Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical basis for understanding Soviet and Russian identities, particularly as they impact upon Soviet and Russian press coverage of the United States. Within this context, I begin to explore a second important theme of this work, changing Soviet and Russian perceptions of the United States in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras.
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Notes
Peter Berger, ‘Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 7, no. 1, 1966, pp. 32–40; Alexander Wendt, Anarchy is What States Make of It’, International Organization, vol. 42, Spring 1992, p. 397; Prasenjit Duara, ‘Historicizing National Identity or Who Imagines What and When’, in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National (New York: Oxford University Press) 1996, p. 163; Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, pp. 132–50; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso), 1992.
Arthur Gladstone, ‘The Conception of the Enemy’, in J.K. Zawodny, Man and International Relations (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing) 1966, p. 678; Karl E. Scheibe, The Psychology of Self and Identity (London: Praeger) 1995, p. 537; Samuel I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.) 1941; Elizabeth Spellman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press) 1988, p. 74; Robert S. Wistrich, The Longest Hatred (London: Schocken Books) 1991, p. xiii; John Keene, ‘Nations, Nationalism and European Citizens’, in Sukumar Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism (Budapest: CEU Press) 1995; Michale Mann, ‘A Political Theory of Nationalism and Its Excesses’, Sukumar Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism (Budapest: CEU Press) 1995, pp. 50–51.
William A. Glaser, ‘The Semantics of the Cold War’, in J.K. Zawodny, Man and International Relations (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing) 1966, p. 678; Jerome D. Frank, Sanity and Survival: Psychological Aspects of War and Peace (Toronto: Vintage Books) 1967, 117 ff; John Mack, ‘The Perception of US-Soviet Intentions and other Psychological Dimensions of the Nuclear Arms Race’, Journal of American Orthopsychiatry, 1982, vol. 52, no. 4, p. 595
‘It may seem melodramatic to treat the twin poles of human experience represented by the United States and the Soviet Union as the equivalent of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil; yet if we allow ourselves to think of them that way, even hypothetically, it can help to clarify our perspective on the world struggle.’ Richard Nixon, quoted by John Mack, ‘Perception’, 1982, p. 597.
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account’, Theory and Society, vol. 23, 1994, pp. 48–50; Viktor Zaslavsky, ‘Nationalism and Democratic Transition in Postcommunist Societies’, Daedalus, vol. 121, no. 2, spring 1992, p. 105; Paul Goble, ‘Ethnic Politics in the USSR’, Problems of Communism, vol. 38, no. 4, July–August 1989, pp. 1–15. Within the multi-ethnic state, nationality was expressed as an ascriptive characteristic found on every citizen’s passport and in the form of ethno-territorial sub-units (union republics, autonomous republics and autonomous regions) which often but did not always contain a plurality of the titular nationality.
William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1990, p. 151.
Terry L. Heyns, American and Soviet Relations since Detente (Washington DC: National Defense University Press) 1987, p. 1.
In What is to be Done?, Lenin wrote, ‘[T]he only choice is either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class above an above-class ideology).’ Quoted in Kerenz, Propaganda State, 1985, p. 36.
Hyland, The Cold War is Over, 1990, p. 182. Georgi Arbatov, The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 1973, pp. 33–6. The origins of Bolshevik foreign policy can be found in Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism, which was first published in mid-1917.
Neumann’s assertion that ‘Europe is the main “Other” in relation to which the idea of Russia is defined’, may be true looking over Russian history as a whole, but especially in the late Soviet period, the United States eclipsed Europe as the main other in Soviet thinking. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe (London: Routledge) 1996, p. 1.
Chafetz says that ‘A role’s main function is to provide actors with a stable sense of identity. Without them, they cannot order their environment and consequently find social behaviour intolerably difficult to understand and manage. Individuals who lack clearly defined roles may cease social function altogether.’ Chafetz, ‘National Identity’, p. 664; Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 400.
Lewin, Making of the Soviet System, 1991, p. 21.
Tucker, Political Culture, 1987, p. 122.
Rubinstein, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1992, p. 321.
Graham Gill, The Collapse of a Single-Party System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1994, p. 12.
Gellner related the following incident when Beria surprised Sakharov by asking him if he had any questions. Sakharov said ‘I was absolutely unprepared… (but)… I asked: “Why are our new projects moving so slowly? Why do we always lag behind the USA and other countries, why are we losing the technology race?”… I don’t know what kind of answer I expected. Twenty years later, when Turchin, Medvedev and I posed the same question… we answered that insufficient democratic institutions… and a lack of intellectual freedom… were to blame.’ Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), 1994.
These inherent weaknesses in Soviet identity caused Soviet leaders to seek other methods of uniting the population. Too often the preferred method was unification against a common enemy, be it kulaks and other class enemies or the ‘encircling’ capitalist powers. This was recognized by Shevardnadze who said that ‘the enemy’ can instil in people ‘fear, hatred and a readiness to accept the existing order of things as something natural and necessary. When you present your own people with an “enemy”, you can force them to bear any privation, make any sacrifice.’ Shevardnadze, Freedom, 1991, p. 65. See also Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books) 1987, pp. 80, 102, 110.
Shlapentokh, ‘War Propaganda’, 1984, p. 88 ff.
Pravda, 16 June 1983, p. 1.
Brezhnev noted that detente ‘does not in the slightest way abolish nor can it abolish or alter the laws of class struggle’. Pravda, 12 October 1974, quoted in Gilbert, Soviet Images, 1977, p. 63. The irony of the situation was noted by Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze who asserted: ‘The ideologues came out with the conclusion that in moments of warmer relations the ideological struggle must not subside. On the contrary, it must be waged more fiercely. To be honest, I cannot figure out how to make friends with a person and at the same time to carry on an implacable struggle against him.’ Shevardnadze, Freedom, 1991, p. 5.
Andropov, CDSP, vol. xxxv, no. 25, p. 2.
Chernenko, CDSP, vol. xxxv, no. 24, p. 8.
Gorbachev’s Report to the XXVIIth Congress of the Communist Party, CDSP, vol. xxxviii, no. 8, p. 6.
Shlapentokh, ‘War Propaganda’, 1984, p. 92.
T.V. Znamenskaya and A.V. Smyagin, ‘Vneshnopoliticheskaya propaganda’, SShA, no. 9, September 1988, p. 26.
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© 1999 Jonathan A. Becker
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Becker, J.A. (1999). ‘Otherness’, Enmity and Envy in Soviet Images of the United States. In: Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598423_5
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