Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 23 – Debates about
the Russian and Soviet past often make it sound as if everyone in that country
today must be the descendant either of one of those who tortured or one who was
tortured, but in fact, two Moscow commentators say, most Russians are neither
the one nor the other, a fact of life that complicates such discussions.
Recently, Viktor Militaryev writes
on the Svobodnaya pressa portal, historian Yury Moskovsky pointed out that “the
overwhelming majority of [those] who are today’s citizens of Russia are neither
descendants … descendants of ‘hangmen from the NKVD,’ or descendants of ‘the
innocent victims of bloody Stalinist repressions” (svpressa.ru/society/article/136625/).
The Moscow commentator for his part suggests
that one might extend Moskovsky’s argument and point out that “the overwhelming
majority of [Russians] are not descendants of noblemen, priests, capitalists,
the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, bureaucrats or officers … or even descendants
of pre-revolutionary workers.”
Instead, “the overwhelming majority”
of Russians are “descendants of pre-revolutionary peasants.” They ancestors
came from the village to the city “no earlier than the 1930s, the time of
collectivization and industrialization. And among this majority, no small part
arrived in the city after the war and then in the 1960s and 1970s.”
That fact, Militaryev says, is “extraordinarily
important” for two reasons. On the one hand, “80 percent of the citizens of
Russia inherited from their peasant ancestors one and the same cultural system.”
And on the other, they are not participants in the debate about the past in the
same way as those more directly involved.
“A large part of both Soviet ‘hangmen’
and Soviet ‘victims’ at least until the beginning of the Great Fatherland War
were urban residents,” a small part of the population. The majority was and remains outside of this,
the Moscow commentator says, except of course for the victims of mass
collectivization.
But because of the intervening war
and because memory tends to pass out of its “hot” phase after two generations, he
continues, most Russians base their common memory on the war and define
themselves in terms of the post-war past and the current situation. Thus they
are most upset not by collectivization but by the post-1991 destruction of
collective farms and all the talk about “farming.”
This “general selectively positive
relation to the Soviet past” explains much about the present, he argues,
including the fact that the peasant “majority” hates the oligarchs and is
convinced that “’thievish privatization’” must be revised but had a positive
attitude toward Putin and “a loyal one to the institution of business.”
It also has behavioral consequences,
including the readiness of Russians to say they are Orthodox even though they
don’t go to church and the fact that “every labor collective” in the country
continues to function much like a “redistribution” committee of the kind that
existed under serfdom. And it defines Russian concerns about justice.”
Moreover, this peasant commonality gives
the basis for the formation of a political nation, albeit with one exception:
the fact that those who study any field in any detail do discover that those
who went before them in fact were “shot, imprisoned, emigrated, or hid from
censorship and falsely pretended to be loyal to Soviet ideology.”
“What is to be done with this
martyrology?” Militaryev asks, and then says, he does not know the answer. But
he insists that everyone must recognized that there is a fundamental
contradiction between the peasant majority’s view of the past in which they
were not primarily “hangmen” or “victims” and that of the minority whose
ancestors were one or the other.
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