We and Zinoviev: A Political View

Abstract

Among the Soviet émigrés of recent times who have tried to disturb the peace of mind of the Western intelligentsia Zinoviev occupies a place completely of his own. His work is possibly the most disturbing and most challenging of all. Not because of the moral intensity which — contrary to what he himself claims — he shares with other dissidents. And certainly not because of his prophetic warnings about the fatal consequences of Western blindness vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, which all too often read like an echo from conservative manuals about the illusions of détente. The heart of the matter lies elsewhere: Zinoviev forces us to take the Soviet Union seriously, to treat her as a genuinely novel social system and to come to grips with her as she is. He will no longer allow us to evade this necessity by approaching the Soviet Union as if she were merely a temporary socio-political experiment gone astray that either détente or Western firmness will ease back or will force back on what we would like to see as the right path of historical progress.