Agursky, Mikhail Samuilovich

Scientific work

Mikhail Agursky was born in Moscow in 1933 , in the family of the famous revolutionary, historian and party leader Samuel (Shmuel) Haimovich Agursky (1884-1947). He graduated from high school in 1950 .

In 1955 he married Vera Fedorovna Kondratyeva. Received higher technical education. In the early 1960s he worked at ENIMS - an experimental research institute of metal-cutting machines.

In 1965, he quit his job and entered the graduate school of the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , after which he worked at the Scientific Research Institute of Engineering Technology (NIITM), the head technological institute of the Ministry of General Engineering, since 1968 . In May 1969 he defended his thesis in cybernetics . M. S. Agursky was the author of several scientific papers published in specialized publications, was a member of the Moscow Society of Naturalists in the genetics section.

Dissident Cybernetics

Having received a technical education, Agursky did not become a narrow technical specialist. According to the poet Alexander Laiko ^[2] , already at the end of the 1950s , Agursky was in the ranks of the Moscow underground , among the initiators of the creation of the youth poetry club Fakel and its chairman.

In 1955, Agursky met Nadezhda Vasilyevna Vereshchagina, the daughter of writer and religious thinker Vasily Rozanov ; later met with the family of Daniil Andreev . From books from the library, Rozanov began to closely study the works of Rozanov himself, Vladimir Solovyov , Konstantin Leontyev , Dmitry Merezhkovsky , Mikhail Gershenzon , the religious thought of Dostoevsky , Tolstoy , Martin Buber . At the same time, he was fascinated by the study of the activities of his father, the history of the Russian church and the activities of the modern Orthodox church, the history of Zionism, interfaith relations.

A special role in the biography of Mikhail Agursky was played by the preacher Alexander Men . Agursky met his family in the mid-1960s. Thanks to the spiritual guidance of Father Alexander, his openness to other faiths , Agursky made new acquaintances both among dissident dissidents, Zionists, and among the priests of the Orthodox Church .

Agursky’s deep knowledge of religious philosophy, contacts with ROC leaders, and open statements in defense of Israeli policy did not get along well with the status of an employee of the military space institution. In the fall of 1970, Agursky left NIIMT, intending to focus on work in the field of bio-cybernetics, but the desire to get a job at the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics (IAT) could not be realized. Once unemployed, Agursky fed his family, making money for VINITI and the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate , while cataloging the foreign library department of the Moscow Theological Academy at Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra in Zagorsk .

Human rights activities

Having gained relative material and social independence, Agursky became close to the Zionist refuseniks ( Vladimir Slepak , Alexander Lerner , Joseph Begun , Kirill Khenkin , etc.) and the circle of Moscow dissidents : Yuri Glazov, Valentin Turchin , Naum Korzhavin , Zhores Medvedev , Yuz Aleshkovsky and others. 1970-1971 - the years of hesitation of Mikhail Agursky. He decided for himself whether he should continue his activity as a cybernetics scientist in the Soviet Union or leave the country and connect his fate with Zionism.

In 1971, he applied for travel to Israel and addressed several letters addressed to the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee, L. I. Brezhnev, about the oppression that he, as a Jew, was repaired when applying for a job. From the text of the letters to Brezhnev, it is clear that the lack of work is more an occasion than a real reason for his concern. Agursky himself spoke of the same thing. His real desire is not only and not so much getting an acceptable job in the Soviet Union, but repatriation to Israel . Agursky, as a former employee of a security institution, was denied travel to Israel without indicating a possible time limit for reviewing such a decision.

At the same time, as Agursky himself recalls, the authorities did not apply any violent measures to him, except for wiretaps. Mikhail Samuilovich freely traveled around the country, published his works abroad and in samizdat , had the opportunity to earn money legally, including from his patented inventions, delivered lectures, collaborated with the Moscow Patriarchate , and met with participants in the Zionist and dissident movements. The authorities avoided open repressive measures, as was the case with Zhores Medvedev, and hoped for a non-violent resolution of the conflict.

Among other Zionists and human rights activists, Agursky took part in an anti-Palestinian demonstration at the Lebanese embassy in Moscow in 1972 , as a result of which all demonstrators were detained. Together with Agursky, Academician A. D. Sakharov was also detained. As a result of this collision, Agursky concluded that there were frictions between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB ; he subsequently provoked these frictions himself, trying to play them in his own interests ^[3] In order to get permission to leave as soon as possible, Agursky also liaises with correspondents of foreign newspapers and magazines.

In 1973, Agursky, among other human rights defenders (Valentin Turchin, Vladimir Maximov , Alexander Galich , Igor Shafarevich ), defended Academician A. D. Sakharov against condemning him by the Soviet media. Thus, Agursky seemed to come into conflict with the Zionist desire to distance himself from any activity related to interference in non-Jewish statehood. The reason he motivated his actions was the unconditional support by Sakharov of the aspirations of Soviet Zionist Jews to repatriate from the Soviet Union to Israel.

Soon Agursky met with Andrei Sakharov himself, Roy Medvedev , Yuri Orlov , Valery Chalidze , Alexander Solzhenitsyn . At the initiative of the latter, he writes an article “Modern Socio-Economic Systems and Their Prospects” for the collection of articles “ From Under the Rock ”. The collection was devoted to questions of the spiritual and social life of that time - the new “Milestones”, in the words of Solzhenitsyn. This collection with articles by Igor Shafarevich, Felix Svetov , Evgeny Barabanov, Vadim Borisov, Mikhail Polivanov , Solzhenitsyn himself and edited by him was published in samizdat in Moscow in 1974 . In the same year, YMCA-Press published a book in Paris .

The book constituted an era in Soviet dissent. Agursky was the only Zionist author among the rest of the publication. As A. I. Solzhenitsyn spoke about Agursky at a press conference in Zurich in November 1974, dedicated to the release of the collection:

It is united with a group of Russian authors in the first place by the great importance that all of them - well, co-authors - attach to national self-consciousness.

According to the researcher Arkady Blumbaum ^[4], Agursky's article is not relevant today, because it:

... was a fairly utopian social project - an attempt to remove the contradictions between "capitalism" and "socialism". As a result, Agursky built an almost totalitarian construct, involving the rejection of the system of political parties, the introduction of censorship, the restriction of access to information, and the elimination, in the spirit of leftist concepts, of the differences between physical and mental labor, etc.

The sensational book, apparently, accelerated the long-awaited departure for Israel to Israel in 1975 in Agursky. Before leaving for Israel in the spring of 1975, Agursky optimistically stated in an interview with The Jerusalem Post :

I am leaving Russia not as her enemy, but as a true friend who cares about her present and future. I tried to do my best for cooperation between the Russian and Jewish national movements. These efforts were apparently successful enough to allow me to hope for the future friendship of Israel and a reborn Russia

As if to confirm his words, on the eve before leaving in April 1975, a variety of people came to conduct Agursky: Ernst Neizvestny , Roy Medvedev, Alexander Ginzburg , Igor Shafarevich , Leonid Borodin , Yuri Orlov , Vladimir Voinovich , Valentin Turchin , Peter Yakir , Gennady Shimanov , Alexander Men , Yuri Ivanov and others.

Agur in Israel

Agursky spent the last 16 years of his life in Israel. But most of what he wrote at that time was somehow addressed to the Soviet Union. In 1976, Agursky became an employee of the University of Jerusalem . He publishes numerous articles on religious, national, socio-political and historical-cultural topics in various media. In 1979 ^[5] (according to other sources in 1983 ^{[6] [7]} ) Mikhail Agursky in France defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sorbonne . After receiving a doctorate in Slavic studies , he became a professor at Hebrew University. Thesis: “The National Roots of Soviet Power”, it was published in Paris in Russian in 1980 in the form of the book “The Ideology of National Bolshevism”.

Subsequently, Agursky lectured, prepared recommendations for the Israeli government as a political scientist, worked as a political commentator on television. In particular, Agursky argued that the military resources of the Soviet Union were insufficient to conduct a large-scale offensive war, which provoked accusations of Agursky in Israel that he was an agent of the KGB. ^[6] Agur was also a member of the Central Committee of the Israeli Labor Party .

The following books are devoted to discussion of Soviet politics: “The Soviet Golem” ( 1983 ), “ The Third Rome ” ( 1987 ), “Trade Relations between the Soviet Union and the Middle East Countries” ( 1990 ), the article “The Middle East Conflict and the Prospects for Its Settlement” , magazine " Our Contemporary ", 1990, No. 6. In addition, he actively studied the history of the Jewish question in Tsarist Russia and in the Soviet Union. In 1986, in collaboration with Margarita Shklovskaya, he published a collection of Maxim Gorky texts on Jewry. Interest in Gorky’s work was reflected in his latest article, The Great Heretic (Gorky as a Religious Thinker), published in the journal Voprosy Filosofii in August 1991 .

During the years of perestroika, Agursky got the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union again. He comes to the country in 1989 , meets with his former colleagues-opponents on the Jewish question (Shafarevich), speaks to various audiences with his own interpretations of Zionism and nationalism. At a meeting at Moscow State University, he is represented by the widow of Daniil Andreeva, Alla Aleksandrovna Andreeva . He gives an interview to Soviet publications - "Herald of Jewish Soviet Culture" and others.

Two years later, he was personally invited to the Soviet Union in connection with the organization of the “Congress of Compatriots”, to which he arrived on August 19 at the height of the August coup . Shocked by the events of Moscow’s hectic political life, he suddenly dies of a heart attack in the hotel of the Rossiya Hotel on August 21, 1991 .

The widow of Mikhail Samuilovich Agursky, Vera Fyodorovna Agurskaya, published in Jerusalem after the death of her husband in 1996, his memoirs “Ashes of Klaas”.

Agursky had a daughter and a son.

The Interpretation of Anti-Semitism

According to Agursky himself, being a convinced Zionist by the beginning of the 1970s, until 1973 he did not take an active part in the dissident movement.

Prior to this, I strictly adhered to Jewish discipline and did not openly intervene in dissident affairs. But then it began to seem to me that this tactic was beginning to reveal its weaknesses. Sakharov always stood in our defense, so it became immoral to remain silent. I decided that the dissidents should be supported publicly in terms of requirements regarding human rights. Anyway, we were tied up by thousands of threads, and behaving differently would have been like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand.

According to Mikhail Bolotovsky, Agursky could not be an ordinary Zionist by virtue of the fact that he was closely connected with the culture and the general spiritual system of Russia. This is "a man who loves Russia and does not want her evil, even in response to evil." For example, if in any Jew the concept of anti-Semite was to cause rejection, then in Agursky it aroused curiosity. For Agursky, this is nonsense, requiring reflection. Agursky's interest in anti-Semitism implied an interest primarily in anti-Semitic thinkers: Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Shafarevich, etc. Agursky sought to understand the thoroughness of many years of prejudice regarding the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and cross-check them.

Agursky interprets Rozanov’s oscillations between anti-Semitism and violent anti-Semitism as a manifestation of the complex indivisible concept of “friendship-hatred”, which has a cyclical character. These fluctuations are in one way or another inherent in many anti-Semitic thinkers. There is domestic anti-Semitism, animal, as a common manifestation of fear and xenophobia , but conscious, intellectual anti-Semitism, according to Agursky, cannot be, but there can only be separate phases of “love-enmity”.

The Concept of National Bolshevism

Unlike most Zionist Jews, Agursky never left the hot topic of the role of Jews in the revolution, in organizing the Red Terror , their significance in the formation of the Soviet regime of suppressing dissent with its colossal camps , forced labor system, etc. On the contrary, he believed that the sooner Jews and Russians come to some sort of joint conclusion on this sensitive issue, the easier it will be for them to find mutual understanding in the future.

The sociologist Alexander Dugin as follows describes the views of Agursky:

Agursky considers the problem of the Jews in the context of Bolshevism in a completely unexpected way. From his point of view, the mass participation of Jews in the revolution is explained not so much by their hostility to Orthodox Russia, by revenge beyond the "Pale of Settlement" or by groundlessness and Westernism , but by the special eschatological messianic mood characteristic of the sectarian variety of Judaism ( Hasidic or Sabbathist type), which was extremely common among East European Jews. It was the similarities of apocalyptic fanaticism, a common religious type with representatives of the Russian sectarianism and Gnosticism of the intelligentsia, that determined the role of Jews in the Bolshevik movement.

On the whole, Mikhail Agursky estimates Russian nationalism as a constructive force aimed at protecting his own interests, and not against other peoples. Its foundation, as well as the foundation of Zionism, is the natural instinct of self-preservation of the nation. As a result, Agursky comes to the following conclusion: "Russian nationalism, focused on the interests of its people, and Zionism are not enemies of each other and, moreover, have common interests." This idea echoes the words of A. I. Solzhenitsyn expressed earlier to Agursky: “Now there are two nations left with the will to live: Russians and Jews.”

In his most significant work, “The Ideology of National Bolshevism,” Agursky develops his own original concept of the purely national, original Russian character of the October Revolution , its inevitability and conditionality. He cites convincing facts of mass support of the Bolsheviks by their former rivals. Among them, the researcher lists the Socialist Revolutionaries , former tsarist generals, professional engineers, Kolchak ministers, Black Hundreds , some churchmen and emigrants - this is a seemingly unexpected environment on which the leaders of Bolshevism could rely to some extent in their own interests.

Among other such fellow travelers of the revolution, Agursky assigns the greatest importance to the Harbin emigrant, the head of the Change of Movements movement, N. V. Ustryalov , who suggested the inevitability of transforming communism and internationalism into a real national power with a true leader of the state at the head. In the concept of Agursky, Bolshevik leaders, like Leo Trotsky or Anatoly Lunacharsky , are representatives of "red patriotism" who are opposed by pure communist-internationalists Lev Kamenev , Grigory Zinoviev .

The inner-party struggle of the "Bolsheviks" and "Communists" was optimally used by JV Stalin, who thus embodied the reality of Nikolai Ustryalov’s dream of a true national-Bolshevik leader. It was Stalin who refused the world revolution , getting rid of a significant part of the Jewish leadership of the USSR. The critic-reviewer of the book “The Ideology of National Bolshevism” Vladimir Yarantsev also sees in Agursky himself “obvious sympathies for revolutionary messianism (Russian, Jewish, Christian, anti-Christian, it doesn’t matter here)”, which, in his opinion, “contradict the humanistic values. "

Agursky himself sums up the following result in his book:

You should not look for the guilty and innocent in history. It's easy to count errors when the battle is already over. And after us there will be counters who, perhaps, will begin to collect materials for the Last Judgment on us. We must try to understand the actions of everyone, whoever they are: the Cadets , Socialist-Revolutionaries, leftists, communists, sectarians. The Bolshevik revolution is a gigantic human tragedy, the study of which will continue for a long time to come.

Agursky and "Our Contemporary"

In 1990, Our Contemporary magazine, in an article on the Middle East conflict and the prospects for its settlement, was one of the first in the Soviet Union to reflect the Israeli point of view on the Arab-Israeli conflict . The author of the article was Mikhail Agursky. He gave a brief outline of the emergence of Zionism, the formation of Israeli statehood and Soviet-Israeli relations. The leitmotif of the article: restoration of Soviet-Israeli diplomatic relations and mutual trust of the two states, non-linking of Soviet-Israeli relations with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Soviet-Israeli contacts, according to Agursky, weaken the position of the right in Israel and give the Soviet Union new leverage for a Middle East settlement.

On the pages of this conservative magazine, Agursky was answered by his lead critic, Vadim Kozhinov . On the whole, he agreed with Agursky’s understanding of the essence of the Middle East conflict, but he challenged Agursky’s understanding of the very term Zionism:

for M. Agursky (this is clearly stated in his article) Zionism is mainly an idea and a practical program for the national revival of Jews as a people.

Kozhinov is ready to agree with such Zionism, but Kozhinov understands modern Zionism more broadly than Agursky:

Zionism is a Jewish national movement that sets as its goal the creation and development of the Jewish state and the concentration of Jews in it. That is the point; if there is an international Zionist movement, then it serves this idea.

According to Kozhinov, the threat is not “ Agursky Zionism ”, but that Zionism that Agursky does not want to see - “an international political phenomenon based on enormous economic power”. According to Kozhinov, “ International Zionism ” is based not in Israel, but in the USA and is represented by people who by no means intend to repatriate to Israel and often do not have the slightest relation to Jewry.

In a response article ^[8], Mikhail Agursky challenged the legitimacy of Kozhin’s demarcation of “two Zionisms,” the division of Jews into Jewish Israelis and Zionist diasporas. According to Agursky, some Jews — equally Jews of the Diaspora or Israelis — are not interested in the Jewish state and Jewish nationalism at all - Israel Shamir (Agursky did not express himself clearly regarding the activities of Shamir, noting his contradictory opinion about it ^[9] ). Therefore, the distinction of Kozhinov is erroneous. He advised Kozhinov to preserve the right of Jews to be Zionists, noting the approach of a publicist, devoid of the anti-Semitic views inherent in some of his conservative colleagues.

According to Patriarch Alexy II ,

In connection with the Jewish-Orthodox dialogue, one should ... recall our contemporary professor Mikhail Agursky from Jerusalem, an expert on the history of Jews in Russia, who has done a lot for our rapprochement. Recently, he came from Israel to Moscow for a congress of the Russian diaspora and unexpectedly died here. Eternal memory to him ...

Literary critic and publicist Vadim Kozhinov:

So there is Zionism and Zionism. "National" Zionism, to which, as follows from his writings, belongs to M. Agursky, proceeds from the completely natural fact that Jews, like any people, strive to develop their own culture and build their own independent statehood ... Famous Zionist leader M. S Agursky, not afraid of acute problems ...

Journalist and editor Mikhail Bolotovsky:

few modern Zionists have contributed more than Agursky to the struggle for the right of Jews to repatriate to Israel. But Moscow human rights activists were silent, and the Israeli intelligentsia was also silent, whose right flank cannot even seven years after Agursky’s death forget about its proximity to the Labor Party, and the left, in turn, still treats it with some caution, mindful of “ unexplained "sympathy of the scientist for Russian nationalists.

The nationalist journalist, himself a former dissident and participant in Agursky’s seeing-off to Israel, G. M. Shimanov , demonstrates a consistent and unconditional rejection of concessions to Judaism in Orthodoxy:

this fellow saint Me (...) turned to the Moscow patriarch with an ultimatum, demanding the decanonization of the martyrs Eustratius of the Caves and Gabriel Bialystok , the rejection of anti-Jewish texts in worship and the anti-Jewish “words” of ecumenical St. John Chrysostom . I no longer remember how long the patriarch was given for an answer, but I remember that it was small, something like a month or even less. Then Agursky promised to appeal to the world community. But either the patriarch was not informed of the ultimatum, or he absent-mindedly forgot to answer him. And Cucumber (as we called him for his eyes) paid him back with the same coin, forgetting to turn to the world community.

- “My testimony in the case of the murder of Alexander Me,” Young Guard , No. 2, 1996

Opinion of the Russian-Israeli historian and publicist Mikhail Kheifets :

The late Melik was known as an unusual explorer in Israel. In my opinion, he didn’t particularly dig materials deep into, but he was always fond of spectacular, although, sometimes, not too substantiated hypotheses (I argued a lot with him often). But ... But then Melik was always interesting! In his free time he read extensive literature, sometimes so popular that almost no one looked seriously into it (well, say, in Gorky's complete collection!), And managed to extract paradoxical historical concepts from there. At first glance, everything seemed to him a pure composition, but ... Over time, unexpected justifications were found, and almost any Agursky hypothesis began to play with fresh and attractive colors.

Sociologist Alexander Dugin :

The most complete and interesting (to date) study of Russian national Bolshevism is the book of Mikhail Agursky. Agursky was a dissident, in the 70s he emigrated from the USSR to Israel, but at the same time, his attitude to Soviet National Bolshevism remains highly objective, and in some cases deep sympathy shows in his assessments. In our opinion, the work of Agursky is the most serious work dedicated to the Soviet period of Russian history, helping to understand its deep spiritual meaning.

Since the mid-1960s, Agursky moved to the Moscow region Belyaevo-Bogorodskoye. In his letters to L. I. Brezhnev, Agursky indicated his return address: Moscow, Profsoyuznaya St., 102, building. 5 apt. 176.

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