Glorification of Russian history played a major role in mobilising the war effort. In 1941 anti-religious organisations and publications were closed down and the Orthodox church was rehabilitated. Tsarist uniforms and epaulettes were restored in the army in 1943. Elite military schools were named after Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nakhimov. On 1 January 1944 the Internationale, the USSR's national anthem since 1918, was replaced by a new nationalist hymn with the opening line, 'The unbreakable union of free republics has been forged through the Great Rus'. At the end of the war Stalin pronounced his famous toast: 'To the health of the Russian people!'105 The post-war years until Stalin's death saw a fearsome nationalist campaign led by Zhdanov, cracking down on 'rootless cosmopolitanism' in culture and the arts. Almost all the wars waged by tsarist Russia were proclaimed just and progressive, including the expansionist policies of the pre- revolutionary empire. Classical Russian opera was officially proclaimed 'the best in the world', and all Western art from the Impressionists onwards classified as 'decadent'. Over many years the Soviet press published systematic claims that Russians were leaders in all fields: it wasn't Edison who invented the electric light, but Lodygin; the Cherepanovs built a steam engine before Stephenson; the telegraph was in use in Russia before Morse in America; Chernov invented steel; even penicillin was announced a Russian discovery. Everything from the bicycle to the aeroplane was declared to be the fruit of Russian talent.106 No wonder that today's Russian nationalists remember the Stalin period with such fondness! For Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, given a few more years Stalin could have effected a total reversal to the pre- revolution period: If its momentum had been maintained, this 'ideological perestroika' would have left no doubt that in 10 to 15 years the USSR would have fully overcome the negative spiritual consequences of the revolutionary upheavals... Stalin needed just five or seven more years to make his 'ideological perestroika' irreversible and secure the resurrection of the unjustifiably interrupted traditions of Russian spirit and statehood.107
The post-Stalin period saw many of these tendencies criticised and somewhat softened under pressure from below, but Russian nationalism remained a key prop of the regime, which continued to direct its ire mainly at the nationalism of the non-Russian republics. The consequences of post-Stalin Russification and national oppression have been described elsewhere in this journal.108But in understanding the strength of Russian nationalism today it is important to grasp that Stalin's legacy in this area was barely scratched, and on the contrary flourished under Khrushchev, Brezhnev and their successors. Indeed, Russian nationalism was used to combat the democratic 'excesses' brought on by the Khrushchev thaw and the Prague Spring. As described in detail by Yanov and Dunlop, the 1960s and 1970s saw a constant tension within the Soviet leadership over the extent to which Russian nationalists should be given a free hand.109In the 1960s nationalists 'were free to an astonishing degree to air their views in the official press'.110Nationalists took control of leading journals such as Molodaya Gvardiya, published by the Central Committee of the Komsomol which was but one of the many mass circulation publications to come under nationalist control. Nationalist dissidents received much more lenient treatment than those such as Andrei Sakharov, exiled to Gorky, who criticised the regime from the point of view of Western liberal democracy.111The appalling Russian chauvinist and anti- Semitic paintings by Ilya Glazunov, for example, earned him major exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad in 1978 and one of the finest dachas(country homes) of the Brezhnev period.112The strength of the Soviet Writers Union as a bastion of Russian chauvinism under perestroikais an indication of the extent to which nationalist writers were encouraged-- their books were produced in print runs of hundreds of thousands (many figures in the Soviet Writers Union are now leading Nazi ideologists, such as Prokhanov and Bondarenko). Throughout the 1970s these and other writers made increasing attempts to weld a common ideology integrating the Communist period into the credo of the nationalist right. When Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Central Committee's propaganda department, came out with criticism of brute Russian nationalism in the early 1970s he was swiftly demoted and packed off to Canada as a diplomat.113 Surveying this history back in 1986, Yanov concluded that the maintainance of a strong 'dissident right' in the Soviet Union was a conscious decision by the leadership to retain a fallback option to the establishment ideology. The official 'Communist' right understood that the growing crisis of the Soviet system demanded counter-reform. According to this logic: reform demands a radical change in ideology capable of restoring the empire's former mobilisational character, securing the active co-operation and support of the masses and parts of the intelligentsia, and of justifying a sharp increase in production, family and cultural discipline and a resurrection of a fighting expansionist dynamic. Orthodox Marxism is no longer capable of such a shift. It cannot justify a return to the ideological atmosphere of war communism [1918-21]... In other words, counter-reform demands an ideological strategy, for the development of which the 'establishment right' has no intellectual or moral resources apart from those that inspire its hounded and persecuted dissident sister. In this sense it is certainly intellectually 'vulnerable' to the more precise dissident nationalists.114
It would be wrong, however, to see Russian nationalism as merely a bureaucratic conspiracy to keep the masses down. Russian nationalism was deeply ingrained in the Soviet Russian population, just as in any other capitalist nation state under normal conditions. By its very nature, the totalitarian dictatorship precluded detailed sociological research, attitude surveys and so on. But there are certain useful indicators of the strength of Russian nationalism in the population, such as letters to the samizdat(unofficial) journal Veche, the mass membership of organisations involved in restoring national monuments, and of course the stunning popularity of artists such as Glazunov.115In a society in which workers have been defeated, atomised, their organisations crushed, we would expect nationalist ideas to find a fertile ground. Anti-Semitism If Stalin was prepared to use Russian nationalism to cement a social base for his regime, he certainly had no scruples about restoring anti-Semitism to official status. Though the revolution had staunched the wounds of anti- Jewish feeling in the population, enabling Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Sverdlov to become national figures, the revolution's defeat saw the gangrene grip the patient harder than ever. When Shulgin, the tsarist politician whose anti-Semitic tirades plumb the very depths, made a secret visit to Russia in 1926, he was delighted to find widespread anti-Semitism: I thought I was going to a dead country, but I saw the awakening of a great country... The Communists will give power to the fascists... [Russia]has eliminated the dreadful socialist rubbish in the course of just a few years. Of course, they'll soon liquidate the Yids.116
Stalin's war on Trotsky and the Left Opposition was carried out under the banner of anti-Semitism. As Trotsky later wrote: After Zinoviev and Kamenev came over to the opposition the situation rapidly worsened. Now there was an excellent opportunity to tell the workers that the opposition is led by 'three disgruntled Jewish intellectuals'. At Stalin's command Uglanov in Moscow and Kirov in Leningrad followed this line systematically and almost completely openly... Not only in the countryside but even in Moscow factories baiting of the opposition by 1926 often took an absolutely clear anti-Semitic character. Many agitators openly said: 'The Yids are playing up'. I received hundreds of letters complaining about anti-Semitic methods in the struggle against the Opposition.117
>From Germany Hitler's companions Ribbentrop, Strasser and Goebels observed
this process with glee--Strasser was convinced that Stalin's aim was to
stop the revolution and liquidate communism.118
The purges of the mid-1930s meant a further turn for the worse, with
organised Jewish life almost completely paralysed: Jewish schools were
closed in their hundreds along with Jewish newspapers and departments of
Yiddish language and culture. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact
(1939-41) the Soviet press ceased to report on Nazi persecution of the Jews
and the murder of Jews in Poland after war broke out.119
The post-war period saw another flare-up of anti-Semitism in Russia, linked-
-as with Zhdanov's nationalist campaign--to the need to re- establish strict control after the upheaval of war. In 1948 arrests began of the Anti- Fascist Committee, run by the director of the Jewish State Theatre in Moscow, Solomon Mikhoels, who was accused of leading a 'pro- American Zionist conspiracy'. His arrest and murder were followed by the roundup and murder of the Jewish intelligentsia. A book on Nazi crimes against the Jews was banned and its authors were prevented from defending themselves. In 1953 the campaign reached fever-pitch with the 'discovery' of the 'Doctor's plot', the alleged conspiracy of nine doctors, six of them Jews, to murder the Soviet leadership. All Jews came under suspicion and thousands were dismissed from their jobs. Only Stalin's death may have prevented plans to deport the Jewish population to Siberia, just like the Balts, Poles, Tatars and Caucasus peoples before and during the war. Khrushchev told the author Ilya Ehrenburg of a conversation with Stalin in which the latter voiced this intention. There is evidence that cattle trucks were prepared in 1953 and that lists of victims were drawn up.120 In the post-Stalin period anti-Semitism flourished under the banner of 'anti- Zionism', an official campaign of a mass character after the Six Day War of 1967. The ideas were extremely crude. From the late 1960s onwards every year dozens of books and hundreds of articles were published relentlessly spreading the same message: namely that the idea of Judaism is the idea of world fascism, the Old Testament was fascist, so were Moses, King Solomon and almost all other Jewish leaders; the Jews had always been aggressors and mass murderers, parasites taught to destroy and subjugate other peoples with the aim of world domination; the Jews had been the pioneers of capitalism; they were in the forefront of anti-Communism and nurtured a burning hatred of Russian culture; Hitler and other Nazis had been mere puppets in their hands, inciting them to make war against the USSR in 1941; they had connived with Hitler to persecute German Jews--in far fewer numbers than claimed by Jews themselves--with the aim of establishing a Jewish state in Israel; and so on and so forth. Hundreds of thousands of copies of pulp fiction were pumped out by the armed forces publishing house featuring lurid tales of ritual Jewish murders and plots.121As Lacquer comments, 'By the early 1980s it was legitimate to argue that there had never been anti-Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia, but merely legitimate acts of self-defence against Jewish provocations.'122 In sum, it has been necessary to dwell on the history of Soviet Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism at some length because it is totally ignored or played down by the left in Britain and elsewhere. Some 60 years of Stalinism have provided fertile soil for the rise of the Russian Nazis today. Only gross complacency or political paralysis can allow Jonathan Steele, for example, to talk about 'nationalism at a low level' in Yeltsin's Russia, as if this was the heritage of some glorious Soviet internationalism.123On the contrary, the Soviet dictatorship was vicious in every respect. Small wonder that Konstantin Rodzayevsky, leader of the Russian Fascist Party in exile in China after the war, could write, 'Stalinism is exactly what we mistakenly called "Russian fascism". It is our Russian fascism cleansed of extremes, illusions and errors.'124 Why no social democracy? <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese
-- Michael Pugliese