Alexander Lyusy. Gift for a disinfectant

“... Non -deceptive evidence of the beginning of truly peaceful coexistence will appear only then, ” wrote the author of this book, a famous German historian, “ when such books as “ The Gulag Archipelago ” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or scientific research, brought to life not by folk pedagogical goals, but by the question of truth."

Since the appearance of this book in the author's homeland of Germany in 1986 , "The Gulag Archipelago" has been published. True, the Soviet Union, which Ernst Nolte had high hopes for reforming, simply ceased to exist. It took the post-Soviet era to perceive and even update the by no means outdated works of Nolte , who recently celebrated his 80th birthday. The appropriateness of Nolte’s belated arrival speaks volumes about the qualities of both his unbiased works and the new Russian reality (in the latter case, hardly with a sign of a qualitative “plus”, so one can only hope that Russia will still endure Nolte’s publication).

Nolte's approach is interesting for us now because he proposes to remove the phenomenon he is studying - the Third Reich - from intellectual isolation and put the demonized "age of fascism" in relationship with world history as reality (and not a reflection of the latter in the heads of historians). For example, it was widely believed among French historians that the National Socialist Party represented the spearhead of German revanchism, which captured almost all Germans. Nazism, the origins of which are already found in Luther , and even in the ancient German Cheruscus Hermann, is thereby identified with Germany itself. Hitler and his party thus appear as only one of the manifestations of the primordial German desire for world domination. The opposite of this aspiration is the rest of Europe with its more humanistic culture, which has absorbed ancient traditions.

The author found the source of his concept in the little-known views of K. Marx , representing the class struggle as an international class struggle. So it is no coincidence that in 1919 the newly founded German Communist Party believed that it was engaged in “the greatest civil war in world history.”

Limiting the concept of the “European civil war” to a comparison of the history of the Russian revolution and the German Reich (only briefly noting elements of such a war in other European countries), Nolte touches on the idea of ​​a “special” path that existed in Russia and Germany, the stability of which is associated with the peculiarities of the industrial modernization of the two countries . However, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 created a new situation for world history. For the first time, an ideological party in a huge state seized sole power with the intention of carrying out a radical revolution throughout the world, by unleashing civil war everywhere, to realize the predictions of Marxism and fulfill the hopes of the former labor movement. Nolte pays attention to attempts to export the socialist revolution from Russia to Germany in 1918 (revealing the special role of K. Radek in this). Even Stalin, even in the revolutionary situation of 1923 , was ready to easily cede revolutionary primacy, declaring in a letter published in the Rote Fahne newspaper: “The victory of the revolution in Germany will be of greater importance for the proletariat of Europe and America than the victory of the Russian revolution 6 years ago. The victory of the German proletariat will, without a doubt, transfer the center of the world revolution from Moscow to Berlin."

According to Nolte’s concept, the international civil war, before developing into the Soviet-German conflict of 1941-1945 , clearly manifested itself within both Russia and Germany (with the internal differences that in Russia it was a real war, while in Germany this war was of limited scope, since the government, despite street clashes and "all the verbal violence in pamphlets and newspapers, ultimately held the reins of government firmly in its hands."

Nolte shows the emergence of fascism (both in Italy and Germany) primarily as a natural reaction to Bolshevism. On the one hand, Hitler declared the protection of the national intelligentsia from barbarism, exploiting the motives for revising the Treaty of Versailles and German unity. On the other hand, he turned out to be a “biological Marxist,” replacing the idea of ​​an advanced class with the idea of ​​a “chosen race.” The reactions became excessive in the anti-Semitic interpretation of the anti-Marxist experience. “Redundancy is the main feature of all ideologies, and... it is inevitable where and when one ideology brings to life another, opposite to itself.”

“Anti-Lenin” Hitler (in practice, in many ways a student of Stalin, although the latter learned a lot from Hitler on the annexation side in the late 1930s) experienced quite “Hamlet” hesitations about whether to attack the Soviet Union or go together against Western countries in the matter of redividing the world. After all, since the 1920s, these countries have been brought together by a lot, starting with the Rappal Treaty of 1922, which was not completely clarified due to the secrecy of Soviet documents. Particularly close ties existed between the Red Army and the Reichswehr, who studied in the USSR both to fly and to conduct chemical warfare. German officers during the Spanish Civil War often asked themselves whether they were supporting the right side (looking at each of them with arrogance and not succumbing to the propaganda of proletarian internationalism).

Nolte compiles a kind of periodic system of similarities and differences between Bolshevism and fascism at different levels, up to comparisons of the songs of the Komsomol and the Hitler Youth. However, his conclusion is that at no point in time is equating fascism with communism justified due to the essential hostility. Like most modern Western neo-Marxists, Nolte seems to lean toward greater ethical justification for the original phenomenon (while still remaining primarily a rigorous researcher rather than an ideologue).

The precise fit of this book into the current themes of current Russian reality is concentrated in the image-concept of a “rat cage,” which the author derives from the torture allegedly practiced in the Lubyanka at the instigation of Chinese security officers. Set on fire in a cage placed next to the prisoner’s body, the rat had no choice but to eat up the victim’s body. This is how the victory of fascism in Germany was explained in the conditions of the communist danger, when the alternative was clear: “the Soviet star or the swastika,” the destruction of national culture in the name of internationalism, or still the preservation of the “state of productive differences.” Of course, we are not talking about a complete repetition of the situation in Germany in the 1920-1930s in modern Russia with its unstructured political life. But now, following Nolte’s book, Alexander Shishkin’s poetry collection “ Corpus Animae ” was published (M.: SoyuzDesign LLC, 2003). In this frightening 800-page whimsical tome by a previously unknown author, it was not easy to extract interesting lines to illustrate our conversation:

So life remains naked
In scraps of yesterday's newspapers,
And the rat eats on fire
A hopeless way out into the world.

I don’t think Shishkin studied Nolte’s book. The image of the Phoenix Rat appearing in the flames of yesterday's newspaper scraps has a clearly archetypal character.

Random hits aside, Nolte’s approach is interesting for Russia because it shows the importance of current global research perspectives. Against the background of a clearly narrowed line of reasoning about “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism,” it seems relevant to consider our modernity in the context of world power lines of development. Will Russia be able to withstand adequate perception of Nolte?