Russian Party of 1960s and 1970s Major Source of Kremlin’s Current Ideology, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 11 – As Putin’s new ideology assumes final shape, Andrey Kolesnikov says, most commentators re pointing to the ways in which it is “a reworked and adapted to contemporary realities, ‘the Russian idea’ which has its roots in the 19^th and 20^th century,” including Uvarov’s official nationality, Slavophilism, and Stalinism.

But a major source is in the articles in Molodaya gvardiya and other “thick” Soviet journals at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s that defined the thinking of what came to be known as “the Russian Party” within the Soviet elite, the Russian analyst says (moscowtimes.ru/2023/11/11/molodaya-gvardiya-na-sluzhbe-putinizma-ili-russkaya-partiya-kak-istochnik-ideologii-kremlya-a112927 excerpted from carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/01/ru-pub-90833).

One of the reasons that this source has been neglected up to now was that the original “Russian Party” was notoriously anti-Semitic and the Putin ideology does not seem to be openly so. But recent events suggest that what the Kremlin leader has done is adapt that ideology while maintaining or even extending its evil dimension.

 Kolesnikov argues that while anti-Semitism isn’t present “with rare exceptions” in the articulation of Putin’s ideology, there are aspects of this new thinking that are worrisome: “The difference between ‘the cosmopolitans’ and ‘the Zionists’ then and today’s ‘national traitors’ and ‘foreign agents is small.”

            Both the one and the other “go against ‘traditional Russian spiritual and moral values and thus undermine ‘the sovereignty’ of the country” and work as “agents of the West” seeking to undermine the sovereignty of Russia. The big difference between the Russian Party and Putin’s ideology is that “today, [such people] do not have to be Jewish by nationality.”