#13 - JRL 7302
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003
From: Andreas Umland <andreumland@yahoo.com>
Subject: Review of N. Mitrokhin "The Russian
Party, 1953-1985"
Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaya partiya: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR.
1953-1985 gody.
Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003.
624 pp. p/b.
So far, the study of Russian nationalist tendencies in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death has been a minor field within sovietology. Whereas the importance of Russian nationalism during high Stalinism has become an acknowledged fact and recently been re-emphasized in new studies edited or written by, for instance, Leonid Luks, Gennadii Kostyrchenko or David Brandenberger, the role of this ideology within the Soviet regime after 1953 has been a lesser explored subject. In the 1990s, to be sure, a number of excellent dissertations on the latter subject by, for instance, Thomas Parland, Peter Duncan, Yitzhak Brudny, Matthias Messmer and Hildegard Kochanek, emphasized the continued relevance of Russian nationalism in the 1960s-1980s. They added significant new details and interpretative approaches to the pioneering works of John Dunlop, Alexander Yanov, Stephen Carter and other authors who wrote the first analyses of the subject in the 1970s and 1980s. The former and some further studies that appeared in the last decade (by, for instance, Walter Laqueur, Semyon Reznik and William Korey) have, certainly, resulted in an increased attention to the paradox of a high number of crypto-nationalist, and more or less antisemitic publications, cultural works, as well as semi-political activities within a supposedly radically internationalist dictatorship.
In spite of these new findings, manifestations of Russian nationalism in the post-Stalin USSR have, however, continued to be seen by many observers as relatively inconsequential. To speak of Russian nationalism as an ideology not only within, but also of the Soviet regime was still beyond the pale. Russian nationalism studies have thus remained on the margins of Soviet studies of the post-Stalin period, and texts by the above authors have only rarely been assigned reading in Western survey courses on the Soviet Union. With his voluminous, detailed, and well-documented kandidatskaya dissertation on Soviet Russian nationalism in 1953-85 (defended at the Russian State University of the Humanities in 2002), Nikolai Mitrokhin demonstrates that this is an inappropriate state of affairs. The author makes here one of the more important Russian contributions to our understanding of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov by showing that Russian nationalism represented, after Stalin’s death too, an ideology that was not merely widespread within the Russian cultural establishment, dissident scene, or ?migr? circles. Mitrokhin documents that, in the 1960s, a Russian nationalist trend, a kind of “Russian party,” emerged within the central Soviet state and party apparatuses. In particular, the highest echelons of the Komsomol and its Moscow section seemed over years dominated by functionaries with barely hidden russocentric and antisemitic outlooks, and close connections to similarly minded people in the CPSU Central Committee, editorial boards of various newspaper and journals, and official cultural organizations.
Although this grouping was obviously not a “party” (though it is interesting that some of its members used the term), Mitrokhin’s findings, based principally on numerous interviews with the main actors, indicate that the concept of a “movement” may apply to this growing circle of functionaries, publicists, novelists, editors, and artists. These persons shared a number of fundamental beliefs about Russian-Soviet history including a particular stance on “the main question,” i.e. the role of Jews in Russia and the world. The members of this community, to be sure, did not hold uniform views, or pursued, in every respect, similar aims. Also, its various sub-groups such as the “Zionologists” (Reznik), village prose writers, or vozrozhdentsy (Dunlop) of the dissident scene within the wider circle often met and acted separately. Still, many of them were, at least, aware of each other, interconnected through various men whom Mitrokhin aptly calls “communicators,” and met repeatedly in most cases only on special occasions, but in some others on a regular basis. The higher placed among them supported, promoted and helped, as far as they could, their fellow-activists outside the establishment. What emerges is a more or less coherent, well-defined cluster of people that can be called a “movement,” and that indirectly linked full members of the Secretariats of the Central Committees of the Komsomol and CPSU with dissidents, and even former political prisoners.
That such an intriguing phenomenon was partly if not largely unknown to Western observers is, in certain respects, understandable. The movement left only few written documents. The “Russian party” had to be an, in certain ways, clandestine movement. Its members communicated with each other orally. What had been primarily investigated before Mitrokhin’s principally oral history were either semi-official journals such as Molodaya gvardiya and Nash sovremennik (the contributions to which had to be written in Aesopian language), or dissident journals like Veche or Mnogaya leta (the contributors of which had not much to loose in terms of their position within the Soviet social hierarchy, yet to take into account Western public opinion). Mitrokhin argues convincingly that relying only on these sources produced a biased picture. It led to an underestimation of the reach of the Russian nationalist movement into the pinnacle of the political establishment, and an overestimation of the anti-totalitarian motive of the nationalist dissidents. To be sure, neither the inofficial idols, de facto leaders nor the key “communicators” of the movement, such as M. Sholokhov, V. Ganichev or I. Glazunov were high CPSU functionaries themselves. Yet, the support these men had among numerous powerful apparatchiks in the highest party, Komsomol, RSFSR and Moscow city apparatuses was a crucial condition for their purposeful infiltration of important social organizations, publishing houses, and editorial boards in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The two phenomena that Mirokhin left out, and which this reviewer would have liked to be included are the growing influence among nationalists of the theory of ethnogenesis developed by Lev N. Gumilev in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as Moscow’s so-called “Golovin-circle” which included such nowadays prominent publicists as Yurii Mamleev and Aleksandr Dugin. If at all, how far and in which ways were these men connected to the “Russian party”? Otherwise, however, this innovative study can be recommended to everybody interested in post-war Soviet political and cultural history. In fact, the book would, in view of its manifold new findings and extensive documentation, seem to be worth a translation into English language.
Andreas Umland (National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv)
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