyj zal at http://magazines.russ.ru/ier/2011/40/a16.html#_ftn1 on 8 May 2016. For an interesting article contesting the fact that Agursky wrote these stories see Mikhail Gorelik, “Nainovejshii plutarkh,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal (2011), No. 40, accessed online at http://www.antho.net/jr/40/gorelik.html on 4 June 2016. 40 See Darya Kurdyukova, “Ernst Neizvestny, the man who dared to argue with Krushchev [sic],” Russia Beyond the Headlines, 9 April 2015, accessed online at

37 Agursky was also exposed to rampant corruption, which shattered whatever remaining illusions he had regarding the supremacy of the Soviet economic system.41 Agursky “hated Khrushchev, and his every step, his every word annoyed” him. He was troubled by Khrushchev’s quelling of the Hungarian Uprising, the USSR’s worsening relationship with Israel against the backdrop of the Suez War, and the Soviet “romance with Nasser.”42 Nevertheless, he still considered himself a Marxist and a Communist. During the early Khrushchev years, he, like many dissidents, looked towards Tito as “a symbol of truth and justice.”43 He began to read anarchists like Piotr Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, although he later wrote that this was not a break with Soviet ideology, but a search for new paths within existing frames.44 Lastly, he hoped for the emergence of a humane communism. These hopes were nurtured by János Kadar’s ascent in Hungary, and by the fact that Imre Nagy was being held in custody not in prison, but in a Romanian spa. But when Agursky heard news of the latter’s execution, he finally broke with the system. In his own words:

A void formed in my heart. Naturally, I found myself at the mercy of the elements, at the mercy of everything that contradicted official ideology. The most powerful was the impact of Russian culture. Jewish culture as an independent phenomenon did not exist. Israel loomed on the horizon as a lovely, but provincial government. Breaking with the system, naturally, I ended up a captive of Russian culture, and it was a pleasant, charming captivity. Above all, I was attracted to religious Russian antiquity.45

1.6 Alexander Men’ and Agursky’s involvement with the Orthodox Church

Immediately after his break with the Soviet system, Agursky set off on a “root searching” trip to the Russian north, travelling around historic churches.46 This journey led to active involvement with the Orthodox Church. Like many Jewish converts to Orthodoxy (hereafter referred to as Jewish-Christians), Agursky’s spiritual mentor was none other than the larger-than-life Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Men’. Although Men’s exhaustive theological writings and

http://rbth.com/arts/2015/04/09/ernst_neizvestny_the_man_who_dared_to_argue_with_nikita_ krushchev_45119.html on May 8 2016 41 See, for example, Agursky (1996) 269-272. 42 Ibid, 258. 43 Ibid, 209. 44 Ibid, 206. 45 Ibid, 258. 46 Ibid, 259-265.

38 activity are well beyond the scope of this paper, a few words must be said regarding his influence on Agursky’s intellectual development. Like Agursky, Alexander Men’ was born to Jewish parents in Moscow right around Stalin’s “Great Retreat.” Unlike Agursky’s parents however, his parents were distinctly anti-Communist. His mother became interested in Orthodoxy at a young age, and after Alexander’s birth she had both him and herself baptized in an illegal catacomb church. Men’s father, Volf, on the other hand, remained a devoted Zionist and a religious Jew his entire life. From a young age, Men’ demonstrated unparalleled intellectual and theological proclivity and knew that he wanted to be a priest. Notwithstanding his early devotion to Orthodoxy, Men’ remained quite connected to his Jewish identity through his father’s influence. In fact, his decision to become a priest was positively influenced by the emergence of a Jewish state in 1948. In 1960, Men’ was ordained as a priest.47 For our purposes here, the two most significant aspects of Men’s ecclesiology were his universalistic ecumenism and his ability to bridge Orthodoxy theology with secular spheres of knowledge. In aiming to unite Christians of all churches, refraining from any political or nationalist reading of Orthodoxy, and connecting Orthodoxy with secular knowledge, Men’s Orthodoxy was distinctly liberal and appealed particularly to the intelligentsia, which at the time comprised many Jews. That Jews were open to the idea of conversion should not be surprising; as has been stressed, Judaism as a religion had ceased to exist in the Soviet Union, and most Jews identified as such ethnically and even culturally, but certainly not religiously. On the contrary, Jews were particularly vulnerable to Men’s liberal Orthodoxy as it at once satisfied their long spiritual thirst and symbolized a break with the exclusion and persecution that had marked the Jewish-Soviet experience since the Stalin era. As Deutsch Kornblatt explained, “Men’s voice revealed for . . . many in the Jewish intelligentsia the relationship between the word and The Word, between the knowledge they loved and a religious experience that had been absent for decades. And the spiritual language he brought them . . . was couched in the language of inclusiveness and universalism.”48 Agursky, searching for some direction after his break with the Soviet system, was particularly susceptible to such a liberal interpretation of Orthodoxy. Baptized by Men’ in the early 1960s, he developed a close relationship with Men’

47 Biographical information on Men’ provided by Deutsch Kornblatt, 69-83 and Dasha Demourova, “Father Alexander Men: an Unorthodox Priest,” Russian Life (January/February 2005) Vol. 48, No. 1, 16-18. See also Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa (Neizvestnye glavy iz knigi),” Studiia (2000) no. 5, 99-101. 48 Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 79.

39 and his family. His intellectual circle in the early 1960s was largely comprised of like-minded Jewish-Christians, many of who, like Agursky, would soon turn to Zionism.49 Agursky’s relationship with Men’ opened up a number of opportunities within the church, and throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Agursky worked “closely and intimately” with Metropolitan Pitirim and Patriarch Pimen I on the Journal of the Moscow Patriarch (ZhMP), researching early Soviet anti-religious policies and honing his skills as a historian.50 A direct result of his research conducted in cooperation with the Orthodox church, Agursky’s first samizdat publication was his exhaustive 1971, “Bibliography of Publications on the Problems of Relations between Jews and Christians in the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Press” which included around 2,000 titles!51 In understanding the role Orthodoxy played in Agursky’s intellectual development, it is informative to think of his conversion to Orthodoxy as a step towards his eventual embrace of Judaism. In his own words, “In the New Testament I immersed myself in a Jewish world, in Jewish history . . . What is more, in Christianity I first began to acquire a Jewish consciousness that had been denied to me . . . I began to discern in myself a kind of continuity with my forebears, a continuity lost by my parents.”52 As Agursky became involved with Zionist circles in the late 60s and sought emigration to Israel, he remained a Christian, but constantly wrestled with his faith and whether or not he would remain a Christian if his emigration status were approved. As he later wrote, looking back on the years just before his emigration,

Was I right? Which values could I bring with me [to Israel] and which ones couldn’t I bring? What was the most important aspect of my Zionism? What was its true spiritual foundation? Was Christianity itself important for me or was it the very search for universalism, which also informed the traditional Jewish heritage and even defined it? I had to answer all of these questions before going to Israel.53

49 Ibid, 76. 50 Mikhail Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa, glavy ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia (2007) no. 10, accessed at Zhurnal’nyj zal http://magazines.russ.ru/studio/2006/10 on 8 May 2016. See also Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa (Neizvestnye glavy iz knigi),” Studiia (2000) no. 5, 115-116; 127-128. 51 Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’–An Anthology (Belmont 1977), 597 and 610. 52 Mikhail Agursky, “Epizody vospominanii,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 2 (1999), 209 quoted by Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 124. 53 Mikhail Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa, glavy ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia (2005) no. 9, accessed at Zhurnal’nyj zal http://magazines.russ.ru/studio/2005/9/agu16.html on 8 May 2016.

40 Eventually, Agursky chose Judaism. Upon his 1975 arrival in Israel, at the age of forty-two, Agursky was circumcised. His wife Vera and even her mother, who joined them in Israel, converted to Judaism as well. The 1996 published version of Pepel Klaasa, Agursky’s memoirs, is based on a manuscript in which he had omitted all references to his involvement with the church. The unpublished chapters that deal with Christian subject matter were later serially published in both the Berlin-based Russian-language journal Studiia and the Israeli Russian-language journal Ieusalimskii zhurnal. Because Pepel Klaasa was published posthumously, there is some debate as to whether or not Agursky intended to omit the Christian subject matter. The editor of Agursky’s memoirs, Mikhail Gorelik was not even aware that another manuscript – with extensive material on Agursky’s Christian period – existed until Pepel Klaasa was ready for publication. He decided to publish the version he had prepared, devoid of references to Agursky’s work with the Orthodox Church and his relationship with Alexander Men’.54 Gorelik wrote that Agursky’s edits were most likely determined “by situational concerns,” suggesting that admitting to an earlier conversion to Orthodoxy could have jeopardized Agursky’s academic position at the Hebrew University or even his Israeli citizenship. Nevertheless, from the way Agursky proudly presented his Judaism throughout the published version of the memoirs, it seems more likely that he simply did not want to leave a Christian legacy. His conversion to Orthodoxy was in no ways a conversion away from Judaism; it was rather a conversion away from Marxist atheism and a step towards Judaism. In the 1996 published version of Pepel Klaasa, Agursky not only hid his involvement with the church – as he would have done if he were motivated by purely pragmatic concerns – but even stressed his dedication to Judaism when confronted with Christianity. Writing about his decision to marry a non-Jew, Agursky swore it was in no way an act of assimilation: “Not in the least! I was proud of my Judaism, but, drawn by the dynamics of personal life, I simply didn’t think about the consequences of my decision.”55 Perhaps more telling is how Agursky documented his roots-searching trip to the Russian North. Claiming not to have found the answers he was looking for, Agursky wrote, “These were not my roots, but I still did not know that. If they were mine, maybe I would have looked at everything differently.”56 Examples such as these testify to the fact that Agursky came to accept Judaism wholeheartedly in Israel.

54 See Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 77-78. 55 Agursky (1996), 186. 56 Ibid, 261.

41 But this is not to suggest that his Orthodox years were not to make a lasting impact on his worldview and his work. His samizdat polemics with Russian nationalists display such a conciliatory tone because during the years he was writing them, he was between their own spiritual world and his eventual one: an ethnic Jew returning to his native religion via Orthodoxy. Men’ provided Agursky with a model of liberal, universalist Russian nationalism, and it was this model that was to guide him in his ideological war against exclusivist, chauvinistic strands of Russian nationalism, as we will see in the next chapter. Tragically, Men’ was murdered with an axe in 1990, a year before Agursky died. The murder is still unsolved. Many suspect that anti-Semitic clergy, deceitful towards Men’s ecumenism and universalism, and his massive influence, ordered the murder.57 Deutsch Kornblatt wrote that in her interviews with Agursky’s wife, Vera, the latter confirmed that Agursky’s final trip to the USSR was partially motivated by intentions “to investigate the unsolved murder one year earlier of his spiritual mentor, Father Men’.”58

1.7 Conclusions

In wrapping up this survey of the biographical influences that transformed an “honest Komsomoler” named after Karl Marx into a Zionist dissident human rights activist, some important conclusions might be drawn regarding the roots of the Soviet dissident movement. Firstly, it is integral to understand the ideological shift that occurred between Samuil and Mikhail’s generations. Many Soviet Jews of Samuil’s generation had been quite optimistic regarding the possibility of assimilation into Soviet society. They were eager to break with the past in order to achieve this end. Yet against their best hopes, official and popular anti-Semitism ironically served to keep their nation alive while ensuring that they had no access to their own religion. This miscalculation of Samuil’s generation caused a reactionary backlash in the successive generation of Soviet Jews. As we will see in the next chapter, Mikhail’s generation, the Jewish shestidesiatniki, increasingly turned to the very ideologies their parents spurred: Zionism and the Jewish faith. Secondly, it should be noted that while anti-Semitism was certainly a salient feature of the Soviet government, the Jews were not the only nationality with qualms. Many Russians, not without reason, also perceived the Soviet government to be anti-Russian. Notwithstanding Stalin’s “Great Retreat” towards Russian nationalism, countless pre-revolutionary nationalist thinkers and

57 Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 70. 58 Ibid, 78.

42 ideologies had been buried under the rubble of Stalinism, and many dissatisfied youths were just beginning to rediscover them. Thirdly, Agursky’s example proves that Jewish national rediscovery was not always occurring alongside Orthodox Russian national rediscovery, but sometimes within its very framework. To a significant extent, the Soviet Zionist movement that emerged in the late 1960s was nurtured in its early stages by the renaissance of Russian Orthodoxy. After all, the Jews had no native religious tradition from which to draw. As Agursky put it, “Torn from Jewish tradition, I had no conception of the fact that a Jewish religious alternative existed . . . I heard about [Martin] Buber through [Pavel] Florensky.”59 Deutsch Kornblatt’s book attests to the fact that Agursky’s example was hardly an isolated example or a rarity among the Jewish intelligentsia of the 1960s. In the words of a Jewish contemporary of Agursky’s, “Christians were not enemies. They were all allies. In those days we were a minority of outcasts.”60 To conclude, it should also be noted that Agursky’s memoirs run contrary to a totalitarian reading of Russian history. Throughout his accounts of the past, Agursky repeatedly stressed that Soviet society “was not and never had been mute (bezmolvnym).” He recalled how his mother frequently complained about and even insulted Stalin. Even during the harshest years of high Stalinism, against the tense backdrop of the ensuing Doctor’s Plot, a Jewish peer of Agursky’s at STANKIN had the gall to publically compare the school administrators to the Gestapo. Such examples are numerous throughout Agursky’s memoirs. As we turn our attention to the outburst of Soviet dissidence in the late 1960s and early 1970s samizdat, it should be kept in mind that these movements did not emerge out of a vacuum. While a concentrated dissident front materialized only in the post-Stalin years, dissent, in one form or another, had existed since the onset of the Soviet experiment.

59 Agursky, “Epizody vospominanii,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 2, 223, 209, 210. quoted by Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 78. 60 Deutsch Kornblatt (2004) 52.

43 Chapter Two: Between Two Nationalisms (1967-1975) Zionism, Russian nationalism and Mikhail Agursky’s samizdat writings

The Jewish National rebirth, occurring now in the USSR, demonstrates how deep national roots run even among those who for so long have been the avant-garde of the soilless, leveling force of internationalism. –From the samizdat journal Veche’s editorial board’s response to Agursky’s open letter in the same journal, 19741

2.1 The Rise of anti-Semitism, Zionism, dissidence, and Russian nationalism during the early Brezhnev era

In 1963, Soviet anti-Semitism took a turn. As Leonard Schapiro noted in a 1986 essay, during the 1960s “Zionism” became the target of an aggressive propaganda campaign:

This was a campaign against ‘Zionism’ that by its very nature soon revealed that it was an attack not merely on Israel and its rulers but on the Jewish people as a whole, wherever they might be found, including the Soviet Union . . . The flow of [anti-Zionist] books, pamphlets, articles, films, lectures, and television shows has continued since 1963, and with special intensity since the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967.2

Mikhail Heller and Alexander Nekrich went so far as to say after that, “Anti- Zionism became the proletarian internationalism of the era of real socialism.”3 Agursky’s Pepel Klaasa attests to the fact that the Six-Day War was an important event in galvanizing Israeli patriotism among Soviet Jews, providing the catalyst for an organized Zionist movement. Judging from his memoirs, it would be fair to say that the Six-Day War converted Agursky himself to a full fledged Zionist. The “anti-Israeli hysterics of the Soviet press” during the Six-Day War even motivated Agursky to commit his first act of explicit political dissidence. On June 3, 1967, he wrote a letter to Aleksei Kosygin urging him “to stop the dangerous course of Soviet politics in the Middle East and to stop helping Nazi [Arab] dictators . . . who had nothing in common with Soviet interests.” Strangely Agursky received no punishment for the letter; it went unnoticed. But borrowing the phrase of

1 Veche editorial board, “Nash kommentarii” [response to Agursky’s letter], Vol’noe Slovo: Izbrannoe Samizdat (Frankfort am Main, 1974) Vypusk 17-18: Iz zhurnala ‘Vehce’ no. 7, 8, 9, 10, 148-150 and 154, 150. 2 Leonard Schapiro, “Nationalism in the Soviet Empire: the Anti-Semitic Component” from The Last Empire (1986), 78-86, 82. 3 Stephen Carter, Russian Nationalism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (London 1990), 78.

44 early Zionist Leo Pinsker, Agursky later called the letter an important act of “auto-emancipation.”4 Yet for all its importance in promoting national self-awareness among Soviet Jews, Agursky contested that “it was not the Six Day War that marked the beginning of a new wave of anti-Semitism in the USSR, but the events in Czechoslovakia [one year later-S.F.] interpreted by Suslovites, Ponomarevites, Epishevites [i.e. party members under the ideological influence of three high- ranking Soviet communists-S.F.] as the result of Zionist diversion.”5 This is an important distinction because it brings attention to a concentrated effort on the part of Brezhnev’s establishment to smear all opposition to the regime as a Jewish phenomenon. Quoting Schapiro again, “From the forms that anti-Semitic propaganda has taken it seems clear that one of its function is to stimulate Soviet nationalism and a consequent rallying behind the Soviet ’establishment’ against that alien and dangerous element, the international Jew . . . Anti-Semitism may also be a useful counter to dissidents: it may be exploited as a means of driving a wedge between loyal Russian or Soviet citizens and ‘these dissidents, who are all Jews.”6 Such a smear campaign was quite effective because, as Slezkine has noted, the liberal intelligentsia was largely Jewish during this time. As we have established in the last chapter, Soviet Jews of Agursky’s generation were in a unique socio-historical position. Born the children of an emancipated generation that had contributed disproportionately to the first generation of Soviet power, only to experience their nation’s fall from grace and official prominence, it follows quite naturally that the Jewish voice would be a particularly loud one in the dissident movement. Although some Jews, like Agursky, converted to Orthodoxy and embraced neo-Slavophile ideas, most embraced democracy or reformist Marxism. These democratic/reformist Marxist Jewish circles, which overlapped with the burgeoning exodus movement, were to form the heart of the Soviet dissident movement in the late 1960s.7 Agursky provided insight into the Soviet-Jewish psyche during the emergence of a Jewish dissident movement:

A rebellion was brewing. The Jews had been turned into a slave estate. One could hardly expect that a people who under Soviet power gave political leaders, diplomats, military leaders, and important economic

4 Agursky (1996), 323. 5 Ibid, 329. 6 Schapiro (1986) 83-84. 7 See Slezkine (2004) 341-342.

45 actors would be content to settle as a class, the highest dreams of which would be to be appointed as the head of a laboratory . . . or the senior researcher in some institute. The Jews were crushed and humiliated to a much greater extent than the rest of the population. The people were deprived of roots and rolled like tumbleweeds. The slaves rebelled.8

While the Jewish presence in the dissident movement was quite dominant, the regime’s propaganda that dissidence was an entirely Jewish phenomenon was naturally untrue. The 1960s saw the emergence of another trend of dissidence, rooted not in westernizing, democratic trends but a backwards- looking Russian nationalism. The irony of this latter form of nationalism is that it actually came to prominence not underground, but was endorsed and promoted by official government circles and official publications throughout the 1960s.9 To be sure, some early nationalists organizations and thinkers worked in opposition to the regime. The All-Russian Social Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON), for example, sought to incite an armed rebellion against the USSR. The KGB closed down the organization in 1967.10 Another group of early dissident nationalists working outside the system worth mentioning was the ultra chauvinist Fetisov Group, the members of which were confined to a mental hospital in 1968.11 But by and large, the rise of Russian nationalism in Soviet culture during the beginning of the Brezhnev era occurred on the pages of official publications. In the sphere of literature, the 1960s saw the rise of the derevenshchiki (or the Village prose writers). By the end of the decade, these writers, who lamented the death of the Russian village and a Russian Orthodox spirit at the hands of Soviet industrialization and moral nihilism, became “the leading school of Soviet letters” and were widely read and beloved by the Russian public.12 Journals like Molodaiia gvardiia published markedly nationalistic articles by writers such as Yuri Ivanov (whom we will discuss more below) and Viktor Chalmaev.13 In the

8 Agursky (1996), 331. 9 See Dunlop (1983) 37-43 for historical background; many sections of this book deal with manifestations of Russian ethno-nationalism in official Soviet culture during this period. See also Mitrokhin (2003), which deals extensively with the multifaceted ties that bound Russian ethno- nationalists and the ruling Communist Party apparatus from the years 1953-1985. 10 For more on VSKhSON see John Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Belmont 1976). See also Yanov (1978), 21-38, Liudmila Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR, “ Russkoe natsional’noe dvizhenie dvizhenie,’” (1983), accessed online at http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/books/ALEXEEWA/Chapter10.htm#_VPID_22 on 31 May 2016. 11 See Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union: The Unofficial Moscow Journal: A Chronicle of Current Events (New York 1972), 431-433. 12 Ibid. See also Carter (1990) 89-101. 13 Dunlop (1983), 39. See also Yanov (1978) 39-61.

46 journal Voprosy literatury, Alexander Yanov began a debate about the 1840s Slavophiles, a topic that had been taboo for most of Soviet history.14 This rise of nationalism was not a purely intellectual phenomenon. By 1971, double the number of domestic tourists traveled to Russia’s historic sites and churches than in 1964. There was also a skyrocketing in the membership of voluntary societies engaged with studying and preserving Russian historical monuments, such as the Rodina Club [“Motherland Club”] and the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIK). By 1977, 9.3% of the USSR’s Russian population belonged to VOOPIK!15 However, the regime’s tolerance for Russian nationalism of all strands was to be short-lived. As John Dunlop noted, “The year 1970 marked a watershed in the regime’s tolerance for Russian nationalism. From then on, it began to persecute manifestations of Russian nationalism which were not melded with Marxism- Leninism.”16 In Dunlop’s view, the regime had sufficiently silenced the democratic dissidents, and could now turn its attention to the nationalists, who were getting out of hand with their anti-Soviet rhetoric and ideologies. In 1970s, Brezhnev himself condemned the nationalism of Molodaiia gvardiia, and the journal’s editor was sacked. This event marked the beginning of what Dunlop calls Russian nationalism’s “samizdat” stage.17 In forcing Russian nationalism underground, the Brezhnev regime incidentally galvanized an ideological war among the samizdat dissident community that reproduced the Slavophile- Westernizer debate of the mid-19th century. Although the division of all Soviet dissidents into neo-Westernizer and neo-Slavophile camps is a conventional oversimplification, and many important dissidents like the Leninist Medvedev brothers did not fall into either camp, this structural model helps us to understand the important debates on the pages of samizdat journals at the time. Informed by his Orthodoxy, Agursky belonged generally in the neo- Slavophile camp, which was abnormal for a Zionist. Yet Agursky was much more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. Seeking cooperation between the Jewish and Russian nationalist movements and the defeat of étatist nationalism, Agursky was ideologically flexible, depending on his audience. While he was sympathetic towards a conservative return to tradition and religion, he was well aware that many Russian nationalists held anti-Semitic views. Much of his samizdat writings were consequently dedicated to eradicating xenophobic chauvinism from Russian nationalist dissidence. Depending on the forum to which Agursky was

14 Dunlop (1983), 41. 15 Ibid, 66. 16 Ibid, 41. 17 Ibid, 43.

47 contributing, this pragmatic goal could alternatively find itself expressed in a more neo-Slavophile or a more neo-Westernizing manifestation. In this chapter we will turn our attention to the ideas advanced in three of Agursky’s most significant and widely cited samizdat publications. These writings have also been chosen because they succinctly and clearly communicate his ideas on three themes that pervade much of his work: 1) the roots of anti- Semitism in the Soviet Union, 2) the ideological compatibility of Russian nationalism and Zionism, and 3) a conservative utopianism that rejects both Soviet socialism and Western capitalism. First, however, we turn our attention to Agursky’s life on the eve of his active dissidence.

2.2 The dawn of dissidence

In 1969, Agursky’s life took two major turns. First, after receiving his doctorate in cybernetics at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, he began working at the Scientific-Research Institute of Machine-building Technology (NIITM), which produced rockets and spaceships. The experience exposed Agursky to the parasitic nature of the Soviet military industrial complex – a theme to which he was later to devote an essay in Israel18 – and furthered his disillusionment with the Soviet system. The inefficiencies of the Soviet economy were personified by Agursky’s boss at NITTM, a certain Makarov who had what Agursky called a “purely Stalinist approach”: “‘Say one thing, think another, and do a third!’”19 The second change in Agursky’s life was his relocation to an apartment in the Beliavo-Bogorodskoe region of Moscow. Incidentally, the neighborhood turned out to be “a microcosm” of Soviet dissidence. Among Agursky’s new neighbors were the Orthodox Christian and frequent samizdat contributor Yuri Glazov, the Jewish poet Naum Korzhavin, the Zionist activist Alexander Averbukh, and the dissident-mathematician Valentin Turchin, co-author of the 1970 Andrei Sakharov-Roy Medvedev letter. Agursky’s move to Beliaevo-Bogorodskoe marked his “first open dissident contact, from which” he “had earlier refrained.”20 During these years, not in small part due to the aforementioned crew’s influence, Agursky became a devout Zionist. Because Agursky’s work in the military industry was of a confidential nature, he did not have the right to leave

18 See Mikhail Agursky, “The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex,” Jerusalem Papers on Peace Problems 31 (Jerusalem 1980). 19 Mikhail Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa, glavy ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia (2005) no. 7, accessed at Zhurnal’nyj zal http://magzines.russ.ru/studio/2003/7/ag18.html on 9 May 2016. 20 Agursky (1996), 331.

48 the country until two years of non-involvement with the military industrial complex had passed. The Zionist movement was strengthening, and many of his acquaintances were already being granted emigration status. Putting all hopes in emigration, Agursky quit his job in 1970. In searching for work while waiting for the obligatory two years to pass, Agursky – despite his prestigious academic record, knowledge of foreign languages, and a number of well-received scientific publications, including a couple of books – was denied from all the posts to which he applied. During this waiting period, he wrote four letters to Brezhnev, appealing to him to allow the Jews to emigrate, or at the very least, provide him with some occupational post.21 He received no answer. In March of 1972, Agursky submitted his first application for emigration status. His request was denied. Around this time, he also met his first foreign journalist, David Bonavia, who frequented the dissident circles in Beliavo- Bogorodskoe. Bonavia was especially struck by Agursky’s intelligence and encouraged him to write two articles. Bonavia succeeded in publishing both of them in very prestigious journals. The first was a review of the Belorussian Encyclopedia, published in the London Times Literary Supplement. The second was a review of a Soviet bestseller at the time of writing: Yuri Ivanov’s 1970 anti- Semitic Caution, Zionism! Agursky’s translator and editor, Peter Reddaway, hailed Agursky’s review as “the first of its kind to be published.”22 The review, “Selling Anti-Semitism in Moscow,” was published in the prestigious New York Review of Books in November of 1972.

2.3 Agursky’s review of Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism!!

The theory that the rise of far-right Russian nationalism during the early Brezhnev period occurred not underground, but in an officially endorsed manner is supported by the example of Ivanov’s book. Ivanov himself worked in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Given the absurdly anti-Semitic nature of his book, it is almost amusing that he was the Committee’s “only expert on Israel.”23 Although earlier Soviet condemnations of Zionism had recently been published and met with great critical and commercial success, Agursky asserted in his review that Ivanov’s book was “a remarkable social document, being the first attempt of the entire Soviet period to justify publicly the need for an all-out

21 See Studiia 9 and 10 (2005). 22 Peter Reddaway, Translator’s Introduction to Agursky’s “Selling anti-Semitism in Moscow,” The New York Review of Books, November 16 1972 accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/11/16/selling-anti-semitism-in-moscow/ on 9 May 2016. 23 Ibid.

49 struggle against the Jews, whom the author views as the country’s chief internal threat.”24 Agursky’s review of Ivanov’s book was not a comprehensive academic review, but rather a platform for him to: 1) advance his readings of Soviet history, the Soviet internal political situation and Soviet foreign policy, and 2) convince the reader that “The only real way to end the Russian-Jewish conflict in Russia would be to allow mass emigration by Jews to Israel.” For our purposes, a few of the article’s arguments are significant as they highlight the salient features that defined Agursky’s work for years to come. In his review, Agursky explained the recent anti-Zionist turn in official Soviet anti-Semitism as a way for the government to present “the humiliating defeat of the Arabs [in the Six Day War –S.F.] who had received enormous quantities of aid from the USSR, as the result of the secret activities of a world Zionism that aspired to world domination and already had the leading Western countries under its thumb.” Agursky demonstrated that there was nothing particularly new about this worldwide Zionist conspiracy; it was simply a revival of arguments found in the so-called Protocols of Elders of Zion and Black Hundreds ideology. “A revival of Black Hundred ideology in post-revolutionary Russia,” he wrote, “where the continuity of communist ideology has remained unbroken . . . ought not to surprise the careful observer.” In explaining why Agursky advanced for the first time his theory of national Bolshevism: “Apart from its social aspect, there was an unusually profound national character to the Bolshevik revolution and it was precisely this that proved a dominant factor in the country’s subsequent development.” Thus, in one of his first non-scientific publications, Agursky already formulated the central thesis that he would advance as a historian. For the next few pages, Agursky outlined his reading of Soviet history. Essentially, his argument was that the anti-Semitism espoused by Ivanov’s book has deep historical roots both popularly and officially. It is clear that Agursky’s reading of history is largely inspired by his own personal experiences, which we have outlined in the previous chapter. Most likely with Samuil in mind, he described how “the influx of many young Jews into central Russian [i.e. western Russia; central in relation to the Pale of Settlement-S.F.], the overt encouragement of them by the authorities, and their innate energy enabled them, lack of education notwithstanding, to rise to many key posts in the party, state, military, and other spheres.” Recalling Samuil’s downfall, he went on to describe

24 Mikhail Agursky (1972). All following quotes are from the same review.

50 how this Jewish influx “in turn caused a heightening of anti-Semitism,” partially inspired by the high Jewish participation “in the unprecedented anti-religious campaigns [that] provoked much discontent among many sections of the population.” The argument continued with Agursky establishing the anti- Semitism of the Stalinist years: the annihilation of large numbers of Jewish communists who had been members of the ruling elite; the fact that “after the purges of the 1930s not one Jew remained in a high-ranking political post in such republics as the Ukraine or Belorussia, which had Jewish populations of several millions”; the destruction of “the last remnants of Jewish-Yiddish culture; the arrest of nearly all the prominent personalities in Jewish society in the post-war years and, finally preparing the ground for the monstrous provocation of the doctor’s plot.” Agursky argued that despite the downfall of Soviet Jewry, anti-Semitism continued to plague post-war Soviet society. In his words, “The historical process proved irreversible. The Jews were still feared as a national group which, given the chance, would speedily regain its position of dominance in the country.” Agursky’s conclusion was that the anti-Zionism of the Brezhnev era was a new manifestation of a very old phenomenon in Russian society and politics. In Agursky’s reading, during the years of Stalinism “there had taken place something which has happened on more than one occasion in Jewish history when assimilatory tendencies began to dominate. Anti-Semitism, instead of vanishing, increased.” Given assimilation’s repeated failure, the clear answer to the Jewish question had to be emigration. Without a doubt, this is the review’s central message. Given that it was published in one of the quintessential western intellectual journals, this fact should not be overlooked. After all, western pressure was instrumental in persuading Brezhnev to allow increased Jewish emigration. Beyond exhibiting the first manifestations of Agursky’s nationalist reading of Soviet history and its Zionist implications, this review is significant for two subtler reasons. The first is that it is also the first time Agursky advanced his theory that Soviet society and political life was marked by “a new variant of ancient gnosticism.” In the introduction, we have discussed Besançon’s comparison of Bolshevism and gnosticism. Agursky observed within Ivanov’s argumentation some of the defining features of this comparison. In particular, Agursky’s saw a gnostic approach in Ivanov’s over interpretation of history and his dualistic juxtaposition of ‘good’ Soviet communism fighting for the realization of history’s teleological end, opposed by ‘bad’ Zionism.

51 In other words, official Soviet readings of history such as Ivanov’s were not based on facts, but instead a speculative, illusive symbolism grounded in infallible Bolshevik ideology. Citing one of Ivanov’s unconvincing examples of the shadow Zionist presence in the early Soviet body politic, Agursky wrote, “According to Ivanov, then . . . the sinister work of the clandestine Jewish secret service in the USSR, which consists of seizing key positions in the country and quietly uttering a few words every now and then . . . will determine the whole course of social development in the country, as they constitute camouflaged messages for organizing the Jews.” For Agursky, Ivanov’s couching of nationalist ideas in Marxist rhetoric was also a prime example of gnostic “pseudo- communism.” So long as the USSR was on the right side of history, fighting for the salvation of mankind, it could do no wrong. To further assert Ivanov’s hypocrisy, Agursky wrote that the “assimilation, of which Ivanov speaks . . . is the very last thing he desires.” As we will see, Agursky continued to argue for the importance of the gnostic dimension in Soviet culture and political life. The second subtle feature of this review is that Agursky used it as a platform to quietly introduce his religious conservative, neo-Slavophile political program. He wrote that Soviet gnosticism “has come into this world, on the ruins of Christian civilization” and that “such is the natural consequence of mass atheism in these countries. It develops into a deification of the people, a racism with gnostic overtones, which aspires to fill the religious vacuum that has formed.” In other words, Agursky’s insinuation is that Russian revival must not pursue a westernizing course, but a national-religious course. The ideological influence of the Orthodox Church is evident here. Elsewhere in the review Agursky wrote, “Experience has shown that liberal opposition in communist countries is very weak and has little prospect of political success.” Much like Solzhenitsyn would famously do two years later in his Letter to the Soviet Leader, Agursky used this 1972 review to advance a neo-Slavophile program that excused a transitional period of authoritarianism and refused to accept democracy as the answer to the Russia question. Thus, while arguing against a far-right anti-Semitic national Bolshevism, Agursky’s review endorsed left wing neo-Slavophile nationalism as the ideology of Russian revival. Here, a central irony of the review – an irony that would come to define much of Agursky’s work – must be noted. While it is hard to refute Agursky’s characterization of the USSR as a gnostic, Orwellian society in which illusive double-speak prevailed – especially given his experience living with it on a daily basis – Agursky’s reading of Soviet history is intriguingly gnostic in its own right. Describing Ivanov’s language, Agursky wrote:

52

Caution, Zionism! is couched in an intricate, Aesopian language of allusion and semi-allusion, of which the greater part can be understood only by specialists. Furthermore, this language makes frequent use of a symbolism fully intelligible only to those who share Ivanov’s attitudes. For example, when he says “Zionist,” the author means “Jew”; when he speaks of “communism,” this should be understood as meaning “Russia.” But Ivanov’s code does not by any means confine itself to these two cipher words. It goes considerably further.

By assuming that everything Ivanov wrote was nothing but a code, Agursky enabled himself to interpret it however he liked. There is something quite ironic about the fact that Agursky attacked Ivanov for perceiving a nefarious camouflaged Zionism bent on world domination as the guiding force in Soviet history, only then to introduce his own version of Soviet history in which the guiding force was a nefarious camouflaged Russian nationalism bent on world domination. While in our opinion, Agursky’s arguments regarding the nationalist influence on Soviet history have more legitimacy to them than Ivanov’s intellectually lazy revival of anti-Semitic myths, the former frequently arrived at his conclusions via the same symbolistic approach of the latter. In a fascinating letter to the editor responding to Agursky’s review, an American academic with distinctly leftist tendencies specializing in Soviet religious policy attacked the latter’s Aesopian approach to reading Ivanov’s book: “It is by no means a foregone conclusion that when Ivanov says ‘Zionist’ he means ‘Jew’ and a serious reviewer should have dealt with the question of whether to be anti-Zionist (as Ivanov unequivocally is) is to be anti-Semitic.”25 Agursky’s response is intriguing. He struck back: “I firmly insist on my thesis that the word “Zionist” is now a substitute for the word “Jew” in modern anti-Semitic vocabulary. My confidence on this point derives from the experience of life which I and millions of other people have had.”26 Without denying the truth of this particular point, it should be noted that Agursky’s decidedly emotional and personal approach to history became a defining feature of his work. While such an approach is excusable in a human rights activist fighting for his people’s emancipation, it became problematic when he devoted himself to pure history and, as we will see in the next chapter, eventually drew criticism from reviewers. On the other hand, it should be noted that it is exactly this emotional tone of

25 Ethel Dunn, “Soviet Anti-Semitism,” The New York Review of Books, November 29, 1973 accessed at the same link as the Agursky review on 9 May 2016. 26 Mikhail Agursky, “In Response to ‘Soviet Anti-Semitism,’” The New York Review of Books, March 7, 1974, accessed at the same link.

53 Agursky’s work that makes him such a fascinating historian. Like many émigré voices in Soviet history, Agursky’s impassioned tone and his moral agenda make him an interesting counterpoint to sober, levelheaded Western analysts.

2.4 Agursky’s open letter in the samizdat journal Veche

The document to which we now turn our attention was not written for a western journal, but instead for the pages of Veche, a nationalist samizdat journal influenced by both neo-Slavophile and far-right ideologies. Numerous scholars recognize Veche to have been the most significant, large-scale, and sophisticated forum for nationalist views during the samizdat phase of Russian nationalism [i.e. the early 1970s].27 The magazine incorporated a wide range of nationalistic ideologies, ranging from the left-wing Christian nationalism of the editor, Vladimir Osipov, to the fascist, étatist line of M. Antonov, a member of the aforementioned far-right Fetisov group, and Gennady Shimanov, with whom Agursky had been acquainted for a long time – most likely through their involvement with the Orthodox Church.28 By 1972, Shimanov, like many Russian nationalists, was beginning to espouse increasingly anti-Semitic ideas. He broke with the democratic movement, because he believed it served Jewish, and not Russian interests.29 His writings, including his contributions to Veche, promulgated an étatist nationalism that called for a marriage between Leninism and Orthodoxy. Dismayed by his friend’s chauvinism and his right-wing interpretation of Orthodoxy, Agursky decided to intervene. He wrote an open letter to Veche and gave it to Shimanov, who passed the letter on to Veche’s editorial board. The board originally declined to print it, but a year and a half later, in December of 1973, Shimanov informed Agursky that Veche had published his letter along with commentary from the editorial board.30 Veche was the embodiment in print of the widening ideological rift occurring in Russian nationalism.31 Accordingly, Agursky used his letter to bring attention to the “polarization between religious and political nationalists, who had prolapsed into a racism in regard to the Jewish question.” Moreover, he strove with his letter to demonstrate that “Russian nationalism – centered on the

27 See, for example, Mitrokhin, (2003), 466 and Duncan (2000), 89. “Samizdat phase” phrase borrowed from Dunlop (1983), 46. 28 See Duncan (2000), 89-96 and Yanov (1978), 62-84. 29 Agursky (1996), 347. 30 Ibid, 356. 31 Yanov (1978), 62-84.

54 interests of its people [svoego naroda] – and Zionism are not each other’s enemies, and even share common interests.”32 In his eighteen-page letter, Agursky traced the early history of Russian Zionism and its reception among various pre-revolutionary Russian political, social, and religious institutions. Displaying his erudition of pre-revolutionary religious relations in Russia, Agursky argued that Zionism was a conservative, nationalist movement whose historic allies had been the Orthodox church and, to some extent, the tsarist regime. On the other, historic enemies of Zionism, according to Agursky, had been leftist movements, liberals, and misguided atheistic Russian nationalists. In the letter, Agursky noted how at the turn of the century, “liberals and left circles related to Zionism with hostility, as towards a dangerous political utopia.” On the other hand, étatist nationalist and rightist circles “spoke of Zionism with disbelief and mockery.”33 Agursky continued, “the only non-Jewish circles where Zionism was met seriously and with sympathy turned out to be a number of Orthodox Churches.”34 To prove this point, he quoted a fascinating article from the 1902 journal of the Petersburg Clergy Academic, Tserkovnii Vestnik [Church Messenger]. The article was itself a response to an anti-Zionist argument printed in the rightist journal Svet [Light] and sheds much light on why Agursky perceived the Orthodox Church as Zionism’s ideological ally:

Therefore in its [Judaism’s] heart the dream never died that a time will come when the scattered dead, so to say, the bones of the nation will unite again into one complete organism, which demands for itself a specific government, a specific territory, where it might begin again its historical and political life. And apparently, the time has arrived for the realization of this dream, and it has found a remarkable expression in the movement, calling itself Zionism.35

The quote went on to assert that, “from a Christian-theological point of view, Zionism in no way contradicts Holy Scriptures.”36 In addition to some church circles, Agursky also mentioned that Zionism had an ally in the tsarist government, which “did not interfere with the activity of Zionists and even warmly welcomed it.” As evidence of this, Agursky cited Piotr

32 Mikhail Agursky, “Pepel Klaasa, glavy ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia (2005) no. 11, accessed at Zhurnal’nyj zal http://magazines.russ.ru/studio/2007/11/ag13.html on 10 May 2016. 33 Mikhail Agursky, “Otkrtoe Pis’mo v Zhurnal ‘Veche,’” Vol’noe Slovo: Izbrannoe Samizdat, vypusk 17-18, 130-148, 137. 34 Ibid, 138. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, 139.

55 Stolypin’s “complete sympathy with the Zionist ideal.”37 In pointing out Zionism’s warm relations with the pre-revolutionary church and even the Russian state, Agursky deliberately structured his argument around cultural symbols revered by his target audience: neo-Slavophiles Russian nationalists. Yet perhaps more telling is whom Agursky identified as the early enemies of Zionism. Firstly, he mentioned the rampant anti-Semitism of pre-revolutionary nationalist Russian political groups, colloquially known as the Black Hundreds [chernosotentsy]: the Union of the Russian People, and the Union of Michael the Archangel. Importantly, however, Agursky stressed that the attitude of these nationalists was not only anti-Semitic, but in complete contradiction to Orthodox values and teachings. He mentioned their denial of the Old Testament, an inalienable component of the Christian religion; their sacrilegious appraisals of Old Testament prophets, kings, and patriarchs; and even their attacks on Orthodox clergy. According to Agursky, these anti-Orthodox sentiments elicited a hostile attitude on the church’s part towards these political parties and resulted in a long conflict between the two institutions.38 With this letter, Agursky hoped to communicate to the Veche community that history compelled any true Christian to support the Zionist movement. Any type of Russian nationalism that manifested itself in an anti-Zionist fashion was not an expression of true Orthodoxy. Even the most étatist contributors to Veche couched their chauvinistic apologies of autocracy in a proclaimed loyalty to the Orthodox Church. With his letter, Agursky admonished these far-right individuals, who, in his eyes, were following the “self-compromising paths of pre- revolutionary nationalist parties” simply “out of inertia.”39 Secondly, Agursky identified leftist (i.e. social democratic) movements, especially the Bund, as significant early adversaries of Zionism. In doing so, he reached out to nationalists and established their enemy as a common one: atheistic, nihilistic Communism. Agursky admitted the high participation of Jewish youth in the communist movements and even conceded their disproportionate role in the Soviet early anti-religious campaigns. Nevertheless, he asserted that Jewish religious culture had suffered just as terribly under these campaigns.40 The burgeoning Soviet-Jewish exodus movement, much like the Veche nationalists, sought above all else to right these wrongs by returning to a society centered on nationality, religion, and tradition. Interestingly, in his

37 Ibid, 142. 38 Ibid, 132. 39 Ibid, 130. 40 Ibid, 144-145.

56 memoirs, Agursky directly compared the death of the Jewish shtetl to the death of the Russian village.41 Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, Agursky named another early enemy of Zionism: democratic liberalism. In appealing to a Russian nationalist audience, Agursky was sure to distance Zionism from western democracy, an ideology that Russian nationalists have diametrically opposed since the Slavophiles. Agursky noted that pre-revolutionary liberals had mistakenly thought that religious differences would disappear as Jewish assimilation increased. But the opposite turned out to be the case.42 In pointing to the historic failure of this assimilatory multicultural solution, Agursky concluded that the only answer was for both the Russian and the Jewish nations to go their separate ways. Agursky hoped to appeal even to anti-Semitic nationalists with this argument. As he said to Shimanov when he first had the idea to write the letter, “‘Fine! If you are so against Jews in Russia, you should understand that the Zionist movement solves the problem. I’ll write an open letter in Veche.’”43 Agursky knew that some left wing neo-Slavophile Christian nationalists, like Solzhenitsyn, might entertain his arguments regarding Zionism and Russian nationalism’s compatibility. Chauvinists like Shimanov, however, never would. Nevertheless, Agursky’s letter reached out to these far-right nationalists as well, proclaiming that Zionism instantly solved their problem by ridding Russia of its Jewish population. Here, Agursky’s pragmatism is quite evident. The editorial board’s rejoinders to Agursky’s letter are informative. Without a doubt, their comments displayed classic anti-Semitism tendencies: they denied Agursky’s assertion that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was definitely a fraudulent document, and they pointed out that, contrary to Agursky’s claims, “Jews live in the very best of material conditions [i.e. compared with other Soviet nationalities].”44 Yet surprisingly, the Veche editors more or less endorsed Agursky’s main point:

We thank M. Agursky for his sincere wish to achieve agreement and mutual understanding between the Russian and Jewish national movements. We want to say to our Jewish readers that “Russian” certainly does not mean “anti-Semite.” On the contrary, the Jewish national movement – when it does not lay claims to a privileged status of Jews in Russia, does not contaminate itself with racism and

41 Agursky (1996), 347. 42Agursky, “Otkrtoe Pis’mo v Zhurnal ‘Veche,’” 136. 43 Agursky (1996), 347. 44 Veche editorial board, 148.

57 does not hope for the worldwide rule of ‘the chosen people’ – evokes within us the most passionate sympathy, like any national movement. The Jewish national rebirth, occurring now in the USSR, demonstrates how deep national roots run even among those who for so long have been the avant-garde of the soilless, leveling force of internationalism.45

Despite the blatantly anti-Semitic qualifications, this tacit endorsement of Zionism on the pages of the far right’s samizdat forum marked the beginning of modern Russian nationalism’s sympathetic attitude towards Zionism. In arguing for cultural differentialism and the imperative of nations to inhabit their native soil, while denying the plausibility of multiculturalist solutions, Agursky essentially advanced a New Right doctrine of ethno-pluralism. The contemporaneous Russian far right could only respond positively. We can even condense the doctrine of ethno-pluralism with a sentence from the Veche editorial board’s response to Agursky’s open letter: “It is more expedient to live in peace apart, than together in conflict” [Tselesoobraznee zhit’ v mire I porozn’, chem vmeste I v ssore].46 This cultural differentialism has become a defining feature of Dugin’s contemporary neo-Eurasianism, which we will discuss in Chapter Four.47 What is more, Agursky’s letter went so far as to establish this differentialist approach as a distinctly eastern phenomenon, opposing it to atheistic, western multiculturalism, an idea also developed by Dugin, as we will see. Agursky ended his essay with an interesting 1907 quote from Metropolitan Antonii Khrapovitsky, a leader of the Orthodox Church in the beginning of the 20th century:

We, Russian Christians and the worshippers of the Gods of our fathers, the Jews, are born to realize the will of God, to teach the people good acts, and to stamp out sinful passions. This is the worldwide vocation of the Holy East, and neither you nor we can exchange this for the pathetic vanity of godless Western culture.48

Thus, while arguing for the right of differentialist Russian and Jewish national societies to exists, Agursky identified the Jews as the allies of the Russians in a global ideological war between the traditional, rooted East and the Godless, cosmopolitan West. That this quote was not merely a pragmatic appeal to his nationalist Veche audience is attested to by the fact that his work continued to be

45 Ibid, 150. 46 Ibid, 154. 47 Laruelle (2008), 138-141. 48 Agursky, “Otkrtoe Pis’mo v Zhurnal ‘Veche,’” 148.

58 marked by an anti-Western spirit, as we will see below. That his future work was simultaneously marked by what often appears to be a wholly negative condemnation of Russian nationalism’s very same anti-Westernism is one of the central ironies Agursky’s oeuvre. In 1974, a number of factors, including the growing ideological rift between members of the editorial board and KGB intrigue, led to the collapse of the Veche journal. In a widely circulated samizdat article entitled “The Intensification of Neo-Nazi Dangers in the Soviet Union,” Agursky posited the theory that the KGB had attempted to make Veche the mouthpiece for their neo-Nazi, pagan brand of nationalism.49 In commending the efforts of Veche’s staunchly Orthodox editor Vladimir Osipov from preventing this from happening, Agursky firmly established his nationalism: anti-regime, conservatively religious, and hopeful for the future cooperation between the Russian and Jewish national movements, which were linked by the bond of Judeo-Christian values.

2.5 Agursky and Solzhenitsyn

Despite his involvement with the church and his publications in the Western press and samizdat, Agursky later reminisced that during this time he strictly avoided open involvement with dissident affairs, as he feared that active dissidence would ruin his plans to emigrate. But with the hounding of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the official Soviet press, Agursky decided that “it was necessary to publically defend dissidents… to behave otherwise was to be like an ostrich, hiding its head in the sand.”50 The year 1973 marked the beginning of Agursky’s “open” dissidence, which was to bring him into close contact with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the leading unofficial voice in Soviet society at the time. In addition to Veche, the simultaneous activity of Alexander Solzhenitsyn confirms Dunlop’s assessment that “by the early 1970s the era of the ‘democrat’ had passed and that of the nationalist had arrived.”51 During these years, Solzhenitsyn’s increasingly nationalistic position invited much criticism from the neo-westernizer camp and western observers. The content of his novels also began to elicit accusations of anti-Semitism. In a 1972 article in The Jerusalem Post, Mikhail Grobman, a Jewish Soviet émigré living in Israel, sparked an intellectual debate that has lasted to this day by accusing Solzhenitsyn of

49 Mikhail Agursky, “The Intensification of Neo-Nazi Dangers in the Soviet Union,” The Political, Social, and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’–An Anthology, ed. Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, trans. Nickolas Lupinin (Belmont 1977), 414-419, 416-417. 50 Agursky (1996), 357. 51 Dunlop (1983), 48.

59 promoting anti-Semitism with his novel The First Circle.52 Agursky disagreed with Grobman’s accusations. After all, Solzhenitsyn supported the Jews’ right to emigrate, even if he did think the exodus movement was garnering disproportionate publicity in the west compared with more pressing struggles of the Soviet population at large.53 In April of 1973, Agursky published an open letter defending Solzhenitsyn in The Jerusalem Post. In his 1973 samizdat article “How the Medvedev brothers are right and how they are wrong,” Agursky defended both Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in his response to the Medvedev brothers’ revisionist socialist program.54 Impressed by Agursky’s samizdat contributions from afar, Solzhenitsyn organized a meeting with him at the end of 1973, just after the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago had been released in Paris. At the meeting, Solzhenitsyn informed Agursky of his intention to prepare a collection of essays modeled after the seminal pre-revolutionary collection Landmarks [Vekhi] and asked Agursky to contribute. Agursky gladly accepted the offer.55 Just over two months later, the revelations of the Gulag Archipelago led to Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and his exile to Switzerland. There, a letter he had prepared the previous autumn addressed to the Soviet leaders was published in the West and in samizdat. In the letter, Solzhenitsyn argued that given the increasing geopolitical tension between China and the USSR and the likelihood of war, the ruling elite must give up Marxist ideology and promote a national agenda if Russia was to survive. The letter fiercely asserted that the lie of Marxism morally compromised every Soviet citizen, forcing them all to live dishonestly in order to achieve any level of material comfort. Controversially, Solzhenitsyn’s letter, written in the language of a realist, suggested that the only thing the regime had to do was to give up this lie. Rejecting any notion of an immediate shift to a parliamentary system, Solzhenitsyn’s letter argued that authoritarian rule could and should continue until Russia was ready for democracy.56 Naturally, the letter caused quite the sensation. Agursky even edited a samizdat collection entitled What awaits the Soviet Union? [Shto zhdet Sovetskii Soiuz?], in which he compiled fourteen responses to Solzhenitsyn’s controversial letter written by prominent dissidents of various ideological persuasions,

52 Nathan D. Larson, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Modern Russo-Jewish Question (Stuttgart 2005), 73-74. 53 Michael Scammel, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (London 1984), 797. 54 “V chem pravy i nepravy brat’ia Medvedevy,” Arkhiv Samizdata, No. 1506, 9. See also Agursky (1996), 358. 55 Ibid, 361-362. 56 Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, 51-54.

60 including Osipov and Sakharov.57 On the left, contributors to the collection such as Raisa Lert argued that “the ‘quiet’ nationalism of Solzhenitsyn would ‘inevitably’ grow over’ into the aggressive nationalism of Stalin.”58 On the far right, Agursky’s old friend Shimanov criticized Solzhenitsyn for implying that Russia would ever be ready for democracy, which he saw as an inherently anti- Russian ideology.59 In his own contribution to his collection, “The International Significance of Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” Agursky passionately defended Solzhenitsyn. He argued that rapid democratization would only bring ethnic conflicts and chaos to the territory of the USSR. He argued that there was much to be gained from a shift from totalitarianism to dictatorship and that the USSR had much to gain from shedding the Marxist lie, as Solzhenitsyn had argued in his letter.60 With the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s letter and the myriad responses it elicited from the Soviet intelligentsia, the neo-Westernizers and neo-Slavophiles had dug their trenches and established their respective position. The one side believed that Russia could only break free from Soviet oppression by embracing Western capitalism and parliamentary systems, and the other argued that it was exactly an overzealous imitation of Western ideas that had brought Russia into the Communist mess in the first place. This neo-Slavophile position reasserted its conservative position with the November 1974 publication of the essay collection to which Solzhenitsyn had asked Agursky to contribute, From Under the Rubble [Iz-pod glyb].

2.6 From Under the Rubble

In order to assess Agursky’s contribution to From Under the Rubble, his article’s relationship to the collection as a whole must be established. As stated above, Solzhenitsyn intended for From Under the Rubble to be a new Landmarks. Landmarks was a 1909 collection of essays edited by the Jewish-born literary critic Mikhail Gershonzon with contributions from the Orthodox philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semyon Frank and the legal theorist B.A. Kistiakovsky. The collection’s unifying theme was a condemnation of the

57 Mikhail Agursky, editor, Shto zhdet Sovetskii Soiuz?: Sbornik statej po povodu ‘Pis’ma vozhdiam’ A. Solzhenitsyna, (Moscow, 28 July 1974) [Arkhiv samizdata No. 2450.] 58 Raisa B. Lert, “Khotim li my vernut’sia v XVI vek?,” July 1974, in Shto zhdet Sovetskii Soiuz? Quoted by Duncan (2000), 99. 59 Gennady Shimanov, “Kak ponimat’ nashu istoriiu i k chemu v nej stremit’sia,” [Arkhiv samizdata No. 1801] in Shto zhdet Sovetskii Soiuz?, quoted by Duncan (2000), 99. 60 Mikhail Agursky, “Mezhdunarodnoe znachenie ‘Pis’ma k vozhdiam,” Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia (Paris 1974) No. 112-113, 217-225. [Arkhiv samizdata 1965; also printed in Agursky’s collection “Shto zhdet?”].

61 atheistic and materialistic orientation of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, which the collection’s contributors believed had led Russia to catastrophe. For these writers, only a return to spiritual values could save Russia. In 1918 the Landmarks contributors, along with a few new voices, published a new collection entitled De Profundis [Iz glubiny], in which they proclaimed that the Bolshevik Revolution symbolized the unfortunate but inevitable realization of their worst fears: atheistic materialism had destroyed Russia. Hoping to bring attention to the spiritual bankruptcy of Brezhnev-era Russia, Solzhenitsyn deliberately chose a “phonetic echo” of this collection’s title [Iz glubiny] as his collection’s title [Iz pod glyb].61 The essays in From Under the Rubble deal with a number of themes, including the nationalities question, the relationship between the Orthodox Church and Soviet society, and the economic sustainability of socialism. Yet the various contributions are united by five underlying assumptions: 1) Civilization should not be founded on the ideology of material progress; 2) both Western capitalism/parliamentary democracy and Soviet socialism/party rule are manifestations of this faulty progress-oriented civilizational approach; 3) Russia’s untenable social situation will not be cured by external, political solutions 4) Only individual, moral steps can save Russian society; and 5) This moral revival must take place within a national framework–– for Russians, this necessarily implies a fundamental role for the Orthodox Church. As Dunlop has noted, this collection, along with Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders can be seen as a direct response to the political programs of the neo-Westernizers.62 The collection begins with Solzhenitsyn’s critique of Sakharov’s “Reflections of Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” in which he attacked Sakharov’s hastiness in embracing Western political systems as the answer to Russia’s problems:

If Russia for centuries was used to living under autocratic systems and suffered total collapse under the democratic system which lasted eight months in 1917, perhaps – I am only asking, not making an assertion– perhaps we should recognize that the evolution of our country from one form of authoritarianism to another would be the

61 Max Hayward, “Introduction,” From Under the Rubble, v-vii. 62 Dunlop (1983), 44.

62 most natural, the smoothest, the least painful path of development for it to follow?63

In the same essay, Solzhenitsyn quoted S. Bulgakov: “‘Westernism is spiritual surrender to superior cultural strength.’”64 For Solzhenitsyn and the other Rubble contributors, Russians should not be seeking political liberation but instead the liberation of their souls from participation in the lie forced upon them.65 Inner freedom, and not political freedom, must be the goal. The entire collection’s approach might be summarized by a sentence found in one of the essays: “The path of heroic spiritual striving is the only path that can lead man – and the whole of society – to freedom.”66 Anyone familiar with Slavophile thought will note that the above ideas were hardly new ones. In calling Russia to turn inwards and render unto Caesar what was his, Solzhenitsyn echoed Konstantin Aksakov’s “distinction between Land and State as inner and external truth.”67 Such ideas however, had long been buried under the rubble of Soviet ideology. Solzhenitsyn’s goal with this collection was to revive distinctly Russian ideas in the unique Soviet historical context. For him, socialism had brought Russia to despair because it was a Western ideology alien to the Russian spirit. A return to normalcy entailed a return to Russian ideologies and the Russian soil. This program even had geographical implications, as Solzhenitsyn stressed the vast Russian northeast as the necessary locale for national rebirth.68 To save herself, Russia needed to look within, not abroad. Above all, the nation needed to purge itself of the Western lie it had accepted as ideology for the six decades. In his final essay in the collection, “The Smatterers,” Solzhenitsyn urged his fellow Russians in all capital letters: “DO NOT LIE! DON’T TAKE PART IN THE LIE! DO NOT SUPPORT THE LIE!”69

Agursky’s contribution to the collection, “Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and Their Future Prospects,” is fairly ideologically compatible with the

63 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” From Under the Rubble, 3- 25, 24. 64 Ibid, 20. 65 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Smatterers,” From Under the Rubble, 229-278, 277. 66 A.B. [pen name of Mikhail Polivanov], “The Direction of Change,” From Under the Rubble, 144- 150, 148. 67 See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Ninetheenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford 1975), 261—quote from 268. 68Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” From Under the Rubble, 105-143, 141-142. Solzhenitsyn’s “northeast idea” is also advanced in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders. 69 Solzhenitsyn, “The Smatterers,” 274.

63 other essays. His article exhibits a number of the unifying features of the collection that we identified above: a negative attitude towards society founded on the notion of progress, a condemnation of both Western and Soviet socioeconomic and political systems, and a belief in the imperative of a return to spiritual and moral values. Agursky’s article differs from the rest of the collection, however, as it offers not just vague spiritual suggestions, but a specific Third Way socio-economic program for the future. As one reviewer noted, Agursky essay also distinguishes itself with its relative, although far from complete, acceptance of democracy.70 Another reviewer correctly noted that Agursky’s contribution, unlike his Veche letter discussed above, is absent of “nationalistic counterposing of Russia to the Western world.”71 Agursky’s essay is comprised of two parts. The first fourteen pages compare and contrast the flaws of Western capitalism and socialism, and the last seven pages propose a utopian future socioeconomic system. Agursky’s article begins with the assertion that communism and capitalism are more similar than they are different, in that the economic bases of both systems is large-scale industry. Accordingly, both systems must stimulate consumption and both systems “are profoundly flawed” in that they are “rapacious plunderers of…natural resources” and politically unstable.72 The West, Agursky argued, was politically unstable because its “dependence on external commodity markets and sources of raw materials,” forced it to cooperate with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes. The USSR, on the other hand, was politically unstable because of its insatiable drive for territorial expansion and because the “revival of religious consciousness, the natural enemy of totalitarianism”73 will always threaten it stability. While Agursky condemned both Western and Soviet socioeconomic systems, his article is perhaps the friendliest in the collection in regard to Western democracy. Admitting that “democracy’s faults pale into insignificance beside the enormities of totalitarianism,” Agursky nonetheless believed that Western democracies were heading towards crisis because the decline of religious values had led to a loss of societal self-control. In his mind, the West had paid a high price for “a good guarantee of basic freedoms.”74 Freedom of the media in the

70 Geoff Gallas, “The Irony of Acceptance: Solzhenitsyn’s Critique of the Russian Socialist State: Review of: From Under the Rubble,” Justice System Journal (Denver 1976-1977) Vol. 2, 195-200, 198. 71 Boris Shragin, “Escapes From Freedom,” The New York Review of Books, trans. by Mirra Ginsburg, June 26, 1975 accessed online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/06/26/escapes-from-freedom/ 72 Ibid, 72-74. 73 Ibid, 79. 74 Ibid, 76.

64 West had ensured the rise of a massive, destructive industry that exploited sexual urges to promote consumption. The right to bear arms, “intended to make life more secure, can now make life in countries like the USA more dangerous.”75 In denying these freedoms, Agursky conceded that Soviet society allowed one to lead a less stressful life, in which fewer decisions had to be made. So too did Agursky criticize the parliamentary system, especially the power of political parties: “A parliamentary system guarantees dissenters many personal freedoms, but does nothing to shield society from the massive propaganda of conformism, which exerts great pressure on people and is extremely difficult to resist.” Summarizing his mixed feelings towards Western democracy, he wrote: “People who have grown up under democracy do not value it highly enough. Yet there are weighty reasons for their dissatisfaction with this society.”76 In painting “a rough picture of the socio-economic system of the future” at the end of his article, Agursky rejected the negative features of both capitalism and Soviet socialism. Firstly, he eschewed large-scale industry as a sustainable economic base. Promoting a central theme of the collection, he wrote, “It is essential to eradicate the idea that productivity is the yardstick of society’s progressiveness.”77 Instead, Agursky suggested breaking down industry into smaller units. Production must “satisfy the optimum (but not maximum) needs of society.” Following his anarchist intellectual hero Kropotkin, Agursky also advanced the idea that everybody in these small-scale self-sufficient economic communities would equally share physical and industrial labor. Interestingly, he cited the Israeli kibbutzim as a superficial realization of this ideal, although they cannot be models because they “work mainly for the outside consumer” and thus promote consumption and not sustainability.78 Agursky believed the foundation of his ideal society must be spiritual and moral values. While Agursky’s utopia rejects the atheism and violence of Soviet communism as utterly contradictory to a moral foundation, it also asserts that for society to be truly moral, “the point of departure for the solution of social, economic and political questions should be the principle of social justice for all.”79 Thus, although he hesitated to use the word “socialism” due to its violent and atheistic connotations, Agursky’s future society distinctly opposed itself to Western capitalism.

75 Ibid, 77. 76 Ibid, 76. 77 Ibid, 81. 78 Ibid, 83. 79 Ibid, 81.

65 Agursky’s essay contrasts with Solzhenitsyn’s apologias for authoritarianism found in the same collection. His article, however, does not propose immediate solutions for Russia, as Solzhenitsyn’s contributions do, but instead imagines an ideal society. We should reiterate that regarding Russia’s immediate development, Agursky supported Solzhenitsyn’s endorsement of authoritarianism. Nevertheless, where Solzhenitsyn’s writings display a romantic idealization of authoritarianism, Agursky recognized democracy as an ideal, albeit an ideal for which Russia was not ready. The rulers of Agursky’s society are popularly elected but political parties and a parliamentary system are rejected. Moreover, Agursky’s “democracy” displays certain authoritarian features in that certain freedoms are limited. For example: “It is vital that society should take control of the mass media” in order to avoid the excessive commercial purposes it serves in Western society and the propaganda purposes it serves in Communist countries.80 Although society would be economically and politically decentralized, a central government will fulfill “the most basic functions, such as the initiation of legislation and the supervision of its observance, the exploitation of natural resources, the direction large-scale scientific research, and so forth.”81 Concluding his article, Agursky anticipated the accusations that his program was utopic and unrealizable. Like many of the contributions to From Under the Rubble, Agursky’s ends on a solemn, yet optimistic note:

Perhaps it will be as the pessimists believe, but that will happen only if mankind completely loses that flame, or even that spark that has inspired its best achievements. Those who have survived so much and still preserve this spark tend to believe that it is inextinguishable. And that gives weighty reasons for historical optimism.82

Agursky’s utopia joins a long list of conservative Russian critiques of capitalism that date back to Vladimir Odoesvky’s 1844 Russian Nights.83 Simultaneously rejecting Western capitalism, Soviet socialism, parliamentary democracy, political parties, state violence, and state atheism, it is hard to affix a label to the political ideology expressed here by Agursky, but Judeo-Christian anarcho-communal libertarianism might come close. As noted above, Agursky’s article distinguished itself from the other works in the collection with its lack of nationalism and its half-hearted embrace of

80 Ibid, 86. 81 Ibid, 85. 82 Ibid, 87. 83 See Walicki (1975), 79.

66 democratic systems. It is interesting that in the three works we have investigated in depth here (the review of Caution, Zionism!, the Veche letter, and his article in From Under the Rubble) Agursky’s ideas are marked by their ideological discordance with the publication in which they are printed. In the first document, Agursky espoused a conservative critique of socialist atheism and multiculturalism on the pages of one of America’s most liberal journals. In the second, Agursky defended Zionism in a journal that had published vehemently anti-Zionistic articles. Lastly, in Solzhenitsyn’s neo-Slavophile collection of essays, Agursky generally towed the collection’s ideological line but rejected the distinctly nationalistic and wholly anti-democratic orientation that marked the other contributions. Agursky was always the odd one out, often trapped between two conflicting convictions. Instead of attempting to affix an ideological orientation to him, we might understand him as Solzhenitsyn’s biographer Michael Scammel did: “an unconventional Zionist . . . ambitious to make his mark in dissident circles as a kind of honest broker between Jews, liberals, and nationalists.”84 Agursky was not a dogmatist but a pragmatist seeking three objectives: the emigration of the Soviet Jews to Israel, the victory of a liberal Russian Orthodox nationalism over the Soviet system and étatist nationalism, and a reconciliation between Jews and Russians facilitated by the accomplishment of these first two tasks. Depending on his forum, he emphasized different components of his ideological system. But his sights were always on facilitating cooperation between traditionally conflicting ideological camps and forcing his audience to entertain different point of views.

2.7 Conclusion: The Yanov hypothesis and Agursky’s disagreements with Solzhenitsyn

From Under the Rubble elicited many ambiguous reviews from Western observers and Soviet dissidents hoping for democratization. On the one hand, Western reviewers all praised Solzhenitsyn and company for the moral force of their arguments. Yet not surprisingly, the collection’s neo-Slavophile apolitical approach also provoked a great deal of negative criticism from Western reviewers. As one reviewer wrote, “The consequences which this apoliticism has had for the Russian people throughout their history must not be forgotten, and it should not be elevated into some kind of moral imperative.”85

84 Scammel (1984), 793-794. 85 Marc Raeff, “Iz Pod Glyb and the History of Russian Social Thought,” The Russian Review, Vol. 34, No. 4 (October 1975), 476-488, 487.

67 Some of the most damning critiques in regard to the nationalist turn that Soviet dissidence took in the early 1970s came from the émigré scholar Alexander Yanov, the first historian to address Brezhnev-era Russian nationalism in his 1978 The New Russian Right. In this work, he advanced an intriguing hypothesis. Dismayed by the rise of Russian nationalism among Soviet dissidents in the late 1960s, Yanov recognized a familiar “paradox of Russian nationalism.” Thinking back on the 19th century, Yanov was intrigued that the ideas of the Slavophiles, “who devoted their lives to a struggle for freedom,” had spawned a number of epigones, such as Konstantin Leontev, who declared that “the Russian nation was especially not intended for freedom” and espoused absolute loyalty to tsarist autocracy. Witnessing the emergence of nationalism from dissidence in his own time, Yanov’s wondered: “How was Slavophilism transformed from a mighty protest against despotism into an equally mighty apologia for it, suitable for practical use in the struggle against democracy? Is there not an objective logic in this tragic evolution of Russian nationalism leading to such a terrible outcome?”86 Yanov suggested that there was, in fact, an objective logic to this pattern. He asserted that Russian nationalism always emerged in reactionary opposition to westernizing trends, and thus it compelled Russian thinkers to search for alternatives to European democracy. In doing so, “noble and honest thinkers inevitably [were led] into the embrace of authoritarianism, since no ‘special’ Russian alternative to democracy has been known in history.” Yanov saw this pattern repeating itself again, and concluded that neo- Slavophile trends in dissident Russian nationalism amounted to “the gradual construction of an ideological base for the possible transformation of the regime in the USSR and the restoration of Stalinism.”87 In other words, anti-democratic programs such as those proposed by Solzhenitsyn in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders and From Under the Rubble in fact empowered étatist nationalist circles and in no way offered a positive path forward for Russia. From the perspective of western liberal, Yanov’s arguments are acute. After all, in admitting that “authoritarian regimes as such are not frightening – only those which are answerable to no one and nothing,”88 Solzhenitsyn drew a very thin line that discouraged most Western observers. Whence did he expect his spiritually enlightened, god-fearing autocrat to arise?

86 Yanov (1978), 4-5. 87 Ibid, 7. 88 Solzhenitsyn, “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” 23-24.

68 Yet Agursky’s correspondences reveal a strong contempt towards Yanov’s “russophobic” ideas89 and with historical hindsight, it seems fair to conclude that this rancor was not entirely without basis. After all, many of the neo-Slavophile fears regarding the rapid democratization of Russia did, in fact, take place when post-Soviet Russia set off on a westernizing course. Bloody ethnic conflicts broke out in Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria and other regions; wealth inequality became a serious problem; and a materialistic, global popular culture (or as Solzhenitsyn would see it, Western culture) invaded Russia. What is more, democracy eventually failed, and the country returned to autocracy, calling it “democracy,” and in effect, living another “big lie.” Given these failures, one can recognize the prescient features of Solzhenitsyn’s apologia for authoritarianism and the valid reasons Agursky would defend such a program. Given the democratic character of Agursky’s ideal socio-economic system, he cannot fairly be accused of an anti-democratic orientation. Nevertheless, in his neo-Slavophile critiques of Western democracy and his demands for the limitation of certain freedoms, he displayed an anti-modern conservative utopianism. Falling somewhere in between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, we once again find Agursky in between two worlds, doing his best to bring them together. As Boris Shragin wrote in his review of From Under the Rubble:

The way out of the universal impasse arising from the confrontation of the two halves of the modern world lies, as Agursky sees it, precisely in increasing closeness between them. Totalitarianism must be abolished, while democratic societies require only greater organization and self-discipline.90 In 1975, Agursky was finally granted permission to move to Israel. Relocating to a society geographically, socio-economically, and culturally caught between the rootless West and the traditional East, Agursky seems to have found a personal solution to his dialectic dilemma. But even after relocation, he still had a great deal more to say about his native land. Essentially all of his writings from his post-emigration years deal with Russian/the USSR. When Solzhenitsyn approached Agursky to contribute to From Under the Rubble, Agursky originally proposed writing an article on his favorite topic: the Jewish question. Solzhenitsyn, however, did not want Agursky to write on any

89 Agursky’s negative view towards Yanov is expressed in his correspondences both with Richard Pipes, especially Pipes’ July 25, 1979 letter to Agursky, which I accessed in the Mikhail Agursky archive [FSO 01-072] at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. All other archival materials will hereafter be cited at FSO-01 072. 90 Shragin (1975).

69 national theme at all; hence the socioeconomic nature of his contribution.91 Yet strangely the nationalities question pervades many essays in From Under the Rubble. It is my speculation that Solzhenitsyn, quite familiar with Agursky’s samizdat work and his views on the Jewish question, explicitly did not want him writing on anything to do with nationalism, as his ideas would have run contrary to the spirit of the collection as a whole. Although we can say that Agursky and Solzhenitsyn agreed on many points, they disagreed passionately on the importance and nature of Marxist ideology in the USSR and the extent to which the Soviet project was Russian in character. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to how such disagreements fueled much of Agursky’s work as a historian in Israel.

91 Agursky (1996), 362.

70 Chapter Three: A Changing of Signposts (1975-1991) Russian messianism, Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism, his historiographical place, and the origins and motives of his nationalist reading of Soviet history

The more time separates us from the Bolshevik revolution, the more clearly one can see that the Marxist (theoretical!) and socialist components of Bolshevism were indeed a ‘historical camouflage.’ -Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome, 19871

3.1: The Russian messianism debate in early 1970s samizdat

While Solzhenitsyn and Agursky agreed on the USSR’s ideal path for the future, they profoundly disagreed about their nation’s past. In this chapter, we will examine how these disagreements fueled Agursky’s extremely nationalist reading of Soviet history, advanced primarily in his 1980 Russian-language Ideologiia bolshevizma and his 1987 English language adaptation of that work, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR. After examining the salient features of these and other historical works, we will discuss his historiographical place and investigate some of the criticism his work received. This is done not to vindicate or condemn his reading of Soviet history, but rather to examine its flaws and biases so that we can then identify the origins of these biases and illuminate what social purposes his reading of history served. We have shown in the last chapter that with his samizdat writings, Agursky was more of a pragmatist than a dogmatist. The same is true with his historical work. Great light can be shed on his reading of Soviet history when one appreciates his point of departure and the goals he was trying to achieve. Thus we are investigating Agursky’s historical works as documents of dissent, and not establishing their scientific merit, although discussion of this latter point cannot be avoided altogether. On a fundamental level, Agursky’s arguments are motivated by a desire to historically vindicate Zionism and dispel the myth of Jewish Bolshevism. But we will also argue that despite their seeming hostility to Russian nationalism, Agursky’s radically anti-Soviet historical works advance a continued desire to promote cooperation between the Russian and national Jewish movements. Just as Solzhenitsyn’s Letter had split the dissident community on the question of democracy’s future prospects in the USSR, a collection of three samizdat articles that had been published five years earlier entitled Metanoiia had cleaved the dissidents into two historiographical camps. The most influential piece of this trilogy was an article entitled “Russian Messianism and the New

1 Agursky (1987), xiii.

71 National Consciousness” by a writer who used the pseudonym V. Gorsky.2 Gorsky argued that the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet system were the direct products of Russia’s long historiosophical tradition of meassianism. The article traces the historical roots of the idea that Russia alone had been chosen by God to realize the eschatological end of history and bring about the Messiah’s kingdom. According to Gorsky, Bolshevism “was the utmost revolutionization of Russian messianism.”3 Despite its anti-religious nature, Marxism’s utopianism, teleological conception of history, and populist elements provided Russian messianism with the ideal vehicle for the secular 20th century. Scholars point to Metanoiia as a major catalyst for the samizdat debates that took place in the early 1970s between the democrats and the emerging nationalist dissident movement.4 Neo-Slavophiles were infuriated by Gorsky’s insinuations. A large portion of Solzhenitsyn’s longest essay in From under the Rubble, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” took up impassioned polemics with Gorsky’s russophobic ideas. Solzhenitsyn did not deny that the Russian people had “lost our heads” and “caved in” to the immoral, atheistic ethos of the time.5 Still, he refused to accept that a revolution whose guiding ideology, Marxism, was in blatant contradiction to Russia’s spiritual past and had been imported from the west could be described as “an organic outgrowth of Russian life.”6 Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If tsarism rested on ‘Russia’s ecumenical pride,’ how can revolution, which brought down the tsarist structure in ruins, also originate in ‘Russian pride’?”7 He thought it absurd to blame the Russians when he believed it was the Russians who had suffered more than any other national group under Soviet power. According to Solzhenitsyn, “Not only are the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’, ‘Russia’ and ‘USSR’ not interchangeable, not

2 Even though the ideas in Gorsky’s essay are similar to the ideas Agursky would later advance in Ideologiia and Third Rome and the family names are strikingly similar, scholars do not believe he wrote this piece, and based on its style, I would agree with their conclusions. Krista Berglund concluded based on thematic and stylistic comparisons that the author of “Russian Messianism” was the dissident Mikhail Meerson-Aksenov. The Russian journalist/publicist Andrei Kolesnikov instead posited that Gorskii was the pseudonym of the Russian Orthodox art historian and theologian Evgeny Barabanov, who contributed to From Under the Rubble. See Krista Berglund, The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker (Basel 2012), 80; Andrei Kolesnikov, “Dvojnoe coznanie rossiiskogo intelligenta,” Vedomosti, 3 September, 2009, accessed online at https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/09/04/607466-dvoinoe-soznanie- rossiiskogo-intelligenta on 25 June 2016. 3 V. Gorsky, “Russian Messianism and the New National Consciousness,” from The Political, Social, and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’–An Anthology (1977) 353-393, 373. 4 See, for example Dunlop (1983), 233-241. 5 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation” (1975), 127-128. 6 Ibid, 126. 7 Ibid, 125.

72 equivalent, and not unilinear – they are irreconcilable polar opposites and completely exclude each other.”8 In fairness, it must be noted that Solzhenitsyn did not absolve the Russians of all guilt. Somewhat ironically, the entire point of his essay was to call them to repent, to take responsibility for the horrors of the Soviet past and stop blaming others as they had done for decades.9 He admitted also that Bolshevism took on certain Russian characteristics after it emerged victorious.10 But Solzhenitsyn refused to blame pre-revolutionary Russian traditions for these horrors; on the contrary, it was the Russian intelligentsia’s very abandonment of their national past and their adoption of modern foreign ideologies that had led Russia into chaos. Solzhenitsyn’s polemics were two-pronged. On the one hand, they were a rebuke to russophobic intelligentsia like Gorsky, who scraped “all the guilt from mother earth” and loaded it unfairly onto the Russians, blaming everything on Russia’s messianic complex.11 On the other hand, it was a repudiation of what Solzhenitsyn labeled ‘national Bolshevism.’ This point of view, according to Solzhenitsyn, held that, “the Russian people is the noblest in the world; its ancient and its modern history are alike unblemished; tsarism and Bolshevism are equally irreproachable.”12 The national Bolshevik tendency was the mirror image of Metanoiia’s russophobia; they both believed that Bolshevism was a legitimate continuation of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past. Yet while the former viewed this continuation in a positive light, the latter did so negatively. Detesting both tendencies and calling for Russia to return to the religious values of its past, Solzhenitsyn continuously stressed the opposite: Bolshevism was obviously a negative and violent break with Russia’s past. Most of those sympathetic to Solzhenitsyn’s neo-Slavophile political agenda tended to agree with him on the anti-national nature of Bolshevism. Yet once again, we find Agursky the odd one out. For all his agreements with Solzhenitsyn on the USSR’s political future, he believed that the Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing Soviet system were direct products of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past and its messianic complex. This major disagreement between Solzhenitsyn and Agursky stemmed from their different views on the Soviet nationalities question. An episode from

8 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Remarks at the Hoover Institution,” Russian Review (1977), Vol. 36, No. 2, 188. 9 Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation” (1975), 117. 10 Ibid, 126. 11 Ibid, 127. 12 Ibid, 119-120.

73 Agursky’s memoirs illuminates these differences. During the pair’s last meeting Solzhenitsyn allegedly told Agursky that the Jews were the “driving force of the revolution.” Agursky disagreed, claiming that they were but one of the several driving forces. The pair then decided to set up an open polemic on the issue, but their plans were never realized. Solzhenitsyn was arrested and forced into exile mere days later.13 It should be noted that Soviet anti-Semitism had taken a new turn following the mass emigration of the Jews throughout the 1970s. Agursky was but one of the 250,000 Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union between 1970-1980.14 Schapiro observed that this mass exodus led to the rise of a popular sentiment among Russians that “they [the Jews] got us into this communist mess, and now they are getting out while we have to stay.”15 We do not wish to accuse Solzhenitsyn of perpetuating the myth of Jewish communism; this is a very delicate intellectual debate.16 Towards the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn was to engage laboriously and prudently with the complex question of the Jewish role in the revolution.17 But his work from the mid-late 1970s does not exactly combat the myth of Jewish communism. The idea that socialism was an invasive ideology from the west pervades his work and in From Under the Rubble Solzhenitsyn asserted that the revolution had “some of the characteristics of a foreign invasion,” that the Cheka had “teemed with Latvians, Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Chinese.”18 He also invited accusations of anti-Semitism with extremely nefarious characterizations of certain Jews in his historical novels, like that of the Bolshevik patron Alexander Parvus in Lenin in Zurich, whom Solzhenitsyn sketched as the evil mastermind financier behind the revolution.19 While Solzhenitsyn believed that the Russians needed to repent for their own contributions in building Bolshevism, he also believed the vast majority of Russians to be the hapless prisoners of a dangerous foreign ideology that had been advanced in Russia in no small part by national minorities, including the Jews. Agursky’s historical work from the late 1970s up to his death in 1991 can be read as a long polemic with Solzhenitsyn on the question of the Soviet system’s national essence. As we will see, Agursky disagreed with Solzhenitsyn that

13 Agursky (1996), 367-368. 14 Alekseeva (1983), “ Evreyskoe dvizhenie za vyezd v Izrail.’” 15 Schapiro (1986), 83. 16 See Larson (2005). 17 See Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste, 2 vols. (Moscow 2001-2002). 18 Solzhenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation” (1975), 126. 19 See Larson (2005), 80-83. In the Third Rome, Agursky repeatedly contested the notion that Parvus was the mastermind behind the revolution. Agursky (1987), 97.

74 Marxist ideology had ever fundamentally defined the Soviet project. Instead, he believed that Marxism had been used as an internationalist smoke screen for Great Russian imperial ambitions. He believed that Marxism provided the Bolsheviks with the necessary legitimacy to absorb the help they needed from the national minorities, only to turn against them once victory had been ensured. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the history of the Jews during the Soviet Union had convinced Agursky that Marxist internationalism had always been a delusion. Agursky’ approached the Jewish contribution to Bolshevism as a complex and tragic phenomenon. He argued that the Jews served “not as masters but as shopkeepers and salesman of the Russian revolution.”20 He repeatedly maintained that despite the disproportionately high Jewish revolutionary contribution, Jews did not initiate and direct the revolutionary process and made no significant theoretical contributions to its ideological development. Given the oppressed pre-revolutionary situation of the Jews, Agursky admitted that, “It was Lenin’s genius to rely on them [the Jews]…in the revolution. However,” he maintained that this very “reliance on Jews meant their national annihilation.”21 The Soviet experiment provided the Jews with a brief moment in the sun, only to lead to their national annihilation. For Agursky, any discussion of Jewish communism during the post-Stalinist era, when sales of books like Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism! were skyrocketing and Jews could not get into prestigious universities, was misinformed. Still keen to promote cooperation between the Russian and Jewish national movements, Agursky saw the first integral step in this process to be the deconstruction of the erroneous anti-Semitic myth of Jewish Bolshevism. Just as Solzhenitsyn believed that Russians had suffered more than any national group in the USSR, Agursky maintained that it was the Jews who had suffered the most.22 In advancing this view and combatting the myth of Jewish Bolshevism, Agursky believed that it was not Marxist internationalism that had brought about Russia’s despair but rather Great Russian imperialist chauvinism and the politicization of a national-religious messianic complex. Agursky labeled this general étatist essence of the revolution and the Soviet political system ‘national Bolshevism.’ We have already encountered two different definitions of this conflated term. Before further exploring Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism and placing his views within the larger historiography of the USSR’s

20 Ibid, 97. 21 Ibid, 98. 22 See for example, Agursky (1996), 331.

75 national element, we must first clarify the various usages of the term ‘national Bolshevism.’

3.2: The many meanings of ‘national Bolshevism’

The term ‘national Bolshevism’ has its origins in 1919 Germany. Following the nation’s defeat, a nationalist MP named Paul Eltzbacher suggested that Germany must look towards the ideas taking hold in Russia to ensure Germany’s revival. He called for a council system and the socialization of the means of production. A few months later, two Hamburg communists, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, began advocating for a “national communism,” whose main goal was Germany’s national restoration. As van Ree noted, Eltzbacher’s long- term nationalist goals were incompatible with Wollfheim and Laufenberg’s socialist orientation, but nevertheless they both shared “a conviction that the restoration of a great German state was the main immediate goal, to be achieved through a communist programme of proletarian power and the expropriation of the capitalist classes.” Eltzbacher, Wolfheim, and Laufenberg did not embrace the term national Bolshevik; it was rather affixed to the former by the German press and to the latter two by Lenin and Radek in a pejorative fashion.23 Two years later Nikolai Ustrialov, a former Kadet who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and ended up in Harbin, China, coopted the term as a label for his unconventional views on the Bolshevik revolution. Ustrialov advanced the idea that the Bolsheviks were the only force capable of preserving Russia’s national grandeur. The Whites had become associated with foreign powers in the minds of the typical Russians. Ustrialov believed not only that the people were with the Bolsheviks, but also that Lenin’s ostensible commitment to internationalist Marxism would soon give way to a political economy governed by national interests. In 1921, Ustrialov and a group of like-minded thinkers published an influential collection of essays entitled “A Change of Signposts” [Smena vekh]. In the collection, the writers argued that the Soviet regime had saved Russia, and that nationalists, liberals and conservatives could take solace in the fact the Lenin’s New Economic Policy signaled the Bolshevik’s “progress from Jacobinism to Napoleanism.” By 1934, Ustrialov and other national Bolsheviks abandoned their hopes for economic liberalizations, recognizing Stalin’s Soviet society as a model of a new classless society. As we will see, Ustrialov and his clique played a major role in Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism.24

23 See van Ree (2001), 292-293. 24 See Mikhail Agursky, “Defeat as Victory and the Living Death: The Case of Ustrialov,” History of European Ideas (1984), Vol. 5, No. 2, 165-180. This article hereafter referred to in citations as

76 When not referring to the early German “national Bolsheviks” or Ustrialov the term ‘national Bolshevism’ usually refers to one of two phenomena. The first is the process of Russification that the Bolshevik party and Soviet society underwent during Stalin’s reign. We have already mentioned Timasheff’s study The Great Retreat. While Timasheff did not use the term ‘national Bolshevism,’ recent historians have built on his ideas to argue that Stalinist society, culture, and ideology was more grounded in Russian nationalism than in proletarian class-consciousness. Citing events like the Lenin Enrollment of 1924; the 1936 “family laws,” which included a ban on abortion; the murder of many non- Russian elite during the Great Purges; the wartime resurrection of pre- revolutionary heroes and rhetoric; and the 1941 revival of the Orthodox Church and its expansion during the late Stalin period, these historians argue that Stalin’s reign was a paradigmatic model of national Bolshevism. David Brandenberger’s book National Bolshevism is the most comprehensive study operating under this understanding of the term.25 As Allensworth noted, scholars are divided over a national assessment of Stalin’s reign.26 Some, like Terry Martin, believe that the label “Great Retreat” is misleading, arguing that the Stalin years marked increased economic dedication to Marxist ideals.27 In much of the work on post-Stalinist Russian nationalism one encounters a definition of “national Bolshevism” similar to the one used above by Solzhenitsyn in “Repentance and Self-Limitation.” John Dunlop, for example, contrasted the national Bolshevik trend, which approved of Soviet power as a legitimately Russian phenomenon, to the anti-Soviet vorozhdentsy trend (represented by the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Agursky).28 As demonstrated in this section, ‘national Bolshevism’ has many meaning, so we have been labeling –and will continue to label – this former trend ‘far right’ or ‘étatist nationalism’ to avoid confusion. The vorozhdentsy trend we have been referring to as ‘neo-Slavophile nationalism. Finally, in the discourse of post-Soviet red-brown politics “national Bolshevism” refers normally to political actors like Gennady Zyuganov, who have built their legitimacy on a nationalist revisionism of the Soviet past.29 Eduard Limonov and Alexander Dugin, who together founded the National Bolshevik

Agursky (1984). See also Hilde Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The Changing Signposts Movement among Russian Émigrés in the Early 1920s (DeKalb 1994). 25 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge 2002). 26 Allensworth (1998), 153. 27 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923- 1939 (Ithaca 2001), 415. 28 Dunlop (1983), 254-265. 29 Allensworth (1998), 164-174.

77 Party in 1994, have also appropriated the term.30 Although they split ways in 1998 and Limonov disbanded the party in 2010, Dugin used the term ‘national Bolshevik’ to advance a postmodern fascism that sees “the dialectical triad of ‘The Third Rome–The Third Reich–The Third International” as the metaphysical essence of Russia, and for Dugin all of Eurasia.31 We will explore Dugin’s national Bolshevism in the next chapter but for now turn our attention to Agursky’s unique conception of the term.

3.3 Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism

Agursky’s use of the term national Bolshevism is sweeping, and he used it inconsistently from work to work. In one of his first essays on the topic, he defined the term as “an attempt to combine the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism with Russian Chauvinism.”32 In his major Russian-language work on the topic, his 1980 doctoral dissertation The Ideology of National Bolshevism [Ideologiia natsional-bol’shevizma] – here after referred to as ‘Ideologiia’ – he failed to give a concrete definition at all. In a 1986 essay, he defined national Bolshevism as “the ideology of a political current that legitimizes the existing Soviet political system from a Russian national point of view, contrary to its exclusive Marxist legitimacy.”33 Finally, in the 1987 The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR, his English-language version of his 1980 dissertation and his most comprehensive work on the topic, Agursky offered his most clear and precise definition of the phenomenon about which he had already been writing for a decade:

National Bolshevism is the Russian etatist ideology that legitimizes the Soviet political system from the Russian etatist point of view, contrary to its exclusivist Marxist legitimacy. Etatism can be distinguished from cultural nationalism . . . Nevertheless, I would like to define etatism as a powerful form of nationalism . . . National Bolshevism does not reject Communist ideology, though it strives to minimize its importance to the level necessary for legitimacy. However, its objectives are different from those of Communist ideology. National Bolshevism in its original form strove for world domination, conceived as the universal Russian empire cemented by Communist ideology. It is not excluded that in some circumstances

30 See Shenfield (2001), 190-220. 31 Dugin (1997), “Metafizika natsional-bol’shevizma,” http://arctogaia.com/public/templars/teor.htm 32 Mikhail Agursky, “The Soviet Legitimacy Crisis and its International Implications” published in The Many Faces of Communism, ed. by Morton A. Kaplan (New York 1978), 146-193, 149. 33 Mikhail Agursky, “The Prospects of National Bolshevism,” from The Last Empire (1986), 87-108, 87.

78 National Bolshevism might limit itself to the etatist concept of a Russian superpower.34

The distinction made here between cultural and etatist nationalism is very important, even if Agursky’s work sometimes obscured this distinction. As we have demonstrated in the last chapter, Agursky belonged to the ranks of anti- Soviet left wing neo-Slavophile nationalists. We have also shown than in his samizdat polemics he targeted the ideas of étatist nationalists like Shimanov in the hopes of pointing out that love of Russia and Orthodoxy were incompatible with chauvinism, anti-Semitism and worship of the authoritarian Soviet state. With his work as a historian he hoped to show that the right wing étatist nationalism of his contemporaries, while experiencing something of a renaissance, had hardly emerged out of a vacuum. Agursky believed that these nationalists were drawing from a long Russian historical tradition of venerating the State above all else as the manifestation of a healthy nation. As the late imperial Russian historian Vasily Kliuchevsky summarized Russian history, “The state grew fat and the people lean.”35 For Agursky, Russian étatist nationalism had reached an apex during the years of Stalinism.36 Yet interestingly, most of his work on national Bolshevism does not focus on the Stalin years. His shorter essays discuss the contemporary (i.e. late 1970s-1980s) political prospects of national Bolshevism and its two- front war for legitimacy against isolationist left wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism and the remnants of Marxists internationalism. His longer and much more comprehensive books (Ideologiia and The Third Rome), on the other hand, set out to expose the early manifestations of étatist nationalism in Soviet history, arguing that Stalin’s “Great Retreat” had hardly been a retreat at all, but rather par for the course. According to Agursky, the precedent of ‘socialism in one state’ had been set long before Stalin. Thus Agursky’s focus in these works is on early Soviet history and the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us now look cursorily at some of the particularly salient features of Agursky’s concept of national Bolshevism.

3.3.1: The influence of pre-Revolutionary non-Marxist social thought

In the beginning of The Third Rome, Agursky explored the influence of non- Marxist 19th century political thought on Leninism. Agursky paid special attention to the geopolitical contest between Germany and Russia leading up to

34 Agursky (1987), xv. 35 Stephen Kotkin, “Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2016) Vol. 95, No. 3, 2-9, 4. 36 See Agursky, “The Soviet Legitimacy Crisis” (1978), 167.

79 WWI. He looked at how aggressive, imperialistic ideas took hold in both nations. From the German side, he maintained Ferdinand Lassalle’s “strictly centralized party under his absolute personal leadership . . . anticipated Lenin’s organizational ideas” and argued that Lasalle had “enormous impact on Russian socialism.”37 He believed the rampant russophobic ideas of most important German socialists would eventually inspire their mirror image in Russian revolutionary thought. From the Russian side, Agursky pointed to the aggressively nationalistic ideas of a number of non-Marxist socialists, like Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, both of whom appealed to imperialistic, pan-Slavic ideas and called for the destruction of Germany by Slavic revolutionary invasion.38 He also cited Dostoevsky’s vision for a universal, socialist utopia that could only be brought forth by the Russians, along with his idea that sin can lead to good.39 Two other revolutionaries incredibly important to Agursky’s understanding of Bolshevism are Piotr Tkatchev, who promoted the Blanquist idea of a revolution led by a trained elite that must take power through conspiracy,40 and Sergei Nechaev, who subjugated all morals, feelings and beliefs to one single passion: the revolution. Agursky argued that, “Lenin absorbed almost all Nechaev’s commandments of immorality.”41 The influence of Nechaev’s Machiavellianism on Lenin is particularly important to Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism. For Agursky, the essence of national Bolshevism was the saying of one thing and the doing of another; the fundamental contradiction between the USSR’s self-proclaimed dedication to the building of a classless internationalist society, and its actual advancement of Great Russian imperial power. We will see that many of the major aspects of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism are based on this idea of the signifier directly contradicting what is being signified: literary gnosticism, Ustrialov’s “changing of signs,” the ‘left’s’ cooperation with the ‘right.’ Agursky agreed with Solzhenitsyn that the USSR was living one big lie. But where Solzhenitsyn believed the lie was serving the interests of Marxism, Agursky maintained it was serving the interests of the Russian étatism.

3.3.2 Gnostics and Fellow Travelers: Russian literature welcomes the Revolution

37 Agursky (1987), 31-33. 38 Ibid, 20-27. 39 Ibid, 48-55. Agursky, (1980), 2.1. Because many of the following footnotes include citations to both Third Rome and Ideologiia, the former will be cited simply as (1987), the latter as (1980). 40 (1987), 33-36. 41 Ibid, 37.

80 One of Agursky’s unique characteristics as a historian is his erudition and wholly original interpretations of the political and social functions of trends in Russian literature. Writing on the Village Prose movement of the 1970s, Agursky asserted that, “without a deep insight into modern Soviet literature and art, which have become a political battlefield, no relevant Soviet studies are possible.”42 His writings on the early development of national Bolshevism testify that he felt that same way about Soviet history. Agursky argued that the late 19th century symbolist poet Vladimir Solovev’s literary gnosticism would become a dominant force in Russian culture. Solovev’s poetry advanced an illusive reading of reality by which all observable phenomena are merely symbols, “the reverse image of the real essence of history.”43 Solovev’s gnostic influence inspired a group of prominent revolutionary-era poets and writers – many of whom joined the Scythian [Skify] literary movement – to welcome the atheistic, “internationalist” Bolshevik Revolution “as genuinely Russian, and even Christian.” Agursky’s Third Rome is filled with fascinating quotes that show how poets normally associated with their struggles with the Soviet regime (e.g. Sergei Esenin, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Nikolai Kliuev) actually justified and even endorsed the revolution in its early days. He tried to show that many of these writers interpreted the Bolshevik Revolution as a messianic event, the unfolding of a world mystery, the arrival of God in the form of the Devil. The best examples of this is the poetry of Maximilian Voloshin, whom Agursky called the “most consistent Russian revolutionary gnostic,” quoting the following stanza, which in many ways encapsulates the way Agursky conceived of national Bolshevism:

What has changed? Signs and titles? The same hurricane in every way: Commissars with the spirit of autocracy Tsars with explosions of revolution.44

Another important literary contributor to the spirit of the times was Maxim Gorky, to whom Agursky was to devote significant scholarly attention.45 In regard to national Bolshevism, Agursky mentioned the importance of Gorky’s

42 Mikhail Agursky, “The New Russian Literature,” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Soviet and East European Research Center (1980), Research Paper No. 40, 64. 43 (1987), 57-61; (1980), 2.4. 44 (1987), 177 (1980), 2.4. 45 See Mikhail Agursky, co-authored with Margarita Shklovskoj, Gor’kii M. Iz literaturnogo naslediia. Gor’kii i evrejskii vopros (Jerusalem 1986).

81 idea of God-building, which was a deification of the masses that saw the “popular spirit” as a manifestation of divine will.46 In addition, Agursky looked at how writers who initially opposed Bolshevism came to welcome it. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a play entitled Days of the Turbins, which ostensibly mourns the loss of Old Russia. Yet at the play’s end, the hero, a White officer, rationalizes joining forces with the Bolsheviks: “‘Because behind the Bolsheviks are the peasants as thick as locusts . . . and what can I oppose them with . . . Let them mobilize me! At least I’ll know I’m serving in the Russian army.’” Stalin defended the play against harsh ideological criticism and personally attended its performance no less than fifteen times.47 With these examples, Agursky exposed the historical roots of the contemporary nationalism of the Village Prose movement and journals like Molodaiia Gvardiia. Since the onset of Soviet history, he argued, the regime tolerated nationalist cultural sentiments, so long as they were flavored with even a reluctant acceptance of Soviet power.

3.3.3 The political and social merger of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’

Agursky argued that the influence of Machiavellian thinkers like Nechaev on Lenin gave him no qualms in absorbing distinctly nationalist movements and institutions into the Bolshevik party, despite his professed internationalism. He noted a “massive merge of the radical right and the radical left after the February Revolution,” by which the supposedly leftist Bolsheviks swallowed many radically right elements: Black Hundreds, tsarist generals, narodniki and right wing Social Revolutionary populists (SR), and even clergy of the Orthodox Church. He argued that the far right and the far left were united by their violent criticism of capitalism, rejection of parlimentarism, hatred of liberals, use of violence, common constituency (i.e. mostly workers), and a similar approach to foreign policy dictated by rampant anti-Westernism.48 Agursky used the paradigmatic case of Sergei Dmitrievsky to argue that, “this process of merging . . . cannot be explained only by . . . political opportunism.” Dmitrievsky was a former right-wing SR who became a senior Soviet diplomat. He joined Stalin’s faction in his political war with Trotsky, and eventually received permission to immigrate to Sweden, where he became an outright fascist and supporter of Nazi Germany. In Sweden he published a number of writings that praised Lenin as “a great Russian patriot” and positively evaluated

46 (1987), 88; (1980), 2.17. 47 (1987), 316-317; (1980), 4.7. 48 (1987), 115-116.

82 the Soviet project as a nationalist endeavor. He wrote: the USSR “is now anti- communist, as are the majority of members of the communist party; the country is permeated with an ever-increasing nationalism.” He also praised the rampant anti-Semitism that took hold of the party following Lenin’s death.49 Although Dmitrievsky is an extreme case, Agursky’s works on national Bolshevism teem with such examples. One important early event in this merger of the left and right was the Red Army’s absorption of the tsarist army. Agursky noted that many of these officers “were right wingers . . . forced to serve the Bolsheviks . . . under the threat of death penalty.” According to Agursky, “they became an important source of National Bolshevism.”50 Later on, there was the Lenin enrollment. Following Lenin’s death, Stalin opened the party up to hundreds of thousands of new members, many of them Russian peasants who had just arrived in the cities. Agursky claimed that these new members were generally Russians, who “had broken away from a traditional lifestyle, indoctrinated by party ideology, but still instinctively carrying traditional habits.”51 It is clear that by “traditional habits,” he meant in no small part anti-Semitism. Agursky wrote that “from the very beginning of Bolshevik rule the idea spread among the people that Bolsheviks and Communists were not the same thing. The Bolsheviks were Russians who gave the land to the people; the Communists were foreigners who tried to put a new yoke on the people.” Many scholars on Russian nationalism have made note of this “two party” phenomenon. It is best summarized by Ivan Bunin’s oft-quoted anecdote about a conversation he overheard between two Red Army soldiers in 1919 Odessa, “All evil comes from the kikes. They are all Communists. The Bolsheviks are all Russians.”52 Agursky’s observations on the early merger of Bolshevism and the far right had significant contemporary implications; he was explaining the historical roots of the officially endorsed Black Hundred anti-Semitism found in books of his own time, like Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism!. He was focused on exposing the gap between “the radical right nature of the Soviet system and its radical left legitimacy.”53

49 (1987), 336-339; (1980), “Prilozhenie No. 2”. 50 Ibid, 196. 51 (1980), 3.13. 52 (1987), 233; (1980), 2.7. 53 Mikhail Agursky, “The Soviet Legitimacy Crisis and its International Implications” (1978), 150.

83 3.3.4 The émigré element

Agursky repeatedly asserted that the neglect of the emigrant dimension was a serious shortcoming in Soviet history. “Without this dimension,” he argued, “it is impossible to understand significant transformations of the Soviet system, including its ideology.” He was to devote exhaustive scholarly attention to this dimension, especially to the aforementioned Nikolai Ustrialov. While many historians before Agursky had studied the nationalist turn in Soviet ideology, Agursky’s was one of the first to pay significant attention to émigré actors like Ustrialov.54 With his nationalist justification of Bolshevism, Ustrialov provided Agursky with a particularly useful example for a number of reasons. Firstly, Ustrialov’s case demonstrated that many members of the old guard came to see the Bolsheviks as the Russian party, especially when contrasted with the Whites – who were funded and supported by the West –and other revolutionary parties, like the Mensheviks, whose ranks were filled with many national minorities. Secondly, Ustrialov is an example par excellence in the gnostic element that defined national Bolshevism for Agursky. Ustrialov saw in Bolshevik ‘internationalism’ the promise of a powerful national imperialism that even the tsars had failed to adequately deliver; he saw in their communism, the seeds of a thriving, liberal economy; he saw in their evil, a path towards good; and he saw in the death of his own country, the rise of a powerful new civilization.55 Agursky believed that such irrational and symbolic readings of history were a powerful social force in Russia’s coming to terms with Bolshevism. The very title of Ustrialov’s collection, A Changing of Signposts, is an integral key to grasping how Agursky conceived of national Bolshevism. An ironic play on the title of the collection Vekhi [‘Signposts’] Ustrialov’s title announced an illusive doublespeak that Agursky believed characterized rhetoric and language throughout Soviet history. Because Bolshevism had created an atmosphere in which nothing was called by its proper name, Agursky believed that society’s salvation lay in tradition and religion, where everything was clearly marked and morality could not be bent to bring about some abstract higher aim. Thirdly, Agursky placed great emphasis on the regime’s reception of Ustrialov’s ideas. It would be one thing if some bitter, right wing anomaly in Harbin had counted his losses, and opportunistically praised the Bolsheviks as national heroes. But Agursky showed that Ustrialov’s ideas inspired great debate

54 See for example Robert Tucker’s March 19, 1977 letter to Sidney Hook (FSO-01-072). 55 See Agursky, (1984), 173-175.

84 within the party, and that many important Bolsheviks accepted Ustrialov’s national Bolshevism. In May 1922, Lenin personally commented on the phenomenon of smenovekhism. While ostensibly condemning Ustrialov’s ideology of bourgeois restoration, he argued that the Communist Party must welcome smenovekhism as the candid expressions of the real class truth, so that the enemy could be better known. In other words, Ustrialov’s ideas were useful to Lenin because they provided the Bolsheviks the opportunity to address and prevent the very real degradation of their ideology into nationalism.56 Rather conspiratorially, Agursky doubted Lenin’s sincerity, arguing that his ambiguous reception served to “dramatize the Smenovekhists’ quest in order to attract general attention to them.”57 While this seems a bit extreme, Agursky’s book is full of evidence supporting the notion that the general party reception of Ustrialov’s national Bolshevism in the early 1920s was not nearly as negative as one would anticipate, even by communists generally associated with internationalism, such as Trotsky. Later on in the decade, Trotsky and other Stalin-oppositionists tried to use Ustrialov against Stalin in their struggle for power. But by then it was too late. Agursky maintained that Trotsky’s attacks against Stalin were “completely inconsistent . . . Stalin had stolen this concept [an acceptance of smenkovekhism] from him.”58 Lastly, Ustrialov’s case is important because once Stalin had solidified his power, ideas such as Ustrialov’s became rather mainstream in Soviet intellectual life, as we will see below with the example of Isai Lezhnev. Ustrialov himself even returned to the USSR in 1935, although he fell victim to the Purges in 1938. His example was integral for Agursky because it demonstrated that national Bolshevism was a two-way street. Not only did society justify Bolshevik rule as Russian, the Bolsheviks themselves tolerated and later promoted these anti- Marxist rationalizations. According to Agursky, by reluctantly tolerating Ustrialov in the early 1920s, Trotsky and Lenin had set the stage for Stalin’s eventual embrace of national Bolshevism.

3.3.5. ‘Socialism in one state’: early Soviet foreign policy

A particularly controversial aspect of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism is his analysis of early Soviet foreign policy. Essentially, Agursky argued that Stalin’s concept of ‘socialism in one state’ had long been the

56 (1987), 263-264. (1980), 3.7. 57 (1987), 264. 58 Ibid, 332.

85 precedent under Lenin. Entirely rejecting Lenin’s professed internationalism, he maintained that the Brest-Litovsk treaty’s sacrifice of huge swaths of Russian territory had been a guarantee against a Germany communist revolution.59 Lenin, Agursky believed, wanted Moscow to be the unquestioned seat of Communist authority, the secular Third Rome. He had no interests in actually promoting a world revolution, despite his rhetoric. Agursky tried to demonstrate that Lenin successfully set out to “prevent any victorious independent Communist revolution and put all internationalist left- wing movements under Moscow’s strict control.”60 He cited how this mindset led to Soviet cooperation with fascism. Italy was one of the first countries to enjoy positive diplomatic relations with the USSR, which had led to Stalin’s 1934 utterance: “‘Of course we are far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany. But fascism is not the issue here, if only for the reason that fascism in Italy, for example, has not prevented the USSR from establishing the best relations with that country.’”61 In Agursky’s view, if the issue was not an ideological war between communist internationalism and fascist nationalism, it had to be the nationalistically driven geopolitical competition between the USSR and Germany that had dominated both nations’ political life since the late 19th century. This contest had inspired many citizens of both countries to abandon a traditionally rooted cultural pride in favor of chauvinistic étatist patriotism.

3.3.6. National Bolshevism and the Jews

The distinction Agursky made between cultural and étatist nationalism is attested to by his analysis of the significant Jewish role in the formation of national Bolshevism. In arguing that many ethnic Jews contributed significantly to the building of national Bolshevism, Agursky tried to make clear that his target was not a religious, neo-Slavophile left wing nationalism. National Bolshevism was the veneration of the Russian state, an ideology of empire to which members of all national groups contributed. After all, Stalin, the very paragon of national Bolshevism in Agursky’s eyes, was Georgian. Agursky’s views on the Jewish national Bolshevism function according to the logic of Robert Tucker’s oft- quoted aphorism: “Via Bolshevism Djugashvili joined the Russian nation.”62 Agursky’s historical attitude towards Jewish communism is fairly complex. He reasoned that because of anti-Semitism and the Jew’s terrible social status in

59 Ibid, 187-195. 60 Ibid, 304. 61 Ibid. 62 Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality (New York 1973), 140.

86 pre-revolutionary Russia, many Jews were attracted to and played an important role in Russian revolutionary movements. He divided the participants into a few categories. At the most “Jewish” end of the spectrum were the Zionists, oriented towards emigration, and the Bund, to which Samuil Agursky had belonged, oriented towards cultural autonomy. Next were the well-educated members of the intelligentsia from the Pale, who gravitated towards the Mensheviks. While russified, they still had “strong Jewish national backgrounds.” Contesting the myth of Jewish Bolshevism, Agursky showed that the Bolsheviks were actually the least popular revolutionary party for the Jews. However, he wrote that those Jews who did turn to Bolshevism generally came from one of two groups. First, there were those like Trotsky and Zinoviev from poor families in the Pale, who had encountered the Bolsheviks in cosmopolitan cities like Warsaw and Odessa. This was the “internationalist” Bolshevik faction, although Agursky even makes Trotsky out to be something of a Russian nationalist during the years 1917-1923.63 Finally, there were those Jews who had welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution not out of any revolutionary sympathy but “because it destroyed a society that insulted one of their most sensitive points: their unrequited love for Russia.”64 These Russian-Jewish (i.e. ethnically but not religiously Jewish) intellectuals had tried with every effort to assimilate into Russian culture. Their attempts, however, had largely been rejected. Bolshevism prevented them the opportunity to prove their love for Russia. Many from this category easily fell into Stalin’s camp during his power struggle with the opposition in the second half of the 1920s. Agursky showed how many Jews from this last category turned to ideas like Ustrialov’s in order “to demonstrate that their loyalty to the Bolshevik system was not opportunistic but based on deep devotion to Russia.”65 These Jews had a significant impact on the formation of national Bolshevism. Agursky called Jewish-born Isai Lezhnev “the manager of the intellectual formation of National Bolshevism” who “verbalized in a clear-cut way many of the central ideas of this trend.” Building on Gorky’s ideas of God-building, Lezhnev welcomed “Bolshevik rule as the manifestation of the popular spirit,” and believed that to sense and identify with the “creative march” of the masses was “the first commandment.” Lezhnev became a prominent editor in the 1930s and was appointed head of

63 (1987), 96-97; (1980), 3.1. 64 (1987), 283. 65 Ibid.

87 Pravda’s literary and culture section. His influence on Soviet ideology was not insignificant.66 Agursky also noted the Jewish-born Orthodox convert turned radical atheist Bolshevik Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz. During the Revolution, the proto-fascist Tan- Bogoraz welcomed the Bolsheviks but condemned their professed internationalism, “The Russian . . . people did not have until now national consciousness . . . But the Russian people deceived by you will turn from internationalism and will obstinately start from the national beginning.”67 In exposing these Jewish national Bolsheviks, Agursky was not advancing the myth of Jewish communism. On the contrary, he was trying to show that it was the Jews most willing to break with the past and most eager to assimilate into Russian culture who had advanced nationalism and, therefore, anti-Semitism. Attempting to deflate the myth of Jewish communism, he wanted to show that there was really nothing very Jewish about those Jewish Communists who had survived the purges and enjoyed high positions of power under Stalin. These Jews were rather Russian étatist nationalists. Demonstrating that assimilationist tendencies resulted in a fascistic nihilism that fostered anti-Semitism, Agursky was arguing for the historical justification of Zionism. For Agursky, nationalism, both for the Jews and the Russians, was an inescapable outcome. If anything, the phenomenon of Jewish national Bolshevism served to advance the ethno- pluralist notion that it is better to live apart and in peace, than together and at war.

3.4 Agursky’s place in Soviet historiography

While Agursky was one of the first historians to give serious scholarly attention to émigré thinkers like Ustrialov, he acknowledged that his nationalist reading of Soviet history was nothing new.68 The introduction of his first published essay on national Bolshevism provides a thorough survey of the historiography of Bolshevism’s national element, and demonstrates that Agursky was more than familiar with his like-minded predecessors.69 He corresponded with a number of contemporaneous western historians, like Robert Tucker and Richard Pipes, who commended him for advancing ideas similar to their own: namely, that Bolshevism and Stalinism had in many ways been rightist,

66 Ibid, 283-286. 67 Ibid, 287. 68 Ibid, xii. 69 Mikhail Agursky, “The Soviet Legitimacy Crisis” (1978), 146-151.

88 nationalist phenomena despite their leftist Marxist legitimacy.70 Following Pipes, a central argument of Agursky’s work on national Bolshevism is that “Lenin looked upon national problems as something to exploit, and not as something to solve.”71 Nevertheless it would be a mistake to group Agursky in the totalitarian school to which Pipes belonged. While the pair agreed on certain issues of Bolshevism’s nationalization, Agursky was much more of a revisionist historian in the attention and emphasis he gave to the cultural and social aspects of Soviet history. His interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution fundamentally contradicts Pipes theory that the revolution was a coup carried out by a tiny minority. As one Russian reviewer noted in his review of Agursky’s Ideologiia in the émigré journal Kontinent,

Agursky crosses out the primitive scheme of the ‘October Coup’ [Oktiabryskogo perevorota], according to which the great tragic event in Russian history was the business of a few adventurists. From the work of M. Agursky follows the idea that this was no coup, but a revolution, for which practically all strata of Russian society bear responsibility.72

We can also notice some striking similarities between Agursky’s historiographical orientation and two other prominent émigré scholars: Hannah Arendt and Leszek Kołakowski. Following Arendt, Agursky saw Bolshevism as the direct product of aggressive imperial 19th century trends like pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism.73 Also like Arendt, Agursky compared Nazism and Bolshevism, seeing these two totalitarian systems as similar phenomena in many respects. On the central Soviet historiographical question of whether or not Stalinism represented a continuation of Leninism, Agursky quoted Kołakowski’s wholly affirmative answer: “The Soviet system as it developed under Stalin was a continuation of Leninism, and that state, founded on Lenin’s political and ideological principles, could only have maintained itself in a Stalinist form . . . He was the personification of a system which irresistibly sought to be personified.”74 It should be noted that all of these scholars experienced and escaped totalitarianism. But in addition to Agursky’s émigré status, one must also

70 See for example May 21, 1977 letter from Robert Tucker to Agursky and May 11, 1982 letter from Richard Pipes to Mikhail Agursky (FSO-01-072). 71 Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge 1954), 49. See also Agursky (1980), 4.1. 72 German Andreev, “Tsennaia rabota o natsional-bolshevizme,” Kontinent (Paris 1981) No. 28, 411-416. 73 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1968), 222-266. 74 Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford 1978), 3:2, 5.

89 consider the time period in which he was writing. We have seen in the first chapter how the disillusionment of Agursky and many of his shestidesiatniki peers was gradual; first, they questioned Stalinism, then Leninism, then Marxism. It is no coincidence that Agursky’s historical works follow this same pattern; they become more cynical and emotionally charged with time. His 1980 Ideologiia displays a negative, but at times sympathetic attitude towards national Bolshevism. In the book’s preface he admitted “a deep sense of respect” for Ustrialov, despite his “disgust towards his apotheosis of totalitarianism.”75 Yet in his 1987 The Third Rome, no such positive qualifications are present; national Bolshevism is portrayed in an entirely negative light. One might object that this difference resulted not from the chronology, but Agursky’s desire to develop a slightly less russophobic line in the Russian-language version of his work. While this might be true, his early English-language writings on national Bolshevism are also much more sympathetic towards the Revolution compared to his later works. In his first essay on national Bolshevism, Agursky even argued, “until the beginning of 1934, Marxism-Leninism was the single legitimizing facet of the Soviet system.” He claimed that only Stalin and maybe a few members of his closest circle embraced national Bolshevism before 1934. Agursky even presented an argument contradicting everything he would later write: he defended Lenin from the accusation that Stalin’s turn to nationalism was a legitimate continuation of Leninism.76 All such sympathetic sentiments towards Ustrialov, Lenin, or really any Bolshevik except for Zionviev are entirely absent from The Third Rome, in which the entirety of Soviet history is presented as the tragic product of national Bolshevism. As we have noted in the introduction, Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism is also largely indebted to Gershom Scholem’s work on gnosticism and Alain Besançon’s comparison of ancient gnosticism with Bolshevik ideology. The mystic element of national Bolshevism is crucial in Agursky’s conception; it was this ‘gnostic’ worldview that allowed important nationalist actors to accept the Bolshevik Revolution as the unfolding of a divine mystery. In the next chapter, while discussing Agursky’s Zionism we will return to Scholem, examining how his ideas on the messianic dimension of Zionism shed light on Agursky’s own Zionist position.

75 Agursky (1980), “Ot avtora.” 76 Agursky, “The Soviet Legitimacy Crisis” (1978), 167.

90 3.5 Critiques of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism

We have only been able to provide a cursory summary of Agursky’s sweeping conception of national Bolshevism. In this lies the first critique of his usage. Agursky’s national Bolshevism is comprised of so many aspects one is left wondering what he was really talking about: what common denominator unites Nechaev’s Machiavellian theory of revolution, Andrei Bely’s apocalyptic poetry, and Ustrialov’s paradoxically nationalist acceptance of Bolshevism? How can we speak of these examples as manifestations of a genuine political or historical phenomenon? As Robert H. McNeal pointed out “there is no conclusion to summarize Agursky’s positions”; instead, his book “intends to convince the reader that Bolshevism is a “Russian revolutionary movement dressed up as Marxism” and that Lenin aimed at “Russian world domination.”77 Numerous reviewers have pointed to this problem. Aleksander Kustarev noted that Agursky’s “attempt to conflate his observations into a single label, ‘National Bolshevism,’ seems to be a hasty and inaccurate generalization.”78 Dunlop agreed. “Agursky,” he wrote, “is at times…unable to master the vast material he has unearthed. The book’s central problem is its lack of a theoretical framework. It needs a theoretical chapter in which the author carefully distinguishes his terms, such a nationalism, national Bolshevism and Red patriotism.”79 Although Agursky’s introduction admitted there was a difference between cultural and étatist nationalism, his analysis consistently blurred the dividing lines. There is also an important critique from the economic angle. Agursky argued that Marxist-Leninism was not the guiding factor in Soviet ideology, but rather a mere screen for the movement’s Great Russian imperialistic nationalism. Criticizing Agursky’s underestimation of Marxist ideology, van Ree justifiably asked what could have convinced Agursky that Lenin was a true Marxist, given that Lenin did everything in his power to destroy the landowning and capitalistic classes.80 One could cite NEP to challenge Van Ree’s assertion that Lenin was completely dedicated to Marxist economic principles, but the historical consensus generally justifies Van Ree’s qualms. There seems to be a great deal of evidence with which one can challenge Agursky’s ideas on Marxism’s ancillary importance. Operating with Agursky’s extreme nationalist reading of Soviet

77 McNeal (1990), 220. 78 Alexander Kustarev, Review of the Third Rome, The Russian Review (October 1988), Vol. 47, No. 4, 461-462, 462. 79 Dunlop (1989), 670-671. 80 Van Ree (2001), 291.

91 history, how is the historian to understand Lenin’s War Communism, Stalin’s collectivization, the destruction of traditional peasant culture? Recent works like Stephen Kotkin’s first installment in his three-part biography of Stalin demonstrate that to this day, many historians still evaluate Marxism as an extremely important decision-making force not just for Lenin, but for Stalin.81 In the end it seems that even if Marxism did not always dictate Soviet decision- making, it played more of an important role than Agursky admitted. Addressing the russification of Bolshevism during the early Soviet period, Stephen Carter wrote, “these tumultuous years were typified by a powerful ‘Sovietisation’ rather than the triumph of national Bolshevism as such, still less of smenavekhism as such, which could logically apply only during the relatively limited period of NEP.”82 In minimalizing Marxism’s ideological weight, Agursky, in the words of one scholar, “may be exaggerating the importance of . . . [his] subject.”83 In regards to Agursky’s ideas on early Soviet foreign policy, McNeal and van Ree both reacted with skepticism. McNeal deemed excessive Agursky’s interpretation of the Brest-Litovsk treaty as an effort to forestall the German revolution.84 Van Ree maintained that while they balanced the concern of world revolution with other realpolitik factors, neither Lenin nor Stalin could be fairly accused of actively suppressing world workers’ revolutions.85 Elsewhere van Ree persuasively demonstrated that the national element is embedded deep within Marxist and non-Marxist socialist thought; ‘socialism in one state,’ according to van Ree has been the rule rather than the exception, and it does not contradict Marxist ideology so much as it contradicts an internationalist myth that has been affixed to Marxism. Thus, while agreeing with Agursky that the national element is a crucial one in socialist society, van Ree rejected the notion that this national element represented some contradiction or obstacle to Marxism’s primacy.86 Finally, reviewers all made note of the emotional and personal nature of Agursky’s historical work. In something of a backhanded compliment, McNeal wrote that Agursky’s Third Rome was “permeated by the Russian intellectual style…[characterized by] intensity, boldness, and breadth.”87 Dunlop noted that Agursky’s “upbringing during a period of decline in official ideology” contributed

81 See for example, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I, Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 (New York 2014), 676. 82 Carter (1990), 50-51. 83 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russian Identities: A Historical Survey (Oxford 2005), 256, fn. 19. 84 McNeal (1990), 220. 85 Van Ree (2001), 292. 86 See Erik van Ree, Boundaries of Utopia: Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin (London 2015). 87 McNeal (1990), 220.

92 to his skeptical attitude towards Marxism.88 Without a doubt, Agursky’s biography – especially what happened to his father and his own encounters with anti-Semitism – contributed significantly to many of his conclusions regarding Soviet history, as we have tried to show in chapter one. A “shortcoming” identified by Ronald Wixman stemming from this personal bias is “Agursky’s virtual obsession with the presence or absence of anti-Semitism.” Wixman admitted anti-Semitism to be “a good indicator of Russian ethnocentricism” but, not without justification, maintained that Agursky’s arguments would have been strengthened with more examples of the official attitude towards “Ukrainian, Polish, Moslem, and other forms of ethnic nationalism.” Wixman concluded that the “space devoted to anti-Semitism at the expense of other ethnographical issues is unwarranted.”89

3.6. The origins and aims of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism

Wixman’s complaints that Agursky ignored important non-Jewish ethnographical material are justified criticisms of a work claiming to be a comprehensive study of Bolshevism’s nationalist dimension, but these criticisms ignore the powerful polemical and social nature of Agursky’s work given its historical context. Agursky’s disagreements with Solzhenitsyn arose from the same point of departure: love of their own nation and concern for its future prosperity. Both Agursky and Solzhenitsyn lacked the luxury of being non-biased observers; their writings are fundamentally motivated by national interests. Consequently, a major goal of Agursky’s works on national Bolshevism was to dispel the powerful anti-Semitic myth of Jewish Bolshevism. Wixman can fault Agursky for focusing too heavily on anti-Semitism, but it would be hard to maintain that a pervasive myth of Baltic or Caucasian Bolshevism took hold of anti-Soviet Russian nationalists as intensely as the myth of Jewish Bolshevism. For someone not only interested in defending his own nation from these erroneous accusations, but also interested in the future cooperation of the Jewish and Russian national movements, Agursky’s historical account can be seen as a pragmatic attempt to combat these pervasive myths by arguing that the Jewish influence on Bolshevism had been minimal. Here we should note that both Solzhenitsyn and Agursky exhibited ambivalent attitudes towards their respective nations’ complex relationship with suffering and guilt. On the one hand, they both had the moral fortitude to glance

88 Dunlop (1989), 671. 89 Ronald Wixman, “Review of Third Rome,” Geographical Review (April 1990), Vol. 80, No. 2, 186- 187, 187.

93 into their nations’ pasts and call for national repentance. Yet it is intriguing that for all their national self-reflection, both Solzhenitsyn and Agursky ultimately concluded that it was his nation that had suffered at the hands of a foreign oppressor. For Solzhenitsyn, Russia had been ruined by a materialistic western ideology; for Agursky, Soviet Jewry had fallen victim to Russian chauvinism and imperialism. To a certain degree, Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism is defensively motivated; it is a reactionary response to the Jewish Bolshevism imagined by right-wing Russian nationalists. But there is something ironic about this similarity, and at their worst, these polemics come across spiteful blame game. Writing in 1977, Besançon shed light on the futility of such contests of national guilt and suffering: “Everyone has had a hand in the affair, and now everyone is busy laying the blame at everyone else’s door.”90 Yet Agursky’s nationalist reading of Soviet history is more than a lament of Jewish suffering. While this firsthand experience with racial discrimination endowed his reading of history with definite biases, it also provided him with an insight into Soviet society that many western analysts lacked. The Third Rome is a powerful piece of perestroika history. Excessive and hyperbolic, it is a fascinating testament to how Agursky’s generation repudiated the myths they had once embraced. This work is a powerful act of dissent in that it represented the culmination of Agursky’s lifelong break with the cultural symbols that he had been taught to worship for many years of his life. Having “lived the lie,” having been repeatedly subjected to anti-Semitism dressed in Marxist rhetoric, Agursky’s personal experience convinced him of what he believed to be a truth that was lost on many western scholars: official Soviet statements had to be approached with complete skepticism. In the preface to The Third Rome Agursky expressed dismay that so many Western historians had “accepted the official Soviet statements at face value.” “Many historians,” he believed “were virtually trapped by these official declarations, and sometimes they transformed Western Soviet studies into a branch of official Soviet historiography.” He believed there was a need in Soviet studies for a “deep and bold revisionism.” In his mind, Bolshevism could not be properly understood by those who looked at Lenin’s “writings as genuine expressions of his views.” His call for revisionism did not mean that official Bolshevik writings were devoid of cognitive value, but rather that they demanded informed interpretation.91

90 Besançon, (1977), 19. 91 Agursky (1987), xiv.

94 Critiquing Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism van Ree wrote that, “any authentic National Bolshevism would be a paradoxical ideology, for it would have two principal goals, namely the construction of a national or multinational superpower and the destruction of the propertied classes.”92 But it was exactly this paradoxical nature to which Agursky hoped to draw attention! For Agursky, the Soviet Union was defined by paradox, a society characterized by falsehood. As we have noticed in the last chapter, this approach was problematic; it enabled Agursky to read Soviet history as he pleased, and this often resulted in him presenting a quote and interpreting it to mean the very opposite of what it professed (e.g. Lenin’s condemnation of smenavekhism as a tacit endorsement of this ideology). Yet it might also be said that Agursky’s skepticism towards Marxism and official documents endowed his studies with certain merits, in that it compelled him to go beyond politics for source material. His studies on national Bolshevism incorporate literary, ethno-national, religious, political, foreign policy, and social trends. The reader is presented with a bevy of fascinating anecdotes, drawn from a vast wealth of materials. Yet as Dunlop noted, Agursky fails to master the wealth of material he had amassed.93

3.7 Agursky’s reading of history as a vindication of left wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism and Zionism

Agursky’s reading of Soviet history is also problematic from a left wing neo- Slavophile perspective. For Solzhenitsyn and other neo-Slavophile nationalists, Marxist ideology had been a very real and dangerous force, responsible for the anti-religious campaigns and the process of collectivization that had decimated the Russian village. In downgrading the ideological importance of Marxism, Agursky contested Solzhenitsyn’s narrative that Russia had fallen victim to a foreign ideology. Agursky’s work exhibits something reminiscent of Gorsky’s russophobia discussed above. Essentially, he implied that Russia’s national traditions and messianic complex were to blame for a movement that not only claimed a guiding western ideology, but also called for the aggressive destruction of Russia’s past and religion. Thus Agursky committed the sin of which Alexander Zionviev accused many émigrés and dissidents: “They targeted communism, but they struck Russia.”94

92 Van Ree (2001), 291. 93 Dunlop (1989). 94 Alexander Zinoviev, “Tselilis’ v kommunizm, a popali v Rossiyu,” Zavtra (1993), No. 2, accessed online at http://www.rusidea.org/?a=10011 on 31 May 2016.

95 Judging from his works on national Bolshevism, the reader unfamiliar with Agursky’s biography and his neo-Slavophile samizdat writings would be under the impression that he was a rampant Russophobe. Agursky’s target, however, is not Russia’s cultural tradition or a religious messianic complex, but rather the late nineteenth–early 20th century perversion of this tradition and religious messianism into a xenophobic, secular and populist ideology of empire. We have seen how Agursky’s samizdat work advocated Zionism and advanced its compatibility with Russian nationalism. It would be a serious mistake to think that his work on national Bolshevism represented a break with this belief. Witnessing the emergence of a non-expansionist, left wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism in the 1970s, Agursky hoped to castigate national Bolshevism as a force that had contradicted both Jewish and Russian national self-expression. At the end of a 1986 essay on national Bolshevism, Agursky wrote the following:

Historical experience . . . demonstrates that the very readiness of the West to recognize Russian nationalism as a peaceful alternative could strongly influence the internal development of the USSR. Every nationalist explosion frightens American politicians, who regard nationalism as a major evil of the contemporary world. But it is time to get rid of the traditional political philosophy according to which world progress must go in the direction of denationalization.95

Thus while Agursky’s work on national Bolshevism seems to be a wholesale condemnation of Russian nationalism, this is not at all the case. National Bolshevism, in Agursky’s estimation, was a political and secular perversion of Russian messianism. It was the profane desecration of a sacred idea; a gnostic attempt to know and achieve the end of history, rather than to faithfully believe that it will come in its own time. As a former Orthodox Christian, Agursky did not oppose pure religious Russian messianism. This much is clear from a passage from a biography of Agursky provided in an English-language samizdat anthology:

. . . he [Agursky] formulated an idea according to which Judaism and Christianity represent integral parts of a united Judeo-Christianity. He feels that the relationships between them have an antinomical nature which can only be resolved eschatologically.96

95 Agursky, (1986), 106. 96 Meerson-Aksenov and Shragin (1977), 597. As the anthology was compiled by Agursky’s acquaintances, it is presumable he approved of or even wrote this biography himself:

96 What Agursky opposed was the politicization and secularization of this religious messianism. In this lay the essence of his conception of national Bolshevism. For all his disagreements with Solzhenitsyn on the history of Bolshevism, Agursky never strayed from his general neo-Slavophile orientation. His shoddy terminological framework obscured the fact that his historical work is completely consistent with his samizdat writings, in that it is an attempt to expose how both Russian and Jewish étatist venerations of the Russian state led to a tragic collapse of their traditional national cultures. Bringing attention to the Jewish national Bolsheviks, Agursky demonstrated how Bolshevism had bred a strange self-hatred and national self-renunciation among radically assimilationist Jews. It is rather telling that Agursky’s book The Third Rome is dedicated to the memory of his parents and “to a world destroyed by the developments this book attempts to interpret.”97 We have seen how Samuil Agursky’s demise served to deflate his son’s faith in the prospects of assimilation. Later on, Agursky’s own experiences with anti- Semitism convinced him that the Zionism his father had shunned was the only plausible answer to the Jewish question that had plagued Russian since the beginning of the 19th century. Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism served not only to dispel myths of Jewish Bolshevism, but also to denounce Bolshevism as a fundamentally anti-Semitic phenomenon and thus justify the 1970s Soviet Zionist exodus movement. We conclude our discussion of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism and its relation to his position on Russian-Jewish cooperation with mention of how for Agursky, the multifaceted nationalization of Bolshevism was proof that man’s deepest sympathies will always lie with his ethnos, even when the state embraces an ostensibly anti-national ideology, like Marxism. Agursky’s historical works held nationalism to be such a powerful force that though it might transform, it would never disappear. His conception of national Bolshevism is a cautionary tale of the ugly forms nationalism can take when it becomes willing to advance great power politics at the cost of native tradition and religious morality. His reading of history told Soviet Russians and Jews alike that they needed to reject national Bolshevism and return to a society grounded in native tradition and religious morality. Jews must do this via Zionism, the Russians by following a political program like Solzhenitsyn’s. These two processes were entirely compatible and should lead to an era of increased cooperation between the two national movements.

97 Agursky (1987), v.

97 As we will see in the next chapter, there is much evidence to suggest Agursky’s hopes for increased Russian-Zionist cooperation have been realized, albeit in ways he would never have hoped for. Condemning the politicization and nationalization of Russian messianism, Agursky proclaimed Zionism as Soviet Jewry’s salvation. But what is Zionism if not the actualization of the Jewish messianic eschatology: the utopian return of the Jewish nation to the land divinely promised to them in the Bible? Thus, one might fairly ask, did Agursky condemn the secularization and politicization/nationalization of Russian messianism only to embrace the same distortion of Jewish messianism? In the next and final chapter we set out to tackle these important questions.

98 Chapter Four: The Shadows of False Messiahs Agursky’s Zionism, Alexander Dugin and the Russian New Right, the relationship between Jewish messianism and Zionism

I think for us Russians there is a real aliyah, a return, an actual Russian Zionism. We, according to Orthodox tradition, are the New Israel . . . But I do not want to offend you. We are very different, irreconcilably, different but difference itself need not cause hatred, but delight. I am convinced that the salvation of the world comes only through Russia. And you . . . -Alexander Dugin in an interview with his far-right Zionist ally Avram Shmulevich1

4.1. Introduction

We have established in the last chapter how Agursky condemned the Soviet project as the dangerous secularization of Russia’s centuries-old messianic complex – an attempt to establish in Russia a secular “Third Rome” that would usher in a new utopian era and bring about mankind’s salvation. Arguing that the USSR’s strength lay in “what is has of Russia, not what is has of Communist,”2 Agursky’s historiographical ideas were based on two positions: 1) Historians should not accept the USSR as a revolutionary society which rejected Russia’s past; instead a “single-stream” theory of Russian history is more applicable, and 2) Because the USSR’s proclaimed internationalism was nothing but a myth, Soviet history contributed to the larger historical vindication of Zionism, in that Jews, despite their best efforts to assimilate and contribute to the building of Soviet society, were not safe or welcome in the fundamentally Russian USSR. We will explore in this chapter the problematic contemporary implications of both of these positions. Agursky’s ‘single stream’ reading of Soviet history has had unforeseen consequences. National Bolshevism has become an important political force in post-Soviet Russia. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s breakup a number of ‘red-brown’ parties emerged who venerated the nationalist element that Agursky identified as the essence of Soviet socio-political life.3 This national Bolshevik orientation towards the past remains incredibly significant today. Walter Laqueur noted recently that in Putin’s Russia, a historical revisionism is occurring according to which Trotsky, a Jew and an internationalist, was evil, and Stalin, who “made Russia greater and stronger” is interpreted as “a positive force” in Russian history.4 In one of history’s ironies,

1 Avram Shmulevich, “Interv’iu s Alexanderom Duginym,” MAOF: Analiticheskaia gruppa (date not provided), accessed online at http://maof.rjews.net/14--sp-706/geopol/54 on 6 June 2016 2 Agursky (1987), xii. 3 See Allensworth (1998), 145-179. 4 Walter Laqueur, Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, (New York, 2015), 5.

99 Alexander Dugin, a major player in post-Soviet Russian nationalism and the father of neo-Eurasianism, has embraced Agursky’s nationalist reading of Soviet history in order to inspire Russian nationalists to ignore socio-economic disagreements and unite in a concentrated front that recognizes Russia’s uninterrupted national greatness. The picture is complicated even further by the fact that Dugin is representative of a turn in Russian nationalism away from a xenophobic racist chauvinism towards an ethno-differentialist defense of the right to national distinctiveness.5 He accordingly embraces Zionism, and has established deep political ties with far-right Zionist organizations run by Soviet- born Jews. As we will see, there are striking similarities between Dugin and his radical Israeli allies today and the Russian and Jewish national Bolsheviks of the Soviet era who so deeply fascinated Agursky. In addition to the contemporary historiographical implications of Agursky’s work, we will simultaneously investigate in this chapter Agursky’s Zionism, which has so far received only peripheral attention. During Agursky’s years in the USSR he never wrote extensively on his Zionist position as he was not forced to confront Zionism’s challenges (e.g. the Arab question, Zionism’s relationship to messianism) until he made aliyah. But after emigrating from the USSR in 1975, Agursky wrote articles in a number of Russian-language French and Israeli émigré journals clarifying his Zionist position. While Agursky’s Zionism was distinctly left wing and he supported a peaceful two-state solution, certain writings from his first years in Israel display a fundamentally messianic belief that a Jewish Israel was to emerge as a beacon civilization for all nations to follow. Working as a historian to condemn the secularization and nationalization of Russia’s messianic myth, there is evidence to suggest that Agursky himself advanced a nationalization of the Jewish messianic myth and embraced Zionism as a utopian ideology. There is great debate in the scholarly community regarding the messianic dimension of Zionism. In discussing whether or not Agursky’s messianism contradicted his condemnation of national Bolshevism, we will consider not only different Zionist trends but also different historical types of messianism. Finally, this chapter serves to explore how many of Agursky’s hopes and predictions regarding the amelioration in relations not only between Zionists and Russian nationalists but also between Israel and Russia have been at least partially realized in the recent years, albeit in ways that Agursky certainly would not have hoped for. Agursky’s work evinces that both nations’ histories are

5 See Laruelle (2008), 138-141.

100 characterized by a fierce dialectic between universalistic messianic conceptions and exclusivist isolationist tendencies. As we will see with the case of Dugin and his far-right Zionist allies, this dialectic continues to develop in the most unpredictable of ways today.

4.2 Agursky’s Nash Sovremennik Zionism Debate with Vadim Kozhinov

4.2.1 Agursky’s article

A good place to begin an investigation of both Agursky’s Zionism and the changing of relations between Zionism and Russian nationalists in the post- Soviet years is a 1990 debate that took place in a leading conservative Soviet journal, Nash Sovremennik [“Our Contemporary”], between Agursky and one of the journal’s chief ideologue, Vadim Kozhinov. Kozhinov was an officially recognized public intellectual and literary critic who had played an important role in the development of late-Soviet Russian nationalism. He had even helped patronize the Veche journal that we discussed in Chapter Two.6 As this debate was the last major polemic of Agursky’s life, it sheds much light on how his positions had developed over the years. In 1990, Nash Sovremennik printed an article by Agursky entitled “The Middle East Conflict and Perspectives on its Regularization,” followed by Kozhinov’s response, “The Zionism of Mikhail Agursky and International Zionism.” Agursky’s article was one of the first times the Zionist perspective had been given an official platform in the Soviet Union.7 For years, official Soviet propaganda had aggressively lambasted Zionism as an evil imperialist world conspiracy bent on global domination. That a major patriotic journal should publish an apologia for Zionism was only allowed by the openness [glasnost’] ushered in with Gorbachev’s perestroika. The main purpose of Agursky’s article in Nash Sovremennik was quite similar to that of his Veche piece that we have analyzed in Chapter Two: to convince his audience that no ideological conflict should divide Israel and Russia. Yet the pieces are quite different, largely because of the fact that while Veche was an illegal, implicitly anti-Soviet samizdat publication, Sovremennik was an official journal with a much wider and more mainstream readership.8 In his Veche piece,

6 See Mitrokhin (2003), 204-207, 476. See also Vadim Kozhinov, Yuri Azarov, and William Riggan, “The Magazine Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary) and Russian Literature,” World Literature Today (1993), Vol. 67, No. 1, 34-36. 7 Gorelik (1996), 413. 8 Kozhinov, Azarov, Riggan (1993), 35, estimates Nash Sovremmenik’s 1990 circulation to be about 500,000.

101 Agursky’s was writing mainly for dissident Russian nationalists, arguing that atheistic and materialistic Soviet communism had extinguished both Russian and Jewish traditional cultures. His task with his Nash Sovremennik article somewhat contradicted his Veche position. In this piece he argued that the USSR should cease its support of the Arab nations in the Middle East and should promptly restore diplomatic relations with Israel, which it had broken in 1967. To convince his reader of this, Agursky had to show not that Zionism could cooperate with a religious, anti-Soviet Russian nationalism, but rather that it could cooperate with the Soviet Union. In order to defend this position, Agursky appealed to three central arguments: 1) The historical relationship between Zionism and the Soviet Union was not nearly as hostile as it would seem; 2) Most Soviet citizens improperly understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the USSR had exploited in order to demonize Israel; and 3) The USSR’s hostile relation to Israel empowered Israeli chauvinism; only a restoration of relations between the two nations would lead towards the peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Let us look briefly at each of these points in turn. Arguing for the positive early historical relationship between Zionism and the Soviet Union, Agursky recycled a number of the events and anecdotes he had cited in a 1984 English-language research paper entitled “The Zionist Controversy in the Soviet Establishment.” In this piece he had argued that while “the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik leadership including Lenin himself were decisively against Zionism, one can discern the opposite view was held by some in the Soviet establishment.”9 In his Nash Sovremmenik article, the main enemies of Zionism, according to Agursky, had been Jewish communists who – like his father – belonged to the Bund and, later, the Evsektsiia. These socialist Jews saw “Zionism as their main enemy on the Jewish Street and waged against an irreconcilable war against Zionism.”10 But among non-Jewish Bolsheviks, Agursky argued that, “there were always those who admitted that the Zionist movement was a national-liberation movement and a movement of social revolution that fought against British Imperialism and the Arab feudal reaction.” Among such persons he listed important names like Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Boris Chicherin, Mikhail Kalinin, Lev Kamenev, and Vladimir Potemkin. Agursky stressed the particular importance of Gorky, who “had done all he could to support Hebrew-language culture and to change the USSR’s

9 Mikhail Agursky, The Zionist Controversy in the Soviet Establishment: Historical Background, (Jerusalem 1984), 1. 10 Mikhail Agursky, “Blizhnevostochnii konflikt i perspektivy ego uregulirovaniia,” Nash Sovremennik (1990) No. 6, 127-136, 127.

102 negative stance towards Jewish Palestine.” He also emphasized the role of the diplomat Potemkin who had “done much for the . . . declaration of the Jewish state in 1947-1948” and ensured that the USSR aided Israel during its war for independence.11 What is more, Agursky argued that this admiration was bilateral. He wrote, “that from the very 1917 revolution socialist circles of Jewish Palestine looked at Israel as a model of their own social experiment.” The Jews in Israel, Agursky claimed, were upset by the persecution of Zionists during the early Stalin years, but these Jews did not blame this persecution “on the Soviet political system itself” but rather the Evsektsiia and other Jewish Communists. Agursky wrote that, “after the creation of the state of Israel there were only the strongest sympathies [on the part of the Israelis-S.F.] towards the USSR . . . which, firstly, had saved the Jewish people from destruction during the Second World War, and secondly, gave Israel huge political and military help during its struggle for independence.” Before the anti-Semitic, “irrational processes” of late Stalinism, he argued, Israeli-Soviet relations were in a very good place.12 Many Soviet politicians were convinced “that the young Jewish state would be a natural ally of the USSR.”13 Presenting a history of bilaterally positive early Soviet-Israeli relations Agursky argued that there was no fundamental ideological conflict between Israel and the USSR. In an attempt to debunk what he saw as another myth of Soviet propaganda, Agursky tried to present and justify to a conservative Soviet audience the Israeli position vis-à-vis the Palestinian question. According to Agursky, since 1955 – after a brief post-Stalin thaw in Israeli-Soviet relations broken by the Suez Crisis – the USSR’s one-sided support of the Arab countries began and since then, Israel had been “systematically presented as a senselessly aggressive state, and the Arab countries as peace-loving victims of unprovoked aggression.”14 Arguing against this narrative, he presented a comprehensive summary of his views in regard to the Arab question. On the one hand, Agursky expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian masses, blaming Israel for certain behavior and decisions. Writing during the tumultuous yeas of the First Intifada, he recognized the uprising as a reaction of the Palestinians to their terrible socio-economic condition. Smart Israelis, he argued, had realized for a long time that it was only a matter of time

11 Ibid, 128. 12 Ibid, 129. 13 Ibid, 129. 14 Ibid, 130.

103 before the post-1967 generation of Palestinians rebelled.15 He spoke in defense of the Allon plan, which called for the evacuation of Israeli troops from Gaza and the West Bank and a full demilitarization of other regions occupied by Israeli troops.16 It is no coincidence that Agursky mentioned that the socialist- democratic Avoda party embraced this plan; this was the political party under which he ran for a seat in the Knesset [the Israeli parliament] the year after this article was published.17 Moreover, Agursky condemned aggressive, and chauvinistic strains of Zionism that he believed had gained ground following the Six-Day War:

It cannot be maintained that finding itself forced into position of occupant [my emphasis –S.F.] Israel behaved in the most prudent fashion. Great power appetites erupted; dreams of a big Israel appeared; unhealthy messianic attitudes, militant nationalism, chauvinism and the mania of national greatness arose. These were fearsome symptoms.18

Speaking on contemporary political groups, Agursky condemned messianic Zionism elsewhere in the article:

Just like Arab extremists and Muslim fanatics[my emphasis –S.F.], Jewish extremists and religious fanatics consider the question of territory from a messianic-religious point of view, maintaining that any territorial concession is . . . betrayal. There are also those far- right circles that dream of the expulsion of all Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.19

As evinced by the quote above, Agursky condemned reflections in Zionism of the very “symptoms” he had discerned in Russian national Bolshevism. He was aware of the dangers that a politicization and secularization of religious messianism could have and he hoped, and had great optimism, that Israel would not go that way. But as the underlined segments of the quotes above suggest, Agursky was no apologist. This is also clear from his narrative of the Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and the ensuing refugee crisis:

It is known that the UN Resolution of 1947 of the creation on the territory of Palestine two governments was accepted by the Jews and

15 Ibid, 132. 16 Ibid, 133-134. 17 See Gorelik (1996), 411. 18 Agursky (1990), 130. 19 Ibid, 134.

104 rejected by the Arabs, who denied the Jewish state the right of existence. After the proclamation of the establishment of a State of Israel in May of 1948 the united Arab nations attacked Israel. During that time Arab feudal circle went to great lengths to provoke a mass flight of Arab refugees from the territory which was under the control of the Israeli army. This flight was conceived as a short-term evacuation (something like the evacuation of Soviet citizens during the war) before the speedy expulsion of the Jews from Palestine. Not all, however, Arabs ran and those who stayed received the opportunity to unobstructed economic and cultural existence in the new state.20

Throughout the article the refugee crisis is presented as the result of the political and economic exploitation of the displaced Palestinians by the surrounding Arab states and ruling classes. Agursky stated that the Arab feudal circles bear full responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis, and for the fact that following Israel’s War of Independence, an Arab state was not created.21 Agursky also defended Israel’s actions leading up to and during the Six Day War, which had been the target of some of the most vehement Soviet anti-Zionist rhetoric. He argued that Israel’s “so-called aggression of 1967 was a lawful, defensive response” to Egypt’s totally unprovoked blockade of the Straits of Tiran, which had threatened Israel’s existence. He maintained that Israel had warned Jordan it had no wish to go to war, but that King Hussein of Jordan feared missing his share of “the not-yet killed bear,” and began shelling Jerusalem. In Agursky’s estimation, this had forced Israel into war with Jordan and later into the position of occupier in the West Bank.22 In regard to the contemporary problem of the Intifada, Agursky believed that Israel’s fatal mistake had been its failure to conduct free elections in Gaza Strip and the West Bank following the 1967 War. He posited that the Palestinians had been living in deplorable conditions in Jordan, and that just after they fell under Israeli occupation, their quality of life had improved for a short period of time and many harbored hopes for a positive future relationship with Israel. While he clarified that this situation quickly deteriorated, he believed that had there been elections conducted at this time, a moderate Palestinian government would probably have formed.23 But instead terrorist organizations like the PLO – whose programs categorically demanded Israel’s destruction – had become dominant.24 While Agursky believed the Intifada to be an inevitable Palestinian reaction to

20 Ibid, 129. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid, 130. 23 Ibid, 131. 24 Ibid, 132-133.

105 their unbearable socio-economic conditions, he condemned the violent terroristic methods of the activists as “barbaric.” Nevertheless, Agursky was characteristically optimistic for the future. He believed that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would eventually run its course. In the last section of his article, he gave suggestions on how both factions of extremists might be defeated and how the situation might be pacified. In his conception, the Arab and Jewish extremists empowered one another. In order to disempower both, the USSR must cease its financial and military aid to the Arab nations, who were supporting extremist Palestinian terrorists organizations, whose attacks were in turn empowering the Jewish far right. Agursky argued that many Jews, unlike the Arabs, were ready for compromise. He stressed that

in sharp distinction from such countries as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq etc., in Israel there has always been a half of the population that has been ready for wide compromise in exchange for peace, that even blames the Israeli government for not trying to accomplish this…[Many] agree to talks with the PLO and the creation of a Palestinian state.25

He maintained that even many Israeli conservatives wanted peace, reminding his readers that the peace with Egypt and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Sinai had been achieved under Menachem Begin’s Likud government (the major right wing Israeli political party).26 Thus, for him the larger problems were the terrorist Palestinian organizations and the “extremist Arab states” that were funding and perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for economic and political capital.27 He denounced the USSR’s hypocritical support of openly terroristic factions of the PLO, and condemned the destructive consequences of the Soviet arming of the “extremist” states of Syria and Lebanon.28 Agursky could only explain Soviet policy in the Middle East as a result of the inertia of the past, but he believed that developments since the early 1980s already showed signs of improvement: in 1982 the USSR had announced that it did not seek confrontation with the USA in the region, and throughout the decade, Agursky believed that the USSR had sharply decreased its attempts at provoking the Arab states to attack Israel.29 Nevertheless, Soviet-Israeli relations had a long way to go in his estimation. He believed the most important next step was the reestablishment of Soviet diplomatic relations with Israel. He did not call

25 Ibid, 133. 26 Ibid, 134. 27 Ibid, 135. 28 Ibid, 134-135. 29 Ibid, 134.

106 on the USSR to take Israel’s side or to abandon its Arab allies, but merely to enter into a dialogue with Israel, which he believed, would have several positive consequences:

The restoration of relations with the USSR will sharply weaken the far-right forces in Israel, strengthen the position of the center and the left and create new possibilities. What is preventing this from happening, when not only the USA supports relations with different sides of the conflict, but even Egypt is emerging from its isolation, thanks to the Camp David agreements?30

Not only did Agursky see Soviet recognition of Israel to be an important step towards the mutual defeat of both Arab and Jewish extremist forces, he also saw this step as the beginning of a new era of Soviet-Israeli cooperation:

Soviet-Israeli relations in general should not be associated with the Middle East conflict. They comprise a wider circle of issues mutually important for both countries, which include above all else economic, scholarly, and cultural ties. Israel will be the most loyal partner of the USSR in this region, for this partnership will be based on . . . historical and cultural foundations, existing in the very structure of the Israeli population and in the history of the formation of the state of Israel.31

By presenting a positive early history between Zionism and the USSR, defending the Israeli position apropos the Palestinian question against claims made by the Soviet propaganda, and arguing that a restoration of Soviet relations in Israel would deliver a blow not only to Muslim extremist forces but also to Jewish chauvinists, Agursky attempted to convince a conservative Soviet readership that the USSR and Israel were natural allies. Rather pleased with the developments of perestroika, Agursky hoped for a new era of Soviet-Israeli cooperation. Kozhinov’s intriguing response confirmed that these hopes were not entirely misplaced.

4.2.2 Kozhinov’s response

As suggested by his title, the central argument of Kozhinov’s response was that Agursky had failed to distinguish between “two principally different phenomena that (notwithstanding their differences) are constantly referred to – both by supporters and opponents – with the same word ‘Zionism.’” Kozhinov showed support for Agursky’s conception of Zionism as a movement of national self-determination, albeit with some critiques. “‘National’ Zionism, to which as

30 Ibid, 136. 31 Ibid.

107 follows from his essay, M. Agursky belongs,” Kozhinov wrote, “departs from that perfectly natural fact, that Jews, like any nation, strive to develop their own culture and build their own statehood.” Kozhinov also maintained that such Zionism presented no threat to the USSR. But he complained that Agursky had ignored the more important and destructive incarnation of Zionism: an international political Zionism based on enormous economic power.32 Building his arguments around the work of controversial anti-Zionist American Jew Lilienthal and certain official Soviet historians, Kozhinov tried to show that since the late 1960s a powerful economic-political lobby based in the United States of America had transformed Zionism from a traditionally oriented project of national self-determination into a worldwide economic-political force “not in the least dedicated to the cultivation of national traditions.”33 He cited how Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion had nobly resisted dealing with international financiers who called themselves Zionists, instead defining a Zionist as “a person who has moved to Israel.”34 Kozhinov argued that Ben Gurion’s successor Levi Eshkol had rejected this traditional and healthy definition of Zionism, and that during his premiership, the XXVI Zionist Congress of 1964-1965 had “triumphantly proclaimed the onset of ‘a new era’ of cooperation between Israel and the diaspora.”35 It is hard to accuse Kozhinov of traditional anti-Semitism because his article repeatedly draws sharp distinction between ‘Jews’ and ‘Zionists.’ He even argued that most ‘international Zionists’ were not even Jewish – they were American lobbyists motivated by political and financial considerations.36 Kozhinov’s article is sympathetic towards Zionists concerned with the task of creating a Jewish nation state rooted in tradition and religion: “I do not doubt,” Kozhinov wrote towards the end of his article, “that a significant segment of the Israeli population is concentrated . . . on the creation of its national society, state, and culture. But facts indisputably confirm that the politics of Israel (especially since the end of the 1960s) depend more on the whim of international Zionism.” Concluding his article, he expressed deep sympathies with Israelis like Yuri Avneri, whose book Israel Without Zionism portrayed international Zionism as

32 Vadim Kozhinov, “Sionism M. Agurskogo i mezhdunarodnii sionism,” Nash Sovremennik, (1990) No. 6, 136-154, 140. 33 Ibid, 142. 34 Ibid, 141. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, 144-145.

108 “an ‘alien and abominable force’ phenomenon, disrupting the very ‘national existence’ of the country.”37 In March of 1991, just months before his death, Agursky published a response to Kozhinov’s response in the Russian-language Israeli newspaper Evreyskaia gazeta [“The Jewish Gazette”], entitled “In the Captivity of a Dangerous Myth.” He listed a number of critiques of Kozhinov’s article, mostly pedantic examples of how Kozhinov had manipulated source material. Fundamentally, he disagreed with Kozhinov that some nefarious international conspiracy centered in the USA dictated Israeli politics, claiming that Kozhinov was still partially held captive by Soviet anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. But Agursky’s response is generally characterized by his positive attitude towards Kozhinov’s piece, and his optimistic attitude that Russian nationalism and Zionism were finally undergoing the rapprochement that he had counted on for years. At the start of his response to Kozhinov’s piece, Agursky wrote in characteristically conciliatory fashion:

Whatever objections I have against what is said in Kozhinov’s article, I am obliged above all to mention Kozhinov’s genuine attempt to escape from the dangerous myth that has formed in the USSR for decades . . . Even rejecting Kozhinov’s argumentation, one must admit his bravery, the bravery of a person who wants to sharply break with the tradition of those circles that comprise a large part of his readers . . . In Kozhinov’s position there is no principle of hostility towards Israel. In short, I see in Kozhinov’s position the appearance of good will and the possibility of open and honest discussion, discussion that should be a polemic, but a polemic that sets itself the task of achieving mutual understanding and not the intensification of hostilities, which is always so much easier.38

For Agursky, Kozhinov’s recognition of the legitimacy of a Jewish national movement signified a huge step forward for Jewish-Russian national relations; it was a sign that conservative Russian nationalists were abandoning a categorical denial of Israel’s right to exist. In August 15, 1991, just five days before his death, Agursky published an article in the Jerusalem Post entitled “We Mustn’t Shun the Russian Right.” In this short piece, he mentioned his polemics with Kozhinov and wrote that while Kozhinov had not “abandoned the anti-Zionist mythology . . . his position has opened various positive vistas.” Agursky also cited the example of Sergei Semanov, a Russian conservative writer known for his anti-Semitism, who had

37 Ibid, 154. 38 Mikhail Agursky, “V plenu opasnogo mifa,” Evreyskaia gazeta, 26 March 1991.

109 recently begun to make efforts to “build a new image” by writing an article that denounced the anti-Semitic Russian nationalist organization Pamiat’. Agursky observed that “Israeli-Russian rapprochement continues,” and he called on Israel to abandon the belief that “the only circles where Israel should look for support are committed pro-Western liberals or Jews.” He concluded instead that, “Israel might do well to cultivate relations with all the Russian political spectrum, avoiding the impression that it is selective. It would also be a wise step to invite a group of Russian moderate conservatives to visit our country.”39 It should be noted that Kozhinov’s response had much in common with the Veche editorial board’s response to Agursky’s 1974 open letter discussed in chapter two. Both acknowledged “national” Zionism as a positive, justifiable phenomenon, but insisted that international Zionism was still a very real and dangerous international political and economic force. It is somewhat strange that Agursky should take Kozhinov’s response as such a breakthrough, when he had heard a very similar line of thinking from the Veche editors over fifteen years earlier. This strangeness is mitigated by the facts that Kozhinov’s appraisal of “national” Zionism was published on the pages of an official, patriotic journal, not an underground nationalist publication. While Agursky was to die with the Soviet Union in 1991, he saw Kozhinov’s sympathy towards “national Zionism” as a signal that mainstream Russian conservatives were beginning to warm up to the idea of a Jewish nation state in Israel. As we turn our attention to Agursky’s posthumous intellectual relationship with the chief ideologue of the Russian New Right, Alexander Dugin, we will see how certain important developments in contemporary Russian nationalism have substantiated Agursky’s predictions in quite unexpected ways.

4.3 Agursky, Alexander Dugin and the contemporary relationship between Zionism and national Bolshevism

4.3.1 Dugin’s contemporary significance and appeal

In recent years, the philosopher, publicist, writer and intellectual leader of the neo-Eurasian movement Alexander Dugin has become a favorite subject of specialists in the field of contemporary Russian nationalism. The reasons for his appeal are several. Firstly, as Marlène Laruelle, the leading scholar of neo- Eurasianism pointed out, Dugin more than anyone else represents “the general evolution of the Russian nationalist milieu over the past two decades.”40 Like

39 Agursky (1991), “We Mustn’t Shun.” 40 Laruelle (2008), 141.

110 many contemporary Russian nationalists, Dugin has rejected the markedly anti- Semitic “Black Hundreds”-revival nationalism that characterized perestroika-era organization like Pamiat’. Striving to develop a more enlightened and intellectually sophisticated Russian nationalism for the 21st century, Dugin has amalgamated into a complex patchwork the ideas of the European New Right, Soviet-era émigré Eurasianists and pre-revolutionary proto-fascist Russian thinkers like Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontev.41 The multifarious nature of his work also contributes to Dugin’s popularity as a subject of study. His philosophies draw from a number of wholly disparate sources, ranging from neo-Nazi fascism to Kabbalah. As Laruelle noted, it is this “intellectual eclecticism [that] assures him a certain degree of success among the young generation, revealing post-Soviet Russia’s lack of foundations of identity.”42 This eclecticism is markedly postmodern, deliberately blurring the lines between ‘left’ and ‘right’, amassing together an aggregate of influences, many of which would presumably be rather dismayed at how Dugin has appropriated and distorted their ideas. On this note, Laruelle has observed one of the many paradoxes of Duginism: in constructing an anti-globalist and anti- Western ideology, he has built his system of thought on the ideas of many Westerners, and has thus “contributed to the internationalization of identity” that he proclaims as his main enemy.43 Lastly, Dugin’s prominence is guaranteed by his relative success in appealing to the political elite of the Putin-era. As Luke March noted, Dugin’s ideas “have received an appreciative audience in the highest political and military echelons.”44 Laqueur has argued that while Dugin is not secretly dictating Kremlin policy, “as the general mood in the country became more right wing and Putin’s policy more aggressive, Dugin became more closely identified with the authorities.”45 The troika of Dugin’s representativeness, eclecticism, and political significance are anchored by his hypothesis that, “to have any potential, a nationalist project must be intellectual, correct, and presentable: an enlightened nationalism.”46 In rejecting the intellectually crude, biologically racist Pamiat’ nationalism in favor of a complex, nationalism rooted in the ideas of the European New Right, Eurasianism, and pre-revolutionary Russian thinkers,

41 Ibid, 128. 42 Laruelle (2008), 142. 43 Ibid, 143-144. 44 March, Luke, “Nationalism for Export? The Domestic and Foreign- Policy Implications of the New ‘Russian Idea,’” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 64, No. 3, 401-425, 412. 45 Laqueur (2015), 82. 46 Laruelle (2008), 141.

111 Dugin is a very useful barometer for scholars to gauge the most significant developments in contemporary Russian nationalism.

4.3.2 Agursky’s influence on Dugin’s conception national Bolshevism

It is much easier to understand Duginism not by what it advocates, but rather by what it opposes: Western liberalism, American globalization, and democracy. Laqueur poignantly and sardonically noted that Dugin’s “work is in great demand, yet his thinking is difficult to follow because of its rapid ideological changes, the contradictions in his views, and his tendency to bring in topics that are unrelated to politics (such as the second law of thermodynamics).”47 Yet certain underpinning ideas of Duginism can be identified. Three of these ideas are explicitly or implicitly relevant to our discussion of the relevance of Agursky’s work in regard to contemporary nationalism: Dugin’s conception of national Bolshevism, his ethno-differentialist anti-Semitic philo-Zionism, and his messianism. Before examining each of these in turn, it is necessary to provide a disclaimer. This section in no way sets out to argue that Agursky bears any responsibility for contributing to Dugin’s neo- fascist ideology. As we have stated above, many of the thinkers whose work Dugin has distorted would presumably be appalled by his implementation of their ideas. Nevertheless Dugin’s appropriations of Agursky’s historiographical ideas betray their most problematic implications. Moreover, his views on the Jewish question testify not only to Agursky’s prescience regarding the changing tides of Russian nationalism but also point to some of these developments’ concerning ramifications. Stephen Shenfield emphasized national Bolshevism as one of the five major elements defining Dugin’s “massive intellectual output.”48 Dugin’s conception of national Bolshevism is most clearly articulated in the opening sections of his 1997 book Templars of the Proletariat [hereafter referred to as Templars], which includes a section entitled “Commissars with the spirit of autocracy”49 devoted to Agursky’s Ideologiia natsional-bolshevizma. This section begins with Dugin noting that the numerous political trends that have borne the name ‘national Bolshevism’ fail to capture the “extended and profound” nature of the phenomenon. He believed many had overlooked how “the approach to nationalism from the left, and to Bolshevism from the right is amazingly fruitful

47 Laqueur (2015), 81. 48 Shenfield (2001), 195. 49 The title of this section comes from a Maximilian Voloshin poem quoted by Agursky in Third Rome and Ideologiia. See Agursky (1987), 177 and Agursky (1980), 2.4.

112 and unexpected, opening absolutely new horizons in the comprehension of the logic of history, social development, [and] political thought.”50 As a starting place for his complex definition of national Bolshevism, Dugin appealed to Karl Popper’s sociological distinction between open and non-open societies, developed in his 1945 work The Open Society and its Enemies. In this work, Popper critiqued the teleological conceptions of history found in the work of a long line of philosophers, whose ranks begin with Plato and include Hegel and Marx. For Popper, these thinkers advanced totalitarianism by positing and elevating some Absolute, thereby threatening the open society, which was marked by ideological flexibility and belief in the primacy of the individual. Popper originally advanced this distinction in order to defend the principles of open societies, but Dugin’s ends are diametrically opposed to this goal. He drew from Popper’s ideas to advance the following general definition for all manifestations of national Bolshevism: “National-bolshevism is a meta-ideology, common for all open society enemies.” Phrased differently, “national-bolshevism is a kind of ideology which is built on the full denial of the individual and his central role . . . national-bolshevism is for any version of the Absolute.”51 In applying this definition to the Soviet period, it should come as no surprise that Dugin found Agursky’s nationalist reading of Soviet history particularly useful. For the post-perestroika Russian nationalists, the Soviet era presented something of a challenge. How was a Russian nationalist supposed to reconcile his nation’s materialistic, internationalist atheistic Soviet past with its pre- revolutionary religious and monarchist tradition? Agursky’s historiographical views provided a convenient way out of this trap, as they posited that the Soviet marriage of nationalism and Bolshevism had amounted to an anti-rationalistic and wholesale rejection of the individual, in favor of the Absolute concepts of the nation and Marx’s teleological view of history. Dugin recognized that a number of historians like Norman Kohn and Alain Besançon had correctly observed nationalist and messianic elements in Bolshevism. But he believed that these historians’ liberal and anti-socialist orientation had blinded them; they only saw the negative features of national Bolshevism. But in Agursky’s work, Dugin saw a “sympathy towards national Bolshevism and a deep understanding of its meaning.”52 He argued that despite the fact that Agursky was a liberal dissident who immigrated to Israel, “his attitude towards Soviet national-Bolshevism remains objective to the highest

50 Dugin (1997), “Metafizika natsional–bolshevizm: Otlozhennaiia definitsiia.” See Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. (Princeton 1945) 51 Ibid, “Metafizika: Sviashchennii soiuz ob’’ektivnogo.” 52 Ibid, “Katekhon i revolyutsiia: Bolsheviki i ikh predshestvenniki.”

113 degree, and in certain instances it shows a deep sympathy [towards national Bolshevism] in its evaluations.” He called Agursky’s Ideologiia “the most complete and interesting . . . research of Russian national Bolshevism” and wrote that the work of Agursky “is the most serious work dedicated to the Soviet period of Russian history, helping us to understand its deep spiritual meaning.”53 It is important to note that in his summary of Agursky’s historical works, Dugin dishonestly distorted some of Agursky’s ideas and, to some extent, exaggerated Agursky’s sympathies towards national Bolshevism. A great example of this is how Dugin tackled Agursky’s ideas on the massive Jewish contribution to the Bolshevik Revolution. Notably, Dugin ignored Agursky’s extensive arguments on how the Russian Jews’ deplorable pre-revolutionary situation put them in the perfect position to be exploited by revolutionary propaganda. Instead he presented Agursky’s less developed idea that the messianic orientation of many Russian Jews of the time – primarily the Hassids, but Dugin also mentioned the Sabbateans, whom we will discuss briefly below – inspired the Jewish masses to interpret and welcome the Bolshevik Revolution as the eschatological unfolding of history. While Agursky recognized the importance of the messianic orientation in certain Jewish national Bolsheviks like Lezhnev, Dugin erroneously maintained that Agursky had written that such attitudes were responsible for the “massive participation” of Jews in the Revolution. On the contrary, Agursky was aware that millions of Jews, like his father, had been attracted to the revolution for much more straightforward reasons. In his conception, the messianic element had been much more widespread a trend among Christian Russian nationalists. Agursky stressed that Jewish national Bolsheviks were a minority, and in Dugin’s summary of Agursky’s work they are presented as a majority.54 As we will see, Dugin exaggerated Agursky’s emphasis on Jewish messianism’s contribution to the Revolution in order to advance his own belief that Jews and Russians are united by their common messianic pathos. While other examples of Dugin’s intellectual dishonesty exist, it is rather remarkable how little he changed Agursky’s original ideas. Fascinatingly, his chapter is essentially no more than a summary of Agursky’s Ideologiia, fairly similar to the summary we have provided of Agursky’s historical ideas in the previous chapter. Dugin did not have to stretch Agursky’s views very much because his conclusion is exactly the same as the one arrived at by Agursky: “for

53 Ibid, “V komissarakh.” 54 Ibid, “V komissarakh: Evreyskii factor.” For Agursky’s brief mention of Sabbatean influence on Jewish national Bolshevism see Agursky (1987): 286 and Agursky (1980), 2.17.

114 74 years the country lived not under Bolshevism, but under national- bolshevism.”55 Dugin best explained his high estimation of Agursky’s work in two characteristically dense sentences found towards the end of his section dealing with Ideologiia:

From Agursky’s analysis develops such an impressive picture of Soviet society in its deepest mythological layers, that a certain feeling forms that we are in a parallel universe, where the entire external, tediously dogmatic, flatly utilitarian, boring-in-its-ordinariness picture of official Soviet history solves itself in the abyssal, saturated, entirely metaphysical intuitions and magical occurrences of reality. And this “second reality” of the Soviet Union – from its origins to its last days – imparts all meaning, fullness, and hermeneutic sharpness. This reality is life-giving, paradoxical, fervid, and deep, as opposed to the dry statistical data, censured historical bulletins, or shrill dissident criticism that, just as tiresomely as the Soviet historians, recites facts, only not triumphantly optimistic [facts], but tragically brutal [facts].56

This quote lays bare the most disturbing implications of Agursky’s nationalist reading of Soviet history. In providing a captivating account of the Soviet Union’s nationalist essence, Agursky has provided post-Soviet Russian nationalists with a bevy of evidence and argumentations to advance a single-stream narrative of Russia’s uninterrupted national greatness. What is more, such a mythological reading of history informs Dugin’s political program. Turning our attention now to Dugin’s global vision, we will see how his embrace of national Bolshevism inspires his ideas on the Jewish question and Russian messianism.

4.3.3 Dugin’s ethno-differentialism and his philo-Zionist anti-Semitism

Dugin’s intellectual development proves that Agursky’s dreams for increased cooperation between Zionism and Russian nationalism were not quixotic. Three years after Agursky’s death, Dugin released his 1994 The Conservative Revolution in which he proclaimed that, “The only state that has partly managed to implement certain aspects of the Conservative Revolution is the state of Israel.”57 Before exploring Dugin’s support of Zionism and the deep connections he has

55 Ibid, “L’age d’argent: Mikhail Agurskii: definitsiia natsional-bol’shevizma.” 56 Ibid, “V komissarakh: Parallel’naiia ideologiia.” 57 Alexander Dugin, Konservativnaiia revoliutsiia (1994), accessed online at http://arcto.ru/article/20 “Konservativnaiia Revoliutsiia: Novii ideologicheskii mir posle Ialty.”

115 established with the Zionist far right, a few words must be said about his “geopolitics” – a word that Dugin seriously conflates58 – and his Eurasian vision. At the risk of oversimplifying his geopolitical theories, Dugin believes the world is split into two conflicting camps: the ‘Atlanticist’ powers, characterized by mercantilism, individualism, materialism, and cosmopolitanism (e.g. USA); and the Eurasian powers, which are rooted in spiritualism, collectivism, authority, hierarchy, and tradition (e.g. Russia). Mixing native ideas with those of European New Right theorists such as Alain de Benoist, Dugin maintains that Western-led liberal ‘mondialism’ [globalization] is destroying national cultures and states, “turning the whole world into one melting pot.”59 It is only the Eurasian nations that still possess national self-awareness and rootedness to their native soil. Dugin believes these nations must unite to defeat the forces of Western globalization.60 Dugin is careful to balance the elements he has borrowed from the Eurasianists and those he taken from the European New Right. The original Eurasianists were an émigré group that emerged around the same time as the Ustrialov’s national Bolsheviks (1920s-1930s). Believing that Russia’s essence was Asian and not European, these Russian nationalists advanced an ideology of empire, proclaiming that Russia had a messianic purpose to fulfill in the East.61 In claiming the intellectual heritage of the original Eurasianists, Dugin distances himself from unsophisticated xenophobic trends in Russian nationalism. As Dmitry Shlapentokh noted, “one reason for Eurasianism’s popularity was that it clearly distinguished itself from racism. Its supporters downplayed racial/ethnic concerns, arguing that Russia was a fusion of Slav and non-Slav – mostly Turkic – people.”62 Thus Dugin’s ‘Eurasianism’ is meant to guarantee that he is not a racist – at least not a traditional biological racist. As Dugin mentioned in an interview with his far-right Zionist allies, “There is no chauvinism, racism, or xenophobia in Eurasianism.”63 Laruelle has observed that in rejecting chauvinistic ethno-nationalism, Dugin “followed the turn of the New Right, which moved from a biological view of the differences between people to a primarily cultural one.”64 An elemental aspect of this turn is the notion of national right to cultural specificity. European New

58 See Laqueur (2015), 9-10. 59 Shmulevich. 60 See Alexander Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki (Moscow 2000), accessed online at http://arctogaia.com/public/osnovygeo/; see also Laruelle (2008), 115-120. 61 For more on early Eurasianism, see Laruelle (2008), 16-49. 62 Shlapentokh (2008), 252. 63 Shmulevich, “Interview s Alexanderom Duginym.” 64 Laruelle (2008), 138.

116 Right theorists, and consequently Dugin, have advanced a multicultural theory of ethno-pluralism based on ethno-differentialism, or the right of nations to develop distinctively and separately. The French theorist Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a major ideologue of the New Right, wrote that, “the cult of difference implies a phobia of intermingling; it celebrates heterogeneity but fears the mixing of people and traditions.”65 We have seen above how Dugin understood national Bolshevism to be the meta-ideology of a non-open society. For him it is precisely this value of cultural specificity and an ethno-differentialist fear of intermingling that defines not only the political systems but the metaphysical essence of Eurasian society. In Dugin’s proposed Eurasian alliance, nations like Russia, Kazakhstan, and Iran would be united against the west, but would maintain and preserve entirely separate cultures. Precisely this desire to maintain cultural distinctiveness would unite these nations against the Western-led forces of ‘mondialism.’66 The Jews and Israel occupy a particularly interesting and complex role in Dugin’s geopolitical theories. Laruelle has noted that with Dugin, “as with the other Eurasianist thinkers . . . [the Jewish] question is particularly complex because they all combine philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic arguments. Dugin proposes his own version of that conjunction in the form of a paradoxical Judaeophobic philo-Zionism.”67 Just as Kozhinov divided Zionists into noble ‘national’ Zionists and nefarious ‘international’ Zionists, Dugin distinguishes between the good Eurasian Jews and the bad Atlanticist Jews. Laruelle has noted that Dugin borrowed this distinction from Iakov Bromberg, a Jewish adherent of the original Eurasianism movement. In his book The Jews and Eurasia, Bromberg contrasted the rooted, traditionalist Eurasian Jews of the Russian Empire with the “West European Jews, whom he saw as bearers of political and economic modernity, of capitalism and communism.” But Dugin has distorted Bromberg’s distinction into an ethno-differentialist defense of Zionism. Where Bromberg sought to enlist the Eurasian Jews to contribute to the building of an integrated Russia-led Eurasian Empire, Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism sees the “good” Eurasian Jews as those who have settled Israel, and the bad Jews as those still in the diaspora.68 Laruelle has identified Traditionalism as Dugin’s “main intellectual reference point and the basis of his political attitudes as well as his Eurasianism.”69 It is

65 Ibid, 140. 66 See Shlapentokh (2008). 67 Laruelle (2008), 135. 68 Ibid, 136. 69 Ibid, 122.

117 from this reference point that Dugin approves of Israel, which he recognizes to be “. . . a state founded on the principle of the full restoration of the archaic traditions of the Jewish religion [and] ethnic and racial differentialism.”70 That Israel is allied with the West is an unfortunate consequence of geopolitics, and should not prevent Russian nationalists from recognizing in Israel a traditionalist country rooted in ‘Eurasian’ ideas, with deep historic and cultural ties to Russia.71 In other words, Dugin recognizes in Israel aspects of a national Bolshevik, or non-open, society. These ideas are advanced by Dugin, among other places, in a 1997 article “Jews and Eurasia,” which takes the title of Bromberg’s book. In this article, Dugin wrote that Stalin’s anti-Semitic actions unfortunately ensured the Atlanticization of Zionism and broke up the spiritual union of Jewish and Russian Bolsheviks that had been based upon their mutual “messianic pathos.” Dugin admitted that since this schism between Russian and Jewish Bolsheviks, Israel had to a large degree succumbed to forces of American globalization. He concluded that ‘Eurasian’ Jewry was going through hard times. But he also expressed his hope for the future of a ‘Eurasian’ Zionism.72 Consequently, he has undertaken great intellectual and political efforts to support far-right Zionist circles. Interestingly, many of the contemporary Zionists who subscribe to messianic, imperialist notions of a Great Israel whom Dugin supports were born in the Soviet Union. This trend suggests that the legacy of Soviet national Bolshevism is evident not only is present-day Russia, but also in Israel. Dugin has expressed particular sympathy for the ultranationalist work of Rabbi Meir Kahane, translating a book of his into Russian.73 Kahane, who was assassinated in 1991 by an Arab, was a U.S.-born Jewish extremist and the ideological father of the modern Zionist ultra right. His ideas inspired the programs of the Kach and Kahane Chai, two banned extremist Israeli terrorist groups.74 Dugin has established deep political contacts with members of the Zionist far right, whose ideas can be traced to Kahane’s aggressively imperialistic and chauvinistic Zionism. Two organizations influenced by Dugin’s neo- Eurasianism have emerged in Israel. The first is Soviet-born Vladimir Bukarsky’s MAOF Analytical Group, established in the 1997 to promote Israeli nationalism to new Russian immigrants. MAOF maintains an active website with a category

70 Dugin (1994), “Konservativnaiia Revoliutsiia: Novii ideologicheskii mir posle Ialty.” 71 See Shmulevich, “Interview s Alexanderom Duginym.” 72 Aleksnadr Dugin, “Evrei i Evraziia,” Zavtra, 25 November 1997 accessed online at http://zavtra.ru/content/view/1997-11-2541jewsand/ 73 See Shlaptenokh (2008), 262 and 266 footnote 13. 74 See “Kach, Kahane Chai (Israel, extremists),” Council on Foreign Relations (20 March 2008) accessed online at http://www.cfr.org/israel/kach-kahane-chai-israel-extremists/p9178.

118 devoted to neo-Eurasianism that features Dugin’s writings and interviews. But historian Mark Sedgwick has identified the more important Dugin-influenced Zionist organization to be Be’ad Artzeinu [To Our Homeland], led by Rabbi Avram Shmulevich and Avigdor Eskin. Both Eskin and Shmulevich are also of Soviet origin; both were present in Moscow at the founding congress of Dugin’s Eurasia Movement and both enjoy high positions in the party hierarchy. Eskin is a particularly notorious figure, famous for reacting to the 1995 Oslo accords by casting an ancient Kabbalistic death curse on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was fatally shot thirty-two days later. This stunt landed Eskin in prison. Soon after his release, he was re-imprisoned for his plans to catapult a pig’s head at the Dome of the Rock during Ramadan and to burn down the building of an Israeli leftist group.75 In 2010, Haaretz published an article on Eskin. As of then he was allying with white segregationists in South Africa and quite pleased with how his far-right views were gaining popularity in Israel society.76 It should be noted that these explicitly pro-Dugin far-right organizations are marginal trends in Israeli political life, but it cannot be said that these trends are not pulling the Israeli center rightwards. The best example of this is the recent success of the Yisrael Beiteinu [Israel is Our Home] Party, led by Soviet-born Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman. The party represents the interests of Russian-speaking Israelis. In regard to the Palestinian question, Yisrael Beiteinu advocates the fundamentally ethno-differentialist Lieberman Plan, a two-state solution that has all the Jews living in Israel and all the Arabs in a Palestinian State. This plan mostly involves border changes, but also some physical population transfers. Yisrael Beiteinu won fifteen Knesset seats in 2009 – the third most of any party – and in the same year joined Netanyahu’s ruling collation. Lieberman has enjoyed immense personal political success during the Netanyahu years. In the past six years he has served as Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and as the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. Currently he serves as Israel’s Defense Minister.77 While commentators disagree about just how far to the right on the political spectrum Lieberman’s party really falls, left-wing

75 See Mark Sedgwick, (2004), 237-240. MAOF’s website can be found here: http://maof.rjews.net/index.php. Eskin’s site: http://web.archive.org/web/20150801011017/http://avigdor-eskin.com/. 76 Shay Fogelman, “‘We Won,’” Haaretz, 05 November 2011 accessed online at http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/we-won-1.323092. 77 For Yisrael Beiteinu’s website: http://www.beytenu.org/. For scholarly critiques of Yisrael Beiteinu’s plan vis-à-vis the Palestinian question see: Yoav Peled, “Citizenship Betrayed: Israel’s Emerging Immigration and Citizenship Regime,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law (January 2007) Vol. 8, No. 1, 603-628, 618-619; and David Koren, “Arab Israeli citizens in the 2009 elections: between Israeli citizenship and Palestinian Arab identity,” Israel Affairs (January 2010), Vol. 16, No. 1, 124-141, 135-138.

119 journalist Gideon Levy pointed out that Lieberman was a member of Kahane’s Kach party in his youth and argued that,

The differences between Kach and Yisrael Beiteinu are minuscule, not fundamental and certainly not a matter of morality. The differences are in tactical nuances: Lieberman calls for a fascist "test of loyalty" as a condition for granting citizenship to Israel's Arabs, while Kahane called for the unconditional annulment of their citizenship. One racist (Lieberman) calls for their transfer to the Palestinian state, the other (Kahane) called for their deportation.78

It is hard to defend a party who embraces the slogan “No loyalty, no citizenship” from such accusations. Unfortunately, such developments confirm that Agursky’s hopes that increased Russian-Israeli cooperation would deliver a blow to the far right in both countries were entirely misplaced. Shelapentokh, who has shown that Dugin does not rule out the possibility of an alliance that would include Russia, Israel, and certain Arab nations, neatly resolved the paradox that is presented by the fact that Dugin also supports extremist Arab groups whose goals are diametrically opposed to those of their Zionist counterparts. He has provided insight into Dugin’s strange logic:

Dugin’s views can be seen as inconsistent, but there may be logic in his assumption that Israeli Jews and Arabs could be united. His point is that traditionalist nationalist Jews and fundamentalist Arab Muslims are structurally the same. They have similar attachments to native tradition and Gemeinschaft social arrangements, and they reject the linear vision of history, whose Western version has emphasised economic progress as the meta-goal of society . . . These Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists actually have no ground for conflict. Their real common enemy is the Atlantic civilisation of the US, whose stress on globalisation is undermining their way of life. As soon as both the Israeli Jews and Arabs understand this — Eurasianism should be a guiding light — the problem would be solved. Arabs and Jews, shedding artificial American values/culture, would happily live together in the context of the great Eurasian empires.79

From Dugin’s point of view, all nations should adopt an aggressively nationalistic stance. Eventually the spread of ethno-differentialist nationalism would end the conflicts that multiculturalism and globalization have created.

78 Gideon Levy, “Kahane Won,” Haaretz, 8 February 2009, accessed online at http://www.haaretz.com/kahane-won-1.269642. 79 Shelapentokh (2008), 262-263.

120 Laruelle has warned that Dugin’s passionate support for Zionism does not equate to a love of the Jewish people. Instead his work stresses a rather esoteric but important hallmark of anti-Semitic Russian thought, which we will return to below: Jewish religious thought is particularistic and lacking the universalism of Christianity. Thus, while Dugin supports the Israeli national project as a manifestation of the oncoming Conservative Revolution, he believes that Israel and the Jews could never realize mankind’s salvation.80 This task is reserved for Russia, the only nation that has preserved Christ’s universal message, which was rejected by the Jews.

4.3.4 Dugin’s Russian Messianism

Scholars have observed in Duginism the continuation of the resilient idea that Russia is “a providential country with a special mission.”81 We have seen how in Templars, Dugin defined the general phenomenon of national Bolshevism as the meta-ideology of non-open society. In the following quote he explained how he saw Russian messianism playing an important role in the Russian manifestation of this meta-ideology:

Russian National Bolshevism is a modernistic expression of messianic aspirations inherent to the Russian people since the fall of Constantinople, but expressed at the same time in the socio-economic intention of the establishment in Russia of an eschatological society based on the principles of justice, truth, equality and other attributes of the "millennial kingdom . . ."82

Elsewhere in the work Dugin expressed a similar sentiment:

National Bolshevism as a spiritual method is the national dialectic, the consideration of the fate of the Russian people and the Russian state as a messianic path chosen for the eschatological accomplishment of Orthodox communality [provoslavnoi obshchiny] with all the extremes, excesses and paradoxes of the transference of this unique ideal into socio-political substantiality – this is what comes closest to a decipherment of the secrets of Rus.83

80 Laruelle (2008), 136-138. For an example of neo-Eurasianist denial of Jewish universalism see an article printed on the website of Dugin’s publishing house, Arctogea: Sergei Pankin, “Dve bol’shie raznitsy: Kabbala v shirokom smysle slova – ezoterizm Zapada, Kabbala v uzkom smysle slova – iudaistskii ezoterizm,” (25 July 2009), accessed online at http://arcto.ru/article/1509 81 See Kotkin (2016), 3. 82 Dugin (1997), “Katekhon i revoliutsiia: Tretii Rim.” 83 Dugin (1997), “Katekhon i revoliutsiia: Nasledie Istiny.”

121 Dugin’s eschatological messianism informs his entire philosophy. For him, national Bolshevism is the modern, twentieth-century political manifestation of Russia’s right to distinctiveness, or samobytnost’. Dugin portrays national Bolshevism as the historical essence of Russia’s messianic mission in order to advance what he sees as Russia’s contemporary task: to provide a model ‘Eurasianist’ closed society for other nations to emulate. Although he believes the world is split into two camps, he welcomes “all antiglobalization tendencies . . . [as] potentially Eurasianist.” As Laruelle noted, Dugin’s mission is “to transform Russian distinctiveness into a universal model of culture, into a vision of the world that is alternative to Atlanticist globalism but also global in its own way.”84 Given the great deal of attention Western press and think tanks have given to Putin’s support of far-right parties across Europe, it would seem that these ideas are not entirely marginal in contemporary Russian politics.85 Suggesting a model according to which Russia lead other nations to adopt a traditionalist, nationalist position, Dugin seeks to resolve the timeless debate between non-expansionist nationalists wishing to preserve Russian tradition in isolation, and étatist expansionists hoping to establish a Russian-led pan-Slavic or Eurasian empire. In other words, he hopes to provide a synthesis for the historic dialectic between the universalist, messianic dimension and the exclusivist, particularistic dimension of Russian nationalism. As Dugin understands it, “the angel of Russia is discovered as the integration angel . . . seeking to teleologically unite other angelic beings inside itself, not obliterating their individuality, but elevating them to the universal imperial scale.”86 Here Dugin’s understanding of Russia’s messianic role is quite reminiscent of Dostoevsky, who acknowledged the “universal” nature of Russia’s destiny, proclaiming that the Russians had been sacredly anointed to realize mankind’s salvation.87 We conclude our discussion of Duginism with mention of his eschatological convictions. As his reference to the “millennial Kingdom” in the second above quote evinces, Dugin is an adherent of millennialism. He believes that we are living in the end times, and that upon Christ’s imminent Second Coming, Russia will be called upon to realize its eschatological mission of saving mankind. As Yanov has observed, Dugin’s eschatological Russian messianism confirms that

84 Laruelle (2008), 120. 85 See for example: Alina Polyakova, “Putinism and the European Far-right,” Institute of Modern Russia (19 January 2016), accessed online at http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500- putinism-and-the-european-far-right. 86 Dugin (1997): “Metafizika natsional-bol’shevizma: metafizika natsii.” 87 Duncan (2000), 40-41.

122 his “real dream is of death, first of all the death of Russia.”88 Strange as it may be, Dugin is hardly the first Russian nationalist to long for Russia’s death. In an article on Ustrialov, Agursky wrote that in order to embrace Bolshevism, Ustrialov had subscribed to a similar idea: “Russia ought to lose itself, its face, reject its identity in the name of humanity and the sake of humanity.”89 Quoting the 19th century poet and political figure Vladimir Pecherin, Agursky reminded us that this strange Russian longing for the nation’s death predated even Ustrialov:

How delightful it is to hate the Motherland. And to expect avidly its extinction. And to see in the destruction of the Motherland The dawn of the world revival!90

Dugin’s example shows that this persistent Russian messianic orientation is well alive. Agursky’s somber assessment from the Third Rome that provides the title to this thesis holds truer today than ever: “The shadows of false messiahs hang over our time.”91

4.4 Messianic tendencies in Agursky’s Zionist writings

4.4.1 Troubling similarities between Dugin and Agursky’s historical motives

We have seen in Agursky’s Sovremennik article how he condemned “unhealthy messianic attitudes” and “dreams of a big Israel.” He sought to defeat the Israeli far right, not to empower it. It is at once a shame that Agursky is not still alive to share his insights on these extraordinary developments, but also something of a blessing that he did not live to see his hopes of increased Russian- Zionist cooperation derail into the very fascistic nationalization and politicization of messianic attitudes he had set out to defeat. Dugin and his far- right Israeli allies are proof that, contrary to Agursky’s hopes, this increased cooperation has failed to thoroughly safeguard Russian nationalism or Zionism from the harmful forces of messianic imperialism. As we have seen in the last section, Agursky and Dugin’s nationalist readings of Soviet history were quite similar. It is generally true that while the former approached national Bolshevism from a negative perspective, the latter did so from a positive one. But Dugin’s oft-quoted summation of national Bolshevism

88 Shenfield (2001), 197. 89 Agursky (1984), 179. 90 Ibid, 178. 91 Agursky (1987), 286.

123 could also serve as a summary of Agursky’s historical works, which equated the USSR with Nazi Germany: “Beyond ‘rights’ and ‘lefts,’ there is one indivisible Revolution, in the dialectical triad of the “Third Rome - Third Reich - Third International.”92 We must also note that Dugin and Agursky’s pragmatic nationalist motives for advancing such a nationalist view of history are not entirely incomparable. In exposing the USSR’s nationalist essence, both Dugin and Agursky hoped to historically vindicate their nationalist projects. To be sure, Dugin’s fascistic call for countries around the world to embrace militant nationalism is a far cry from Agursky’s left-wing Zionism. But one might also argue that both Dugin and Agursky’s belief in national Bolshevism helped them to justify the nationalization of national-religious messianic tasks: for Dugin, the realization of Russia’s task as a model non-open, ‘Eurasian’ society; for Agursky, the rise of a Jewish civilization in Israel that would become a beacon for mankind, blending the best elements of East and West. As we turn our attention to messianic tendencies in Agursky’s Zionism, the obvious troubling questions that arise: to what extent did Agursky subscribe to a vision of Zionism not so different from the national Bolshevism he condemned? What, if anything, is the distinguishing ideological factor between the political realization of the Jewish messianic idea – the return to Zion – and attempts such as national Bolshevism to politically and secularly realize Russia’s messianic role? In order to address these questions fairly, we must explore some of the messianic notions espoused by Agursky in his writings on Zionism. But before we do that, a few words are necessary regarding the different historical types of Jewish messianism and Zionism’s complex relationship with messianism.

4.4.2 Jewish Messianism and its historical relationship with Zionism

Jewish messianism is rooted in the notion that Jews are God’s “chosen people,” whose national existence began when they entered into a covenant with God. A number of passages from the Old Testament books of the Prophets – the most numerous and notable of which are found in the Book of Isaiah (Eighth century B.C.E) – prophesize a time when the Jews will receive their end of the covenant, announced by the coming of a messiah. These prophecies hold that with the arrival of the messiah, glory will be restored to Israel and peace will reign over the world. Duncan has noted that from the onset, “The development of Jewish messianism brought out the tension between universalist messianism and

92 Dugin (1997), “Metafizika: Tretii Rim – Tretii Raykh – Tretii Internatsional.”

124 nationalist messianism which has been common to later messianisms.” On the one hand, the universal dimension of Jewish messianism is emphasized in passages in Isaiah that recognize that with the messiah’s arrival, all nations “will turn to the God of Israel who will judge them and inaugurate peace.” But Duncan has noted that the nationalist, particularistic dimensions of Jewish messianism – which came to dominate in later historical writings such as the Book of Daniel (165 C.E) – is also indisputably present in the ancient books of the prophets. Even in the Book of Isaiah, the Jewish messiah is recognized to be “a national, political figure of this world, within history, who would restore the national independence of Israel, re-establish the House of David and rule as King of Israel.” A large reason Judaism did not recognize Jesus as the messiah is because the spiritual salvation He offered did not realize the long awaited historical, political restoration of the Jewish kingdom in Israel.93 In beginning the discussion of Jewish messianism’s relationship to Zionism, it is important to stress that notwithstanding the nationalist-political element in biblical Jewish messianism, many Orthodox Jews fundamentally opposed and continue to oppose Zionism as an ideology of false messianism. These religious Jews hold that the messianic era and the Jewish return to Israel will be initiated divinely. Any human attempt to rush this eschatological process would be heresy. For much of Zionism’s early history, such ideas informed most religious Jews, who saw Zionism as a distinctly secular movement. It was not until the mid-1920s that the forefathers of modern religious Zionism, like Rabbi Isaac Kook, tried to reconcile the Orthodox Jewish religious tradition with the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel. Religious Jewish anti-Zionism suffered its greatest blow following the Holocaust. Naturally, after such devastation it became rather difficult to argue that the Jewish people should continue to wait around for the messiah, especially as the establishment of a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine became an increasingly realizable political task.94 Orthodox opposition to Zionism can be read as a protest against the desecration of the sacred into the profane, a dangerous Promethean attempt to accomplish a meta-historical task in real history that was doomed to fail. Considering the messianic rhetoric of many prominent Zionists, the concerns of these religious Jews cannot be deemed groundless. Given the long historical precedent of the nationalist dimension in Jewish messianism, it is hardly

93 Duncan (2000), 7-8. 94 For Orthodox opposition to Zionism see Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York 1972) 407-413. For more on Kook’s role in formulating religious Zionism see the collection of essays Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Jewish Spirituality, ed. Lawrence J. Kaplan and David Shatz (New York 1995).

125 surprising that messianism featured prominently in Zionist discourse after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. A number of scholars have emphasized the importance of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in advancing messianic ideas and rhetoric to mobilize the Jewish masses. When referring to the Jewish national-building task in Israel, Ben-Gurion frequently used expressions such as “‘messianic vision’, ‘chosen people’, ‘a model society’, ‘a light unto the nations’, and ‘the redemption of the nation and of humanity.’”95 David Ohana has noted that “in view of the Bolshevik challenge,” which proclaimed a secular universal redemption, Ben-Gurion sought “to transform Zionism into Messianic fire” for propaganda purposes. In other words, he needed to appeal to the eschatological sensibilities of the masses. But Ohana also argued that Ben- Gurion’s Zionism was messianic not only in form, but also in content. Ben-Gurion believed, according to Ohana, in the “Messianic vision . . . [as] the central aim of Jewish/Hebrew history.”96 Nir Kedar has conversely downplayed the messianic dimension of Ben-Gurion’s Zionism, arguing that Ben-Gurion “never aspired to the end of history.” Instead, Kedar maintained, Ben-Gurion’s messianic rhetoric was only the means to the end of the quintessential concept of his political thought: mamlakhtiyut [civicism], defined by Ohana as “an awareness of society’s need to function as a civilized, independent polity manifesting civic republican responsibility and participation, respecting democracy, and upholding law and order.”97 Regardless of Ben-Gurion’s motives, in the late 1950s his messianic rhetoric began to draw a great deal of criticism from certain Zionist circles. These thinkers were wary of Ben-Gurion’s messianic language because they recognized in it the same dangerous nationalization and politicization of messianism that they had fearfully witnessed in the Soviet project – the defining elements of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism. As Kedar observed, they feared that “the combination of sweeping messianic ideas and Ben-Gurion’s political might would inflict an irreparable blow to Israeli democracy.”98 One of the most notable voices to articulate the dangers of Ben-Gurion’s messianic Zionism was that of Gershom Scholem, whose intellectual influence on Agursky we have briefly discussed in the introduction and the previous chapter. Having devoted his life to the study of Jewish mysticism, Scholem wrote

95 Nir Kedar, “‘We need the messiah so that he may not come’: on David Ben-Gurion’s use of messianic language,” Israel Affairs (2013), Vol. 19, No. 3, 393-409, 393. 96 David Ohana, Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and Its Critics (New York 2010), 39. 97 Kedar (2013), 394. 98 Ibid, 393.

126 extensively on the 17th century Sephardic rabbi and false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. Zevi eventually converted to Islam under Ottoman pressure but his messianic claims nonetheless inspired a massive Jewish religious movement, Sabbatianism, which Scholem believe had resulted in spiritual disaster.99 Scholem emigrated to Israel in 1926, and with time, his Zionism moved from the far left towards the center. Nevertheless, throughout his intellectual development, his deep knowledge of the catastrophic consequences of false messianism in Jewish history made him quite wary of Zionism’s messianic dimension.100 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Scholem, who had just immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, played a leading role in the Brit Shalom [Covenant of Peace] political organization. Brit Shalom was a small group, comprised of intellectuals like Scholem and Martin Buber who considered “Arab-Jewish rapprochement as the main task of the Zionist movement.”101 Informed by some of the Orthodox Jewish criticisms of Zionism addressed above, these intellectuals and, Scholem in particular, were cognizant of secular Zionism’s dangerously messianic elements. Scholem’s concerns were largely linguistic. The contemporary Israeli professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s has explained that in his first years in Israel “Scholem was well aware of the tensions and dangers inherent in the secularization and politicization/nationalization of Jewish conceptions,” including the Hebrew language. This much is clear from a 1926 letter Scholem wrote to German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig:

In a language [Hebrew –S.F.] where He is invoked back a thousand fold into our life, God will not stay silent. But this inescapable revolution of the language, in which the voice will be heard again, is the sole object of which nothing is said in this country. Those who called the Hebrew language back to life did not believe in the Day of Judgment that was thus conjured upon us [which they set up for us by their deeds-A.R-K.]. May the carelessness, which has led us to this apocalyptic path, not bring about our ruin. 102

Despite Scholem’s early wariness regarding Zionism’s dangerous politicization of biblical conception and the Hebrew language, he came to endorse political Zionism wholeheartedly in the late 1930s, largely as a result of the rise of Nazism.

99 See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah: 1626-1676 (London, 1973) and Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” published in The Messianic Idea In Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York 1971), 78-141. 100 For a fascinating article on the development of Scholem’s Zionism see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “‘On the Right Side of the Barricades’: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism,” Comparative Literature (2013), Vol. 65, No. 3, 363-381. 101 Laqueur (1972), 218. 102 Raz-Krakotzkin (2013), 368-369. Quote from a 1926 Scholem letter to German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.

127 Compared with his writings from the 1920s and early 1930s, Scholem’s post-war Zionism was much more pragmatic and less sympathetic towards the Palestinian plight. Just as Agursky, in his later years Scholem hoped that that the Jews and Arabs would find peace, but primarily blamed the Arabs for the lack of peace.103 Raz-Krakotzkin has argued that in turning his back on Jewish-Arab rapprochement, and embracing political Zionism, Scholem ended up promoting the very politicization of messianism that his writings from the 1920s had sought to combat.104 Raz-Krakotzkin’s controversial observations on Scholem’s intellectual development are quite intriguing and shed light on Agursky’s case. But they are also disputable. Even after embracing political Zionism, Scholem remained quite critical of Zionism’s messianic dimension, sharply criticizing Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric in the late 1950s and taking great intellectual pains to distinguish between meta-historical religious messianism and Zionism’s concrete historical tasks. In Scholem’s 1959 essay, “Towards and Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” he stressed the fatal implications that a failure to distinguish between messianism and Zionism had for the state of Israel:

Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. This readiness no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our own generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim, which has virtually been conjured up— that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.105

Here Scholem recognized that the tragic events of twentieth-century Jewish history had served to historically justify a Jewish state in Israel. Nevertheless, he made it clear that if Zionism was to be a successful project, it must reject false politicizations and imperialistic, chauvinistic understandings of biblical Jewish messianism. Scholem articulated these ideas with clarity in a 1970 interview he gave to Israeli writer Ehud Ben Ezer:

103 See for example Ehud Ben Ezer, “Zionism – Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion: Interview with Gershom G. Scholem,” published in Unease in Zion, edited by Ben Ezer (Jerusalem 1974), 263-297, 270-271. 104 See Raz-Krakotzkin (2013), 372. 105 Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” published in Scholem (1971), 1-37, 35-36.

128

I came here [to Israel] because I thought, and I still think that Zionism is not a Messianic movement. Absolutely not. There are, of course, certain Messianic strains accompanying it in the background. As a sort of overtone there is a sublime melody that accompanies Zionism, for the Jews have been addicted to Messianism for two thousand years. But the price of Messianism . . . was a fundamental weakness of Jewish history, and it was a terrible price that we paid for that weakness. Our faith in the Messianic concept has cost us in terms of the very substance of the Jewish people, debilitating its powers of survival, as in the Sabbatai Zevi affair . . . But Zionism really did rebel. The difference between Zionism and Messianism resides in the fact that Zionism is acting within history, while Messianism remained on a Utopian plane.106

Like Agursky, Scholem denounced those who confused meta-historical messianism with the ideology of Zionism, operating in real historic time. For example, in a 1980 interview, Scholem compared one such far-right group, Gush Emunim [Bloc [of the] faithful] – which justified Israeli imperialistic claims with religious messianism – to the Sabbateans. “Like the Sabbataians [a different spelling- S.F.]” Scholem said in an interview, “their [Gush Emunim’s] Messianic programme can only lead to disaster. In the seventeenth century, of course, the failure of Sabbatianism had only spiritual consequences; it led to a breakdown of Jewish belief. Today the consequences of such Messianism are also political, and that is the great danger.”107 We have taken the liberty to expound on Scholem’s views on the complex relationship between Zionism and Jewish messianism because Scholem and Agursky’s Zionist positions are quite comparable. In their scholarship both Agursky and Scholem served to expose the disastrous historical consequences of false messianism; the former in regard to Soviet history, the latter in regard to Jewish history. Given these lessons, both thinkers rejected a messianic understanding of Zionism. But as Raz-Krakotzkin argued, Scholem’s “excitement about the messianic imagination together with anxiety with regard to its consequences,”108 exposes Zionism’s larger ambivalent relationship with messianism. On the one hand, as Scholem liked to stress, Zionism denied religious messianism as overly passive. In rushing the eschatological Jewish return to Zion, Zionism was distinctly anti-messianic and uncorrupted by any profane pretention of sacredness. But on the other hand, Raz-Krakotzkin poignantly observed that another side of Zionism was inherently messianic from

106 Ben Ezer (1974), 269. 107 David Ohana, Modernism and Zionism (London 2012), 75-76. 108 Raz-Krakotzkin (2013), 370.

129 the onset: “messianism,” he wrote, “was also reinterpreted as the basis for a national ‘secular’ myth, with Zionism (‘the utopian return’) as its fulfillment, and Israeli secular culture is based on the notion that the state is the realization of the expectations and longings of generations.”109 Here Raz-Krakotzkin identified those elements of the Zionists project that Scholem tried to explain away in the quote above as merely “the sublime melody that accompanies Zionism,” and not its essential feature. In the next section, we turn our attention to how Agursky – who as we have seen similarly to Scholem condemned messianic impulses in Zionism – also paradoxically followed in his mentor’s footsteps by perpetuating the messianic myth inherent in Zionism.

4.4.3 Messianic tendencies in Agursky’s Zionist writings

One has to dig rather deep to find messianic sentiments in Agursky’s Zionist writings. But the most prominent of such sentiments are found in his Russian- language writings on Zionism from the mid–late 1970s. We have actually already encountered one such text: Agursky’s 1974 open letter in the samizdat Veche journal. In chapter two, we concluded our discussion of this letter by noting that Agursky ended his Zionist appeal to Russian nationalists by quoting an early twentieth century Orthodoxy priest, who stressed that Jews and Russians alike had been endowed with the “worldwide vocation of the Holy East,” namely to oppose the “pathetic vanity of Godless western culture” by realizing “the will of God” and teaching “the people good acts.” Here, Agursky directly appealed to the “messianic pathos” that Dugin identified as the most important historiosophical bond between Jews and Russians. More than this – similarly to Dugin’s current work – Agursky’s Veche letter envisioned the East as a collection of model, traditional societies united against the harmful materialism of the godless West. Agursky also resolved the universalist-particularistic tension inherent in his Jewish nationalism much in the same way Dugin did with his Russian nationalism in Templars of the Proletariat: by realizing a model society based on particularistic and exclusivist religious traditions, Israel and Russia were to become universal beacons, inspiring other nations to turn away from materialistic globalism and to return to their respective national and religious roots and traditions. It is not a very large intellectual leap between Agursky’s messianic understanding of the traditional East and Dugin’s vision of a Eurasian union of non-open societies rooted in traditionalism.

109 Ibid, 369.

130 Agursky’s Veche letter was written while he was still in Russia, and his messianic conception of Zionism was to undergo some changes upon his arrival in Israel. During his first years in Israel, Agursky contributed to a number of Russian-language émigré and Israeli journals. In these writings, he turned away from the more nationalist and traditionalist arguments found in his Veche letter (Jewish messianism à la Book of Daniel), and increasingly advanced a universalist understanding of Zionism’s messianic function (Jewish messianism à la Book of Isaiah). One of the best examples of Agursky’s messianic universalism is a 1977 short article he wrote for the Russian-language Israeli journal Sion [Zion]. In this article he tackled the challenges facing Israel in light of the massive influx of Soviet Jewish immigrants. At the end of his piece, he provided his vision for Israel, which he believed could reap huge civilization benefits from the Soviet newcomers:

In the long-term perspective, Israel should become not only a beacon (and possible the only center) of Jewish social life [obshchestvennoi zhizni], but also the spiritual and cultural center of all mankind, as the Jewish prophets dreamed ...... Such a goal, certainly, will attract Jewish intellectuals and will give birth to a pull towards Israel, despite all its challenges, and this is the most elementary way to gather the forces necessary for the revolutionary renewal of Jewish life. Such a goal has been repeatedly formulated by many Jewish thinkers. Ben-Gurion constantly stressed our predestination: “to be the beacon of nations.” The entirety of Israeli history is the evolution in this direction. The Jewish nation, its deep national strengths cannot be awoken with easily solved tasks. Our enthusiasm is aroused only by the inaccessible and the insurmountable, which, with superhuman efforts, we will transform into the achievable.110

One person particularly intrigued by Agursky’s belief that Zionism could only be revitalized in the 1970s “by the injection of . . . non-realist objectives” was the Canadian-American Jewish writer Saul Bellow. In July 1976, Bellow published a long New Yorker article about his journey to Israel and his thoughts on the state of Zionism. At the article’s end, he devoted a couple of pages to Agursky and his unconventional belief that only the impossible task of establishing a model, universal civilization could revitalize Zionism. Bellow’s discussion of Agursky’s ideas are drawn from two sources: a letter he received from Agursky and a résumé he found in the London journal Insight of Agursky’s article on Russian immigrants to Israel (presumably the Sion article we have just mentioned). A

110 Mikhail Agursky, “Neosionizm v sovetskom soiuze,” Sion (1977), No. 19, 76-83, 82-83.

131 central feature of both the letter and the résumé, according to Below, was that Agursky believed that the new wave of Russian immigrants were in a unique position to instill in Zionism a real sense of universalism based on a return to traditional and religious values. Bellow focused on Agursky’s idea that the Soviet-Jewish Zionists of Agursky’s generation had a real chance to transform Israeli civilization for the better, in light of the bitter lessons communism had taught them:

The Russian Jews, he [Agursky] concludes, can make an important contribution to the necessary revival of religious feeling. Their totalitarian experience has matured their goals as well as toughened their minds. Bitter experience has given them a wisdom too scarce to be wasted.111

Presumably, Bellow’s point is that Agursky believed Russian Jews had learned the lessons of national Bolshevism. They had a unique obligation and ability to ensure that Israel did not follow in Russia’s wake, politicizing messianic religious beliefs in a chauvinistic fashion. Instead, they should turn towards uncorrupted religious beliefs. Yet as we have seen, Agursky did not separate messianism from Zionism, which is also clear from Bellow’s article:

Agursky . . . speaks of an older revolutionary generation which has not been forgotten, and of the messianic universalism of that generation and its desire for social justice. He thinks that the Hebrew prophets in Russian translation should be put into the hands of the new immigrants from the Soviet Union ‘to enrich their national awareness’. . .‘No capital investment could be as effective as this spiritual investment.’ Agursky himself writes, ‘Israel must become the center of a new civilization as was dreamed by the prophets, the best representatives of the Jewish people.’112

Thus, Agursky believed the only way to counter Israeli chauvinism was with a universalistic understanding of Zionism’s messianic dimension, derived from the Old Testament Prophets. Such universalistic messianic ideas are also expressed in a 1976 letter Agursky sent to the Parisian Russian émigré newspaper Russkaia mysl’ [Russian Thought]. In this letter, he condemned Russian nationalists who had accused Israel of “imperialism [and] the borrowing of German [i.e. Nazi- S.F.] methods.” He admitted that like all nations, Israel had its fair share of “spiritually

111 Saul Bellow, “A Strictly Personal Syllabus – 1,” The New Yorker, 12 July 1976, 40-82, 80. Agursky is discussed from 79-81. 112 Ibid.

132 impoverished, chauvinistic nationalism,” but also stressed that many Israelis, like himself, rejected chauvinism and imperialism, even if they understood their national task in messianic terms:

I entirely support the idea . . . that Israel took upon itself the function of creating a new social-ethical model in the post-industrial epoch. But my point of view . . . this is not based on chauvinism. It derives from the old predictions of such Jewish prophets as Isaiah. This is the duty of the Jewish people, which it has unfortunately avoided for a long time. And if another nation desires to compete with it [Israel] in the business of creating such a model, we can only rejoice at this.113

This quote lays bare Zionism’s ambivalent relationship towards Jewish messianism observed by Raz-Krakotzkin. On the one hand, Agursky condemned Israeli chauvinism and imperialism, seeing it as the profane desecration of a sacred religious messianism. But much like Scholem, he was also enthusiastic about the utopian dimension of Zionism, recognizing in Zionism a messianic project that would usher in a bright new era for all mankind. Left wing scholars such as Raz-Krakotzkin see Zionism’s ambivalence towards messianism as rather problematic, given the injustices and the widespread suffering of the Palestinian people to which Zionism has at least partially contributed. He argued that Scholem’s ambivalence towards messianism raises concerning questions.114 These questions apply with equal validity to the case of Agursky: Where is the dividing line between the chauvinistic right-wing Zionism condemned by Agursky that believes the Jews are divinely owed the entirety of historic Palestine – including the West Bank and Gaza – and Agursky’s utopian Zionism, which held that the rise of a Jewish State in Israel would lead the world’s return to religion and tradition, ushering in the utopian post-industrial age? While Agursky’s variant is much more palatable and peaceful, both are rooted in nationalizations and secular actualizations of Jewish messianic concepts. Fundamentally, Zionism is the ideology that a Jewish homeland should exist in Israel, which is already a territorial claim. Far-right Zionists use these same messianic justifications to lay claim to an even wider swath of territory. Is the diving ideological factor between Agursky’s anti- expansionist messianic Zionism and the far right’s expansionist messianic Zionism merely a question of how much territory should be given to the Jews?

113 Mikhail Agursky, “K diskussii o Solzhenitsyne [Iz redaktorskoy pochty],” Russkaiia mysl’, 17 June 1976. 114 Raz-Krakotzkin (2013), 372, 374-375.

133 Moreover, the similarities between Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism and his own nationalization of the messianic complex are striking. Agursky’s utopian Zionist sentiments – especially those discussed in his Sion letter – can be directly compared to the nationalization of messianism that Agursky observed in the thought of Ustrialov, as the juxtaposition of these two Agursky quotes shows:

The Jewish nation, its deep national strengths cannot be awoken with easily solved tasks. Our enthusiasm is aroused only by the inaccessible and the insurmountable, which, with superhuman efforts, we will transform into the achievable [from the passage of Agursky’s 1977 Sion article quoted above-S.F.].

The real objectives of Russia are according to such a gnostic point of view, broader than its frontiers and deeper than its narrow national interests. Russia must liberate labour and creativity, must accomplish the synthesis of civilisation and culture technology and the new man115 [from Agursky’s 1984 article on Ustrialov-S.F.].

These similarities beg the question: to what extent did Agursky embrace a universalistic messianic vision of Israel not so different from Ustrialov’s national Bolshevism? One could try to defend Agursky against accusations of politicizing messianism by appealing to the same arguments of intended audience that explain the sympathies towards national Bolshevism found in Agursky’s early Russian-language work. It should be noted that just like his most sympathetic work on national Bolshevism, the most messianic of Agursky’s Zionist writings – the pieces which we have just discussed – are his Russian-language writings from the period of 1975-1980. Besides Bellow’s article, which is a secondary source, Agursky’s messianism never entirely emerges in his English-language work. Even in his later 1990 Russian-language Sovremennik article, as we have seen, Agursky related to messianism’s influence on Zionism quite negatively, and his commitment to a two-state solution is much more evident. In his late 1970s writings in Russian-language Israeli and émigré press perhaps Agursky deliberately appealed to the “messianic pathos” that Dugin believes unites Jews and Russians. This explanation especially makes sense in regard to his Sion article, which aimed to inspire Zionist enthusiasm in Soviet Jews who had just made alliyah. In his Sovremennik article, conversely, Agursky is more concerned with proving to Russian conservatives that Israel is not an evil bourgeoisie

115 Agursky (1984), 179.

134 imperialist empire. He consequently downplayed Zionism’s messianic dimension in this piece. It is also possible that throughout the 1980s, Agursky’s scholarly investigation of national Bolshevism swayed him away from his earlier messianism. But his 1984 article “Universalist Trends in Jewish Religious Thought” challenges this simple chronological explanation. In this fascinating article Agursky argued against “the widespread tendency to regard Jewish religious thought as totally isolationist and bereft of any universal elements.” As we have noted, this tendency features prominently in what Laruelle has called Dugin’s “anti-Semitic philo-Zionism.” Agursky contended this predominating view – which he believes had taken root not only in Christians, but also Jews – by providing examples of Russian-born Orthodox Jewish thinkers who advanced universalist ideas in their work. For example, he discussed how Rabbi Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, “was sharply opposed to the position of those Jews who rejected other religions; genuine elements, he [Kook] argued, are present in all religions . . . one must expose the common element in other religions. . .” Agursky also mentioned Rabbi Abraham Hen’s deep respect for Dostoevsky and Kropotkin. He thus argued for the legitimacy of the universalist trend in Jewish thought, claiming:

Judaism is pluralistic and everyone can find a trend within Judaism corresponding to his outlook and taste. It would be a grave mistake to think of Judaism as a militant religious system excluding all contact with the outside world. While there are people who view Jewish-Gentile relations in terms of the mortal confrontation between Jacob and Esau, these trends nevertheless belong to the margins of Judaism.116

Here the ambiguity of Agursky’s position is quite clear. On the one hand, he expressed his belief that Israel must be pluralistic and open to the outside world. This clearly distinguishes Agursky’s position from Dugin’s national Bolshevik model of a non-open society. But on the other hand, much like the Russian nationalists (e.g. Dostoevsky, Dugin) who stress the universal elements of Russian thought, Agursky’s article assumes that it is Israel, and not Russia, that has been divinely anointed with the messianic “superhuman task” – to borrow a phrase from Agursky’s Sion article – of realizing mankind’s universal salvation. It is no coincidence that Rabbi Kook is featured prominently in this article. As we

116 Mikhail Agursky, “Universalist Trends in Jewish Religious Thought: Some Russian Perspectives,” Immanuel (Fall 1984), No. 18, accessed online at http://www.jcrelations.net/Universalist_Trends_in_Jewish_Religious_Thought__Some_Russian_P erspectives.2725.0.html

135 have noted, Kook was among the first to justify Zionism along Orthodox Jewish lines. With this article and the others we have examined in this section, Agursky followed in Kook’s footsteps by nationalizing Jewish religious messianism.

4.5 Conclusion: Agursky’s larger view of history and important distinctions between Agursky and Dugin’s messianisms

In this chapter we have tried to show that while Dugin and Agursky read Soviet history in a similarly nationalist way, the former distorted the historiographical ideas of the latter in order to advance a chauvinistic Russian messianism based on the national Bolshevik non-open, traditionalist Eurasian society. Dugin has even found a place for Israel in this vision of global national Bolshevism. If anything is clear, it is that these developments have vindicated Agursky’s longstanding hope for increased cooperation between Russian nationalism and Zionism, but haven proven utterly wrong his predictions that this increased cooperation would lead to the disempowerment of the Russian and Israeli far-right. Towards the end of this chapter we have discussed how Agursky’s keen awareness of the dangerous historical consequences of the USSR’s politicization/nationalizations of religious-national conceptions and his marked opposition to chauvinist, right-wing Zionist trends did not prevent him from embracing Zionism’s messianic dimension. Agursky’s work clearly shows that he believed deeply and continuously in the divine, universal historic task assigned to the Jewish nation. But in concluding our arguments, one last word must be said in defense of Agursky’s messianism. In 1975, Agursky received a fascinating letter from a Russian-born Orthodox priest who had immigrated to America, Igumen Gennady Eikalovich. Discussing the relationship between Jewish and Christian messianism and Zionism, Eikalovich wrote that, “Although Christ said that His Kingdom is not of this world, and consequently any utopian ideology preaching the actual implementation of this Kingdom in this world is untenable, we must nevertheless aspire to such an ideal via the path of implementing Christian morals in personal and social life.” What is more, Eikalovich recognized Zionism as a positive example of this aspiration.117 Eikalovich’s appraisal of Zionism sheds light on the moral and religious nature of Agursky’s faith in Zionism. One could argue that in laying claim to a Jewish Israel at all, Agursky politicized messianic conceptions. But unlike Dugin’s messianic belief in Russia’s eschatological historical role, Agursky did not

117 Igumen Gennadii Eikalovich, 17 December, 1975 Letter to Agursky [FSO-01-072].

136 understand the creation of a Jewish state as the teleological end of history that could be brought about with human efforts. Agursky saw Zionism much in the same spirit as Eikalovich saw Christian messianism: an imperfect human aspiration towards a divine utopia that will eventually be realized eschatologically. Despite the impossible nature of realizing in concrete, historical terms God’s divine kingdom, Agursky welcomed this impossible challenge as a morally edifying task for the Jewish nation. He did not see Zionism as the mystical realization of the eschatological process, which remained a divine mystery, but rather the imperfect attempt to emulate God’s Kingdom on earth. Regardless of one’s stance on the difficult Palestinian question, Agursky’s can hardly be accused of perceiving all other nations as instruments of Israel’s own eschatology, or of abandoning traditional morality in the pursuit of history’s final telos. Unlike Dugin, Agursky never justified violence or territorial expansion in order to bring about the end of history.118 On the contrary, Zionism for Agursky meant that Israel was anointed with a higher moral calling, and should thus strive to bring about peace and social justice, especially in regard to the Palestinian question. He believed that despite the divine call to realize God’s will on earth, mankind must not delude itself that it is accomplishing divine tasks or realizing the end of history. Dugin fails to make this crucial distinction: like the Soviet-era national Bolsheviks, he sees in Russian politico-messianism the unfolding of the divine, metaphysical process, and thus venerates not religious morality, but his own political task. While we cannot deny that Agursky was guilty of nationalizing religious Jewish messianism, his messianism remained religious, while Dugin’s messianism is distinctly gnostic. Dugin believes he knows; Agursky knew he believed. These are important differences. As this chapter has tried to show, it is often very difficult to draw distinguishing lines between religious and political nationalism, and perhaps even more difficult to distinguish between a pure religious messianism – which tries to emulate God’s Kingdom on earth while still waiting for the divine hour – and a dangerous politicization of messianism that places divine tasks into human hands. To be sure, Agursky’s writings and beliefs often blur these dividing lines. He himself wrote in Pepel Klaasa that, “Religious and political nationalism are always mixed in any national tendency, and neither Russian nor Jewish nationalism is an exception.”119 Nevertheless, even in his nationalization of religious messianic ideas, Agursky attempted to advance the same cause he had endorsed since the beginning of his career as a public

118 For Dugin’s advocacy of violence see, for example, Dugin (1997): “Sub’’ekt bez granits.” 119 Agursky (1996), 356.

137 intellectual: the defeat of far-right étatism. As we have seen, he persistently stood by a traditional, non-expansionist religious nationalism as “the only humanistic alternative in Russia to racism and neo-Nazism.” In 1998, Wayne Allensworth wrote on the present-day significance of the anti-democratic, left wing neo-Slavophile stance advanced by Agursky in a 1977 defending Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders:

What may have appeared cryptic some time ago . . .seems evident now . . . Agursky’s comments seem all the more prophetic: Russia is at a crossroads. A choice must be made, not between nationalism and internationalism but between Russian nationalisms.120

Agursky made his choice and stood by it. Contemporary developments suggest that his hopes for the blossoming of a religious Russian nationalism devoid of étatism have so far not been realized in the post-Soviet era. But for all the concerning implications of his work, Agursky’s case suggests that instead of categorically condemning nationalism we would do better to realize its staying power and to defend its healthy manifestations, grounded in religious morality and not gnostic political perversions of religious conceptions. Thus the ambivalent words Agursky used to conclude his article on his own favorite subject of study, Ustrialov, can be applied with equal validity to his own beguiling case: “So he did not betray his views. Was this his final decisive victory over common sense? Who knows?”121

120 Allensworth (1998), 83-84. 121 Agursky (1984), 179.

138 Conclusion

We have tried to show a full picture of the roots, reasoning, and contemporary implications of Mikhail Agursky’s unconventional belief in the compatibility of the aims of the Jewish and Russian national movements and his hopes for their future cooperation. Agursky’s disillusionment with the Soviet system – fueled by the bitter memory of his father’s tragic fate and his own negative encounters with anti-Semitism – brought him to the very ideologies and institutions his fathers’ generation of Soviet Jewry had spurned: religion and nationalism. Severed from his native Jewish faith, Agursky first converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and while working with the Church developed a deep sympathy for Russian nationalism. But it was not long before the Church led Mikhail back to the Judaism and Zionism that his father had so zealously shunned. With the rise of official Soviet anti-Semitism and the formation of a concentrated neo-Zionist front in the late 1960s, Agursky found himself in between two nationalisms: the Russian nationalism that had fostered his spiritual awakening, and the Zionism that was for him at once ancient and brand new, having been buried beneath a generation of proclaimed Soviet internationalism. In between these two worlds Agursky advanced something of an anomalistic position in his dissident writings from the early and mid 1970s. Fighting for the right of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, he also supported Solzhenitsyn’s conservative left wing neo-Slavophile position, and defended his anti-democratic program for Russia. Advancing the notion that both the materialistic West and the totalitarian East had lost sight of tradition and morality, Agursky, just as Solzhenitsyn, urged society to return to the religious and communal bonds of the past. He saw both anti-Soviet Russian nationalism and Soviet neo-Zionism as defensive movements, seeking to recover traditions and religions that had been destroyed by Soviet totalitarianism. Thus, while far-right nationalist dissidents spread myths about the Zionist conspiracy to destroy Russia, Agursky all the same advocated closer ties between Zionism and Russian nationalism. At the same time, Agursky believed that Soviet ideology had coopted certain aspects of Russian nationalism and particular Russian Orthodox religious conceptions, grossly distorting ‘the Russia idea’ into a chauvinistic, expansionist ideology of empire. With his work as a historian in Israel Agursky castigated this étatist Russian/Soviet nationalism, labeling it ‘national Bolshevism’ and portraying it as the defining feature of Soviet history. In drawing attention to the

139 disastrous consequences that the false hopes of Samuil’s generation had wrought for Russian Jewry, Agursky hoped to prove that Soviet internationalism had been a fallacy, and that Soviet Jews could live freely and safely only in Israel. Enlightened to the dangerous consequences that resulted from the secularization and nationalization of religious messianic conceptions by personal experience and his own scholarship on national Bolshevism, Agursky denounced similar étatist positions he observed among far-right Zionists. Working with the socialist-democratic Avoda Party, he sought a peaceful two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and condemned messianic justifications of Israeli territorial expansion. Nevertheless, he also understood his own Zionism in messianic terms. Attempting to reconcile the particularistic and universalist dimensions of Jewish nationalism, Agursky argued for the need of a fundamentally ethno-differentialist1 Jewish state in Israel, while also subscribing to the universal import of the Zionist mission, believing that Israel would emerge as a utopian, beacon civilization for all mankind, as had been promised by the Jewish prophets. Agursky foresaw the birth of a new Third Way socio-ethical civilizational model in Israel and believed that Israel would recover a traditional way of life that had been lost in the chaos of the twentieth century, showing other nations the new way forward. In regards to Russia, he remained hopeful until the end that a non-expansionist left-wing neo-Slavophile nationalism would finally defeat chauvinistic étatism, and he maintained that increased Zionist cooperation with Russian nationalism would defeat the far right and bolster healthy, traditional, religious, and moral societies in both nations. While recent developments in both Israel and Russia confirm the realization of Agursky’s hopes for increased cooperation between Russian nationalism and Zionism, they negate his hypothesis that this cooperation would lead to the defeat of far-right étatist imperialism. On the contrary, in both Russia and Israel the politicization/nationalization of national-religious messianism has only gained intensity in recent years. Laruelle has defined contemporary Russian nationalism as fundamentally étatist. In a top-down process, historical and religious national symbols are coopted in order to pursue a course of modernization, normalization, and Westernization, “even if this is achieved by military or authoritarian means, as once occurred under Peter the Great.”2 Although Laruelle was writing in 2009, her observations were wholly vindicated with Putin’s speech following the annexation of Crimea, in which he justified

1 Naturally, Agursky himself did not use this term. 2 Marlène Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York 2009), 203.

140 Russia’s imperialistic expansion on the grounds that Crimea had been the location of Prince Vladimir’s baptism.3 In Israel too, étatist nationalism is on the rise. Raz-Krakotzkin’s has declared that Scholem’s query as to whether or not Israel will perish “in the crisis of the Messianic claim,” “has become even more urgent in Israel today, where politico- messianic enthusiasm is growing and gaining increasing recognition.”4 We have encountered the most passionate fringes of this enthusiasm: Dugin’s neo- Eurasianist-Zionist allies, such as Eskin. But we have also seen how the recent success of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party attests to the entrance of New Right ideas like ethno-differentialism into the Israeli political mainstream. In an article printed in The Guardian just over one month ago, Netanyahu’s most recent coalition deal – which involved the appointment of Lieberman to Defense Minister – is said to have ushered in the most hard-right government in Israeli history. On the left, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak warns that the Israeli government has been “infected by the shoots of fascism.” And even on the right, the former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, whom Lieberman replaced, fears the “rising tide of extremism in his party and the country as a whole,” notwithstanding his own hawkish position.5 It is a concerning sign of the times that a major mouthpiece of Western liberal intellectualism, The New York Review of Books, is no longer running articles like Agursky’s 1972 apologia of Zionism. Instead, one finds on the pages of this publication concerning accounts of how “the Israeli right, with the government behind it, is continually attempting to criminalize Israeli human rights activists.”6 Yuri Slezkine has poignantly summarized how in many ways, the Zionist dream of a Jewish utopian return to Israel has resulted in an aggressively étatist state:

Europe’s strangest nationalism has succeeded in transforming a radical Jewish ‘self-hatred’ into a functioning nation-state. It is a peculiar state however – almost as peculiar as the doctrine that brought it into being. Self-consciously Western in the heart of ‘Oriental’ darkness . . . it is the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe in the postwar – and post- Cold War – world. The Israeli equivalent of such politically illegitimate concepts as ‘Germany for the Germans’

3 Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” 18 March, 2014, accessed online at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 on 28 June 2016. 4 Raz-Krakotzkin (2013), 367. 5 Peter Beaumont, “Israel coalition deal brings in its most hard-right government ever,” The Guardian, 25 May 2016 accessed online at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/25/israel-coalition-deal-hard-right- government-avigdor-lieberman on 16 June 2016. 6 David Shulman, “Israel: The Broken Silence,” The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2016.

141 and ‘Greater Serbia’ – “the Jewish state” – is taken for granted both inside and outside Israel . . . The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life. And probably no other European state can hope to avoid boycotts and sanctions while pursuing a policy of territorial expansion, wall building, settlement construction in occupied areas, use of lethal force against demonstrators, and extrajudicial killings and demolitions.7

Considering Agursky’s hopes that Israel would become a new civilizational model of morality and justice, there is something painfully ironic about Slezkine’s observations. This irony is rather reminiscent of Samuil Agursky’s defeated hopes in the realization of an internationalist worker’s paradise on earth. In the endless historical dialectic between fathers and sons, Mikhail Agursky believed Zionism to be Russian Jewry’s salvation from the mistakes of his father’s generation. But Mikhail Gorelik – the editor of Agursky’s memoirs – profoundly noted that,

In a paradoxical way, it would seem that despite all the ways Agursky contradicted his father, he mainly resembled him: in his passion, his unwillingness to accept reality, his anti-Hegelian disobedience, his inflexibility, the indomitable energy of his break with the present – which is doomed to become the past, his impassioned aspiration towards freedom and the creation of something new.8

This paradoxical relationship of contrast and likeness between father and son reveals the profound dialectic between dogmatism and open-mindedness that defined Agursky's life and work. On the one hand, Agursky was set in his convictions, advancing passionate and often excessive views, which have troublesome contemporary implications. But on the other hand, he continuously sought reconciliation with ideological camps ostensibly hostile to his own position, and was most fascinated by the very ideas that he opposed. This was because Agursky, unlike Dugin, was not convinced that he knew the end of history. While he believed that he was on the right side of the barricades, he knew his position to be only one of billions. Reminding the world that “Peace is not made with friends,”9 Agursky refused to read history dogmatically or didactically:

We should not look for the guilty and innocent in history. It is easy to count mistakes when the battle is already over. And after us there will

7 Slezkine (2004), 364. 8 Gorelik (1996), 407. 9 Agursky (1991), “We Mustn’t Shun.”

142 be record-keepers, who perhaps will collect material about us in preparation for the Last Judgment. We must try to understand the actions of everyone, no matter who they were: the Cadets, Social Revolutionaries, the left communists, sectarians. The Bolshevik Revolution is a huge human tragedy, the study of which will continue for a long time yet.10

Ultimately, it is this candid attitude of impartiality, this recognition that only via mutual understanding can we achieve progress, that endows Agursky’s beguiling life and work with its deeper significance – a significance that remains as powerful and relevant today as ever.

10 Agursky (1980), “Ot avtora.”

143 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited by Mikhail Agursky

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144 Materials cited from the Agursky Archive FSO-01-072 at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen

-Eikalovich, Igumen Gennadii, 17 December, 1975 Letter to Agursky -Pipes, Richard, May 11, 1982 letter to Agursky -Pipes, Richard, July 25, 1979 letter to Agursky -Tucker, Robert, March 19, 1977 letter to Sidney Hook -Tucker, Robert, May 21, 1977 letter from to Agursky

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148