The Shadows of False Messiahs: Mikhail Agursky and the relationship between Russian nationalism and Zionism from the Brezhnev era to the present

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The Shadows of False Messiahs

Mikhail Agursky and the relationship between Russian nationalism and

Zionism from the Brezhnev era to the present

MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Samuel Finkelman 11104473

Main Supervisor: Michael Kemper Second Supervisor: Uladzislau Belavusau

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I would like to thank the following people for the following reasons: my supervisor Michael Kemper for all of his help in formulating the structure and content of this paper and his edits along the way; Erik van Ree for his intellectual guidance; Christian Noack for his help with pragmatic concerns; my second supervisor Uladzislau Belavusau for obliging to read a long thesis; all of my professors at Universiteit van Amsterdam for everything they have taught me this year; and the staff at UvA’s libraries and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam for helping me access source material.

I would also like to thank everyone at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen who showed me such warm hospitality; provided me with a research space; and helped me navigate their vast collection of samizdat, tamizdat, and archival materials, without which this thesis would not have been possible. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the center’s archivist of Soviet materials, Maria Klassen, who tried to warn me «Нельзя объять необъятное» and to whom this thesis is dedicated.

Contact Information Samuel Finkelman

Post address:

408 Willowbend Court

Hockessin, Delaware 19707 USA +1-302-690-2951

Samjfinkelman@gmail.com Michael Kemper (Supervisor) Office address: Oost-Indisch Huis Kloveniersburgwal 48 Amsterdam Kamernummer: D2.08A Post address: Kloveniersburgwal 48 1012 CX Amsterdam Mkemper@uva.nl 0205254370 020525228

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Introduction

Mikhail Agursky: the White Raven of Soviet Dissidence

An Unlikely Gathering

On April 5, 1975 a crowd of five hundred artists, intellectuals, and activists gathered in an apartment in the Beliaevo–Bogorodskoe neighborhood of Moscow. Much of the party could be split into two wholly discrepant groups: a faction of ultra-nationalist Russian Orthodox thinkers on the one side; and dozens of Jewish dissidents, refuseniks, and human rights activists on the other. If the guests did not notice the irony themselves, two posters hung in opposite corners of the flat to remind them: one read, “Corner for Jews,” the other, “Corner for anti-Semites.” On that evening, two common denominators united this diverse crowd. The first was their active opposition to the Soviet system. The second was their acquaintance with Mikhail Agursky (1933-1991), who had just been

granted permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel. He was leaving in a matter of days. This unlikely mix of Zionists, Russian nationalists, human rights activists and artists had gathered to see him off.1

As the eclectic crowd present at his goodbye party suggests, the dissident, human rights activist, and historian Mikhail Agursky was something of an anomaly. While most Jews of Agursky’s generation had grown up speaking Russian, and during their younger years they had identified not as Jewish but as Soviet, the increasing hostility of both popular and official attitudes towards the Jews during the late 1960s, alienated many of them from any remaining loyalty to either Soviet socialism or Russian culture. Jews were left with two ideological choices: Western-oriented liberalism or Zionism.2_{Especially after the events of} the Six Day War and the ensuing campaign of official anti-Zionism in the Soviet press, the latter became the increasingly popular choice. Esther Markish, the daughter of Yiddish-language Soviet poet Perets Markish, recalled in her

memoirs: “When the threat of war loomed over Israel, many Russian Jews made the unequivocal choice: ‘Israel is our flesh and blood. Russia is, at best, a distant relative, if not a total stranger.’”3

Agursky, however, rejected this “unequivocal choice.” Notwithstanding his ardent commitment to the Zionist cause and his immigration to Israel in 1975, Agursky never abandoned his Russian identity. He saw nothing incompatible between his Judaism and his Russianness, always seeking cooperation and

1_{Mikhail Agursky, Pepel Klaasa: Razryv (Jerusalem 1996), 397.} 2_{Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton 2004) 341.}

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reconciliation between Jews and Russians. In the early 1960s he even converted to Russian Orthodoxy, although he later returned to his native Judaism. Never shying away from an intellectual argument, his works are marked by a

sympathetic fascination with right-wing Russian nationalism. His “favorite interlocutors” were anti-Semitic intellectuals, and he eagerly threw himself into polemics on the pages of far-right samizdat journals.4_{Publicist Mikhail}

Bolotovsky explained: “For most Jews, if the word ‘anti-Semite’ was addressed to someone this became sufficient grounds to remove that addressee from the list of people worth shaking hands with. But not for Agursky. ‘Anti-Semite? Why do you say anti-Semite? And in general–is he really an anti-Semite?’ In such a way, one might roughly formulate his approach.”5

Agursky’s sympathy towards right-wing Russian nationalism can be

explained by his belief in Russian nationalism’s compatibility with Zionism. For Agursky, Russian nationalism and Zionism shared a common enemy: the

atheistic Soviet system that had attempted to extinguish both cultures. What is more, in his eyes, they shared a common goal: national self-preservation. Since Zionism sought to preserve the Jewish nation on a territory far away from Russia, there could be no conflict of interest. Nevertheless, Agursky was painfully aware that much of the nationalist dissident movement did not agree with him

regarding the compatibility of the Jewish and Russian national movements. Dismayed by Russian nationalism’s chauvinistic tendencies, Agursky refused to remove himself from Russian culture, as most Zionist activists did. Instead, he tried to persuade ideological opponents that Zionism and Russian nationalism shared common interests, sources and goals.

This thesis serves to explore the roots, content, and contemporary relevance of Agursky’s unconventional belief in the potential for cooperation between Zionism and Russian nationalism, two ideologies commonly believed to be anathema to one another. This work does not strive to be a biography in the traditional sense, although it might be classified as an intellectual biography. The arguments of this paper will center on analyses of Agursky’s articles, books, and other writings – not on his life. Nevertheless, certain biographical information is crucial to understanding Agursky’s ideological formation, and the first chapter of this thesis will focus on how early developments in Agursky’s life impacted his later worldview. In the second chapter we will explore Agursky’s dissident activity and the development of the Jewish Question in his samizdat writings

4_{Mikhail
Bolotovsky,
“Agursky
i
Rossiia:
Istoriia
pechal’nykh
sovpadenii,”
Polit.ru (date of} publication not provided) accessed at http://www.zhurnal.ru/polit/articles.html?agursky

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from the mid 1970s. We will pay particular attention to his grounds for belief in future Russian-Zionist cooperation and the utopian program he advanced in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s collection From Under the Rubble [Iz pod glyb]. In the third chapter, we will look at Agursky’s work as a historian in Israel and

investigate the conception of ‘national Bolshevism’ he advanced in his two major historical works: his 1980 Russian-language Ideologiia natsional-bolshevizma and his 1987 English-language adaptation of that work, The Third Rome: National

Bolshevism in the USSR. In the final chapter we will explore the contemporary

relevance and implications of both Agursky’s ‘national Bolshevik’ reading of Soviet history and his belief in the ideological compatibility of Zionism and Russian nationalism. This final chapter will focus on how and why Agursky’s ideas have been appropriated by the chief ideologue of the Russian New Right, Alexander Dugin, in his 1997 work Templars of the Proletariat. In this

introduction we set out to present the central arguments to be found in each chapter and to introduce the reader to important biographical information and terminology that will inform the paper’s argumentation.

Chapter One: A Loaded Spring (1933-1967)

The young Agursky’s path to dissidence

Mikhail [born Melib, often referred to as Melik] Agursky was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1933. His father was a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and party historian who was arrested in the Great Terror and exiled to

Kazakhstan, where he died in 1947. Even though his father had been deemed a traitor, Agursky’s familial connections secured him access to excellent primary and secondary education. For many years, Agursky perceived his father’s arrest to be something of a mistake. He was a dedicated and mostly well-behaved student and participated actively in the Komsomol; in his youth, he was a

convinced Marxist and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he deeply respected Stalin. But as he grew older, he began experiencing discrimination. His Jewish ethnicity and his father’s pariah status prevented him from attending the most prestigious Soviet institutions of higher education, and he decided to pursue a degree in engineering. After graduating from the Stalin Machine-Tools Institute in Moscow (STANKIN) in the mid 1950s, he worked for the Experimental Research Institute of Machine Tools (ENIMS). In 1965 he became a PhD candidate [aspirant] at the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1968 he began working for the Scientific-Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering (NIITM), which produced rockets and spaceships. In 1969 he defended his dissertation in cybernetics and received his doctorate.

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Agursky’s disillusionment with Soviet communism was slow and gradual, and took many intellectual turns and detours. He wrote in his memoirs that it was not until 1958 that he lost faith in the Soviet system. It was around this time that Agursky turned towards religion. Interestingly, the Jewish-born Agursky converted to Russian Orthodoxy. This is not as strange as it might seem, and was actually something of a phenomenon for intellectual Moscow Jews of Agursky’s generation.6_{Like many Soviet Jews of his era, the young Mikhail understood his} Jewish identity in ethno-national rather than religious terms. In many ways, Agursky – who understood but did not speak the Yiddish of his parents – felt just as much Russian as he did Jewish. In 1955, he had even married a Russian

woman, Vera Kondratieva, who was to remain his wife until his death.

Searching for truth after his break with Soviet communism in the late 1950s, Agursky fell under the spiritual influence of the notable Orthodox priest, Father Alexander Men’. It was with the church that Agursky’s work as a historian began. Working closely with high-ranking clergy, he researched early Soviet

anti-religious policy and helped with the publication of the Journal of the Moscow

Patriarch (ZhMP). As we will see, Agursky’s involvement with the Orthodox

Church also instilled in him a love and veneration for the values and institutions his father’s generation had spurred: religion and national tradition. Moreover, Agursky’s Church activity provided him a bridge by which he returned to his native faith and nationality.

In the first chapter we will set out to show how these and other important biographical and historical developments in Agursky’s early life (1933-1967) influenced his belief in grounds for Russian-Jewish cooperation. Our main source for this chapter will be Agursky’s fascinating memoirs of his years in Russia (1933-1975), The Ash of Klaas [Pepel Klaasa].7_{In this chapter we will strive to} show how various biographical and historical developments during these years contributed to Agursky’s disillusionment with Soviet communism and compelled him to turn towards religion, and eventually Zionism. We will pay particular attention to the tragic fate of Samuil Agursky, and the young Mikhail’s

experiences with anti-Semitism and encounters with intellectual and religious

6_{See Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the} Russian Orthodox Church (Madison 2004).

7_{A number of chapters that did not go into the published version have since been printed in} Ierusalimskii zhurnal and Studiia, Russian-language journals based in Israel and Germany,

respectively. The content of these chapters and the history of Pepel Klaas’s publication will also be addressed in Chapter One. These originally unpublished chapters of Pepel Klaasa can be found in the following two places: “Epizody vospominanii” Ieusalimskii zhurnal Nos. 2-5 (1999-2000): 189-234; 161-210; 231-274; 197-240; and “Pepel Klaasa: Glavy, ne voshedshie v knigu,” Studiia Nos. 4-14 (1998-2010), accessed online at http://magazines.russ.ru/studio/ on 5 March 2016.

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counterculture. Introducing important historical developments in Soviet-Jewish relations that will be referred to throughout this paper, the first chapter

endeavors to explain how history allowed a Jewish-born Soviet boy named after Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht [Melib] to convert to Russian Orthodoxy before becoming a dedicated Zionist.

Chapter Two: Between Two Nationalisms (1967-1975) Agursky’s dissidence and samizdat writings

In the early 1970s, Agursky became increasingly involved with dissident Zionist circles. Largely fueled by the rise of popular and official anti-Semitism in the late 1960s, a concentrated neo-Zionist movement emerged, advocating the Jewish right to leave the Soviet Union and make aliyah [i.e. immigrate to Israel]. Under Western pressure, the Soviet Union dramatically increased emigration quotas for Jews in 1970. During this time Agursky began attempting to obtain an exit visa, but his first couple of requests were denied. While at first Agursky refrained from open dissident activity for fear that it would ruin his chance of obtaining an exit visa, his increasing closeness with dissident figures and his growing frustration with the regime, who kept denying his requests anyway, compelled him to speak out. From 1972-1975 Agursky penned a number of articles in foreign publications and underground samizdat journals, defending the Zionist movement and calling for increased Russian-Jewish cooperation.

The second chapter will investigate these writings of his dissident years, in which he clarified his ideological position and explained his belief in the future cooperation between the Jewish and Russian national movements. In dealing with Agursky’s dissidence we will attempt to clarify his position on the major

samizdat debates of the early 1970s. To do so, we must first identify the

prominent trends of Russian nationalism during this era. When referring to the late Soviet period, Russian nationalism is quite a vague umbrella term that incorporates a number of different ideologies, ranging from Christian populism to neo-Nazi fascism. As Agursky himself wrote about Russian nationalism, “the analyst has to be very cautious in his handling of this explosive political material. The different trends must be carefully distinguished and not mixed to make a witches’ brew.”8_{As the distinguishing factors of these major trends of} Brezhnev-era Russian nationalism inform this paper’s main arguments, terminological clarification is immediately necessary.

8_{Mikhail
Agursky,
“Contemporary
Russian
Nationalism,”
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The} Soviet and East European Research Center, Research Paper No. 40 (January 1982), 3.

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Various trends in Brezhnev-era Russian nationalism and patriotism

Following Walker Connor we will use the word ‘nationalist’ throughout this thesis to refer to ethno-nationalism, or identification with and loyalty to “a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related.”9_{As Wayne Allensworth} noted in his discussion of Connor’s conception of ethno-nationalism, “The tie that binds is not the territory or the polity itself but the sense of common ancestry that is given concrete reality in national mythology, religion, art, customs,

language, and folkways.”10_{Loyalty to the political entity of the state we will label} not ‘nationalism’ but ‘patriotism.’11_{Thus, in purely theoretical terms, dedicated} Marxists were neither patriots nor nationalists in that their loyalties were with the international workers of the world. This is not to say, however, that a large number of such dedicated Marxists, if any, filled the ranks of the Communist Party by the 1970s, or to suggest that official Soviet ideology had not

incorporated extremely nationalistic aspects, but rather to say that the Soviet state was at least still laying claim to a fundamentally anti-nationalist ideology.

Having established the distinction between patriotism and nationalism and having excluded the Platonic ideal of a pure, internationalist, classist Marxist from either camp, we can divide the various movements of Brezhnev-era nationalists and patriots into the following categories: 1) the official Russian nationalists Soviet, who represented Russian ethno-nationalist concerns in the party apparatus, such as Politburo members Dmitry Poliansky and Alexander Shelepin; 2) the patriotic but anti-nationalist neo-Westernizers, famously represented by Andrei Sakharov; 3) the nationalist but anti-étatist neo-Slavophiles, best represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and finally, 4) the patriotic-nationalist dissident far-right neo-Slavophiles, whose ideas were something of a hybrid between those of categories 1 and 3, best represented by rather obscure actors, like the Orthodox thinker Gennady Shimanov.

Many scholars have labeled this first trend – which accepted and endorsed the Soviet system as a protector of Russian ethno-national concerns – with Agursky’s favorite term: national Bolshevism.12_{This term, however, has}

9_{See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton 1994), xi.} 10_{Wayne Allensworth, The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist} Russia (Oxford 1998), 11.

11_{For
the
‘confusion
interutilization’
of
the
key
terms
nation
and
state,
see
Connor
(1994), 39-42.} 12_{For
such
a
usage
of
‘national
Bolshevik,’
see
John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian} Nationalism (Princeton 1983), 242-265. Dunlop contrasted between the étatist national

Bolsheviks and the dissenting vorozhdentsy. Besides the imprecision and conflation of the term ‘national Bolshevik,’ we have rejected Dunlop’s model because it is an oversimplification.

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undergone serious conflation. Because it has been applied to various political trends and has been used differently by various scholars and historians – including Agursky – we will use the term étatist nationalism when referring to this trend.13_{Étatist
nationalists
were
“the
supporters
of
a
strong
state
who} rejected Marxist class analysis but glorified alike the Soviet State and tsarist Russia.”14_{Proponents of this ideology were willing to sacrifice important} national values and institutions (e.g. a powerful Orthodox Church, traditional Russian village life) in the name of Soviet modernization and expansion. Yet despite their acceptance and veneration of the Soviet system, these étatist nationalists sought to downplay the internationalist aspect and class analysis of communist ideology, lobbying instead for a culture, economy, and military that would promote and serve Russian national interests. At the same time, they sought territorial expansion and saw a large Russia as a strong Russia. In the sense that national Bolshevism was a movement that valued rapid

modernization and heavy industrialization and militarization as guarantees of Russia’s greatness, it might be labeled a “progressive” nationalism.

Those patriots and nationalists opposed to the Soviet system would include the above categories 2, 3, and to a much lesser extent 4. As will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, Soviet dissidence became an important intellectual force during the years of Agursky’s intellectual formation. We can split many of these dissidents into two large, opposing typologies that

reproduced the central debate of 19th_{century Russian political
thought:} ‘neo-Westernizers’ and ‘neo-Slavophiles.’

The neo-Westernizer trend (2) can be labeled a progressive patriotism, in that it lobbied for a modernized Russia. However, unlike the national Bolsheviks, the neo-Westernizers vehemently opposed the violent methods and arbitrary nature of the Soviet regime, and saw Russia’s adoption of Western capitalism and liberal democracy as the nation’s only salvation. Valuing Western concepts such as rule of law, freedom of information, and a democratic political system, these patriots saw the state, and not the Russian people, as the safeguard of the nation’s interests. We cannot, however, label this trend a type of nationalism, in the vorozhdentsy, and trend 4 would be something of a hybrid. Since trend 2 was not a nationalist movement its adherents were obviously neither vorozhdentsy nor national Bolsheviks.

13_{For
a
critique
of
the
ambiguity
and
imprecision
of
the
term
‘national
Bolshevism’
see: Erik van} Ree, “The Concept of ‘National Bolshevism’: An interpretative essay,” Journal of Political

Ideologies (2001) Vol. 6, No. 3, 289-307. Peter J.S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London 2000), 97 suggests the term “gosudarstvennik

ideology” to refer to those who glorified the USSR from a statist point of view. 14_{Duncan (2000), 3.}

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that the Westernizers placed relatively little stock in the cultural, historical, and mythological Russian heritage.

Opposing this liberal trend were the conservative left-wing neo-Slavophiles (3) who stressed Russia’s distinctiveness from the West. Using a content

definition of ‘conservatism,’ as will be done throughout this thesis, the neo-Slavophiles was a conservative trend, in that it rejected many of the fundamental assumptions of post-Enlightenment modern thought. The neo-Slavophiles argued that instead of seeking answers in communism or Western liberalism, Russia must look backwards in order to move forward. These neo-Slavophiles, best represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, called for an imperative return to a society centered on tradition, community, custom, and Judeo-Christian ethics. They placed immense importance in the Orthodox Church and the Russian village. This typology liked to conceive of itself in apolitical terms, focusing more on the spiritual and moral regeneration of the nation than political reforms. Thus, diametrically opposed to the neo-Westernizers, we can label this typology

nationalistic but distinctly unpatriotic. Despite their traditional and religious agenda, left wing neo-Slavophiles such as Solzhenitsyn also stressed the importance of basic human freedoms (e.g. freedom of speech and press) and supported a tolerant internal cultural policy. Moreover, this trend was non-expansionist and rejected imperialism, chauvinism, and xenophobia.15

Finally, there existed the right-wing dissident conservative neo-Slavophiles (4) that will be referred to throughout as the dissident far right. The dissident far right blamed most of Russia’s problems on external forces. Adherents to this brand of nationalism, just as the left wing neo-Slavophiles, sought a national return to Orthodoxy, but instead of focusing on morality, spirituality, and the individual, these nationalists lobbied for an aggressively expansionist and autocratic Russia. This reactionary movement was chauvinistic, imperialistic, and anti-Semitic. The far-right fringes of this movement were even open to the idea of cooperation with the Soviet regime, so long as that regime rethought its policy regarding religion. In mixing patriotic veneration of the state and

nationalistic veneration of the Russian ethnos, this movement found itself in a fairly similar ideological position as the national Bolsheviks. Really, the only thing separating them was approval of the Soviet regime.

These various typologies of nationalism and patriotism will be used throughout this paper. This is not to imply any direct influence of 19th_-century Russian political ideological structures on Soviet-era thinkers. To be sure, the

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Soviet-era thinkers to be discussed below were developing unique and original ideas in a particular historical context. Moreover, as Wayne Allensworth noted, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas differed on some key points from those of the Slavophiles,16 just as Sakharov’s ideas differed greatly from Belinsky’s Westernism.

Nevertheless such terms are justified because enough obvious structural

parallels do exist between these original ideologies and their latter day echoes.17 Furthermore, such labels are convenient in establishing the structural continuity of certain worldviews in Russian politics that have persisted throughout Russian history and continue to this day. This convenience is especially informative for our purposes in the fourth chapter, when discussing contemporary Russian nationalism in regard to Agursky’s ideas formed during the Soviet period. Lastly, these terms allow us to avoid confusing terminology such as “liberal

conservative” or “liberal neo-Slavophilism” when discussing backwards-looking ideologies that are, on the whole, anti-liberal. Nevertheless, the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ are somewhat misleading given that left wing neo Slavophiles can hardly be considered ‘leftists’ given their veneration of many ‘rightist’ ideas and institutions (i.e. tradition, religion, and the nation). Likewise, ‘right wing’ neo-Slavophiles were actually open to many ‘leftist’ ideas, especially on economic questions. These terms are rather used to stress the differences

between the two trends’ attitudes towards non-Russians, their ideas on the state, and their foreign policy visions. In chapter four, during our discussion of various Zionist trends, we will apply the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ as historian Mark

Sedgwick has noted they are normally applied in Israeli usage: “principally denoting approaches to the Palestinian question: the left favors land for peace, and the right does not.”18

Agursky’s dissident position

A central task of Chapter Two will be to ideologically locate Agursky’s work from the early to mid 1970s in relation to these aforementioned trends. This is a rather difficult task given that Agursky’s work is not only frequently

characterized by a beguiling ambivalence, but also changed over the years and depending on his audience. Generally, however, we can place Agursky within the left-wing Slavophile camp. Opposed to both the excessive materialism of

Western capitalism and the violence and arbitrariness of Soviet socialism,

16_{Ibid, 84-85.} 17_{Ibid, 84.}

18_{Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of} the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2004), 239.

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Agursky believed that society must return to a spiritual and moral foundation. This notion illuminated both his Zionism and Russian nationalism, and he believed that the two national movements were in a unique position to work together in order to achieve this end. Upon leaving Russia, Agursky delivered the following words during an interview with The Jerusalem Post: “I am leaving Russia not as her enemy, but as her true friend, who is concerned with her present and future. I tried to do everything possible for the collaboration between the Jewish and Russian national movements.”19

Agursky’s dissident activity in early 1970s occurred during a period when chauvinist nationalism was gaining ground both popularly and officially. Books such as Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism! (1970) recycled the old myth of a global Jewish conspiracy and became bestsellers.20_{Increasingly, Russian nationalists} perceived their main enemy not to be the Soviet regime, but Zionism and world Jewry. While the regime’s crackdown on official nationalism at the end of the decade served to drive Russian nationalism underground,21_{certain Soviet} politicians – such as Politburo members Dmitry Poliansky and Alexander Shelepin – represented the interests of this reactionary brand of Russian nationalism in very high places for much of the early 1970s, constituting what historian Nikolai Mitrokhin has referred to as the ‘Russian party’.22_Confident that such men might hear their voices, far-right nationalist dissidents like the aforementioned Gennady Shimanov (one of the guests at Agursky’s goodbye party) began advancing aggressively anti-Semitic programs that called for a marriage between Marxist-Leninism and Orthodoxy.23_{In the early 1970s, many,} including Agursky, feared the “convergence of this ‘dissident New Right’ with the ‘establishment New Right.’”24

Agursky’s central task in promoting cooperation between the Jews and Russians was to save conservative Russian nationalism from the rising influence of the anti-Semitic far right. Agursky dedicated his intellectual career to

dismantling anti-Semitic myths embraced by chauvinist Russian nationalists. In his eyes, anti-Zionist Russian nationalists were not so much evil as they were prisoners of a dangerous myth. With their ideas they were rashly empowering their actual enemy, the Soviet system. Because Agursky’s own path to Zionism

19_{Agursky (1996), 401.}

20_{Mikhail
Agursky,
“Selling
Anti-Semitism,”
The New York Review of Books, 16 November, 1972} accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/11/16/selling-anti-semitism-in-moscow/ 21_{See Dunlop (1983), 43-49.}

22_{See Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaya Partiya: Dvizhenie Russkikh Natsionalistov v SSSR 1954-1985} (Moscow 2003). For more on Shelepin and Polianksii see 98-118; 119-123, respectively. 23_{See Ibid, 113-131.}

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and dissidence was largely informed by his early intellectual encounters with dissident Russian nationalism and his conversion to the Orthodox Church, he was personally sympathetic to many aspects of the far right’s agenda. By

pointing out the commonalities between the goals and worldviews of the Russian and Jewish national movements and exposing the erroneous nature of anti-Semitic myths popular among right-wing nationalists, Agursky hoped to purge conservative Russian nationalism of chauvinism and anti-Semitism.

Yet in his flirtations with the far right, some might argue that Agursky went too far. Like Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in his 1973 Letter to the Soviet Leaders – a letter that Agursky passionately defended – that Russia would have to accept an authoritarian regime during its transition out of socialism,25_{one could accuse} Agursky of advancing the very anti-democratic ideas promulgated by his étatist anti-Semitic nationalist opponents.

A year before his emigration to Israel, Agursky’s dissident activity reached its zenith with his contribution to Solzhenistysn’s samizdat collection From Under

the Rubble (1974), a veritable manifesto of neo-Slavophile thought. Agursky’s

article in the collection, “Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their Future Prospects,” criticized the excesses of both western capitalism and Soviet

socialism. In the article, he outlined a utopian plan for a future society, to be based on small-scale enterprise and “a foundation of spiritual and moral values.”26_{Although
fundamentally
democratic,
Agursky’s
decentralized
utopia} paradoxically contained certain totalitarian elements, such as state control of the media.27_{Alexander Yanov has suggested that such neo-Slavophile utopias were} practically unrealizable, yet nonetheless very ideologically dangerous in that they stimulated the Right opposition and galvanized its radicalization and inclination towards cooperation with the authoritarian Soviet regime.28

In the second chapter we will investigate how Agursky’s left wing

neo-Slavophile position and his Solzhenitsyn-esque vision for Russia’s future enabled him to petition for increased cooperation between Zionists and Russian

nationalists, who both sought a return to native religion and tradition. We will pay particular attention to the views on Jewish-Russian relations Agursky espoused in his 1972 review of Yuri Ivanov’s Caution, Zionism!, and an open letter he published in 1974 in the nationalist opposition’s samizdat journal Veche.

25_{Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, trans. by Hilary Sternberg (London 1974)} 51-54.

26_{Mikhail
Agursky,
“Contemporary
Socioeconomic
Systems
and
their
Future
Prospects,”
From} Under the Rubble, translated under the direction of Michael Scammell, (Boston 1975), 67-87, 81. 27_{Ibid, 86.}

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But we will also address Yanov’s hypothesis that left-wing neo-Slavophile

dissidents like Agursky contributed to the very chauvinistic forces they sought to vanquish. For this purpose, Agursky’s contribution to From Under the Rubble is a very important document that will be discussed at length.

Chapter Three: A Changing of Signposts (1975-1990)

Agursky’s conception of nationalism Bolshevism

Had Agursky’s career ended with his immigration to Israel in 1975, it would have been abnormal enough. To my knowledge, no other Soviet Zionist engaged in such serious polemics with anti-Semitic Russian nationalists. Yet Agursky’s work as a historian after his emigration from the USSR further complicates our understanding of this unique thinker.

On March 28, 1975, Agursky was granted an exit visa and given nine days to leave the USSR.29_{Presumably, the regime decided that he was causing more} trouble for them in the USSR than he would be if his wish to emigrate were granted.30_{For the last sixteen years of his life Agursky lived in Jerusalem,} working as a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had achieved marginal fame with his dissident writings – especially his contribution to From

Under the Rubble – and was frequently invited by western scholars to take part in

conferences across Europe and the USA. He traveled frequently and spent much time in Paris, where he collaborated with other Soviet émigrés, contributing and helping with the publication of various journals, including Vladimir Maksimov’s

Kontinent.

Agursky’s primary vocation during these years, however, was an intensive study of the Bolshevik Revolution and early Soviet history. In 1983, he

completed a second doctorate, this time not in cybernetics but in Slavic studies, at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. His doctoral dissertation was a French version of a 1980 book he had published in Russian, The Ideology of National

Bolshevism [Ideologiia natsional–bolshevizma; hereafter referred to as Ideologiia].

In 1987, he published an adaptation of this work in English, The Third Rome:

National Bolshevism in the USSR [hereafter referred to as Third Rome]. Agursky

wrote many articles in a number of languages in the years between his

emigration and death, but Third Rome and Ideologiia are his most comprehensive works, presenting the most complete picture of his understanding of Soviet history. A number of thematic focuses can be identified in Agursky’s other

29_{Agursky (1996), 393.}

30_{Agursky’s
bureaucratic
battle
for
his
exit
visa
is
documented
in
detail
throughout
the
last
fifty} pages of his memoirs; Agursky (1996), 342-393.

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historical essays and articles: Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East, the history of Zionism in Russia and the USSR, Maxim Gorky’s relationship with Judaism and Russia’s Jews, the Orthodox Church, the Soviet military industrial complex, and the political significance of popular trends in post-Stalinist Soviet literature (i.e. Village Prose). Yet as the titles of his two major works suggest, the central focus of his historical work that serves to unite these sub-themes into a coherent nexus of thought is without a doubt his conception of national Bolshevism, which will be the focus of the third chapter.

A major reason we have chosen to refer to Brezhnev-era étatist nationalists as such and not as ‘national Bolsheviks’, is because we have reserved the term ‘national Bolshevik’ to refer to Agursky’s unique conception of this term, advanced in his Ideologiia and Third Rome, among other writings. The quintessence of Agursky’s historical thought and his conception of national Bolshevism can be more or less condensed in the following sentence: from the onset, the Soviet political system had been primarily legitimized from a Russian étatist point of view and not, as the system would have one believe, from a Marxist ideological point of view. Phrased differently: theoretical Marxism has served as “a historical camouflage” masking the Soviet system’s nationalist essence and its nefarious objectives of world domination, or at the least, the establishment of a strong Russian superpower.31_{Understood yet another way,} national Bolshevism is the term Agursky used to characterize the Russian chauvinistic attitude that he believed Bolshevism had embraced and exploited since the pre-revolutionary era. In his conception, this Soviet-masked Russian chauvinism had reached its zenith during Stalin’s last years, but persisted in the post-Stalin era, sometimes in disguised form, sometimes openly.

Agursky was hardly the first historian to approach Soviet history from a nationalist departure point. In the third chapter we will discuss his

historiographical place and compare his work to other historians who focused on the nationalist aspects of the USSR. Nevertheless, his works – especially Third

Rome – represent something of a historiographical extreme. When historians cite

Agursky it is frequently to provide an example of a scholar who has exaggerated the nationalist dimension of the Soviet project.32_{To borrow one of his own} favorite phrases, Agursky has become something of a “litmus test” on the

31_{Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder 1987), xv.} Hereafter referred to in citations as Agursky (1987).

32_{See
for
example
Alain
Besançon,
“Nationalism
and
Bolshevism
in
the
USSR,”
published
in
The} Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future, ed. Robert Conquest (Stanford 1986), 1-14, 4. Or

Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet

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question of national Bolshevism: an extreme point of view by which other historians may measure their own views regarding to what extent far-right étatist nationalism influenced Soviet history.

The extremity of Agursky’s views – especially those found in Third Rome – drew serious criticism from a number of reviewers. In the third chapter, we will address these critiques. Both John Dunlop and Erik van Ree have criticized Agursky for his lack of “a theoretical framework” and his conflated usage of the term ‘national Bolshevism’.33_{Various reviewers also criticized the work as} “oddly vituperative,”34_{“emotionally
motivated,”}35_{and
“excessive.”}36_{In Third}

Rome, the history of the USSR is presented as a giant tragedy. Lenin is depicted as

a nefarious megalomaniac bent on Russian world domination, who sought to exploit the nationalities question rather than solve it. Direct comparisons are drawn between the early USSR and Nazi Germany.37_{This is particularly}

intriguing because in the 1980 Russian-language Ideologiia, Agursky presented a more moderate and sympathetic conception of national Bolshevism – albeit still a negative one in our opinion. Like his samizdat writings, Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism changed with time and according to his intended

audience.

In the third chapter, we will address the following questions: how did Agursky’s extremely nationalist interpretation of Soviet history advance his attempts to promote cooperation and understanding between Zionism and Russian nationalism? Why would he castigate Russian nationalism, the very movement with which he was seeking cooperation, as the essential feature of the immoral communist system? This complex question warrants a complex answer, but the central argument to be found in the third chapter is that Argusky’s

attacks are not leveled against all manifestations of Russian nationalism but rather a particular brand of étatist nationalism that eschewed morality and often rationality in justifying the Soviet system as the surest protector of Russian ethno-national interests. Agursky believed national Bolshevism to be the unfortunate product of a number of intellectual and political trends of late 19th century Russian thought, that had perverted Russian nationalism, exchanging morality and tradition for imperial grandeur and great power chauvinism. These were also the features of the dissident far-right nationalism adhered to by

33_{See Dunlop (1989) and van Ree, (2001), 290-291.}

34_{John Dunlop, Review of The Third Rome, Slavic Review (Winter 1989), vol. 48, no. 4, 670-671,} 670.

35_{Ibid, 671.}

36_{Robert McNeal, Review of The Third Rome, The Journal of Modern History (March 1990) vol. 62,} no. 1, 220-221, 220.

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Agursky’s samizdat interlocutors, and his historical works can be read as an investigation in the early-Soviet roots of this étatist brand of Russian nationalism. Thus we will argue in the third chapter that Agursky’s goal with his historical works, despite appearances to the contrary, was consistent with that of his

samizdat writings and his larger life mission: to save a morally grounded,

left-wing neo-Slavophile Russian nationalism that gave primacy to religion and small-scale communities from the forces of an aggressive imperialistic nationalism that eschewed traditional morality and bestowed primacy to the state.

Two concepts that will be discussed at length in chapter three require some clarification: Russian messianism and gnosticism. As we will see, a defining aspect of Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism was that the Soviet

project represented a secularization and nationalization the idea that Russia had been divinely chosen to realize the eschatological end of history and save

mankind. Russian messianism is historically tied to the idea that after the fall of Constantinople, Moscow became the Third Rome. In a famous 1511 letter from the monk Filofei the Elder to Tsar Vasily III, the former proclaimed, “For two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others.”38_{Titling his major work on} national Bolshevism The Third Rome, Agursky drew direct comparisons between Russia’s Orthodox messianism, and the utopian Soviet project, which he saw as a secular perversion of Russian messianism.

Agursky’s belief that materialistic, atheistic Bolshevism was in fact a secular manifestation of Russia’s religiously rooted national messianic complex is rooted in his rather idiosyncratic understanding of the gnostic dimension of Soviet society. Generally, gnosticism is a loose term applied to a wide range of ancient religious movements that “emerged along the fringes of developing orthodoxies,” including Christianity and Judaism.39_{Gnostics believed that our material world} was a flawed creation, but via gnosis, or mystical enlightenment, one could gain access to the spiritual world.

Agursky’s conception of the mystical, gnostic elements of national

Bolshevism is largely indebted to the work of two thinkers: the German-born Israeli philosopher/historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem and the French historian Alain Besançon. In the preface to Ideologiia Agursky wrote that Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism had served “as a benchmark for discussing

38_{See Duncan (2000), 11-12.}

39_{Alain Besançon, The Intellectual Origins of Leninism, translated by Stanley Matthews (Oxford} 1977), 10.

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the role of Russian mysticism on national Bolshevism.”40_{Scholem defined} gnosticism as any “religious movement that proclaimed a mystical esotericism for the elect based on illumination and the acquisition of a higher knowledge of things heavenly and divine.”41_{He explored the developments of early Jewish} gnosticism, which need not concern us here. But in a 1977 work Les origines

intellectuellles du Leninisme, Besançon wrote on the similarities between

gnosticism and Bolshevism, which was to influence Agursky’s work.42

Besancon clarified that there existed hardly anything in common between the doctrines of gnosticism and Bolshevism, but he claimed that there were striking similarities between the two doctrines’ general structures of thought, states of mind, and psychological dispositions. In both Soviet ideology and ancient gnosticism, Bescançon observed something of a middle ground between science and religion. Naturally gnosticism – which rejected the material world – denied science, but it also distinguished itself from religion by rejecting

traditional religious morality and faith. Instead gnosticism held the divine plan was knowable, and that the morality of any action was defined not objectively but rather according to what extent it served this plan. As Besancon wrote,

There is no just in itself. The just if relative to the execution of the cosmic plan as it is revealed by gnosticism, and thus is relative to gnosticism itself. Conformity to the good is thus not marked by the fulfillment of justice, but by the fitting of conduct to the realization of the cosmogonic scheme. This is where gnosticism separates from religion. That is why . . .[it has been accused] of ignoring virtue.43 Besançon argued that Leninism, which embraced Marx’s teleological view of history, similarly blurred the lines between science and religion.

When Lenin declares that the materialist interpretation of history is not a hypothesis, but a scientifically demonstrated doctrine, it is doubtless a belief, but a belief he imagines proved, and based in

40_{Mikhail Agursky, Ideologiia natsional bolshevizma (Paris 1980), accessed online at}

http://historic.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000026/ on 4 March 2016, “Ot avtora.”

Because Ideologiia was accessed online and page numbers cannot be provided, the part and chapter numbers where each passage can be found are provided (e.g. 2.1 refers to Part 2, Chapter One; “Ot Avotra” refers to Agursky’s Preface). Ideologiia hereafter cited as Agursky (1980). 41_{Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York} 1960), 1.

42_{See Agursky (1980), 2.3 and Agursky (1987), 57. Agursky also mentioned along with Besançon} how the Italian historian Luciano Pellicani’s work I revoluzionari di professione (Florence 1975) also developed the gnostic element of Bolshevism; unfortunately, I could only find his work in Italian.

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experience. At the basis of the ideology, lies something known. Lenin does not know that he believes. He believes that he knows.44

Naturally, Besançon also argued that Lenin’s dogmatic belief that the development of history could be known led him to follow in the gnostics’ footsteps by eschewing traditional morality. Building on these comparisons, Besançon observed the following similarities between ancient gnosticism and Soviet ideology, among others: “a locked encyclopaedic system of cosmology and soteriology [the doctrine of salvation–S.F.]; the over-interpretation of history; a morality deriving from the doctrine;. . .the relativization of man to his

contribution to salvation; . . . and the geo-historical dualism between regions which are ontologically damned and regions which are saved.”45

As we will see, these observations had a profound impact on Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism. In order to construct an argument that Bolshevism represented the secularization of Russian messianism –

promulgating the belief that Russia could solve the end of world history by building a communist utopia on earth – he appealed to the gnostic dimension of Soviet ideology that Besançon had identified. We will examine in chapter three Agursky’s discussion of how important Russian nationalist thinkers and writers originally horrified by the Bolshevik Revolution came to embrace Bolshevism as a manifestation of “holy sin.”46_{In other words, they took a gnostic approach,} recognizing good within evil, welcoming the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution as the development of the divine plan, the unfolding of Russia’s eschatological mission. Thus, when using the word ‘gnostic’ in regard to the USSR and national Bolshevism throughout this paper, we are not implying a direct influence of gnostic doctrine on Soviet socialism, but rather talking about an orientation by which history is read as a secret set of illusive symbols and the world is split into two opposing camps of good and evil47_{: in the Soviet model, those fighting for the} dictatorship of the proletariat, contrasted with those fighting against it.

Finally, in chapter three, we will argue that Agursky’s work on national Bolshevism – despite certain contradictions from work to work – is consistently a negative condemnation of the secular and chauvinistic perversion of Russian religious-national ideas. In portraying national Bolshevism as the political and cultural secularization and nationalization of Russian messianism, Agursky

44_{Ibid, 9.} 45_{Ibid, 16.}

46_{Agursky (1987), 177.}

47_{This was the belief of Manichaeism, an Iranian gnostic religion that preached a dualistic} cosmology of good and evil.

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called on Russian society to return to the traditional, religious morality that he believed national Bolshevism had so tragically distorted. At the same time, we will explore in this chapter how Agursky’s conception of national Bolshevism served to historically vindicate Zionism. By portraying a vehemently anti-Semitic Soviet society, and arguing that ethno-nationalism will always trump civic

nationalism, Agursky hoped to expose the fallacy of Soviet internationalism and justify a Jewish nation state in Israel.

Chapter Four: The Shadows of False Messiahs (1975-present)

Agursky’s contemporary relevance

Agursky died a premature death, the circumstances of which were somewhat mysterious. In August of 1991, he was personally invited to take part in a

conference in Moscow in association with the newly created Congress of

Compatriots. His visit coincided with the August Putsch that lasted from August 18-21. On the last day of the Putsch, the day that the Soviet Union effectively collapsed, Agursky was found dead of a heart attack in his room at the Hotel

Rossiia.48_{Those who have written on
Agursky’s
death
tend
to
stress
its
symbolic} nature.49_{Even after making aliyah to
Israel,
Agursky’s
work
focused
almost} exclusively on Russian and Soviet themes. Despite his vehement opposition to the Soviet system, its very existence provided him with a ubiquitous ideological opponent and gave purpose to his intellectual activity. Once that opponent disappeared, Agursky was left without an enemy, and his heart gave out.

Yet perhaps even more tragic than his death is the fact that Agursky never really received his due posthumous credit. As a dissident, Agursky was one of the most important and active advocates for the Zionist cause. His attempts to

cooperate with those who held entirely disparate views challenge some of the most fundamental understandings regarding Zionism, Russian nationalism, and Soviet dissidence. As a historian Agursky became one of the pioneer scholars in the field of national Bolshevism, which was to become important in the context of yet another renaissance of Russian nationalism during the post-perestroika era. A voracious reader, Agursky sparked new public interest in a number of

48_{Deutsch Kornblatt (2004), 73 also wrote – based on her interviews with Agursky’s
widow,} Vera – that Agursky returned to the USSR to recover the body of his son who had died in a skiing accident in Southern Russia, and to investigate the murder of his spiritual mentor Father Alexander Men’, who was assassinated in 1990.

49_{See for example Alexander Dugin, Tampliery Proletariata, “L’age
d’or
ou
l’age
Mordoree:} Mikhail Agursky,” (Moscow 1997) http://arctogaia.com/public/templars/agursk.htm; or Mikhail Gorelik, “Roman zhizni Mikhaila Agurskogo,” published in Agursky (1996), 402-415, 413-414. As Dugin’s books were accessed online, chapter and section titles are provided instead of page numbers.

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Russian, Jewish, and Soviet writers and politicians who had been buried under the rubble of Soviet repression. Even those scholars who critiqued Agursky’s biases and lack of terminological clarity praised his erudition and his exhaustive study of vast source material.50

Finally, as a Soviet, Orthodox Christian, Jewish Zionist cyberneticist turned human rights activist turned historian, Agursky existed somewhere in between a multitude of political, cultural, linguistic, disciplinary and geographical worlds and thus makes a fascinating subject of study for the historian of the postmodern age. At once an Israeli and a Russian, he wrote and read in a number of languages, including Russian, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and French. Politically, he was sympathetic to the right and extremely critical of Soviet communism until the end, but he nevertheless remained committed to leftist economic ideas and social justice. Despite the anti-democratic tendencies of some of his samizdat writings, his work as a historian is marked by a strong belief in democracy’s superiority to other forms of government. In 1991, he even ran for the Knesset on the Israeli labor-party [Avoda] ticket. Bolotovsky has suggested that it was precisely this ideological itinerancy and fluidity that has ensured Agursky’s lack of posthumous recognition:

Agursky’s name hardly means anything for the general reader . . . Nevertheless, there are few modern Zionists who made more of an impact than Agursky in the struggle for [Soviet] Jews to immigrate to Israel. But the Moscow human rights defenders have remained silent, as has the Israeli intelligentsia—the right wing of which cannot, even seven years after Agursky’s death, forget about his closeness to the Labor Party–and the leftists, in their turn, still treat him with some caution, mindful of the ‘inexplicable’ sympathies of the scholar towards Russian nationalists. ‘Of course’, opponents agree, ‘Agursky was an outstanding scholar and a most honest man. But . . .’

Everybody has a ‘but.’51

Yet it would be unfair to say that Agursky has left no legacy. Many Western scholars working on nationalism in the USSR frequently cite him, albeit often only as the representative of an extreme historiographical position.52_{But more} interesting than his legacy among academics is his legacy among contemporary Russian nationalists.

Perhaps the most intriguing assessment of Agursky’s work as a historian comes from the ultra-nationalist ideological father of neo-Eurasianism,

50_{See for example Dunlop (1989).} 51_Bolotovsky.

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Alexander Dugin. In his 1997 book Templars of the Proletariat, Dugin called Agursky’s work as a historian “the most serious work dedicated to the Soviet period of Russian history, helping us to understand its deep, spiritual meaning.” Moreover, Dugin strangely believes – or at least pretends to believe – that Agursky’s work betrays “a deep sympathy towards Soviet

national-Bolshevism.”53_{What
appeals
to
Dugin
most
about
Agursky’s
historiographical} position is without a doubt the centrality Agursky gives to Russian nationalism. In many ways, Agursky subscribed to what is often referred to as the ‘single stream’ [edinii potok] theory of Russian/Soviet history, which is a useful position for Dugin to cite. Allensworth described this theory in a way that sheds light on both Dugin and Agursky’s reading of Soviet history:

. . . the ‘single stream’ interpretation of Russian history. . . [is] a version of the Russian past that merges the victory at Kulikovo and the messianism of the first Great Patriotic War with the long march to Berlin during the Second, the Russian empire with the Soviet Union, and Peter the Great’s legacy with that of Stalin. The October

Revolution did not represent a sharp break with the past . . . but rather a metamorphosis of the Russian derzhava [great power].54

While Agursky generally presented this continuity as a negative phenomenon – and even this is debatable, depending on the work in question – his assertion that Russian nationalism superseded Marxist ideology during the Soviet period is a very useful position for Dugin to cite in his attempts to unite Russian

nationalists of all economic persuasions in a concentrated front.

Even more unexpectedly, despite definite tendencies of anti-Semitism in his work, Dugin has cooperated with far-right Zionist groups and has praised the traditional and conservative aspects of Israel and Judaism.55_{Interestingly, such} an ideological position seems representative of much of the Russian political elite these days, as contemporary Russia and Israel both pursue nationalistic agendas while enjoying better relations than ever. Dugin’s willingness to even consider Israel an ally of Russia’s in the ideological war between Eurasianism and Atlanticism represents the realization of Agursky’s hopes that Russian nationalists and Zionists would strengthen their ties and increase cooperation.56 Yet, while Agursky hoped this increased cooperation would weaken both the

53_{Dugin
(1997),
“V
komissarakh
dukh
samoderzhav’ia,”

(Moscow
1997)}

http://arctogaia.com/public/templars/agursk.htm 54_{Allensworth (1998), 146.}

55_{Dmitry
Shlapentokh,
“Alexander
Dugin’s
Views
on
the
Middle
East,” Space and Polity, (30 June} 2008) vol. 12, no. 2, 251-268 and Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: Ideology of Empire (Washington D.C. 2008) 135-136.

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Israeli and Russian étatist far right, contemporary headlines and scholarship suggest that the opposite has taken place.

It is in no way the aim of this paper to suggest that the Russian right has abandoned anti-Semitism.57_{Some of the most aggressively anti-Semitic political} developments in Russia occurred during the years immediately following the death of Agursky and the demise of the Soviet Union.58_{Nevertheless, ideas such} as Dugin’s that suggest the potential compatibility of Russian nationalism with Zionism seems not to have fallen on deaf ears, as Vladimir Putin manages to couple an agenda of Russian nationalism with an unprecedented friendliness towards Judaism and Israel.59_{In an increasingly globalized and multicultural} world both Russia and Israel have taken a nationalist stand, asserting that nations reserve the right to distinctively develop in their historical homelands. Many scholars comment on how the persistent ‘Russia Idea’ – the notion that Russia is fundamentally distinct from the West and has a special historical mission to realize – continues to play a significant role in contemporary Russian socio-political life.60_{Likewise, certain Israeli scholars have warned that in Israel} today, “politico-messianic enthusiasm is growing and gaining increasing

recognition.”61

In the last chapter of this thesis we will investigate these rather troubling developments. We will argue that the primacy his reading of history gave to nationalism left his work open to exploitative interpretations such as Dugin’s. Moreover, Agursky and Dugin not only stressed the same nationalist aspects of Soviet history, they also both did so in order to advance nationalist projects: for Agursky, the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, for Dugin the establishment of a modern-day Russian-led Eurasian empire. While the former project is much more historically justifiable than the latter, in my opinion, it is a central irony of Agursky’s work that while condemning national Bolshevism as the secularization and nationalization of Russian messianism, he defended Zionism, which could be seen as exactly that: a utopian attempt to realize on earth a divine eschatological covenant. In wrestling with whether or not there exists in this irony an

irreconcilable contradiction, we will look at Agursky’s Zionist writings from his

57_{For an interesting article on the role of anti-Semitism in contemporary Russian political culture} see Walter Laqueur, “Anti-Semitism and the Russian Idea,” Mosaic Magazine, 25 June 2015, accessed online at http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/06/anti-semitism-and-the-new-russian-idea/ on 28 June 2016.

58_{See Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (New York 2001).} 59_{See
Mark
N.
Katz,
“Putin’s
Pro-Israel
Policy,”
The Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2005), 51-59.} 60_{See for example Laqueur (2015).}

61_{Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin,
“‘On
the
Right
Side
of
the
Barricades’:
Walter
Benjamin,
Gershom} Scholem, and Zionism,” Comparative Literature (2013), Vol. 65, No. 3, 363-381, 367.

The Shadows of False Messiahs: Mikhail Agursky and the relationship between Russian nationalism and Zionism from the Brezhnev era to the present