Jealous Gods : BLACK HUNDRED: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, <i> By Walter Laqueur (HarperCollins: $27.50; 306 pp.)</i>

After a decades-long confrontation with communism on the left, the clear if not present danger in Russia now, we are warned, comes from the right: Help Yeltsin and Russia’s fledgling democrats now, the West is urged, or face anti-Western leaders even more unsavory than their communist predecessors. But who, exactly, are the forces on the Russian right, what do they believe, and what do they stand for?

That we know far less of Russian reactionaries than we do of the Russian reformer-democrats is understandable: the Russian right has little use for Western culture and values, and they are not particularly concerned what we think of them, as long as they convince us that they are powerful, or potentially so. They don’t travel in the West, collecting lecture fees from universities and business groups, and their writing, aimed at a native audience, is seldom translated into English. Only a few Western scholars and journalists seek them out for interviews. True, the intellectual giant of Russophile conservatism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, still lives in Cavendish, Vt., but his star has been on the wane here since he excoriated the West in his 1983 Harvard speech and proposed, in his 1990 “How to Rebuild Russia,” a truncated Slavic union consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan.

It’s hard to evoke American sympathy for cultural and political groups united by little besides a common rejection of the West and an assertion, often unsupported, of the superiority of the Russian nation and the “Russian idea.” In “Black Hundred,” distinguished historian Walter Laqueur has taken on a subject that he views with obvious distaste, but of which he is very knowledgeable. He tries in advance to defend himself and his book against charges of “Russophobia,” but the reader senses they are inevitable.

For, as Laqueur convincingly demonstrates, one of the Russian right’s most consistent characteristics is a paranoid conviction that the rest of the world hates Russians and denigrates Russian culture. “Students of Russian conservatism have noted its strongly utopian and metaphysical character; perhaps nowhere else has the right shown so much disdain for pragmatism and common sense. But the greatest weakness of Russian right-wing politics and thought--now even more than in the past--has been its paranoiac style.” Consumed by conspiracy theories, the Russian right has historically blamed the failures and tragedies of the Russian people on malevolent alien nations, primarily the Jews, usually in alliance with the Masons in a worldwide “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.”

Laqueur finds little novelty in the political, cultural or economic ideas of the Russian “New Right.” Nor is this surprising--they are, after all, conservatives. Though Laqueur does make some comparisons with contemporary European right-wing ideas, his failure to mention the American far right is regrettable. It would be interesting to compare the rhetoric and ideology of, say, Pat Buchanan with Siberian nationalist writer Valentin Rasputin.

Both the American and Russian far right aim to preserve, or even restore, a traditional family lifestyle; both are concerned by what they see as a wave of sexual license and pornography. Both hate the rock culture--the Russians all the more because it comes from the West. The Russians are understandably more concerned with the ravages of alcoholism on the Russian people and of ecological degradation of the Russian land; unlike the American right, they have not yet become fixated on homosexuality and alternative lifestyles. Perhaps this is a peculiarly American obsession, as the Jews and Masons are for the Russians.

Laqueur begins by tracing the economic and philosophical origins of the original Black Hundred. These loosely-organized groups appeared in Russia at the time of the 1905 revolution, and, with tacit support from the government, launched a series of pogroms against the Jewish population, particularly in the southern areas of the Russian empire. Many an American Jew has them to “thank” for his grandparents’ decision to emigrate.

Laqueur characterizes them as “a halfway house between the old-fashioned reactionary movements of the 19th Century and the right-wing Populist (Fascist) parties of the 20th. . . .” Unlike earlier conservatives, who were largely aristocratic and elitist, the new right wing, Laqueur points out, “understood the importance of mobilizing the masses.” Their holy text was the best-selling forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purports to document a Jewish conspiracy for world domination “whose main tools were democracy, liberalism, and socialism.”

The 1917 revolutions were, of course, an unmitigated disaster in the eyes of the right, an opinion shared today by many Russians of a far more liberal bent. Laqueur acknowledges that Jews, natural recruits for an anti-Tsarist revolution, were indeed represented well beyond their numbers among the new Bolshevik leaders, and among the rapidly growing ranks of the secret police. Communist internationalism strongly discouraged expressions of national superiority or prejudice; in the 1920s, at least, those on the far right who had not emigrated learned to keep their ideas to themselves.

But Stalin, though Georgian by birth, was the consummate Russian nationalist. In the 1930s, as his purges decimated the ranks of the Old Bolsheviks and industrial engineer-managers, Jews and to a lesser extent, other non-Russians, were practically eliminated from the higher ranks of the party and the nomenklatura. Only Lazar Kaganovich remained in the inner circle, a defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, and a convenient lightning rod for those who would blame him, rather than Stalin, for the disasters of collectivization and the destruction of Moscow’s architectural heart.

Stalin’s “socialism in one country” made “Soviet patriotism” increasingly hard to distinguish from Russian chauvinism. Despite the facade of cultural autonomy, confined largely to folk-dance troupes, Stalin pursued a dogged policy of Russianization in the ethnic republics: resentment of his legacy finally unraveled the Union in 1991. By World War II, Stalinism had become, in essence, little different from the fascism which engaged it in mortal combat. Surely this explains Stalin’s infatuation with Hitler in the late 1930s, and his disbelief when Germany attacked Russia in June, 1941.

Today’s Russia has produced a confusing merger of far left and far right. Faced with a common enemy--Western-style reforms of both the economy and the political system--the nationalists have entered into a marriage of convenience with the remnants of the former Communist nomenklatura (the old aristocracy, in Soviet terms) to combat Yeltsin and the democrats. It is a tempting alliance for those whose political instincts, if not their ideological roots, are remarkably similar.

Laqueur surveys in detail the formation and factionalism of the new right groups like Pamyat, seeing their weakness in the failure to produce a single charismatic leader. He traces nationalist elements in the revival movement of the Cossacks and of the Russian Orthodox church. Along the way, he has interesting things to say about the Russian right’s historical fascination with Satanism, and he links the current vogue for astrology and various occult teachings with the Right’s basic anti-rationalism. In certain circles, there is considerable nostalgia for the pre-Christian Slavic paganism, its gods and legendary heroes, that is less widespread than Wagnerian Teutonism under the Nazis.

In his final, and most hopeful, chapter Laqueur tries to define the border between patriotism and nationalism. He discusses more appealing strains of Russian nationalism, including the “liberal conservatives,” exemplified by Dmitri Likhachev, distinguished scholar of Old Russian culture.

There are, indeed, good reasons to doubt whether the “achievements” of the Western economic and political model should be transplanted intact to Russia. Peter the Great tried it, as did the Bolsheviks, for Marxism, of course, was also a Western import. No wonder today’s Russian nationalists see Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF as just one more “Judeo-Masonic plot.” But the Right, always more fanatic than clear-sighted, may have doomed its chances for ultimate success by its National Bolshevist alliance with die-hard communists. For whatever distrust and resentment Russians may harbor for the West, for now at least they hate the community oligarchy, which still has its tentacles in Russia’s economy and politics, even more.