Monday, November 11, 2019

Putin’s View that Bolsheviks Laid ‘Atomic Bomb’ under Russia by Creating National Republics Not True, Emil Pain Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 6 – In the latest essay assessing widely held stereotypes about Russia Emil Pain, one of Moscow’s leading specialists on ethnicity and ethnic conflict, says that Vladimir Putin’s insistence that the Bolsheviks laud “an atomic bomb” under Russia that exploded in 1991 is “not confirmed by the history.”

            In the mid-1860s, the Austrian and the Russian empires “began to formulation strategies for the self-preservation of their imperial regimes and multi-national states,” the professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics says. The two adopted completely different plans; but in the end, neither worked (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/bomba-dlya-imperii-o-tom/).

            At that time, Pain continues, the term “’nationality question’” first appeared in Russia from the pen of Petr Valuyev, the minister of internal affairs, to designate the threat of national separatism to the empire.  And because that was so, the tsarist regime adopted a different and much harsher policy than did Austria.

            After years of struggle, the Austrian Empire transformed itself into Austro-Hungary and extended so much autonomy to its component parts that “now some theoreticians even pose the question as to whether it might be better to call Austro-Hungary not an empire but a federation,” the Moscow scholar says.

            While Austria was doing that, Tsar Alexander II, the liberator of the peasantry, “did not show himself to be a liberal in nationality policy.”  In the wake of uprisings in Poland and Lithuania, he and his regime took steps to wipe these terms from the map and stepped up Russification efforts in Ukraine.

            His successors continued that line: Alexander III completely suppressed the use of Polish in educational institutions. And Nicholas II began to try to limit the autonomy of Finland.

            “What was the result of this repressive policy?” The more liberal policy of Austro-Hungary did not block the rise of nationalist parties, and the more repressive one of the Russian Empire did not do so either, Pain says. Once it became possible for nations in Russia’s borderlands to organize after 1905, many of them demanded autonomy or independence.

            These demands were so massively supported and so insistent, he continues, that both the Bolsheviks and their White Russian opponents had little choice but to try to make some kind of an arrangement with them. As is well known, Poland and Lithuania moved quickly and were recognized as independent early on.

            More instructive but less well known is the case of Finland. There, nationalists split between the reds and the whites, the former supporting autonomy within the Soviet state while the latter demanded independence.  This upsurge in national self-consciousness in the northwest allowed the Poles, the Finns, and the three Baltic countries to defend themselves at least until 1939-1940.

            The situation elsewhere on the territory of the former Russian Empire was different: “national self-consciousness was less consolidated than in the western regions and support for leftwing ideas extremely great.  That left tendency played a key role in their retention within the borders of the Soviet Union.

            Putin, of course, has focused on the process of formation of the USSR in his argument that Lenin inserted a delayed action mine under the whole country by creating republics rather than moving in the direction Stalin preferred which was a narrower and more limited autonomization.

            Putin’s words make “crystal clear” his attitude toward federalism: to put it mildly, he views it in starkly negative terms and is on Stalin’s side rather than Lenin’s.  But what he does not address is why Stalin after Lenin’s death did not “’demine’” the Soviet constitutional arrangement.

            The reason the Soviet dictator didn’t, of course, is that he had no need to do so. He could keep Lenin’s words on paper even as he behaved in a vastly harsher way to the non-Russian portions of the population. But that very harshness was the crucible that led to the rise of national self-consciousness and demands for greater autonomy and ultimately independence.

            “By 1990, in a significant part of the republics, not only in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and several others had formed powerful movements directed at not allowing a return to imperial, ‘external’ rule from Moscow,” Pain recounts.  And then in 1988-1991, similar movements emerged in the non-Russian republics of the RSFSR and elsewhere.

            What this shows is this, the Moscow scholar concludes, is that “the real mine (‘bomb’) for it was the mass consciousness of individual cultural-territorial communities of the forced nature of their presence in a state viewed as an empire,” something they were no longer prepared to tolerate.

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