The Russian Silence

"The Weakness of Russian Nationalism" by Anatol Lieven, in Survival (Summer 1999), International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 Tavistock St., London WC2E 7NQ, United Kingdom.

It’s another case of Sherlock Holmes’s the 1990s in the former Soviet region of dog that didn’t bark: the absence during any mass mobilization of Russians along ethnic, nationalist lines. Why hasn’t the region gone the bloody way of Yugoslavia, as many in 1992 feared it would?

"Soviet totalitarian rule (which under Lenin and Stalin at least was vastly more thorough and ruthless than anything attempted by Tito in Yugoslavia) destroyed or greatly weakened" the Orthodox Church and the nobility in Russia, as well as nascent civil institutions that had emerged in the final decades of tsarist rule, explains Lieven, a Research Fellow at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. While this devastated condition has been "a grave weakness for contemporary democracy in Russia and most of the other former Soviet republics," it also has made for relative peace, despite "the extreme economic hardship and psychological and cultural dislocation" experienced by the populace.

Fortunately for Russia, its neighbors, and the West, Lieven says, "Russian national identity in recent centuries... has been focused on nonethnic allegiances." The Soviet state was explicitly founded not on nationalism but on a communist ideology that "contained genuine and important elements of ‘internationalism.’ " While the Soviets exploited Russian national symbols and traditions during and after World War II, they drained them of almost all meaning other than the "imposed Soviet one." Before the Soviet Union was formed, Lieven says, the Russian Empire, "though much more clearly a Russian state," stressed "loyalty to the Tsar and the Orthodox faith," not ethnicity.

Unlike many other nationalisms, Russian nationalism, as shaped by Soviet rule, conceived of the Russian nation "not as a separate ethnos but as the leader of other nations," Lieven says. The absence of a strong sense of Russian ethnic identity, he notes, also "reflected historical and demographic reality.... From the 15th century, Russia conquered and absorbed many other ethnic groups." Hostility exhibited at times toward particular ethnic groups, such as Jews or Caucasians, he says, was "a focused hostility...for particular reasons, usually economic."

Russians outside Russia have rarely come under physical attack in this decade. Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s government stated more than once that it would use force, if necessary, to protect the Russians in the Baltics and elsewhere. Though Estonia and Latvia, after gaining their independence, moved to restrict the rights of their Russian minorities, they did so peacefully, by legislative or administrative means, and most of the local Russians reacted calmly "and did not join the hard-line Soviet loyalist movements which opposed Baltic independence," Lieven notes. In Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the governments did not take any measures against their Russian minorities. And— despite the bluster of ultranationalist political figures such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky— the Russian government, Lieven says, for the most part has not encouraged Russian secession movements in the other republics.

But "as Russia loses its role and its self-perception as the leader of other nations," Lieven fears, it could "develop a new form of patriotism which is not pluralist and multi-ethnic but one which is resentful, closed, and ethnicallybased." If that happens, he warns, it could well prove "a disaster for the whole region."