Mending Broken Bones: Russian Nationalism and the Fate of Russia - By Frank Ellis
He who wishes to serve the proletariat must unite the workers of all nations, fighting relentlessly against bourgeois nationalism and his own and that of others. He who defends the slogan of national culture belongs in the ranks of the nationalistic philistines and not among the Marxists.
Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, ‘Critical Observations on the National Question’ (1913)
Patriotism is a feeling of total and permanent love for one’s Motherland, with a readiness to make sacrifices for her, to share her misfortunes, without any obsequiousness, without any support for unjust claims, and openness in the assessment of her flaws, sins, and repentance for them.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Russia in Ruins (1998)
Introduction
If you wish to grasp something of the Russian spirit/soul (dukh/dusha) - Russians have a great deal to say about both – Russian culture, history and thought all of which contribute to the sentiments of national identity and have forged the way Russians feel and reflect upon ideas such as Fatherland (Otechestvo) and Motherland (Rodina), I know of no better way than to read the work of Russia’s greatest writers. Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and in the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova (1888-1965), Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Vasilii Grossman (1905-1964), Viktor Astaf’ev (1924-2001) and, for me, the great moral and intellectual titan of the last century, the unashamed patriot, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), are a surer guide to the nature of Mother Russia than so much of Western historiography and its commentariat. On the other side of this divide, and hostile to any assertion of a unique Russia, and committed to her destruction, stand the revolutionary fanatics of the late nineteenth century and their heirs, the Bolsheviks, who crucified Russia in the name of class war and internationalism, and whose social engineering together with their Maoist comrades marks the apex of twentieth-century genocide. In this protracted battle of ideas and so much blood and suffering we can find some kind of insight into what it means to be a Russian in the early twenty-first century.
Of all the nineteenth-century Russian writers who have concerned themselves with the nature and essence of Russia and her place in the world, Dostoevsky remains the most prophetic, and disturbingly so. The Devils (1871-1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) are uncompromising assertions of the nature of good, evil, man’s need of God, and to borrow an idea from Viktor Frankl, man’s search for meaning (man’s desperate need for meaning). It is Dostoevsky’s view that without the nation (Russia) and without the God that cares for Russia, the people are rendered mere raw material vulnerable to the machinations of ideological fanatics. Here then is a point of attack for those who wish to subvert and to destroy the nation: tell the people that the nation is an abomination; attack the culture that nurtures and sustains it; turn the next generation against their mothers and fathers. One reason why Dostoevsky was regarded with profound suspicion throughout the Soviet period was because he clearly understood the nature of the revolutionary movements that had emerged in Russia and to where their creed would lead. In fact, The Devils is core reading, if you wish to understand the mindset of the modern terrorist and the self-loathing which seems to be such a prominent feature of the left-liberal psyche.
In the twentieth century, the obvious defender of Mother Russia, her religion and folkways was Solzhenitsyn. Virtually all his major works, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) which made his name, to First Circle (1968), Cancer Ward (1968), Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975-1976) and August 1914 (1971 & 1989), are imbued with a profound love and understanding of Russia. In two long essays published after his return to Russia in 1994, The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century (1994) and Russia in Ruins (1998), Solzhenitsyn analyses what he quite rightly calls ‘Russia’s endlessly cruel century’1, exploring, inter alia, the nature of Russian nationalism and the manner in which, beginning with Lenin after 1917, all forms of Russian national identity and consciousness were suppressed or opportunistically co-opted by the party. The value of these two essays for the theme of Russian nationalism as a whole is that they provide a thorough historical overview of the trials and tribulations of Russian nationalism in the twentieth century from before 1917 through the Soviet period and beyond. Moreover, and I think this is important: they are the thoughts of a man who experienced the Soviet concentration camp system first hand.
Source:
Mending Broken Bones: Russian Nationalism and the Fate of Russia - By Frank Ellis
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