Window on Eurasia: New Journal Seeks to Elevate Russian Nationalist Discourse

Paul Goble

Vienna, April 29 – Two weeks ago, a group of conservative Russian nationalists led by Konstantin Krylov launched a new journal, “Questions of Nationalism,” not only to take on their opponents but to raise the intellectual and political level of discussion within and about the Russian nationalist movement.
Krylov told “Russkoye obozreniye” that the journal has three distinct missions. First, it is intended to serve as “the theoretical organ of Russian nationalists, above all of the Russian national liberation movement or national democrats as [they] call themselves” (www.rus-obr.ru/opinions/6367).
Second, he said, the new publication is to serve as a research journal, to the extent that at the present movement all research in this area is being conducted by people who are not well-disposed [to Russian nationalism] and certain alternatives are needed, including academic alternatives.”
And third, Krylov said, the new journal defines as one of its goals “the acquainting of [its] reader with little-known pages of the history of Russian social thought and Russian politics as such.” “All three missions,” he argued, “are interconnected in quite complex ways” that require research.
The publication will come out four times a year, and the first issue was published in 1000 hard copies. Unlike most such efforts, Krylov continued, priority will be given to the paper version, although he said that “it is possible” that there will be an electronic version of the publication sometime in the future.
Until the electronic version appears, keeping track of the journal is likely to be difficult, but some portals are beginning to pick up and distribute with permission articles that have appeared. APN.ru did that today with Mikhail Remizov’s “Nationalism and Constructivism,” a 5,000-word essay on those concepts (www.apn.ru/publications/article22685.htm).
If Remizov’s article is typical in its familiarity with Russian and foreign students of nationalism and its care in laying out their arguments, then, the new “Questions of Nationalism” quarterly could become an important place for the discussion of issues that all too often are dealt with only in the most tendentious way.