--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> By the way, what is up with this bullshit on your
> website?
>
> September 04, 2004
> The Emergence of Weimar Russia
> Chris Bertram marks another stage in the emergence
> of
> Weimar Russia:
>
> Chris Bertram marks another stage in the emergence
> of
> Weimar Russia:
I'm going to rant about this subject because the whole dumb-fuck "Weimar Russia" motif keeps appearing in the "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, so I'll just draw a vague historical analogy" school of Western commentary on Russia. The WR bullshit, which was fed to the Western media by Yeltsin's circle in order to get backing in the West to defend "democracy" from a largely nonexistent Red-Brown horde, seems to run like this: After Germany was defeated in WWII, it felt humiliated, and this since of national humiliation appealed to deep-seated feelings of nationalist scape-goating in Germany. Russia was defeated in the Cold War, therefore... Q.E.D.
There are slight problems with this argument. First, the USSR was not defeated in the Cold War, and the Russian population therefore does not feel defeated. The Cold War ended in the late 1980s because of diplomacy on the part of Gorbachev and Reagan. The USSR was dissolved as part of an anti-Gorbachev coup which incidentally Russian nationalists, to teh extent to which they existed, were usually in favor of. In fact Bush I was against breaking up the USSR.
Second, there is almost no sense of Russian nationality. Russia is not a nation-state, and the Russian Federation is not inhabited by "Russians." It is inhabited by about 250 different ethnic groups, only one of which is Russian, and exist because the Russian Empire, unlike the United States, did not slaughter the native peoples but absorbed them. The Tsarist and Soviet governments tried to ward off the emergence of Russian nationalism for hundreds of years, sucessfully, because they considered it a threat to the multinational empire. As a result, outide of anti-Jewish pogroms that mostly took place in Ukraine anyway, Russia does not and has never had serious ethnic conflict between Russians and other ethnic groups, or religious conflict for that matter until the recent appearance of the Wahabbis, and that's mainly an intra-Muslim thing. Serious conflicts have occured between small ethnic groups, like Ossetians and Ingush, Ingush and Chechens, and Muslim and Christian Tatars, not between Russians and other nationalities.
In fact, if you asked a Russian peasant in the 1800s what his "nationality," he would probably not know what you were talking about and answer "Orthodox, from Novgorod" or wherever he was from.
A cursory knowledge of Russian reality shows why this is so:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/commonwealth/ussr_nat_82.jpg
http://countrystudies.us/russia/34.htm
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/commonwealth/russia_ethnic94.jpg
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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