Window on Eurasia: Russians Urged to Revive Novgorod Traditions

Paul Goble

Vienna, March 14 – Medieval Novgorod, a city that was democratic, strong and closely linked to the West, provides a model for Russia’s development, but tragically many of those in Moscow who today call themselves Russian nationalists echo the baseless views of those in the West who say that Russians are incapable of democracy.
In an essay posted online yesterday, Mikhail Pozharskiy, a Russian nationalist himself who has drawn fire from statist and authoritarian nationalists, argues that most Russian nationalists are either ignorant of or have chosen to ignore the precedents Novgorod’s history provides (http://www.apn.ru/publications/print11636.htm).
Nearly a millenium ago when the rulers of Moscow were growing increasingly authoritarian even as they bowed down to the Mongol horde, the city of Novgorod the Great not only was governed by the pro-democratic “veche” but also was linked to states in Western Europe by trade and capable of successfully attacking the Mongols.
Precisely because of these qualities and because they are at odds with those which Moscow represents, Novgorod’s historic role has been played down by the tsarist authorities, by the Soviet regime, and by the post-Soviet Russian government, Pozharskiy suggests.
Soviet-era textbooks generally neglected these traditions because of the danger they posed to the highly centralized and anti-Western USSR, choosing instead to play up the story of Aleksandr Nevskiy and his fights – on behalf not only of his principality but also the Mongols – against the Teutonic knights.
Unfortunately, Pozharskiy continues, that approach has continued since 1991 and for many of the same reasons. And intentionally or not, it has reinforced the common view of Russophobes and statist nationalists that Russians as a nation are incapable of developing a democratic state.
“One well-known European politician said that one must not judge Russia too strictly because there was never a democratic tradition in that country … and Russians are incapable of administering themselves,” Pozharskiy continues. Such things when said by a foreigner are almost universally acknowledged as a form of Russophobia.
But unfortunately, he notes, “many who call themselves ‘Russian nationalists’ say absolutely the same thing. Apparently in their view as well, democracy is alien to the Russian people.” And as a result, they support the notion that Russia must be controlled by a brutal dictator “or at the very least by a cheap parody of a dictator – V.V. Putin.”
To prove both foreign and domestic doubters of Russia’s democratic possibilities, Pozharskiy says, he and some of his colleagues are seeking to promote the ideas of Novgorod to a broader audience, arguing that ethnic Russians need to escape from the Russian Federation in its current form lest they commit demographic suicide.
Not surprisingly, such views are anathema not only to the Moscow Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church but also to many Russian nationalists, who have not been shy in denouncing Pozharskiy and others as dangerous marginals, committed to the dissolution of the Russian state (For a sample of this criticism, see http://www.apn.ru/publications/print11489.htm).
And indeed, many of Pozharskiy’s ideas and those of the Russian national democrats with whom he is associated are both extremist and undemocratic in their implications. But his argument that Russians are not inherently undemocratic is important and may be finding support in some unexpected ways and places.
Last week, after an Ingush migrant killed a Russian youth in a Karelian village, local residents met and declared as a group that they “reserved for themselves the right” to have their district detached from Karelia and unified with the Leningrad oblast if the Karelian authorities did not act (http://www.pravaya.ru/dailynews/11471?print=1).
This kind of proto-democracy, of course, may lead to various kinds of abuses of human rights, but certainly no greater abuses than those visited upon the population of the Russian Federation by its current government. And such popular actions almost certainly are the soil out of which some kind of Russian democracy could again emerge.