Four of Six Politburo Members Associated with ‘Russian Party’ in 1970s weren’t Russians, Averyanov-Minsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 10 – Four of the six Politburo members often identified as members of the nationalist Russian Party within the CPSU were not Russians, Kirill Averyanov-Minsky says. Two of them were Belarusians – Mazruov and Masherov – and two were Ukrainians – Kirilenko and Polyansky.

            Indeed, the APN commentator says, people from these two republics in general “more actively manifested Russian national feelings than did residents” of the RSFSR and followed the nationalist line promoted by Molodaya gvardiya rather than the liberal one of Novy mir and the neo-Stalinist one of Oktyabr (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=38255).

            Averyanov-Minsky provides a granular discussion of lower-ranking CPSU Central Committee officials who promoted the idea of the Russian Party. Among them, two Belarusians figured prominently: Vasily Shauro and Mikhail Zimyanin.

            Between 1965 and 1986, Shauro who was from Vitebsk Oblast, oversaw cultural policy for the CPSU Central Committee, He played a decisive role in the fall of Aleksandr Yakovlev and his exile as Soviet ambassador to Canada for the latter’s article attacking Russian nationalism.

            In 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev brought Yakovlev back, Shauro was unceremoniously retired.

            The second party apparatchik in the Russian Party was Mikhail Zimyanin who served as chief editor of Pravda from 1965 to 1976 before becoming CPSU secretary working under Mikhail Suslov. When Suslov died, Yury Andropov wanted to elevate Zimyanin to the Politburo but the latter who openly expressed his anti-Semitism torpedoed his chances.

            Andropov approached Zimyanin about the promotion pointing out that he planned to put Heydar Aliyev in charge of industry and the two would be working closely together. Zimyanin said that he didn’t think it was a good idea to bring in so many “natsmeny” and that the party should instead be promoting more Russian nationalists. That was too much for Andropov.

            In 1987, Gorbachev sent Zimyanin into retirement; and two years later, the party leader secured his ouster from the Central Committee.

            “Belarussians in the Soviet leadership really were the most ‘powercentric.’ They did not see their little motherland outside of a common political and cultural space with Moscow,” Averyanov-Minsky says. In that they were very different than the leaders of other non-Russian republics who led the latter into independence and after.

            There are of course at least two reasons why Belarusian and Ukrainian party officials were more given to attaching themselves to the Russian Party than were Russian communists. On the one hand, their commitment to Russia was a display of loyalty while any Russian support for Russia as such could be viewed as dangerous nationalism.

            And on the other, while the Belarusians and Ukrainians in the party were nominally non-Russians, many identified as ethnic Russians – some even changed their nationality in their passports -- and had their national identity intensified by their more frequent contact with non-Russians than did many Russian party officials.

            For a comprehensive survey of this ideological trend, see in particular Nikolay Mitrokhin’s Russkaya Partiya (Moscow, 2003).