Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 6 – In the latest
essay assessing widely held stereotypes about Russia Emil Pain, one of Moscow’s
leading specialists on ethnicity and ethnic conflict, says that Vladimir
Putin’s insistence that the Bolsheviks laud “an atomic bomb” under Russia that
exploded in 1991 is “not confirmed by the history.”
In the mid-1860s, the Austrian and
the Russian empires “began to formulation strategies for the self-preservation
of their imperial regimes and multi-national states,” the professor at Moscow’s
Higher School of Economics says. The two adopted completely different plans;
but in the end, neither worked (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/bomba-dlya-imperii-o-tom/).
At that time, Pain continues, the
term “’nationality question’” first appeared in Russia from the pen of Petr
Valuyev, the minister of internal affairs, to designate the threat of national
separatism to the empire. And because
that was so, the tsarist regime adopted a different and much harsher policy
than did Austria.
After years of struggle, the
Austrian Empire transformed itself into Austro-Hungary and extended so much
autonomy to its component parts that “now some theoreticians even pose the
question as to whether it might be better to call Austro-Hungary not an empire
but a federation,” the Moscow scholar says.
While Austria was doing that, Tsar
Alexander II, the liberator of the peasantry, “did not show himself to be a
liberal in nationality policy.” In the
wake of uprisings in Poland and Lithuania, he and his regime took steps to wipe
these terms from the map and stepped up Russification efforts in Ukraine.
His successors continued that line:
Alexander III completely suppressed the use of Polish in educational
institutions. And Nicholas II began to try to limit the autonomy of Finland.
“What was the result of this
repressive policy?” The more liberal policy of Austro-Hungary did not block the
rise of nationalist parties, and the more repressive one of the Russian Empire
did not do so either, Pain says. Once it became possible for nations in Russia’s
borderlands to organize after 1905, many of them demanded autonomy or
independence.
These demands were so massively
supported and so insistent, he continues, that both the Bolsheviks and their
White Russian opponents had little choice but to try to make some kind of an arrangement
with them. As is well known, Poland and Lithuania moved quickly and were
recognized as independent early on.
More instructive but less well known
is the case of Finland. There, nationalists split between the reds and the
whites, the former supporting autonomy within the Soviet state while the latter
demanded independence. This upsurge in
national self-consciousness in the northwest allowed the Poles, the Finns, and
the three Baltic countries to defend themselves at least until 1939-1940.
The situation elsewhere on the
territory of the former Russian Empire was different: “national
self-consciousness was less consolidated than in the western regions and
support for leftwing ideas extremely great.
That left tendency played a key role in their retention within the
borders of the Soviet Union.
Putin, of course, has focused on the
process of formation of the USSR in his argument that Lenin inserted a delayed action
mine under the whole country by creating republics rather than moving in the
direction Stalin preferred which was a narrower and more limited autonomization.
Putin’s words make “crystal clear”
his attitude toward federalism: to put it mildly, he views it in starkly
negative terms and is on Stalin’s side rather than Lenin’s. But what he does not address is why Stalin
after Lenin’s death did not “’demine’” the Soviet constitutional arrangement.
The reason the Soviet dictator didn’t,
of course, is that he had no need to do so. He could keep Lenin’s words on
paper even as he behaved in a vastly harsher way to the non-Russian portions of
the population. But that very harshness was the crucible that led to the rise
of national self-consciousness and demands for greater autonomy and ultimately
independence.
“By 1990, in a significant part of the
republics, not only in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but in Armenia, Georgia,
Moldova, Ukraine and several others had formed powerful movements directed at
not allowing a return to imperial, ‘external’ rule from Moscow,” Pain recounts. And then in 1988-1991, similar movements
emerged in the non-Russian republics of the RSFSR and elsewhere.
What this shows is this, the Moscow
scholar concludes, is that “the real mine (‘bomb’) for it was the mass
consciousness of individual cultural-territorial communities of the forced
nature of their presence in a state viewed as an empire,” something they were
no longer prepared to tolerate.
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