Alexander Mikhailovsky
The pressure valve
Russian nationalism in late Soviet society
Published 9 December 2015
Original in English
First published in Eurozine
Downloaded from eurozine.com (http://www.eurozine.com/the-pressure-valve/)
© Alexander Mikhailovsky / IWM / Eurozine
In the 1970s and early 1980s, a movement of Russian nationalists
attempted to reshape the USSR in a Russian-patriotic spirit. Alexander
Mikhailovsky considers the reception of this movement among intellectual
circles at the time and whether its legacy still plays a role in official Russian
politics today.
In his famous article “For official use only” of 1999, the Russian philosopher
Vladimir Bibikhin writes:
During the final period of the Soviet Union, the authorities were
searching for ideological alternatives to Marxism. As early as 1973,
we knew that military and political strategists planned to throw off
Marxism and thought about equipping the army with the ideological
tool of Orthodoxy.
But, he adds, “this search for openness was kept secret” (Bibikhin 2003,
181-82). When I read these enigmatic sentences at the beginning of the text
published in his essay collection Drugoe nachalo (“The other beginning”), I
asked myself: How can we verify this? How much of Bibikhin’s suspicion was
real and how much of it was “kitchen talk”? For once, it seems clear that
Bibikhin’s statement could only have been based on a highly subjective
point of view. Even with hindsight, it seems highly dubitable that there really
was a targeted “search” at the highest level for ideological alternatives to
Marxism. Even if there were, why would Bibikhin have kept his knowledge
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secret until 1999? Though we can no longer ask him personally, we should
still consider the question: what was the ideological context, which persons
and ideas could one refer to in order to make sense of Bibikhin’s words?
In this article, I will try to answer this question by looking at the intellectual
history of the late Soviet Union. My topic is the so-called “Russian Party” – a
movement of Russian nationalists that claimed to reshape the
internationalist USSR in a Russian-patriotic spirit and that can be considered
as the most conservative alternative to the official Marxist ideology at the
time. I use the term Russian Party as a general term for different intellectual
groups present both in official and unofficial Soviet culture in the form of
their ideology, media, clubs and cultural organizations. What follows
provides an overview of these groups and assesses their impact on Soviet
political life and its aftermaths.
The Russian Party
The Russian Party was made up of prominent historians, writers, journalists
and editors. These people had access to all the levers that influenced public
opinion and created more or less well-organized subcultures. They followed
different strategies in their well-coordinated media campaigns. Nikolay
Mitrokhin, the author of The Russian Party: Russian Nationalist Movement in
the Soviet Union in 1953-1985 (2003) speaks about the Russian party as a
“lobbyist group”. I am not sure that this is the correct term, as lobbyists
offer arguments, evidence and research to support their groups’ positions in
a political process. The publications of lobbyists allow interest groups to
influence public opinion, which, in turn, often influences the policy decisions
of lawmakers. Lobbyists work to persuade governmental officials. But this
kind of political process was obviously not present in the case of the late
Soviet Union! There was no open political process of opinion formation; the
Department for Propaganda and Agitation of CK KPSS had enough time and
capacities to research issues themselves, they didn’t rely on information
from interest groups and lobbyists to keep them informed and up-to-date.
That is why I don’t think that Mitrokhin’s term “lobbyists” for the Russian
Party is a carefully considered one.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the nationalist movement had
its own advocates in the Communist Party – not at the highest level, but at
the mid-level of bureaucrats in the Propaganda Apparatus (e.g. Vladimir
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Vorontsov, the assistant chief of Mikhail Suslov, the Communist Party’s main
ideologist) and among Komsomol leaders (e.g. Valerij Ganicev, director of
the publishing house Molodaja Gvardija from 1968 to 1978). And there can
also be no doubt that the government was aware of the risk that arose from
the nationalist movement: even Suslov, who is considered to have been the
chief supporter of the patriotic movement, expressed fear of the dissident
Right as a subversive force. Underground conservatives were often detained
in mental hospitals (Gennadiy Shimanov, Anatoly Ivanov-Skuratov are
examples) and even in labour camps (such as Igor Ogurtsov, Leonid Borodin
and Vladimir Osipov).
As opposed to earlier decades under the Soviet regime, when ideological
alternatives were simply suppressed, the nomenclatura during the Brezhnev
era was interested in the controlled flourishing of ideological niches (i.e.
liberal, national-bolshevist or traditionalist ones) of public discourse. The aim
was the control of people and of the diffusion of ideas. No protagonist should
be able to leave his or her niche, or possibly claim to be the Communist
Party’s official voice. The absence of a real public sphere and the lack of real
national solidarity was a proper basis for transforming the Communist
autocracy into a “cratocracy” [1] – to use Vittorio Strada’s apt neologism to
describe late Soviet totalitarianism (Strada 1985, 213).
Social, cultural and political contexts
Russian nationalism was something like a pressure valve for public opinion
during the 1960s, which was characterized by increasing confusion and
uncertainty about the fictive status of the “new historical community” of the
Soviet people. From today’s perspective it is clear that during the leadership
of Leonid Brezhnev between 1964 and 1982, Soviet cultural ideology
underwent some crucially important changes. The staunch Marxist-Leninist
paradigm succumbed to a more pragmatic orientation. A “cold peace” with
society became the principal objective of the ruling elite. The gradual
evaporation of the previous official ideology prompted compromises with the
upper levels of society, and drove the regime towards a reluctant
recognition of new ideological schemes. One of these schemes was
nationalism (cf. Cosgrove 2004, 11-12).
Slavophilism and nostalgia for old rural Russia were already espoused by the
Soviet intelligentsia shortly after Nikita Khrushchev’s dismissal from power
in 1964. The popularity of “village prose”, Orthodox revivalism and a fast-
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growing concern for Russian national culture provided the intellectual
context for Soviet nationalism, which grew into a veritable opposition to the
regime.
Soviet nationalists benefited from a change in ideological mechanisms under
Brezhnev. In the 1970s, a lot of cultural and political issues were no longer
resolved at the Politburo (cf. Kretschmar 1997, 16). The almost-theatrical
performances about issues of cultural politics at the Politburo, which had
been typical for the Khrushchev era, were succeeded by the dry prose of
Central Committee resolutions. In practice, this meant that the power of the
mid-level bureaucracy grew significantly, since it was there where the
directives coming out of the Politburo were translated into concrete policies.
Exhausting altercations with zealous and hesitant functionaries who took no
risks in their uncompromising position was a daily routine of writers, artists
and stage directors of the time. Moreover, the Soviet Union used the third
wave of emigration (after the waves of 1917 and 1945) as a cultural-political
tool. The Soviet Union was compelled to take into consideration the
reactions in the West to trials against dissident writers and artists because
there was a certain interdependence between the “lessening of international
tensions” and issues about human rights in the Soviet Union. That’s why the
Soviet authorities sought to avoid criminal cases against dissidents,
preferring banishment and deprivation of citizenship instead. The case of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974) was exemplary in this regard, because public
opinion in the West regarded his exile as a rather peaceful act of the Soviet
government’s, not as repression.
Mapping the “Russian Party”: Nationalist dissidents
and the intellectual establishment
In the Brezhnev era, Russian nationalism enjoyed increasing popularity. A
key role in the dissemination of Russian nationalist feelings and ideas was
played by the Komsomol (The Communist Union of Youth) and its journal
Molodaja gvardija (“Young guard”). The painter II’ja Glazunov and the writer
Vladimir Soloukhin campaigned in the journal and elsewhere for the
preservation of Russian historical monuments, especially churches and
monasteries, many of which had been destroyed to make way for the
communist future. The public organization “Commission for the Preservation
of Monuments of Culture and History” (VOOPIiK), established in 1965,
managed to gather the support of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.
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Writers of the “village prose” movement (derevenshchiki), such as Fjodor
Abramov, Sergej Zalygin, Vasilij Belov and Valentin Rasputin, praised the
spiritual values of the threatened Russian peasantry, opposed the
destructive modernization policies of the government and, in some cases,
showed sympathy for Russian Orthodoxy. Together with the Komsomol, the
Russian branch of the Union of Writers, and a number of the so-called tolstye
zhurnaly – “thick journals”, lengthy volumes of more than 200 pages such as
Molodaja gvardiyia, Nash sovremennik and Sever – formed the institutional
centre of the Russian Party.
It is not an easy task to map the Russian Party because the spectrum of
Russian nationalist groups and figures was wide and heterogeneous. It is
common practice to divide them into “national-bolsheviks” and
vozrozhdentsy, as John Dunlop does (Dunlop 1986), or into “patriots” and
“traditionalists” as Vladimir Shlapentokh suggests (Shlapentokh 1990). At
one pole, we deal with gosudarstvenniki who favoured a strong Russian
state and supported the Soviet government as the legitimate successor to
the Tsars. At the opposite pole, we have the vozrozhdentsy who wanted a
Russian cultural rebirth based on Orthodoxy and expressed sympathy with
early Slavophiles of the nineteenth century (cf. Duncan 1988, 35-6).
However, this division into political nationalists and cultural nationalists is
still insufficient, because there were also monarchists, Stalinists, Orthodox
believers and neopagans in both camps. The main drawback of the term
Russian Party still lies in the fact that the distinction between the “systemic”
and the dissident factions of the Russian Party has not been systematically
drawn. For this reason, and in order to avoid misleading categorizations, I
propose a pure sociological criterion for the definition of the “Russian Party”,
namely the type of relation of each group to the Soviet government. If we
apply this criterion, we find two clearly distinct factions of the Russian Party:
established intellectuals on the one side and an illegal underground on the
other. Each faction had their own types of publication, whether the official
magazines or samizdat.
From 1971 to 1974, the most important nationalist samizdat journal Veche
was published. The journal’s editor Vladimir Osipov had earlier been arrested
and sentenced to seven years in the camps. Like the influential official
magazines Molodaja Gvardija or Nash sovremennik, the editors of Veche put
forward their own alternatives to the Brezhnev regime but preferred to avoid
any confrontation with the authorities. Veche was tolerated – in spite of a
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critical report issued by Glavlit, the Chief Directorate on Literature and
Publishing – until October 1972, when Aleksandr Yakovlev who led the
Central Committee’s propaganda department published a strong antinationalist critique (Semanov, Lotareva 2006, 192-216). In 1974, the KGB
finally suppressed Veche‘s publication. Veche declared itself the voice of the
“loyal opposition”: “We have to convince the Administration [of the
Communist Party] that the existence of a loyal opposition is not to the
detriment of, but to the benefit of the state.” It was beneficial for the
following reasons: 1) the “loyal opposition is your protection against
proliferated bureaucracy that not only the workers, but the leaders
themselves consider a burden”; and 2) “it protects against a single-leader
dictatorship” (after Yanov 2014).
Having started as a legal movement within the intellectual community,
“Russophilism” soon became a part of the underground opposition as well.
The Russophiles’ most important dissident organization was the All-Russian
Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON) in
Leningrad, headed by Igor Ogurtsov, with twenty-eight members and thirty
candidates on the eve of its destruction by the authorities in 1967.
In the 1970s there was rather intense interaction between the legal and
illegal spheres. Solzhenitsyn, for instance, became a prophet for the legal
Russophiles, even though they could not mention his name in their articles,
and he would not praise them in the West for fear of hurting their cause. I
believe it is important to indicate that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the
Russian Club (this was the unofficial title of VOOPIiK) became something like
a melting pot for Orthodox dissidents and official patriots. The Club met on a
weekly basis from the 1960s to the early 1980s to discuss the existing state
of native Russian cultural and political affairs. Historian Sergei Semanov, one
of the Club’s founding members and editor of the popular journal Chelovek i
zakon (“Man and the law”), was critical of the official Marxist government
positions and wished to influence the governance of the country in an
Orthodox-patriotic spirit. Semanov supposed that Russian nationalism was
able to facilitate the mild transformation of the Soviet Empire into an
authoritarian state. Vladimir Osipov visited these meetings and
communicated with Sergei Semanov and philologist Pjotr Palievsky. These
Russian Club discussions were held without any Marxist rhetoric as if there
was no Marxism at all. But neither were there any anti-Soviet speeches (cf.
Mitrokhin 2003, 320 ff.).
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Both the established and the underground Russophiles had good reasons for
choosing their status. For example, an established intellectual could take
advantage of being published in one-and-a-half million copies and enjoy
social privileges. A dissident intellectual was not sure about his future but he
had an opportunity to reach an international audience by publishing his
articles and diaries in Russian émigré-journals (Posev, Vestnik RSHD). He
was interviewed by Associated Press and, in case of prosecution, could count
on the attention of human rights advocates in the West.
Alexander Yanov points out the fact that it “was not Young Guard, and
certainly not their party ‘cover’, but the illegal nationalists who paid the real
price of Sergei Semanovs’s blunder [see below] and the authorities’
crackdown on nationalism in 1982. While chief editor Anatoly Nikonov of
Young Guard just moved into the chair of the chief editor of Vokrug Sveta,
the editor-in-chief of the nationalist magazine Veche, Vladimir Osipov moved
into one of Mordovia’s prison camps” (Yanov 2014). The dissident
nationalists became the convenient scapegoats of nationalistic populism of
the late Soviet Union.
The ideology of the Russian Party
The Russian Party’s policy was not limited to ethno-nationalism, antiSemitism, and xenophobia, as Mitrokhin writes (cf. Mitrokhin 2003, 8-9). His
thesis that some prominent figures of the Russian Party tried to combine
communist and orthodox views also needs to be analysed carefully.
Likewise, the thesis of Shlapentokh, the émigré Soviet sociologist, that
Russophilism “was very aggressive toward the West and the Jews,
contending that Russia has its own specific history, culture, and traditions
that are deeply alien to Western democratic institutions” (Shlapentokh 1990,
223) needs further specification.
In reply to both Mitrokhin and Shlapentokh, I am inclined to interpret the
ideology of the Russian Party in a slightly different key: it was undoubtedly a
nationalistic ideology, because all of its members attached great importance
to the concept of nation. There were surely some elements of an ethnonationalist doctrine, but most adherents of the Russian Party maintained
imperialist ideals. I therefore suggest the term “imperial nationalism” to
describe an ideological, not political, movement seeking a greater voice for
the nation within an empire, claiming that this will benefit both the nation
and the empire.
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Moreover we should pay attention to the fact that most Russian patriotic
writers did their best to protect the indigenous people of Siberia and to
preserve Russian nature. In fact, they became the first representatives of
the Russian ecology movement. For example, V. Rasputin suggested that
the government should take measures to protect the Russian landscape
against the ravages of irresponsible modernization with the same energy
that it used for preventing the international exploitation of Siberian mineral
resources.
Of course, the Russian Party was anti-western in attitude, fully in line with
the tradition of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles. Like Fjodor Dostoevsky
or Nikolay Danilevsky, Soviet Russophiles rejected the concept of general
patterns of historical development and perceived the history of each people,
nation and civilization as developing according to its own laws. Consequently
they advanced the idea of the specific character of Russian history based on
its unique culture, traditions and morals (cf. Shafarevich 1989). Iurij
Davydov, philosopher and sociologist, attacked the western modernist
philosophy and its “relativist morals”, and kept insisting that the most
important characters of Russian literature from Dostoevsky to Rasputin were
inclined toward sacrifices for the sake of others and together, constituted
the world’s “single bearer of the moral idea” (Davydov 1989).
Where religious issues were concerned, the books and articles of Nikolai
Berdyaev were probably the most read. Besides Russian religious
philosophers like Berdyaev, Leontiev, Soloviev, Rozanov and Frank, western
authors such as Soeren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger were also popular
among people with an interest in religion (cf. Osipov 2012, 39).
Russophiles rejected the fundamentals of the Marxist philosophy of history in
favour of approaches that emphasized the decisive role of culture. It is not
surprising that Russophile ideology was much more hostile toward Marxism
than toward liberal ideology. But there were only a few marginal persons
who claimed that Russia was genetically incapable of democracy. The bestknown journal of conservative nationalists was called Veche, which means a
town assembly democracy in Novgorod. It is therefore rather unlikely that
they considered democracy a purely western invention or an impossibility in
Russia.
The Russian Party attacked with special vehemence the ideas of proletarian
internationalism and world revolution, and it continued to do so into the
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1980s. Semanov, one of the leaders of the Russian Party, says:
We were all ardent patriots, supported the Soviet power (adjusted for
patriotism, of course) […] We despised the West for its bourgeois
culture and it was by mere accident that the West was Communist
party’s main enemy as well. (Semanov 1997, 180)
Patriotism, or the worship and love of the state, formed the core of
nationalist ideology – not only in its “patriotic” variant. The state was
conceived as the great protector of the Russian people. V. Rasputin
proposed a widely extended definition of patriotism:
Patriotism means moral consciousness, duty, love for our native
land, the good, faith, personality, citizenship etc. […] Patriotism is
not a kind of love for an idea but love of fatherland, covenant
faithfulness, honouring its ashes, suffering for all Russian sufferings,
confidence in its purifying exodus. (Rasputin 1989, 410)
The cult of the Soviet state was also abundant in underground Russophile
literature, particularly the samizdat magazine published by Osipov. From the
very beginning, Osipov demonstrated his hostility toward the Soviet political
order, and bitterly and uncompromisingly lashed out against the so-called
modern patriots: individuals who speculated on Russian feelings while
continuing to serve the authorities. At the same time, he suggested only the
“softening of dictatorship, observation of laws, and tolerance toward the
differently minded”. Osipov underscored his acceptance of the existing order
as a reality, arguing that “whatever the political fate of Russia, national
interests are of primary, supersocial and eternal importance” (after
Shlapentokh 1990, 211-12). Consequently, the evolution of Osipov’s views
during the 1970s could be described as a shift from traditionalist-monarchist
views towards the national-patriotic positions.
Shlapentokh is correct in his observation that despite serious differences on
many issues, Russophiles demonstrated a general consensus in their
attitudes toward the Soviet empire and its future. Only a few of them (for
instance Solzhenicyn) considered the national independence of the nonSlavic people a desirable goal. Since the early 1960s, the majority of
Russophiles rejected the idea of dismantling the Soviet empire, i.e. the idea
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of “Great Russia’s dedicated representatives of all nationalities”. For
example, in their search for the ideological basis for a “Great Russia”,
intellectuals from the VShSON planned to overthrow the communist
dictatorship and establish a new political order on the principles of Social
Christianity. In their minds, every imperial acquisition was incorporated into
Russia’s identity. Even such an implacable foe of the Soviet system as the
“traditionalist” Shafarevich and such a moderate “patriot” as Osipov in the
1970s wanted the empire to survive (Shlapentokh 1990, 214-15).
What was the Russian Party’s core argument for this crossbreeding of Soviet
system and (not only orthodox but also neo-pagan) traditionalism? To clarify
this, let me quote a short fragment from Letters about Russia (1971-72) by
the dissident writer and editor Gennady Shimanov:
What I am really afraid of is a sudden liberalization, the notorious
“Western democracy”, which is the pinnacle of some intelligentsia’s
hopes […] Until the Soviet power exists, the religious revival in our
country cannot be brought to a stop. It could be stopped only by a
sudden liberalization after the Czechoslovak model […] Of course, we
will have a lot of churches and a lot of people in these churches but it
will be not the beginning but rather the end. It will be a foetus and
Russia will become the back of beyond and the backyard of the West
which is neither cold nor hot.” (after Mitrokhin 2003, 522)
Shimanov means that imperial-orthodox nationalists should support the
regime, good or bad, in its struggle against westernizers. In future, there
would be no alternative for the regime, accepting either its dependence on
the Russian Orthodox forces or its total failure. The agenda was quite clear:
to support the Soviet system and to develop its strong institutions of
industry, army, education into a prominent bulwark against western
liberalism and democracy.
Conclusion
The Russian Party became very influential among the Russian intelligentsia
by the early 1980s. The Central Committee’s Department for Propaganda
and Agitation maintained a strict watch over patriotic journals (Tavanec
2012), and the KGB seemed to turn a blind eye to the Russian Party’s
activity, considering it a counterbalance to the actions of liberal dissidents
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(cf. Suslov 2009, 329). Continuous stagnation in the economy, a prevalent
agricultural crisis, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan pressed the regime to
appeal to the patriotic feelings of the Russian people. Sergei Semanov,
Vladimir Soloukhin, Vadim Kozinov and others published overtly nationalistic
and religious essays in the journal Nash sovremennik. However, in 1981-82
the security service took measures to put an end to “flirting with the little
god” (zaigryvaniia s bozen’koi). [2]
Therefore I cannot verify Bibikhin’s statement that there was a purposeful
search for ideological alternatives to Marxism among the authorities. At the
same time, the phenomenon described by Bibikhin is entirely in the spirit of
the Russian Party. Here the question arises whether contemporary Russian
politics are influenced by the Russian nationalists. No doubt, the Russophile
ideology had become a dominant ideology in the late Soviet Union. Today it
appears to have left the marginal place it occupied during the past 25 years
of the post-Soviet era and to reflect the consensus between public opinion
and the opinion of the power elite. Nonetheless, today’s curious politicoideological mixture of militant imperialism, Russian Orthodoxy and the idea
of a Russian Sonderweg should not necessarily be understood as the natural
result of an evolutionary development. One thing is clear: it points to a
certain continuity in the logic of power. There are a lot of ideological niches
in the Russian intellectual milieu – one could mention Eurasianism,
liberalism, “mystical fascism”, the national democratic movement, etc. –
which can provide a convenient set of ideas to reshape the political agenda.
The present-day success of imperial-orthodox nationalism in the spirit of the
Russian Party is contingent on a series of factors, first and foremost its
persuasiveness for a major part of Russian society and its adaptability as the
ideological basis for the construction of a political agenda in terms of friendenemy distinction.
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Literature: The Case of Nash Sovremennik, 1981-1991. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Footnotes
1. Power for power, the redoubling of power, or reduction of power to its
pure form of machination.
2. A declassified memo "On the anti-Soviet activities of A. Ivanov and S. N.
Semanov" written by then KGB boss Yuri Andropov to the Politburo on March
28, 1981 reads in part: "Recently, in Moscow and other cities of the country
a new tendency toward negative and critical thinking has manifested itself in
elements in the scientific and creative intelligence sectors. They are referred
to as Russianists (rusisty). Under the pretext of defending Russian traditions
they are in fact engaged in anti-Soviet activities. [...] The chief editor of 'Man
and the Law' journal, Communist Party member S. M. Semanov distributes
slanderous stories about Communist Party leadership in the domestic and
foreign affairs policies of the government. [...] He emphasizes the need to
fight the government. [...] If we ourselves do not resist, we are lost."
(Russian text in: Semanov, Lotareva 2006, 366-368).
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