ALEXANDER ZINOVIEV: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISWORK

Also by Michael Kirkwood and published by Palgrave Macmillan

ALEXANDER ZINOVIEV AS WRITER AND THINKER (editor with Philip Hanson) LANGUAGE PLANNING IN THE SOVIET UNION (editor)

Alexander Zinoviev

Alexander Zinoviev: An Introduction to His Work

Michael Kirkwood Senior ucturer in Russian School oj Slavonic and East European Studies University oj London

M

© Michael Kirkwood 1993

Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1993

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First published 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 978-1-349-12485-5 ISBN 978-1-349-12483-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12483-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Ponting-Green Publishing Services Sunninghill, Berkshire

For Alexander Zinoviev, my friend and (unwitting) mentor

Contents

List 0/ Abbreviations Vlli

Introduction IX

Part One Prolegomena

1 Homo Sovieticus 3

2 Zinoviev's Style and Language 29

Part Two The Brezhnev Era

3 Ziiaiushchie vysoty 61

4 Svetloe budushchee 89

5 Zheltyi dom 114

6 Kommunizm kak real'nost' 148

Part Three The Gorbachev Era

7 Gorbachevizm 173

8 Katastroika 196

9 Konets kommunizma? 221

Notes 248

BibliolJ'aphy 257

Index 263

Vll

List of Abbreviations

G ING IS K KKR MDMCh SB TGF TM TRC TRF VPR YH ZhD ZV

Gorbachevizm Idi na Golgofu Il superpotere in URSS Katastroika. Povest' 0 perestroike v Partgrade Kommunizm kak real'nost' Moi dom - moia chuzhbina Svetloe budushchee The Grand Failure The Madhouse The Reality of Communism The Radiant Future V preddverii raia The Yawning Heights Zheltyi dom Ziiaiushchie vysoty

viii

Introduction

This is not a book in the 'life and works of' mould. Zinoviev's output to date, not counting his professional work, occupies over a metre of the shelf space in my study. This volume will take up probably less than three centi­metres. A full discussion of his work in one volume is quite obviously impossible. I have essayed a partial discussion of so me of his work.

I have been prompted to write this book by an awareness of the fact that Zinoviev is undervalued, both as a writer and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. He is a 'difficult' writer who makes great cognitive demands on his readers and also a writer who constantly broadcasts his opinion of Western Soviet studies scholarship by dismissing it in toto. Not surpris­ingly, he has been virtually ignored by the vast majority of Western Sovietologists. This is a major source of concern to me, for Zinoviev has contributed more to my understanding of the Soviet Union than the rest of Russian literature and Soviet studies scholarship put together. I do not exaggerate.

Given the constraints of space, I have been obliged to be highly selective in my treatment of this writer. Of the various approaches which I could have adopted (thematic, chronological, genre-based, biographical) I have chosen a combination of the chronological and the genre-based. The reasons for my choice were dictated by the readership I had in mind.

The book has been written for people who have a good command of Russian and who are interested, professionaBy or otherwise, in the Soviet Union and how it works. With the exception of the first two chapters, each chapter examines an individual book. An English translation for aB of these books bar Konets kommunizma? (The End of Communism?) is, or shortly will be, available. I earnestly recommend, how­ever, that the works should be read in their original Russian version if at aB possible. Given the fantastic rate at which developments in the Soviet Union are taking place, it seemed to me important that I should present Zinoviev's views on these events. That consideration partly explains

IX

x Introduction

the selection of works examined in the last three chapters. However, there are two major reasons for choosing to examine individual works in chronological order. One was the desire to chart the evolution of Zinoviev's 'model' of Communism from its inception. Another reason resides in the complexity of the structure of the works themselves. The sad fact is that many readers do not 'stay the course', particularly as regards the larger works such as Ziiaiushchie vysoty (The Yawning Heights) and Zheltyi dom (The Madhouse). I have therefore tried to help the reader by producing a kind of vade mecum for each of the books examined.

It may be thought presumptuous of me to assume in advance that the reader of Zinoviev will require any par­ticular assistance. However, there are good grounds for my assumption. First, by writing in an amazingly discontinuous fashion, he makes incredible demands on the reader's short­term memory. As I discuss in detail in future chapters, his works are compendia of short texts, accompanied by a title. A work like Zheltyi dom contains over 800 of them. Keeping track of wh at is going on in a Zinoviev 'novel' is a major undertaking. Secondly, his works are entirely innocent of lists of contents and/or indexes. This constitutes a major handicap for the reader, since Zinoviev, more than any other writer I can think of, requires the reader to refer back constantly to what has gone before, without, however, pro­viding him or her with any obvious means of so doing. At that mundane level, therefore, this book should be of assistance, since I try to provide a 'reader's guide' to help in the negotiation of Zinoviev's vast intellectual terrain. To that extent, description takes precedence over analysis.

I make no apology for that, since it seems to me that at the present stage of Zinoviev scholarship what is required is an effective mode of access to his work as a preliminary to productive analysis. I am the more persuaded of this view by my perception that various literary critics have made ques­tionable judgements about Zinoviev's work which seem to have their origin in a less than thorough acquaintance with it. Part of my purpose, therefore, has been to discuss and evaluate the reception of his works by the literary-critical establishment, offering my own response where appro­priate.

Introduction xi

In an important sense, however, Zinoviev is a writer sui generis. Indeed, he seems to me to be a remarkable, if unwitting, example of a writer who fits, more closely than anyone else I can think of, the model adumbrated in that school of literary criticism associated with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. To borrow a phrase from the social sciences, he does not write within any of the conventional 'paradigms', yet he writes on matters literary, historical, political, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, moral and religious, in a mode which defies genre classification. In that sense he is indeed a 'scriptor' producing 'ecriture', to borrow terms defined by Barthes in his essay 'The Death of the Author'. Perhaps an unconventional writer requires unconventional treatment.

This book is unconventional in the sense that it tries to discuss the issues which Zinoviev raises from a perspective which is not 'paradigm-specific'. Zinoviev is writing for the intelligent non-specialist. This book examines his work from a non-specialist point of view. My selection of individ­ual works from Zinoviev's vast output has been determined by my sense of their relative importance. They constitute in my opinion the 'essential' Zinoviev. Excluded are well­known works such as Gomo sovetikus (Homo Sovieticus) and Idi na Golgofu (Go to Golgotha) , as weIl as works of arguably little or no interest such as Para hellum or Gosudarstvennyi zhenikh ( The State Suitor). One major omission is V preddverii raia ( On the Threskold of Paradise), a huge book which was published while Zinoviev was still in Moscow. This 'book' in fact was Zinoviev's literary archive, smuggled out to the West and published in unrevised form, and for that reason I decided reluctantly to leave it out. I have with much less reluctance decided to ignore the huge number of articles which Zinov­iev has written for an astonishing range of Western (and, increasingly, Soviet) publications. Much ofwhat he writes in these articles replicates ideas treated in the books I have selected for examination. I have also made no reference to his numerous public appearances on radio and television, nor to the notorious interviews with George Urban and Georges Nivat, published respectively in Encounter and L 'Ex­press. These constitute, to my mind, the 'inessential' Zinov­iev.

Xll Introduction

The format of this book is simple. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the man and his method of writing. The remain­ing chapters discuss individual works in chronological order, for the reasons given above, covering almost equally the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. All quotations are given in English, but the Russian has also been supplied in the case of excerpts taken from Ziiaiushchie vysoty, Svetloe budushchee (The Radiant Future), Zheltyi dom and Katastroika. All un­acknowledged translations are my own. I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration.

POSTSCRIPT, 2 SEPTEMBER 1991

I am grateful to the Macmillan Press for granting me the opportunity before the typescript goes to press to comment on the momentous events whieh have taken place in the Soviet Union since I wrote this book, partieularly the events of the failed coup of 19 August 1991 and its aftermath.

Actually, these events do not materially affect the argu­ments set out in this book. Zinoviev hirnself predicted a coup and provides at least part of the explanation for its failure. The coup was the logieal outcome of the process of 'counter-perestroika' wh ich is discussed in Chapter 9, and at least part of the explanation for its failure is the unreli­ability/untrustworthiness of comrades, a theme whieh runs through Zinoviev's whole oeuvre and whieh is discussed in Chapter 8. The anties of Gennady Yanaev, a man in whom Gorbachev put his trust, recall the figure of Suslikov, Gor­bachev's right-hand man in Katastroika.

The aftermath of the failed coup has also been in tune with Zinoviev's view of Communist society. Boris Yeltsin's instincts were authoritarian and anti-democratic, reflected in his move to shut down newspapers and ban the activities of the Communist Party.

More serious for Zinoviev's theory of Communism are Gorbachev's suspension of the Communist Party and the historie session of the Congress of People's Deputies on 2 September 1991, at which Gorbachev and the leaders often of the fifteen Soviet republies signed a join t declaration outlining proposals for what is in effect the controlled

In troduction xiii

dissolution of the Soviet Union. Zinoviev has always main­tained that one of the constitutive features of a communist society is a unified, centralised system of power. Currently, the Soviet centralised system is in the process of being destroyed.

However, one of Zinoviev's key distinctions is between what he calls the 'froth' of history and history's more important, unseen currents. The failed coup, the banning of the Communist Party and the 'joint declaration' referred to above may weIl be examples of that 'froth'. The Soviet Union's chronic problems remain. There are still many opponents of capitalism and believers in the egalitarian principles of the Communist ideal. Such private enterprise as exists is increasingly in the grip of various mafias. The administration of a territory as large as the Russian Federa­tion with its population of some 147000000 (1989 census) is likely to require a centralised system, albeit under another name.

In short, it is too soon to say with certainty that the system has been destroyed for good. Zinoviev has always main­tained that the Communist system is unreformable. So far he has been proved right. An attempt is currently being made to destroy it. It is too early to be sure that that attempt has succeeded. But even if it does succeed, it does not mean that Communism cannot be resurrected. For Zinoviev, Com­munism is based on the communalist instincts of people who are required to live in large numbers in complex societies. These instincts are natural and must be restrained by various forms of social con trol (see Chapter 3). Finally, ingrained habits die hard. The Soviet population cannot be expected overnight, or even in the next ten years, to forget patterns of thought and behaviour ingrained in them since birth. Having been told for generations about the evils of capitalism and the 'falseness' of Western democracy, they are unlikely to embrace wholeheartedly the new philosophy which denigrates virtually the whole Soviet experience and exaggerates the virtues of Western capitalism. As Zinoviev has frequently pointed out, the Soviet population cannot have the benefits of capitalism without its considerable disadvan tages.

We are entering the post-Soviet era. It would be com-

xiv Introduction

forting to think that it was also genuinely the era of post­Communism. No one can predict the future, but if I were asked to say which was the more likely, a successful transi­tion to a post-Communist, market-oriented, enterprise cul­ture on the territory of the former Soviet Union, or areturn to a centralised, authoritarian, anti-democratic system, al­beit with a different ideology (let us say 'humanist'), I would reluctantly opt for the latter. I ho pe I am wrong.