ABSTRACT
If the previous period was notable for the contraction of public political space, when the Russian debate about Europe was stripped of positions alternative to the state’s and public discussion of what that position should be was all but eradicated, then the period under discussion in this chapter saw a tentative expansion of public political space. The public discussion about the state’s position was resuscitated in the form of professional debates between foreign affairs specialists, the mezhdunarodniki. These debates did not call into question the basic framework within which Europe was seen, and the issue of moral judgement was limited to a question of how much less advanced capitalist Europe was as compared with the socialist bloc. The focus was rather on how to interpret the relations between Western European states themselves, and also those between Western Europe on the one hand and the United States (and to some limited extent also Japan) on the other, as well as on what kind of relationship Russia should have with Western Europe. The tone was set by Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, where he announced that Soviet foreign policy was based on peaceful coexistence between states belonging to different social systems.1 Following the ouster of Khrushchev, the fully public Russian debate about Europe continued along the same lines, with remarkably little variation of themes and views. Throughout the period, the focal points of this part of the Russian debate about Europe remained the nature of European integration and the extent of Western Europe’s independence from the United States. Following the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964, however, there was a steep
increase in the number of writings disseminated at the margins of the public debate, the samizdat or privately manifold literature. While the foreign affairs specialists concentrated on the position of the state, it was left to samizdat writers to resuscitate the old romantic nationalist position, and to attempt the resuscitation of other positions as well. While the images thus presented were seldom original, but were
more often explicitly lifted from or latched onto the views of Russian tsarist and/or émigré authors, they nevertheless had an original impact, since the Russian debate into which they were reinserted was rather different from what it had been at the time when these images were first presented. The subterranean publication of a collection of essays under the title Iz-pod glyb
(From Under the Rubble) in 1974 captures the significance of what was happening. The title of the collection was doubly significant. First, by alluding to Soviet life as the ‘rubble’ from under which the collection could emerge, it placed itself in direct opposition to the state. Second, by self-consciously alluding to the follow-up volume to Vekhi, Iz glubiny (From the Deep), which was the last book-length romantic nationalist publication to emerge within Soviet Russia, a claim was made to take up the cudgels for this position and thus burst the state’s monopoly on the debate. Third, the key member of the group, author Aleksander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) further sharpened the critique of the state’s political practice by naming the first article of the collection ‘As Breathing and Consciousness Return’, thus placing the years between the Bolshevik suppression of Iz glubiny in 1918 and the emergence of his own article within a spiritually void parenthesis.
