The reactionary tradition that has shaped the Russian soul, and continues to do so

On a hot day in 1928, in Harbin, Manchuria, a twenty-one-year-old Russian student climbed onto the balustrade of the Faculty of Law and tore down a Soviet flag. His name was Konstantin Rodzaevskij; he was one of the Russian exiles who had sought refuge in north-eastern China following the October Revolution. Harbin, in those years, took in a great many of them: they were anti-Bolsheviks, dreaming of the regime’s downfall and a return to their homeland. Rodzaevskij, however, had more ambitious plans: to reconquer Russia and re-establish it on the model of Mussolini’s Italy. To this end, in 1931 he took part in the founding of the Russian Fascist Party, becoming first its secretary and then its president. There was even an ‘ABC of Fascism’, complete with revision questions to check that comrades had understood everything: for example, that Bolshevism was a creation of international Jewry. The party had grand plans: it claimed to have twenty thousand members and dreamt of entering Moscow by 1938. Obviously, it would not succeed. Rodzaevskij would not reach the capital until seven years later, only to be promptly arrested, tried and shot.

His story is now recounted by Andrea Tarabbia in “Dio Nazione Lavoro. Anima russa e pensiero reazionario”, due to be published on 3 November by Feltrinelli. “A small, absurd story”, as the author describes it, but perhaps not as marginal as it seems. Tarabbia traces its developments, drawing two far broader conclusions. The first is that the stance and ideology of that movement did not disappear with its leading figures: they spanned the twentieth century and, after the fall of the Wall, flourished once more. The second is even less obvious: the fascists’ search for the ‘Russian soul’ coincided with a mix of elements (Orthodoxy, authoritarianism, the fatherland, the idea of a mission) that form the shared identity of today’s nationalists.

What persists, first and foremost, is the belief that the West – incapable of understanding Russia’s unique character – seeks to weaken it to the point of dismantling it. It is a fear, Tarabbia observes, that may seem incomprehensible to those of us who have grown up here, but which for many Russians forms part of their identity. It can be found, amongst others, in the reactionary philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who in 1950, speaking of the future of an independent Ukraine, envisaged a country destined to lose its identity under European influence if Russia were unable to preserve its ‘Russianness’. Tarabbia links these views to those of Vladimir Putin, who in July 2021, a few months before the invasion, wrote an article on the ‘historical unity’ of Russians and Ukrainians: they are ‘one people – he writes – one and the same’. The parallel with Il’in is eerily striking. Il’in himself, after all, is by no means a forgotten figure in Putin’s Russia.

In 2006, his remains were transferred to Moscow, to the Donskoy Monastery. Some time later, Putin had one of the philosopher’s works, “I nostri compiti”, distributed to his officials. A gesture that was anything but coincidental. Tarabbia, however, is careful not to portray Putin as a disciple of Ilyin. The conclusion, if anything, is even more dizzying: there is a reactionary repertoire of ideas, images and words that has survived the Soviet Union and is always there, ready for use. “I know of no people,” writes Tarabbia, “who, throughout their history, have tried to define themselves publicly, to lay themselves bare and to trace the boundaries of their own soul with greater constancy and obstinacy.” After all, the search for the ‘Russian soul’ has also been a way of asking ‘who are we?’, of finding a ‘we’ and telling its story, above all through literature. And it is here that Tarabbia’s book also becomes the tale of a difficult love: that for ‘the greatest literature ever written’, born – the writer maintains – from the very soil in which the roots of that reactionary thought lie.