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The Past in the Present: Contemporary Russian Nationalism in Historical Perspective

  • Chapter
Russian Nationalism Past and Present

Part of the book series: Studies in Russia and East Europe ((SREE))

Abstract

As late as 1991, the collapse of communist rule in Russia seemed no more probable to many seasoned observers than it had to Trubetskoi, writing in exile in Sofia seventy years earlier. In the eyes of the outside world, and indeed of many native Russians, the restoration of Russian statehood remained a pipedream cherished only by a small minority of nationalists who were widely dismissed as dissident cranks. Yet in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s unexpected demise on 31 December 1991, at least a part of their dream was finally realized and it is worth noting some of its similarities with the ‘miracle’ mocked by Trubetskoi. First, though the West may not have rushed into diplomatic pacts with the emergent Russian Federation, its leaders have been willing both to offer the Russian government a measure of economic aid and to turn a blind eye to its military activities in Chechnia in the interests of political stability in Europe and Central Asia. Only such an unaccustomed degree of international insulation has permitted Russia’s politicians to launch peacefully into their predictably chaotic search for the domestic solution that will divide Russians least. That quest has been self-consciously conducted in terms designed to emphasize that the resultant regime must be ‘Russia’s Choice’, to quote the revealing title of the most uncompromisingly reformist party.2

The ‘restoration of Russia’, as Russian political émigrés depict it, would be nothing less than a miracle. One fine day we shall all wake up to discover that everything that is now happening in Russia has simply been a nasty dream, or that it has all suddenly vanished at the wave of a magic wand. Russia will once again be a great power, feared and respected by everyone, and offered, in the short term, the most tempting political and economic alliances, leaving her free to choose the best form of government, and then to live happily ever after, bringing fear to her enemies and glory to herself. What would this be, if not a miracle?

Prince N.S. Trubetskoi (1921)1

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References

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  71. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, ‘Rich and Poor in Post-Communist Russia’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, vol. 10, 1994, no. 1, pp. 3–24, traces increasingly rapid social differentiation since 1987, when capitalist operations in Russia were legitimized. One might also note that Chernomyrdin, whilst abolishing the restrictive propiska, replaced it with a suspiciously similar system of ‘registration’: Rossiiskaia gazeta, 27 July 1995.

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  99. I suggested that this would be so in an essay written in 1990: ‘What Price an Orthodox Revival? The Dilemmas of the Russian Church’, in Peter J.S. Duncan and Martyn Rady (eds), Towards a New Community: Culture and Politics in Post-Totalitarian Europe, Hamburg/Münster, 1993, pp. 81–92. For further explorations of this theme, see Jonathan Sutton, Traditions in New Freedom: Christianity and Higher Education in Russia and Ukraine Today, Nottingham, 1996.

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  101. See Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960, passim.

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  102. Quoted in Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, California, 1994, p. 208.

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  104. Quoted in F. Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864–1917, New Haven, Connecticut, 1968, p. 27.

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  105. D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914, trans. B. Little, Leamington Spa, 1987, p. 94. Count Reiset, sometime French diplomat in St Petersburg, was determined ‘to drive [the Russians] back into Asia whence you came.

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  106. You are not a European Power; you ought not to be one, and you will not continue to be one if France remembers the part she ought to play in Europe.’ Quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861, DeKalb, Illinois, 1982, p. 170.

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  108. Quoted in G.A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma 1907–1914, Cambridge, 1973, p. 218. Even Struve believed, however, that ‘the area which is genuinely open to the influence of Russian culture … is the whole Black Sea basin: that is, all the European and Asian countries bordering on the Black Sea’.

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  109. A. Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, vol. II: The Release of Harmony 1908–1921, Oxford, 1978, pp. 291–4, quoted at p. 293.

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  110. Carol Avins, Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature 1917–1934, Berkeley, California, 1983, pp. 29–34, quoted at p. 31.

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  111. Jakobson, Notes and Letters, p. 21.

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  112. For critiques, from different perspectives, of the widespread coverage of Eurasian ideas in the Russian press, see Valerii Senderov, ‘Evrazii: proshloe ili budushchee, realnost’ ili mif?’, Grani, no. 175, 1995, pp. 247–78;

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  113. Appolon Kuz’min ‘Evraziiskii kapkan’, Molodaia gvardiia, 1994, no. 12, pp. 149–60;

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  114. Natal’ia Narochnitskaia and Kseniia Malo, ‘Eshche raz o “evraziiskom soblazne”‘, Nash sovremennik, 1995, no. 4, pp. 128–37.

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  115. In the context of the present chapter, perhaps the most relevant work by this prolific and idiosyncratic scholar is his last, Ot Rusi k Rossii: Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii, Moscow, 1992. Readers of English have access to his most explicitly methodological book in translation, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Moscow, 1990. See also Bruno Naarden, ‘“I am a genius, but no more than that.” (Lev Gumilëv, 1912–1992): Ethnogenesis, the Russian Past and World History’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 44, 1996, no. 1, pp. 54–82.

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  116. See, inter alia, Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations, London, 1996, pp. 181–3.

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  117. Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov 1786–1855, DeKalb, Illinois, 1984, pp. 19–24;

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  118. Uvarov quoted in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, ‘Asia through Russian Eyes’, in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples, Stanford, California, 1972, p. 12.

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  119. Striking studies include John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South, Oxford, 1987,

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  120. and James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918, Oxford, 1993.

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  121. Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Cambridge, 1994 is an original and significant study.

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© 1998 School of Slavonic and East European Studies

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Dixon, S. (1998). The Past in the Present: Contemporary Russian Nationalism in Historical Perspective. In: Hosking, G., Service, R. (eds) Russian Nationalism Past and Present. Studies in Russia and East Europe . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26532-9_9

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