Questions of ideology
I once had occasion, in one of my materials, to touch upon the subject of a request for a state ideology. But since that time, the number of citizens who do not see the meaning of life without the morning political information has not diminished, and the lack of state ideology is almost the main complaint of unsuited patriots to Putin. Already, even the sufferers for Ukraine, which has not yet been completely captured, are marginalized. Soon the heralds of the “drain of the Donbass” will die out (from natural causes). And the fighters for ideologization not only continue to suffer, but also find support and understanding, both among the broad masses, and in circles of experts and even the political elite. Moreover, in the struggle for the ideologization of the state and society, communists and fascists, liberals and democrats, supporters of constitutional monarchy, apologists of enlightened absolutism, and even supporters of the estate of the Kalita dynasty and the first Romanovs act as a united front.
What is the reason for the fact that the Russian state, which is usually sensitive to the demands of politically active citizens, does not respond to the pandemic of ideologization that has struck the brains of the population?
It would seem that what is simpler - the experience of the USSR is not just known, even the cadres of ideologues are alive. Download yourself on radio and television "correct" theses and citizens in harmonious, like-minded columns will move towards happiness, sweeping away all obstacles in their way and not exchanging petty squabbles over domestic stories, features of domestic and foreign policy, as well as prospects for the development of Russian statehood. And the authorities will be easier to manage. There is no need to carry on endless discussions, to endure the subversive work of agents of influence, who express wrong views in the media. And the ghost of Maidan, which adherents of a single ideology use as the ultima ratio, is completely dissolved in a universal joyful unity.
In fact, with a single ideology, everything happens exactly the opposite.
First, every citizen who advocates a single state ideology, by default, assumes that his views will be recognized as correct. I will not remind you how many communist parties and sects in the country are at war with each other, how many monarchical associations are oriented towards different forms of monarchy, different dynasties and different representatives of the same dynasty, how many fascist groups that hate their ideological counterparts more than ideological opponents. Even the "democrats" of the Yeltsin spill, now called liberals, who faded into political oblivion, fought each other for ideological purity with rare frenzy and still continue to produce party projects, all of whose members will not fit even on the same sofa, but on the bedside rug. Just to note that in addition to the general ideological trends (monarchism, communism, fascism, liberalism, democracy, etatism), every citizen who considers himself an adherent of one of these, in practice confesses some kind of his own particular ideology, periodically stigmatizing his own ideological gurus to what light is worth and almost their public burning on the market square, like hardened heretics.
In principle, the ideological preferences of individual citizens and small groups can be neglected, they do not affect the overall picture. For a start, let's look at general trends.
Let's make a simple separation between patriots and liberals. Patriots today in the country an absolute majority. We declare patriotism state ideology, prohibit anti-state propaganda and calmly drink tea in anticipation of a breakthrough to the gaping heights.
I could say that the country still has at least 15-20 million supporters of the liberals, that they will not put up with such violence against their conscience that they will actively protest and this will destabilize the situation. But opponents will rightly notice to me that if not all liberals, then their top leadership has long since been working against Russia and there is nothing to stand on ceremony with them. Start a civil war in their guts, and with the rest of the problems cope. Perhaps this is true. And several million of their fellow citizens can not be taken into account - endure-love. The main thing is not to turn off the main road to universal happiness, and small costs inevitably accompany any process.
If we put the liberals behind the brackets after the broad masses of the people, it’s still impossible to take everyone’s opinion into account.
We, however, need to define clear criteria for the ideology of patriotism. After all, a single state ideology cannot exist in conditions where each person himself determines what is patriotic and what is not.
Liberals also claim that they are the most patriotic patriots, and their opponents are just an uneducated flock. If everyone defines the ideology of patriotism himself, then we will have to recognize the liberals as patriots and then nothing will change. So it is necessary to develop canonical patriotic texts, correct books, a set of rules and a moral code of a true patriot.
Here we will encounter difficulties. We will choose from several popular versions of Marxism (including Trotskyism, Leninism and Stalinism), several popular versions of monarchism (both associated with Orthodoxy, and, surprisingly, atheistic), moderate fascism, akin to the modern European right and radical Nazism, appealing to blood and soil and diving in neo-paganism.
Each of these ideologies can also represent from several millions, up to several tens of millions of adepts, but there will already be an absolute minority of them. Many patriotic movements risk finding out with surprise that they have fewer supporters than the liberals they are going to hang in their lanterns. The main thing is that, facing the threat of suppression of their legal political activity on the part of the common state ideology alien to them, the same communists will unite with liberals against the "overblown monarchists", liberals, monarchists and fascists will come out with a united front against the "communist threat". And this is not counting the intra ideological contradictions in each of the major trends. Let me remind you that in the 30s, the Trotskyists were actively blocked against the Stalinists with any enemies of the Soviet government, after 1917, the Menshevik social democrats opposed the victorious Bolsheviks, together with the most inveterate Black Hundreds. And now the losers of the ideological struggle of the faction of the victorious ideological force will “fight for the truth” in alliance with the enemies of their own “heretics”. Ideology always requires purity and like-mindedness, so the ideological faction in its own ranks causes more rejection than alien ideology. Aliens - just enemies, and their own "apostates" - traitors.
Therefore, an attempt to introduce a single ideology will immediately deprive the state power of a broad base of support and force them to oppose the majority of their own people. At least against its most active part.
Such things can be ignored after the revolution, when the civil war of the new and old world is still underway. Victory in such a war is almost always on the side of one of the most radical trends (from whatever side it may be). Conventionally, either the radical left (the Bolsheviks) or the radical right (the Black-Hundred monarchists) could have won the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks had a serious advantage. They offered another unknown "kingdom of justice", which each represented in its own way. The monarchists, on the other hand, suggested returning to the well-tried old, to which practically everyone had their own claims. The monarchists lost, but all sorts of democrats and liberals had no chance at all. Appealing to reason during the war, they were alien to both camps, both sides considered them enemies and traitors. They were attacked by radicals from both flanks, and the extremely radical population striving for the victory of “their truth” did not understand their call to negotiate with opponents - it’s much easier to kill, especially “for the truth”.
However, modern Russia is rightly proud of not revolutionism, but civil peace, harmony and stability. The civil conflict, during which radical ideological trends take precedence, is a pipe dream of the geopolitical opponents of the Russian state, because whoever wins, he will destroy it from the inside, how the Russian empire destroyed the ideological conflict, how it destroyed modern Ukraine. Therefore, an attempt to introduce a single mandatory state-wide ideology will not strengthen Russia, but immediately, in the shortest possible time, weaken it. To understand what will happen, read any discussion in the comments on any political text on the Internet. You will find that for every ten arguing one and a half dozen ideological schemes are proposed. At the same time, peaceful intelligent people, already from the second phrase, are ready to shoot, burn and hang each other. And to understand that this is not a joke, also turn to the Ukrainian experience. An ideological discussion in which "patriotism" ("Ukrainians") was opposed to "national betrayal" ("anti-Ukrainianism") began there twenty years ago, and now is being conducted with the help of artillery, aviation and heavy armored vehicles. At the same time, pro-European liberals and Nazis who opposed the “Russian World” (which was far from monolithic) as a united front are already accusing each other of “national betrayal” and are ready to tear the former “patriotic” allies to pieces.
In the course of this analysis, I deliberately bypassed statism, that is, pure non-ideological statehood. In the end, no matter what ideology you adhere to, you are surprised (well, if not hopelessly late) to discover that the state is primary, and ideology is secondary. A state can exist with any ideology and without ideology at all. Ideology without a state does not exist. In this case, it is just an intellectual exercise of a narrow circle of political marginals. Therefore, in any case, you will have to subordinate the interests of ideology to the interests of the state, otherwise you will lose both the state and ideology.
So, since the absence of ideology is also ideology, the extra ideological statehood, which, by the way, is the quasi ideology of the Russian Federation, is the most acceptable ideology, although it does not satisfy the assorted “narrow” ideologues.
Russia was a kingdom, an empire, a republic of soviets, and became a bourgeois republic. At the same time, each adequate power (whatever ideological color it had) solved the same international and internal problems.
The simplest example is that the confrontation between the USA and Russia did not end with the abolition of the USSR and the communist ideology, as naive reformers of the 80-90-s of the last century hoped, but only intensified. That is, the problem is not in ideological confrontation, but in the clash of objective state interests.
Putin's reforms in Russia, Lukashenko in Belarus and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan solved the same problems that faced the creators of perestroika and were not solved by them. The difference in the formats of modern Russian, Belarusian and Kazakh statehood is partly due to national peculiarities, and partly from the personalities of national leaders. Nevertheless, the consistently growing desire of these states to integrate, continuing (despite objective and subjective obstacles) for two and a half decades testifies not only to the significant role of the common past, but, above all, to the similarity of the internal political and foreign policy tasks solved today. .
The myth of the highly successful ideologized state has been refuted by history. Despite the short-term (from a historical point of view) impressive successes, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Communist (from the point of view of the dominant ideology) of the USSR eventually collapsed. But the Chinese Communists, who advanced the slogan about the irrelevance of the color of a cat that catches mice well, quite successfully created capitalist China under red flags, subordinating ideology to state interests.
You can motivate your right to power, even with a popular will expressed in free elections, even with divine anointing, even with the mandate of heaven, even the most advanced teaching. As soon as you try to turn an ideology into a dogma and begin to subordinate the activities of the state to it, it will fall in your hands.
This, by the way, was well understood by Lenin and Stalin. The first one, quite calmly, rejected “war communism”, in favor of the NEP, instead of the Bolshevik communist land reform program, adopted the Socialist-Revolutionary Socialist Revolutionary Party. The second, during the Great Patriotic War, temporarily revived the union of the state and the church (deeply contradicting the atheistic norms of the version of communist ideology that prevailed in the USSR), at the level of state propaganda replaced the appeal to the international feelings of the working people of the whole world, on the basis of national self-consciousness, eventually disbanded the Comintern and abandoned the idea of a world revolution — the basis of Marx’s teachings. As long as the Bolsheviks used the ideology flexibly to state interests (do not hesitate to put forward slogans diametrically contrary to yesterday’s), they went from success to success. But what does ideology have to do with it? Today, such a method, adherents of ideologization is contemptuously called state propaganda.
Another experience of the Bolsheviks. As soon as all parties were banned, except for the CPSU (b), the struggle of the factions in the CPSU (b) / CPSU began, which did not subside (when explicitly, and when hidden) despite the prohibition of factionalism and repression against draft dodgers from the general line, up to the collapse of the USSR. That is why in the years of perestroika, a “democratic” wing emerged (and actually legalized) in the CPSU, the nationalist wing in the CPSU, the conservative wing, the reforming wing, etc. In fact, these were different parties that coexisted in the same party system within the one-party political system. As soon as the ban on the multi-party system was lifted, the adherents of the “single ideology” instantly found themselves in parties that were at war with almost the degree of civil war.
You can set up an experiment. Collect fifteen to twenty ideological like-minded people and puzzle them not by criticizing alternative trends, but by developing the canonical foundations of their own ideology. And you will see how the seemingly unshakable ideological unity will crumble before our eyes on the seemingly secondary issues, and the yesterday's ideological monolith will split into irreconcilable hostile groups.
Even general, strategic - the most common interests and priorities of society are constantly changing. Moreover, it is always divided into social groups (classes, estates, castes), interacting within the framework of the law on unity and the struggle of opposites. On the one hand, they cannot exist without each other and constitute a single state organism, on the other hand they are shared by a lot of irreconcilable tactical interests. In the end, any society is divided into managers and managers, creators of information and its consumers, leaders and followers. And material separation is present in any society. Moreover, in the late USSR, the material stratification, ridiculous compared to today's Russia, was perceived by the population no less, but rather more painfully, than the existing social inequality.
Ultimately, the task of the state is not to accept the position of a single social group as a dogma (even if it is framed in an outwardly attractive ideology) but to smooth out existing contradictions and, on the basis of a social class compromise, achieve unity. But the ideologists of all colors and shades, formulating the preferences of the social and national groups they represent, help the state authorities (if, of course, it is adequate to the tasks before it) to find and embroider bottlenecks.
Therefore, the ideologues were, are and will be, and they are needed. But if, on the whole, ideologists and ideologies can bring substantial benefits (clearly articulating the most important social tendencies and preferences), then an attempt to determine the “only correct doctrine” and the entire power of the state to brush everyone's hair together is an absolute evil.
What is the reason for the fact that the Russian state, which is usually sensitive to the demands of politically active citizens, does not respond to the pandemic of ideologization that has struck the brains of the population?
It would seem that what is simpler - the experience of the USSR is not just known, even the cadres of ideologues are alive. Download yourself on radio and television "correct" theses and citizens in harmonious, like-minded columns will move towards happiness, sweeping away all obstacles in their way and not exchanging petty squabbles over domestic stories, features of domestic and foreign policy, as well as prospects for the development of Russian statehood. And the authorities will be easier to manage. There is no need to carry on endless discussions, to endure the subversive work of agents of influence, who express wrong views in the media. And the ghost of Maidan, which adherents of a single ideology use as the ultima ratio, is completely dissolved in a universal joyful unity.
In fact, with a single ideology, everything happens exactly the opposite.
First, every citizen who advocates a single state ideology, by default, assumes that his views will be recognized as correct. I will not remind you how many communist parties and sects in the country are at war with each other, how many monarchical associations are oriented towards different forms of monarchy, different dynasties and different representatives of the same dynasty, how many fascist groups that hate their ideological counterparts more than ideological opponents. Even the "democrats" of the Yeltsin spill, now called liberals, who faded into political oblivion, fought each other for ideological purity with rare frenzy and still continue to produce party projects, all of whose members will not fit even on the same sofa, but on the bedside rug. Just to note that in addition to the general ideological trends (monarchism, communism, fascism, liberalism, democracy, etatism), every citizen who considers himself an adherent of one of these, in practice confesses some kind of his own particular ideology, periodically stigmatizing his own ideological gurus to what light is worth and almost their public burning on the market square, like hardened heretics.
In principle, the ideological preferences of individual citizens and small groups can be neglected, they do not affect the overall picture. For a start, let's look at general trends.
Let's make a simple separation between patriots and liberals. Patriots today in the country an absolute majority. We declare patriotism state ideology, prohibit anti-state propaganda and calmly drink tea in anticipation of a breakthrough to the gaping heights.
I could say that the country still has at least 15-20 million supporters of the liberals, that they will not put up with such violence against their conscience that they will actively protest and this will destabilize the situation. But opponents will rightly notice to me that if not all liberals, then their top leadership has long since been working against Russia and there is nothing to stand on ceremony with them. Start a civil war in their guts, and with the rest of the problems cope. Perhaps this is true. And several million of their fellow citizens can not be taken into account - endure-love. The main thing is not to turn off the main road to universal happiness, and small costs inevitably accompany any process.
If we put the liberals behind the brackets after the broad masses of the people, it’s still impossible to take everyone’s opinion into account.
We, however, need to define clear criteria for the ideology of patriotism. After all, a single state ideology cannot exist in conditions where each person himself determines what is patriotic and what is not.
Liberals also claim that they are the most patriotic patriots, and their opponents are just an uneducated flock. If everyone defines the ideology of patriotism himself, then we will have to recognize the liberals as patriots and then nothing will change. So it is necessary to develop canonical patriotic texts, correct books, a set of rules and a moral code of a true patriot.
Here we will encounter difficulties. We will choose from several popular versions of Marxism (including Trotskyism, Leninism and Stalinism), several popular versions of monarchism (both associated with Orthodoxy, and, surprisingly, atheistic), moderate fascism, akin to the modern European right and radical Nazism, appealing to blood and soil and diving in neo-paganism.
Each of these ideologies can also represent from several millions, up to several tens of millions of adepts, but there will already be an absolute minority of them. Many patriotic movements risk finding out with surprise that they have fewer supporters than the liberals they are going to hang in their lanterns. The main thing is that, facing the threat of suppression of their legal political activity on the part of the common state ideology alien to them, the same communists will unite with liberals against the "overblown monarchists", liberals, monarchists and fascists will come out with a united front against the "communist threat". And this is not counting the intra ideological contradictions in each of the major trends. Let me remind you that in the 30s, the Trotskyists were actively blocked against the Stalinists with any enemies of the Soviet government, after 1917, the Menshevik social democrats opposed the victorious Bolsheviks, together with the most inveterate Black Hundreds. And now the losers of the ideological struggle of the faction of the victorious ideological force will “fight for the truth” in alliance with the enemies of their own “heretics”. Ideology always requires purity and like-mindedness, so the ideological faction in its own ranks causes more rejection than alien ideology. Aliens - just enemies, and their own "apostates" - traitors.
Therefore, an attempt to introduce a single ideology will immediately deprive the state power of a broad base of support and force them to oppose the majority of their own people. At least against its most active part.
Such things can be ignored after the revolution, when the civil war of the new and old world is still underway. Victory in such a war is almost always on the side of one of the most radical trends (from whatever side it may be). Conventionally, either the radical left (the Bolsheviks) or the radical right (the Black-Hundred monarchists) could have won the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks had a serious advantage. They offered another unknown "kingdom of justice", which each represented in its own way. The monarchists, on the other hand, suggested returning to the well-tried old, to which practically everyone had their own claims. The monarchists lost, but all sorts of democrats and liberals had no chance at all. Appealing to reason during the war, they were alien to both camps, both sides considered them enemies and traitors. They were attacked by radicals from both flanks, and the extremely radical population striving for the victory of “their truth” did not understand their call to negotiate with opponents - it’s much easier to kill, especially “for the truth”.
However, modern Russia is rightly proud of not revolutionism, but civil peace, harmony and stability. The civil conflict, during which radical ideological trends take precedence, is a pipe dream of the geopolitical opponents of the Russian state, because whoever wins, he will destroy it from the inside, how the Russian empire destroyed the ideological conflict, how it destroyed modern Ukraine. Therefore, an attempt to introduce a single mandatory state-wide ideology will not strengthen Russia, but immediately, in the shortest possible time, weaken it. To understand what will happen, read any discussion in the comments on any political text on the Internet. You will find that for every ten arguing one and a half dozen ideological schemes are proposed. At the same time, peaceful intelligent people, already from the second phrase, are ready to shoot, burn and hang each other. And to understand that this is not a joke, also turn to the Ukrainian experience. An ideological discussion in which "patriotism" ("Ukrainians") was opposed to "national betrayal" ("anti-Ukrainianism") began there twenty years ago, and now is being conducted with the help of artillery, aviation and heavy armored vehicles. At the same time, pro-European liberals and Nazis who opposed the “Russian World” (which was far from monolithic) as a united front are already accusing each other of “national betrayal” and are ready to tear the former “patriotic” allies to pieces.
In the course of this analysis, I deliberately bypassed statism, that is, pure non-ideological statehood. In the end, no matter what ideology you adhere to, you are surprised (well, if not hopelessly late) to discover that the state is primary, and ideology is secondary. A state can exist with any ideology and without ideology at all. Ideology without a state does not exist. In this case, it is just an intellectual exercise of a narrow circle of political marginals. Therefore, in any case, you will have to subordinate the interests of ideology to the interests of the state, otherwise you will lose both the state and ideology.
So, since the absence of ideology is also ideology, the extra ideological statehood, which, by the way, is the quasi ideology of the Russian Federation, is the most acceptable ideology, although it does not satisfy the assorted “narrow” ideologues.
Russia was a kingdom, an empire, a republic of soviets, and became a bourgeois republic. At the same time, each adequate power (whatever ideological color it had) solved the same international and internal problems.
The simplest example is that the confrontation between the USA and Russia did not end with the abolition of the USSR and the communist ideology, as naive reformers of the 80-90-s of the last century hoped, but only intensified. That is, the problem is not in ideological confrontation, but in the clash of objective state interests.
Putin's reforms in Russia, Lukashenko in Belarus and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan solved the same problems that faced the creators of perestroika and were not solved by them. The difference in the formats of modern Russian, Belarusian and Kazakh statehood is partly due to national peculiarities, and partly from the personalities of national leaders. Nevertheless, the consistently growing desire of these states to integrate, continuing (despite objective and subjective obstacles) for two and a half decades testifies not only to the significant role of the common past, but, above all, to the similarity of the internal political and foreign policy tasks solved today. .
The myth of the highly successful ideologized state has been refuted by history. Despite the short-term (from a historical point of view) impressive successes, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Communist (from the point of view of the dominant ideology) of the USSR eventually collapsed. But the Chinese Communists, who advanced the slogan about the irrelevance of the color of a cat that catches mice well, quite successfully created capitalist China under red flags, subordinating ideology to state interests.
You can motivate your right to power, even with a popular will expressed in free elections, even with divine anointing, even with the mandate of heaven, even the most advanced teaching. As soon as you try to turn an ideology into a dogma and begin to subordinate the activities of the state to it, it will fall in your hands.
This, by the way, was well understood by Lenin and Stalin. The first one, quite calmly, rejected “war communism”, in favor of the NEP, instead of the Bolshevik communist land reform program, adopted the Socialist-Revolutionary Socialist Revolutionary Party. The second, during the Great Patriotic War, temporarily revived the union of the state and the church (deeply contradicting the atheistic norms of the version of communist ideology that prevailed in the USSR), at the level of state propaganda replaced the appeal to the international feelings of the working people of the whole world, on the basis of national self-consciousness, eventually disbanded the Comintern and abandoned the idea of a world revolution — the basis of Marx’s teachings. As long as the Bolsheviks used the ideology flexibly to state interests (do not hesitate to put forward slogans diametrically contrary to yesterday’s), they went from success to success. But what does ideology have to do with it? Today, such a method, adherents of ideologization is contemptuously called state propaganda.
Another experience of the Bolsheviks. As soon as all parties were banned, except for the CPSU (b), the struggle of the factions in the CPSU (b) / CPSU began, which did not subside (when explicitly, and when hidden) despite the prohibition of factionalism and repression against draft dodgers from the general line, up to the collapse of the USSR. That is why in the years of perestroika, a “democratic” wing emerged (and actually legalized) in the CPSU, the nationalist wing in the CPSU, the conservative wing, the reforming wing, etc. In fact, these were different parties that coexisted in the same party system within the one-party political system. As soon as the ban on the multi-party system was lifted, the adherents of the “single ideology” instantly found themselves in parties that were at war with almost the degree of civil war.
You can set up an experiment. Collect fifteen to twenty ideological like-minded people and puzzle them not by criticizing alternative trends, but by developing the canonical foundations of their own ideology. And you will see how the seemingly unshakable ideological unity will crumble before our eyes on the seemingly secondary issues, and the yesterday's ideological monolith will split into irreconcilable hostile groups.
Even general, strategic - the most common interests and priorities of society are constantly changing. Moreover, it is always divided into social groups (classes, estates, castes), interacting within the framework of the law on unity and the struggle of opposites. On the one hand, they cannot exist without each other and constitute a single state organism, on the other hand they are shared by a lot of irreconcilable tactical interests. In the end, any society is divided into managers and managers, creators of information and its consumers, leaders and followers. And material separation is present in any society. Moreover, in the late USSR, the material stratification, ridiculous compared to today's Russia, was perceived by the population no less, but rather more painfully, than the existing social inequality.
Ultimately, the task of the state is not to accept the position of a single social group as a dogma (even if it is framed in an outwardly attractive ideology) but to smooth out existing contradictions and, on the basis of a social class compromise, achieve unity. But the ideologists of all colors and shades, formulating the preferences of the social and national groups they represent, help the state authorities (if, of course, it is adequate to the tasks before it) to find and embroider bottlenecks.
Therefore, the ideologues were, are and will be, and they are needed. But if, on the whole, ideologists and ideologies can bring substantial benefits (clearly articulating the most important social tendencies and preferences), then an attempt to determine the “only correct doctrine” and the entire power of the state to brush everyone's hair together is an absolute evil.
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