WASHINGTON REPORT Holy Russia Rises in Vermont

...The czarist secret police, picking up from the practice in France, enlarging it and eventually passing it along to its Soviet successor, got and stayed on friendly terms with the opposition, the underground, student movements sworn to destroy or otherwise modify the autocracy...

...The reemergence of this 19th-century Russian moonshine provides by far the most interesting, perhaps the only interesting, note in Solzhenitsyns remarks to the Harvard graduates...

...Many elements, among them the most essential, of the Soviet political structure were either established, strengthened, or sharpened in purpose as the last several Romanov czars strove vigorously against the rise of a middle class and, more broadly, against even the faintest semblance of the sharing of power with anyone at all...

...The tradition was passed intact to the Soviet successor, along with state-inflicted terror against the populace, and without too much of that addition, to the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA under Allen Dulles and Richard Helms...

...The subjugation of non-Slav provinces is an ancient Russian tradition, as in the "republics" of Georgia, Armenia and others...

...The two great innovations the Romanov autocracy introduced in its last two years were the secret police and the bureaucracy...

...Since in normal human experience salvation in most of its gradations comes from persons better educated, even of greater intelligence than those who are saved, that Russian belief obviously was mystical rather than rational and indeed there was a recognized Christian strain, but the young Russian atheism had no trouble at all making making the leap of faith toward the salvationary peasantry...

...But there are autocracies and autocracies: differences between, say, Augustus and Caligula, more important, continental differences between Ivan the Terrible and Josef Stalin...

...Meanwhile, back in the Slavonica heartland, Russian industrialization has proceeded more or less as it would have under the czars, perhaps a little slower, agriculture remains unmanageable, or at least unmanaged, and there is no greater hope for political maturity or human rights than there was under Alexander II...

...on the other hand, it is possible that they have not and further possible that, whether they have or not, the practice continues anyway...

...In this country we are only very recently becoming aware of the perils to republican government posed by both a huge bureaucracy and a lawless secret police...

...in industrialization, agricultural production, education, political maturity and what we have recently taken to calling "human rights," Russia was by far the most backward in all these fields...

...In Russia, there has been no republican government to be imperiled by either...

...Its backwardness then and now has had crippling effects on the rest of Pan-Slavonica...

...It surely is no accident that the Slav state that advanced farthest in all those directions both as briefly independent and under Soviet occupation, Czechoslovakia, finds itself the most thoroughly Soviet-occupied, harassed and impeded of all the Pan Slavonic states...

...The reasoning here was not merely the universally observed delusion of the idle about the ennobling effects of agricultural labor, although that was present in plenty, as may be observed in Tolstoy...

...WASHINGTON REPORT HOLY RUSSIA RISES IN VERMONT It has taken a little better than sixty years, but at last the late 19th century Russian self-bamboozlement of the intelligentsia—a Russian word, it is always worth remembering, in spite of its Latin roots—has returned in pretty much the same form it had when it disappeared in the general tumult of 1917...

...Responding to that situation in almost horticultural fashion, the emerging, politically powerless middle class put forth mock political shoots that eventually made themselves a sub-class and dubbed themselves the intelligentsia...

...The rest is mostly standard conservative, occasionally reactionary claptrap that many of the graduates, one imagines, have been hearing from their older male relatives all their lives and that can be heard any day here in the public rooms of the ArmyNavy Club...

...The Romanovs' Russia, of course, had always been an autocracy...

...The occasion is as good a one as any to recall developments in late 19th century Russia and their profound and enduring effects on die Soviet system...

...Again, both had been around in one form or another for some time, but only after the assassination of Alexander II did both take over administration of the state in large areas both geographic and categorical...

...That's the nature of secret police operations...

...It has recently dawned on some perceptive American observers that EuroCommunism poses more of a threat to the Soviets than it does to the West...

...The peculiarly Russian variation was that the Russian peasant was a salvationary figure precisely because the peasants for centuries had been so exploited, beaten, degraded, enslaved, humiliated, insulted and injured every day for all their lives...

...On the contrary, both have been used by both the czars and the Soviets to strengthen an absolutist government...

...It is possible that the successors of Hoover and Helms have abandoned the practice...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...With that last note Solzenhitsyn revived yet another 19th century Russian intellectual passion, Pan-Slavism, the East European equivalent of the quite similar Anglo-Germanic selfinfatuation that ended so disastrously in the World Wars after warring against half the people of Europe, Asia and Africa for more than a century...

...Yugoslavia is more serious: not only Slav separated from Pan-Slavism, but also Communist, under a Moscow-educated leader who has, for 30 years, kept in business an evolving Communism that is much closer to Marxism than the Soviet tyranny is and that allows much greater self-management to the country's constituent republics than Soviet Russia has ever dreamed of doing...

...and, of course, the continued and at times quite uppity independence of the South Slavs, Yugoslavia...

...That particular form of self-bamboozlement sprang from a projected perception of the Russian peasant as the source of all virtue, goodness and hope for humanity...

...Its return was one of the less widely remarked but one of the most important features of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's recent commencement address at Harvard...

...Pan-Slavism, shared by the czars, most of their ministers, large sections of both the bureaucrecy and the aristocracy, has been achieved by the Soviets and achieved in the only way it was ever possible, the imposition of arms...

...If, a century ago, all the Slav states or Slav provinces of the German states were backward compared to Western Europe and the U.S...

...With Solzenhitsyn summoning up the distant past like Proust, it is tempting to reexamine the more recent Russian part in the light of the novelist's unexpected intellectual resurrectionism...

...Double agents are no doubt as old as spying, which is very old indeed, but that Janus-faced variation somehow seems archetypical of the last 40 years of the Romanov dynasty...

...If that is true, obviously, Yugoslavia, merely by existing, poses a far worse threat...

...If anyone in our government really wants to think war, instead of just thinking military megabucks, that's the war they ought to be thinking...

...But it is quite startling to see the longforgotten salvation-bearing Russian peasant come back to life at Harvard, of all places, his numbers now swollen by the novelist to include virtually all Russians who have suffered under the tyranny plus all citizens of nations under Soviet occupation...

...They move very rapidly out of the control of any responsible officer of government, becoming by definition irresponsible, ultimately subversive of the government that gave them being...

...That Russian drive to the sea that the unspeakable Al Haig worries about the way he used to worry about justice catching up with his creator, Nixon, is much more likely to be to the Adriatic than to the Atlantic...

...Appalled at both the autocracy and the landed aristocracy, the intelligentsia came to believe that Russia's salvation, indeed the salvation of the human race, lay in the Russian peasant...

...This collaboration led to ease in making arrests but it also led to situations in which the secret police seemed to be the principal supporters of subversive movements against the state power...

...There are two blemishes on Pan-Slavonica: the presence within the empire of such non-Slav states as East Germany, the Baltic "republics" of the USSR, Hungary and Roumania...