The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism by Isaiah Berlin

Author:Isaiah Berlin [Berlin, Isaiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2004-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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1 These two paragraphs formed the original conclusion of the essay: see p. xxxi above.

1 ‘Well said, old mole. Canst work i' th' earth so fast?’ says Hamlet to the Ghost in Shakespeare's play (act 1, scene 5, line 162). ‘Well grubbed, old mole,’ says Marx at the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (London etc., 1979), p. 185. Hegel appears not to have used the image directly, though the tenor of Marx's remarks is broadly Hegelian.

1 The usual translation of ‘bezrodnye kosmopolity’ (‘bezrodnyi’ literally means ‘without relations’ or ‘without a native land’), which was used to refer to Soviet Jews. Though Hitler called Jews and others ‘a rootless international clique’ (see p. 118), in a 1933 broadcast, this specific Russian phrase first appears in print (so far as I can discover) in an article by the editor of the journal Ogonek, A[natoly Vlad imirovich] Sofronov, ‘Za dal'neishii pod'em sovetskoi dramaturgii’ (‘For the Further Development of Soviet Dramaturgy’), Pravda, 23 December 1948, p. 3 – though ‘kosmopolit’ on its own had certainly been in use since the 1930s, if not before, as a derogatory tag for anyone who did not toe the official political line; it had also been used pejoratively of Westernisers by Slavophils in the nineteenth century. The Pravda article was preceded by an anti-Semitic letter to Stalin from Anna Begicheva, an arts journalist at Izvestiya, about ‘enemies at work in the arts’ (letter dated 8 December 1948, currently [November 2003] in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI] 17, 132, 237, 75–81), but this formulation does not appear there.

1 The problem was not, of course, one of pure theory, and did not arise in the void – in the course of abstract contemplation of history and its laws on the part of Stalin or anyone else. When the excesses of the first Bolshevist terror and ‘war Communism’ were followed by the compromises of the New Economic Policy, the danger of repeating the pattern of the great French Revolution, or, for that matter, of the revolutions of 1848–9, must have appeared very real to Bolshevik leaders. They were certainly reminded of it often enough, especially by foreign critics. The technique of political navigation here described was therefore born, as most notable inventions are apt to be, of urgent practical need. I.B.

1 Presumably the Professor Kon mentioned in the note on the next page.

1 These are as often as not the orthodox of yesterday. One wonders what is to be the fate of Professor Kon [unidentified], who sought, in the summer ‘breathing spell’ of 1951, to protect history from the fanaticism of the ultra-Marxists of 1946–7. I.B.

1 I do not wish to imply that Stalin is solely responsible for all of even the major decisions of Soviet policy. No system so vast, however ‘monolithic’, can literally be directed by any single individual, whatever his powers. But, on the other hand, we have no reason

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