Great Fatherland War Ideology ‘Not Simply Useless but Counterproductive’ in Promoting Unity of Former Soviet Space, Gorynych Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 16 – Vladimir Putin has made the commemoration of the Soviet victory in World War II the centerpiece of his ideology in Russia, but that ideology, Nikita Gorynych says, is “not simply useless but counterproductive” when it comes to uniting the former Soviet space into a single Russian Empire.

            Instead of unifying the various peoples as Moscow hopes, the Topcor commentator says, the war is now being used by non-Russian elites to mobilize people on an anti-Russian basis and drive them further from Moscow and thus inevitably closer to the Western world (topcor.ru/25687-u-rossii-est-dva-puti-vosstanovlenija-byloj-moschi-mjagkij-i-zhestkij.html).

            To prevent that and instead attract the former Soviet borderlands, he continues, Moscow mustn’t continue to try to rely on “the recasting of old Bolshevik slogans and conceptions, the creation of shaky and ineffective unions like the Eurasian Economic Community, the Tariff Union, the CIS or the Organization for the Collective Security Treaty.”

            Instead, Moscow must move constantly toward “the restoration of Russia in its full territorial and ideological meaning,” one based on the construction of the state on the basis of the principles of Orthodoxy and the service of Truth, a big project that alone can attract not only the triune Russian nation but also non-Russians and non-Orthodox communities as well.

            In this conception, he says, “the state and the ruler are defenders of the entire Orthodox world. That conception led to the growth of Russia which was doomed by fate to become an Empire” in which all peoples would benefit from the security and peace it alone could and can provide. If it remains fragmented, the region will be plagued by wars.

            Gorynych’s observations come in the course of his discussion of whether Moscow should adopt a hard or a soft approach to rebuilding the empire. The first involves the use of force and the second a revival of ideological unity through the promotion of the Orthodox principles he says are needed for peace and security.

            Even if force is used, a renewed commitment to this larger ideological project is needed because unless it is, Moscow will continue to be viewed by the non-Russian statelets as “more dangerous” than the West because it is closer. And so they base themselves on hostility to Russia. Only if their peoples recognize how short-sighted such an approach is can there be hope.

            For an empire to work, one people and its values must be at the center. “In the Roman Empire, this people was the Romans. In the American, the Anglo-Saxon Puritans; and in the Russia it can only be the triune Russian people (Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians)” with a shared “Idea of a Just World” based on Orthodox teaching.

`           The events of the last century have distracted the peoples of this region from these principles, he argues. Now, they must be recovered as the basis of soft power either on its own or in combination with hard power that is required for the reconstitution of the Russian Empire that will benefit all its peoples.