Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 13 – Most commentaries
on Russian attitudes since the Crimean Anschluss have focused on the role of
the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus in creating a new sense of Russian national
identity. But Yevgeny Ikhlov argues that what is going on has deeper roots than
that.
In a commentary over the weekend,
the Moscow commentator says that what has occurred is rather typical of the
kind of “euphoria” that often accompanies the birth of a nation and argues that
annexation of Crimea was “the detonator of the birth of a Russian political
nation” (forum-msk.org/material/politic/10536643.html).
In Russia, he suggests, “people have
ceased to complain about poverty and need because the nation is emerging from a
state of psychological depression,” and that is happening because it is “now at
the stage of euphoria arising out of the birth of a nation,” something that
usually but not always requires the emergence of a civil society at the same
time.
Indeed, at least in part, Ikhlov
says, “Putin has fulfilled the work of Navalny and Kasparov: he has created an
[ethnic] Russian political nation,” one that has emerged in a way that is psychologically
“comfortable” for Russians because it has not required that they break with their
“imperial inheritance.”
That is how it was “with the Turks
under Ataturk and with the Germans under Hitler,” and with Russians now, it has allowed them to feel united with
anyone who believes that “Crimea is ours” and view the world not as “gray” and
full of problems in which they are “losers” but as one of bright colors in
which they are winners.
Under Putin and since Crimea, “Russians
are being given the priceless sense of a meaning for existence – the struggle
with a most horrific evil,” however defined. And that has brought them
together, just as it brought the Black Hundreds and the Democrats together
during World War I.
Even better for ordinary Russians,
this new sense doesn’t require any heroic actions. Indeed, the powers that be
are happiest if people “sit at home and be patriots,” Ikhlov says, adding that “a
sense of national revenge has replaced the sense of cultural incompleteness”
that had characterized Russians since 1991.
And he argues that a model for this “Russian
national revenge” is quite close at hand: the diatribes of Ilya Ehrenburg
during World War II when in fact the Soviet writer created for Stalin “the ‘Russian
idea,’” the idea that “the simple Russian had a culture much higher than the
one the German had,” even though the latter’s had been viewed as the height of
European culture.
Putin has given Russians “the happy
chance to feel themselves proud and unique,” but he has succeeded not by virtue
of his propaganda but rather by exploiting a feeling that has long existed
among Russians that they should be allowed to escape a sense that they are
somehow a lesser people and be able to take pride in what they are.
In short, Ikhlov says, the Kremlin
leader “has been able to give people what they want at a unique instant in
their history, the moment of the birth of a nation.” His propagandists
may have given people a vocabulary for this, but they have not, the Moscow
commentator says, created the conditions for the response that they are given
credit for.
Exactly the same thing happened in
Germany and with Hitler, Ikhlov says. When Germany lay defeated after 1918, its
people were lost and felt they were somehow lesser than the Europeans. But “then
an explosive growth of national self-consciousness began,” as Germans began to
ask themselves why they should feel that way.
Hitler arrived and exploited this
and understood that he could tightly unite the overwhelming majority of Germans
by attacking Jews and communists. But like Putin, he succeeded at least for a
time because what he sought to do was what his population was on its own quite
ready for.
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