Cites Yanov, Agursky on, "National Bolshevism, " Timasheff, Laqueur on,
"Red- Brown, " nationalism.
> ...The Red-Browns and the Russian Strasserites
There are several umbrella organisations in Russia that bring Nazi,
monarchist and extreme nationalist groupings together with supporters of
the former regime, people and organisations that call themselves Communist.
The best known of these is the National Salvation Front, whose secretary
was for a time the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation,
Gennady Zyuganov. The front has been responsible for massive demonstrations
in Moscow of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes leading to bloody
clashes with the police. Here you can find placards of Stalin rubbing
shoulders with the black, white and gold flags of the Romanovs. This
phenomenon has become popularly known as the 'Red-Brown' movement, uniting
the 'Reds' with the 'Brownshirts'.
Politically these apparently diverse forces are agreed in their demand for
an end to democracy, the introduction of a state of emergency (the
programme of the August 1991 putschists), an end to military-civil
conversion in the arms industry and the resurrection of Russia as a great
imperial power.
The ideological cement of the movement is Great Russian nationalism. Take
the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), for example, an
organisation that numbers over half a million members. Gennady Zyuganov's
latest book, Great Power(1994), claims to set out the central planks of the
CPRF's politics. Zyuganov makes no attempt to distinguish nation from
class, and offers but one small apology to Marx, who apparently considered
his theories to be applicable only to Western Europe, and to Lenin, who
apparently argued to unite all classes so as to stand at the head of the
nation.84
For Zyuganov, Moscow is to become the 'Third Rome', 'Holy Rus', destined to
fulfill the tsarist trinity of 'autocracy, Orthodoxy and nation'. Russia
must fight a 'national liberation struggle' against 'transnational,
cosmopolitan forces' of the 'world oligarchy', against 'naked russophobia'
and 'crazed persecution of Russian writers', to resurrect the USSR, 'the
historical and geopolitical inheritor of the Russian empire'. He talks of
returning Russia's 'natural geopolitical borders' to include the 'little
Russians' (ie the Ukrainians) and Byelorus. He considers the CPRF to be a
party of derzhavniki(great power supporters), of 'patriots' who have
'rejected the extremist theses of class struggle' to unite the workers with
'nationally oriented entrepreneurs'.85Finally he adds:
It is time for us to recognise that the Russian Orthodox Church is the
historical foundation and expression of the 'Russian idea' in the form
polished by ten centuries of our statehood... The most powerful means of
undermining the Russian national consciousness, the main tool for splitting
it... are the endless attempts to antagonistically juxtapose in people's
minds the 'white' and 'red' national ideas... By reuniting the 'red'
ideal... with the 'white' ideal... Russia will at last attain its craved
for social, cross-class consensus and imperial might, bequeathed by tens of
generations of our ancestors, achieved through the courage and holy
suffering of the heroic history of the Fatherland!86
>From the above it ought to be clear why Zyuganov can happily appear on a
platform with Alexander Barkashov. In the autumn of 1994 the CPRF even
proposed a new national motto, Slavyas Rossiya!--Glory to Russia! This is
identical in meaning and but a slight verbal modification on Barkashov's
version of sieg heil: Slava Rossii!pronounced with outstretched arms by his
young Nazi thugs. Zyuganov, however, represents the 'moderate' wing of the
Communists. Between the CPRF and Barkashov are a number of major
organisations laying claim to the Stalinist heritage of the USSR.
First among these is Victor Anpilov and his Russian Communist Workers Party
(RCWP) . Anpilov is the popular leader of the mass movement Labouring
Russia. One of the newspapers claiming to represent the movement--Chto
delat?(What Is To Be Done?)--is edited by the Nazi Vladimir Yakushev,
leader of the National-Social Union mentioned above, and is full of anti-
Semitic filth. Anpilov popularises a brand of 'Gulag revisionism' which
says that Stalin's camps weren't as bad as they are made out to be, and
that anyway the end justified the means. According to him, the October
revolution swept away the regime that had destroyed the Russian Empire in
February.87Anpilov is well aware of the history of Stalin's vicious anti-
Semitism, and fully approves:
Stalin saw the danger to the party, bled dry by the bitter war, represented
by the remnants of the Zionist Bund that had wormed their way into the
Bolsheviks in 1917 and quickly seized the key posts in the party and the
state. With typical decisiveness Stalin took practical measures to restore
the proletarian character of the party.88
The Central Committee of the RCWP includes General Albert Makashov, who led GorbachevIs crackdown on the Armenian independence movement in Yerevan in 1987-88. In October 1993 Makashov appeared surrounded by Barkashov's machine gun toting Nazis and led the storming of the Moscow Town Hall. Another leading figure to advocate 'national bolshevism' (the Russian analogue of German national socialism) is Eduard Limonov.89After breaking from Zhirinovsky he has made several attempts to unite 'ultra-communists' with Nazis, the latest being the launch in November 1994 of the National Bolshevik Party. At a talk at Moscow State University to 250 students in November 1994 he called for a ban on individual freedom, the establishment of a network of informers on every block, the creation of a 'Führer regime', and so on. In June 1994 Limonov united with Barkashov to form the 'National- Revolutionary Movement', which has a red flag with a white circle and a black hammer and sickle.90(Hitler's flag was red with a white circle in the middle and a black swastika.) On the pages of Zavtra Limonov and Barkashov made an appeal to 'Anpilov, red brother' to join them.91Anpilov declined to attend the launch event, but sent his greetings. National bolshevism has attracted some well known supporters. The rock singers Yegor Letov and Pauk (Sergei Troitsky) of the heavy metal groups Grazhdanskaya Oboronaand Korroziya Metalaare cult figures among Russian youth. Their packed concerts often include the appearance of uniformed Barkashov supporters giving Nazi salutes on stage, and are inevitably accompanied by the sale of Nazi literature. Hitler and Mussolini also had 'left wings' that emphasised the 'anti- capitalist' element of this essentially reactionary ideology--in Germany they were associated with leaders of the SA butchered by Hitler during the 'night of the long knives', 30 June 1934. This brought the petty bourgeois radicals to heel after they had done the dirty work of smashing the trade unions and the Communists. Daniel Guerin has described at length how Hitler's Nazis combined their support for capitalism with an anti- capitalist rhetoric: It was Gregor Strasser who became the brilliant and tireless propagandist of this synthesis: 'German industry and economy in the hands of international finance capital means the end of all possibility of social liberation; it means the end of all dreams of a socialist Germany... We National Socialist revolutionaries, we ardent socialists, are waging the fight against capitalism and imperialism... German socialism will be possible and lasting only when Germany is freed!'92
Variations on Strasser's words can be heard at any Red-Brown meeting in Moscow. Limonov makes explicit reference to this side of the ideology of Hitler and Mussolini, and writes: 'At least Hitler was a revolutionary'.93Limonov and Anpilov are the Strasserites of the Nazi movement in Russia today. The roots of Russian nationalism The strength of the Russian hard right and its rapid rise to prominence are proof of widespread Russian nationalism in the USSR. But the phenomenon continues to baffle many on the left, who saw in the Soviet Union a buffer against nationalism and a bastion of 'friendship of peoples' (to use the hackneyed old Soviet slogan). Thus, in his otherwise useful book on Yeltsin's Russia, the Guardian'sJonathan Steele concludes that the emergence of a 'strong Russian national state' is an impossibility, and that 'for the Communists [Russian nationalism] was impossible, given the long tradition of Soviet "internationalism" and the desire to preserve the USSR'.94Contrary to such widespread assumptions, however, a central element in Stalin's counter- revolution was the restoration of Russian nationalism to the status of the dominant and at times official ideology. The Soviet Union was undoubtedly the Russian empire, staffed by Russians inspired by a messianic Russian nationalism, the great majority of them members of the Communist Party. None of this should come as any surprise to socialists today:95in the last years of his life Lenin was well aware that the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers' state in Russia was opening the floodgates of Russian nationalism. It was precisely on the national question that he first prepared to do battle with the bureaucracy.96In 1922 he declared his intention to 'defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great- Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat'.97 Already in 1922 Stalin was accusing Lenin of 'national-liberalism'. 'They [the bureaucrats] say we need a united apparatus', Lenin replied, 'but where did these assurances come from? Did they not come from that same Russian apparatus which we took over from tsarism and only slightly annointed with Soviet oil?' Lenin was preparing to give battle to 'the Great-Russian chauvinist riffraff' at the Twelfth Party Congress in the spring of 1923, but illness prevented him.98 Throughout the 1920s Russian nationalist tendencies in the state, literature and art grew in intensity, as Agursky shows in some detail.99But a qualitativeshift occurred in the first half of the 1930s. According to the emigre sociologist Nikolai Timasheff, this was one of the most striking elements of Stalin's 'Great Retreat' from the original aims of the revolution: 'in 1934 ... the trend suddenly changed, giving place to one of the most conspicuous phases of the Great Retreat, which in the course of a few years transformed Russia into a country with much more fervent nationalism than she ever had before the attempt of international transfiguration'.100 As John Dunlop notes in his studies of contemporary Russian nationalism, Russian nationalists today also recognise the significance of the dramatic reversal in official attitudes to Russian nationalism at this time.101As the officially sponsored Russian nationalist journal Molodaya Gvardiyaput it in 1970: A nihilistic raging in respect to the cultural achievements of our past was unfortunately rather fashionable among a segment of our intelligentsia in the 20s... Pokrovsky and his 'school' placed a fat minus sign before the entire history of Russia... In his [Pokrovsky's]essays on Russian history (which it would be more correct to term essays on anti-Russian history) the names of [the tsarist generals]Suvorov and Kutuzov are virtually not mentioned... Now it is clear that in the task of the struggle with the destroyers and nihilists the break occurred in the middle of the 30s.102