ABSTRACT
The dogmatist direction of Russian culture has been shaped for centuries by Byzantine and Greek Orthodox traditions. Russian communism has a cult of technology because Russia has been anti-mechanist at heart. American capitalism has a cult of technology because America is pro-mechanist at heart. The American tech-cult is the rationalization of an inner excess. The Russian tech-cult is overcompensation of an inner lack. The Russians have bowed down and worshipped the electric light of the West and suffer the fate as the West. In culture and intelligence Russians are our equals; in pluralist flexibility and easy-going tolerance they are our inferiors; in wisdom, that intuitive human wisdom which only suffering can earn, they are our superiors. The existence of latter refutes the blindly anti-Soviet thesis that Soviet culture is monolithic, servile, and sterile, as under Stalin. A peasant wants to own his own land, as in the only two uncollectivized Communist agricultures: Poland's and Yugoslavia's.
