Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 13 – When Putin departs from power, the role Russian may very well expand, Aleksandr Verkhovsky says; and the sooner the Kremlin leader does so, the larger that role is likely to be at least in the short run. That is because those known as Russian nationalists are far better positioned to play a role than were their predecessors.
At the end of a survey of how difficult it is to define Russian nationalism and how much the consensus view as to what it consists of has evolved, the director of the SOVA analytic center which tracks this phenomenon offers his thoughts on what is likely to happen in the future when Putin leaves the scene (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2024/09/13/kto-vy-russkie).
A major reason behind his conclusion that Russian nationalism will likely play a larger role then is that this trend of opinion has evolved under the impact of what one could call “the present-day official ideology of a unique brand of nationalism, which the powers have advanced to a large extent as alternative to the ideas of Russian ethno-nationalists.”
The Russian nationalist movement of 15 years ago “still had a strong attachment to white racism, which was not very popular in Russia and a totally unpopular attachment to neo-Nazi roots,” two characteristics which meant that it could hardly hope to gain large numbers of supporters and challenge the regime.
But in 2014, at the time of the Crimean Anschluss, the Russian nationalists split, not so much about whether they viewed Ukrainians as Russians, part of a triune people including Russians and Belarusians, or as a separate nation than their own past ideological positions domestically.
There are many explanations, but “it is impossible not to notice that the pro-Kiev Russian nationalists were closer to white racism while the pro-Donetsk ones, for all their ethno-nationalism, were closer to the themes of the greatness of the state and its confrontation with the West,” according to the SOVA analyst.
That brought “the pro-Donetsk people closer” to the Kremlin’s approach while the pro-Ukraine trend lost out and appears to have “exhausted itself” as far as the future is concerned, he continues. “But one should not conclude that this excluded” their links to those who opposed the regime on other issues.”
When xenophobia which had been declining in the second decade of this century returned to its earlier levels after the launch of the expanded invasion of Ukraine and the authorities’ use of anti-immigrant notions to win support domestically, “politically organized opposition nationalism” based on such ideas “had almost completely disappeared.”
The desire of the authorities to generate support from below and the anti-immigrant attitudes Kremlin propaganda exacerbated is leading to a redefinition of official nationalism from one focused exclusively on great power imperialism toward a more complex mix, one that opens the way for the rise of oppositional nationalism from below.
How this will play out remains uncertain, Verkhovsky says, but if politics does reemerge in Russia with the departure of Putin, then “today’s Russian nationalists have a somewhat better chance of mobilizing support than did their predecessors” – and that means they are likely to be a force to be reckoned with.
Compared to the nationalists of ten to 20 years ago, the new unofficial nationalists are less revolutionary, less tied to criminal groups, less explicitly white racist and more interested in defending Russian traditions and supporting Moscow’s great power aspirations, according to the SOVA director.
How far these groups will evolve in that direction depends to an important degree on how long Putin remains in office. The longer he is there, Verkhovsky suggests, the greater the evolution in these directions and thus the greater the role of Russian nationalism and those who represent it will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment