Today’s National Bolshevism More At Odds with Russian Interests than Yesterday’s International Version, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 2 – No one can predict with certainty whether the current Russian regime will be able to remain in place as long as the Soviet one did, Vladimir Pastukhov says; but the differences between today’s national bolshevism and yesterday’s international bolshevism are not encouraging for those who hope it will.

            The reasons for that conclusion, the London-based Russian political analyst says, lie in the differences between “the two versions of Russian bolshevism,” both of which involved the seizure of the state by a small group of people and their use of coercion to cement their rule in place (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=656B5D67B2F73).

            But these two groups were fundamentally different. The internationalist Bolshevism of a century ago was “a group of semi-religious fanatics” devoted to modernization on what proved to be false principles and who only after seizing power became “an organized criminal community.”

            The national bolshevism of today, Pastukhov says, started as “an organized criminal community” which having come to power has sought to acquire “secondary ideological characteristics” and only then “began to recall a group of religious fanatics.” That means that “the roads in principle are the same; but the directions of movement are different.”

            Internationalist bolshevism was “in its first iteration initially and immediately an ideological phenomenon,” while nationalism bolshevism was not and only acquired an ideological patina afterwards and by drawing on others for ideas, the London-based Russian analyst says.

            But there is another and more important difference: “international bolshevism was a modernizing ideology and therefore, despite its radical nature, coincided with the general vector of the ideological development of Russia … National bolshevism on the contrary is anti-modernizing” and will need energy from abroad if it is to survive for a long time.

            And that leads to the following question: the national Bolshevik regime of today will manage to hold things together “only if it runs entirely on Chinese batteries and is fed from Beijing. Everything does seem to be heading in that direction, Pastukhov says; “but it is uncertain whether [the current Bolsheviks will have time to reach that goal.”