Fernando Kaskais posted: " Detail of Eternal Russia (1988) by Ilya Glazunov. Photo courtesy Wikimedia/Mos.ru Lenin envisioned Soviet unity. Stalin called Russia 'first among equals'. Yet Russian nationalism never went away Joy Neumeyer is a writer and historian of Russia and" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Detail of Eternal Russia (1988) by Ilya Glazunov. Photo courtesy Wikimedia/Mos.ru
Lenin envisioned Soviet unity. Stalin called Russia 'first among equals'. Yet Russian nationalism never went away
Joy Neumeyer is a writer and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe. A former reporter in Moscow, her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others.
On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kiev to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet 'totalitarian regime' in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraine's future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of any future empire. Five months earlier, in June 1990, inspired by independence movements in the Baltics and the Caucasus, Yeltsin had passed a declaration of Russian sovereignty that served as a model for those of several other Soviet republics, including Ukraine. While they stopped short of demanding full separation, such statements asserted that the USSR would have only as much power as its republics were willing to give.
Russian imperial ambitions can appear to be age-old and constant. Even relatively sophisticated media often present a Kremlin drive to dominate its neighbours that seems to have passed from the tsars to Stalin, and from Stalin to Putin. So it is worth remembering that, not long ago, Russia turned away from empire. In fact, in 1990-91, it was Russian secessionism – together with separatist movements in the republics – that brought down the USSR. To defeat the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt at preserving the union, Yeltsin fused the concerns of Russia's liberal democrats and conservative nationalists into an awkward alliance. Like Donald Trump's Make America Great Again or Boris Johnson's Brexit, Yeltsin insisted that Russians, the Soviet Union's dominant group, were oppressed. He called for separation from burdensome others to bring Russian renewal.
The roots of nationalist discontent lay in Russia's peculiar status within the Soviet Union. After the Bolsheviks took control over much of the tsarist empire's former territory, Lenin declared 'war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism' and proposed to uplift the 'oppressed nations' on its peripheries. To combat imperial inequality, Lenin called for unity, creating a federation of republics divided by nationality. The republics forfeited political sovereignty in exchange for territorial integrity, educational and cultural institutions in their own languages, and the elevation of the local 'titular' nationality into positions of power. Soviet policy, following Lenin, conceived of the republics as homelands for their respective nationalities (with autonomous regions and districts for smaller nationalities nested within them). The exception was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR, which remained an administrative territory not associated with any ethnic or historic 'Russia'.
Russia was the only Soviet republic that did not have its own Communist Party, capital, or Academy of Sciences. These omissions contributed to the uneasy overlap of 'Russian' and 'Soviet'.
It was Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, who promoted Russians to 'first among equals' in the Soviet Union, confirmed by his postwar toast that credited 'most of all, the Russian people' with the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. Nikita Khrushchev continued the Soviet commitment to the formation of a multiethnic community that would eventually converge in a shared economic, cultural and linguistic system. In this Soviet melting pot, Russia was a kind of older brother, especially to the purportedly less-advanced peoples of Central Asia. Russian remained the Soviet language of upward mobility, Russian history and culture were the most celebrated, and Russians generally thought of the Soviet Union as 'theirs'. Like white Americans who marked other groups as 'ethnic', Russians saw themselves as the norm in relation to 'national minorities'.
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was a majority urbanised, educated society whose legitimacy had come to rest on its status as a stable welfare state. Freed from the terror, war and mass mobilisation of the previous decades, Soviet citizens spent their leisure time watching TV and listening to records (some officially banned, but easily available thanks to state-produced consumer technologies). After the horrors of the Second World War, in which 20 to 28 million Soviet citizens died, the hard-won stability of the postwar decades led some to wonder what a meaningful life looked like when the era of epic struggle was over. The question was particularly acute for the generation that reached adulthood after Stalin's death in 1953. They inherited the Soviet state's crowning achievements – victory over Hitler, the conquest of space – but lacked a unifying world-historical cause. Like their peers in other highly developed societies of the 1970s, they sought answers through self-improvement quests, spiritual awakening, aimless hedonism and environmental activism...
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