The Ideologyof NTS

By Sergei Levitsky
The Russian emigre anti-communist organization NTS (originally NTSNP) emerged in 1930 in Belgrade and spread soon to other
European capitals containing significant numbers of exiled Russians.
The letters NTS stand for Natsionalno Trudovoi Soyuz (National
Labor Alliance; the letters NP-"of the new generation"-were
dropped during World War II). Members of this organization now
generally referred to as National Alliance of Russian Solidarists,
originally belonged to the young generation of exiled Russians who
were born in Russia but grew up and received their education
abroad.
This point is of crucial importance for the understanding of the
ideological background of NTS. Although strongly anti-communist
since its inception, NTS owed its birth to the generation gap among
Russian emigres. The fathers had fought bravely in the ranks of the
White Armies on the battlefields of the civil war. Unlike the sons,
they did not attribute particular importance to the problems of
political ideology. Most of them were monarchists who had inherited
their monarchism from their ancestors and gave little thought to the
idea of monarchy as such. Basically they were conservatives, often
even reactionaries, but instinctively rather than consciously.
In contrast to their politically unsophisticated fathers, the sons
were engaged in a serious search for the reasons for the February
and October Revolutions as well as the defeat of the White Armies.
Having grown up outside of Russia, they did not share their fathers'
idealization of tsarist Russia. They were convinced that the Revolution would not have succeeded had not something been basically
wrong with the Russian empire. When they asked their fathers
for explanations, they received no satisfactory answers.
It was precisely the political naivete of the older generation of
emigres which stimulated the politically more inquisitive sons to
form a group of their own for the purpose of discussing the motives
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and aims of the Revolution.

Eager to prove themselves in action-i.e., political action-the
crucial question arose: "Whatis to be done?"Some of the fathers
counted on the outbreakof a war between the Westernpowers and
the Soviet Union, in which case they would be ready to take up
arms again; others placed their hopes in the eventual inner collapse of the communistregime. But all this merely amounted to
passive waiting.

In contrastto this, the new generationwas anythingbut apathetic.

The sons were political activists determined not to follow the
fathers'wait-and-seeattitude.
By 1934, only three years after its inception, NTS held its first
grand-scaleconvention. By that time, it had cells in Yugoslavia,
France, Czechoslovakiaand had followers in most other European
countries.During the same year the conventionadopted the slogan
"Litsomk Rossii" (Face to Face with Russia), which defined its
stand. It signified that members of NTS, though unalterablyopposed to the Soviet regime, felt close to the Russian people and
strove to sharetheir mode of life.
In concrete terms this meant that members of NTS and their
sympathizersbegan to read popular Soviet writers and poets, to
sing Soviet songs, and to identify themselvesmore and more with
the life of the Russian people. As a result, many emigre rightists
began to suspect NTS of pro-Sovietleanings and even called them
"Komsomol-fellows."
Thus mutual alienation of fathers and sons
increased.
Participantsin the Belgrade meeting of 1934 realized that NTS
stood in need of formulatinga programmaticideology. Thus the
philosophicallyminded intellectualsof NTS began to formulate a
political and ideological program. Soon thereafter a number of
pamphletswere publishedwhich containedthe basic outline of the
new political and philosophicalideology. Because of their green
covers, these pamphlets were called "green novels." They were
milestonesin the developmentof NTS, endowing the group with a
political as well as ideologicalimage.
This political ideology had a positive and a negative side. On the
negative side, it condemnedthe following: a) the inhumanideology

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and practice of communism in the USSR, b) the rationalistic and

materialistic tradition of Western liberalism, which, according to
NTS, was greatly responsible for the rise of Bolshevism, c) the
political and ideological passivity of Russian emigres. On the positive side, it favored idealistic and Christian precepts, extolling the
principle of national and international solidarity against the communist cult of the class struggle (hence the label of "solidarism").
Furthermore, true to the spirit of activism, NTS advanced the slogan
of the liberation of Russia by Russians themselves and called for a
national revolution, mainly from inside Russia and not through
intervention from abroad.
The problem of the future political form of government, whether
a constitutional monarchy or a republic, was a subject of many controversies among the emigres. Members of NTS regarded this issue
of secondary importance. In their view, more important than the form
of government was the socio-political structure of the state. To
back up this reasoning, they pointed out that England, for example, is a constitutional monarchy and yet is a democracy, whereas
Germany under Hitler was formally a republic, although it was de
facto a ruthless dictatorship.
The basic socio-political beliefs of NTS were subjected to a crucial
test during and after World War II. NTS sided neither with Nazi
Germany nor with the Communist Soviet Union. It rather sympathized with the Western democracies. But members of NTS
seized the opportunities of war to make direct contact with the
Russian people. They worked mostly as engineers and interpreters
in the German-occupied territories of Russia. At first the Germans
did not pay much attention to their activities. In 1944, however, they
realized the ideological danger of a rapprochement between NTS
members and a substantial number of Russians who responded to
NTS ideas. German suspicions increased when during the second
part of the war NTS launched a new slogan: "The Third Forceneither Stalin nor Hitler." During the summer of 1944 most members of NTS were arrested and many perished.
In the first months after the defeat of Germany, NTS members
were actively engaged in resisting American and British efforts to
forcibly repatriate Russians living in Germany. During the postwar

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401

years NTS concentrated on internal consolidation. In 1947 the

weekly journalPossevand the literarymagazineGraniwere founded
and quickly gained excellent reputations. Subsequently the publishing house Possev came into being and began to publish many
valuable books in Frankfurt/Main.
During the fifties and sixties, NTS embarkedon a majorventure.
It tried to reach the Soviet populationwith its publicationsby way
of the underground.The beginning was not very auspicious, but
by the sixties, according to reliable reports, its attempts were
crownedwith considerablesuccess. Undergroundcells of NTS sympathizersbegan to form inside the Soviet Union, and such publications as Grani,for example,began to enjoy great popularityamong
dissident Soviet citizens.
Samizdat owes its success, of course, to the activities of Soviet
dissidents, but NTS, by encouragingthe export of samizdat, contributed indirectly to its growth. The ideological contacts of NTS
with Soviet dissidents is today an evident fact. In addition, the
ideology of NTS began to exert some influenceon the rightistpolitical circlesin the Scandinaviancountriesas well as in France.These
circles, consisting mostly of soul-searchingyouths, proved to be
receptive to NTS, which proposedto solve the problemof socialism
versus capitalismby enunciatinga differentideology which placed
itself "beyondright and left."
The basic ideology of NTS is solidarism.The doctrine itself is
not new but goes back to Pierre Leroux (1797-1871). It was systematically outlined by the German Catholic thinker Heinrich
Pesch (1854-1926) and other social philosophersat the beginning
of this century.But previouslythe doctrinedid not have a clear-cut
political application.Thus Russiansolidarismdeveloped independently. It was formed in opposition to Soviet Marxism,countering
Marxism'smaterialisticphilosophy and doctrine of class warfare
with idealismand the doctrineof cooperationamongthe classesand,
hopefully, among all nationalities.
To begin with, solidarismstresses the fact of mutual aid which
exists, as is recognizedin modernbiology, in the plant and animal
world. Here Russian solidarists refer to Kropotkin'sdoctrine of
mutual aid in nature. Without denying Darwin's theory of the

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struggle for survival and the survival of the fittest, the solidarists
charge that the social Darwinists overemphasized the war of all
against all and overlooked the equally important phenomenon of
solidarity. Russian solidarism points out that war of all against all
would result in chaos, whereas the universe is a cosmos. It affirms
that mutual aid and solidarity are of no less and, in a sense, are of
even greater importance in explaining the nature of the cosmos.
But Russian solidarism is not so much concerned with natural as
with social life. It holds that there are at least two social unitsthe family and the nation-which are based on conscious and not
merely instinctive, solidarity. To be sure, there are and always will
be family quarrels and conflicts between nations, but the raison
d'etre of these social units themselves is an intrafamily and an intranational solidarity.
The phenomenon of social solidarity is thus more fundamental
than the fact of social conflict, although more attention is paid to the
latter. This is analogous to the fact that health is more fundamental
than illness, although we more frequently refer to our ailments than
to our good health.
The idea of solidarity is pregnant with implications. The most important one is the fact that social solidarity can exist only among
free personalities. In societies in which people are not free, there
is no possibility of the free interaction and free cooperation in which
solidarity manifests itself. Thus the idea of free personality is the
basic implication of social solidarity. The philosophy in which the
idea of a free and responsible personality occupies a central place
is known as personalism. This explains why the social world view of
solidarism is based on the philosophy of personalism, which found
its best expression in the doctrines of William Stern, Max Scheler,
Lossky, and Berdyaev.
As such, solidarism with its personalistic foundation is opposed
to two extremes-collectivism and individualism. The traditional
individualist regards society as a composite of egotistical, isolated
atoms-individuals whose interaction is based on considerations of
mutual profit. To put it another way, society is conceived by traditional individualism (and by its social projection-liberalism) as a
mechanical aggregate.

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Solidarism,on the other hand, sees society as an organic whole.

Accordingto solidarism,the basic social entities are united not only
by commoninterestsbut also by a commonfate.
This may suggest that solidarism is a variety of collectivism
which proclaimsthe primacy of society over the individual. But
nothing could be farther from the truth. Collectivism in practice
decrees and imposesunity and this leads inevitably to the suppression of the free personalityby the collective, thus excluding solidarity, which is based on mutual consent and mutual freedom.
The third and deepest level of this conception of solidarity is
the idea of service.Althoughsolidarismaffirmsresolutelythe basic
and fundamentalvalue of human personality,it connects this personalismwith the ethical imperativeof servicewhich the personality
owes to such superpersonalvalues as truth, goodness, and beauty.
For those who believe in God (as does the author of these lines),
the Platonic triad constitutedthe triune God. But even the honest
atheist or agnostic cannot deny the essential value of truth, goodness, and beauty. The superpersonalin our immediate experience
includessuch values as, for example,the nation.Solidarismdemands
from the personality service to this and other collective entities.
After all, the human being is more than his own ego. He is also a
member of a certain superpersonal"we." Man's involvementon a
superpersonallevel can enhance his importanceand enrich his life.
However, a subtle temptationarises if social unities exceed the
superpersonallevel and become supremevalues. The deificationof
a nation, a social class, or a state, for instance,can easily lead to a
collective amoralitywhich, because of its scope, may have much
more terribleconsequencesthan any self-deification.It can lead to
collective crimes, such as we witnessed in the case of Germannational socialism.
Only when higher social unities serve the interest of supercollectivevalues, such as truth or goodness,does the sacrificeof the
individualfor the sake of society become justified.
Of great importancein the philosophicalworld view of NTS is
the conceptionof freedomand its distinctionbetween negative and
positive freedom. Negative freedom is a freedom from something
(for example,from externaloppression).As such, negative freedom

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is a fundamentalcore of the very idea of freedom.Nevertheless,the

idea of negative freedomis not self-sufficient.Mancan be free from
limitations,and yet he may not know what to do with his freedom.
The true idea of freedom therefore implies service to higher, inspirationalvalues. The NTS upholds positive freedom without discarding negative freedom, but it calls for the sublimationof freedom for its elevation to a higher level: This emphasison sublimation of freedom occupies a central place in the whole ideology of
NTS. Thus negative freedom is the life-giving source of freedom,
while positive freedomis its fruit.
In a preface to the programof NTS it is stated that the gap
between spiritual culture and the mechanistic civilization constitutes a basic characteristicand the main tragedy of our era.
Whereas in the realm of technology we have entered the atomic
age, in the realm of the spirit we have reverted to the stone age.
The most refinedachievementsof contemporaryscience are all too
often used for destructiveinsteadof constructivegoals.The ominous
shadowof a nuclearholocausthauntsus constantly.
The goal of NTS is to try to create a social structureand a kind
of governmentwhich would diminishthis gap, which would place
certain limits on the abuse of freedom,and which would stimulate
creative endeavors.To be sure, one should not forbid "negative"
freedom in the name of "positive"freedom,and NTS is well aware
of this danger. Even so, it should be possible to curb destructive
manifestationsof negative freedom by creating conditions which
diminishevil and enhance goodness.
Neither traditionalliberalismnor the ill-fated socialism (at least
in its totalitarianform) can create such conditions.Fascismfelt the
need of new solutions of the socio-economic problems, but its
answerto these problemswas totally wrong. It stifled freedomand
threw the baby out with the bath. Solidarismtries to evade the
Scylla of traditionalliberalismand the Charybdisof totalitarianism
by its socio-economicdoctrine.
The basic philosophicattitude of NTS found its applicationalso
in the program.To begin with, NTS professesdemocracy,a regime
of freedomwithin a frameworkof the legal state, and thus guarantees all traditionalfreedomsof speech, press,assembly,and religion.

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In the spirit of the idea of positive freedom, NTS offers firm guarantees for the preservation of these traditional freedoms. For example, political parties which advocate revolutionary changes by
force or by abolition of freedom would not receive legal status and
representation in an NTS-constructed state.
NTS proposes two representative governmental bodies: apart
from the traditional parliament where political parties would be represented, it introduces the so-called creative professional representation (tvorcheski- delovoe predstavitelstvo). This second representative body would consist of members of professional groups (professionalno-trudovye gruppy) such as doctors, engineers, journalists,
writers. Manual workers would probably be less interested in such
professional representation because they would be mostly concerned
with the safeguarding of their material interests, whereas the representation of professional workers presupposes an objective interest
in their respective professions.
The second representative body would constitute a substantial
antidote or counterpart (protivoves) as well as a complement
(dopolnenie) to the traditional parliament with its interplay of political forces. If a serious conflict arises between the two bodies, a
court of arbitration (treteiskii sud) would be called upon, provided
there is ample time for the procedure of mediation or arbitration.
In a case of emergency, however, the state council, presided over by
the head of government (glava pravitelstva), would have the decisive last word.
In conclusion, I should like to stress the following points regarding the NTS program: a) it is both positive and negative; b) it
guarantees the proper functioning and preservation of a businesslike
democracy (delovaia democratija); c) it takes full account of the
national and historical peculiarities of Russia; d) it envisions harmonious cooperation with other nations, especially with the USA.