Russian ‘Adat’ Basis of Stalin Cult among Russians, Eidman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 4 – For decades if not longer, Russian commentators have argued that customary law among the North Caucasians, a category of rules known as adat that reflect local history and social arrangements, explains why those peoples have remained backward or even incapable of modernization.

            Now. Russian sociologist Igor Eidman applies that term to Russians to explain the vitality of the Stalin cult among them and why any attempts at liberalization begin with the dethroning of Stalin and authoritarian restorations began with a new cult” of the Soviet dictator (blog.newsru.com/article/04may2019/stalin_adat).

                “Stalin,” he writes, “is the symbol, preserver and god of Russian adat, that is, the system of archaic traditions, customs, values, and social practices and norms which have been transferred from generation to generation.” 

            It rests on “three main historical traditions: serfdom, the rule of the bureaucracy, and imperial expansion,” and those in turn are based on “the view of unfreedom as the natural condition of man, the habit of denigrating the weak and bowing down to the strong, and hatred of ‘the other.’”

            Chernyshevsky formulated “the basic law of Russian adat” by writing that Russians are “’a nation of slaves, from top to bottom, all are slaves.’ Orthodoxy, communism and patriotism are only ideological covers. In reality, under the Romanovs, under the Bolsheviks and under Putin a large part of the country lived and lives under this unwritten law.”

            For the last two centuries, the Western spirit of individual freedom has been a threat to the Russian adat, Eidman continues.  And those who were inspired by it for all their differences were able to achieve a great deal at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries. “It even seemed that the Carthage of Russian adat would be destroyed.”

            But the Bolshevikvs reversed this process by rooting out of Russia any moves in that direction.  And it was no accident that “even certain patriot fellow travelers of the Bolsheviks (for example, the writer B. Pilnyak) viewed with satisfaction that fact that the October coup threw Russia back to the 17^th century.”

            According to Eidman, “Stalin completed the process of de-Westernization. He destroyed in Bolshevism the cosmopolitan spirit of the European avant garde, leaving only militant anti-liberalism well combined with traditional Russian authoritarianism” and thus cementing in place a regime “which ideally corresponded to the Russian adat.”

            The Soviet dictator did so by bringing together in his system “the worst traditions of the country: mass slavery, the pervasive rule of the bureaucracy and the police, harsh state regimentation, imperialism, militarism, and hatred of the rest of the world, of freedom, and of those who think and feel differently.”

            “More than that,” Eidman continues, “Stalin extended and developed these traditions, far exceeding his predecessors in the extent of force and cruelty. For this, apparently, he is loved by those who see a special path for Russia. That is because the alternative is only the Westernization that they hate.”

            It is thus no surprise that Russian nationalists very often turn out to be Stalinists … while Russian Europeans and cosmopolitans always are radical anti-Stalinists,” he says. Indeed, “democratic reforms in Russia will be successful only if they can destroy the still powerful Russian adat which was embodied in Stalinism in the 20^th century and in Putinism the 21^st.