Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 11 – Fifty-two years
ago this week, the constituent congress of the All-Russian Society for the
Preservation of Monuments and Culture took place in Moscow, a group that
presented an alternative to communist ideas of internationalism and modernism
and that arguably played at least as great a role in the destruction of the
USSR as did the dissidents.
In reporting on this anniversary,
Yevgeny Politdrug of the Sputnik i Pogrom
portal, says that the 1966 congress “became an important moment in Soviet
history because it was this organization which became a center of attract of
all those being drawn toward ‘the Russian Party’ in the CPSU” (sputnikipogrom.com/calendar/all/85453/8-june-1966/).
Before World War II, internationalist
ideas dominated in the USSR; but in the way Soviet patriotism became popular,
an idea that suggested that the proletarians had acquired their own country and
thus had something to lose, the commentator says. Some people still think
Stalin was a Russian nationalist, but he wasn’t: Soviet patriotism rested on a
communist foundation.
With Stalin’s passing, internationalist
themes of the pre-war kind were replaced largely by the notions of “friendship
of the peoples,” a development that had the effect in many people’s minds of
raising the question as to whether the Soviet state had forgotten the ethnic
Russians, even as it became possible to take pride in Russia’s pre-1917 history.
Such feelings were intensified by
Khrushchev’s attack on the church; and after he was overthrown, many began to
lobby on behalf of defending old churches, a program that was “covered with the
sauce that Khrushchev was a bad man and voluntarist while Leonid Illich had a
respectful attitude toward the past and wouldn’t repeat his mistakes,”
Politdrug says.
In the summer of 1965, the
preservationist society registered with the RSFSR government and immediately
attracted to its ranks many prominent writers, artists, composers, directors,
academics and even a few senior Russian officials. Remarkably, one who joined was
a White leader’s grandson who had been in the camps since 1928.
“Formally,”
the commentator says, the group was entirely about defending old monuments; but
“informally, the organization became a center of attraction for various kinds
of those who disagreed with the regime from national communists to Orthodox
conservatives.” In 1968, some of the
most radical formed the semi-public Russian Club.
“It would be too much of a stretch
to call this nationalism,” Politdrug says. Most stayed largely within the
communist framework and only asked how they could improve things. But over time, some of the members came to
reject Marxism-Leninism as such, opening the way for some ideological
pluralism.
In addition, of course, “there were
not a few Stalinists who sincerely considered Stalin the heir to the
traditional course of powerful statehood.” But they did not set the weather, as
it were. Instead, the group grew and attracted ever more people to its
alternative ideological program of action.
Not surprisingly, it was criticized
by the regime, especially under Andropov, but more surprisingly, the attacks on
it were limited to ideological ones, thus making it easier and less dangerous
for people to join its ranks and even to become more radical as was the case
with the spinoff group, Pamyat.
Within the group, Russians evolved
in various directions, some toward monarchism, others toward Orthodox
conservativism, a third toward Stalinism, and “some passed through all these
stages.” One thing they had in common: They viewed liberals with much the same
hostility they had earlier viewed Marxist-Leninists.
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