Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 31 – The Kremlin
has long talked about finding a unifying idea for Russia, but in fact the two
unifying ideas on offer are mutually exclusive, cannot be combined, and
threaten to drag the country into chaos, civil war and disintegration,
according to Aleksey Shiropayev.
One of these ideas, which seeks
secularism, democracy and federalism, unites the forces of modernization and
Westernization, the Russian regionalist writer says. “In essence, this is the
idea of a peaceful bourgeois-democratic revolution” and is being advanced by
lliberals, national democrats and the non-totalitarian left.”
The other, which wants to “hold
Russian in a permanently medieval state” in which the imperial state is
paramount and the population its subjects, is supported by “the forces of
regression and reaction” which are in power now and which know that if they
yield their power, they will lose their own raison d’etre (rufabula.com/articles/2013/10/30/what-unites-us).
This situation explains the second group’s
“hatred to the West as a civilized redoubt of democracy,” “its playing with
tsarism” ideologically, its “pathetic slogan of ‘a single and indivisible
Russia,’”and its use of the Russian Orthodox
Church as “a universal spiritual anesthetist.”
Russian society is deeply split as a
result, Shiropayev says, a situation which “of course is worse than the victory
of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, but all the same better than a civil war.” It is unstable given how much at odds the two
ideas are, “but what will happen next,” the regionalist writer says, “no one
knows.”
Russian leaders have been looking for a
single all-embracing and all-unifying idea for years, but “it is obvious that
all attempts of this kind have proved unsuccessful” because Russia is simply
too divided for that in terms of the values that its people have. And that
situation, acute a century ago, is only getting worse.
At the start of the 20th
century, the Russian Empire “entered into a decisive stge of crisis.” It had to
federalize itself or face disintegration like Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman
Porte. But the Bolsheviks by the use of terror held things together, and
despite “having lost enormous territories after August 1991, the Russian Empire
in essence has been preserved.”
“More than that, now [the Russian state]
openly declares its revaunchist goals and even seeks to expand its territory as
was the case in August 2008.” But even as the Kremlin does so, it has engaged
in an effort to find a unifying national idea, an effort that in the
circumstances is doomed to failure.
None of the unifying ideas or events
work effectively across the entire society: those who accept one set of ideas or
versions of ideas do not accept the others and vice versa. The regime cannot
use Stalin because too much is known about what he did, and even Victory Day
divides almost as much as it unites, Shiropayev argues.
As far as the Russian Orthodox Church is
concerned, it has not become and will not gain “unqualified universal authority”
given its obscurantism. And tsarism, “nostalgia for which [the regime] is now
promoting” for “the moral strengthening of Putin authoritarianism,” is
offputting to many interested in a more open Russia.
This fundamental conflict is very much
on view in the arguments over hat a new single school history textbook should
look like, one that would seek to present Russian history as a single unified
flow. Some divisions like that between the Reds and the Whites can be overcome “on
an imperial basis” bcause both sides believed in that, albeit in different ways.
But it won’t be possible to fuse
together Novgorod and Moscowbecause they represented “two completely different
civilizational choices.” In the official
Moscow history, Novgorod with its democracy and Western ties remains a
threat. And it won’t be possible to
unite Leontyev with Pobedonostsev or Stalin with Vlasov.
In reality, Shiropayev writes, “the authorities
can fashion a universal conception of Russian history only by minimizing the
components of Russian freedom.” That they won’t do because “the current
imperial power simply by its nature isnot capable of offering society another
Russian hstory besides the history of the state” and that won’t unite the
country.
If Russia is to move forward, it needs a
new conception of history, one that will be “the history of the liberation
struggle of the peoples of Russia,” with stress not on the names of tsars and
secretaries general but on those of the many in Russia’s regions who have fought
for democracy and a genuintely federal Russia.
In an ideal world, such a history would
be based on the idea of Russia as “a secular democratic federation,” one that
would allow Russia to become “a Russia for all, Russians and non-Russians,
believers and unbelievers.” But unfortunately it is impossible to combine this
idea with those of Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky and Putin.
The opposition of such people to a new
history is easily explained: “the nomenklatura-chekist caste knows very well
that in such a Russia it would in the best case face lustration.” Consequently,
these people seek to defend themselves behind the ramparts of reaction and
obscurantism.
And the unified history they seek is
thus about only one thing: the latest effort to find “yet another instrument
for the enslavement of society.”
The situation is truly “pathetic,”
Shiropayv continues. Despite all the
power of the side of reaction, it is “not in a position to put down advanced
society,” even though that society is not yet in a position to cast aside the
reactionary powers. Instead, there are today, “two Russias, two societies, and
they cannot (or almost cannot) be connected by system values.”
Faced with this situation, the Kremlin
is trying to play a game of divide and rule, setting “the simple people”
against “the creative ones,” “the poor provinces” against “rich Moscow,” even
as it engages in discussions about “a unifying idea,” discussions that in the
context of the real divides in Russian society are leading to extraordinarily “dangerous
speculations.”
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