Clash in Russia Over Country's Future between Stalinists and Black Hundreds ‘Inevitable,’ Prilepin Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 12 – Despite Putin’s efforts to combine the values of the Stalinists and the Black Hundreds, Zakhar Prilepin says, a clash between the two is inevitable; and on its outcome will depend not only how Russia is internally ordered but also how Moscow relates to the former Soviet space.
    In the course of a wide-ranging 9,000-word article in Kazan’s Business-Gazeta, the writer and nationalist politician argues that the world as a whole is engaged in a choice about what civilizational project it will seek to realize in  the future both at home and abroad (business-gazeta.ru/article/659600).
    In Russia, Prilepin says, this choice is between those who want a post-war Russia to be “a mono-ethnic Russian state with minimal national autonomies so that the country will never again disintegrate” and those who want Russia to play a central role in the creation of a new international order “so that we again stand at the head of a great anti-colonial revolution.”
    The former, which may be called the Black Hundreds vision, needs little to do with the former Soviet republics or other neighbors, while the latter, which is Stalinist in its orientation, wants to dominate them and expand Russian influence far beyond the current borders of the Russian Federation.
“These two concepts are already starting to fight each other. I think that in Russia there will be a clash between these two ideas,” Prilepin says. “The left, Leninist-Stalinists, on the one hand, and the neo-White Guards, Black Hundreds, on the other, are already gathering in two large flocks, and a clash between them seems inevitable to me today.”
Putin has a foot in both camps. Thus he has restored the Soviet anthem but talks about Ilyin, brought back the red banner but also Solzhenitsyn, and promotes How the Steel was Tempered as well as The Gulag Archipelago. But “the entire political system can’t be that complex and people are being increasingly pulled to one pole or another.
Consequently, the direction Russia will take will depend on the outcome of this clash, Prilepin suggests.