Volume 30, Number 2 · February 17, 1983
Russia's Old New Right
By Aileen Kelly
The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History
by Alexander Yanov, translated by Stephen Dunn
University of California Press, 339 pp., $19.95
After emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1974, Alexander Yanov, a historian and journalist, published two monographs in which he drew attention to the rise of a Soviet 'New Right': a messianic nationalism which for two decades had been gaining ground not only in the government (where it animated a neo-Stalinist opposition to détente), but also, and more remarkably, in the dissident movement. Yanov concluded that parts of the opposition and establishment right shared an isolationist and messianic nationalism strongly colored by anti-Semitism. Both believed that the fundamental conflict between Russia and the West was neither political nor economic but spiritual in nature. On the one side they saw the bankrupt values of the West, reflected in the hollow freedom of its political democracies; on the other, the unique spiritual qualities of the Russian people which had found their supreme expression in the political tradition of Byzantine-Orthodox authoritarianism.
Review, 5082 words
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