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Post-Soviet
Nationalism and the Future of Russia
"The Kremlin’s Nationalist Policies Could Have Serious
Consequences
The roots of Russia’s currently rising nationalism are
threefold: pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet. The idea of Moscow as the “Third
Rome,” the belief that Russia has a special mission in world history, goes back
several centuries. Contrary to what many in the West believe, Russian
nationalism was an important element of Soviet ideology beginning in the 1930s.
Like in the early 19th century, when Moscow’s so-called Slavophiles applied German
nativist thought to Russian conditions, ideas of various Russian nationalist
movements today are often imported from the West.
One of the factors accounting for Russia’s recent
nationalist resurgence is the way of thinking learned in Soviet schools and
universities – a Manichean world-view which sharply distinguishes between “us”
and “them.” Although the basic definitions of “us” and “them” have changed, a
number of Soviet stereotypes, about the United States, for instance, have
persisted.
The major determinant in
the recent rise in Russian nationalism is that the Kremlin’s political
technologists have discovered it as a tool suitable for reconfiguring political
discourse in general. In the Kremlin’s new political reality, President
Vladimir Putin is not competing with alternative programs or parties. Putin’s
opponents are not socialists, liberals or other Russian political movements.
Instead, Putin is juxtaposed against Chechen terrorists, Estonian fascists,
Georgian russophobes, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, American imperialists, Western
conspirators, and, in general, to those non-Russians who desire to destroy,
divide or at least humiliate Russia. In this atmosphere of paranoia, it is only
logical that those opposing Putin are not acknowledged as constituting a
legitimate (not to speak of useful) political opposition. Instead, they are
represented as a “fifth column” of the West, as traitors who are, in Putin’s
words, skulking around foreign embassies like jackals...."
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Russia