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Russian Nationalism As a Medium of Revolution

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Russian Nationalism As a Medium of Revolution TITLE : Russian Nationalism as a Medium of Revolutio n AUTHOR: Liah Greenfeld , Boston University THE NATIONAL COUNCI L FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEA N RESEARC H 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N .W . Washington, D .C. 20036 INFORMATIONPROJECT :* CONTRACTOR : Boston University PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR : Liah Greenfel d COUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER : 806-2 7 DATE : June 10, 199 4 COPYRIGHT INFORMATIO N Individual researchers retain the copyright on work products derived from research funded b y Council Contract . The Council and the U.S. Government have the right to duplicate written reports and other materials submitted under Council Contract and to distribute such copies within th e Council and U.S. Government for their own use, and to draw upon such reports and materials fo r their own studies; but the Council and U.S. Government do not have the right to distribute, o r make such reports and materials available, outside the Council or U.S. Government without th e written consent of the authors, except as may be required under the provisions of the Freedom o f Information Act 5 U .S.C. 552, or other applicable law. * The work leading to this report was supported by contract funds provided by the National Council fo r Soviet and East European Research. The analysis and interpretations contained in the report are those of th e author. Russian Nationalism as a Medium of Revolution Executive Summary The central claim of the following paper is that Russian political development (includin g the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the anti-Communist revolution of recent years) is a functio n of Russian nationalism . In the present context, "nationalism" should be understood not in th e usual sense as aggressive or chauvinistic sentiments, set on political aggrandizement, but as a shared framework of consciousness, which, obviously, may imply -- or, under certain conditions , even take the form of -- such sentiments, but is not limited to them . Russian nationalism exerts its influence on politics chiefly, though not exclusively , through the Russian social and cultural elite -- the intelligentsia . Nationalism determines th e attitudes and the conduct of the intelligentsia because, for reasons that have to do with the origins and evolution of both nationalism and the intelligentsia in Russia, national identity forms the cor e of the intelligentsia's group (or class) identity and, therefore, its interests . It is this triple connec- tion between Russian nationalism, the intelligentsia, and political development that forms th e focus of the paper . Since the intelligentsia is the group that has traditionally articulated an d shaped Russian national consciousness, its interests may be expected to influence the attitudes o f other groups in society and, in a modified form, be reflected in their conduct as well . Paramount among the intelligentsia's group interests is their aspiration for social statu s and political authority, to which they consider themselves entitled because of their belief (embed- ded in Russian national consciousness) that culture is the supreme expression of the national spiri t and the foundation of Russia's international prestige . The inevitable frustration of this aspiratio n under the conditions of the Russian and Soviet political systems has been the chief stimulant o f political unrest, the revolutionary and, later, dissident movements providing ways to escape thi s frustration and offering alternative means of self-realization for the intelligentsia . Three things, at least, follow from this. First, as long as Russian national identity remains fundamentally unchanged, the development of democracy in Russia is highly unlikely . Second, communism in Russia also had nationalism at its root . And third, the right-wing , extreme nationalism the rise of which accompanied the anti-Communist revolution from the ver y start, and which turned from a pro-reform, anti-Communist (progressive as it was called here ) force into the ideology of the anti-democratic opposition to reform, is but a specific, extrem e expression of a general phenomenon, and is for this reason far more significant and dangerou s than it would be in its own right . The arguments presented in this paper will be further developed in the book I am current- ly writing, based on interviews with members of the intelligentsia (including certain active an d influential participants in the democratic reform) and on historical research using published materials from the period 1840-1993 . The paper includes some excerpts from the interviews . pertaining to the coup of 1991 (which might be of interest to government readers) . It concen- trates, however, on the pre-revolutionary period, which provides an historical background fo r later developments . A discussion of certain aspects of these developments and the curren t situation was presented to the Council at an earlier point in a paper titled The End of th e Russian Revolution," which was distributed by the National Council in October 1992 and a short version of which was published in The New Republic in September 1992 . iv Russian Nationalism as a Medium of Revolution Liah Greenfel d The problem this paper attempts to address is the relationship between nationalism an d political change in Russia . Its central argument is captured in the title . It proposes that national - ism -- defined, for the purpose of this discussion, as a particular framework of consciousness - - has been the medium of the revolutionary movement in Russia, providing the framework i n which one lived, which shaped one's interests, and which determined what one regarded a s problems and possible solutions . This interpretation was inspired by the recent Russian revolution, the "Soviet" revolutio n as some have called it to distinguish it from the Russian Revolution of 1917, 1 or the anti-Commu- nist revolution. But an examination of the connection between nationalism and political unrest i n this case led me to consider it in a wider historical context . The specific problem or puzzle i n the anti-Communist revolution is the unaccountable (from the perspective of our initial interpreta- tion of this event) behavior of its participants . According to this initial interpretation, th e anti-Communist revolution in Russia was a dramatic step in the process and the direction o f democratization . It was the desire for democracy which, as we supposed, moved the Russians t o abandon their 70-year-old order . The abandonment of Communism, however, was from the ver y start accompanied by a resurgence in national sentiment, and nationalism represented an anomal y for this interpretation, even though at the outset we viewed it in a positive light as yet anothe r powerful -- perhaps too powerful -- wedge undermining the regime . It was an anomaly not only or chiefly because we believed that 70 years of Communism had extinguished nationalism (whic h might have been the reason for our initial surprise at its ubiquity and vigor), but because nation- alism -- especially in its traditional Russian form -- had so little in common with the universalisti c spirit of liberal democracy . The type of post-Communist nationalism in Russia on which Wester n attention focused was that of the right-wing opposition to reform,' the nationalism of the so-calle d "hard-line communists" of our evening news . But the issue of national identity has been at leas t as salient among the mainstream and originally pro-reform public ; the place of Russia vis-a-vis the West on the one hand and Asia on the other, the Russian "idea," the Russian "mission" ar e discussed incessantly in the "democratic" press . This extraordinary salience of nationalism and the connection between it and th e anti-Communist revolution seems intriguing enough to make one want to account for it an d explore this relationship beyond the assumption that, well, when you take the lid off the socia l 1 For example, by Anatol Lieven in The Baltic Revolution, Yale University Press, 1993 . 2 The most important recent analysis of this variety of Russian nationalism is Walter Laqueur's Black Hundred, Harper-Collins, 1993 . pot, ideological steam naturally escapes . It is not necessarily natural that seventy years o f cooking did not transform this steam ; there is a need to explain how -- in which structures - - nationalism was preserved intact, despite the obvious contradiction between it and the officia l internationalist ideology, which could have suppressed it at least as easily as it did suppres s religion, but for some reason did not ; and why it was preserved intact, i.e., whose interests did i t serve. Furthermore, given that nationalism evidently was not suppressed during 70 years o f Communism, and given its extraordinary salience from the very outset of the anti-Communis t revolution, couldn't it be possible that this revolution was in some way inspired by nationalis m and not by the desire for democracy? This proposition may seem far-fetched, but one shoul d explore it just in case . What makes me think that it is not as far-fetched as it may seem is another aspect of the behavior of the participants in the anti-Communist revolution or, rather, a dramatic transforma- tion in their behavior as recently as in the last 2-2½ years . That this behavior did change could be observed during the coup, or as it is now called "rebellion," of September-October 1993 ; just how dramatically it has changed may be gauged by comparing this behavior with the behavior o f the same people during the coup of August 1991 . For the purpose of my present research, I visited Russia twice, the first time in June and July of 1992, and again a little more than a year later, in August and September of 1993, leaving one day before the outbreak of the "rebellion ." My original intention was to explore the changes in the Russian national consciousness which, I presumed, the abandonment of Communism presupposed, and the implications of the Russians' new self-definition for the prospects o f Russia's democratization .
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