Russian Commentators Adopt Updated Tactic of Soviet-Style Attacks on ‘Bourgeois Falsifiers’

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 17 – In Soviet times, Russian writers often attacked what they called “bourgeois falsifiers” of Soviet and Russian history, an approach that allowed them to avoid talking directly about domestic and émigré non-Russian critics of the official line and also at least on occasion introducing into Soviet discussions what Western writers had picked up.

    Having the Soviets apply that term to oneself became a point of pride for many Soviet specialists in the West who saw such attacks as confirmation of their positions and as bringing their ideas to a broader audience. Indeed, the prominent Sovietologist T.H. Rigby entitled the story of his life The Memoirs of a Bourgeois Falsifier (North Melbourne, 2019).

    Now, at a time when Putin is restoring so many other Soviet-era tradition, it is perhaps not surprising that his regime is doing this as well, choosing to attack Western writers rather than take up the sources they use and wittingly or not spreading their ideas to an audience inside the Russian Federation that might otherwise not have had access to them.

    The author of these lines has now been subject to such treatment. On the Don’t Tread on Me telegram channel, he has been denounced as “a well-known dismemberer’ of Russia” for his articles on the Orenburg corridor between the republics of the Middle Volga and Kazakhstan (t.me/dntreadonme/2098 reposted at centrasia.org/newsA.php?st=1744745220#gsc.tab=0).

    While I certainly enjoy collecting this latest epithet, far more important is the way that those employing it use their article to provide not only a detailed discussion of why the Orenburg corridor created by Stalin to block the Middle Volga from having the kind of external border that could have allowed them to pursue independence but also a useful map confirming that.

    The authors of this attack could have chosen to talk about Kazakh and Idel-Ural sources who have discussed the Orenburg corridor or even about Ukrainian interest in it as part of Kyiv’s efforts to weaken Russia. But by attacking me rather than covering them, the Don’t Tread on Me people can present this idea as having emerged from the hothouse of Western thinking.

    But while that may be the primary reason that this telegram channel has done that, there is another that may be far more important if not intentional. This attack on your humbler servant has brought the issue of the Orenburg Corridor to far more people than my writings over the years or even those of Kazakh, Idel-Ural and Ukrainian articles have.

    For background on this Corridor, see jamestown.org/program/the-orenburg-corridor-and-the-future-of-the-middle-volga/, jamestown.org/program/kazakh-nationalists-call-for-astana-to-absorb-orenburg-outraging-moscow/, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/kyiv-views-middle-volga-and-north.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/02/tatars-and-bashkirs-must-recover.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/orenburg-corridor-threatens-russia-more.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/05/if-tatarstan-had-bordered-foreign.html.)