Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 6 – Ukrainians and
Russians differ in many ways, Vadim Shtepa says, but perhaps the most important
is that Ukrainians “feel themselves masters of their own country” but Russians “do
not feel” the same way. Instead, among residents of the Russian Federation,
there is a sense that the powers control everything and the people do not.
Shtepa, one of Russia’s leading
regionalist commentators, says that the reason for this is simple: “After the
disintegration of the USSR, new civic nations arose in 14 of the 15 republics,”
in everywhere “from Estonia to Turkmenistan.” And Russians who live in them
have become citizens like anyone else if they learn the local language and
follow local laws and customs (rufabula.com/articles/2014/11/06/rossiyans-do-not-exist).
But in one of the 15 – the Russian
Federation – “a completely different picture” has obtained. “In the mass
consciousness of the residents of the RSFSR,” the events of the end of 1991
were conceived “not as a civilized ‘divorce’ of the former union republics but
as a case in which all of them were separated
from Russia.”
Such a view is quite obviously a
reflection of “an imperial worldview,” something Yeltsin did not cure Russians
of and something that Putin has sought to promote and exploit. If as the
current Kremlin leader says, the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” then reversing it
must be the task of the 21st.
For this project, “the RSFSR (now the
Russian Federation) has become a new imperial center which in the intention of
its directors must again bring under its control all the territories of the
former USSR,” Shtepa says.
But what is the source of this? It is
not just economics or great power aspirations. Rather, it lies in the Stalinist
past that Russia alone has not overcome. That is documented, Shtepa says, by
the impressive new book of David Brandenberger, “Stalinist Mass Culture and the
Formation of Russian National Consciousness (1931-1956).”
That book shows how much the present
ideological mood is the same as the one that Stalin promoted in the 1930s and
1940s, a mood which insisted that “’for Russians there are no bourgeois borders’”
and consequently, Russians have no reason to respect those of others or focus
on their own domestic concerns instead of seeking imperial conquests.
In that understanding, Shtepa continues,
“’Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ are almost synonyms despite the fact that a huge number
of Russians were in [Stalin’s] camps.”
Brandenberger cites the words of Stalin
on the 800th anniversary of the city of Moscow in 1947 to make his
point. At that time, the Soviet dictator said: “The contributions of Moscow
consist not only in the fact that over the course of the history of our
Motherland, it liberated it three times from foreign oppression … The
contribution of Moscow consists above all in that it became the basis of
unifying a divided Rus into a single state with a single government and a
single leadership.”
According to Stalin, “the historical
contribution of Moscow consists in the fact that it was and remains the foundation
and initiator of the creation of a centralized state in Rus.”
Shtepa asks his readers rhetorically, “What
has changed since Stalin’s times?”
And to reinforce his point, he refers as
well to Brandenberger’s discussion of the 1949 Leningrad affair in which a
group of party leaders from the Northern Capital proposed among other things to
make Leningrad the capital of the RSFSR and thus leave Moscow with the status
of the union center.
Stalin’s response, Shtepa points out, “was
extremely harsh” even compared to his other actions. The leaders of this group
were all shot. As a result, “the RSFSR remained only something virtual – in
comparison with other republics” because Stalin “simply showed that the Russian
equals the imperial” and that Russians have “no sovereignty.”
This history helps to explain “why in
Russia in contrast to other former union republics no new civic nation has
taken shape.” Instead, what is present is a remnant of the Soviet people which “was
much more interested” in acquiring new territories than in improving their own,
“an imperial complex” Stalin personified and that Putin has “reanimated.”
“The
current residents of the Russian Federation up to now consider the entire
territory of the USSR ‘their own.’ Therefore, ‘Rossiyane’ as a civic nation
within its own borders does not exist. There is only the largest remnant of ‘the
Soviet people.’”
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