Paul Goble
Vienna, November 28 – Russian patriotism and Russian nationalism are generally treated as synonyms or at least as mutually reinforcing phenomena, both in nearly all cases equally at odds with political democracy and economic liberalism and thus anathema both to Russian reformers and to others who wish Russia and Russians well.
But in fact, the two ideologies rest on completely different foundations, with Russian patriotism focusing primarily on the state and Russian nationalism on the Russian people as a community. And consequently, some of the variants of each often are very much at odds with those of the other.
A programmatic article by a Russian nationalist a month ago calling attention to this divide has reopened this debate. And it shows few signs of any quick resolution but nonetheless says a great deal not only about where Russians and the Russian state are now but also about where they could be and are likely to be in the future.
In that essay, Aleksei Shiropayev argues that Russian nationalism properly understood will promote democracy, capitalism, and integration with Europe, thereby challenging a large number of the core beliefs of Russian patriots and of those Russian nationalists who follow them (http://www.nazlobu.ru/publications/article2333.htm).
Russian patriotism, he argues, presents itself as “the true service of the State” be it tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet because “ontologically all these versions of the Empire are ontologically the same.” And consequently, it suggests that “the historic meaning of the existence of the Russian people” is sacrificial service to the Imperial Leviathan.”
“According to the patriots,” he continues, the Russian people do not have their own fate: their fate is [linked to that] of the supra-national hyper-State, of the fate of the empire. Not to rule in the empire but to be its eternal servant, its faceless cement; bearing without complaint the burden of imperial ‘super tasks” rather than acting for itself.”
That is the “imperial ‘liturgy’” of the Russian patriots, Shiropayev insists, a doctrine that reduces Russians to “eternal slaves,” permanent collective farmers,” and forever “proletarians” who must be herded forward by an all-powerful state entity that alone can decide where they should go.
Russian nationalists, on the other hand, focus on the Russian people, their needs and aspirations, but because Russian patriots and not they have been in charge so long, Shiropayev continues, their approach is best presented in terms of how different it is from the latter.
Because they focus on the people rather than the state, Shiropayev says, Russian nationalists – or at least the part of the Russian nationalist spectrum his “national democrats” represent – are “non-imperial” in principle. “Not through the restoration of the Empire lies the path to the Russian future, but across the corpse of the empire.”
“Thanks to the Empire, the Russian people has not become a nation,” he insists, and to change that, Shiropayev continues, it is vitally important to “open the sluice gates of regional development,” to promote “a bourgeois state,” and to integrate with Europe, must as the countries of Eastern Europe and the Baltic already have.
The first task ahead of Russians, he argues, is “overcoming the fetishization of the state” by advancing the claims of the people over which the state has ruled. And the most effective way to do that is to promote the creation of regional governments that are closer to the people.
These units could then perhaps form a Confederation, Shiropayev argues, and with that kind of a political arrangement, Russians would be in a position to develop the kind of economic and political system that would allow them to join Europe rather than stand in opposition to it as the Russian patriots always insist.
According to Shiropayev, Boris Yeltsin understood this point early on. In a speech to the Urals Polytechnic Institute in February 1990, the future president said that it should be possible to form within the Russian Federation “seven Russian republics: Central Russia, the North, the South, theVolga, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East.”
For Russian nationalists, Shiropayev argues, that action makes Yeltsin a hero, but for the Russian patriots, it makes him a destroyer of the state. And for them, Yeltsin is worthy of praise only for his willingness to launch of a war against the Chechen drive for independence.
Indeed, Shiropayev continues, if Russian nationalists have any reason to dislike Yeltsin, it is this: “he preserved” the core part of the empire, “its initial place des armes, its bastion of revenge – the Russian Federation,” rather than allowing that entity to disintegrate and the Russian people to become true historical actors.
Russian nationalists offer the Russian people the opportunity to “live and work for themselves and not for the imperial-bureaucratic ‘uncle,’ to be guided by their own real interests and not phantom ideological construction like the ‘Third Rome’ or the ‘Third International,’” to escape “the sacralized slavery of the empire and live in a bourgeois democratic state, “a Russian Europe.’”
In short, Shiropayev says, Russian nationalists want Russians to practice “national egotism and self-respect instead of imperial internationalism and the belittling of themselves,” to escape from “the idea of Russia” and begin to live on their own, and thus to “begin at last” to make their own “Russian history.”
In the course of his long, two-part essay, Shiropayev discusses each of these points in detail as well as making a wide variety of comments on Russian history and the views of his ideological opponents, the Russian patriots. But his most controversial remarks concern his open support for the rise of a Russia of the regions.
He surveys regionalist impulses in Siberia and other parts of the country, considers the movements that have already emerged to advance their ideas, and says he backs all of them even if that means that some of them might decide to pursue independence from the center.
Shiropayev has received some support from these regionalists – see, for example, the equally detailed article of Mikhail Kulekhov on Siberian neo-oblastnichesto at http://www.apn.ru/publications/print18447.htm which points out that Siberians “do not want the collapse of the Russian Federation but we do not fear it either.”
But his opponents, the Russian patriots, have attacked his ideas in a series of increasingly sharp, even vitriolic articles over the last month in the Russian “nationalist” – that is, “patriotic” – media. Typical of these is an essay by Vladimir Karpets that was posted online October 21st (http://www.pravya.ru/look/14380?print=1).
He accuses Shiropayev personally and those who have published his writings of betraying the country, of promoting its disintegration, and of being hirelings of various international forces who see Russian regionalism as a weapon to destroy the Russian state, the only entity capable of defending the Russian people.
To block the machinations of this group, he continues, Russia needs to establish “a genuine anti-separatist front,” on that will differ from the National Salvation Front only in that it will be directed not against the authorities but in support and under the guidance of them.
And having created that front, Karpets continues, Moscow should move to create a “Yezhov-style Empire” – a reference to Stalin’s notorious secret police chief – to ensure that the Russian state that Shiropayev and his like want to put in the grave will in fact survive and prosper.
In terms of argument, Shiropayev certainly has the advantage, but in terms of Russian politics under Vladimir Putin, Karpets and those who continue to deify the state at the cost of keeping the Russians from a nation like any other would seem to have the greater influence.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Stalin ‘Documents’ on the Church are Forgeries, Moscow Historian Says
Paul Goble
Vienna, November 28 – A document purportedly showing that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had a change of heart about Soviet anti-religious policy and ended attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church in 1939 is a complete forgery, according to a historian at the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
That document and the directive it ostensibly replaced were first published in 1999, Igor’ Kurlyandskiy writes in an article entitled “The Protocols of the Church Elders,” but a close examination of their style and content reveals both to be frauds (http://www.politjournal.ru/preview.php?action=Articles&dirid=50&tek=7705&issue=209).
Sometimes they have been used by those who hope to boost Stalin’s reputation, but more often and to this day – one was posted on the www.pravaya.ru site yesterday, to give but one example -- they are invoked by those who hope to form an alliance between Russian Communists and authoritarian elements in the Orthodox Church.
And because they have appeared so often and have been challenged so infrequently, Kurlyandskiy notes, they are now even used by otherwise reputable scholars in several monographs and at least one doctoral dissertation on Soviet anti-religious policy before and during World War II.
What makes Kurlyandskiy’s conclusion so important, therefore, is that it reduces the chances for such historical revisionism or for such an alliance of these former opponents. What makes them so impressive is that he works at an institute known for its nationalism and he shows the documents to be false on the basis of internal evidence.
The key “document,” which the Moscow scholar shows to be a forgery, is usually referred to be its title, “Excepts from Protocol No. 88 of the Session of the Politburo of the Central Community of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks” of November 11, 1939.
This protocol purportedly vacates a “Directive of Comrade Ulyanov (Lenin) from May 1, 1919, in which the founder of the Soviet state supposedly called for the arrest and execution of all priests and other religious figures as soon as possible. The 1939 protocol also reverses all orders to the Soviet police agencies to that effect.
And often in recent publications, appended to this November 1939 document is a note from Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, dated December 22, 1939, reporting to his boss on the release, consistent with the November 11 document, of some 24,000 priests and hierarchs from prison and the camps.
By presenting these documents together, by blaming the lack of the usual archival apparatus about them on their extreme sensitivity, and by offering what appears to be a coherent story, those making use of these materials have succeeded in winning a large audience for their point of view..
But in the space of a single article online, Kurlyandskiy makes short work of these “documents.” And the errors that he points to are so blatant that it is amazing that so many Russians have been taken in. Apparently, he implies, they believed in these documents because they were predisposed to want to do so.
Among the defects in and about these documents that Kurlyandskiy points to are the misuse of terms, the absence of records of any such decrees, the use of a number—which includes the “mark of the beast” – that was never employed, and the reference to “Comrade Ulyanov (Lenin),” a style no Soviet author ever used.
Moreover, he notes, not only are there no cases of “secret” party or government documents in pre-1953 Soviet times vacating earlier such orders or any at all repealing documents Lenin had signed, but the orders that these forgeries contain are inconsistent with what the Soviet government actually did either in 1919 or in 1939.
Thus, Kurlyandskiy concludes, “all the published materials” he has examined on this question “are forgeries, crudely falsified by unknown political provocateurs at the end of the 1990s and disseminated” by those who hoped to use them in pursuit of their goal.”
That goal, he said, was “the formation and rooting in public consciousness of the myth about a shift in the position of Stalin toward the Church and the Orthodox faith even before the war, and the creation of positive images of the ‘Orthodox” Stalin and the ‘patriotic’ Stalinist leadership.”
Kurlyandskiy has made their task a little more difficult, although it is likely that his expose will not end their attempts to realize it.
Vienna, November 28 – A document purportedly showing that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had a change of heart about Soviet anti-religious policy and ended attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church in 1939 is a complete forgery, according to a historian at the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
That document and the directive it ostensibly replaced were first published in 1999, Igor’ Kurlyandskiy writes in an article entitled “The Protocols of the Church Elders,” but a close examination of their style and content reveals both to be frauds (http://www.politjournal.ru/preview.php?action=Articles&dirid=50&tek=7705&issue=209).
Sometimes they have been used by those who hope to boost Stalin’s reputation, but more often and to this day – one was posted on the www.pravaya.ru site yesterday, to give but one example -- they are invoked by those who hope to form an alliance between Russian Communists and authoritarian elements in the Orthodox Church.
And because they have appeared so often and have been challenged so infrequently, Kurlyandskiy notes, they are now even used by otherwise reputable scholars in several monographs and at least one doctoral dissertation on Soviet anti-religious policy before and during World War II.
What makes Kurlyandskiy’s conclusion so important, therefore, is that it reduces the chances for such historical revisionism or for such an alliance of these former opponents. What makes them so impressive is that he works at an institute known for its nationalism and he shows the documents to be false on the basis of internal evidence.
The key “document,” which the Moscow scholar shows to be a forgery, is usually referred to be its title, “Excepts from Protocol No. 88 of the Session of the Politburo of the Central Community of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks” of November 11, 1939.
This protocol purportedly vacates a “Directive of Comrade Ulyanov (Lenin) from May 1, 1919, in which the founder of the Soviet state supposedly called for the arrest and execution of all priests and other religious figures as soon as possible. The 1939 protocol also reverses all orders to the Soviet police agencies to that effect.
And often in recent publications, appended to this November 1939 document is a note from Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, dated December 22, 1939, reporting to his boss on the release, consistent with the November 11 document, of some 24,000 priests and hierarchs from prison and the camps.
By presenting these documents together, by blaming the lack of the usual archival apparatus about them on their extreme sensitivity, and by offering what appears to be a coherent story, those making use of these materials have succeeded in winning a large audience for their point of view..
But in the space of a single article online, Kurlyandskiy makes short work of these “documents.” And the errors that he points to are so blatant that it is amazing that so many Russians have been taken in. Apparently, he implies, they believed in these documents because they were predisposed to want to do so.
Among the defects in and about these documents that Kurlyandskiy points to are the misuse of terms, the absence of records of any such decrees, the use of a number—which includes the “mark of the beast” – that was never employed, and the reference to “Comrade Ulyanov (Lenin),” a style no Soviet author ever used.
Moreover, he notes, not only are there no cases of “secret” party or government documents in pre-1953 Soviet times vacating earlier such orders or any at all repealing documents Lenin had signed, but the orders that these forgeries contain are inconsistent with what the Soviet government actually did either in 1919 or in 1939.
Thus, Kurlyandskiy concludes, “all the published materials” he has examined on this question “are forgeries, crudely falsified by unknown political provocateurs at the end of the 1990s and disseminated” by those who hoped to use them in pursuit of their goal.”
That goal, he said, was “the formation and rooting in public consciousness of the myth about a shift in the position of Stalin toward the Church and the Orthodox faith even before the war, and the creation of positive images of the ‘Orthodox” Stalin and the ‘patriotic’ Stalinist leadership.”
Kurlyandskiy has made their task a little more difficult, although it is likely that his expose will not end their attempts to realize it.
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