There is No Political Russian Nation and Won’t Be Until Moscow Looks Forward Not Backward, Basmanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 12 – Moscow keeps talking about wanting to create a non-ethnic Russian political nation, but it hasn’t done so and won’t be able to until it focuses on some future ideal which has been the basis for all other polyethnic political nations rather than on the past which in the nature of things highlights ethnicity, Vladimir Basmanov says.

            Russians “too well remember” communist efforts to create ‘some kind of super identity” in the shape of the Soviet people and they understand how that led to “thousands of tragedies of specific peoples and destroyed the fates of millions of individuals,” the émigré head of the Nation and Freedom Community says (afterempire.info/2019/03/12/polit-naciya/).

            They have no interest in going down that route again, one that combines a proclaimed interest in the future with the kind of repressive state the in fact celebrates the past whatever it declares, a past in which ethnic identities mattered and an approach which if anything makes them matter more, Basmanov continues. 

            What the peoples of Russia need, he says, is for a situation to arise in which “millions of people feel responsible for the future of the country and the people and are prepared to expend their energy for the construction of civic and state institutions which will promote the internal development of the country.”

            For that they need both an image of the future they want to pursue and the possibility of pursuing it on their own without the tutelage of the state, Basmanov argues.  Among the values they need are “respect for the individual, human rights, the supremacy of law, social justice, [and] economical concern … all directed at the improvement of the lives of the citizens.”

            Those things require an openness and tolerance that is found in Europe but not yet in Russia, he says.  The big issue now for Russians is whether they can develop civic institutions in a repressive milieu of the kind found in the Russian Federation today. According to Basmanov, they can.

            Individuals and groups can do many things like restore a free media after the authorities destroy that and organize strikes and demonstrations in behalf of one or another cause. “All this is very important, but on the other hand, it is senseless and incorrect to impose … certain labels [like a civic Russian nation] which force it to compete with ethnic identity.”

            “With us, there is a Russian nation, there is a Tatar nation, there is a Chechen nation, and none of the representatives of these ethnoses must give up its national identity in order to acquire another national identity,” Basmanov argues.   Any polyethnic state that tries to do so will inevitably appear to its citizens as “a prison house of peoples,” promoting one identity above all.

            According to the activist, “the utopian desire to make all individuals the same by reducing as much as possible the number of identities which each of them has is an echo of extreme leftist ideas of the past century,” but that is exactly what Moscow hopes to do with its notion of a non-ethnic civic Russian nation.

            Fortunately, “the majority of people who lived in the USSR or who are acquainted with live in the USSR directly from the stories of their parents have formed a specific immunity against this,” and the project will fail unless the Kremlin is able to break the back of all the nations within its borders, an unlikely prospect.

            What the regime wants is a homogenous population of Spartans who will serve the state without reference to their values and identities and who will be able to turn their back on the future by focusing only on the past.  But “people do not want to be like that,” like the ones they would be if the Kremlin’s “Russian civic nation” were to be created at their expense.

            “I am not a supporter of ‘nation building,’” Basmanov says. “I am a national idealist and am convinced that happiness will come if the offices of officials are taken over by people who cannot sleep a t night because they are constantly thinking about how they can more quickly and better feed our people and guarantee its well-being and flourishing.”

            According to him, “our nation and our civic community doesn’t need leaders anymore who try to tell us how we should be instead of fulfilling their professional obligations” to improve the lives of the people.

            Not long ago, Basmanov relates, he saw a picture of a Russian girl with a placard reading “We may have conquered the entire cosmos but they put us in jail for reposting something on the Internet.”  That he says, is the entire problem in a nutshell.

            “The Russian people is suffocating in a GULAG and therefore cannot make the desired contribution to the development of civilization.” If the GULAG is dismantled, then “already on the next day, we will see a strong civil society, penetrated by a spirit of solidarity and respect for the individual which as I hope will not be opposed to the national (ethnic) identity of people.”

            That is because, he argues, “we are too tired of regime dedicated to grinding down the human personality into something pathetic and farcical [and] it is because Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and Koryaks deserve better.”