Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 30 – Stalin’s
identification of the Russian people as “the elder brother” of all the nations
of the USSR “was incorrect,” Marxist historian and Soviet-era dissident Roy
Medvedev says. “Why should the Russian people be the elder brother? Why shouldn’t
the Uzbek or Ukrainian nation not be equal?”
That tilt toward the ethnic
Russians, he continues in the course of a wide-ranging interview with Kazan’s Business-Gazeta, was one of the manifestations
of the fact that Stalin’s nationality policy was “mistaken in many ways” and had
disastrous consequences for the peoples of the USSR (business-gazeta.ru/article/362280).
“The nationality policy of the Bolsheviks,”
Medvedev says, “was formulated by Lenin, not by Stalin” as many now think. It
was a major preoccupation of Lenin, “and namely he developed all the basic
propositions of the strategy even before the revolution.” Russia in his vision
was to be based “on the equality of nations,” not on the supremacy of any one
of them.
“The nationality policy dictated by Lenin was
correct,” the historian says. “But during Stalin’s time, nationality policy
already was perverted. To a significant degree, the national rights of many
peoples except perhaps the Georgians, were violated.” And to this day, the
peoples of the former Soviet space have reasons to complain about that
fact.
Medvedev stresses that his
assessment of Stalin is “absolutely negative: he had no positive role in the
history of our country. [He] did not establish a firm state. It fell apart in
1991 because it was based only on force and it needed to have been based on
ethnic and social foundations.”
“China, for example, has not
disintegrated, but the Soviet Union has, although the two countries in equal measure
considered themselves to be socialist countries. In Russia,” as a result of
what Stalin did to distort the system, “socialism in fact was liquidated in the
course of a single month and replaced as an ideology.”
Medvedev, it
should be remembered, has always been a consistent anti-Stalinist and in most
cases a defender of Lenin. But his words in this case about Stalin’s
introduction of the notion of Russians as “the elder brothers” of all other
Soviet peoples are still significant because they highlight a problem that both
the Soviet leadership faced earlier and that Putin does now.
And that is this: if the center
tilts too far in the direction of Russian nationalism, the country becomes
ungovernable except by massive repression because that nationalism will
generate a response among other peoples, their own nationalisms, and those
nationalisms will be by definition anti-Russian.
Balancing the need to recognize the
preeminence of the Russian nation in the country and the rights of non-Russians
was too much for the Soviet Union as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev decided to move
away from massive force: his targeted use of violence in Baku, Tbilisi, Vilnius
and elsewhere wasn’t enough.
The same thing, Medvedev’s analysis
suggests, will be true of the Russian Federation: If the Kremlin tilts too far
in the direction of the Russian nation, it will either be compelled to rely on
force to hold the country together or it will set in train forces that will
tear that state apart yet again.
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