Russia's new empire
Bohdan Nahaylo
In his first major speech after replacing Aleksei Kosygin as Soviet premier, Nikolai Tikhonov was given the unenviable task of bringing some festive cheer in these gloomy times to his colleagues in the Soviet leadership at a Kremlin meeting commemorating the 63rd anniversary of the October Revolution. While mechanically presenting in superlative terms a long fist of the many achievements claimed by the Soviet state, Tikhonov reiterated the official description of the Soviet Union as a country of 'free and equal nations and ethnic groups, joined together into a single harmonious family — the Soviet people'. With the 'nationalities problem' in the USSR long since solved the Communist Party, he stated, remains 'implacably opposed to any symptom of nationalism'.
But, as with so many things in the Soviet Union, this official version is at odds with what is really happening. Beset by numerous problems ranging from the economic imbroglio at home to embroilment abroad in Afghanistan and the 'peaceful revolution' in Poland, the Soviet leadership is increasingly relying on the one force capable of holding the Soviet system together — Russian nationalism. While lip service is ritualistically paid to the largely discredited official ideology, behind the scenes the leadership has been quietly but determinedly working to harness the recent upsurge of Russian nationalism and to transform it into a mainstay of Soviet rule.
The current revivalof Russian nationalism dates from the early 1960s. Engendered both by the ideological vacuum resulting from 'destalinisation' and by Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign, it initially took the form of an active interest in Russian cultural and religious traditions. In 1964 there emerged officially approved 'Motherland' (Rodina) clubs. A year later, an 'AllRussian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments' was founded, its membership reaching some 12.5 million by 1977. Between 1967 and 1970, moreover, Molodaya gvardiya (Youth Guard), the monthly organ of the Communist youth organisation Koms6rnol, assumed a thinly disguised neo-Slavophile colouring, indicating that there was support in high places for the nationalist, even chauvinist, views it was propagating. An entire generation of young Russian communists — today's officials — was brought up in this spirit, before the authorities eventually withdrew their benevolent toleration of the journal's position by dismissing 'its editor.
Russian nationalist themes nevertheless frequently surfaced in other official Soviet publications as well as in samizdat. All this has led to the creation of what one author and emigrant from the USSR, Alexander Yanov, describes as a Russian 'New Right'.. It ranges from the'liberal' nationalismof the mathematician Igor Shafarevich, the Slavophilism of the imprisoned writer Vladimir Osipov, to the chauvinistic and openly racist position of the authors of the notorious samizdat document A Nation Speaks and the neo-Stalinist national Bolshevism which is known to have support among some party and government apparatchiks.
A major element in the thought of many representatives of the Russian 'New Right' is the argument that Russians have suffered from communist rule as much as nonRussians, if not more, and also the rejection of any notion of the Russians as a 'ruling nation' in the USSR. In particular, they point to the higher standards of living enjoyed by many non-Russians as conclusive proof that the Russians are not exploiters but the exploited. Abroad, the best known champion of this position, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, recently published an essay entitled The Mortal Danger in which he argues that Western misconceptions about Russia — notably the identification of the 'universal disease of communism' withRussia — 'imperils' the West. He accuses the Western press of waging an 'anti-Russian campaign', and argues that 'Russian national consciousness today has been suppressed and humiliated to an extraordinary degree by all that it has endured and continues to endure'.
Not all Russians, however, share this view. In a recent interview in the New York Review of Books (22 November 1979), that other great contemporary Russian man of letters, the literary scholar and critic Andrei Sinyavsky, warned against the new Russian nationalism: the Russian nationality is the dominant . . .
one within the Soviet Union, and as it did at times before the revolution, the Russian sense of self is becoming very assertive, very insistent. It takes on a chauvinistic cast. There is a lot of hostility toward the rest of the world — toward other Soviet nationalities, toward the West.
Furthermore, Sinyavsky also recently told Newsweek that 'there is currently a right wing of the dissident movement, and it has some very dangerous tendencies — at times even tending towards Fascism'.
The current resurgence of Russian nationalism is probably most conspicuous in the cultural sphere. In literature the most popular current has for a relatively long time been 'village' prose with its implicit nationalist and sometimes religious elements. It is preoccupied with traditional Russian values which are seen as under threat of destruction from industrialisation and urbanisation, the concomitants of which are considered. to be acculturation and dehumanisation. In the arts, the darling of the Russian 'New Right', the avowed monarchist Ilya Glazunov seems to typify the current mood in Russia. He paints portraits both of the Soviet leaders as well as nostalgic portraits of the Tsars, and is allowed to get away with works that would be considered far too nationalistic from any non-Russian artist.
Russian nationalism has traditionally been linked with the Russian Orthodox Church. It is not surprising therefore that the resurgence of Russian nationalism has coincided with a religious revival in Russia'. In recent years the Soviet leadership has apparently gradually co-opted the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church into the Soviet Union's 'establishment'. This slow but sure process, with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch now appearing on Soviet television and his representatives travelling abroad, would have seemed unthinkable ten or so years ago. It is the establishment of a modus vivendi with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the identification of Russian national and religious interests with those of the Soviet state which may help to explain how and why the Soviet authorities recently managed to force the dissenting Russian Orthodox activists Father Dmitry Dudko, Viktor Kapitanchuk and Lev Regelson to recant.
The Soviet authorities have also renewed their emphasis on the leading and 'progressive' role of the Russians in all spheres, from literature to science, both in the pre-1917 and the Soviet period. This has affected even the interpretation of the history of the Tsarist Russian Empire which has been idealised along with its conquests. In a talk by the Russian historian Fedor Nestorov contrasting British and Tsarist imperialism recently broadcast by Soviet radio, for example, it was argued that although Tsarist Russia was a 'prison of nations', 'unlike Western empires, it owed less to conquest than to peaceful peasant colonisation and the voluntary adherence of non-Russian nationalities'. Listeners were told that the Russians 'never felt themselves to be rulers standing over other nations'.
Western correspondents on leave from Moscow talk of the strong Russian nationalism expressed to them in private by the editors of leading Soviet journals and regular contributors to Pravda. Not only is there widespread anti-semitism, they reveal, but also a condescending, even racist, attitude to the USSR's non-Russians. Clearly, the Soviet officials in question also speak for their colleagues in high positions in the Soviet hierarchy. This is evident not only from Brezhnev's avowed preference for Tehaikovsky to Soviet marches during official ceremonies, but, more significantly, from some of the policies currently pursued by the Soviet leadership.
As the Russian share of the Soviet population continues to fall sharply, threat ening in the next few years to make the Russians a minority in the USSR, the Soviet leadership has resorted to seeking the support of the Russian masses by playing on their fears of this threat and openly bolstering the national interests of the Russians in supporting the maintenance of their dominant position in the Soviet Union. The 1977 Soviet Constitution, for example, echoes the Tsarist notion of Russia 'one and indivisible' by describing the Soviet federation of supposedly sovereign states as a 'unitary' polity. Despite all the window dressing, the party is committed to a policy of promoting the 'drawing together' of nations, which in practice means the creation of a Soviet citizen with a Russian cultural core, and Russification is probably more intense now than ever before in the post-Stalin period. The party presents itself as the champion of national unity and addresses its appeal to the many Russians who apparently believe that better a Red Empire than no empire at all.
The last decade has seen numerous official campaigns against 'bourgeois nationalism' and 'nationalist survivals' among the USSR's non-Russians, while characteristically there have been no corresponding campaigns against the growth of Russian nationalism. Moreover, one is struck by the small proportion of Russians among the USSR's political prisoner population, although Solzhenitsyn and others would have us believe that Russian 'national and religious circles' are being 'systematically persecuted with the full force of the criminal code'. Almost half of the Soviet population is now made up of non-Russians, and many of their representatives have been imprisoned for describing the Soviet Union as the last surviving great empire. The very words of the newly adopted Soviet anthem only serves to remind them of this: An unbreakable union of freeborn republics Great Russia has welded for ever to stand; Long live the united, powerful Soviet Union, Created by the will of the peoples!
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