In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Anatoly Chubais, a leader of Russian liberal thought, lashed out the ideas of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Mr. Chubais said he had re-read all of Dostoyevsky over the past three months and felt nothing but almost physical hatred for the man. While acknowledging the writer's genius, he criticized the idea of Russians being special, holy people, his cult of suffering and the false choices he presented. Mr. Chubais said he wanted to tear him to pieces.
Although Dostoyevsky died more than a century ago, his ideas still provoke many debates.
The false choice mentioned by Mr. Chubais is Dostoyevsky's idea that there is no social progress in history, all purely economic ideas are fiction and the objective of Russian society should be constant moral improvement and deep faith to provide an example to the rest of the humankind.
In short, Dostoyevsky's vision of the perfect Russia was a kind of grand monastic community.
It is well known that the writer started life as a passionate advocate of liberal ideas. He protested against the monarchy, thought a republic to be the ideal for the country, believed in progress and the triumph of technology, considered faith to be a personal matter and was tolerant of atheism.
His idol was a democrat and socialist, Mikhail Petrashevsky, who developed ideas of democratizing the authorities and abolishing the monarchy. The young writer was a regular at meetings of Petrashevsky's supporters.
Fate, however, had a cruel lesson in store for him.
Dostoyevsky's views changed radically after the society's members were arrested and sentenced to be hanged. The execution was only cancelled at the very last moment, when the noose was ready, and replaced with hard labor in Siberia. The writer decided that liberal ideas were the devil's temptation, cursed the dreams of reforming Russia and in all his novelsdenounced individualism and revolutionary sentiments.
He was especially critical of pro-Western idealists in his novel The Devils. He depicted passionate liberals of the late 19th century as devils incarnate and moral monsters.
Even at that time, Dostoyevsky's monarchism and Christianity caused ferocious criticism in society. Before the Revolution, students considered any love for Dostoyevsky to be reactionary. After the Bolsheviks came to power, he was virtually banned, and his books were not reprinted. Neither schools nor universities studied his works.
But forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest, and the awful post Revolution repressions that befell Russian society, above all, its liberal, democratic and pro-Western part, radically changed attitudes toward the writer.
Under Stalin, Dostoyevsky became a secret idol for intellectuals. His ideas were taken up by the writers Yevgeny Zamyatin and Andrei Planotov, while in Europe his thoughts of false progress and the tyranny of idealists inspired George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to write their famous anti-utopias 1984 and Brave New World. The former is about the degeneration of revolutionary principles, the latter about decay in a consumer society.
The 20th century proved that Dostoyevsky was often right, especially his idea that a just society could not be developed using repression.
By the time the Chubais-spearheaded liberal reforms began in the 1990s, Russian intellectuals, save for some minor exceptions, were all for Dostoyevsky. The secular part of society rejected progress as a false chimera: any new attempt to reform Russia will repeat past mistakes, they said. Religious intellectuals only believed in moral salvation. There was a minority as well, but at that time it seemed omnipotent, all the more so that it could speak, write and call for changes and used these abilities, while the majority kept silent.
As a result, as we see now, society gave its tacit consent to privatizationas a way to buy itself out of the social experiment with a colossal bribe - giving up the nation's property - to the reformers. This position of non-interference, on the one hand, made it easier for Anatoly Chubais and his associates to return Russia to capitalism, but, on the other hand, they found themselves in a vacuum. There were too few proponents of reforms in the high and low echelons of power and too many ordinary people who believed the privatization was tantamount to fraud.
But let us return to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At the end of the Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov says that a human life is sacred. Oddly, the same sentiment is heard when Mr. Chubais talks of private property.
The institution of private property is not just a set of laws or a class of owners that have real power, he argues. It is 146 million people who must agree that private property is sacred. He doubts that it can happen in one generation.
Dostoyevsky writes that total world harmony is not worth a tear of a tormented child.
Paradoxically, Anatoly Chubais also appeals to a child. When he says his opponents tell him that the privatization was wrong, that it was against the interest of the people, he argues he did not do it for his generation but for our children.
His words conceal the same formula by Dostoyevsky, though somewhat revised: all the troubles of the world are worth a future child's smile.
Finally, cursing Dostoyevsky and exclaiming how he wants to tear him to pieces, Mr. Chubais unconsciously imitates the writer who wanted to tear to pieces liberal intellectuals, i.e., people who thought like Mr. Chubais.
In other words, the maximalist Chubais is tarred with the same brush as the maximalist Dostoyevsky. No wonder that he has found time to spend three months to re-read (how may times has he done this?) the 17 volumes of Dostoyevsky's works. Maybe he was brought up on hatred towards the books he re-reads?
The new elite has old idols.
In terms of Russian realities, Anatoly Chubais and Fyodor Dostoyevsky stand shoulder to shoulder, and it is not important who holds the icon and who the axe.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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