Intellectuals and Apparatchiks

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Intellectuals and Apparatchiks

Intellectuals and Apparatchiks Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution

KEVIN O'CONNOR

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham· Boulder· New York· Toronto· Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2006 by Lexington Books First paperback edition 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows: O'Connor, Kevin, 1967Intellectuals and apparatchiks: Russian nationalism and the Gorbachev revolution / Kevin O'Connor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Nationalism and communism--Soviet Union. 2. Perestroreika. 3. MinoritiesGovernment policy-Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union-Politics and govemment-19851991. 1. Title. HX550.N3012 2006 320.540947'0904-dc22 2005029937 ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0771-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-7391-0771-2 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-I3: 978-0-7391-3122-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-7391-3122-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3123-7 eISBN-IO: 0-7391-3123-0 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

1

Russians, the RSFSR, and Soviet Nationalities Policy, 1917-1953

23

2

Russian Nationalism, Russification, and the Rise of the "Russian Party," 1953-1985

45

3

Writers: An Opposition in Embryo, 1986-1988

79

4

The Ligachev Line, 1986-1988

111

5

"Russophobia": Perestroika and the Russian Question

133

6

A Consolidating Force: Creating a Russian Communist Party

165

7

The Apparatchiks' Party

211

8

A Word to the People

237

9

"Russia to the Exit!"

279

Selected Bibliography

295

Index

311

About the Author

323

v

Acknowledgments

The basic idea for this book was conceived in the closing years of a bygone millennium, when I was a graduate student at Ohio University in Athens. In its earlier incarnation the book was a Ph.D. dissertation, which I completed under the supervision of Steven M. Miner. His guidance and encouragement during the early stages of this project were crucial both to its development into what would become a book and to my personal growth as a scholar and teacher. As I find his words passing from my lips in my Russian history classes I am continually reminded of how much I learned in his lectures and seminars and during our informal sessions over coffee or Kung Pao chicken. I am also grateful to former History Department chairman Bruce Steiner, who generously provided funding for my research and language training. Dr. Steiner's mantra that "there are beginnings ... and there are endings" was a source of inspiration to the legions of graduate students, including myself, who managed to complete their degree requirements in a timely manner. A research trip in the summer of 1999, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Russia and the Soviet Union, introduced me to Moscow's archives and libraries. Subsequent stays in Moscow were hosted by Lena and Irina Alekseeva, whose warmth and generosity I will always remember with great affection. I am also grateful to the staff at the Gorbachev Foundation, the Russian State Library, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, and the Central State Archive of Social Movements of Moscow for providing me with documents, books, and photocopies. Many thanks also to John Henry Trant, who helped with the index, and Ted Weeks of Southern Illinois University, who read parts of the manuscript and saved me from committing several errors. Although I was initially annoyed at the anonymous reader of a much earlier version of this manuscript, I am now quite grateful for his or her criticisms and suggestions. The resulting book is significantly improved as a result. Other errors, no doubt, remain, and these are vii

viii

of course my own responsibility. That said, I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of Brian Richards, Seth Hoy, Rebekka Brooks, MacDuff Stewart, Christopher Case, and the staff at Lexington Books, who saw to it that this book went into production without undue delay. Finally, I would like to acknowledge a tremendous debt of gratitude to my family, including my mother Marianne and my brothers Michael and Robert, who never failed to provide me with moral support and encouragement through the many years of graduate school and my search for that elusive permanent position. A special thank you to my father, Richard O'Connor, who has read and proofread the manuscript in its entirely both in its earlier incarnation as a dissertation and in something like its present form. His questions and corrections were invaluable. It is to him that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

On 25 December 1991, nearly seven decades after the conclusion of Russia's Civil War and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the red flag that flew over the Kremlin was removed and replaced by the Russian tricolor. Concluding a two-year struggle that pitted "Russia" and the other republics against the Union "center," Boris Yeltsin, the popularly elected president of the Russian republic, was finally able to wrest power from his nemesis, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president and the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). For the next eight years Yeltsin ruled Russia alone as it and the fourteen other former Soviet republics pursued separate paths, with varying degrees of success. Gorbachev, who to the end had struggled to hold the Union together, now stood on the sidelines, waiting-in vain-for the Russian people to call him back to active politics. Many have never forgiven him for launching the reform program (perestroika) that ultimately destroyed the Communist Party and accelerated the collapse of a superpower. Some of his former comrades, embittered by this betrayal, have publicly called him a traitor. Unlike the bloody struggle that inaugurated the Bolsheviks' iron rule in Russia, the collapse of the Soviet single-party state was, on the whole, remarkably peaceful. Although armed conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaidzhan broke out almost immediately, they took relatively few lives. Tadzhikistan's civil war (1992-1997) and the two wars waged by Russia against Chechen rebels were far more violent, but such brutality was the exception rather than the rule throughout the former Soviet Union. (Of course, brutality often manifested itself in non-military forms.) One need only consider the Balkan wars of the 1990s to imagine how the collapse of the Soviet empire could have been far bloodier. The fact that the former Soviet republics did not descend into the large-scale violence that characterized Yugoslavia's disintegration-that Russia did not aggressively pursue territorial claims against its neighbors as Serbia's leaders

2

Introduction

did-is a testament to the relatively civilized nature of the transition. Indeed, not only Gorbachev, but even the men who plotted to remove him in August 1991, rejected the use of deadly force to defend the Soviet state. 1 As the Soviet Union disintegrated and Russia began to reinvent (or, one might say, to invent) itself, the country was fortunate not to produce a top leader comparable to Slobodan Milosevic-a demagogue willing to fan the flames of nationalism to aggrandize his own power and carve out a Greater Russia from the carcass of the Soviet Union. Although Vladimir Zhirinovskii or Albert Makashov might have fit this profile, they failed to capture the imagination of the Russian people during the decisive period between 1989 and 1991, when local nationalism engulfed much of the USSR and shook the foundations of the Soviet state. Indeed, in the summer of 1991, when conservative forces staged a coup d'etat in order to save the indivisible Soviet Union from collapse, it was Boris Yeltsin-then identified with liberalism, democracy, and anticommunism-who was widely seen as the embodiment of Russian patriotism. For nearly two years Yeltsin had been playing the Russian national card, but rather than seeking to preserve Russia's hegemonic position in the Union, Yeltsin, working in tandem with the leaders of several other Union republics, orchestrated Russia's withdrawal. Again, the contrast between the Russian president and the Serbian leader is revealing: whereas Milosevic rode to power by reminding Serbs in Kosovo, a region of Serbia populated largely by Albanian Muslims, of an historical injustice (from the Serbs' view) that was six hundred years old, Yeltsin's popularity was derived in part from his anti-imperial rhetoric. 2 Russians, he emphasized, for too long had disproportionately borne the burdens of empire; it was time for Russia, like the other Soviet republics with which it sought cooperation as ostensibly equal partners, to go its own way. One of the most striking aspects of the USSR's collapse was the old regime's feeble resistance to the dismantling of the Communist-ruled Soviet state. Considering the stakes involved-the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, control over the Soviet Union's mighty nuclear arsenal, and not least, the seat of power in the Kremlin-the transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, from Communist to semi-democratic rule, was remarkably civilized, at least in the sense that it was free of organized violence. Although a small group of conspirators who were once close to Soviet President Gorbachev summoned tanks into Moscow in August 1991, the putschists had no stomach for the bloodshed that would be necessary to defeat Yeltsin and his supporters. Communism, its last defenders apparently concluded, was not worth fighting for. But it was not to save communism that the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) went into action; its purpose was to save a "great power" (derzhava) from the nationalists and separatists who wished to destroy it. The August putsch, botched and desperate as it appeared, was an attempt by Soviet loyalists to avert the conclusion of a new Union Treaty that would devolve most political authority from Moscow to those republics-nine at most-still willing to sign. Yet even for this cause-the fate of the "great homeland"-the State

Introduction

3

Committee, composed almost entirely of Russians, was unwilling to risk the possibility of a civil war. Perhaps this is partly because Russians, including Gorbachev's nationalpatriotic critics, were unable to come to a consensus at to exactly what their "homeland" was. Was it the Soviet Union, which covered nearly the entire territory of the old tsarist empire and included nearly three hundred million peopleonly half of whom were Russian? Or was it Yeltsin's "Russia," the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic), which claimed 80 percent of the USSR's territory and only half its population? For many of the Union's defenders-mostly the Russian nationalist-conservatives within and outside the CPSU as well as the Russocentric Gorbachev himself-Russia and the USSR were indistinguishable. 3 Each year when June 12 rolls around and Russians celebrate their "Independence Day," many ask themselves-and each other-the following question: "Independence from what?" It was on that day in 1990 that the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR adopted a Declaration of Sovereignty. 4 While most working Russians happily accept a respite from their labors, for many the idea of "independence" makes little sense: indeed, in the minds of many Russians the Soviet Union from which Russia was ostensibly liberated was Russia, even if Russia was not necessarily the entire Soviet Union.

What is "Russia"? The difficulty of defining "Russia" in territorial terms is largely rooted in the country's size and extraordinary ethnic diversity. In the two centuries between the reigns of Tsar Ivan IV (1547-1582) and Catherine II (1762-1796), Russia expanded deep into Asia and central Europe, incorporating peoples as diverse as Poles and Tatars, Finns and Buriats, Ukrainians and Chechens. 5 As Muscovy transformed itself into the Russian Empire, expanding at a rate of 30,000 square kilometers (about the size of Belgium) per annum, Russians populated an area stretching from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean. 6 Right up to the revolutions of the early twentieth century, Russian intellectuals such as the celebrated historians Sergei Solov'ev and Vasilii Kliuchevskii continued to identify the empire with the Russian national homeland. Yet, as Dominic Lieven has suggested, the reality was that Russia, at least partly because of the existence of the empire, arguably possessed a weaker sense of national solidarity in 1914 than it had in the days of Ivan IV.? Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Russians were still peasants whose identity was closely tied to religion (Orthodoxy) and locality rather than to some broader sense of "Russianness." Most of the tsar's subjects were not Russians at all. 8 Historians of Russia frequently point out that Russia, unlike the countries of Western Europe, failed to consolidate itself as a nation-state, and that this failure has been detrimental to both the Russian state and Russian society. As one such

4

Introduction

scholar, Vera Tolz, has written, the idea of Russia as a "land without end" had an especially negative impact on nation-building, for "it diminished the need to draw precise geographical boundaries for the national homeland.,,9 In contrast to Britain and France, each of which held large overseas empires in which core and periphery were distinct, Russia's contiguous empire, created before Russia had the opportunity to consolidate its national identity, made such a distinction impossible. IO As the empire expanded beyond areas traditionally inhabited by Russians into Europe and Asia, Russians could not distinguish between "Russia proper" and the tsar's possessions that were not Russian in the same sense. To mask this ambiguity, of which even Russia's rulers were only hazily cognizant, the country's emperors and empresses equated Russia with the empire, effectively fusing them into one well before the age of nationalism had arrived in Eastern Europe. Russia thus became a multinational empire before a modem Russian national identity was developed. II A significant long-tenn consequence of this development is that Russians even today lack a fully developed sense of national identity. A leading proponent of this view, historian Geoffrey Hosking, has suggested that there is in fact no such thing as Russian nationalism; there is only Russian imperialism. 12 That is to say that although the tsars discouraged the development of feelings of national self-identity, Russia's expansion, resulting in the destruction or weakening of powerful states such as Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, did foster a popular consciousness of the country's status as a superpower surrounded by unfriendly neighbors. This, Viktor Kremenyuk observes, "contributed to a national psychology that worshiped the Motherland and spumed foreign influence." Instead of developing a specifically Russian self-identity, the country's dominant nationality was prone to xenophobic tendencies and chauvinism-"a feeling of superiority that considerably blocked the way to progress.,,13 Thus, although Russia had built a state-and a powerful if underadministered one at that-as late as 1914 it had failed to develop a shared sense of belonging to a common community. Since the tsars had done little to advance the cause of nation-building in the empire, the task was taken up by Russian intellectuals from the 1830s onwards. The "Slavophiles," a group that distinguished itself from the "Westernizers," were the first shapers of modem Russian identity.14 Alienated from a repressive state and repulsed by the rationalism of the West, Slavophile intellectuals, following the lead of the Gennan Romantics, believed that Russia's uniqueness lay in the ancient wisdom and traditions of its "people" (narod), not in its superficially Europeanized elites or its Little Father, the tsar. In the hands of the Slavophiles Russian identity was defined negatively-that is, it was defmed principally according to what it was not. From the Slavophile perspective, the Russian soul was not by its nature rational, individualistic or materialistic, as the Slavophiles believed the peoples of Western Europe to be; the Russian soul was instead communal, spiritual, and nonpolitical.

Introduction

5

According to the Slavophiles, not only were the Russian people distinct from-and morally superior to---the peoples of Western Europe, the Russian state, unlike Western states, developed organically, on the basis of cooperation between Russian and non-Russian peoples. Whereas Western states were aggressive and were historically formed through conquest, the Russian imperial state was benign. The Russian state, wrote Konstantin Aksakov, an early Slavophile, was "founded not by conquest, but by a voluntary invitation of the government.,,15 Although like the "Westernizers" the Slavophiles sought internal reform (the abolition of serfdom, the amelioration of the country's social ills, and the removal of government censorship), they rejected the West's pursuit of parliamentary politics in the belief that the autocracy was the most appropriate political system for a people who sought not political participation but freedom from politics. The Slavophiles and their heirs were incapable of conceptualizing Russian identity without comparing the virtues of Russians to the negative values that they believed characterized the West. Thus, insofar as Russian nationalism developed as an idea, it developed principally as a rejection of Western values and of Western models of development. 16 Having deemed these unsuitable for Russia, the Slavophiles and later the populists (narodniki) "constructed an imaginary alternative path for the country" based on the traditional practices of the Russian countryside. 17 Yet a "Russian idea" based on the Russian peasantry was of limited use to the rulers of the empire, who conceived of themselves, not the "people," as sovereign in Holy Russia. Although Slavophilism had developed during the reign of the martinet Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855), it was firmly rejected by the autocrat. The emperor, more concerned with the fulfillment of duty than the enlightenment of the narod, was suspicious of intellectuals and wished to protect the masses from any potentially dangerous ideas. For Nicholas, Russians may have been in some sense unique-particularly in regard to their unusual mysticismbut the narod did not personify the Russian Empire: that was the prerogative of the autocrat (samoderzhets) and the Russian Orthodox faith. The doctrine of "Official Nationality" ("Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality," as formulated by Minister of Education S.S. Uvarov) upheld by Nicholas 1's regime in fact had little to do with Russian nationalism or nation-building; most of all it was an ideology whose purpose was to reinforce the established order while serving as a bulwark against the challenge of Western ideas. 18 Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did Tsars Aleksandr III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917) seek to bolster the specifically "Russian" identity of the empire. However, this was not a case of placing the source of political power in the hands of the nation-the "people"-as was being done in the countries of Western Europe, but rather was accomplished (to the extent that it was accomplished at all) through the implementation of a program of linguistic and political russification on the empire's periphery. Whatever its aims, the program was applied inconsistently, and it is still not clear that russification had any more ambitious goal than that of the preservation of a multinational

6

Introduction

state facing the pressures of nationalism on its periphery.19 Indeed, the main engine of russification from above was the empire's need for centralization and bureaucratic standardization. This is not the same thing as nation-building, which involves the sort of bonding of state and society that was more characteristic of Western countries like England, Holland, and France. As a result, unlike the West, wrote historian Hans Rogger, "Modern Russia did not develop a nationalism that was capable of reconciling important segments of Russian society to one another and to the state.,,20 Moreover, given its considerable ethnic diversity, the Russian Empire could not fashion itself as a Russian national homeland in the same way that the Kaiser's Germany could transform itself from a patchwork collection of kingdoms and principalities into a strong and mostly homogeneous national state with a geographically distinct overseas empire. Although the tsarist regime's "desire to equate Russia with the Great Russian nationality and the Orthodox church was at times irresistible," Theodore Weeks concludes, "Imperial Russia was not, and could not be, a nation-state.,,21 Unable to come fully to terms with its imperial and multinational nature, the regime pursued muddled and often contradictory nationality policies. "Yet one thing was clear in tsarist policy," observes Robert Geraci, the author of a history of conceptions of "Russianness": "whether or not the Russian nation was so infinitely expandable as to eliminate all others in the empire, no other nation would be allowed to spread.,,22 Russians, it was clear, were the bearers of empire and the bringers of civilization to the uncivilized. Yet in an age of nationalism, which had penetrated the empire's western borders, it was dangerous to promote the culture and status of the hegemonic nationality at the expense of the nonRussians living on the periphery. As a result, russification floundered and only stimulated resentment and resistance in the borderlands. By 1917, under the impact of World War I and revolution, the empire unraveled. The Bolsheviks' seizure of power inaugurated a new approach to the nationality problem in Russia. This is discussed more fully in Chapter One. Committed internationalists, Russia's new rulers sought to downplay the role of the Russian nation and instead to promote the cultures and languages of the nonRussian nationalities. To reflect these new priorities, and to win the trust of the non-Russians, the new regime recreated the empire as a federation of republics, with a large Russian republic (the RSFSR)-what remained after the peripheral regions were constituted as Union republics-at its core. Despite several alterations the structure that emerged in the early 1920s endured for nearly seven decades. With the addition of the three Baltic republics during World War II, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was comprised of fifteen nominally sovereign republics, each with its own government, parliament, and communist party. The only exception was the RSFSR, which lacked many of the accoutrements of individuality granted the other republics. For this Russian republic all-Union bodies such as the CPSU (rather than a Russian Communist Party) would suffice; otherwise, it was feared, one republic and one nationality would dominate all the others.

Introduction

7

Soviet rule, with its confinnation of Russian as the country's lingua franca, to some extent facilitated the development of a Russian national identity among members of the dominant nationality. However, because Russia was defined as a territorial republic with fixed borders within the USSR, this identity was in principle explicitly anti-imperial-a development that went against the grain of the Russian national-imperial consciousness that had fonned over the country's centuries of expansion. For Soviet Russians, then, "Russia" had two different, contradictory meanings: Russia was both the contemporary RSFSR and, in the minds of many, the entire Soviet Union. While the bifurcation of Russian national consciousness had been developing over several decades, it became politicized only under the unique conditions created by glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The result-the contraposition of "Russia" (the RSFSR) and the Union "center"-was a main cause of the USSR's demise in 1991. By the Brezhnev era (1964-1982), the Russian problem, like all the USSR's nationality problems, was believed to have been resolved: Russia was the RSFSR, and Russians, well-represented in nearly all the Soviet republics, were the glue that held the multinational Soviet Union together. In the official view, all the peoples of the Soviet Union enjoyed a supranational identity: whether one's native tongue was Armenian, Ukrainian, or Uzbek, one was first a Soviet. Indeed, in late 1987, on the eve of the USSR's nationalist explosion, Gorbachev could still make reference to "the friendship and cohesion of the peoples of the Soviet Union" in his book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. The Soviet republics, he wrote, fonned "a community based on brotherhood and cooperation, respect and mutual assistance." It was only natural that the Russian language, native to the largest ethnic group in the country, was the common means of communication in the multinational Soviet Union. Far from being a hegemonic nationality, the Russian people, he continued, "have proven by their entire history that they have a tremendous potential for internationalism, respect and good will to all other peoples." Although these words were intended for public consumption (especially in the West), they did reflect a certain truth about Gorbachev's understanding of the national situation in this "harmonious multi-ethnic state.,,23 That truth was that the nationality policy launched by Lenin had failed to achieve the goal of eliminating nationalism (and nations) and creating homo soveticus, the Soviet man. The country remained a composite of many distinctive nationalities, large and small, at the geographic and political center of which stood the Russian people. Although Gorbachev himself did not share many of the core views of the Russian nationalist movement (discussed below), he was, like the Soviet leaders who preceded him, undeniably Russocentric: Gorbachev understood the Soviet Union to be the successor to the Russian Empire and never seemed to question the Russians' right to rule it. Despite Gorbachev's underestimation of them, nationality issues were among the most controversial and most passionately argued during the Soviet Union's last few years. 24 At the heart of the nationality problem was the matter

8

Introduction

of republican sovereignty, which was nominally granted by the Soviet constitution. The question was first raised by the Baltic republics-Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania-in the late 1980s and quickly made its way to the revamped RSFSR parliament in early 1990. On the resolution of the issue of republican sovereignty stood the whole Soviet edifice, for if the other republics could press for "sovereignty," then why could Russia (the RSFSR) not be "sovereign"? And ifit could, then what would this mean? Would strengthening the Russian republic vis-a.-vis the center amount to augmenting its position in the Union so that it could act as a consolidating force? Or would it involve scaling back the RSFSR's ties and responsibilities to the other republics? Indeed, this was the central point: how would Russia's relationship to the rest of a reformed Soviet Union be constituted? Politicians and intellectuals who played the "Russia card" during the USSR's final years had different answers to this question. Those who gathered around Yeltsin advocated Russian sovereignty in order to escape the control of the "center" and thereby advance political and economic reform. Another group, whose political orientation was much more orthodox in the Soviet context, also defended Russian sovereignty, but did so in an attempt to strengthen the cohesion of the USSR by augmenting the power of its largest republic. But the confusion about "Russia" still remained, and in fact was more muddled than ever. Although generations of Soviet citizens had been taught to equate Russia with the territory of the RSFSR, Soviet authorities since Stalin had simultaneously encouraged the notion that the Soviet Union was the successor to the Russian Empire. Thus the conundrum remained: was Russia the RSFSR, or was "Russia" the entire Soviet Union? Or perhaps Russia was, as some nationalists averred, "wherever Russians live." The Russian question, and in particular the meaning of Russian sovereignty, was one of the focal points of Soviet politics at a time when Soviet politics had never been more fractured. After several years of glasnost and perestroika, by 1990 the seemingly monolithic unity and Party discipline that had once uniquely characterized Soviet politics since Stalin had begun to break down, exposing the territorial, national, and ideological fault lines that had been surreptitiously, almost imperceptibly, developing over several decades. Soviet "conservatives"those who sought to preserve the USSR as a multinational empire ruled by the Communist Party-were disoriented by the breathtaking speed of the changes and were slow to react or organize. Dismayed by the ideological innovations of the heretics who controlled the Kremlin, horrified by the intrigues of nationalseparatists in the Baltic republics, repulsed by the bullishness of the "democrats" in the Russian legislature, and perhaps most significantly, aggrieved at the loss of the CPSU's hegemonic position in the USSR, the conservative wing of the Party, stunned by the pace of change but still outwardly loyal to the general secretary, stood by as Yeltsin and his followers mounted an assault on the prerogatives of Moscow. The level of Party discipline exercised by the conservatives even through the upheavals of perestroika is striking and is a testament to the mono-

Introduction

9

organizational nature of the system throughout its existence. As the authors of an economic history of the perestroika era write of Gorbachev and his opponents: "An activist ruler with a radical agenda rolled over every established interest, and only after six years of extremely radical change and acute social and political crisis was there any serious opposition on their part.,,25 While largely true, this may be overstating the case. Although nearly everyone claimed to be in support of perestroika at first, suspicion of Gorbachev's agenda arose among nationalist-conservative circles as early as 1987, and perhaps even earlier. Indeed, as soon as Gorbachev discarded the official position, conditioned by decades of Marxist-Leninist ideology, that there was one single truth, discussion and then opposition became inevitable. The nationalist-conservative opposition to Soviet reform-to Gorbachev's perestroika and to Yeltsin's even more radical program-is the main subject of this book. More specifically, this study discusses the steady movement of the orthodox wing of the CPSU toward Russian nationalist positions once the ideological straightjacket was removed and the USSR entered its terminal crisis. This rapprochement took place in part because of certain shared ideas: both the Russian nationalists and the Marxist-Leninists were conservatives who, like the Slavophiles 150 years earlier, deplored the cultural Westernization that was gripping Russia and feared the imposition of alien Western political and economic models. Indeed, once Lenin's luster faded it gradually became clear to some in both camps-nationalist and Soviet-that both these political streams shared much in common. In addition to their shared concerns about Westernization, a feeling of disempowerment was common to both the Russian nationalists and the Communist old guard: just as Russians were losing their hegemonic position in the Soviet Union, so were Communists losing their hegemonic position in Soviet politics. Many influential "conservatives" in the Communist Party bemoaned its fracturing and struggled to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union by reaching out to allies who, whatever their opinions of Marxism-Leninism, shared these concerns. Some, such as Egor Ligachev, Gorbachev's "second" secretary until 1989, and Ivan Polozkov, the first secretary of the short-lived Communist Party of the RSFSR, were openly sympathetic to the complaints of Russian nationalists who expressed their astonishment at Russians' loss of their hegemonic position in the empire. With Marxist-Leninist ideology receding into irrelevance as the Soviet Union endured its greatest challenge in half a century, many Communists appeared to abandon their lifelong commitment to communist internationalism in favor of restoring a "Great Russia, One and Indivisible." It is this paradox that this book attempts to explain.

10

Introduction

Nations and Nationalism Now we turn to the terminology that is used in this book. Since the idea of Russian nationalism is at the core of this study, we must first explain what is meant by the terms "nation" and "nationalism." Moreover, it would be useful to outline the different varieties of Russian nationalism under discussion. Even a cursory glance at the literature reveals that social scientists have not arrived at any consensus about the meaning and origins of nations and nationalism. In general, the field is divided roughly into those who see nations and nationalism as products of modernity, and those who believe that nations have deeper roots in culture and ethnicity. The first group, whom Anthony D. Smith calls "classical modernists," contends that nations are not ancient, but are the products of the planned and rational activity of political and intellectual elites. 26 This group includes scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson. Although they disagree on much, in general they each believe that nationalism is a product of modernization, and that nationalism creates nations, rather than the other way around. This school of thought emerged in response to older "perennialist" paradigms that had grown out of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the modernists, who see nations and nationalism as logically and historically contingent phenomena, perennialists see the nation as an ancient cultural community. While they agree that "nationalism" may be modem, "nations" as such are simply updated versions of organic pre-modem ethnic communities. It is the perennialist paradigm, rather than that of the classical modernists, that has exerted greater influence on modem Russian nationalist thought. Since an understanding of "nationalism" is inextricably tied to one's conception of the "nation," the latter term must be defined as well. Liah Greenfeld analyzes the semantic evolution of the word "nation" in her monumental study Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Romans, she explains, first used the Latin word natio to refer to foreigners sharing a particular geographical region. By the sixteenth century, after several mutations, the English word "nation" had come to be synonymous with "people," having shed its negative connotations with outsiders. 27 Thus the modem "nation" is associated with the population of a specific community. Benedict Anderson describes this community as an "imagined" one, "since the members of even the smallest nation will never know of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.,,28 The "imagined political community," writes Anderson, is a product of the modem age in which identification with the "primordial villages of face-to-face contact" have largely been superseded by individual identification with a greater community-one formed on the basis of a sense of common ancestry and manifested in a shared language, set of customs, mythology, religion, and territory. Whereas Greenfeld insists that the national idea arose before modernization, appearing first in the England of King Henry VIII (who enlisted it in support of

Introduction

II

his battle with Rome), Benedict Anderson, like other modernists, takes the view that "nations" are largely the social and intellectual constructs of nationalists, although they may have their roots in earlier ethnic and kinship ties. Ernest Gellner likewise contends that "It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around.,,29 From this perspective, nations are "made" as a result of the processes of centralization and modernization in modern society. While Gellner stresses the role played by central authorities who imposed an exact and standardized language in the political unit, Anderson stresses the cultural dimension and the role of print-capitalism in the creation of the imagined political community. Eric Hobsbawm similarly emphasizes the "invented traditions" of nationalists whose explicitly political aim was to create nation-states. 3o While both Anderson and Hobsbawm concede that the nationalists' attachment to the nation is quite real, these scholars emphasize the constructed nature of the modern nation. In contrast to the classical modernists, perennialists, who represent an older school of thought on nations and nationalism, have stressed the more organic nature of nations. Contemporary perennialists criticize the modernists' "topdown" or elites-driven approach to nationalism and instead emphasize the genuine national attachments of the lower and middle strata. While some scholars trace the origins of nations to the Middle Ages and most believe that the origins of nationalism lay in Western Europe, there is a near consensus among Western scholars of nationalism that there is a link between modernity and nationalism. 31 Although Walker Connor has sometimes been grouped with the perennialists, he agrees that nationalism is a modern phenomenon: he simply argues that nations are more deeply rooted than the modernists are willing to concede. For Connor, a nation "is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group of people who can command a person's loyalty because of felt kinship ties; it is, from this perspective, the fully extended family.,,32 At first glance this definition of the nation appears to be close to the "primordialist" approach, which tends to view nations more as natural phenomena based on ethnicity and kinship than as modern social and political constructs. To Connor, however, what is important is perception rather than reality: "it is not what is but what people perceive as is which influences attitudes and behavior.,,33 Although unpopular in the West today, the primordialist approach to nations and nationalism is generally accepted in post-Soviet Russia. 34 Indeed, one can trace the shift to primordialism all the way back to Stalin in the 1930s. 35 From this perspective, nations are, in the words of historian Ronald Suny, more a "force of nature" than a "product of history.,,36 In contemporary Russia primordialism is most prominently associated with Lev Gumilev's concept of "ethnogenesis," whereby ethnicity is not seen as a social or intellectual construct, but rather as part of human evolution. This emphasis on the ethnic-biological basis of nationality contrasts markedly with the Marxist belief, which to some extent influences many of the "classical modernists" discussed above, that modern nations resulted from capitalist modes of production. Primordialism informs the thinking of numerous Russian intellectuals and politicians of the post-Soviet

12

Introduction

period, including CPRF leader Gennadii Ziuganov. 37 It is one of the striking paradoxes of contemporary Russian nationalism that the leader of Russia's largest Marxist party-the successor to the CPSU in Russia-eschews Marxist interpretations of nations and nationalism in favor of a primordialist understanding of Russianness. Thus far we have seen that the word "nation" is an ambiguous term: the nation may be a social and political construct that has emerged from the logic of modernity (the modernists' view), or it may be primordial and deeply historically rooted (the perennialists' view). The word is made more complicated by the contention of many students of nations and nationalism that there is both a "civic" nation and an "ethnic" nation. The civic nation comprises the citizens of a sovereign political entity (which best describes the western European idea of "nation"), regardless of ethnicity; yet the word "nation" also refers to the ethnic nation (more typical of central and eastern Europe), which may share such a territory with other ethnic groups or even be divided across territorial borders. 38 Whereas Greenfeld, for example, believes that it is perfectly legitimate to use the word "nation" in each of these senses, Connor considers this misleading: for him the nation is the ethnic nation. For present purposes, the most important thing is to understand that the word "nation" may be used by different people to refer to quite different things. The distinction between the "civic" and the "ethnic" nation is particularly meaningful in the Russian context, for the Russian language uses two different words for "Russians": russkie refers to ethnic Russians, wherever they may live; while rossiiane refers to the citizens of the RSFSR during Soviet times, and afterwards to citizens of the Russian Federation, regardless of their ethnicity.39 But, returning to the term that is most central to this study, what of nationalism? Most scholars of nationalism agree that it is a political ideology with expressly political goals. Whether nationalism begat nations or vice versa, there is no getting around the fact that "nationalism" is a modern phenomenon and that "nationalists" have an explicitly political agenda. John Breuilly defines nationalism as a term "used to refer to political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments.',40 Likewise, Michael Hechter has defined nationalism as "collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit.,,41 While these definitions of nationalism, with their emphasis on its political component, may be useful for understanding nationalist mobilization in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, is it applicable to the "nationalism" of Russians and other Soviet peoples in the decades before perestroika and glasnost? For this phenomenon it is more appropriate to use the term "cultural nationalism," which, according to Anthony Smith, has existed in history where political nationalism has failed or is exhausted. In Soviet Russia, where expressions of political nationalism were expressly forbidden almost until the end, cultural nationalism, stimulated by Russian intellectuals' "yearning for cultural regeneration," existed in its stead. 42 This is one of the main themes of Chapter

Introduction

I3

Two, in which Russian nationalism and its relationship to the Soviet state prior to the Gorbachev era are discussed. To a considerable extent the various forms of Russian nationalism that began to flourish under more open conditions at the end of the 1980s took shape in accordance with their supporters' views of Marxism-Leninism and of the Soviet past and future. Yitzhak Brudny identifies three basic varieties of modem Russian nationalism: liberal, conservative, and radical. In the late Soviet period, liberal nationalists, a group that included an important segment of the Democratic Russia organization that supported Boris Yeltsin, tended to articulate their national loyalties in civic terms, with emphasis on the sovereignty of the RSFSR (while stressing the interests of rossiiane, citizens of Russia, rather than those of ethnic russkie) within the Soviet Union. The liberal nationalists generally tended to support the political and economic reforms of the perestroika era. While holding a positive image of Western institutions and ideas and a fondness for prerevolutionary Russia, their attitude toward the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalinist past was generally negative. Following Brudny's typology, opposing the "liberal" nationalists were "conservative" and "radical" Russian nationalists. Although "conservative" and "radical" nationalists shared a common antipathy toward the most radical reforms of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin governments and the cultural and political values of the West, they parted ways in their evaluations of the past: whereas "radical" nationalists (such as the editorial staff of the journal Molodaia gvardiia) found much of value in the supposed ideological purity and patriotic fervor of the Stalinist period, their "conservative" counterparts (such as the village prose writers of the 1960s and 1970s) were more likely to reject Stalinism and the Bolshevik revolution and to sympathize with Russian Orthodoxy and the old monarchy.43 While the pages that follow make occasional reference to "liberal" nationalists and frequent reference to "conservative" nationalists, the latter term is used broadly. That is, since distinctions between "radical" and "conservative" nationalists are often unclear, and since they often found themselves on the same side of a number of the most important political issues during the perestroika era, this study generally uses the term "conservative" to embrace all the non-liberal groups in Soviet politics and within the Russian nationalist intelligentsia. In other words, for the purposes of this study, the conservative nationalists, or nationalist-conservatives, were those who sought to tum the clock of Soviet reform back to at least 1988 and who at the same time upheld the preeminent position of the Russian nation in the multinational USSR. Many, especially those who lived in the Baltic and other non-Russian republics, referred to themselves as "internationalists"-an obvious exercise in double-speak coming from overwhelmingly monolingual Russian-speakers living in Russian enclaves on the Soviet periphery. Muddying the semantic waters even further is the fact that many Russian nationalists regarded themselves as faithful Communists and were often members of the CPSu. Therefore, it is useful to draw distinctions not only between

14

Introduction

"liberal" and "conservative" nationalists, but also to identify the various streams within Soviet conservatism (which for the purposes of this study includes nearly any political philosophy that opposed the major political and economic reforms of perestroika and wished to preserve elements of the Soviet past) more generally. This study uses the typology of Soviet "conservatives" formulated by John B. Dunlop in his The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Dunlop divided Soviet Russian conservatives into three broad and frequently overlapping groups. "National Bolsheviks" were those Russian nationalists who believed that the Soviet empire could best be preserved by retaining orthodox Marxism-Leninism as its ideological foundation while emphasizing Russia's historical, cultural, and political weight in it. 44 Mikhail Agurksy, who emphasized the complementarity of communism and Russian nationalism in his works, defines National Bolshevism as "the ideology of a political current that legitimizes the existing Soviet system from a Russian national point of view, contrary to its exclusivist Marxist legitimacy.,,45 However one defines National Bolshevism, its adherents bridged an ideological gap that separated what Dunlop called the "conservative Russian nationalists" (often called "Russophiles" or "neoSlavophiles"), who usually respected Russian Orthodoxy and revered the tsarist past but in general opposed communism, from "neo-Stalinists," who viewed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a progressive event and favored the command economy, but rejected the pre-revolutionary Russian monarchy and the Russian Orthodox Church as reactionary institutions. 46 Of course, designations such as "liberal," "democratic," "radical," "conservative," and so forth, leave much room for disagreement. The people who were often tagged as "conservative" (Communist hardliners and those who expressed serious reservations about the thrust of perestroika), for example, often rejected being labeled this way by those who (usually) proudly referred to themselves as "democrats." As Defense Minister (and future coup plotter) Dmitrii Yazov complained in early 1991: I personally cannot understand: Who are the democrats and who the conservatives? Someone who espouses socialist positions, the positions of a unified union state, is regarded as a conservative. And someone who is prepared to sell the motherland down the river, to ruin the Union, to retreat into national compartments, and to pull the Army apart is a democrat. It is absurd. 47

Just as orthodox Communists like Yazov disliked being labeled "conservative," Russian nationalists sometimes object to the terms "nationalism" and "nationalist" when they are applied to Russians. Stanislav Kuniaev, a poet and the main editor of the monthly journal Nash sovremennik (one of the main strongholds of the Russian nationalist movement during the perestroika era), explained why the term "patriotism" is preferable to "nationalism." "Nationalism is for small peoples, who are afraid of disappearing .... The Russians are a great people." He and most other exponents of some variation of a conservative Russian nationalist ideology believed that Russians who love the Fatherland are not "na-

Introduction

15

tionalists," but "patriots" devoted first and foremost to the Russian state rather than to any particular ethnic group. For Kuniaev and like-minded thinkers in the Russian nationalist movement, "Patriotism founded the Russian state and held it together. ,,48 Indeed, nationalism and patriotism refer to two distinct loyalties: the first to one's national group, and the second to one's state. 49 It is on this basis that Roman Szporluk, writing in 1989, divided the two main political forces in Russia into "nation-builders" (those who focused on the "construction" or "reconstruction" of the Russian ethnic community, which they dissociated from the Soviet state) and "empire-savers" (those who elevated the territorial integrity of the Soviet state-which they regarded as a Russian state-above all other concerns).50 While Szporluk's division of Soviet Russia's political forces into two neat groupings has the advantage of simplicity, by the end of 1990, little more than a year after his article was first published, the political context in the USSR had changed dramatically, and many of those who had criticized communism from a Russian nationalist perspective came to see the Soviet state as the lesser of two evils. That is, when Yeltsin offered Russians a democratic, liberal, Western-style nation state-"small Russia," whose boundaries were those of the RSFSR-many Russian nationalists, whatever their feelings about communism, sought refuge in Soviet "Great Russia" rather than accept the loss of "historically Russian lands." In any event, the main purpose of this study is not to describe in detail the many varieties of Russian nationalism, but to discuss the development of a heterogeneous coalition of groups and individuals who, despite their ideological differences, nonetheless regarded themselves as patriots and sought to arrest the program of radical reform that they believed was destroying the country. Above all else they sought to maintain a unitary Soviet state, but one based on distinctly Russian traditions-authoritarian traditions that for many harkened back to Tsar Nicholas I's ruling ideology of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." Therefore this work often uses terms such as "patriots," "nationalist-conservatives," and "empire-savers" in broad reference to the conservative Communists and Russian nationalists who placed supreme value on maintaining a strong state based on the restoration of Russian power. Although it is inevitable that some readers will disagree with my terminology, I hope that my usage of these words does more to enlighten than to obscure.

The Book's Outline Exploring opposition to reform at both the institutional and ideological level, this is a work of both political and intellectual history. Mainly it examines the public rhetoric of Russian nationalist intellectuals and those Communist Party leaders who were sympathetic to their views. While its main sources are literary and political journals, newspapers, and memoir literature, it also relies on secon-

16

Introduction

dary sources and to a lesser extent unpublished documents and supplementary personal interviews. What distinguishes it from much of the existing literature is not necessarily any sweeping revision of the history of perestroika-era politics or of the Russian nationalist movement, but its explanation of how Russian nationalism came to occupy such a prominent place in the views of those who considered themselves to be the torchbearers of Marxist-Leninist ideological orthodoxy. Indeed, the major political conflict in Russia in the late Soviet period was less one of "democrats" versus the Party than of two competing visions of the future of the country: one that aspired to integrate the country with the thought, institutions, and culture of the West, and one that rejected the West and instead turned inward for the sources of Russia's renewal. Chapters One and Two discuss Soviet nationality policies from Lenin to Brezhnev. Chapter One focuses on the creation of the USSR's basic political structures and the manner in which they effectively discriminated against the Russian republic and, many Russians believed, against ethnic Russians. It also reviews the gradual rehabilitation of Russian culture and symbols by Stalin. Chapter Two focuses on the rise of Russian nationalism after Stalin, the nationalities policies pursued by the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes, and the leading position of the Russian people in Soviet culture and politics. This chapter places particular emphasis on the Brezhnev regime's ambivalent attitude toward Russian nationalism; it seeks to place the regime's tolerance and even encouragement of controlled manifestations of Russian nationalist sentiment in the context of the Kremlin's larger policy goals in the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapter Three discusses the formation in the RSFSR Writers' Union of a coalition of anti-perestroika Russian nationalists and Soviet conservatives, unified by a shared opposition to the union's "liberal" elements, whose views were favored during the glasnost campaign. This process paralleled and anticipated developments in Soviet high politics, where Politburo member Egor Ligachev emerged as a symbol of opposition to the "excesses" of glasnost and the Westernizing direction that perestroika had taken. This is discussed in Chapter Four. While glasnost's critics in the Writers' Union took their cues from Ligachev and looked to him for support, Ligachev turned to the Russian nationalist intelligentsia to shore up support for a return to more traditional values. It was at this time, between 1986 and 1988, that the broad outlines of two different views of the Kremlin's reform program emerged in debates in literary journals and at Writers' Union meetings. A number of these writers played leading roles in the Russian national-patriotic movement that openly emerged during this period. This is probably an appropriate place to note that I make no pretension to literary expertise; the writers under discussion are viewed here as political activists, not as artists. Chapters Five and Six discuss the USSR's nationalities problem, the mobilization of Russian nationalism in response to nationalism in the Union republics, and the CPSU leadership's reaction to these developments. Focusing on the period from 1989 to mid-1990, Chapter Five discusses the Russian nationalists' rising concerns about "Russophobia" in the republics and the formation of

Introduction

17

groups outside the CPSU with a Russian nationalist orientation. Chapter Six focuses on the creation within the Party of a body that was sympathetic to the Russian national-imperial idea, the Communist Party of the RSFSR (RCP). Its creation marked a schism within the Communist Party between Gorbachev's liberalizing reformers and his conservative critics who managed to secure their control over the RCP. Chapter Seven considers the efforts ofIvan Polozkov's RCP in 1990-1991 to tap into Russian nationalist feeling at a time when both Communist rule and the Soviet Union itself were threatened with extinction. Hoping to prevent the disintegration of the Union, the leadership of the RCP attempted to blend Marxist-Leninist ideology with traditional Russian "great power" nationalism in order to broaden its appeal and thereby pressure Gorbachev to take firmer measures to restore order in the country. Chapter Eight discusses the country's terminal crisis during its last year and Gorbachev's attempt to save the USSR by coming to an agreement with the leaders of the Soviet republics. With Gorbachev's concessions to the republics infuriating the Party's hardliners and many Russian nationalists, criticism of the president finally turned into action in the summer of 1991. Although those who inspired the coup, those who launched it, and those who supported it were not necessarily the same people, each shared a common interest in retaining the centralized, Russian-dominated Soviet state that they believed the president was helping to destroy. Their struggle was not for communism, but for Russia, "one and indivisible." Chapter Nine serves as an epilogue. It discusses some general trends in Russian politics in the immediate post-coup period and seeks to place in historical context the struggle between reformers and conservatives during the Gorbachevera.

Transliteration and Capitalization This work uses the Library of Congress system of transliteration with several exceptions. Names beginning with the soft vowel 'ia' (j{) are rendered as 'ya.' Thus the Soviet Minister of Defense is Dmitrii Yazov rather than Iazov; Yakovlev rather than Iakovlev, etc. Several names are written in their more familiar form, such as Yeltsin and Trotsky, rather than EI'tsin and Trotskii. Likewise, the familiar "Politburo" is used instead of "Politbiuro." I have also dropped the diacritical marks that indicate the Russian soft sign in the words glasnost and samizdat, which under the Library of Congress system are more strictly rendered glasnost' and samizdat '. The existence of various transliteration systems can pose a number of challenges, one of which is the matter of consistency. So, for example, while I use the Library of Congress system in the text, when citing passages from works that use other transliteration systems I do not change the translation of the cited works. While most foreign words are italicized, fre-

18

Introduction

quently-used Russian words such as perestroika and glasnost are left unital icized. When capitalized, the word "Union" without a modifier refers specifically to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lower-case "union," absent a modifier, may refer to any union, including the Writers' Union. The word "Communist" is similarly used: when capitalized, "Communist" refers specifically to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); "Communists" are persons having membership in the CPSU and its branches in the Soviet republics. Lower-case "communist" has a broader meaning, both as an adjective (i.e., communist ideology) and in reference to non-specified communist parties. Finally, when referring to the Soviet republics I use their official Soviet (Russian) names: hence, until their declarations of sovereignty in 1990-1991, the Moldavian SSR rather than Moldova and the Belorussian SSR rather than Belarus. Likewise, the words Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Georgia, etc., refer to the Soviet Socialist Republics of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.

Abbreviations

ASSR - Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic CC - Central Committee (of the CPSU) CPD - Congress of Peoples' Deputies CPRF - Communist Party of the Russian Federation CPSU - Communist Party of the Soviet Union DKI - Movement of Communist Initiatives KGB - Committee for State Security LNF - Leningrad Popular Front MVD - Ministry of Internal Affairs NEP - New Economic Policy (1921-28) OFT - United Workers' Front OSR - United Council of Russia RAPP - Russian Association of Proletarian Writers RCP - Communist Party of the RSFSR (1990-91) RCP(B) - Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) RDC - Russian Deputies' Club RSFSR - Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic RSFSR CPD - RSFSR (Russian republic) Congress of People's Deputies SSR - Soviet Socialist Republic USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USSR CPD - USSR (Soviet) Congress of Peoples Deputies UW RSFSR - RSFSR (Russian republic) Writers' Union UW USSR - USSR (Soviet) Writers' Union VOOPIK - All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments

Introduction

19

VSKhSON - All-Russian Social Christian Union for the Liberation of the People

Russian terms

apparat - full-time Party-state bureacracy apparatchik - member of the Party or state apparat derevenshchiki - village prose writers derzhavnost' - Russian "great power" nationalism glasnost - openness Glavlit - Main Literature and Art Administration (responsible for censorship) Goskomizdat - State Committee on Publishing gorkom - city Party committee ispolkom - Soviet executive committee Komsomol- Communist Youth League korenizatsiia - indigenization krai - region nomenklatura - privileged Party and state workers obkom - regional Party committee oblast' - region perestroika - restructuring raikom - district Party committee raion - district rossiiane - citizens of the RSFSR (and later the Russian Federation) rossiiskii - adjectival form of rossiiane russkie - ethnic Russians russkii - adjectival form of russkie samizdat - a publication lacking official sanction sblizhenie - the drawing together of nationalities sliianie - the blending of nationalities

Notes 1. There were, of course, those cases where the central government did use force to quell nationalist disturbances in Tblisi (1989), Baku (1990), and Vilnius (1991); likewise, the republican governments used force against their own ethnic minorities in Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaidzhan, Kirgizia, and Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, during the terminal stage of the Soviet crisis in 1991, the country's leaders were unwilling to unleash the army on the population at the risk of a civil war. 2. Kosovo Pole was the site of an Ottoman victory over the Serbs in 1389. In 1987, as Yugoslavia entered the terminal phase of its criSIS, Milosevic spoke to a crowd of aggrieved Serbs in Kosovo (which they believed to be their ancestral heartland), telling

20

Introduction

them that "No one should dare to beat you." In his rise to power in Serbia in the late 1980s, Milosevic unabashedly played on Serbs' profound sense of victimhood. See Tim Judah, The Serbs: History Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 160-164. 3. Still another approach to the Russia question was taken by the exiled Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who watched events unfold in the Soviet Union from his isolated compound in Vermont. In a much-discussed article published in the autumn of 1990, titled "How Can Russia Be Rebuilt?," Solzhenitsyn suggested that the new Russia should be reconstituted as the RSFSR plus the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, as well as the northern part of Kazakhstan, if their populations favored it; the remaining regions of the USSR did not constitute essential and historically "Russian" parts of the Russian core and thus simply added to the imperial burden. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Kak nam obustroit' Rossiiu?," Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 September 1990, 3-6 4. Public opinion polls have demonstrated that "Independence Day" is a meaningless holiday to most Russians. According to one poll, conducted in June 2002, in response to the question "What does the June 12 holiday mean to you personally?" the leading answers were "It means nothing to me" (32 percent) and "An extra day off' (30 percent). "The Public Opinion Database." (14 April 2004). 5. Russian expansion, notes John LeDonne, was not the result of a master plan, but resulted from the simultaneous rise of Russia and the decline of neighboring powers such as Sweden, Poland, and Persia. To some extent, this drive to occupy the entire "heartland"-the continuous plain that stretches from the Elbe River to Manchuria-was conditioned by Russian geography, which determined the paths of Russian expansionism. John LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700-1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Contmnment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xiii, 1. 6. In 1462 the Grand Prince of Moscow ruled 24,000 square kilometers; in 1914 the Russian Empire covered an area of about 13.5 million square kilometers. Dominic Lieven, Empire: The RUSSIan Empire and Its RIvals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000),262. 7. D. Lieven, 253. 8. According to the 1897 census, only 44.3 percent of the empire's inhabitants were Russian. In the last Soviet census, taken ninety-two years later, that figure was 50.8 percent and declining. 9. Vera Tolz, RUSSIa. Inventing the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. 10. Roman Szporluk, Nations and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich LIst (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),206. 11. Szporluk (1988), 206. 12. Geoffrey Hosking, RUSSIa: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 13. Viktor A. Kremenyuk, Conflicts In and Around RUSSIa: Nation-Building in Difficult Times (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994),7. 14. See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). 15. Cited in Astrid Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 64. Emphasis in the original.

Introduction

21

16. Liah Greenfeld has identified this feeling as ressentiment-the resentment and hatred that arose out of Russian nationalists' realization that their country could not live up to the Western ideal. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter three. 17. Timothy McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 44. 18. W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978),239-250. 19. Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern 1llinois University Press, 1996). 20. See Hans Rogger, Russia in the Modern Age: Modernisation and Revolution 18811917 (New York: Longman, 1983). Quote from Rogger, "Nationalism and the State: A Russian Dilemma," Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 3 (1962): 253. 21. Weeks, 5. 22. Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 26. 23. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 118-121. 24. For an overview of the nationalist revival in the USSR, see H6U:ne Carrere d'Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Also see Ronald Gregor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 25. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider's History (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 7. 26. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998). 27. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 4-7. 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 29. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983), 55. Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm believes that nationalism precedes nations, and in particular looks at the role of political authorities in constructing nations "from above." Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 30. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 31. Josep R. Llobera, The God ofModernity: The Development ofNationalism in Western Europe (Oxford and Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994),219-221. Adrian Hastings argues that national consciousness in England was shaped between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Adrian Hastings, The Construction ofNationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15. 32. Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 202. 33. Connor (1994), 197. 34. Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage, 1997), I-II. See, for example, Gumilev's Ot Rusi do Rossii: Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii (Moscow: Rol'f, 2001). 35. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 448-450. 36. Suny, 7.

22

Introduction

37. In his book Beyond the Horizon, Ziuganov defined "the historical process" not as the history of "class struggle," but as a "process of interaction, competition, and change of ... civilizations." This process involved "ethnic groups (etnonsy) that have alwaysfrom ancient times-been the ... bearers, guardians, and the main players on the stage of the world history." Ziuganov, Za gorizontom (Moscow: Informpechat', 1995), 10. 38. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, distinguishes between the civic and democratic nationalism of western Europe from about 1830 to 1870 and "ethno-linguistic nationalism" of Central and eastern Europe between 1870 and World War I. See his Nations and Nationalism (1990). Some theorists reject the existence of civic nations. Bernard Yack, for example, suggests that the "myth of the civic nation" reflects one strategy that liberals, disappointed by the results of the age of nationalism, have used to "find and preserve a form of national community that is compatible with liberal political commitments." See Bernard Yack, "The Myth of the Civic Nation," in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 115. 39. Vera Tolz points out that the word "Rossiia" originated only in the eighteenth century, and that "rossiiskii" and "russkit' were used interchangeably into the twentieth century. Furthermore, she notes that only in the late 1980s did the democratic concept of a civic nation enter the discourse of Russian political elites. Tolz, 5, 58, 273. 40. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, second edition (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 2. 41. Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),7. 42. Anthony D. Smith, 74. 43. Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8-13. It should also be pointed out that the word "radical" was also often used by Soviet conservatives of all ideological persuasions to describe advocates of rapid democratization and economic reform; such "radicals" referred to themselves as "democrats." 44. When it originated during the civil war, National Bolshevism, first espoused by Russian patriots opposed to the Bolshevik seizure of power, was based on the assumption that communism in Russia was a temporary phenomenon. Viewing communism in the broader view of Russia's historical trajectory, National Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Ustrialov hoped that the Bolshevik regime would eventually become more Russian in nature and would defend Russian national interests. The National Bolsheviks of the late Soviet era likewise emphasized the vital roles played by the Communist Party and Soviet institutions in preserving the empire. 45. Mikhail Agursky, "The Prospects of National Bolshevism," in The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future, ed. Robert Conquest (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 87. 46. John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 128-129. 47. Pravda, 23 February 1991, I. 48. Interview in La Repubblica, 27 January 1990, 12, in Foreign Broadcast Infonnation Service Daily Report for the Soviet Union (hereafter FBIS-SOV), I February 1990, 66. 49. Connor (1994), 196. 50. Roman Szporluk, "Dilemmas of Russian Nationalism," Problems of Communism 38, no. 44 (1989): 15-35.

1 Russians, the RSFSR, and Soviet Nationalities Policy, 1917-1953 "In the West it is poorly understood that the Third International is not the International, but the Russian national idea." - Nikolai Berdiaev, 1937 "Scratch certain communists and you find a Great Russian chauvinist." - Vladimir Lenin, 1919

This book's main idea is uncomplicated: a movement toward Russian nationalist positions by part of the Communist Party elite had been taking place for several decades before Gorbachev, but began to be fully realized only as the Soviet Union entered its terminal crisis during the perestroika era. Just as many of the liberal reformers abandoned, and in some cases repudiated, Marxism-Leninism as they attempted to transform their country, so were the Party's conservatives forced to reconsider their own ideological convictions. Many appeared to lose faith in the official ideology's power to save the USSR and instead turned to traditional "great power" Russian nationalism. To fully appreciate this development it is useful to compare the views of the Bolshevik party's founder, Vladimir Lenin, to those of Gennadii Ziuganov, the head of the post-Soviet Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) since 1993. Their differences are significant and owe much to the circumstances under which their political philosophies developed. Lenin's political consciousness was shaped by the crisis of the old regime and the international struggle of the laboring classes. His main interest was in accelerating the unavoidable demise of the first and the inevitable triumph of the latter. The views of Gennadii Ziuganov, however, developed during an era when Russia, now in its Soviet incarnation, was at the height of its international prestige and was engaged in a global competition with a rival superpower; his outlook was also shaped by the tensions between the official Marxist-Leninist ide23

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ology of the CPSU and the post-Stalin Russian cultural nationalism of the intellectual elite. Whereas Lenin's ideas about the revolution developed underground and in exile, both internal and abroad, borrowing heavily from both the European socialist and the Russian revolutionary traditions, Ziuganov's views about Russia formed while serving the ruling party as a provincial instructor and then as an official in Moscow. Both Lenin and Ziuganov had extensive experience with propaganda-the first in the service of smashing the old world, and the second in the service of saving it. Unlike Lenin, who believed that the October Revolution represented a decisive break with Russia's backward, tsarist past, the leaders of the contemporary CPRF tend to place the Soviet era firmly in the context of Russia's thousandyear history. For Ziuganov, Soviet communism, despite its flaws and distortions, was a direct outgrowth of the Russian experience. While Lenin the revolutionary believed that socialist values were indisputably superior to the traditional Christian values that were fated to disappear, Ziuganov the Russian patriot believes that socialist values are the modem expression of traditional Russian and Christian values. Without fear of contradiction, Ziuganov asserts that he is a Marxist, a Leninist, an Orthodox Christian (or at least sympathetic to believers), and above all, a Russian patriot. During electoral campaigns his party has traditionally sought the support of all those who are committed to reviving the power of Great Russia. While the early Bolsheviks claimed to be internationalist, committed to a worldwide revolution of the proletariat, in today's Russia a basic component of communist ideology is the recognition of the Russian people's special ethnic identity and their mission to unite and lead the diverse peoples of Eurasia down a distinctly non-Western path of development. This broad appeal to Russian nationalism in its traditional-that is, ethnic and, more overtly, imperial-forms might at first glance seem to be antithetical to the Marxism's traditional emphasis on internationalism and Lenin's own efforts to suppress "Great Russian chauvinism." Nevertheless, this shift in emphasis earned Ziuganov and the CPRF considerable popular support during the tumultuous Yeltsin decade. Contrasting themselves to the "so-called democrats" (as they often referred to the liberals), whom they accused of blindly copying Western models of development as they sold out Russia's interests for their own personal gain, the Communists portrayed their own party as the leading party of Russian "patriots." Although on the surface this development might seem counterintuitive and contradictory, the merger of Marxism-Leninism and Russian nationalistconservatism continues a trend that had been taking place in Soviet Russian communism since Stalin or even since the early 1920s. During the Brezhnev era in particular, a time when Russian nationalists enjoyed considerable influence in Soviet political and creative institutions, limited expressions of Russian cultural nationalism became acceptable-and often useful-to the regime as long as the basic tenets of Soviet communist ideology were unchallenged.' The flowering of

Russians, the RSFSR, and Soviet Nationalities Policy, 1917-1953

25

Russian cultural nationalism influenced and indeed even shaped the political consciousness of a new generation of Communists and intellectuals who came of age during and after the Stalin era. Sharing several common assumptionsmost fundamentally the notion of Russian (and Soviet) uniqueness, the maintenance of a strong and indivisible state, and anti-Westernism-Soviet communism and conservative Russian nationalism had always enjoyed a certain degree of complementarity. This condition became more apparent when the USSR was threatened with its own demise after 1989. The ftrst two chapters of this book examine these developments. Chapter One discusses the development of Soviet nationalities policy from 1917 to 1953, focusing speciftcally on the position occupied by the country's dominant nation and its republic, the RSFSR. Chapter Two focuses on the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, when efforts to create a truly Soviet identity throughout the USSR paralleled the revival of Russian cultural nationalism in the RSFSR and the rise of an influential "Russian party" within the country's leading political and cultural institutions. But ftrst we turn to the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, and the creation of a nationalities policy that bore his imprint for more than seven decades.

Lenin and the Revolution Writing almost twenty years after the October Revolution, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev remarked that Bolshevism was "the third appearance of Russian autocratic centralism," following the old Muscovite state and Peter the Great's Russian Empire. Berdiaev claimed that because of the combination of Russia's history of despotism and the individual Russian's uncompromising search for the Absolute (and his resulting capacity for extreme dogmatism), "only in Russia could a communist revolution take place."z Of course Berdiaev's conclusion was later nullifted by the triumph in 1949 ofa largely indigenous Chinese Communist movement, influenced in part by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Nevertheless, to this day questions about the social and ideological roots of communism in Russia and indeed the very nature of the Bolsheviks' revolution remain contentious. Was the totalitarian nature of Soviet communism deeply rooted in the Russian autocratic tradition? Or was twentieth century Russia simply the accidental laboratory for a radical social experiment that was intended for the more economically developed countries of Western Europe? Putting the matter in more precise historiographical terms, was the Soviet Union, as historian Richard Pipes has long contended, the direct heir to the authoritarian political traditions of Holy Russia? Or did an imported Marxist ideology warp tsarist Russia's plodding but otherwise healthy development toward a Western-type polity and society, as Martin Malia has claimed?3 The answer to

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these questions is predicated largely on one's understanding of the founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Much Western scholarship on Lenin, especially in recent years, has portrayed him as a misanthrope who had as little love for Russia and Russians as he did for a tsarist system that had long outlived its usefulness. 4 To this Lenin, Russia was little more than a "slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunk country," as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his novel Lenin in Zurich. 5 Although it is true that he loathed Russia and its people, preferring instead the organization and efficiency of the Germans, Lenin was nevertheless strongly influenced by the Russian revolutionary tradition. The populists (narodniki) of the l860s and l870sand in particular Petr Tkachev and Petr Nechaev, each of whom emphasized the creation of a conspiratorial organization and the subordination of all morality to the needs of the revolution--were especially admired by the young Lenin. Yet Lenin carried on not only the Russian revolutionary tradition, but also many of Russia's most significant ruling traditions, including the centuries-old pattern of centralized dictatorship and the authorities' claim to a monopoly on Truth. In this sense, writes Timothy McDaniel, the author of The Agony of the Russian Idea, Bolshevism was "the triumph of a new version of Russian traditionalism.,,6 In the decade before the outbreak of World War I, that uncontestable Truth was Marxism, an imported ideology that confidently posited the inevitability of a violent working class revolution that would sweep away the decadent old bourgeois capitalist order in Europe. With its commitment to the creation of a higher form of society, Marxism was easily adapted to Russian conditions and mentalities. Russian Marxism, concludes McDaniel, was "not just a doctrine imported from the West, but was itself deeply rooted in the Russian idea.,,7 Years later Josef Stalin would marry Marxist socialism to Lenin's ideological and practical innovations (whose main purpose was to accommodate Marxism to Russia's particular social, political, and economic conditions) to create a new orthodoxy, a new Truth: Marxism-Leninism, the proper guardian and unassailable interpreter of which was the Communist Party he headed. Although the Bolsheviks were the more radical branch of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (the Mensheviks, from whom they split in 1903, were the other), they were still heavily influenced by the internationalist thinking of the European socialist movement. Most Marxists, Russian or otherwise, adhered to the belief of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that nationality and nationalism were products of bourgeois capitalism. In this view, state and national boundaries acted as barriers to the international unity of the working class-the revolutionary class. For the moment the class struggle would take place within state boundaries, but after the inevitable socialist revolution those national differences would gradually disappear. The bonds of class, they believed, were more durable and more deeply rooted than the bonds of nationality. Thus for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the proletarian revolution was not to be specifically Russian, but instead had worldwide ambitions. Whereas Marx and

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27

Engels, as well as most of the European socialists who followed them, were convinced that the socialist revolution would inevitably break out in one of the "advanced" capitalist countries of the West, Lenin imagined Russia-backwards and peasant, to be sure, but rapidly developing as an industrial power-as the scene of the workers' revolution. As early as 1893 Lenin had declared that Russia was a capitalist country and was therefore ripe for revolution-and socialism. Two decades passed while Lenin built up his conspiratorial party and worked, mostly from abroad, toward his final goal: the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat. The favorable conditions necessary for the proletarian revolution and the triumph of socialism finally appeared with the stalemate of World War I, which fundamentally weakened the imperial system. Declaring that Russia was the weakest link in the imperialist-capitalist chain, Lenin, while calling for its defeat, concluded that Russia would be the springboard of the first revolutionary upheaval. Subsequently the real revolution would shift to Western Europe, where capitalism was more developed and the conditions for the creation of a socialist society were more propitious. Upon seizing power in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were intent on extending the spirit of revolution to the workers and soldiers of war-weary Europe. Before signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, in which the new Bolshevik-dominated government ceded large portions of the empire to Germany and applied the principle of "self-determination" to many non-Russian regions, it scarcely occurred to the Bolshevik leaders that there might be "socialism in one country." As late as March 1919, at the height of the Civil War, Lenin continued to write that "Complete and final victory ... cannot be achieved in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries.,,8 Yet with the failure of the radical left in Germany to seize power in 191819, and Bela Kun's overthrow after leading a short-lived Communist government in Hungary in 1919, the prospects for a general proletarian uprising in Europe faded. Another opportunity to internationalize the revolution appeared in 1920 with the Polish invasion of Russia, which Lenin hoped to use as a springboard to send the Red Army into the heart of Europe and ignite workers' uprisings in Germany.9 This too failed, and the dream of a worldwide socialist revolution was postponed pending the appearance of more favorable conditions. The ostensibly international revolution that began in Russia had become a Russian revolution led by the Bolsheviks. In the end, Lenin and his party were left with backwards Russia, minus its western borderlands (which paradoxically were among its most economically developed regions as well), as the laboratory for the socialist experiment. After more than three and a half years of war with Germany, followed by three more years of civil war, the country Lenin ruled was in tatters. The attempt to impose a completely state-run economy by force-War Communism-had failed miserably, and in 1921 was replaced by the New Economic Policy (NEP),

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Chapter One

which allowed for concessions to individual entrepreneurship and the market. Still, the Bolsheviks' hold on the country was practically uncontested. Swelling with new recruits from various political backgrounds, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was quickly transformed from a small conspiratorial group into a mass organization with a membership in the millions.1O The Party absorbed elements running the entire gamut of prerevolutionary political activity, ranging from the socialist "left" (repentant Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries) to the extreme "right" (including former activists in the monarchist Union of Russian People), in an effort to consolidate Soviet power within the borders of the old tsarist empire. Thus, not long after the regime's birth-as again at the end of the Soviet era-two ideologies standing at opposite ends of the political spectrum, each fearing that with Western aid the empire assembled by the tsars would be dismembered, came together in order to preserve power in Russia. As the Party's base expanded to include millions of Russian proletarians, after 1921 it was subsumed by a strongly anti-Western perspective. This can be explained at least partly by the unfavorable circumstances the Bolsheviks faced at the time, including the West's rejection of the Bolsheviks as Russia's rulers, the Allies' participation in the Civil War, and the failure of the anticipated international revolution. I I Such anti-Westernism remained a key plank of Communist ideology for more than sixty years; moreover, after Stalin it was a common point of contact for both orthodox Marxist-Leninists and Russian nationalistconservatives. Indeed, anti-Western feeling continued to unite the Russian nationalists and Communists who struggled against Boris Yeltsin, his economic reforms, and his conciliatory foreign policy during the 1990s.

Bolshevik Nationalities Policy and the Russian Question After the false promise of 1917-1920, hopes for the global victory of communist "internationalism" slipped back into the realms of propaganda and political theory. While in theory the party of Lenin was above all internationalist, in practice its policies suggested a certain degree of ambivalence about the national issue. On one side of the equation, the Bolsheviks singled out Russian national tradition for destruction during the early years of the revolution. Nevertheless, elements of traditional Russian national feeling quickly appeared within the swelling ranks of the Bolsheviks, and as the political circumstances changed in the 1930s the regime co-opted and to some extent even encouraged these tendencies. The country's territorial organization was the most telling reflection of the Bolshevik regime's attitude toward its dominant nationality during its early years. Was the country to be a federation of sovereign nations, as Lenin had promised, or was it to be a centralized unitary state, as he believed was neces-

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29

sary? Despite his wartime calls for the national self-determination of peoples, Lenin was convinced that the large degree of political and economic centralism achieved during the tsarist era would be instrumental in the creation of socialism. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1913, Lenin had written that "The great centralized state is a tremendous step forward from medieval disunity to the future socialist unity of the whole world, and only via such a state ... can there be any road to socialism.,,12 Despite his later promises of "national self-determination" for the non-Russian peoples, Lenin never abandoned this belief, for he was convinced that centralization was a precondition for the future success of socialism. In fact, Lenin had little sympathy for the nationalist aspirations of Russia's ethnic minorities. A committed internationalist, he regarded nationalism as an ephemeral phenomenon-a "bourgeois trick"-associated with the era of capitalism.13 In the long run, the establishment of communism would destroy nationalism. Thus his calls for the "right of nations to self-determination" were merely tactical, and in any event the principle was never formally accepted by the Bolshevik Party. On his way to creating the socialist paradise, Lenin's goals were to destroy the remnants oftsarist power in the empire and gain the trust of the non-Russian peoples. In these he enjoyed some success. His stance against "Great Russian chauvinism" during the Civil War-in stark contrast to the conservative nationalism of White Army generals such as Anthony Deniken, whose army employed the slogan "Russia, One and Indivisible"-was no doubt appealing to the oppressed non-Russian nations of the empire and won considerable support for the Bolsheviks in the periphery. 14 Nevertheless, the new country that emerged from the Civil War was created not by persuasion but by force, and it was the threat of force that held the country together for the next seventy years. Although full sovereignty was granted to a cluster of nations in the northwestern borderlands-Finland (December 1917), Estonia (February 1920), Lithuania (July 1920), and Latvia (August 1920)-by the end of the Civil War the Bolshevik government revoked many of its past concessions and withdrew the independence option wherever practicable. Among the national territories that were forcibly reincorporated were Ukraine (December 1919), Azerbaidzhan (June 1920), Belorussia (August 1920), Armenia (December 1920), and Georgia (March 1921). With the loss of the western borderlands and its populations (including more than seven million Poles), the proportion of Russians in the new state rose significantly. Once the Russian Empire's largest minority (44.3 percent in 1897), Russians emerged as the majority nationality (52.6 percent in 1926) in the territorially-reduced Soviet Union. IS Russians also constituted 72 percent of the Communist Party (1922). Thus the problem of Great Russian dominance, which Lenin saw as a major threat to the cohesion of the new state, was only exacerbated by the country's loss of millions of non-Russians. The long-term answer to the Russia's nationality problem, Lenin believed, lay in the policies of sblizhenie (drawing closer together) and sliianie (blending or assimilation) of its many nationalities. 16 Russians and the dozens of ethnic

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Chapter One

minorities who made up the new state would gradually merge to form one Soviet people, while "national" cultures and nationalist sympathies-in particular the Great Russian chauvinism that had made the tsarist empire a "prisonhouse of nations"-would become relics ofthe past. 17 However, this was a distant goal to be achieved over the course of generations. Since the making of a true Soviet man--one whose political and cultural consciousness was shaped by communist ideology, undiluted by antiquated national or religious sentiment-lay sometime in the future, a sensible short-term solution was to grant the non-Russian nationalities their own national-territorial republics in which non-Russian cultures would be allowed to develop. Although he disdained nationalism, Lenin recognized that it could be useful for advancing his main objective, which was to create the world's first socialist society. In December 1922 a Union Treaty formally united the nominally independent Ukraine, Belorussia, Transcaucasia (an amalgamation of Georgia, Azerbaidzhan, and Armenia), and RSFSR (which included what would later become the Central Asian republics) into a "confederation" of equal Soviet republics. According to the treaty's final article, each Union republic had the right to secede from the Union-a right that was repeated in every successive Soviet Constitution (1924, 1936, 1977).18 Thus with the formation of the USSR the Bolsheviks had arrived at a compromise federal solution that would ostensibly satisfy the aspirations of the non-Russian peoples by providing them varying degrees of autonomy, but that in reality concentrated most powers in the center. While in principle the new entity was a federal state based on the voluntary union of national republics, in reality orders emanated from Moscow, the historic seat of pre-Petrine Russia. Many Bolsheviks were unconvinced on both practical and ideological grounds of the soundness of these concessions to non-Russian nationalism, but Lenin managed to persuade his comrades to accept the federal formula as an instrument for welding together the fragments of the old empire. 19 Only by the compromise of combining the popular sentiments of nationalism with the political institutions of territorial federalism, the Bolsheviks concluded, could the country's political forces be harnessed in the service of building socialism. 2o Thus for Russia's new rulers, federalism was merely a stage on the path to a unified socialist society.21 With the situation in the USSR more or less stabilized, the main thrust of the Soviet Union's nationalities policy through the 1920s and into the early Stalin period was directed at korenizatsiia, or indigenization. This policy aimed at raising the level of social, economic, and political development of the relatively backward regions of the country by providing the republics with institutional equality and considerable cultural autonomy. National elites were to be trained and promoted into positions of leadership in each national territory. In addition, the non-Russian republics could, and indeed were actively encouraged to, use their own languages and choose their own alphabets. With the introduction of Ukrainian as the language of public life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Repub-

Russians, the RSFSR, and Soviet Nationalities Policy, 1917-1953

31

lic (SSR), Ukrainian nationals who had once spoken Russian as their primary language began using Ukrainian. Introduced by force, the new language policy similarly affected the Belorussian SSR, despite significant local resistance to its implementation. 22 According to Terry Martin, the author of a highly original study of what he calls the "Affirmative Action Empire," these concessions to the non-Russian nationalities were based on three premises: 1) that the appeal of nationalism could be disarmed by granting the forms of nationhood; 2) that national consciousness was a necessary phase that had to be tolerated on the way to internationalism; and 3) that non-Russian nationalism was historically justified as a response to the great-power chauvinism of the Tsarist regime. Local nationalism, Lenin believed, was a lesser danger than Great Russian chauvinism. 23 Of course, the ultimate purpose of korenizatsiia (or natsionalizatsiia, the preferred term) was not to encourage the development of local national identities for their own sake, but to sovietize the non-Russian regions. For example, written languages were developed and used for the purpose of educating indigenes and promoting socialism. 24 Kirgiz, Turkmen, and Tadzhiks were among the major nationalities that received written languages at that time, as did the titular peoples of numerous "autonomous republics" (ASSRs, located within the Union republics), including Chechens, Ingush, Bashkirs, Mordvinians, Buriats, and Kalmyks. 25 Meanwhile, attempts to conduct the fight against illiteracy in the Russian language were frequently denounced as "great-power chauvinism.,,26 Valery Tishkov, the former director of the USSR's Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and once a nationalities advisor to Yeltsin, has long been critical of the Leninist-Stalinist approach to the national-territorial division of the Soviet Union. In his view, the regime's nationality policies were beset with internal contradictions: "on the one hand, they [Soviet leaders] pursued a harsh policy of repression and hyper-centralized power; on the other, they carried out a policy of ethnonational state-building.,,27 Indeed, with the eventual creation of fifteen national (Union) republics, embracing thirty-eight national-territorial units (autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, and autonomous okrugs), national territories were created for nearly every major ethnicity in the USSRin many cases before they had even consolidated into nations. 28 In each of the Union republics the titular nationality constituted a majority, and Slavs, mostly Russians, were a significant minority. The result of Soviet nationalities policies was that, as historian Ronald Suny has written, "Rather than a melting pot, the Soviet Union became the incubator of new nations.,,29 Indeed, observers have not infrequently called the USSR a national time-bomb, fated to come undone by the very institutions that it created during its formation. 30 Yet in the short- and medium-term, Soviet nationalities policies were successful, as they largely achieved their goals of educating and promoting nonRussian peoples in the larger effort to create a loyal Soviet citizenry devoted to the creation of a socialist society. At the same time, Soviet policies during the 1920s and early 1930s facilitated the growth of nationalist sentiment among the

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Union's non-Russian peoples while suppressing overt manifestations of Russian chauvinism. Both Lenin and Stalin believed that this would help the nonRussians to overcome their historic distrust of the Great Russians and thus would aid the consolidation of Soviet power, for all nationalities-Russian and non-Russian alike-would develop an overarching Soviet identity. In the meantime, since Soviet "affirmative action" policies were intended to benefit the nonRussians, Russians were expected to make sacrifices. To avoid the perception of empire, Martin asserts, Russians, particularly those living in areas dominated by another nationality, "bore the brunt of positive discrimination": they were asked to learn non-Russian languages, and their culture was stigmatized as a culture of • 31 oppressIOn. The sacrifices that Russians were expected to make were also reflected in the federal structure of the Soviet Union, which in effect discriminated against the territorial republic of the country's largest nationality. Most significantly, the Soviet leadership determined that the cohesiveness of the USSR would be best served if the Russian republic (the RSFSR) were denied its individuality by submerging it within all-Union structures. For this reason the Soviet government refused to grant the RSFSR certain institutions possessed by the other Union republics, such as a separate communist party apparatus and an Academy of Sciences. Until 1990 the Russian republic was instead served by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the USSR Academy of Sciences, as well as other all-Union institutions. The effect of this policy is best summarized in a later writer's lament that "Russia became the only republic without its own history books or its own national encyclopedia, and Russian schools were the only ones that did not require courses in the history of their republic in addition to the history of the USSR.,,32 This territorial and institutional arrangement reflected Lenin's belief that Russians should not be perceived as colonizers or chauvinists. Therefore the RSFSR could not be a national-territorial republic for the Russians in the same way that the Georgian people, for example, were later served by the creation of the Georgian SSR. Indeed, the RSFSR was simply what was left over after national republics had been created for the major non-Russian nationalities. Moreover, the RSFSR itself contained a number of autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts that served as territorial homelands for even smaller nationalities on the periphery; in these territories, too, the development of native languages and cultures was encouraged under the indigenization policy. Although the specific arrangements underwent several modifications, the matreshka-like nature of the arrangement remained the same for seven decades. Thus partly in order to contain the Great Russian chauvinism that he suspected was lurking just underneath the surface, Lenin made the Russian republic less equal than its counterparts. An even harsher and therefore more readily recognizable expression of Lenin's attitude toward Russia's past and its national identity was the new regime's ruthless treatment of the Russian Orthodox

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33

Church, Russia's most prominent cultural institution and the focal point of the messianism of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles. As Marxists, Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that religion was the "opium of the people"-a drug that offered relief to the pain of the oppressed classes. But since under the Bolshevik regime these classes were no longer oppressed-indeed, Bolshevism's triumph was officially attributed to the anticapitalist alliance of workers and peasantsreligion was now superfluous and even harmful to the Bolsheviks' plans to create a new people and a new society.33 In Lenin's view, the Russian Orthodox Church represented a potentially threatening relic of the old order and thus had to be isolated and then destroyed. In the long run religion, like nationalism, must ultimately disappear. 34 Despite the formulation and implementation of policies that were explicitly designed to undermine Russian nationalist sentiment, manifestations of Great Russian chauvinism and xenophobia did not disappear but in fact grew during the early 1920s as the Bolsheviks and their enemies adapted to the postrevolutionary environment. In 1921 Nikolai Ustrialov, together with other Russian emigres, published a collection of essays entitled Smena vekh (Change of Landmarks), which represented their having come to terms with Bolshevik power as a genuinely Russian phenomenon capable of holding the Russian state together and reviving its imperial power. The smenavekhovtsy lent their support to Bolshevik policies such as the New Economic Policy, adopted in 1921 to replace the failed policy of War Communism, which to them suggested that the regime was relaxing and becoming more sensible. As a result the Party welcomed some of them back to the Soviet Union, and Lenin himself went so far as to acknowledge that the smenavekhovtsy "express the mood of thousands and tens of thousands of bourgeois and all sorts of Soviet officials who participate in our New Economic Policy.,,35 Thus the merger of the "red and the black"----of "the most militant and xenophobic element in Bolshevism with the most chauvinistic and illiberal strain of Russian imperialism," in the words of historian Robert English-dates from the fIrst years of Communist rule. 36 As the Party swelled with commissars whose outlook was shaped more by old peasant Russia than the complex intellectual traditions of Europe (and Russia) and its thin internationalist veneer eroded, the Party's "ethos was increasingly marked by anti-Westernism and anti-intellectualism.,,3? Although the growth of Great Russian chauvinism that accompanied the expansion of the Party's ranks was of grave concern to Lenin, a stroke in March 1922 left him incapacitated and only intermittently active in politics until his death less than two years later.

Official Nationalism under Stalin As the Commissar of Nationalities from 1917 to 1924, Josef Stalin, a Georgian, was recognized as the leading Bolshevik expert on nationalities issues. In fact, it

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was Stalin who in 1913 provided the party with its official definition of the nation as "a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture.,,38 This description of the nation, with its emphasis on tangible ethnonational characteristics, remained the official definition for the entire Soviet period and is a testament to the Soviet view that the nation was not a subjectively defined community of perceived belonging and destiny, but rather something that can be created or destroyed through the development or disappearance of its cultural attributes within a national territory.39 (Hence Stalin's belief, put to the test near the end of W orId War II, that disloyal nations could be destroyed by deporting them from their ancestral homelands.) As long as Lenin lived he and Stalin agreed on the basic principles of Soviet nationalities policy, even if they sometimes disagreed about specific aspects of its implementation. 4o For more than a decade Stalin supported korenizatsiia (or, as he called it, natsionalizatsiia) but was aware that this policy, with its antiRussian undertones and support for non-Russian national cultures, was not popular with the Party rank-and-file. 41 And for Stalin popular support within the Party for his ideas was essential for defeating his rivals for power, which he did partly by disarming them ideologically and partly by presenting himself as Lenin's partner, ideological doppelganger, and intended heir. To counter Lev Trotsky and his internationalist principle of "permanent revolution," Stalin promoted "socialism in one country.'.42 To its critics, this slogan was evidence of Stalin's Russocentrism, as its internal focus suggested that the general secretary was placing Russian interests ahead of those of the international proletariat. This allegation was nothing new, for as commissar for nationalities during the civil war Stalin had been charged with Great Russian chauvinism by his ailing mentor for the harsh methods he employed while incorporating Georgia into the Union. Although Stalin's defeat of Trotsky was due in part to the fact that his stance better reflected the Russocentric views of the Party majority, his rise to power in the mid-1920s did not result in a sudden reversal of Soviet nationalities policies in favor of the dominant nation; indeed, Russians would get no special treatment for another decade, and even when Russian culture was later rehabilitated it still fell disproportionately to Russians to bear the burdens of lifting the more backward nationalities to their level of economic and cultural development. For the moment, under Stalin pre-revolutionary Russian culture continued to be suppressed. This was best symbolized by the assault on religion-and on the Russian Orthodox Church in particular-that persisted in violent waves through the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, in literature and scholarship, fields in which Russian emigres (who largely rejected the Soviet regime) contributed actively, the Soviet authorities continued to attack symptoms of Great Russian chauvinism. This was one of the functions of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), one of the predecessors of the Writers' Union. Historical

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studies were also monitored-a task that fell to Vice Commissar of Education Mikhail Pokrovskii-and ideological deviations from Marxism were to be punished. The new history glorified the October Revolution not as the pinnacle of Russian history but as a victory of the international proletariat, and historians suspected of harboring sympathy for the dark times of pre-revolutionary Russia suffered harsh consequences. A more overtly Russocentric orientation emerged only gradually and in the context of a transformed international climate. A significant milestone was the war scare of 1927, when the regime launched a major campaign designed to mobilize popular support for the regime. 43 With the growth of fascist movements in Europe and the outbreak of war in the near future a real possibility, it seems that Stalin lost faith in Marxist-Leninist ideology'S ability to mobilize the Russian masses, which after all formed the core of the Soviet population. By the early 1930s the regime was trying to encourage the development of popular patriotic loyalty to the Soviet Fatherland, and in the process began to rely on the nationality most closely identified with the Soviet state-the Russians. Most significant in this regard was a December 1932 Politburo decree that inaugurated, according to Terry Martin, "a thoroughgoing rehabilitation of Russian culture and the right of Russians to national seIf-expression.'M This line continued with the promulgation of a new Soviet Constitution in 1936. The regime now emphasized the "Friendship of the Peoples"-a metaphor that was intended to signify the existence of a multinational community on Soviet soil, but which in reality put the Russians "first among equals.,,45 The policy of korenizatsiia gradually came to an end as the Soviet regime began to promote the "russification" of the political institutions of the non-Russian republics. 46 Although Stalin's main goal in promoting a policy ofrussification was to secure Soviet dominance in the increasingly distrusted national borderlands, it was not long before russification appeared to have become an end in itself47 Throughout the USSR, Soviet propaganda now celebrated the unifying role of the Russian nation and culture, while the Russian language and literature, as well as Russian national heroes, were showered with unprecedented praise. Having earlier declared Great Russian chauvinism to be the main threat to the Party, Stalin abandoned this rhetoric by the middle of the decade; from 1936 onward the Soviet press avoided any reference to great-power chauvinism and discrimination against locals. 48 The historic non-Russian "mistrust" of Russians, Stalin declared in December 1935, had been overcome. 49 Although many historians, most notably Mikhail Agursky, have portrayed this phenomenon as a gradual merger of communism and Russian nationalism, Nicolai Petro believes that Stalin's policy reversal was "a calculated decision on Stalin's part to prepare the regime better for the trials ahead-rapid industrialization, possible war.,,50 Likewise, Brandenberger emphasizes that this ideological reversal was "[p]ragmatic rather than genuinely nationalist." Stalin, he argues, "did not aim to promote Russian ethnic interests in those years so much as to foster a maximally accessible, populist sense of Soviet identity through the

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instrumental use of russocentric appeals.,,51 His famous 1931 speech to Soviet industrial managers, whose backdrop was industrialization, the fulfillment of the first Five Year Plan, and the urging of increased vigilance against both external and internal enemies, illuminates how Stalin was prepared to employ Russian history in the service of Soviet goals: To reduce the tempo would mean to fall behind; and those who fall behind are beaten. . . . The history of old Russia showed her constantly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all-for her backwardness. For her military backwardness, her cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet [Nekrasov]: "Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty and thou art helpless, Mother Russia.,,52

Yet such appeals to Russian history were not indicative of a radical shift in nationalities policy; there was to be no return to the "prisonhouse of nations" associated with tsarist imperialism. As Robert English observes, "Leninism was not repudiated, but Stalin's constituency among the vydvizhentsy [the new generation that was moving up the Party's ranks] grasped simple historical analogies better than complex Marxist theories about capital or markets.,,53 Nevertheless, such analogies were used with greater frequency during the 1930s as the regime searched for a "usable past" that could be deployed to mobilize society in support of Soviet goals. Stalin concluded this could be found in the history of Russian state-building. 54 The dominant Pokrovskii school of history, which had emphasized the importance of unseeable forces over that of great men, was replaced by a more traditional approach to history that praised the achievements of Russian heroes such as Dmitrii Donskoi and Aleksandr Nevskii. Beginning in the 1930s Russian and Soviet history "was to catch people's imagination and promote a unified sense of identity that the previous decade's internationalist proletarian ideology had failed to stimulate. Forging a sense of patriotic unity promised to strengthen the party's and state's position in regard to internal opposition and external threat. ,,55 Accordingly, the Soviet leadership decided that under these circumstances the most effective historical narrative for the multinational Soviet Union would be a Russian-centered one that stressed traditional patriotism. In the new textbook portrayal of Muscovite and imperial Russia, for example, the extension of Moscow's control over Ukraine and Belorussia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was portrayed, as it was in tsarist times, as the reunification of indigenous Russian lands. Likewise, textbook writers developed the theory of the "lesser evil" to justify Russian nationalism to the empire's non-Slavs: Russians were portrayed as the elder brother whose conquest brought the fruits of her civilization to the

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37

empire's peripheries while it protected Central Asia and the Caucasus region from the British. The history of the USSR, from this perspective, was the continuation of the Russian people's state building. 56 Whether intentional or not, such policies encouraged the revival of Russian national feeling. Under Stalin, official history was part of a larger policy designed to bond the republics closer together by emphasizing the notion that Russians were the historic integrators of the multinational state. Likewise, the regime also hoped to remedy the undesirable growth of local nationalisms that were inadvertently encouraged by the creation of national republics and the korenizatsiia policy. To achieve these goals the Soviet regime encouraged the in-migration of nonindigenes, especially Russians, into the republics. Between 1926 and 1939, 1.7 million people migrated to Kazakhstan and the Central Asian republics alone; and even within the RSFSR a large part of the Russian population moved from European Russia to the eastern and southern (northern Caucasus) regions. 57 Even if this process was stimulated more by economic than political considerations, no doubt Stalin saw the influx of a Russian upper class in the national territories as a factor that contributed to the political stability he desired there. 58 While under Stalin Russians in the RSFSR or elsewhere received no special privileges, those Russians who settled in the other republics nevertheless tended to be better off than the titular nationalities, if only because Russians were rewarded for the better-developed technical skills that they tended to possess. 59 Russians also benefited from the promotion of the Russian language as the lingua franca for all the Soviet peoples. Although this had been the case since at least the mid-l 920s, by the mid-1930s non-Russians found it increasingly necessary to learn Russian in order to achieve success in their careers--especially for those who pursued political careers. Any ambiguity about the primacy of the Russian language even in the non-Russian republics was clarified in March 1938, when a new law was enacted that made mandatory the study of Russian in all schools throughout the USSR. Afterwards the number of books published in languages other than Russian fell sharply, as Russian became the language of all official business and of most educational institutions. Naturally, this was helpful to the Russian diaspora that settled in the republics during the wave of intensive industrialization that had begun ten years earlier, and contributed to the perception in the republics that Russians were colonizers. Coinciding with what appeared to be a policy of russification in the political, intellectual, and cultural spheres in the non-Russian parts of the USSR was the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Many leaders of the republics, accused of committing "national deviations," were removed (and often shot) and replaced with Russians, who Stalin perceived to be more loyal to the state. Similar accusations of national deviation and disloyalty resulted in the deaths of one thousand non-Russian writers and numerous other cultural figures. 6o Meanwhile, thousands of potentially disloyal Latvians and Poles (among others) in the sensitive border areas were deported and the number of Jews in leading Soviet bodies (for example, the NKVD and the Central Committee of the CPSU) declined

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Chapter One

dramatically. A Communist Party whose ethnic and class composItIon had changed substantially since the revolutionary days, when it was dominated by intellectuals and members of oppressed minorities, was now overwhelmingly Russian and in the grips of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. This tendency was exacerbated after World War II, during Stalin's last years, when a campaign against "cosmopolitanism" roused anti-Jewish sentiment in the country. The Great Patriotic War, during which Stalinist rhetoric tended to speak in terms of nations and patriotism rather than of classes and the class struggle, cemented the distinguished place of the Russian people in the Soviet Union. With Soviet statehood threatened by the German invasion of June 1941, appeals to Russian patriotism for the defense of the Fatherland (or Motherland) escalated. 6l Although the Soviet regime continued to advertise the principle of the equality of races and nations (in contrast to the Nazis' claims of German racial superiority), during the war's last years several Soviet nations were punished and deported for allegedly collaborating with the Germans, including the Chechens and Ingush, the Kalmyks and Karachais, and the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars. Instead of internationalism and the class struggle, the Soviet government emphasized Russian national pride, for this war was not only "great," it was a war for the Fatherland, whose defense required the destruction of every single German, regardless of his class. The Soviet regime went so far to accommodate Russian national feeling as to revive the Russian Orthodox Church, which had suffered so greatly in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church, Stalin believed, could provide useful services both as a rallying point for the Russian people and as an instrument for the reoccupation of the Soviet borderlands at war's end. 62 A reflection of the regime's heightened respect for the Russian past was its adoption at the end of 1943 of a new national anthem that began with the words "Great Rus' has forged for all time an unbreakable union of free republics.,,63 Since victory in the Great Patriotic War was bought first of all with Russian blood, the Russian republic emerged from the war as "the first among equals" of the Soviet republics and the status of Russians was officially elevated to that of "elder brother" among the Soviet nationalities. Throughout the 1940s Russians, as well as Georgians and Armenians (both historically Orthodox peoples), continued to be given preferential admittance into the Party as the representation of Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, and the Central Asian peoples decreased. 64 The deportation of "disloyal" groups at the war's end was a signal to the other nonRussian nationalities-the Muslim nations in particular-that they should accept their subordinate place in the increasingly Russian-dominated one-party state. 65 Stalin's famous address to a group of Red Army commanders at the end of the war demonstrates how he conceived of the Russians' leadership role in the USSR: I would like to drink a toast to our Soviet people, and in particular to the health of the Russian people.

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I drink first of all to the health of the Russian people because it is the leading nation of all the nations belonging to the Soviet Union. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it earned in this war general recognition as the guiding force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people, but also because it has a clear mind, a firm character and patience. 66

Great Russian chauvinism--combined with militant anti-W esternism and an intensified Soviet xenophobia-reached new heights after the war. While a campaign against "servility before the West" attempted to justify the lowering of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, a simultaneous crusade against "bourgeois nationalism" aimed to destroy national self-consciousness in the USSR's nonRussian republics. The praise of everything Russian reached the height of absurdity in the late 1940s as intellectuals were obliged to demonstrate Russian superiority in areas such as science, history, and culture. 67 Stalin himself, now dabbling in linguistics, promoted Russian as the "world language of socialism" in a 1949 article. "No one who does not know Russian and cannot read the works of the Russian intellect in the original can call himself a scholar," he asserted. 68 While the West was demonized and Jews were singled out for attack during the postwar zhdanovshchina and especially during Stalin's last years, Russians and the Russian past were accorded a level of prestige unprecedented in Soviet history.69 Yet "Russia" had not triumphed over the Soviet Union: the rehabilitation of traditional Russian culture and the promotion of Russian national selfexpression since the mid-1930s were intended mainly to bolster the Soviet Union's cohesion. The regime encouraged Russians to identify their national interests with Soviet interests by blurring the distinction between them; after the war the terms "Russian" and "Soviet" were routinely used interchangeably.70 Russians, like the USSR's other nationalities, were expected to think of themselves as above all Soviet, and to believe that their aspirations were realized within the Soviet state. Nevertheless, from the 1930s until nearly the end of the Soviet era, the Soviet Union was in many respects a Russian empire. The Russian language, Russian culture, and Russian traditions were not only dominant in the RSFSR, but were also promoted throughout the USSR alongside the languages, cultures, and traditions of the non-Russian republics. With Russian acknowledged as the universallanguage of the empire, Russians naturally found themselves in an advantageous position: they faced fewer restrictions on where they could work, travel, and live than did non-Russi an-speaking peoples. Moreover, with the creation of Russian-language newspapers in the non-Russian republics, Russians were made to understand that they need not feel like national minorities anywhere in the Soviet Union. 71 Russians, unashamed and even proud of their national past and traditions, played a unifying role throughout the USSR. Dominating the Com-

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Chapter One

munist Party and its leading bodies, Russians were without a doubt the leading nationality in the Soviet Union.

Notes I. The literature on late Soviet-era Russian nationalism is extensive. Most of it is based on published sources, such as Soviet literary journals and newspapers, as well as samizdat materials. See, for example, John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Stephen K. Carter, Russian Nationalism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); Thomas ParI and, The Rejection in Russia of Totalitarian Socialism and Liberal Democracy: A Study of the Russian New Right (Helsinki: Commentationes Scienarium Socialium, 1993). Alexander Yanov, an emigre with extensive insider knowledge of the Russian nationalist movement, has made valuable, although heavily biased, contributions with his The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR (Berkeley: Institute ofIntemational Studies, 1978) and The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Recent scholarly publications include Yitzhak Brudny's Reinventing Russia, which analyzes the Brezhnev regime's attempt to co-opt Russian nationalist sentiment during the 1960s and 1970s, and Judith Devlin's Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), which examines the various tendencies of Russian nationalism during the post-Soviet period. Most recently Nikolai Mitrokhin has made a significant contribution to the literature on Russian nationalism after Stalin in a study based largely on interviews with members of the "Russian party" within the Soviet establishment. See his Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkie natsionalistov v SSSR 1953-1985 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003). 2. Nikolai Berdiaev, The Origins of Russian Communism (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948),114,120. 3. Such arguments about the nature and sources of Soviet communism may be found in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) and Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History ofSocialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Also see Solzhenitsyn' s essay, "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations," in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, et aI., From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 105-143. For a very useful essay that discusses the alleged predisposition of Russian intellectual culture to totalitarianism, see Andrzej Walicki, "The Intellectual Tradition of Pre-Revolutionary Russia: A Re-examination," in Alexander Shtromas and Morton A. Kaplan, eds., The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future, Volume 3: Ideology, Culture, and Nationality (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 3-21. 4. See Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: The New Press, 1994); Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5. Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, Lenin in Zurich (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 103-4.

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41

6. McDaniel, 54, 61. 7. McDaniel, 101. 8. Quoted in Carter, 43. 9. Pipes (1996), 95-114. 10. Among the large numbers of Bolsheviks who flooded the Party's ranks after the revolution, the overwhelming majority were Russian, thus creating a party that by 1922 was composed of 72 percent ethnic Russians, with an additional 10 percent being Russian by language. For many of these new elements, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" amounted to the establishment of Great Russian hegemony in the reconsolidated country. Richard Pipes, The Formation o/the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964),277-278. II. The Russian emigre historian Mikhail Agursky argues that the Bolsheviks were always Russian nationalists of a particular sort. He claims that they had inherited the nationalism of the nineteenth-century Westernizers, which rejected both the alien intruder and the ancestral ways which hindered true progress. Agursky cites the West-rejecting ideology of the Vpered (Forward) group (which included Aleksandr Bogdanov, Mikhail Pokrovskii, and Leonid Krasin) as having made "an extremely important contribution to the nationalization and totalitarianism of Bolshevism." See Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 8, 72-76. 12. Quoted in Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography o/Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),99. 13. Pipes (1964), 276; quote cited in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 4. 14. See Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 280282. 15. Raymond Pearson, "The Historical Background to Soviet Federalism," in Alastair McAuley, Soviet Federalism, Nationalism and Economic Decentralization (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 17-18,21. 16. Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 36-37. I 7. A consequence of Lenin's strong distaste for Russian nationalism was that the emigre intelligentsia, having left Russia to escape Bolshevik persecution, became the standard-bearers of Russian traditions for as long as Lenin lived. 18. Of the fifteen Union republics that constituted the USSR after World War II (a sixteenth, the Karelo-Finnish Republic, created in 1940, was demoted to the status of an autonomous republic within the RSFSR and renamed the Karelian Republic in 1956), six had been either signatories, or the direct legal successors to signatories, of the original Union Treaty (RSFSR, Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaidzhan). The other Union republics were created at various times: the five Central Asian Republics (Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan) were carved out of the RSFSR in the 1920s, while Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and most of what would become the Moldavian SSR (there was already a tiny Moldavian ASSR within the RSFSR) were annexed during World War II. In legal terms, these nine republics joined the USSR not by being signatories to the original Union Treaty, but by petitions by their governments requesting admission to the USSR-a sham that Soviet governments used to justify their hold on these territories until 1991. Jane Henderson, "Legal Aspects ofthe Soviet Federal Structure," in McAuley, 47-48. 19. Pipes (1964), 43-49, 110- I I 1,277; Connor (1984), 36-37.

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20. Gregory Gleason, Federalism and Nationalism: The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990),3. 21. Gleason, 19. 22. See Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, trans. Karen Forster and Oswald Forster (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 42-48. 23. Martin, 4-8. 24. Kaiser (1994), 124-135; Martin, 10-12. 25. Simon, 46-47. 26. Simon, 49. 27. Tishkov notes that instead of creating conditions that would ensure equal rights for all the USSR's nationalities and ethnic groups-namely, the national-cultural principle of social organization within a liberal and democratic framework-the system focused on the rights of "titular" nations within their own national-territorial units while often ignoring the rights of minorities. Tishkov, 30, 33, 39; Brubaker, 23-40; Kremenyuk, 56-57. 28. There were also substantial minorities that lacked their own national territory. Thirteen of those nationalities numbered over 100,000, and Germans and Poles over one million. Indeed, the designation of Union republic and the lesser autonomous republic (within a Union republic) did not necessarily correspond to the size of the nationality for which it was created. For example, while one million (1989) Estonians had their own Union republic, the national-territorial unit named for the USSR's 6.65 million Tatars had only autonomous status within the RSFSR. 29. Suny, 87. 30. For a comparative discussion of the long-term impact that socialist institutions, national federalism in particular, had on the multinational USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, see Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Bunce writes that "the very design of these systems functioned over time to divide and weaken the powerful, homogenize and strengthen the weak, and undercut economic performance." "Thus," he concludes, "in response to the question of institutional determinism, we would have to argue that these systems were fated to end." Bunce, 13 I, 142. Also see Rogers Brubaker's discussion of "institutionalized multinationality" and its consequences, 23-54. 31. Martin, 15-20. 32. Galina Litvinova, "Starshii ili ravnyi?" Nash sovremennik 6 (June 1989): 17. 33. No less significant was Lenin's rejection of religious morality, which could only impede the triumph of socialism. Indeed, for the Bolshevik leader, morality was a relative concept: anything done in the service of the revolution was moral; whatever stood in its way was immoral. See Lev Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," originally published in The New International 4, no. 6 (1936). 34. Historian Arto Luukkanen believes that in general the religious policy of the Bolshevik party, like its nationality policy, was guided more by political reality than by ideology. Under the pressures of the Civil War the Soviet regime attempted merely to isolate the Church; once its external enemies were defeated, the Bolsheviks were able to focus on destroying the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution. This zig-zag approach, in which the Bolsheviks alternated brutal actions with more tactful methods of dealing with the Church, can be attributed to the fact that the party was divided into "hawks" and

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43

"doves" on religious policy. See Arto Luukkanen, The Party of Unbelief The Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party, 1917-1929 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1994). 35. Quoted in Carter, 45-46. For the Soviet regime's treatment of smenavekhism, see Robert English, Russia and the idea of the West: Gorbachev, intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 28-31. 36. English, 31. 37. English, 32. 38. Cited in Kaiser (\ 994), 102. 39. Kaiser (\ 994), \02-103. 40. One substantive area of disagreement between Lenin and Stalin concerned the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union. While both supported the rights of non-Russians, Stalin opposed Lenin's proposal of creating a federation of independent and equal republics with one republic-the RSFSR-for the Russians. Instead, Stalin preferred to keep the existing RSFSR, which included all the other Soviet republics (Ukraine, Armenia, etc.), arguing that subsuming the other republics within the RSFSR, rather than giving them and the Russian republic equal and independent status, was the best way to disarm Russian nationalism. (It should be kept in mind that hopes for the worldwide revolution had not yet been abandoned when the RSFSR was created, and that the Bolsheviks expected the creation of other Soviet republics beyond the borders of the old tsarist empire.) Lenin's argument carried the day, and the USSR was created as a multi tiered structure in which the RSFSR (an internationalized "Rossiiskaia," not "russkaia" republic, Stalin was careful to emphasize) and the other independent republics entered as nominally equal members. See Martin, 394-401. 41. Martin, 245. 42. Although his book, The Permanent Revolution, was published in 1930, Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution" dates to a series of articles written during the 1905 revolution. His original argument was that the revolution should not stop at the bourgeois phase, but must result in the seizure of power by the proletariat. Later, having come to the bitter realization after the civil war that the anticipated worldwide revolution had not occurred, Trotsky reasserted its global nature. "The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable ... it will not be accomplished until the final triumph of the new society throughout the planet." L. Trotsky, Permanentnaia Revolutsiia (Berlin, 1930), 167, in Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 199. 43. David L. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian Nationalldentity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. 44. Martin, 394. 45. Brandenberger, 43. 46. Republican political institutions were russified in the sense that by the mid-I 930s, while the leader of any given republican communist party was a member of the local nationality, Russians came to occupy the position of second secretary. Moreover, the holder of the latter position was made more powerful because of his direct access to the security services. 47. Some historians argue that there was a link between Stalin's brutalization of the Soviet peasantry-Ukrainian peasants in particular-and his concern with the loyalty of non-Russians. From this perspective, in Stalin's mind the peasant question was inseparable from the national question. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Col-

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lectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Also see Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History ofthe Nationalities Problem in the USSR (New York: The Free Press, 1990),66-73. 48. Simon, 84. 49. Martin, 45 I. 50. Nicolai Petro, The Rebirth ofRussian Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 96-97. 5 I. Brandenberger, 4. 52. Malia, 177. 53. English, 40. 54. Brandenberger, 45-62. 55. D.L. Brandenberger and A.M. Bubrovsky, '''The People Need a Tsar': The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 193 I - I 941," Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 5 (1998): 875. 56. Brandenberger and Bubrovsky, 875-876. Also see chapter six of Brandenburger's National Bolshevism, 63-1 14. 57. Simon, I 19. 58. Piil Kolsto, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 9 I; Simon, I 19-I 2 I. 59. StilI, the perception that Russians were the favored nationality is borne out in the massive ethnonational "reidentification" of non-Russians as Russians in the late I 920s and 1930s, evident in the censuses of 1926 and 1939. That is, large numbers of people who had identified themselves as, say, Belorussians, in the 1926 census identified themselves as Russians in the 1939 census. See Kaiser (1994), 142-143. 60. Nahaylo and Swoboda, 77-78. 61. Simon, 181-183; Gennady Bokrdyugov, "Stalin's Regime and Russian Nationalism," History Today 45, no. 5 (May 1995): 27-33. 62. See Steven M. Miner, Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (Chapel HilI: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 63. Quoted in Frederick C. Barghoom, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 40. 64. Simon, 34-35. 65. Peter lS. Duncan, "Ideology and the National Question: Marxism-Leninism and the National Policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," in Stephen White and Alex Pravda, eds., Ideology and Soviet Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 185. 66. Quoted in Barghoom (1956), 27. 67. Simon, 207. 68. Klaus Mehnart, Stalin Versus Marx: The Stalinist Historical Doctrine (London: AlIen & Unwin, 1952),64; English, 47. 69. Zhdanovshchina refers to the postwar ascendancy of Andrei Zhdanov (1896- I 948), a Stalin protege and ideology chief after 1944 who is best known for pursuing a harsh cultural policy whose main goal was the eradication of West em influence. 70. Brandenberger, 192. 71. Martin, 460.

2 Russian Nationalism, Russification, and the Rise of the "Russian Party," 1953-1985 "All the nations and nationalities of our country, above all the Great Russian people, played a role in the formation, strengthening and development of this mighty union of equal peoples that have taken the path of socialism. The revolutionary energy, selflessness, diligence and profound internationalism of the Great Russian people have rightly won them the sincere respect of all the peoples of our socialist homeland." - Leonid Brezhnev, 1971 "My motherland is not Russia, but the village of Korolevo in the Yaroslavl region. And why should I love myself for being Russian? I'm not guilty for it, nor did I earn it-it just happened that my parents were Russian." - Aleksandr Yakovlev, 1999

This chapter discusses Soviet nationalities policy, the paradoxical position of Russians in the USSR, and the growth of nationalist feeling among a segment of the Russian intelligentsia after 1953. It explains how Russian nationalism began to develop as an independent ideology in the decades after Stalin and eventually became a basic component of the country's ethnic politics. It also discusses the way the regime responded to the growth of Russian nationalist tendencies in officially approved literature. This chapter does not discuss underground, or samizdat, Russian nationalist literature. I As both a cultural and a political movement, Russian nationalism exerted considerable influence within Soviet institutions and consequently on Soviet, or more specifically, Russian society as a whole. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev Russian nationalists, protected by powerful patrons in the leading bodies of the Communist Party, were promoted into influential positions in the media, Soviet creative organizations, the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), the Central

45

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Committee, and even the Politburo itself However, despite the growth of Russian cultural nationalism within the intelligentsia and the leading position of Russians within the USSR's leading institutions, on the eve of Gorbachev's reforms Russian national identity remained weakly developed, to a significant extent submerged within a broader Soviet identity. Although most Russians were proud of Soviet achievements, just as they were proud of the achievements of pre-revolutionary Russian culture, they also believed, with some justification, that they bore a disproportionate share of the costs of Soviet development. Russians did not perceive themselves as rulers of an empire, but as the bearers of culture and providers of human and material resources. In sharp contrast to the situation in, for example, the Baltic republics, where nationalist feeling had antiSoviet characteristics, there was, it would have seemed, little potential for Russian nationalism as a true oppositional movement. Whatever the attitude of Russian nationalists toward communist ideology and the Kremlin's policies, most remained loyal to a Soviet state that they hoped would adopt their positions.

Russian Cultural Nationalism after Stalin Before discussing the influence of the "Russian party" at the institutional level, let us first consider the political and cultural climate in the 1950s and 1960s that prepared the way for the emergence of Russian nationalism as an independent, and to a very limited extent, oppositional ideology.2 After 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" began the unraveling of the Stalin myth, a more liberal, relaxed atmosphere enveloped the country. De-Stalinization not only meant putting an end to the indiscriminate use of state terror as an instrument of social control; it also signified a retreat from the official anti-Semitism, antiWesternism, and Great Russian chauvinism that had characterized the post-war Stalin regime. While he allowed a considerable degree of liberalization and permitted changes that offered greater exposure to life outside the USSR-such as the launching in 1955 of the journal Inostrannaia literatura (Foreign Literature) and the promotion of cultural, scientific, and educational exchanges with Western countries-Khrushchev himself should not be mistaken for a "liberal": to the end he remained distrustful of the West and suspicious of intellectuals, whose careers he could just as easily destroy as promote. Despite his earlier experiences as first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, when at Stalin's behest he crushed Ukrainian nationalism and attempted to sovietize (or, one might say, russify) the republic, Khrushchev promised a more tolerant and equitable nationalities policy that focused on national development in the republics. Nations deported to Siberia and Central Asia by Stalin during and after World War II, including Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Tatars, were rehabilitated and as many as 500,000 people were allowed to return to their homes (which in thousands of cases had been occupied by Russians for the past decade) in the southern part of the RSFSR. Ukrainians, distrusted by

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Stalin and now seen by Khrushchev as natural allies in the battle against Stalinist forces, were recruited into the highest levels of the party while the representation of Russians declined. 3 Russians were still at the height of their prestige and influence in 1952, when they constituted 71.5 percent of the Central Committee; yet by 1961 Russian representation in that body had fallen to 62.7 percent as non-Russians increasingly filled top positions in the CPSu. 4 During Khrushchev's first years the Party guaranteed the development of the economy and culture of all the Soviet nations and nationalities. However, by the end of the decade concerns about the excesses of nationalism in the republics caused Khrushchev to shift toward the sblizhenie (drawing closer) and sliianie (assimilation) of the USSR's many nationalities. Having granted the republics a greater role in economic planning and management, he began to reverse this process in 1957. The next year the regime made the attendance of national language schools in the republics "voluntary," while Russian-language schools continued to operate throughout the USSR. Then, from 1959 to 1961 the regime conducted a purge of leaders in the non-Russian republics, including the Latvian, Moldavian, and Azerbaidzhan SSRs, as well as the Central Asian republics (although not, notably, the Ukrainian SSR, with which Khrushchev enjoyed a special relationship), for "national deviations"; however, in contrast to Stalin's purges, such as in the Estonian SSR more than a decade earlier, the victims were not murdered. 5 Determined to accelerate the merging process, it appears that Khrushchev, like Lenin, believed that national differences would ultimately disappear in the course of building communism. As the Party Program adopted by the TwentySecond CPSU Congress in 1961 stated: The borders between the union republics within the USSR are increasingly losing their fonner significance, since all the nations are equal, their life is organized on a single socialist foundation, the material and spiritual needs of each people are satisfied to the same extent, and they are united into one family by common vital interests and are advancing together toward a single goalcommunism. 6

Although Khrushchev was himself a product of Stalinism, promoted up the Party ladder by the Father of the Peoples and crushing his rivals in order to secure his position at the top after Stalin's death, once in power he sought to build a communist society without the Stalinist terror and hypercentralization that he believed had inhibited the realization of true socialism. Liberated from strict Stalinist cultural controls and the creative confines of Socialist Realism during the "thaw," Soviet artistic and literary life began a recovery that peaked in the mid-1960s. However, Khrushchev's liberalizing policies had the unintended effect of encouraging the growth of nationalist tendencies throughout the USSR. Some writers and artists in the western borderlands expressed nationalist themes in their work that reflected the collective pain of foreign occupation and sovieti-

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zation; a few writers in the Baltic republics, for example, discussed collectivization or the deportations of 1941. Some writers, Russians and non-Russians alike, made reference to the Terror and the Gulag; many more focused on the shortcomings of an indifferent bureaucracy. Among Russian writers, the new freedom gave rise to the "village prose" school of Soviet fiction, which emphasized rural themes rather than socialist ones. 7 Although it had its origins in the late Stalin era, with the publication of works such as Valentin Ovechkin's Sketches of Rural Daily Life (1952), village prose became popular during the thaw and remained so into the more conservative 1970s. Aleksandr Yashin's Levers (1956), which focused on rural problems such as material shortages and indifferent bureaucrats, was particularly influential among the Russian nationalist intelligentsia. The next year saw the publication of Vladimir Soloukhin's Vladimir Back Roads, whose evocation of the nineteenth century Slavophiles and vivid description of ancient Russian churches suggested the author's sympathy for Russian Orthodoxy and the prerevolutionary past. A later work by Soloukhin, Letters from the Russian Museum (1966), which denounced the destruction of Moscow's churches in the 1930s, resonated particularly strongly among Russian nationalists. 8 By the 1960s the village prose school was characterized not only by its fascination with the Russian countryside, but also by its ecological consciousness and concern for the fate of Russia's pre-revolutionary architectural monuments. In contrast to the optimism of the officially encouraged Socialist Realist school, whose practitioners were expected to depict a positive hero and the hope of a bright and shining communist future, the village prose writers (derevenshchiki) lamented a past that had largely been destroyed. The works of Vasilii Belov (b. 1932), for example, focused on the moral values of the traditional Russian peasantry and the corrupting influence of modem urban life on simple country people. Some of the derevenshchiki, notably Valentin Rasputin (b. 1937), became spokesmen for environmental issues in the Soviet Union. His novel Farewell to Matera (1976), published just as the village prose movement began to wane, warned its readers about the negative effects of Soviet prometheanism-such as the building of immense hydroelectric dams and gigantic waste-producing industrial projects--on village life and the Russian environment. 9 In contrast to the bulk of the literary establishment that churned out ideologically reliable works-when they wrote at all-writers such as Soloukhin, Belov (both of whom were Party members), and Rasputin (who was not) were independent thinkers who tested the limits of the permissible. Initially viewed both by Soviet officialdom and Russian nationalists as "liberals," village prose writers were frequently attacked by Soviet critics for their retrograde ideology and for their subjects' increasing irrelevance to contemporary social problems. Only in the late 1960s did the Russian nationalists in the political and literary establishment, some of whom were gradually moving from the Stalinist pole of the Russian nationalist spectrum toward the Slavophile end, begin to sympathize with some of the ideals of the derevenshchiki and identify them as potential allies. 1O Likewise, the neo-Slavophiles within the cultural intelligentsia moved

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49

closer to the Stalinists, as they shared the latter's belief that the West's bourgeois values posed as great a threat to Russia as its military might. Still, neoSlavophilism's relationship to Stalinism was always problematic. "Though it was Stalin who had destroyed their idealized pastoral harmony," writes Robert English, "it was also Stalin who swept away the hated European, cosmopolitan aspects of Bolshevism and promoted Russian nationalism. So in this respectand certainly in their dislike of the West and Brezhnev's flirtation with it through detente---even benign neo-Slavophilism found itself uncomfortably close to something far more malignant." I I The popularity of village prose in the 1960s reflected an increasing Russian awareness of and sensitivity to the connections between the problems of contemporary society and the destruction of the country's pre-revolutionary past. Once again, Khrushchev's policies inadvertently contributed to this awareness. The general secretary's antireligious campaign, launched in 1959, not only offended Russian believers, but also horrified those Russians who saw in the disappearance of thousands of onion domes an attack on Russian tradition. In Moscow alone, six of the city's fifty functioning Russian Orthodox churches were torn down along with numerous other architectural monuments-including a sixteenth century mansion. 12 The neglect of Moscow's urban core and the regime's flagrant contempt for the city's older historic structures provided the impetus for the creation of preservationist organizations such as Rodina (Motherland) and the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIK), each of which was founded as the result of initiatives by Russian nationalists. The Rodina club was created in May 1964 with the support of the Komsomol and the permission of Soviet authorities. Although all members of the club stood in the first place for the concrete problem of saving and restoring old Russian architectural monuments, some used this organization to spread the ideology of Russian nationalism. 13 With a membership of around five hundred, the Rodina club was dwarfed by VOOPIK, whose membership numbered in the millions. 14 Although the impetus behind VOOPIK's founding came from below, partly on the initiative of the Russian nationalist artist Il'ia Glazunov (b. 1930), it was made a legal organization in July 1965 by a decree of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR. The fact that its leadership included a number of high-ranking Soviet officials was indicative of the high level of support VOOPIK received from elements in the Soviet leadership. IS Although a considerable part ofVOOPIK was composed of people for whom love of old architecture was more important than Russian nationalism, it was essentially, as Mitrokhin notes, a "semi-legal nationalist party." 16

Like the razing of historic monuments in Moscow and other Russian cities, Khrushchev's attempt to decentralize Soviet institutions represents another policy initiative that had the unintended effect of stimulating the growth of Russian

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nationalism. Decentralization meant devolving authority to the governments of the republics, including that of the RSFSR, which began to develop institutions analogous to those of the other Union republics. Russian writers, for example, who had been denied their own union since the creation in 1932 of the USSR Writers' Union (UW USSR), in 1958 were rewarded with the creation of a Russian branch (UW RSFSR), which remained under the control of the reliably Stalinist Leonid Sobolev until 1970. 17 The process of equipping the RSFSR with its own institutions and other symbols of individuality stimulated the development of a particular sort of Russian national identity-one that identified Russia as the RSFSR rather than as the entire Soviet Union. Moreover, it inadvertently contributed to an emerging sense of Russian (Hrossiiskit') identity within the RSFSR. 18 It should be noted, however, that these changes in the Russian republic's status took place within the context of policies that were designed to increase the economic and cultural powers of all the Union republics vis-a-vis the center. Although the Russians' unifying role throughout the USSR continued to be well understood, in the course of devolving power from Moscow to the republics Russians and their republic were not singled out for preferential treatment. An alarming nexus of geopolitical and demographic circumstances further contributed to the growth in Russian national feeling in the 1960s and afterward. As tensions escalated on the Soviet Union's border with China, resulting in a series of armed clashes by the end of the decade, a sense of patriotism grew among both Slavophiles and commissars. Many felt that the Russian people, and its youth in particular, must be prepared to defend the country against a far more populous adversary whose millions of soldiers were preparing to pour over the long Sino-Soviet border. A related Russian concern was the slow growth of the Russian population, as compared to the far more rapid reproduction rate of the USSR's southern republics. 19 This was a source of particular concern after the release of the 1970 census figures, which served as confirmation of this trend. Russians, who constituted 54.6 percent of the Soviet population in 1959, saw their share of the population drop to 53.3 percent in 1970 and 52.3 percent in 1979.20 Experts and Russians themselves came to believe, correctly, that Russians were failing to keep up with the reproductive habits of their Chinese and Muslim neighbors. As a result, Russians might not only lose their preponderance within the USSR; in the long run they risked losing part of the USSR itself. Forced to confront the possible geopolitical consequences of their own demographic stagnation, many Russians also began to ponder the demographic consequences of negative social phenomena such as rampant drunkenness, high abortion rates, and the general deterioration of the family. Already beginning to feel defensive, by the 1970s many Russians believed themselves to be the victims of affirmative action policies that favored nonRussians and discriminated against Russians. The paradoxical position of Russians as the country's ruling nationality-but whose members were in fact being denied educational and professional opportunities in favor of the titular nationalities of the non-Russian republics-is discussed below. But first let us tum to

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the challenges posed by the rise of Russian nationalism within the cultural and political establishment during the early Brezhnev era.

Young Guardism

By the mid-1960s Russia was in the grips of a cultural reawakening that was reflected in the popularity of the village prose literary school and the establishment of preservationist organizations such VOOPIK. But the growth of Russian nationalism during this period should not be viewed only as a cultural phenomenon. Despite the legal existence of only one party-the CPSU and its branches in the republics-there was also a "Russian party" within the establishment that sought to advance the interests of the country's dominant nationality. The institutional center of this "Russian party" during the 1960s was the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), a mass organization charged with the political socialization of young people aged seven to twenty-eight. After 1970, however, the new locus of the Russian nationalist movement became the Russian branch of the Union of Writers, which by controlling several influential periodicals in the RSFSR managed the media that transmitted the nationalists' messages.21 This reflected a more general trend in the late 1960s and 1970s that saw activists in the Russian nationalist movement moving from all-Union bodies to RSFSR structures. 22 Nikolai Mitrokhin's study describes in some detail the personal and professional connections between the various members of the "Russian party" within the Soviet establishment during the three decades between Stalin and Gorbachev. According to Mitrokhin, one of the earliest and most important patrons of the post-Stalin Russian nationalist movement was Aleksandr Shelepin (19181994), who as first secretary of the Komsomol from 1952 to 1958 had been involved in the anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin's last years. Heading the KGB from 1958 to 1961 and then appointed a secretary in the Central Committee, Shelepin collaborated with other Stalinists who opposed Khrushchev's liberalizing measures. Among his allies were Vladimir Semichastnyi (1924-2001), who succeed Shelepin at his Komsomol and KGB posts; Petr Demichev (b. 1918), who during the second half of the 1960s was Chairman of the State Committee for the Press; and Gennadii Voronov (1910-1994), the Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers through most of the 1960s. All were Stalinists, all disapproved of Khrushchev's policies, and all rose to power together under Khrushchev, whom they (together with Brezhnev's Dnepropetrovsk group) helped depose in 1964. Most active in the years just after Khrushchev's removal, a time when the Central Committee's mood was anything but liberal, Shelepin and his clients aimed to create a new, more appealing ideology to buttress Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy-one that was based on the remembrance of the Soviet people's vic-

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tory over the Nazis in World War II. Over the course of the next twenty years numerous Russian nationalist writers, many of whom were themselves veterans of the war, would take a leading role in creating the myth of the Great Fatherland War (i.e., that the Soviet people, led by the Great Russians, together rallied in defense of socialism and Fatherland against the German invaders), including Mikhail Alekseev (b. 1918), lurii Bondarev (b. 1924), and Ivan Shevtsov (b. 1920). Providing "protection" to others who shared Shelepin's conservative, Stalinist tendencies, most of the Shelepin group was banished from party-state structures in the early 1970s as the Brezhnev regime sought to combat excessive displays of nationalism. 23 Whatever the mood in the Kremlin, the Komsomol, where Shelepin began his political rise, remained a bastion of conservatism into the Gorbachev era. 24 Its journal, Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard), was the most Stalinist and anti-Western of all the USSR's literary journals, and its publishing house, also called Molodaia gvardiia, published numerous titles with Stalinist and Russian nationalist themes. From 1959 to 1968 the Komsomol was headed by Sergei Pavlov (1929-1995), a Russian nationalist sympathizer whose collaborators were known as "Young Pavlovists." They enjoyed the full protection of the Politburo as long as Shelepin remained influential. Among Pavlov's collaborators were Anatolii Nikonov (1923-1983), who headed the journal Molodaia gvardiia from 1961 to 1970, and Valerii Ganichev (b. 1933), who worked for the Molodaia gvardiia publishing house for most of the 1960s and 1970s?5 Other Pavlovists included Vladimir Gusev (b. 1932), a career politician who later rose to become deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers; the nationalist writer Vladimir Chivilikhin (1928-1984); Vladimir Osipov (b. 1938), who in the early 1970s edited and distributed a samizdat journal titled Veche; and Valentin Chikin (b. 1932), who headed the hardline RSFSR newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia) during the perestroika years and afterward. Although Pavlov fell out of favor with the Brezhnev clique and was released from his duties as first secretary of the Komsomol in 1968, members of his "group" continued to exert considerable influence through other Soviet institutions such as the Russian Writers' Union, VOOPIK, and the Central Committee of the CPSU. 26 While the Komsomol and its press organs provided a haven for Stalinists and Russian nationalists, a number of well-known Russian nationalist cultural figures emerged from the philology department at Moscow State University in the 1950s, including the publicists Viktor Chalmaev (b. 1932) and Sergei Semanov (b. 1934), in addition to the radical nationalist literary critic Vadim Kozhinov (1930-2001) and poet Stanislav Kuniaev (b. 1932), who in 1988 was appointed chief editor of the nationalist journal Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary). Another group arose around the artist Il'ia Glazunov, a convinced anticommunist whose "protector" was Sergei Mikhalkov (b. 1913), himself a Stalinist poet who headed the Russian Writers' Union after Leonid Sobolev was retired in 1970.27 It is impossible to summarize the views of the members of the "Russian party" without glossing over the nuances of their positions and resorting to im-

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precise generalizations. Some were Stalinists (Nikonov, Chalmaev, Semanov); some were cautiously pro-Stalin (Ganichev, Kozhinov, Chivilikhin); others, particularly the village prose writers, tended toward anti-Stalinism (Belov, Glazunov, Soloukhin).28 Attempting to describe the ideology of the Pavlovists, Mitrokhin observes that they represented a variety of different views, including "red patriotism," romantic militarism arising out of the USSR's victory over the Nazis, anti-Semitism, radical anti-Westemism, and "ethnonationalist dreams about the overwhelming domination of ethnic Russians in all spheres of governmental and social life in the USSR.,,29 Later, with the rising influence of village prose and other forms of Russian cultural nationalism, their views tended toward the Slavophilism of the derevenshchiki. One thing that most members of the Russian nationalist movement shared in common, however, was their ability to reconcile themselves with the powers that be. This is an important point to note, for during the late perestroika era many Russian nationalists, whatever their attitudes toward Stalin and the communist experiment, were willing to cast their lot with the conservative Russian Communist Party (RCP) of Ivan Polozkov, which defended Communist rule and the privileged place of Russians within the USSR, rather than with Yeltsin's "democrats," who were bent on overthrowing the old order. (After Yeltsin's sudden retirement at the end of 1999, many Russian nationalists were willing to back Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel with authoritarian tendencies. More than a few gradually became disillusioned with Putin.) Likewise, in their attempt to roll back perestroika and appeal to public opinion the hardline leaders of the RCP willingly appropriated Russian nationalist ideas and formed strategic alliances with Russian nationalists during the USSR's final years. This is the subject of Chapter Seven. Returning to the subject of the present chapter, how did the Brezhnev regime cope with the rise of Russian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s? Did the regime, as is often alleged, encourage this phenomenon? Or did Brezhnev's Politburo prefer to restrain Russian nationalist tendencies? Scholars of this period of Soviet history have found that since the Soviet Union maintained strict censorship policies until nearly the end (and it is no accident that the end came soon after those restrictions were lifted), an analysis of literary publications is one of the most reliable ways of gauging the regime's attitude toward various social and cultural phenomena. Yitzhak Brudny, for example, has found that because they were consonant with the Brezhnev regime's policy goals (heavy investments in agriculture, anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism), Russian nationalistpatriotic themes in the literary sphere were more or less tolerated in the late 1960s. Brudny calls this practice the "politics of inclusion.,,30 However, a 1972 campaign against nationalism (including the Russian variety) showed the suspicion with which Russian nationalism was viewed by some in the Kremlin. This shift in policy only underlines the fact that Brezhnev's Politburo never did formulate a unified and distinct concept of the ethnic question.

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During the period under discussion, from the thaw through the era of stagnation (zastoi, a label the reformers of the Gorbachev era attached to Brezhnev years), the Soviet literary establishment, where the battles over culture and hence the place of Russian nationalist ideology were traditionally fought, was divided into two basic tendencies. The main intellectual current of the first group tended to be reformist, broadly Marxist, and "Westernizing"; it included the "liberal" Moscow journals and newspapers such as lunost' (Youth), Novyi mir (New World), and Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette). The second group, emboldened by the removal of Khrushchev in 1964 and the trial of the writers Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel two years later (the charge was "antiSoviet slander"), was conservative, patriotic, sometimes "Slavophile," and often Stalinist. Its periodicals included Molodaia gvardiia, Nash sovremennik, Moskva (Moscow), the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia, and after the appointment ofVsevolod Kochetov as chief editor in 1961, the journal Oktiabr' (October).31 Of the "patriotic" journals the most influential was the Komsomol organ Molodaia gvardiia, whose editorial board under chief editor Anatolii Nikonov included a number of leading Russian nationalist intellectuals, including Sergei Vikulov (who in 1968 was appointed chief editor of Nash sovremennik), Vladimir Chivilikhin, Valerii Ganichev, and Vladimir Soloukhin. 32 At the height of its influence during the neo-Stalinist resurgence of the late 1960s, Molodaia gvardiia published a series of articles with national-patriotic themes that provoked a fierce debate in the Soviet literary world. The most prominent and widely discussed of the Molodaia gvardiia articles were Mikhail Lobanov's "Educated Shopkeepers" (April 1968) and Viktor Chalmaev's "Great Strivings" (March 1968) and "Inevitability" (September 1968). They are worth noting because they expressed ideas that get to the very heart of the cultural and political divide between Russian "patriots" and "Westernizers." In particular, each of these articles was characterized by a distinctly anti-Western attitude, which of course had been a staple of Soviet ideology since Lenin as well as a common point of contact between orthodox Communists and Russian nationalists. 33 Both Lobanov and Chalmaev emphasized that Russia's (and the USSR's) great cultural heritage must be guarded against the cheap culture of the West. Convinced that Russia was succumbing to the West's materialism and love of money, they blamed these temptations on the liberal-reformist intelligentsiaLobanov's "educated shopkeepers" or "educated philistines"-whom they accused of being critical of everything Russian and responsible for the Americanization of the Russian soul. Each saw the creeping Westernization of the Soviet intelligentsia and the ruling elite as the main threat to the Russian nation. To ward off this impending danger, Lobanov and Chalmaev turned to the Russian national spirit and soil for the country's salvation. A second theme that appeared in these contributions to Molodaia gvardiia was the "single stream" thesis of Russian and Soviet history. This was first articulated in the early 1920s by National Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Ustrialov, who, while opponents of the Bolshevik revolution, nevertheless recognized its Russian national character. Almost a half century later Chalmaev argued that all

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of Russian history was one great continuum: Peter the Great's victory at Poltava was as much a tribute to the will of the Russian people as the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad. Rather than being the culmination of the struggles of the international proletariat, the October Revolution was simply another one of the Russian people's many great achievements. "Chalmaevism," as the tendency to approach history from a nationalist rather than a class perspective was called, was attacked in the monthly Novyi mir34 and became the object of a Central Committee investigation. Consequently, in January 1969 the Central Committee issued a decree-directed at Molodaia gvardiia, Novyi mir, and any other journal tempted to challenge Marxist-Leninist ideology and Soviet policies-that made the heads of cultural institutions (print media, radio, television, cinema, etc.) responsible for the contents of the works published or produced by their institutions. 35 A series of debates in 1968 and 1969 between the national-patriots and their liberal-reformist critics, published in Literaturnaia gazeta and the Party journal Kommunist, ultimately forced an intervention by higher authorities, for the ideological deviations each side accused the other of committing could not be ignored. The publication in 1970 ofIvan Shevtsov's anti-Semitic and anti-Western novel In The Name of the Father and the Son and Sergei Semanov's Stalinist article, "On Relative and Eternal Values" (in Molodaia gvardiia), convinced chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov and other Soviet leaders that conservative Russian nationalist intellectuals, by arguing for the reconstitution of a neo-Stalinist state that would isolate Russia from the West, were potentially as dangerous to the Brezhnev regime as were the liberal reformers. Having already cracked down on the liberal intellectuals in the wake of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the regime now moved to restrain the Russian nationalists. Suslov, who was neither a Russian nationalist nor an anti-Semite, took a personal interest in Molodaia gvardiia and convened a meeting of the Central Committee Secretariat in December 1970 to discuss the journal's content. The result was a reprimand by Suslov, the dismissal of the journal's chief editor, Anatolii Nikonov, and a purge of its editorial board. 36 Chalmaev, who was the deputy editor of Nash sovremmenik, was also punished by being removed from the journal's editorial board. Meanwhile, the circulation of Nash sovremmenik was temporarily slashed in half. 37 Although Russian nationalists retained their control of Molodaia gvardiia, Nash sovremennik, and Moskva, Nikonov's dismissal, Brudny notes, "taught Russian nationalist intellectuals that the politics of inclusion had limits. The party wanted them to perform an important political function but was not yet ready to permit an open challenge to its policies or ideological foundations.,,38 Nevertheless, despite the oppositional tendencies within the movement, the regime regarded Russophilism as being far preferable to liberalism and understood that the former could be used to counter the latter. 39 Indeed, the regime's obvious support of Russophilism was probably the most important factor in atlract-

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ing many Soviet intellectuals to the movement. More than a few liberal intellectuals, demoralized by their defeat during the early Brezhnev years, increasingly concerned with their material well-being, and "looking for an ideology that could reconcile them with political reality," found themselves moving toward the Russophile camp.40 Although Russian nationalist ideas continued to make their way into print, the influence of the "Russian party" within the Soviet political establishment began to wane in the early 1970s. The "Yakovlev Affair" of 1972-1973 illustrates the nature of the struggle over nationalism that was then taking place within the Soviet leadership. In the early 1970s, Aleksandr Yakovlev (b. 1923), nearly two decades before his remarkable renunciation of communism, was a staunch internationalist and a committed Marxist-Leninist. As head of the Central Committee's propaganda department, for years he had identified Great Russian nationalism as the main ideological threat to orthodox Marxism-Leninism and was partly responsible for the purge of Nash sovremennik.41 In a long article titled "Against Anti-Historicism," published in the 15 November 1972 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta (a weekly organ of the USSR Writers' Union), Yakovlev attacked the reactionary Russian nationalist tendencies that had been creeping into Soviet literature, journals, and newspapers in recent years. 42 In particular, he criticized the nationalists' idealization of the Russian peasantry, as well as an historiography that idealized the autocracy, the tsarist military, and the Russian Orthodox Church. The article also rejected the notion, popular among the Russian nationalists and their official supporters, that Russia and the West were irreconcilable enemies-a position that was at variance with the politics of detente. At its core, the thrust of Yakovlev's article was that "neo-Slavophile ideology" was incompatible with Soviet socialism. Perhaps the publication of this article was, as historian Alexander Yanov believes, a final attempt by Yakovlev to have his orthodox views prevail over those of the Party leaders who were more sympathetic to Russian nationalism and less cognizant of the threat that nationalism in general posed to the country.43 Whatever the reason, this stance came at considerable personal and professional cost to Yakovlev. In his memoirs Yakovlev informs us that the publication of this article angered Brezhnev, whose report on the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR was to be delivered in a few weeks. 44 Reprimanded at a Central Committee meeting, Yakovlev soon found himself exiled to Canada, where he served as the Soviet Union's ambassador for nearly a decade. 45 The Molodaia gvardiia and Yakovlev affairs together illustrate both the nature of the ideological divide within the Russian intellectual community and the regime's ambivalent attitude toward the Russian nationalists during the first half of the Brezhnev era. On the one hand, the regime sought to co-opt Russian nationalist sentiment because its patriotism and anti-Westernism were to some extent consonant with the regime's policy goals; at the same time, however, the Politburo recognized the powerful emotive qualities of Russian nationalism and its political potential and thus sought to keep it in check. Whatever the status of the Russian nationalists under Brezhnev, it must be noted that during the early

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1970s, as the regime suppressed dissent at home and supported revolution in the Third World, anti-nationalist campaigns were being conducted throughout the Soviet Union. These campaigns resulted in the removal of top leaders in those republics-the Ukrainian, Georgian, Azerbaidzhan, and Armenian SSRswhere the mood appeared to be increasingly nationalistic. Meanwhile, known protectors of the Russian nationalists within the Politburo were also removed, including Voronov (in 1973), Shelepin (1975), and Polianskii (1976). No doubt Brezhnev's team realized that cracking down on the non-Russian republics while not placing limits on nationalistic expression by the country's dominant national group would only invite charges of chauvinism and upset the country's already delicate ethnic balance. Strains of Russian nationalism that were unacceptable-those that rejected communism or were tied to religious belief, for example-had to find other, illegal outlets. However, those strains of Russian nationalism that supported Soviet domestic and foreign policy goals continued to benefit from official support.

Anti-Semitic and Patriotic Literature: Pikul' and Prokhanov Because ethnic Russians were at the core of both the Russian Empire and the USSR, Great Russian nationalism often tends to exhibit an imperialistic streak. It was this stream of Russian nationalism, with its support for the great power status of the Soviet Union-and the privileged place of the Russian core within it-that the Brezhnev regime and its short-lived successors continued to sanction into the 1980s. For reasons related to both the USSR's domestic and foreign goals, the regime was also willing to tolerate, and even encourage, the publication of literature with anti-Semitic themes-which of course has long been a staple of conservative Russian nationalist thought as well. Although the postwar Stalin years were characterized by "anti-Zionism" and a campaign against "cosmopolitanism," anti-Semitic books were generally not published in the Soviet Union until the Brezhnev era. 46 The fight against "cosmopolitanism" in 1948-1949 took place mainly on the pages of newspapers and journals, and even then, with some exceptions, the leading Soviet writers managed to avoid becoming involved in the campaign. Even Khrushchev's crude anti-Semitism did not lead to the open approval of anti-Semitic publications. Only under Brezhnev did such books appear, coinciding with Israel's victory over the USSR's Arab clients in 1967 as well as the government's alarm at the expressed desire of many Soviet Jews to emigrate. As in Stalin's day, antiSemitism was manifested as disapproval of the "Zionist" idea, which the Soviet regime tried to discredit through the massive number of publications dealing with this theme. 47 Such propaganda tended to encourage chauvinism and xenophobia, while helping to justify the ideological offensive then being conducted by the Soviet regime outside its borders. 48 Moreover, the anti-Zionist campaign

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perpetuated the Russophile and Soviet tradition of anti-Westernism, on the grounds that the Zionists had already enslaved the entire Western world. According to the Soviet Zionologists' line of reasoning, since the Zionists already controlled the West, their next target was the socialist world. From this perspective, the Soviet Union was the last major obstacle to Zionist world domination. 49 (During the Soviet regime's last years, advocates of this theory would claim that the changes taking place in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR were the work of the Zionists.) Among the most notorious propagators of anti-Zionism were Vladimir Begun, Aleksandr Romanenko, Evgenii Evseev, Iurii Ivanov, and future Pamiat' leader Valerii Emelianov. Far from being giants of Soviet literature, these authors wrote harsh polemical tracts that analyzed the world threat posed by the Zionists. Before glasnost, however, official anti-Zionist literature had to be informed by the Marxist-Leninist classics; Judaism was analyzed with reference to its "class essence" rather than the Jews' race. 50 As noted earlier, Ivan Shevtsov's anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic novel, In the Name of the Father and the Son, drew the attention of Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, who condemned it at a meeting of the Central Committee Secretariat. 51 While the official press periodically denounced anti-Semitic excesses in Soviet literature, books with such themes continued to be churned out, especially as Soviet Jews pressed for the right to emigrate during the 1970s. 52 Anti-Semitic themes also appeared in the works of fiction writer Valentin Pikul' (1928-1990). In the decade prior to glasnost, after which the forbidden fruit of Western and previously suppressed Soviet authors became available, Pikul' was one of the Soviet Union's most popular and prolific authors. 53 Unlike the derevenshchiki, who tended to focus on contemporary Russian peasants and their relationship to the soil, Pikul"s historical novels mostly took place in tsarist times and were unambiguously patriotic. Although his earlier novels were subjected to harsh reviews in Literaturnaia gazeta in the mid-1960s, with the 1973 publication of With Pen and Rapier, set in 1759 as the Russian army took Berlin, his books began to earn a more positive evaluation from the Soviet establishment. 54 Pikul"s novels soon began to find their way onto the pages of Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik. Although never far from the surface in his earlier works, Pikul's antiSemitism was most explicit in his hefty novel At the Brink of the Abyss. Set in the Romanov dynasty's last years, it depicted Jews ("Zionists"), working through Rasputin, as the culprits behind imperial Russia's downfall. The Zionists' evil plot infects virtually everyone in the novel; the only character who emerges unsullied is Vladimir Purishkevich, the founder of the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds, whom Pikul' portrayed as Russia's savior. Originally titled The Evil Force, the novel was completed in 1975 but was not published until 1979 in Nash sovremennik, at a time when the journal's editorial board included unambiguous Russian nationalists such as Viktor Astafev, Vasilii Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. Pikul" s brand of Russian nationalism may have been all the more appealing to some Soviet authorities (and palatable to others) because it was

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shorn of the religious elements that informed the beliefs of so many of the dissident nationalists. Despite Pikul"s popularity and apparently high level of support within the Soviet cultural establishment, his critics nevertheless continued to disparage his works for their ideological flaws. 55 In contrast to Pikul', whose anti-Semitism and Russophilism sometimes exceeded tolerable bounds in the eyes of some Soviet authorities (in response to this publication the Party authorized a series of condemnations of Nash sovremennik in other press organs), in a period of heightened international tensions the Russian nationalist-tinged Soviet patriotism of Aleksandr Prokhanov (b. 1938) was beyond official reproach. In his youth, Prokhanov was a journalist who had traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union, but by the early 1980s he had come into his own as a prolific author who promoted an imperialist Soviet foreign policy in books set in countries such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. One scholar has thusly summarized the plots of these novels: "The main conflict is always connected with the immediate political situation in a given country, but in the background, in the form of reminiscences, meditations, and internal dialogue, the narrator muses about his past, about his home, his family, and Russia.,,56 One example of Prokhanov's vision of Soviet imperialism was his novel A Tree in the Center of Kabul (1982), in which he portrayed Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan as, in effect, aid workers: they help in construction, education, and health care. There was little to indicate that these troops were invaders; instead their purpose was to keep the peace in a country tom by a war provoked by the hirelings of the West. Naturally, Prokhanov presented the communists as the progressive force, while their adversaries, supported primarily by Western interests, were portrayed as the enemies of the people. By the early 1980s Prokhanov's novels were in the mainstream of official Soviet literature, satisfying the Communist Party's political and educational goals and supporting its internal and external political objectives. While his heroes were not entirely uncritical of the shortcomings of Soviet life, they were nonetheless patriots who upheld the Soviet Union's foreign and domestic policy while identifying with Russia's past and traditions. Russian nationalism was not the main theme of his books, but at the same time the nationalist motif was difficult to ignore. What is noteworthy, however, is the way the Soviet authorities used the type of political literature produced by authors such as Prokhanov. In at least one way Soviet literary policy during the 1970s and early 1980s echoed Stalin's policies in the 1940s and 1950s: just as the Stalin regime used patriotic propaganda to discredit and destroy political rivals, in the Brezhnev era patriotic literature was used to counter external, primarily Western, influences by affirming the superiority of "spiritual" (Russian and Soviet) values over materialistic (Western) ones. 57

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The Russian Orthodox Church Just as the Brezhnev regime found the ideas of Russian nationalist intellectuals to be alternately useful and threatening, so were its relations with the Russian Orthodox Church complicated by the competition between religion and the socialist idea for the hearts and souls of Russians and other Slavs. Yet the regime could not ignore the potential usefulness of the pliant Church hierarchy as an instrument through which the authorities could regulate some elements of Soviet social life and prevent the emergence of a religious-based opposition. Just as the Church unfailingly served the tsars before the revolution, its leaders repeatedly asserted their loyalty to the Soviet state despite the latter's repressive religious policies. Although this subservience before power compromised the independence of the Russian Orthodox Church both before and after 1917, the Church's loyalty bought it protection against spiritual competitors. Indeed, as we shall see later, when the loosening of religious restrictions under Gorbachev facilitated the revival of other religious traditions in the USSR, it was to the Soviet state that many Church hierarchs turned for protection. Chapter One briefly mentioned the Soviet regime's religious policies, with particular focus on the position of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, one cannot fully appreciate the nature of church-state relations in the post-Stalin era without an understanding of the deeper historical context that shaped them. The depth of Russians' historical identification with their religion is reflected linguistically in the contemporary words khristianin and krest'ianin, which respectively mean "Christian" and "peasant," and which emerged from the same root during the era of the Kievan Rus'. As Russia broke up into feuding principalities during the period that followed the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged as a symbol of national unity. Indeed, under the Tatar yoke, Orthodoxy assumed great importance as the one and only rallying point for outraged Russian national feeling. Isolated from Western Christianity, the Russians elevated their own brand of Christianity to the position of the one true faith. When the center of Orthodox Christianity, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453, Muscovite Russia, by this time freed from the Mongols, was on its own, "beleaguered by a world of infidelity, heresy and apostasy. ,,58 Having inherited from Byzantium the concept of Caesaropapism-whereby the political ruler, in a symphony of the secular and the ecclesiastic, controlled the Church's administrative affairs as well as matters of religious doctrine, leaving churchmen to execute political duties in addition to their religious ones-the Church was unable to remain independent of political power and instead became totally subordinate to the Muscovite government. The Tsar of Muscovy, the visible manifestation of God's order, became the object of religious praise and the holder of practically unlimited power in the kingdom. By the time Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate in 1721 (it was revived in 1918), the Russian Orthodox Church found itself in the humiliating position of that of a

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state department-the Ruling Holy Synod-rather than an independent entity with its own voice. Consigned to a closed social estate, alienated from the mass of the Russian people as well as from society's elites, and utterly dependent on the Russian state and its sovereign, the Church contented itself with what remained of its authority in the spiritual sphere, while supinely offering its services as an instrument for the execution of secular policies. For example, under Peter's Spiritual Regulation, the parish priest was supposed to take on the duties of a police official, reporting local disorders and other items of concern to the authorities. Although the Russian Orthodox Church remained institutionally weak relative to the state which controlled it, it was nonetheless the official church of a sprawling, multiethnic empire, and over the centuries it had acquired significant interests in the empire's non-Russian regions-in particular Ukraine, whose population was split between Eastern Rite Catholics (Uniates or Unia, predominant in western Ukraine) and Orthodox (predominant in the regions closer to Russia proper}-while acting as one of the state's primary instruments ofmssification in these areas. 59 In tsarist Russia, then, the institutional interests of the Russian Orthodox Church substantially overlapped with those of the Russian state, and the dynamic of collaboration between them and the subordination of the former to the latter were important features of church-state relations to the end. This dynamic became manifest once again under the Soviet regime, which, despite subjecting the Church and its priests to persecution and near annihilation in the 1920s and 1930s, summoned Church hierarchs and the country's religious believers to the defense of the motherland during World War II. Once revived, in the postwar era the Russian Orthodox Church was the Soviet state's principal agent for the reassimilation of the western borderlands, gaining four thousand new churches in the process. 60 Although the Church continued to share certain institutional interests with the regime that controlled it, it nevertheless found itself in an uncomfortable position, for the Church's existence was still incompatible with atheistic and totalitarian Marxist-Leninist ideology. Although Stalin never again resorted to the radical and murderous antireligious policies of 1920s and 1930s, his successor Khrushchev was a convinced atheist who displayed little tolerance for the traditions and symbols of pre-revolutionary Russia. Viewing religion as a relic of the past that was fated, with the aid of Soviet bulldozers, to disappear with the creation of the communist utopia, Khrushchev, as noted earlier, launched an atheistic campaign that resulted in the closure of hundreds of churches and the destruction of many more. Although the antireligious drive did not result in the mass execution of priests, as had happened under Lenin and Stalin, new regulations for parish priests turned them into employees of the Soviet state. Despite these limitations on its autonomy, the Russian Orthodox Church nevertheless survived the antireligious policies of the regime's first half century to become under Brezhnev a somewhat tolerated, regulated (KGB-controlled), and even

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useful ann of the Soviet state, which was expected to promote certain Soviet policies, pay taxes to the Soviet state, and defend it from charges of religious persecution. With the Church under the authority of the Council for Religious Affairs (which itself was formally under the Council of Ministers of the USSR but in reality was controlled by the KGB and the Central Committee's Ideology Department), few Orthodox bishops were uncompromised by the church's subservience to the regime. The most heavily compromised segment of the church was its hierarchy. Just as Patriarch Aleksii declared in 1955 that "Soviet policy is just and corresponds to the Christian ideals which the Church preaches," his successor Pimen continued the tradition of affirming the church's allegiance to the Soviet state, proclaiming in his 1971 enthronement speech that "Serving the Holy Russian Orthodox Church is inseparable from serving our fatherland. ,,61 Likewise, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, although less effusive in his praise of the Soviet regime than Pimen, was, according to one writer, "the primary source for church statements in favor of all aspects of the Soviet system. ,,62 Just as Church hierarchs, hoping to prevent further repression, pledged their unwavering love for Fatherland and support for the Soviet regime, ordinary priests had little choice but to go along. As Father Dmitrii Dudko, a dissident priest who in the 1970s had a major influence on the Russian nationalist samizdat journals and Orthodox groups, confessed, all the clergy had to cooperate in one way or another in order to be able to work in their parishes. 63 This was confirmed by Anatolii Oleinikov, the last deputy chairman of the Soviet KGB, who claimed that only 15 to 20 percent of the Russian Orthodox priests who had been propositioned had refused. 64 Those who resisted or criticized the Soviet regime-like Father Gleb Yakunin, who complained about the USSR's record on human rights-were subject to harassment and arrest. 65 Although the Brezhnev regime is correctly portrayed as being more tolerant of religious organizations and believers in general than its predecessor was, the number of open, registered churches continued to decline under its watch, dwindling from approximately 7,500 in 1965 to 6,800 in 1982--only about two thousand of which were in the RSFSR. 66 Brezhnev himself, although lacking his predecessor's desire to eradicate religion altogether, was said to complain about the ubiquitous presence of Orthodox churches on Soviet television, perhaps believing that this represented the failure of Marxism-Leninism to meet the spiritual needs of the Russian people. In his last years as Soviet leader, the enfeebled general secretary authorized the launching of a new antireligious campaign that resulted in the demolition of hundreds of churches, most of which were located in the Ukrainian republic. Despite the repression and control to which they were subjected, the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church remained loyal and useful to the Soviet state, for in many ways their needs were congruent with the needs of the Soviet authorities. Sharing with most Soviet leaders the belief that the east Slavic peoples-the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians-represented the USSR's core, the Church was able to represent itself as a unifYing force within the multi-

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ethnic USSR. This role only increased in significance as it became apparent that the USSR's Muslim populations were reproducing at a much faster rate than its Slavs. As one observer noted, the Russian Orthodox Church was more than a national church (i.e., one that restricts its membership to the faithful of a particular nationality); it was an "imperial church" that "always sought to extend in sway with the expanding borders of the Russian Empire and to bring into its fold all of the empire's subject peoples"-a role it resumed during World War II as the Soviet regime annexed the western borderlands. 67 Later the Church was used by the regime to disseminate external propaganda in the guise of "peacekeeping" activities-a function it performed in the hope that the Church would thereby become indispensable to the Kremlin. 68 Just as the Brezhnev regime used its Russian nationalist writers as an instrument with which to counter the influence of the liberal intelligentsia, so did it use the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church-the country's most distinctly Russian institution-to manage its thousands of priests and promote the policies of the Soviet state. Likewise, just as a good part of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia, despite its anticommunist tendencies, was characterized by its ability to reconcile itself with the existing authorities, so did the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, despite the obvious incompatibility of their religious mission and the official atheism of the Soviet state, publicly support the policies of the regime. Indeed, the official position of the Church, long used to serving the authorities in Russia, was similar to those historians and literary criticsChalmaev, for example-who saw a "single stream" in Russian history. As one observer wrote, each "saw the Soviet state as the legitimate successor to the tsarist state and eulogized them both.,,69

Russification or Sovietization? Thus far in this chapter I have discussed the growth of Russian cultural nationalism in the first two post-Stalin decades, the simultaneous rise to power of Russian nationalists and their sympathizers within the USSR's highest political and creative institutions, and the Party's attempts to control both Russian nationalist intellectuals and the most important surviving pre-revolutionary Russian institution, the Orthodox Church. Now I shall tum to the relative position of Russians and the other Soviet nationalities during the era of "developed socialism." To what extent was russification taking place during the decades after Stalin? Did Russians identifY with the goals and professed achievements of the Soviet regime--or did they believe themselves to be making sacrifices that principally benefited non-Russians? Had the Soviet regime, on the eve of Gorbachev's appointment to the top CPSU post, achieved its objective of creating a united Soviet people? The answers to these questions are significant because they will

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help us to understand Russian nationalism's political potential during the era of perestroika and glasnost. In general the Brezhnev regime took a softer line on nationalities policy than had its predecessor. Whereas Khrushchev had unambiguously declared that the goal of Soviet nationalities policy was the obliteration of national distinctions, Soviet policy during the Brezhnev era aimed at furthering the integration of Soviet nationalities (sblizhenie) while deemphasizing the earlier goal of assimilation (sliianie). In his 1972 speech to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the USSR, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev declared that "the nationalities question, in the form in which it came down to us in the past, has been resolved completely, resolved definitively and irrevocably.,,7o In typical Brezhnevian fashion, the regime closed its eyes to a significant social problem, hoping that by declaring it resolved it would simply disappear from view. Declaring that the USSR had reached a new stage on the path toward the communist utopia-what it called "developed socialism"-the Brezhnev regime simultaneously emphasized the creation of a "new historical community" of Russian-speaking "Soviet people" (sovetskii narod).71 Although the main goal of Soviet nationalities policy during the Brezhnev era was not explicitly to elevate the status of Russians relative to the country's other nationalities, as appeared to be the case during the late Stalin era, it did nevertheless emphasize the critical role of the Great Russians in forging the USSR. Still, while the persistence into the foreseeable future of different national cultures continued to be acknowledged, nationality was downplayed in favor of the loftier goal that united all the Soviet people-the building of communism. The consciousness of homo soveticus was shaped not by national or religious ties, but by his devotion to the USSR and the socialist choice. 72 The nationalities policy pursued by the Brezhnev regime has often been equated with russification-a word that suggests that the regime was conducting a policy designed explicitly to impose the Russian language and culture on its non-Russian peoples and assimilate them into the Russian nation in an effort to make the USSR in its entirety more recognizably "Russian." The ethnic russification of smaller peoples such as the Mordvinians and Karelians (who had their own territories within the RSFSR), as well as Germans, Poles, and Jews (who did not, the utterly artificial Jewish Autonomous Region in remote Birobidzhan notwithstanding) took place on a significant scale from the 1920s through the 1970s; likewise, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Belorussians living outside their national republics were assimilated into Russian culture. 73 Estimates of the number of non-Russians assimilated into the Russian nation by abandoning their national identity (as recorded in the required internal passports) and adopting a Russian one in the period between 1926 and 1970 (at which time the process began to reverse itself) range from four million to seventeen million. Whatever the true number, the russification of other Soviet peoples was a major factor in the Russian growth rate during this period. 74 Nevertheless, national assimilation was not a political priority in the CPSU's nationalities policy. The decision by many non-Russians to adopt a

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Russian identity was for many a matter of adaptation to the dominant environment. The main thrust of russification was Soviet language policy, the main goal of which during the Brezhnev era was to encourage the mastery of Russian by the empire's non-Russians. The fact that, according to the 1970 census, 57 of 112 million non-Russians-slightly over half-could not speak fluent Russian resulted in a renewed drive for all citizens to learn and speak Russian. 75 The russification of education was particularly pronounced in the RSFSR, where Russian replaced local languages in many middle schools. But the regime also took measures to improve Russian-language education in the other Union republics by expanding the Russian-language curriculum and increasing the number of hours assigned to Russian-language instruction in general schools. The Ukrainian and Belorussian republics were exceptional in that Russian was steadily replacing native-language instruction rather than supplementing it, as was the case elsewhere, during the 1970s. 76 In the view of Anatol Lieven, this process should be seen less as russification than as "Soviet modernization through the medium of the Russian language.,,77 While the Soviet leaders who designed this policy were undoubtedly Russian, most probably did not view the Russian language as an instrument for the imposition of Russian hegemony over non-Russian peoples, but rather as an integrating force that would further consolidate the sprawling USSR and its diverse peoples. Indeed, although their views were certainly influenced by an environment that was shaped by the revival of Russian nationalism as a cultural trend, it is quite likely that Soviet leaders did not see linguistic russification as an expression of Russian nationalism; instead they saw the Russian language as "universal" and "international," reflecting their sincere belief that for Russians to insist on the use of the Russian language was not (as many non-Russians believed) Great Russian chauvinism, but for Latvians or Ukrainians to insist on the use of the Latvian or Ukrainian languages was nationalism. 78 Naturally, non-Russians often did not welcome the emphasis on Russian in the new language policy. In April 1978 thousands of protesters gathered in Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian republic, in response to a draft of the new republic constitution that failed to acknowledge Georgian as the republic's "state language," a status it had formerly held. Moscow quickly conceded the point and the constitution of the Georgian SSR, as well as those of Armenia and Azerbaidzhan, were revised to restore the earlier status of the titular languages. 79 Whatever the beliefs and intentions of the Soviet leadership, according to Robert J. Kaiser, "surprisingly little linguistic russification took place" after 1959, and almost none after 1979.80 Indeed, the vast majority of members of most non-Russian nationalities living within their titular republics retained their own national language as their primary tongue. 8 I With the exception of the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, each of which continued to experience significant linguistic russification, indigenous languages were in fact not seriously jeopardized by linguistic assimilation during the postwar period. 82 Where

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linguistic Russification did experience considerable success after 1970 was the increasing mastery of Russian as a second language by non-Russian nationalities. 83 Since Russian was the country's lingua franca and mastery of it was essential for upward mobility in those sectors of the economy where Russians were predominant (industry for example), non-Russians faced increased pressure to learn Russian, and millions did so. Meanwhile, Russians, including those living in non-Russian republics, faced not even the slightest pressure to learn other languages, as non-Russian languages had been optional in Soviet schools since 1958. In 1970 only 12 percent of Russians living outside the RSFSR (and typically less than 3 percent living in the Central Asian republics) were fluent in the language of the titular republic. 84 Linguistic russification, although limited mostly to the non-Russians' acquisition of Russian as a second language, was accompanied by demographic russification during the first two postwar decades. By 1979 more than twenty-five million Russians, or 18.5 percent of the total Russian population, were living outside the RSFSR. Stalin, as we have seen, saw the movement of Russians into the national territories as a factor that contributed to political stability by securing Soviet dominance in them. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that all Soviet leaders since Stalin saw the Russian diaspora as the glue that held the Soviet Union together. 85 Although the migration of Russians and other Slavs to the Baltic and Central Asian republics certainly helped to reinforce Moscow's control of the periphery, the main impetus behind demographic russification was the country's industrial requirements. The regime's ideological commitment to bring industry to the less developed republics in Central Asia, which were rich in mineral and hydroelectric resources, could not be fulfilled without a trained labor force that the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs (for example) did not possess in the period after World War II. Almost invariably the ministries showed a preference for employing Russians and other Slavs rather than training the native inhabitants. 86 While qualified labor was imported from the Russian and Ukrainian republics, the local population was expected to continue the production of traditional goods, such as cotton, wool, vegetables, and fruits.87 The newly-annexed Baltic republics, on the other hand, and Latvia and Estonia in particular, "represented a skilled-labor reserve unlike any other in the Soviet Union.,,88 In these republics it often appeared, at least to the locals, as though the settlement of Russians was a goal in itself rather than a means of industrialization. 89 Indeed, no part of the Soviet Union outside the RSFSR felt the weight of the Russians as much as the Baltic republics, the destination of hundreds of thousands of migrant Slavs since the end of World War II. Only the Lithuanian SSR, for decades headed by the politically savvy Antanas Snieckus until his death in 1974, was able to avoid large-scale demographic russification. The peak period of influx came in the immediate postwar years, but continued in waves into the 1950s. Some Russians came on their own initiative, attracted by the relatively high living standards they could expect to enjoy in the Baltic republics. Perhaps the majority of such migrants came from the Pskov region of the western RSFSR and were generally "far below the local population

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in their educational and cultural level. ,,90 Others who arrived to the region after World War II, including the thousands of officials who were assigned to supervise the social and economic changes being imposed on these republics, were actively recruited. The industry that was created in this region was, according to Baltic experts Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, "based on Russian investment and Russian labor, managed by Russians according to goals set by Russians, importing a large part of the raw materials from Russia and exporting most of its product.,,91 In all the peripheral regions that experienced intensive demographic russification during the postwar decades, whether Central Asian or Baltic republics, one characteristic of Russian immigration was the tendency of Russians to concentrate in urban areas: by the 1960s Russians and Russian-speakers formed the bulk of the population in large cities such as Riga, Tashkent, and Alma Ata, while also concentrating in larger geographical areas like eastern Moldavia and northeastern Estonia.92 Narva, for example, became an almost entirely Russian city. Feeling little need to integrate with the local population or learn their languages-all the more so since Russian schools and cultural facilities were available throughout the Soviet Union-Russian-speaking communities tended to live in their own enclaves, apart from the natives. 93 Although the official goal of sblizhenie (drawing closer) was a total failure, the Russian-speakers residing in the non-Russian republics were truly "Soviet people," identifying themselves with the USSR as a whole (which most regarded as "Russia") rather than with the republic in which they resided. The bulk of demographic russification, like linguistic russification, took place well before 1970 and especially before 1959. By the 1970s the waves of immigration into the non-Russian republics had stopped; instead a reverse migration was taking place that saw Russians leaving the southern republics in particular and returning to the RSFSR. 94 This was due in part to economic changes: Russian workers employed in the oil fields of Azerbaidzhan, which were declining by the 1970s, moved to the new oilfields being developed in the Siberian regions of the RSFSR. Moreover, because of demographic changes that saw a serious decline in Russian birthrates by the 1950s, the Russian republic suffered from a growing labor deficit, thus making it easier for Russians to find jobs in their own republic. However, as one analyst observed, "the main factor behind the departure of members of the settler population was the assumption by the native population of more and more administrative and managerial posts, which produced a growing sense among the settlers that they had no future in these republics.,,95 Starting in the Georgian and Azerbaidzhan SSRs in the 1960s, the net outflow of the settler population continued in the Kazakh and Central Asian republics in the second half of the 1970s. This outflow of Russians and Russian-speakers, plus a rise in the Muslim populations of the Transcaucasian and Central Asian republics, led to a strengthening of the position of the titular nationalities in these republics. 96 Russians, as a result, suffered a loss

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in prestige, declining employment opportunities, and anti-Russian nationalist sentiment. In the western republics the Russian share of population continued to increase after the 1960s, although not at the same levels as the late 1940s and 1950s. The process was less marked in rural republics such as Lithuania (where the non-native population held steady at about 8 percent from 1960 onwards) and Moldavia, but the more industrialized Latvian and Estonian republics, which suffered from low birthrates and a resulting deficit of surplus labor, continued to attract workers from outside. 97 By 1980 ethnic Latvians made up only 53.5 percent of their republic's population, while only 64.5 percent of the population of the Estonian SSR were of the native nationality; most of the remainder were Russians or "Russian-speakers.,,98 While few Russians regarded their adopted republics as anything other than part of their Soviet homeland, most Baits regarded the Russians as occupiers. Although russification was, within the limits described above, taking place on the linguistic and demographic levels in the decades after World War II, the reality was that these processes had slowed down significantly by 1970 as the non-Russian republics and their peoples steadily developed their own national identities. Writing in 1986, Soviet nationalities expert Gerhard Simon asserted that in the decades after Stalin's death, as the Soviet Union modernized and provided new educational and professional opportunities for non-Russians, the country was experiencing "an inconspicuous but probably irreversible decolonialization.,,99 Equipped with their own political and cultural institutions, the non-Russian republics possessed an increasingly educated population and a nationally-conscious intelligentsia. Moreover, the titular nationalities of these republics, especially in Central Asia, were the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in education and technical employment. Because of such policies, the children produced from marriages between Russians and indigenes more often than not declared their nationality to be that of the titular nationality, a process that reinforced the consolidation of national identities on the Soviet periphery. In light of these developments, it would be no stretch to say that national consciousness was developing more rapidly among the non-Russian peoples within their national republics than Russian national consciousness was developing among the Russians. The result was that by the 1970s many Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics had begun to perceive of themselves as the "victims" of national development in these republics as Russians began to suffer from declining social status, fewer professional opportunities, and a rise in antiRussian sentiment. This in fact was one of the major catalysts responsible for the rise in Russian nationalist sentiment discussed earlier in this chapter. Likewise, when local nationalism became much more outspoken in the non-Russian republics in the late 1980s, many Russians, intellectuals in particular, reacted defensively, forming their own nationalist organizations and arguing for the reinforcement ofthe center's control over the periphery. While the non-Russian republics were granted the accoutrements of individuality that reflected their legal status as, according to the 1977 Constitution,

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"free" and "equal" Soviet Socialist Republics, their citizens were conscious of the contradictions in Soviet nationalities policy and the hegemonic position of Russians throughout the USSR. Non-Russians were offended by the regime's excessive praise of the Russian people and the intensive promotion of the Russian language as the country's lingua franca. They regarded with suspicion the presence of Russian "watchdogs" in key Party and government posts in the republics (for example, while the first secretaries of the republics were natives, the second secretary was almost always a Russian, as were most KGB chiefs in the republics) and were dissatisfied with the general diktat of the center, which the non-Russians naturally identified with Russians. Although by the 1970s the institutions of the non-Russian republics had been consolidated under the control of the titular nationalities, there could be little doubt that, as Soviet nationalities expert Aleksandr Motyl wrote in 1987, the Soviet state was "institutionally Russian." 100 Of course, the most important institution in Soviet society was the Communist Party, which according to Article Six of the Soviet Constitution was "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system [and] of all state and public organizations.,,101 While its branches in the nonRussian republics were subordinate to the CPSU and its leading bodies, the Central Committee and its Politburo, they also became more heavily indigenized in the decades after Stalin. Gregory Gleason cites the Kirgiz SSR Communist Party as an example of the phenomenon of increasingly titular control over the local communist parties. He notes that between 1970 and 1981 the percentage of the local party apparat that was composed of ethnic Kirgiz rose from 37.7 to 44.2 percent, while the percentage of Russians declined from 37.6 to 32.9 (and continued to plummet thereafter}-a process that generally paralleled the overall demographic decrease of Russians in the republic. 102 In the Lithuanian republic the non-native, mostly "Russian-speaking" (and Polish) population held steady at about 20 percent during the same period while the percentage of Lithuanians in the local party apparat increased from 61.5 in 1965 to 68.5 a decade later. 103 Yet if the titulars were able to increase their representation within the CPs of the non-Russian republics, the CPSU itself-the mother party and the source of all power in the Soviet Union-remained the stronghold of ethnic Russians. Although the Russian republic had been denied its own Communist Party, the reality was that the Russian party was the CPSU itself, to which all the republican branches were subordinate. During the Brezhnev era the Russian dominance of the CPSU's highest bodies returned to the level of the late Stalin era. Between 1966 and 1981 the percentage of Russians in the CPSU Central Committee rose from 55 to 68.3 percent, while Russians overwhelmingly dominated the Secretariat. 104 Likewise, in 1966 six out of eleven Politburo members were Russians; by 1981 that figure had risen to ten out of fourteen. 105 Although the USSR was not a Russian national state beholden to Russians, it was, according to Motyl, a Soviet Russian state in which Russians were societally hegemonic,

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controlling a major share of the resources that constitute ethnic powerdemographic size, economic modernization (size of working class), social development (number of urban dwellers), cultural vitality (number of scientific workers as a substitute for size of intelligentsia), communications capacity (number of books published), and organizational capacity (number of sociopolitical activists or organizations).106

The Soviet Union, Motyl added (writing in 1987), was "Russian primarily in the sense that the holders of most of its inter- and intrainstitutional authority are Russian."Io7

Russian Nationalism on the Eve of Perestroika On the eve of perestroika in the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was a heavily centralized multinational empire in which political power was concentrated largely in the hands of ethnic Russians, who constituted 52 percent of the Soviet population (1979 census). The country's leading institution, the CPSU, was a Russian-dominated body that oversaw a policy that emphasized the primacy of the Russian language while repressing nationalist "deviations" among nonRussians. The Party's relationship with the Russian nationalist movement, the main subject of this chapter, was indeed ambiguous during the Brezhnev period and into the early 1980s, but this chapter has shown that the regime supported Russian nationalist activities within certain limits and so long as the movement's spokesmen refrained from directly criticizing the country's leadership and appeared to accept the basic tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The period 1980-1981, coinciding with the six hundredth anniversary of the Kulikovo Field Battle, in some ways marked the peak of Russian nationalist activity, before Iurii Andropov's regime curtailed nationalist expression of all kinds.108 Granted unprecedented freedom of expression as Russia celebrated one of its most politically significant anniversaries, Russian nationalist intellectuals vigorously debated demographic issues (the depopulation of rural Russia and declining Russian birthrates), environmental issues (notably the Siberian rivers diversion project), the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia, and the necessity for a moral renewal of the nation. Some used the occasion to revisit the argument that, because of their irreconcilably different natures, Russia and the West were mortal enemies. The emphasis on such concerns, Yitzhak Brudny believes, "was a clear message to the party leadership that the official ideology had failed to prevent the moral corruption of Russian society and had thus weakened the state.,,109 That the Soviet regime allowed these debates to continue indicates that a significant and powerful part of the Soviet establishment agreed, at least in part, with these views and that the leadership continued to find the nationalists' arguments to be politically useful.

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Having emerged from the shadows of Stalinist monism during Khrushchev's thaw, the Russian nationalist movement and its spokesmen enjoyed considerable prestige during the Brezhnev era. Firmly embedded in institutions such as the Russian branch of the Soviet Writers' Union and occupying the editorial offices of several major literary journals and newspapers, the nationalists used their clout to influence public opinion and the creation of Soviet policy. However, their hopes that the Soviet regime would loosen censorship and tackle certain social concerns (the environment, the plight of the Russian countryside, the preservation of historical monuments, the increasing influence of the West on Russian youth) were disappointed, for as the regime ossified it was incapable of addressing these issues. With the deaths of ideologist Mikhail Suslov and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, followed by the demise of Brezhnev's successors Iurii Andropov (d. 1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (d. 1985), the Russian nationalist movement entered a period of uncertainty during which its spokesmen could no longer count on the same level of official support. While the Russian nationalist intellectuals hoped to regain their influence under Mikhail Gorbachev, it soon became apparent that they would be among the losers of the new general secretary's attempts to reform and reinvigorate Soviet socialism.

Notes I. The literature on Russian nationalist samizdat is extensive and is somewhat beyond the scope of this study. The best-known and most important of the samizdat nationalist publications was Veche, founded and edited by Vladmir Osipov, an open Orthodox believer. Veche managed to publish ten issues between 1971 and 1974, which suggests that the KGB was for a time willing to look the other way. Although the journal was saturated with articles by religious believers proclaiming the central position of the Orthodox faith in Russian society, at the same time Veche's content reflected a stream of nationalist thought that was reconciled to the rule of the Soviet regime. See Darrell Hammer, "Vladimir Osipov and the Veche Group (1971-1974): A Page from the History of Political Dissent," The Russian Review 43, no. 4 (1984): 355-375. Also see Yanov (1987), 128-154, and the numerous references in Dunlop (1983) and Mitrokhin. Other significant "underground" Russian nationalists included Mikhail Antonov, Gennadii Shimanov (each of whom hoped to reconcile Leninism with the "Russian idea"), and Anatolii M. Ivanov (who wrote under the name A. Skuratov), author of the infamous samizdat essay titled "Code of Morals." See Dunlop (1983); Alexeyeva (1985); Yanov (1978). The best-known clandestine Russian nationalist organization was All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON), which formed in 1964 but was dissolved three years later by the KGB. See John B. Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1976); Mitrokhin, 221-235. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of course, defies categorization, for he was an anticommunist who was generally free from the taint of anti-Semitism and chauvinism. His calls for a

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moral revolution in Russia, and his opposition to the Soviet regime, resulted in his exile in 1974. For his views at this time, see his three chapters in Solzhenitsyn et a!., From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974). For his battles with the Soviet regime, see his The Oak and the Calf (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) as well as Michael Scammell, The Solzhenitsyn Files (Chicago: Independent Publishers Group, 1995). 2. Here the term "Russian party" is used to mean establishment figures who supported pro-Russian nationalist positions. See Mitrokhin. 3. A native of Kursk province, on the border of Russia and Ukraine, Khrushchev believed that Ukrainians and Russians were historically united. In this spirit, and perhaps in an attempt to secure Ukrainian national support in 1954, he transferred the Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. 4. Simon, 230-231. 5. The crackdown on "bourgeois nationalist" tendencies in the Latvian republic in 1959 was particularly harsh. A major purge of the Latvian Communist Party cost about two thousand officials their jobs. 6. Cited in Gleason, 66. 7. A useful analysis of the village prose movement may be found in Kathleen F. Parthe, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 8. Brudny, 71-72. Soloukhin, a CPSU member, was later criticized for his religious views in the Party journal Kommunist. See Vladislav Krasnov, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle ofNational Rebirth (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 96-98. 9. Brudny writes that by the I 960s the "village prose" writers had begun to be divided into liberal (moderate) and conservative Russian nationalists. The liberals, who focused on the tragedy of collectivization and peasant suffering, included writers such as Fedor Abramov and Sergei Zalygin, each of whose works were published in the relatively liberal Novyi mir. The conservative derevenshchiki, on the other hand, focused on the Russian peasantry's traditions and morality, which they idealized. Their works assailed the evils of city life and criticized the cult of modernity then being promoted by the Soviet regime. Such writers included Aleksandr Yashin, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vladimir Chivilikhin, and arguably Aleksandr Solzhenytsin; later their ranks were joined by Vasilii Belov and Valentin Rasputin. 10. Historian Yitzhak Brudny argues that the derevenshchiki were tolerated because they were in fact useful to a Brezhnev regime that sought to manipulate public opinion to support heavier investments in agriculture. Brudny,27-13I. II. English, 13 7. 12. Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 554. 13. Mitrokhin, 308-313. 14. By 1965, VOOPIK had 3 million members, a figure which rose to 19 million by 1971 and 35 million by the mid-I 980s. Carter, 82; Petro (1996), 134. 15. VOOPIK's founding and its activities are discussed in Dunlop (1983), 63-87, and Mitrokhin,300-337. 16. Mitrokhin, 320. Mitrokhin also discusses a "Russian club" within the Moscow organization of VOOPIK, where Russian nationalists (including Vadim Kozhinov, Sergei Semanov, Viktor Chalmaev, Iurii Ivanov, and several dozen others) met to discuss their

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ideas about Russia and its enemies. The "Russian club" was active from 1967 until November 1972, when the Moscow branch of VOOPIK was shut down; this act coincided with the Kremlin's 1972 campaign against nationalism. See Mitrokhin, 320-326. 17. Although it was intended to be a conservative counterpart to the liberal (and heavily Jewish) Moscow organization, with the creation of the UW RSFSR, Russian writers at last had their own institution-one which by 1970 became the center of Russian nationalism. 18. Although the creation of a republican organization for writers in Russia was justified on the principle of equality for the republics, Khrushchev, like Lenin and Stalin before him, realized that the same principle could not be applied to the Communist Party. Fearing that the creation of a Communist Party for the RSFSR would upset the delicate balance between the CPSU (which was already dominated by Russians) and the republican parties, the matter was postponed until late in the Gorbachev era. Nevertheless, in the absence of a republican Communist Party, a Russian Bureau under the CPSU Central Committee was created in 1956 to serve Russian republican interests. It lasted only until 1966, when it was dismantled by the Brezhnev regime. 19. The natural birthrate in the RSFSR in 1970 was 14.6 per thousand, the lowest of all the Soviet republics after Latvia (14.5). The highest growth rates were in the Tadzhik SSR (37.1), the Uzbek SSR (34.5), and the Turkmen SSR (34.4). Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples ofthe Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 122-123. 20. Kozlov, 69. 21. The most important of these periodicals was Nash sovremennik, which in the 1970s became the central organ of the Russian nationalist movement. Also under nationalistconservative influence were the RSFSR daily Sovetskaia Rossiia, and the journals Literaturnaia Rossiia, Sovremennik, and Moskva (under the control of the Moscow branch of the RSFSR Writers' Union). At the all-Union level Russian nationalists enjoyed significant influence on the editorial staffs of Molodaia gvardiia, Roman-gazeta, Voenizdat, and to a lesser extent Ogonek. 22. Mitrokhin, 369. 23. Tensions in the relationship between the ambitious Shelepin and Leonid Brezhnev existed from the beginning but had come out into the open by 1967, particularly over Brezhnev's agricultural policies. As a result, in September 1967 Shelepin lost his position in the Secretariat-the source of his power-but was allowed to remain in the Politburo until 1975. Mitrokhin, 99-1 17; John Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union 1945-1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 195-196. 24. Although once a training ground of the Communist Party elite, by the 1980s the Komsomol became one of the "earliest elite sources of businessmen." David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997), 118-119. 25. Valerii Ganichev is widely acknowledged as the vozhd' (chief) of the Russian nationalist movement during the 1970s. After a five-year stint as first deputy director of the Molodaia gvardiia publishing house, Ganichev worked in the Komsomol Department of Propaganda in 1967-68, but then returned to Molodaia gvardiia, which he directed for the next decade. After another brief stint working in the CPSU Department of Propaganda, in 1978 Ganichev was appointed chief editor of the newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda, joining the board of the conservative-nationalist journal Roman-gazeta two years later. During this period he lobbied for the interests of the Pavlov group while cultivating con-

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tacts with writers-including Russian nationalists, anti-Zionists, and veterans-whose works he had published at the Molodaia gvardiia publishing house. He was what Mitrokhin calls a "communicator," a universally recognized leader who brought together the various strands of the Russian nationalist movement within the establishment and the intelligentsia. See Mitrokhin, 379-382. 26. Despite the fact that Shelepin and Dmitrii Polianskii (another protector of the Russian nationalists) remained in the Politburo until the mid-l 970s, after 1970 the Russian nationalists no longer had a formal group of supporters in Brezhnev's Politburo and Secretariat. Mitrokhin, 121,360-364. 27. Mitrokhin, 200-210. 28. Mitrokhin, 353. 29. Mitrokhin, 249. 30. See Brudny, 27-131. 31. Because of their preponderance within the RSFSR Writers' Union, nationalistconservatives also controlled most of the regional publications, whereas liberal-reformists tended to control periodicals in Moscow and Leningrad. 32. The serialized essays written by the painter Il'ia Glazunov and Vladimir Soloukhin and published in Molodaia gvardiia in 1965 and 1966, each of which praised prerevolutionary Russia and Russian national culture, were particularly influential among the Russian nationalist intelligentsia. See Brudny, 71-72. 33. For discussions of the articles by Lobanov and Chalmaev, see Yanov (1978), 1415; Yanov (1987),39-48; Dunlop (1983), 218-227; Laqueur (1993),91-93; Brudny, 7376. 34. Aleksandr Dement'ev, "0 traditsiiakh i narodnosti," Novyi mir 44 (1969): 215-235. Dement'ev's critique is summarized in Dunlop (1983), 221-223, and Brudny, 82-84. 35. Brudny, 82. 36. Nearly a year before the purge of Molodaia gvardiia, in February 1970, the board of Novyi mir, long the leading liberal-reformist journal, was purged, and its chief editor, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, was forced to resign. 37. See Brudny, 80-93; Aleksandr Yakovlev, Omut Pamiati (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), 178. 38. Brudny, 93. During the 1970s under the editors Fedor Ovcharenko and (after 1972) Anatolii S. Ivanov, Molodaia gvardiia continued its development into a mouthpiece for neo-Stalinist and ultranationalist ideas, largely devoid of any anticommunist or antiSoviet content that the regime might consider threatening. Meanwhile, Nash sovremennik under Sergei Vikulov flourished in the 1970s, more than tripling its circulation as it attracted village prose writers who had once published their works in Novyi mir. 39. As evidence of the Brezhnev regime's support for the politics of the derevenshchiki, Brudny points out that between 1971 and 1982, eleven village prose writers were honored with the four highest Soviet literary awards. During this same period the circulation of each of the nationalist thick journals-Nash sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and Moskva-more than doubled. This feat could not be claimed by any of the major liberal-reformist journals. Brudny, 103-105. 40. Vladimir Shlapentokh' Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 187. 41. Mitrokhin, 133-134.

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42. Yakovlev's views about the dangers of Russian nationalism were well known prior to the publication of his famous article. In October 1971 he had written an essay critical of Russian nationalism, published in the CPSU journal Kommunist. Two weeks before the publication of "Against Anti-Historicism" he wrote a memorandum to the Politburo in which he criticized Kommunist for its failures in dealing with local nationalisms and Russian nationalism. Brudny, 97-98. 43. Yanov (1978), 57-58; also see Brudny, 94-101. Valerii Ganichev believes that Yakovlev took this position on Russian nationalism for careerist purposes-that is, to remove the "stain" of his earlier membership in the Shelepin group from his autobiography. See Mitrokhin, 132. 44. Yakovlev claims that the Politburo never discussed his article. Yakovlev, 190, 203. 45. Although there obviously could be no direct response in the official press to the views of one of the Party's chief ideologists, the samizdat journal Veche responded to Yakovlev's arguments with an editorial entitled "The Struggle with So-Called Russophilism, or the Road to Suicide for the State." See Yanov (1978), 59. 46. Noteworthy exceptions include Ivan Shevtsov's novels and V. Ivanov's Yellow Metal (1956), whose plot has Jews stealing Siberian gold for sale abroad. 47. According to figures provided by Semyon Reznik, an emigre writer and an expert on Russian anti-Semitism, between 1969 and 1985 about 230 books were published in the USSR that exposed the Zionist-Masonic conspiracy against Russia and the entire world. Moreover, according to Reznik's count, between 1981 and 1986 alone more than 48,000 different anti-Semitic articles appeared in the Soviet press. Reznik, The Nazijication of Russia: Antisemitism in the Post-Soviet Era (Washington, D.C.: Challenge Publications, 1996),49. 48. Walter Laqueur claims that one of the main supporters of "anti-Zionists" in the Soviet establishment was the political directorate of the Soviet armed forces, which found it useful to bolster the image of a new enemy in the face of the declining appeal of Soviet ideology. The publishing house ofthe armed forces continued to publish such works right up to 1990. See Laqueur (1993), 108, 110. 49. For a discussion of Soviet Zionology, see Reznik (1996), 35-60. 50. Laqueur (1993), 109. 51. See Brudny, 90. 52. By the early 1980s, Soviet leaders, concerned with the country's international image, began to regard the sort of anti-Semitic propaganda being produced by Begun and others as a liability to the regime. As a result, less of it was produced in the USSR, particularly in the early Gorbachev years. 53. Several historians have discussed the significance of the controversy over Pikul'. See, for example, Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York: Collier Books, 1990), 119; Mikhail Heifetz, "The Resurgence of Christianity and Russian-Jewish Relations," in Nicolai N. Petro, ed., Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 186-188; Mikhail Heller, Rossiiskie zametki, 1969-1979 (Moscow: MIK, 1999),528-530; Brudny, 112-115. 54. The reviewer for the journal Zvezda (no. 3, 1973) expressed his approval of Pikul"s investigation into "the formation of the Russian national character." See (no author given) "Valentin Pikul': The Soviet Vsevelod Krestovsky," Radio Liberty Research, 17 September 1979, 5. 55. For a discussion of the critical responses to this novel, see Brudny, 112-115.

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56. N.N. Shneidman, Soviet Literature in the 1980s: Decade of Transition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 143, 144, 153. 57. See Vera Tolz, "Russian Nationalism in the 1980s: Echoes of Stalinist Policy," Radio Liberty Research, 7 November 1985, 3. 58. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (New York: McGraw, 1974),64-65. 59. The Uniate Church was established by the Union of Brest in 1596, a time when most of Ukraine was under Polish control. Although linked to Rome, the Uniate Church retained the rituals, practices, and customs of Orthodoxy. Most Orthodox bishops loyal to the Polish state went along with the union, but most Orthodox believers did not. Eastern parts of Ukraine have tended to favor Orthodoxy, while western Ukraine, annexed to the USSR during World War II, is mostly Uniate. 60. See Steven M. Miner, Stalin's Holy War. Viewed as a simple tool of the Kremlin, the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply resented by the millions of western Ukrainians who had been deprived of their own church. Forty years later few would be surprised that at the first opportunity western Ukrainians would be prepared to reestablish the Uniate Church and take control over its pre-war property-actions that would put the Uniates and their backers at sharp odds with the institutional and material interests of the Russian Orthodox Church. 61. Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999),487; Peter J.S. Duncan, "Orthodoxy and Russian Nationalism in the USSR, 1917-1988," in Geoffrey A. Hosking, ed., Church, Nation and State in Russia and the Ukraine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991),321. 62. Eugene B. Shirley, Jr., and Michael Rowe, eds., Candle in the Wind: Religion in the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Policy Center, 1989), 121. 63. Dunlop (1983),190-195. 64. Andrew, 490. 65. In 1976 Father Yakunin founded the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers' Rights. Three years later he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. 66. Keep, 166; Dmitry Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1998),336. 67. Bohdan R. Bociukiw, "Nationalities and Soviet Religious Policies," in Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger, eds., The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 152. 68. Bociukiw, 151. 69. Duncan (1991), 320. 70. Then Brezhnev proceeded to contradict himself by acknowledging the "new problems and tasks" that nationality relations continued to pose in the USSR. Walker Connor, "Soviet Policies Toward the Non-Russian Peoples in Theoretic and Historical Perspective: What Gorbachev Inherited," in Alexander Motyl, ed., The Post-Soviet Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),43. 71. The creation of a "new historical community was first announced by Khrushchev in 1957 but became a hallmark of Brezhnev's nationalities policy. Valery Tishkov aptly describes how the emphasis on "Soviet socialist culture," despite its emphasis on Russian as a common means of communication, provoked objections on the part of many Russian nationalist intellectuals. "To many of them, it signified a 'loss of one's roots' and abandoning the traditions of Russian folk (primarily peasant) culture. What was considered

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Russification by the non-Russian intellectuals meant 'Sovietization' for Russian nationalists. This dissent served as a major cause behind the emergence of the Russian nationalpatriotic movement, which in many aspects was the political analogue of ethnonationalist movements among other nationalities of the Soviet Union." Tishkov, 87. 72. See Karen A. Collias, "Making Soviet Citizens: Patriotic and Internationalist Education in the Formation of a Soviet State Identity," in Henry R. Huttenbach, ed., Soviet Nationalities Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR (New York: Mansell Publishing Ltd., 1990), 73-93. 73. Simon, 317-322; Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 30. 74. Simon, 317. 75. Tishkov, 85. 76. Simon, 324-328. 77. Anatol Lieven, "The Weakness of Russian Nationalism," Survival 41, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 53-70. 78. Rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy: The Collapse of the USSR and Latvia (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), 17. 79. Karklins (1986), 62. 80. For a thorough discussion of russification during the postwar period, see Robert J. Kaiser (1994), 254-295. Quote from p. 262. 81. R. J. Kaiser (1994),265. 82. R. J. Kaiser (1994), 282. 83. R. J. Kaiser (1994),288-293. 84. By 1989 this figure had risen to 15.6 percent. RJ. Kaiser (1994), 294. 85. Kosto, 91, 99. 86. Ann Sheehy, ""Ethnographic Developments and the Soviet Federal System," in Alastair McCauley, ed., Soviet Federalism: Nationalism and Economic Decentralisation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991),78-80. 87. Kremenyuk, 15. 88. Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940-1990, revised and expanded edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 108. 89. As Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera point out, "it made little economic sense to deport Baltic farmers to Siberia and then import Russian labor into Baltic cities." P.108. 90. Roman Levita and Mikhail Loiberg, "The Empire and the Russians: Historical Aspects," in Vladimir Shlapentokh, Munir Sendich, and Emil Payin, eds., The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 16. 91. Misunas and Taagepera, III. 92. See Kozlov, 4-70. 93. On the national self-identities of the "Russian-speaking" communities, see David D. Laitin, identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 94. See Kaiser (1994), 158-170. 95. Sheehy in McAuley, 81. 96. Sheehy in McAuley, 81.

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97. Misiunas and Taagepera, 214-216. 98. Largely because of the political astuteness of its longtime Communist Party leader Antanas Snieckus, the Lithuanian republic was able to avoid such a high rate of Russian immigration. Statistics on the population and ethnicity of the Baltic republics may be in Misiunas and Taagepera, 353. For a discussion of the national consciousness of the "Russian-speaking population (rnsskoiazychnoe naselenie) in the non-Russian republics, especially in the years after 1991, see Laitin. 99. Simon, 265. 100. Alexander J. Motyl, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 41. 101. The Soviet Union, second edition (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1986), 317. 102. Gleason, 89-90. 103. Misunas and Taagepera, 353, 360. 104. Simon, 418. 105. Nahaylo and Swoboda, 207. 106. During the second half of the 1970s and into the 1980s the numbers and circulation of Russian-language periodicals grew much faster than those of periodicals printed in other languages. The Ukrainian-language press was particularly negatively affected by this policy. See Roman Szporluk, "The Press and Soviet Nationalities: The Party Resolution of 1975 and Its Implementation," Nationalities Papers, vol. 14, nos. 1-2 (1986), 4764. 107. Motyl (1987), 42-43. 108. The Kulikovo battle of 1380 is one of the central events of Russian medieval history. The victory of the Muscovite prince Drnitrii Donskoi over the Tatars is usually portrayed as marking the beginning of Russia's independence from the Golden Horde. 109. Brudny, 183-184.

3 Writers: An Opposition in Embryo, 1986-1988 "The Party and Government have given the writer everything, and taken away from him only one thing-the right to write badly." - Leonid Sobolev, 1934 "What, then, is our culture? It is the Kremlin, the old Arbat, the wisdom of Pushkin, the phenomenon of Lomonosov, the architecture of northern villages, great painting, the Decembrists, freedom, the world of Tolstoy, the genius of Lenin, the October Revolution, socialism." - Iurii Bondarev, December 1985

Chapter Three discusses the culture war that was taking place within the Russian intellectual community during the fIrst three years of Gorbachev's reforms. The glasnost policy launched in 1986, intended by the regime to rally popular support for perestroika, considerably loosened the ideological straightjacket that had long prevented intellectuals from engaging in an honest discussion of the Soviet past and present. In an era when policy remained the preserve of the Communist Party alone, the culture war served as a proxy for the struggle over perestroika itself, pitting the pro-perestroika liberal-reformists who had been placed in charge of much of the media against conservatives who retained their grip over the RSFSR Writers' Union and several of its key journals and newspapers. Once favored by the Soviet regime, the union's nationalist-conservative secretaries were soon alarmed by the excesses of glasnost and the seeping cultural Westernization that enticed the younger generations; many writers felt threatened by the potential impact that literary perestroika would have on their organization and on their livelihoods. United in a common struggle against the liberalreformists now favored by the Kremlin, the differences of opinion among the Russian nationalist intellectuals and union's literary apparatchiki narrowed signifIcantly. While Gorbachev still faced no organized opposition before 1990, the Russian Writers' Union served as an institutional base for an opposition in embryo. 79

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Engineers of Human Souls Chapter Two discussed the rise of Russian nationalism as an independent ideology after Stalin and the qualified support that Russian nationalist intellectuals received from the Brezhnev regime. Because of the regime's tightening of censorship, its ambiguous attitude toward Russian nationalism after Brezhnev, and its failure adequately to address the nationalists' concerns, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 the Russian nationalist intellectuals were already somewhat alienated from the Soviet regime. I The gulf was further widened by Gorbachev's decisions to launch a program of political and economic reform and to cultivate the support of the liberal-reformist intelligentsia, who naturally were thought to be among those most likely to support the regime's policy goals. Believing, like most Soviet citizens, that politics in the USSR was a zero-sum game in which there were "winners" and "losers," the nationalistconservatives realized that Gorbachev's cultivation of the liberal intelligentsia could only have an adverse effect on their power and influence. While at first they welcomed glasnost's promise of a loosening of censorship, Russian nationalist intellectuals soon discovered that they were under attack from the liberal reformers and were losing power to them in their institutional base, the Writers' Union. As their alienation grew, the opponents of perestroika began to use the space afforded them by the Gorbachev regime to launch an attack on restructuring itself. Eventually their positions, which had developed during the Brezhnev era and continued, within the ideological limits acceptable to the regime, to be articulated in the journals and newspapers they controlled, would be taken up by those in the political establishment who shared their concerns for the consequences, both real and potential, of Gorbachev's attempt to transform the country. To place the struggle in the Writers' Union in its proper context, it is necessary first to consider more generally the relationship between the writer and the state in the USSR. The traditional Soviet approach to art and literature was to judge a work by its political usefulness and to reward or punish an artist or writer accordingly. From the Kremlin's point of view, the main purpose of art was to disseminate knowledge and inculcate ideas that the Soviet leaders believed would facilitate the victory of the proletarian cause. Perhaps nowhere in Soviet life were the bonds that connected art and politics more tenacious than in the world ofletters. From the outset of Soviet rule, literature, like all art, was subject to strict political controls. In reality, of course, in those early years the Bolsheviks were too busy handling (or mishandling) other urgent problems, such as the civil war and a famine, to be overly concerned with literary issues; thus for a time there was at least some space for non-political art as long as it was not hostile to the regime. Art was regulated by Anatolii Lunacharskii's Commissariat for Enlight-

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enment as well as Party members who were in one way or another connected with the arts. 2 In addition, the regime relied on proletarian writers, along with proletarian artists, to act as cultural leaders by their examples. Since writers were expected to monitor each other during the early NEP period, this allowed for some flexibility in the literary arena. As Stalin consolidated his position as the top Party leader, however, a general line emerged in connection with cultural matters. Consequently, the arts, and in particular literature, became more tightly bound to the policies of the Party. The censorship body, Glavlit, was established in 1922, and beginning with Evgenii Zamiatin's novel, We, one of its main tasks was to ban ideologically suspect works. As the regime still lacked an external body to guide literature from the outside, a number of groups formed which competed for the government's favor and for subsidies. This competition ended in 1928 with the creation of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the dominant branch of a series of "proletarian" groups calling themselves Associations of Proletarian Writers. 3 For four years RAPP exercised a near monopoly in dictating literary policy (one of its concerns was monitoring any manifestations of Great Russian chauvinism in Soviet literature), until a Party decree on literature issued in 1932 abolished all unorthodox literary trends and all literary associations in the Soviet Union and set up a new, comprehensive literary association, the Union of Writers of the USSR (UW USSR)-also called the Soviet Writers' Union. Many writers hoped that the new union would put an end to the dogmatic restrictions in literature that they had identified with RAPP. They were to be disappointed. Although the Party did not want to be seen as interfering directly in the literary process, the Writers' Union was nevertheless created just for that purpose: it was a non-Party intermediary through which the CPSU could influence the work of Soviet writers. In order further to ensure universal conformity to the general line, membership was required of all full-time writers in the Soviet Union. Thus, with the creation of the Writers' Union, the Soviet state assumed almost total mastery over the imaginations of its writers. It even created a new literary orthodoxy-Socialist Realism-through which writers could serve the Party's political and ideological needs. Officially defined as "the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism," Socialist Realism "demands from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development ... combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism.,,4 As the "engineers of human souls," to use Stalin's phrase, writers had to make sure that their works observed the requirements of the Party and the union. 5 Writers first submitted themselves to scrupulous self-censorship, knowing that manuscripts that did not meet the Party's standards had little chance of ever reaching Glavlit, which was the formal censorship organization. The Secretariat of the Board of the Writers' Union, in cooperation with Goskomizdat (the State Committee on Publishing) and the Party ideology specialist, made the routine

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decisions concerning what works of literature would get published and in how large a print run. 6 Although compelled to observe the strict boundaries of official orthodoxy, those writers who were accepted into the Writers' Union enjoyed a comparatively comfortable existence. 7 Perquisites might include access to high-quality consumer goods, the chance to live in Moscow, or the possibility of receiving a larger apartment, and for the most trusted writers, the opportunity to travel abroad. s Such enticements were part of a calculated strategy to encourage and reward loyalty. It is easy to understand why many members, long used to relative affluence in a society that rewarded its writers not only materially but also with high status, would feel threatened by the rapid changes of the Gorbachev era that imperiled the continued existence of these privileges. While the union depended on the Party from its inception, in the late 1960s these links were tightened. Henceforth the Writers' Union would playa greater role in Soviet literary life and as an agency through which the Party would create Brezhnev's new society.9 Indeed, after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 Glavlit's role in official censorship declined as that function increasingly fell to the CPSU Central Committee and the editorial boards of periodicals and publishing houses. Increasingly what mattered during the Brezhnev era was access to the Party hierarchy, for well-placed individuals in the Central Committee's Department of Culture and Department of Propaganda could stop the publication of materials already passed by Glavlit; conversely, the Party hierarchy could also encourage the publications of the types of works they would like to see in print. 10 As discussed in the previous chapter, during the Brezhnev era this resulted in the favoring of Russian nationalist writers over those of a liberalrefonnist bent. The convergence of the political apparat and the literary bureaucracy reached a peak during the 1970s, by which time Writers' Union members occupied numerous influential posts in agencies such as Goskomizdat and were a dominant presence on the editorial boards of many journals; likewise, Party members dominated the Congresses of Writers, which were held about every five years. II While more than half of the union's writers were members of the Party, conversely, top Party leaders could claim, sometimes dubiously, to be writers-as the case of Leonid Brezhnev's award-winning ghostwritten memoirs demonstrates. Even the structure of the Writers' Union bore some resemblance to that of the CPSU: at the apex of the union hierarchy was a Litburo (like the Politburo it was drawn from a larger Secretariat) consisting of nine individuals (always men) who had the power to make decisions affecting the entire union. 12 The coordination between the Party and the Writers' Union during the Brezhnev era was also reflected in each body's sharp tum toward russification and Russian nationalism: by the 1970s Russians dominated both the Politburo and the Writers' Union Litburo. This was occurring at the same time as the Russian nationalists were securing their positions on the editorial staffs of several major literary journals.

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When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 the regime's attitude toward the Russian nationalist intelligentsia was ambiguous. One thing was certain, however: the "inclusionary politics" of the Brezhnev era were over.13 Indeed, when Gorbachev sought to whip up popular support for glasnost and perestroika between 1986 and 1988, it was to the liberal-reformist intelligentsia that he turned-although he never abandoned the hope that he could win over the Russian nationalist intellectuals whom he admired. The "bogus intellectuals" (Shlapentokh's term) who had once obediently served the Brezhnev regime and the Russian nationalists who had once enjoyed its support soon found themselves on the defensive, for perestroika, by lowering the barriers between Russia and the West and by unleashing demands for even more radical change, challenged their vision of all that was sacred in Soviet Russia. 14 The challenge, however, was more than ideological, for the positions many writers took on the economic elements of the reform program were informed by their material concerns. While some writers believed that the introduction of some form of a market economy would provide talented writers with the opportunity to get rich, others were convinced that perestroika in the literary world could only hurt the standing and privileges enjoyed by its entrenched establishment.

"Whose side are you on, masters of culture?" Mikhail Gorbachev set out neither to introduce a democratic revolution nor to destroy the Soviet Union. Like many others of his generation-the "children of the Twentieth Party Congress"-Gorbachev was driven by a belief in a better socialism. When his team came to power in mid-1980s, writes historian Stephen Kotkin, they "continued to puzzle over the reformist generation dilemma: how to bridge the gap between socialism's ideals and its disappointing realities, within the context of the superpower competition.,,15 Committed to a renewal of socialist ideals, the general secretary sought in the early stages of perestroika not to repudiate the system, but to modernize and reinvigorate it. 16 "Perestroika" meant restructuring, not destroying, socialism. Despite some initial skepticism on the part of a Soviet public that was conditioned to coping with the disappointment that always followed pie-in-the-sky promises and half-implemented and abandoned reforms (such as Khrushchev's reforms of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the aborted Kosygin reforms of 1965), there was in the early Gorbachev years a broad consensus for change after more than a decade of "stagnation" (zastoi) under Brezhnev. 17 While one group of top Soviet officials, still clinging to the old dogmas of the Brezhnev era, sought a hardline tum at home and abroad, many of the reformist advisors and institutchiki (academic scholars and analysts) upon whom Gorbachev relied and ultimately depended-Aleksandr Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnzdze, Georgii Arbatov, Abel Aganbegian, Anatolii Cherniaev, Georgii Shakhnazarov, and

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others-had spent decades studying the problems of Soviet society and soon emerged as the standard-bearers of "new political thinking" (novoe politicheskoe myshlenie) in domestic and foreign affairs. It was, Robert English argues, Gorbachev's acceptance of the new thinking, a process that took place incrementally during his first two years at the helm, that made possible the changes that ended the Cold War and transformed Soviet society. 18 During the first two years of perestroika Gorbachev's policies promised "prosperity, consumer goods, reduced international tensions, increased openness in culture and the arts, more public voice and representation in public decision making, and an increased likelihood that socially valuable work would result in personal advancement," and to achieve these ends the general secretary quickly secured the public support of some of the most powerful and influential sectors of Soviet society, including the military and the intelligentsia, as well as those sectors identified with agriculture and consumer goods production. 19 Indeed, at first, nearly everyone claimed to be in favor of perestroika. While perestroika came to be identified with all these policies, Gorbachev's earliest attempts to reinvigorate socialism focused less on real structural reform than on "acceleration" (uskorenie), a slogan from the Andropov era that stressed the need for increased discipline in the workplace. Perestroika, Gorbachev emphasized in those early years, meant "working harder." But the general secretary soon realized that acceleration could bring only sporadic and limited results and that a more concerted effort would need to be made to harness the energies of the Soviet people in the service of creating a better socialism. The problem, he concluded after his first year at the helm, was not the system created by Lenin, but the millions of Party bosses and bureaucrats-the nomenklatura-who benefited from the system as it was. By the spring of 1986, Gorbachev later recalled, "The feeling [in the Politburo J was that it [perestroikaJ had run up against the gigantic Party and state apparat, which stood like a dam in the path of reforms. ,,20 The grip of the nomenklatura, he concluded, had to be loosened by force. Thus the Kremlin reformers emphasized "glasnost," loosely translated as "openness" or "publicity." Glasnost was a precondition for perestroika, and from the outset it had very specific purposes: to draw attention to poor managerial performances; to expose and root out the worst cases of corruption; to reduce inefficiency by publicizing its sources; and most importantly, to begin the transformation of the country's political culture. In short, glasnost was an instrument for the mobilization of social energies in the service of meaningful change. The Chemobyl tragedy of April 1986 provided much of the impetus for this latest campaign, for it had shown beyond question that the Stalinist system, whose main hallmarks were secrecy and a lack of concern for the population, was backward and corrupt. Gorbachev, who suffered a loss of credibility as a result of his initial silence, learned an important lesson from the Chernobyl disaster: glasnost had to be perceived as being more than just a propaganda campaign; it had to have substance. The Soviet people would have to be told the truth about the country's miserable circumstances.

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Most writers initially viewed the introduction of glasnost positively. Indeed, many of them, including Russian nationalist writers such as Valentin Rasputin, had been campaigning for a loosening of censorship since the mid-l 960s. The launching of the glasnost campaign, however, was in no way intended as a step toward the abolition of censorship; its purpose was to galvanize public support for the regime's policy goals through a measured loosening of cultural controls. As under previous Soviet regimes, the state's writers were expected to endorse the goals of the Party. Gorbachev's main comrade-in-arms at the height of the glasnost campaign was Aleksandr Yakovlev, who after a series of candid conversations with Gorbachev (then a rising star under Andropov) in Canada in 1983 had returned to Moscow after a decade in Ottawa as the Soviet ambassador. In 1985, after serving for two years as the director of the Institute of W orId Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), he returned to his old post as head of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department. Enjoying considerable influence over the new general secretary, Yakovlev advanced quickly, as he was promoted to candidate member of the Politburo in January 1987 and to full membership the following June. In 1986 Yakovlev and Gorbachev began a revolution in the cultural sphere whose flavor was best captured by the slogan "Back to Leninism!" The goal of this cultural revolution was to gain popular support for perestroika. For this the country's leaders turned to the intelligentsia-and in particular to the country's liberal-reformist intellectuals. Already enjoying positions of power in the country's literary and cultural institutions, the Russian nationalist intellectuals-and the literary bureaucracy as a whole-could not hope to benefit from substantive political and economic reform, although many did initially welcome glasnost as an opportunity to discuss with greater candor certain problems in literature and in Soviet society more generally. During the first year of Gorbachev's rule, before the glasnost campaign got off the ground, it was still the Russian nationalist intellectuals who set the agenda for public debate (such as it was). The most popular topic at this timeone that was safely apolitical yet socially and culturally meaningful-was Soviet environmental policy, and in particular the proposed river diversion project, which would divert the flow of the Russian rivers Ob', Irtysh, and possibly the Enisei, southward to arid Central Asia. Many Soviet intellectuals, and those identified with Russian nationalism in particular, questioned the wisdom of this plan, fearing the harm the river diversions would likely inflict on the environment of the Russian north.21 In the summer of 1985 the project was discussed by experts in Nash sovremennik, and soon afterwards a group of Russian nationalist writers mobilized in protest against the scheme, citing the likely destruction of cultural and religious monuments in a key historical area of Russia. 22 At the RSFSR (Russian) Writers' Union Congress in December 1985 and at the USSR Writers' Union Congress in June 1986, Sergei Zalygin (b. 1913), whose environmental activism stretched back a quarter century, as well as the popular vil-

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lage prose writer Valentin Rasputin and the war novelist Iurii Bondarev, warned against the project and by influencing the decision to terminate it won a symbolic victory for Russian nationalists. 23 An early supporter of glasnost who would soon be among its leading critics, Iurii Bondarev wrote in early 1986: "If broad discussion and openness reigned everywhere, many errors might have been avoided.,,24 On 19 June 1986, less than two weeks before the Eighth Congress of the USSR Writers' Union was scheduled to convene, Gorbachev hosted an informal meeting with about thirty Soviet writers and editors who were deputies to the Supreme Soviet-the USSR's rubber-stamp parliament. Here the general secretary spoke at length about the difficulties of implementing his perestroika program. Gorbachev acknowledged that the "administrative layer" (meaning the Soviet bureaucracy) was the greatest obstacle to perestroika: from mere passive resistance to change it had moved to outright sabotage. Glasnost, he emphasized, was a precondition to true reform of the Party and society: "We don't have an opposition [party]. How then can we monitor ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. And most of all, through glasnost." Nevertheless, Gorbachev added, glasnost had its limits: exploration of the past was impermissible-a line that would change as Gorbachev reconsidered the objectives of perestroika. Apart from the simple habit of repeating his now-familiar mantras about the need for perestroika and glasnost, the point of the meeting was, of course, to indicate to writers and artists that Gorbachev was depending on them to help him in his struggle to circumvent the bureaucracy and to "restructure" Soviet society.25 "The Central Committee needs help. You cannot imagine how much we need help from a group like the writers." Putting the matter more bluntly, he asked them: "Whose side are you on, masters of culture?,,26 The implications of this question, originally asked more than fifty years earlier by the first Writers' Union chief, Maksim Gor'kii, were surely lost on no one in the room. Many, used to the vagaries of official policy and well aware of the regime's history of rewarding obedient writers and punishing the disobedient, were able to adjust to the prevailing winds and changed their issues in accordance with the liberal spirit of glasnost. Later their opponents would remind them of how many among their ranks had loyally served the Stalin and Brezhnev regimes.27 As John and Carol Garrard note in their study of the Writers' Union, by calling upon the Soviet intelligentsia to play an active role in supporting the restructuring program, Gorbachev was seeking help from the very group that had the most to lose if his policies were implemented. 28 Indeed, glasnost and the reform program it was intended to support soon came to be regarded with some trepidation by much of the Writers' Union bureaucracy. There were several reasons for this. To begin with, most of the union's members were far from young; thus it is hardly surprising that the majority were unreceptive to the rapid changes afoot. Writing in 1990, historian Geoffrey Hosking described the union as a "classic instance of an official organization unresponsive to youth; of its recent recruits only twenty percent have been under the age of thirty-five at the age of entering.,,29 The average age of its nearly ten thousand members was

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sixty.30 Indeed, the banner of perestroika was more often carried by much younger people whose stake in the existing system was considerably less. Second, by the summer of 1986 it was clear that the regime was favoring intellectuals of a liberal-reformist bent over the literary old guard that had been promoted by the Brezhnev regime. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was in charge of the media, wasted little time in appointing ideological allies to top positions in the main cultural and literary organizations. Poet Iurii Voronov replaced Vasilii Shauro, a supporter of Russian nationalism, as the head of the Central Committee's Cultural Department, while Vasilii Zakharov replaced Petr Demichev, a former Shelepin protege best known for stifling creativity in the arts, as the USSR's Minister of Culture. In the summer of 1986 Yakovlev also appointed two reform supporters to the top editorial positions of major literary journals: Sergei Zalygin, who was not even a member of the Party, became editor of Novyi mir, while Grigorii Baklanov was appointed to head Znamia (Banner).31 Liberals soon came to dominate a number of other publications as well, such as Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Newspaper), Ogonek (Little Flame), and Sovetskaia kul'tura (Soviet Culture). A third reason for the literary establishment's reservations about glasnost concerned the type of literature which Yakovlev's new appointees in the Party Ideology Department, in Goskomizdat, in the Ministry of Culture, and on the editorial boards of some of the leading journals and publishing houses, wished to publish. Socialist Realism, the dominant paradigm of Soviet literature for half a century, quickly became almost irrelevant. Beginning in 1987, when some previously suspect authors began to be published in the Soviet press, published works were to be judged by criteria other than ideological correctness. When they became subject to the vagaries of the open market (the principles of which Gorbachev was beginning to introduce in 1987), writers faced the disturbing reality that they had to produce an economically viable product. 32 Many would indeed find it difficult to compete with the newly available classics of Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and other previously "forbidden fruit." Finally, there is the matter of opening old wounds. A number of writers who were still active in the mid-1980s had played a conservative role during Khrushchev's thaw; some were complicit in the suppression of the writers and works being revived under glasnost. 33 Since glasnost favored the liberal-reformist intellectuals and their ideas, it would be possible for them to revisit the earlier antiliberal campaigns of the conservatives who had dominated the literary establishment for so many years. With editorial boards now expected to police themselves, liberal publications, with the encouragement of Aleksandr Yakovlev, soon began to promote the anticipated successes of perestroika while taking advantage of glasnost to explore the limits of the permissible. Degree by degree, censorship seemed virtually to disappear during the next two years as playwrights, filmmakers, journalists, and writers took the initiative in exploring the Soviet past. Mikhail Sha-

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trov, for example, became one of the most prolific playwrights of the glasnost era, specializing in plays about Lenin. His plays supported the Gorbachev line of the time-the genius of Lenin and the fundamental correctness of his path. By the spring of 1987, with the appearance of The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Shatrov had crossed over into anti-Stalinism-a line which by that time was not at variance with Gorbachev's changing objectives. As the scope of the permissible broadened, in September 1986 ideology chief Egor Ligachev (b. 1920) gave permission for the film Repentance, which explored the Stalinist past through fictional characters that resembled Stalin and his chief lieutenants, to be shown to a limited audience and approved its wider release for December. Meanwhile, a series of novels by distinguished Russian writers such as Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Atsafev, and Vasilii Belov appeared in 1985 and 1986. Far from being optimistic about the current state of Soviet society, such works dealt frankly with the themes of corruption, moral decline, and the Russian people's loss of spirituality. More astonishing still for a reading public that had been denied the artistry of some of the twentieth century's greatest writers was the publication of works previously suppressed by the Soviet authorities. In early 1987 Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, a story about a mother's grief over her son's arrest in 1937, was published in Oktiabr', just weeks after Aleksandr Tvardovskii's By Right of Memory, a memorial to the author's father, who was exiled as a kulak (a rich, exploiting peasant) during the collectivization campaign in 1931, appeared in Znamia and Novyi mir. It was not long before Evgenii Zamiatin's We and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago made their way into print, accompanied by an avalanche of literature by both past and contemporary authors that was explicitly critical of Stalin and that forced a critical reexamination of the Soviet past. As a result of these changes in the literary world and in the Soviet Union more generally, in 1987 and 1988 the Writers' Union became the epicenter of a culture war that pitted the "liberals" of Novi mir, lunost', and Znamia-journals that published such works-against the "conservatives" who controlled Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik. However, the first signs of dissent against the new line appeared as early as the middle of 1986, when the USSR Writers' Union held its Eighth Congress, only two weeks after Gorbachev's talk with Soviet cultural leaders at the Krem1in. 34 As noted earlier, the congress was a forum for public opposition to the Siberian rivers diversion plan, uniting both liberals and conservatives against a potential ecological catastrophe-a concern that was all the more serious in the wake of the recent Chernobyl nuclear accident. Although the positions of "liberals" and "conservatives" on perestroika and glasnost were not yet fully formed, for the impact of Soviet reform had yet to be fully felt, even at this early stage some writers expressed their concern about the potentially negative effects of excessive openness. An unambiguous supporter of the new cultural line was the thaw generation poet Evgenii Evtushenko (b. 1933), the author most famously of Babi Yar, a 1961 poem about the Nazis' mass murder of Jews in Kiev, and more recently of Fuku!, an anti-Stalin poem that was published in September 1985. A popular

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liberal who never experienced the sort of intimidation that characterized the regime's treatment of dissident writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Voinovich (each of whom was forced to leave the USSR), Evtushenko would playa prominent role in the coming battle for control over the Writers' Union. Suggesting at the writers' congress that more "leading writers" take responsibilities in the union's secretariat, rather than awarding these posts mainly to "mediocrities, whose only project is to land a cushy job," Evtushenko left no doubt about where he stood on restructuring in the Writers' Union. His support for perestroika at the writers' congress was echoed by the poet Andrei Voznesenskii and Slavic medievalist Dmitrii Likhachev, each of whom volunteered additional suggestions about how to restructure the Soviet publishing world. 35 In a departure from usual tradition, the literary establishment was also subjected to considerable criticism, especially from non-Russian writers. Some, including those from the Latvian, Ukrainian, and Uzbek SSRs (among others), were critical of the union's slight of non-Russian literature and urged the literary authorities to pay more attention to works published in the indigenous languages of the nonRussian republics. The outgoing first secretary of the UW USSR, Georgii Markov (he was awarded the largely ceremonial post of chairman), was cautiously critical of the new line. 36 In his keynote address Markov offered the usual praise for "the wise instructions and advice of the Party" with which Soviet writers were armed, but sadly noted the increasing number of books that "do not meet ideological and artistic requirements." Reading a passage from Mikhail Alekseev's (chief editor of Moskva) recent article in Pravda, such writers "acknowledge the truth with certain exceptions ... and they refuse to acknowledge the truth when the matter at hand is our achievements and victories." Markov then proceeded to warn of the union's penetration by "parasites" who had no direct connection to literature. This reference to those who sought to bring perestroika to the publishing world was eerily reminiscent of the sort oflanguage once used by conservatives during Khrushchev's thaw to criticize writers who tackled controversial themes. 37 A later speaker at the writers' congress was Iurii Bondarev, a respected author ofa number of novels set during World War II.38 The first deputy chairman of the RSFSR writers' organization (second in command to Sergei Mikhalkov), but long suspected of being its real leader, Bondarev's standing in the literary bureaucracy was reflected in the extraordinarily large print-runs his books enjoyed-nearly six million copies of his books were printed in 1981-1985 alone. 39 (How many were actually sold is a mystery.) By the time the Eighth USSR Writers' Union Congress convened in June 1986, Bondarev had earned a reputation as one of the union's main Russian nationalist spokesmen. A sharp polemicist who would become one of perestroika's most prominent enemies, Bondarev already had sharp words for the liberals who sought to change the way the game was played in Soviet literary life. He was particularly hostile to those critics who, "suffused in the sweet poison of nihilism," rejected Russian and

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Soviet literature. With the boundaries of glasnost still unclear, defending the accepted canon of Russian and Soviet "classics" was one way the conservative writers could safely register their displeasure with the early results of glasnost. Likewise, one could oppose the publication of previously forbidden works, as Markov did at the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress three months earlier when he told foreign journalists that Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago would never be printed in the Soviet Union. 40 Also speaking at the Eighth Writers' Congress was Aleksandr Prokhanov, a defender of Soviet imperialism and the author of a recent series of political novels and stories about the campaign in Afghanistan. Striking a patriotic pose, Prokhanov questioned the national loyalty of the liberal reformers as he juxtaposed different types of characters represented in contemporary Soviet literature: one was "ambivalent," indifferent to ideology and politics and "prepared to strike a compromise with the adversary at the lowest, most humiliating level," while another was the "citizen of a great power," angered by the appearance of battleships off the Crimean coast. The implicit suggestion that some writers were bowing to the West was lost on no one. The above-cited speeches at the Writers' Congress demonstrate that, despite Gorbachev's cultivation of the Soviet intelligentsia, almost from the beginning a number of conservative writers had serious reservations about Gorbachev's new policies. While both Prokhanov and especially Bondarev were already quite well-known to millions of Russian readers, as the reform program widened in 1987 and 1988 they would emerge as two of its leading conservative opponents. Each would also playa vital role in transforming the country's leading cultural body, the Union of Writers, into a political one whose secretaries were mobilized around the goals of squelching the excesses of glasnost and rolling back perestroika. Despite the fact that Yakovlev's appointees tended to be supporters of the regime's new cultural program, its conservative opponents maintained their control over key journals such as Nash sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and Moskva, each of which had long been regarded as the mouthpieces of Russian nationalist opinion. It was in these journals that the Russian nationalists and their National Bolshevik and neo-Stalinist allies would fight the coming battles with perestroika. As we shall later see, throughout the perestroika years Gorbachev, who saw himself as the bridge between the liberals and conservatives, never lost the hope that he could win the Russian nationalist intellectuals over to his side. By 1990, however, the intellectuals-and not only those of a Russian nationalist-conservative bent-lost interest in him.

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"The reptiles are descending on Moscow!" The pace of perestroika accelerated sharply after 1986, and with it the convergence of forces in the literary establishment who sensed its far-reaching consequences. In a January 1987 plenary meeting of the CPSU Central Committee, Gorbachev called for democratization and political reform, now proposing real elections with secret ballots (although this did not in fact take place until 1989). By May 1987 a law on private economic activity was put into effect that allowed individuals to engage, with many restrictions, in a broad range of hitherto illegal productive activities, particularly in regard to services and handicrafts. This was followed by another law in July that gave enterprises such as farms and factories more autonomy from the state planners at Gosplan. These attempts to loosen the Party's control over the economy were coupled with efforts to mobilize Soviet society in support of perestroika. Informal clubs, many at least nominally in support of perestroika, proliferated with the regime's encouragement. And, just as in earlier times, Soviet writers were once again mobilized to advance the regime's policy goals. Working in a far more liberal climate, a livelier Soviet press began to publish long-suppressed works of literature and to explore the limits of the permissible. Indeed, in the nearly seven decades of the USSR's existence, the Soviet literary scene had never been more exciting and controversial than it became in 1987 and 1988. Its influence spreading beyond the mass media and into the world of book publishing, the glasnost campaign quickly exacerbated the split between the liberal reformers, who benefited the most from glasnost, and the Russian nationalist-conservatives, who feared the campaign's negative effects on Soviet Russian culture and especially on the country's youth. In the first half of 1987 the three main issues were: the publication in the Soviet Union of a number of previously banned works of literature; the liberals' attacks in the press on the old guard writers; and the Stalin question. 41 Although many writers' views on the reform program were still evolving, the stand they took on this intertwined set of issues may be used to identify them as either "liberal" or "conservative" at this stage of perestroika. Liberals, who supported the hazy goals of perestroika, seized the initiative to publish banned literature; they exposed the hypocrisy of the old guard writers; and they jumped on the opportunity to condemn Stalin and Stalinism. Conservatives, on the other hand, whether of the Marxist-Leninist or Russian nationalist variety, were dismayed by the liberals' attacks and many opposed the publication of some of the previously forbidden works. 42 On the Stalin question, discussed below, the conservatives were divided. The liberals' first shot against the nationalist-conservative writers aimed at a new novel written by Vasilii Belov, a village prose writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s. In Everything Lies Ahead, which he published in Nash sovremennik in the summer of 1986, Belov expressed concern about the danger

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of the Westernized Soviet intelligentsia being manipulated by the "JewishMasonic conspiracy.,,43 Likewise, in the essays he published during the ftrst years of perestroika, Belov, like Rasputin and Bondarev, turned his critical eye to the West, complaining in particular about the dangerous narcotic effect of rock music and the corrupting influence of Western popular culture in general. The anti-Semitic insinuations in Belov's new novel, based mostly on a single negative stereotype, did not fail to attract the attention of its Soviet critics, who poked fun at Belov's primitive Russian nationalism. 44 Viktor Lakshin, a proponent of liberal views during Khrushchev's thaw and an editorial board member of Novyi mir in the days of Aleksandr Tvardovskii, gave Belov's new novel a poor review in /zvestiia in December 1986; this was followed in early 1987 by another liberal attack in Znamia. 45 Likewise, the novel of another Russian nationalist, Viktor Astafev, titled The Sad Detective and published in Oktiabr' in early 1987, was also criticized for its negative depiction of Westernized Soviet intellectuals who were interested only in "cognac, cocktails, and sex.,,46 Popular and respected writers like Belov and Astaf ev had generally enjoyed immunity from liberal criticism (although they could occasionally be taken to task for their ideological deviations) and were surprised at the audacity of their critics. Indeed, traditionally the selection of a novel for review was usually in itself a mark of acclaim, and most works received positive reviews. 47 The attacks on Belov and Astafev galvanized the conservative elements in the Writers' Union into action, as they stepped up their efforts to form a united front against the liberals. Moreover, having lost their supporters in Brezhnev's Politburo to retirement, death, and Gorbachev's heavy broom, the nationalistconservatives also sought the protection and support of like-minded patrons in high politics. A March 1987 meeting of the Secretariat of the Board of the RSFSR Writers' Union conftrmed that the nationalist-conservatives who dominated the organization more or less shared the same concerns about literary restructuring. 48 The secretaries who spoke at this meeting, including Sergei Mikhalkov, Iurii Bondarev, and Petr Proskurin (b. 1928), had long been dominant ftgures in the literary bureaucracy and continued to control the agenda of union meetings. Now facing the fact that as a group their position had been weakened, they retaliated against the liberals who dared to criticize their esteemed colleagues. In many ways, the conservatives' counterattacks can be seen as a proxy for a more general critique of the reform program itself. Sergei Mikhalkov, chairman of the Russian Writers' Union for nearly two decades and a stalwart defender of established interests, opened the meeting by citing a recent speech by Party ideology chief Egor Ligachev, who (as discussed in Chapter Four) was already expressing his concerns about the results of glasnost, and in particular the tendency of some writers to critically examine the Soviet past. Making little effort to conceal his opposition to perestroika--or at least to the campaign's most aggressive supporters-Mikhalkov warned that "[b ]ehind the slogans 'Long live glasnost! And 'Long live perestroika!' there are concealed ... speculators, mediocrities, and very shady people. ,,49

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Mikhalkov's speech was later followed by those ofPetr Proskurin and Iurii Bondarev, who described in detail what they saw as the flaws of openness in the realm ofliterature. Proskurin, a secretary of both the RSFSR and USSR Writers' Unions, reproached the "yellow journalism" prevalent in some organs of the Soviet press as he chastised critics for operating with "hooligan methods." Singling out the liberal weeklies Moskovskie novosti (Moscow News) for its criticism ofBelov's novel and Ogonek for its "spirit of cliquishness" and "caste exclusiveness," Proskurin then asked, Has criticism really failed to notice that there have been several generations now of young people who have come to literature ashamed to mention the word "communist" in their books? And our critics keep quiet. Pravda keeps quiet, and Literaturnaia gazeta discusses what sort of novel has come out in Argentina but pays no attention to what is happening here in Russia. Is the word "communist" forbidden or something?5o

A more apocalyptic picture of the present state of Russian literature was painted by Iurii Bondarev, a member of the editorial board of Nash sovremennik, which had printed Belov's novel. SI According to Bondarev, the effect of the new policy, which had resulted in the publication of authors who were once considered anti-Soviet and which permitted the liberal press unprecedented license to attack the upholders of tradition, was like the situation that existed in July 1941, when the progressive forces, offering a disorganized resistance, retreated under the onslaught of the battering-ram blows of the civilized barbarians-blows designed to destroy a great culture ... If this retreat continues and the time of Stalingrad does not arrive, things will end up with national values and everything that constitutes the people's spiritual pride being toppled into the abyss.52

For Proskurin it was communist ideology that was under siege; for Bondarev, Russia itself was threatened by the forces of glasnost and the cultural Westernization that appeared to accompany it. But Proskurin's lament about the disappearance of the word "communism" should not obscure the fact that he, like Bondarev, was nearly as ardent a Russian nationalist as he was a loyal Communist; likewise, the nationalist writer Bondarev, by virtue of his high position in the Writers' Union, was a devoted Soviet apparatchik and a faithful servant of the Communist Party. Although their critiques of the changes taking place in Soviet society seemed to originate from opposite ends of the political spectrum, their opinions nevertheless converged on the matter of the absolute necessity of reinforcing the ideological underpinnings upon which the continued existence of the Soviet state depended. This the conservatives understood far better than did the reformers, who apparently believed that the Soviet system

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could and must be reformed by reevaluating or downplaying important elements of that very same ideology. Faced with the ideological and material threats that they associated with the policies of perestroika and glasnost, by the summer of 1987 opponents of Gorbachev's reform program, whatever the ideological differences between them, had begun working together in the common interest. 53 The basis of this alliance was the age-old political dictum, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Indeed, unlike the liberals who soon began to argue amongst themselves in the Soviet press about the pace and extent of reform, the Russian nationalists and Marxist-Leninist hardliners appeared to have come to a tacit understanding that they ought not to attack each others' views in public. It was more important to unify against a common threat-namely the domestic agents of the West and its "mass culture," which conservatives of various stripes saw as anti-Russian, antiSoviet, unrelentingly capitalist, and dominated by Jews. Russia, the nationalistconservatives generally agreed, had to be protected from the corrupting influences of heartless capitalism and mindless Western mass culture. This public show of solidarity concealed, or attempted to conceal, what were in reality truly immense ideological differences within what John Dunlop labeled the "conservative coalition" within the Soviet Russian intelligentsia. Dunlop, who has written extensively on the subject of Russian nationalism, identified three main elements in the coalition. Proskurin and Bondarev, for example, were "National Bolsheviks"-conservative Russian nationalists who believed that the Soviet empire could best be preserved by retaining orthodox Marxism-Leninism as its ideological foundation and by emphasizing Russia's historical, cultural, and political weight in it. The National Bolsheviks bridged an ideological gap that separated the "neo-Stalinists" on one end of the Russian nationalist spectrum from the anticommunist "conservative nationalists" at the other end. Whereas "neo-Stalinists" (Mikhalkov, Chakovskii) rejected the prerevolutionary Russian monarchy and the Russian Orthodox Church as reactionary institutions and viewed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a progressive event, "conservative nationalists" (Kozhinov, Soloukhin) generally held a negative view of the revolution, of Lenin, and of Marxist-Leninist ideology, while they sympathized with Russian Orthodoxy and the old monarchy. 54 Of course, an alliance that included such ideologically incongruous partners was bound to be uneasy. However, the neo-Stalinists, like Stalin himself in the last years of his rule, were prepared to manipulate Russian nationalist sentiment (and anti-Semitism, usually phrased in terms of opposition to "Zionism") in order to bolster a weakening official ideology and strengthen an unsteady Soviet state. Likewise, many Russian nationalists, whatever their opinion of MarxistLeninist ideology, regarded the Soviet state as serving a useful purpose in perpetuating the old Russian Empire and protecting Russians from the decadent influence of the West. Whatever their differences of opinion, such ideological disagreements narrowed significantly as Russian conservatives of all stripes began to comprehend the nature of the threat confronting the Soviet--or Russian-fatherland.

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In this regard, the Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin is of particular interest. Long recognized as an author of some talent, Rasputin was also an impassioned environmental activist who tirelessly campaigned for the protection of Lake Baikal. At the outset of the cultural revolution Rasputin published The Fire (1985), a novel about a Siberian town where a great fire unleashes the worst instincts of the villagers. 55 Just as his earlier works lamented the disappearance of the peasantry's traditional values, The Fire implicitly criticized what seventy years of communism had wrought on the Russian people: dishonesty, alcoholism, and a lack of belonging and personal loyalty. As the nationalities issue exploded in the late 1980s and Russians began to explore their own history, Rasputin helped lead the way, defending (but never joining) the nationalist and anti-Semitic organization Pamiat' (Memory) and eventually going into politics, serving as a deputy to the new Soviet legislature in 1989 and joining Gorbachev's Presidential Council in 1990.56 Rasputin represented the apparent incongruities of the "conservative coalition" that was beginning to form around this time. For a time, all sides considered Rasputin one of their own: for the reformers he was, at least initially, a spiritual leader of glasnost; for the Russian nationalists he was a challenger of Marxist-Leninist ideology; and for Soviet conservatives he was a like-minded opponent of the Kremlin's apparent embrace of Western ideas and values. That Rasputin came to support the reactionary Russian Communist Party against the liberal democrats during the last years of Soviet power is revealing both of Rasputin's personal contradictions and the paradoxes of Russian politics during perestroika. Initially enthusiastic about the restructuring program, in a March 1987 interview Rasputin emphasized the need for a spiritual renewal of the people; in doing so, however, he perhaps stretched glasnost beyond its intended limits. "Perestroika's economic, social, and political goals cannot be attained unless and until the spiritual order of things is restored. This must be done, first of all, by telling the truth about the history of Communist violence against nature and [against] the Russian nation.,,57 The implication was that the Soviet experience had on the whole been a negative one, and Rasputin now saw the advent of glasnost as an occasion for the Russian people to come to terms with their history since 1917. As noted earlier, the new openness gave novelists, historians, and journalists an unprecedented opportunity to explore the past, and they wasted no time in doing so. What perturbed many of the literary guardians was the reverence with which "liberal" writers embraced Pasternak, Nabokov, and Akhmatova, who for several decades had been considered anti-Soviet authors, while seeming to reject the canon of accepted Soviet authors. The liberals' praise of repressed writers was a regular topic of discussion at Writers' Union meetings and the subject of endless newspaper and journal articles during glasnost's first years. Another favorite topic was the lack of spirituality in Soviet life so frequently bemoaned by Rasputin and Belov. This was the

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main subject of an April 1987 writers' plenum, planned as a follow-up conference to the Eighth USSR Writers' Union Congress of the previous year. Whereas the dominant theme of the earlier congress was ecology, at the April plenum the assembled writers focused on the negative impact on Soviet youth of the West's "mass culture."S8 Iurii Sergeev, a younger writer later known for his anti-Semitism and activism in the Cossack revival, and Nash sovremennik editor Sergei Vikulov spoke with particular force about the inroads that "mass culture" was making in Soviet society. "So-called 'mass culture' has inundated the West with filth, sex, murders, violence, and cruelty," complained Sergeev, "and the way has been prepared by this very rock music," which "blasts out of television and radios" and is celebrated in the Soviet press. "Heavy metal ("metallorolf')-with all the symbolic marks of a butcher of the Middle Ages, and its destructive program for the annihilation of cultures and the erection of a 'church of Satan'-this is not music, but a movement of bourgeois psychology."s9 Similar views were being expressed with increasing virulence and frequency as the regime's cultural controls slackened during the perestroika years. Summarizing his own critique of perestroika, in an earlier interview Iurii Bondarev opined that "restructuring must not be turned into an imitation of the West," the effects of which Bondarev would describe repeatedly with characteristic hyperbole. 60 Simply stated, in the view of these writers, perestroika opened Russia's doors to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. As the conservative opposition to perestroika began to take shape between 1986 and 1988, this fear of the moral and social evils of cultural Westernization was one of its unifYing core beliefs. A wry analysis of the lining up ofliberal and reactionary forces in the world of Soviet literature was penned in the spring of 1987 by the Ukrainian writer Vladimir Voinovich, himself an outspoken critic of the Soviet regime since the 1970s. Voinovich, reporting from Munich where he was living in exile, amusingly described how Aleksandr Chakovskii, the longtime chief editor of Literaturnaia gazeta (a weekly newspaper of the UW USSR), was alleged recently to have "flown into a rage at a meeting of the secretariat of the Union of Writers, raising his hands to the ceiling and shouting 'the reptiles are descending on MoSCOW!",61 The reference was to Mikhail Bulgakov's science-fiction story, "The Fatal Eggs," a story that had not yet been published in the USSR. As Voinovich explained, In this story, a scientist's experiments inadvertently result in the hatching out of great numbers of giant serpents, which do in fact advance on Moscow but are stopped in the end by the heroic Red Army. Chakovsky [Chakovskii] evidently hopes that the Army and the KGB will manage to repulse the latter-day reptiles or, as he calls them elsewhere, Bulgakov the White Guardist, Nabokov the sex fiend, and Pasternak the anti-Soviet agitator. 62 But there was more to Chakovskii's angst than the publication of suppressed authors, for the liberalization of cultural policy overseen by Gorbachev and Yakovlev posed a mortal threat to the writers' livelihoods and values. As the

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tide of glasnost swelled and calls mounted for the publication of banned Russian works, the privileges and prestige of the literary nomenklatura came under threat. This was no less true in the political realm, where many long-serving Soviet apparatchiki were coming under fire for their incompetence, their lack of regard for the public interest, and their resistance to perestroika. But just as Gorbachev was relying on the "masters of culture" to bolster his reform program, so did Party conservatives-the protectors of the interests of the apparat-Iook to those writers of a nationalist-conservative bent to fight a rearguard action against the "reptiles" then descending on Moscow.

"The Struggle for the Right to Write Badly" By mid-1987 a widening gulf separated intellectuals who supported Gorbachev's reform program from those who feared its ramifications within the literary world and its impact on Soviet society as a whole. If perestroika meant a restructuring of the Soviet system, the self-appointed custodians of orthodoxy and tradition could themselves be "restructured" out of their privileged positions. The liberals struck at the heart of the conservatives' dilemma in the June 1987 edition of the pro-reform weekly Ogonek. In an article titled "The Struggle for the Right to Write Badly," the literary critic Benedikt Sarnov wrote that [People] who like to give orders and defend their right to write badly from [their] commanding positions have never disappeared [from our midst]. And to give them their due, they won the right for themselves little by little. And without a battle (perhaps without a real war in which there will be many attacks and rear-guard actions) they will not surrender. 63

This insult to the entrenched literary bureaucracy was met with a response from seventeen writers, who sent a collective appeal against glasnost to the CPSU Central Committee. The signatories-including Mikhail Alekseev, the chief editor of the conservative Moskva, and Iurii Bondarev and Sergei Vikulov of Nash sovremennik-attacked Ogonek and accused its chief editor Vitalii Korotich (a newly-baptized liberal who had recently removed the Order of Lenin from the front cover of the magazine) of subversive activity and ofabusing glasnost. 64 This episode was starkly reminiscent of the organized attack on Novyi mir two decades earlier, which resulted in the ouster of Aleksandr Tvardovskii, its liberal chief editor.65 Although apparently no action on the conservatives' complaint was taken by the CPSU, the letter drove an even deeper wedge between the Writers' Union's liberal and conservative wings. Setting the tone for the battles of the next four years, the liberals accused conservatives of being

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hacks undeserving of their office, to which the latter responded by questioning the liberals' patriotism. The polemics continued in the July 1987 issue of Molodaia gvardiia, in which the journal's deputy editor, Viacheslav Gorbachev (no known relation to the general secretary) defended the Russian nationalist writers under attackBondarev, Rasputin, Astafev, and others-and, echoing the critiques of Lobanov and Chalmaev nearly two decades earlier (see Chapter Two), suggested that rather than making a positive contribution to Soviet life, the liberal Soviet writers were instead succumbing to consumerism and the superficial lures of the West. Particular venom was reserved for pro-reform journals and newspapers such as Ogonek (and in particular its editor, Vitalii Korotich), Sovetskaia kul'tura, and Literaturnaia gazeta, which V. Gorbachev accused of sometimes being oriented "toward philistine tastes and the demands of philistine morality." The politics of the liberal media, Gorbachev complained, showed a "lack of spirituality" and were more in tune with "the consumerism of Western mass culture than with the tasks of the active and united participation of Soviet writers and intelligentsia in perestroika." Tied into this criticism of the liberal journals' pro-Western orientation and the "Nabokovshchina" (which he defined as "the striving to make an impressive show of perestroika") that he believed characterized the times, was the controversy surrounding the recently resurrected Stalin question. In the same article in which he criticized the harmful pro-Western attitudes of the liberal-reformists, V. Gorbachev went on to complain that their journals went too far in their recent attacks on Stalin. While confessing his personal ambivalence about Stalin, Gorbachev insisted that he should not bear the brunt of the blame for the Terror: the purges weren't so terrible, collectivization was really Trotsky'S idea, and in any event Stalin had been the victim of his own bureaucracy and was a tool of his secret police chiefs, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria. 66 Encouragement for this position came from the highest levels of the CPSU, including Egor Ligachev, the general secretary's second-in-command. According to Anatolii Cherniaev, an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, Egor Ligachev's support for the line taken by Molodaia gvardiia was known throughout Moscow. Ligachev apparently even called the journal's editor to congratulate and thank him for printing these articles. 67 Likewise, Viacheslav Gorbachev showed his approval of the Ligachev line by citing one of his speeches about the evils of bureaucratism. With the exception of the general secretary, Ligachev was in fact the only CPSU leader mentioned in the Molodaia gvardiia article. By this time the Stalin issue had more or less come out into the open, spurred in part by the timely release of a provocative film titled Repentence. With restructuring in the Soviet film industry proceeding apace, Tengiz Abuladze's film, which had been gathering dust since it was shot and shelved in 1984, was shown throughout the Soviet Union in early 1987.68 The film's main character was a local tyrant named Varlam, who appeared to represent an amalgamation of Stalin, Beria, and Hitler, with Varlam's little mustache resembling that sported by the Fuhrer. It was one of the first noteworthy attempts to fill in

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the "blank spots" in Soviet history. Soon afterwards Anatolii Rybakov's longsuppressed novel Children of the Arbat was released, with its grim characterization of the paranoid Josef Stalin. Although there had been limited attempts during Khrushchev's thaw to address the matter of Stalin's repressions and his "crimes against the Party," nothing like an open discussion of Stalin and Stalinism took place in the Soviet Union until 1987. With the encouragement of his de facto chief ideologist (and rival to Ligachev), Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev himself began to grapple with the Stalin issue. Although in early 1987 the public Mikhail Gorbachev continued to take the traditional position that "Stalinism is a concept made up by opponents of Communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism," privately he had begun to reevaluate the "Bukharin alternative.,,69 The general secretary began to realize that resurrecting Nikolai Bukharin (an old Bolshevik who, before being murdered by Stalin, was closely associated with the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which combined concessions to the market with continued Communist rule) as Lenin's intended heir could yield significant political gains against the conservatives. 70 Thus Gorbachev launched this wave of "de-Stalinization" at least partly as a preparatory step toward the radical reform of the country's political and economic systems. For many of the old literary bureaucrats, however, a complete expose of Stalin would only further undermine the legitimacy of the regime to which they had devoted their lives. The Stalin issue is particularly important for an understanding of the political divisions that were forming at this time. To many of the nationalistconservatives--even those who had no great love for the October RevolutionStalin was a great leader whose brutality was justified by the harsh circumstances under which he ruled; whatever his flaws, he saved Russian civilization from the German invaders and restored the country's position in the world. Taking the contrary position, the liberal reformers, many of whom for the time being retained much of their residual belief in the correctness of Lenin's path, saw Stalin's rise as the point at which the great experiment had gone wrong. 71 Of course, this is not to suggest that even the Stalin question was without nuance. Many conservative Russian nationalists viewed Stalin negatively, seeing in him one of the destroyers of tsarist Russia. For example, in his review of Children of the Arbat in the spring of 1988, the neo-Slavophile Vadim Kozhinov agreed that Stalin was indeed a monster; his point, however, was that Stalin's crimes were less an historical aberration than a consequence of the state set up by Lenin (whom Kozhinov had praised two years earlier for protecting Russian culture against the "Trotskyists," by which he probably meant Jews).72 Finally free to abandon Lenin, Kozhinov demonstrated nearly equal distaste for both the tyrant who saved Russia from the Germans and for the revolutionary who brought communism to the country in 191 7. 73

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Despite the nuances involved in sorting out the various positions on the Stalin question, one thing was clear to the conservatives who dominated the literary establishment: an honest and critical examination of the Soviet past could damage the prestige of the Communist Party and call into question the very legitimacy of the Soviet state. Whereas anticommunist Russian nationalists like Kozhinov and Rasputin might well have welcomed this kind of historical scrutiny, many others who shared their critiques of Soviet reform and its consequences were wary of filling in too many blank spots in the country's turbulent history. Indeed, the above-quoted article by Molodaia gvardiia's Viacheslav Gorbachev was emblematic of those complaints that the entire foundations of the Soviet system were being undermined by glasnost and the reform program that it was intended to support. The fact that this article was not criticized in the mainstream Soviet press perhaps testifies to the continuing strength of the literary old guard in 1987-1988. An antiliberal journal whose editorial staff had remained largely the same since 1969, Molodaia gvardiia remained a consistent opponent of perestroika to the end. With a print run of about 640,000 in 1987 (as compared to nearly three million for lunost', another Komsomol journal but one that was relatively liberal), the journal appealed to a large number of readers who shared its Stalinist, ultranationalist, and anti-Western convictions and who were otherwise united in their opposition to the thrust of the reform program. The journals Nash sovremennik and Moskva propagated much the same kinds of opinions as Molodaia gvardiia, although of the three Nash sovremennik published the most chauvinistic and anti-Semitic views. 74 Sergei Vikulov, the chief editor of Nash sovremennik since 1968, permitted the publication of contributions from a number of extremists, including representatives of Pamiat' (discussed in Chapter Five). Of course, such extremism was not necessarily shared equally by all who sympathized with Russian nationalist opinion or by all contributors to Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik. Nevertheless, it was around these journals that a patriotic coalition began to form in the early years of glasnost, united in defense of the literary status quo and of the privileges they had long enjoyedincluding, one is tempted to say, "the right to write badly.,,75 Uniting against the alien forces that were sweeping through the literary world and through Soviet society more generally, the nationalist-conservatives consolidated their control over the Writers' Union and over its Russian branch in particular. A consideration of who was permitted to speak at their meetings provides further evidence of the conservatives' control over these bodies. For example, Anatolii Pristavkin, the newly prominent writer of an anti-Stalinist novel, A Golden Cloud Passed the Night, was not invited to attend the April 1987 plenum (discussed above), while Iurii Sergeev, a relatively unknown reactionary who was not even a member of the union, was allowed to speak. 76 The union leaders' pattern of excluding their more outspoken liberal colleagues was apparent again at the plenum of the board of the RSFSR Writers' Union in March 1988: Pristavkin was once again absent, while a number of speakers, notably Iurii Bondarev, Stanislav Kuniaev, Iurii Prokushev, Vladimir Krupin, Nikolai

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Shundik, and Viacheslav Shugaev-all of whom were recognized as Russian nationalists with close ties to Nash sovremennik-gave speeches that reflected their increasingly apocalyptic views. 77 Kuniaev and Krupin went so far as to defend the extremist Pamiat' groups. While the reactionaries' criticism of the liberals and of the "excesses" of glasnost had become habitual at Writers' Union meetings, what distinguished the March 1988 plenum from the one held a year earlier was that when Russian nationalists maligned thaw-generation writers such as Evtushenko and Voznesenskii, their attacks now went unanswered. Although some moderate writers, such as Sergei Zalygin, spoke at the March 1988 plenum, their most outspoken colleagues were absent and the conservatives easily dominated. 78 That the conservatives were ascendant in the Writers' Union was undeniable after the publication in March 1988 of the infamous Nina Andreeva letter (discussed in Chapter Four)--a manifesto that indicated a split within the Politburo and served as a clarion call to all those who opposed the pace and direction of perestroika. Provided with another opportunity to consolidate their forces, the Russian nationalists and Marxist-Leninist conservatives who dominated the union responded with renewed vigor. For example, in the autumn of 1988, just as Gorbachev was purging the upper ranks of the CPSU of conservatives, Iurii Bondarev chaired a meeting of the Secretariat of the Board of the RSFSR Writers' Union in Riazan'. The speakers at the meeting, all contributors to Nash sovremennik, aired their views about the Western cultural imports that were polluting Soviet society: rock music, beauty contests, and press articles critical of Stalinism. According to the writers assembled at Riazan', Western and "cosmopolitan" (read: Jewish) enemies of Russia had deliberately introduced these innovations in order to corrupt the country's young people and to destroy the nation's independence. 79 But the conservatives' reservations about perestroika were not just limited to the cultural revolution that was sweeping the country, for perestroika also meant economic restructuring. Following a hostile response to the Riazan' meeting from the pro-reformjoumal Kommunist, the Russian Writers' Union decided to call a plenum for 14 December 1988, where one of the major issues was the market-oriented reforms ofGorbachev's economic team. 80 The tone of the meeting was set by Anatolii Salutskii, a frequent contributor to Nash sovremennik and a secretary of the Russian Writers' Union, who delivered the opening address. His main targets were Academicians Abel Aganbegian and Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, whom he took to task for past mistakes that resulted in the "annihilation of the [Russian] countryside" and for the regime's present attempts to promote economic efficiency. For the most part, only one strategy for bringing about a new condition of society is being instilled in the mass consciousness through the press; it is, to a great extent, an imported strategy that has been borrowed from the West. Proponents of this method attribute economic failures exclusively to the intrigues

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of forces trying to impede progress.... Hasn't the principle that "anything that is not prohibited is allowed" been perverted in a way that is contrary to the intentions of the state and the good of the people? ... If, in Dostoyevsky's words, the most important civic virtue in our country becomes the ability to make money, won't honesty, decency, love and friendship be mocked as vices? What will come of the confrontation between two new real freedoms-freedom of morals and freedom of conscience?81 Although it is not a stretch to believe that Salutskii's stand arose at least in part from a genuine commitment to socialist social justice, he surely understood the probable economic and political consequences of restructuring for writers in particular. With most Soviet literary journals now publishing the sort of works that simply were not permitted during the era of "stagnation" and publishing houses threatening to introduce commercial criteria at the beginning of the new year, there would clearly be less room for the traditional Soviet writers in the new system. 82 Such fears were not at all groundless and indeed were borne out by subsequent events. 83 Two years later an article in Pravda reported that At a time when economic accountability prevails and the market will soon be upon us in full force, there is constant debate over the question of whether the Writers' Union should continue to exist at all. ... Literally every day we are inundated with bad news: some publishing houses are in danger of closing and are curtailing their operations; others will soon be turned over to commercial enterprises. The market is cruel. ... The broad reading public is constantly being given either Russian emigre authors (these are by no means always talents on a par with Solzhenitsyn or Nabokov, of course), or detective stories, or the fantastic escapades of prostitutes in outer space. 84 Indeed, under such conditions, how could the nearly ten thousand members of the Writers Union hope to survive? As one writer who experienced the world of Western book publishing later lamented: Once highly-paid civil servants, we are becoming self-employed and povertystricken. I wish we were spared such freedom! ... Life was so much more comfortable for us Soviet authors when we were absolutely independent of the readers. The only unpleasant thing was censorship.... Year after year Soviet authors got paid from the ideological purse. Why should we be unhappy if the Party told us how to write, about what and for whom? The books that got published were topical and useful. Literature fulfilled a great ideological mission. 85 The economic perils that accompanied perestroika would indeed be felt acutely by these intellectuals, and in their view the downward economic slide that had began in 1989 could not be separated from glasnost, the effect of which was to destroy the myths that had held the country together since at least World War II. Instead of "openness" and "restructuring," all these writers could see around them was defamation and destruction--of Soviet history, of MarxistLeninist ideology, and of Soviet cultural achievements. And filling the void cre-

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ated by all this destruction? Banditry, blue jeans, rock and roll, and sexual promiscuity. Thus it is not difficult to see why Salutskii and his conservative colleagues balked at the reforms then being put in place-and why many of the writers who attended this plenum waxed nostalgic for what the Brezhnev era had delivered so reliably for so long: security, status, and at least some degree of support from the authorities for their Russian nationalist positions.

Notes I. See Brudny, 132-192. 2. In the early years of the revolution, the Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization (Proletkult), headed by the ex-Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, acted as a challenger to the Party's assumed right to act as the final authority in cultural matters. By the end of 1920 it had become firmly subordinated to the Commissariat for Enlightenment. See Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power (New York: Touchstone, 1992),191-193. 3. The intelligentsia leadership of RAPP represented the working class to a lesser extent than the organization's name implies, but rather presumed to act in its name. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 132. 4. Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917-1991 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 53. 5. The Writers' Union saw its ranks decimated by the purges; it lost perhaps one-third of its membership between 1936 and 1939. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 446. 6. John and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers' Union (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 5, 8. 7. The USSR Writers' Union had 7,942 members in 1976 and 9,584 in 1986. Ronald Hingley, Russian Writers and Soviet Society, 1917-1978 (New York: Random House, 1979), 195; Literaturnaia gazeta, 25 June 1986, 6. 8. John and Carol Garrard note that the rewards for writers were so great that in Brezhnev's USSR that there were "certainly more ruble millionaires among writers than in [any] other legal profession in the Soviet Union." John and Carol Garrard, 129. A fuller treatment of the kinds of perks offered to writers and the mechanisms used to control them may be found in Hingley, 196-197, 205-225. Hingley notes that one of the system's features is "the latitude given to minor, failed, or mediocre authors," who through bureaucratic manipulation may contrive to be put in charge of their more gifted colleagues. Also see V. Shlapentokh (1990),11-15. 9. Garrard and Garrard, 77. 10. For example, Dmitrii Polianskii, an influential force in Brezhnev's Politburo, was known to cultivate certain writers and was a sponsor of Ivan Shevtsov's anti-Semitic works, which were published in large print-runs by the Ministry of Defense. See Mitrokhin, 118-123; Reznik (1996), 88; Heller, 56-57.

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II. For example, among the 542 delegates at the 1976 Writers' Congress, 462 belonged to the CPSU. A similar proportion of Party members were elected delegates to the Eighth Writers' Congress in 1986: 474 of 567, or about 84 percent. Hingley, 196. 12. During the Brezhnev era responsibility for the union was shared by the Department of Culture and the Department of Propaganda, although the latter exercised final authority over publishing and had more staff and broader responsibilities. In 1988, however, Gorbachev combined the two departments into the Department of Ideology. For a thorough description of the structure of the Writers' Union, see Garrard and Garrard, 77-105. 13. This is Yitzhak Brudny's term. 14. For an analysis of the splintering of the Soviet intelligentsia during the glasnost period, see V. Shlapentokh (1990),224-79. 15. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Col/apse, 1970-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57-59. 16. The matter of Gorbachev' s real intentions upon coming to power remains a subject of debate. The leading political biography of Gorbachev, Archie Brown's The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), portrays Gorbachev as a committed radical reformer even before 1985. Jerry Hough, on the other hand, portrays Gorbachev as a Leninist who in seeking to democratize socialism inadvertently launched a revolution that destroyed it. See his Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). Gorbachev himself claims that the desire to improve the Soviet standard of living was one of his main reasons for launching perestroika. As a Party secretary in good standing in the I 960s and 1970s, Gorbachev had traveled to Western Europe on several occasions and realized that people there lived in better conditions than they did in Russia. However, Ellman and Kontorovich argue that the low standard of living was in fact not a cause of perestroika: since there was little popular dissatisfaction with Soviet living standards, they argue, the general secretary was under no pressure to improve them. They claim that far from seeing their living standards decline in 1985-86, the Soviet people on average lived better in the mid-I 980s than they did a decade earlier. Nevertheless, the general secretary was aware of an economic crisis that loomed large over the USSR as the country teetered toward bankruptcy. Military expenditures had risen significantly since the early 1970s and by 1985 constituted anywhere from 15 to 35 percent of the Soviet GDP (depending on how this was measured and by whom) to support the world's largest armed forces (about five million men). Meanwhile the country's main source of export revenue-oil-had dropped from $53 per barrel in 1983 to $10-12 in 1985-86. The "Novosibirsk Report," complied in 1983 by Soviet sociologist Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, described the bleak state of the Soviet economy and acknowledged the need for structural reforms. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 102-103, 136; Ellman and Kontorovich, 26, 36-40; David Hollaway, "State, Society, and the Military under Gorbachev," International Security 14, no. 3 (Winter 1989-1990): 524; Mark Galeotti, The Age of Anxiety: Security and Politics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Longman, 1995),22; Kotkin, 10-17; Tatyana Zaslavskaya [Tat'iana Zaslavskaia], "The Novosibirsk Report," Survey 28, no. I (Spring 1984): 88-108. 17. Andropov's early death in February 1984 has often been seen as a "lost opportunity" to reinvigorate socialism. During his fifteen months as general secretary Andropov had managed to fashion a conservative-reformist consensus at the top that understood the need for reform in order to arrest the USSR's slide. See English, 172-180; Robert Galeotii, Gorbachev and His Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 19-40.

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18. English, 194. 19. Gleason, 6. 20. Gorbachev (1996), 188. The contributors to a study of the collapse of the Soviet economy contend that there was no evidence of resistance to Gorbachev's reforms. The emphasis by the Gorbachev team on sabotage by the antiperestroika forces, they remind us, "is a time-honored maneuver on the part of Soviet leaders' going back at least to Stalin." Ellman and Kontorovich, 22. Also see Kotkin, 77-79. 21. See Hosking (1990), 50-56; Nicolai N. Petro, '''The Project of the Century': A Case Study of Russian National Dissent," Studies in Comparative Communism 20, nos. 3-4 (1987): 235-252. 22. Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 December 1985,4, 7. Also see the Nash sovremennik editorial board's roundtable discussion in "Zemlia i khleb," Nash sovremennik 7 (July 1985): 115-l5l. 23. See Sovetskaia Rossia, 3 January 1986, 3, and 31 January 1986, 2. This repeated and public criticism (some of which, it should be noted, came on the heels of the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986) likely influenced the Politburo's decision the following August to suspend construction work on the project. The CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers cited the concerns of "broad sections of the public" as one reason for their decision to terminate work on the project. See Pravda, 20 August 1986, I. 24. Quoted in Petro (1987), 243. 25. It was perhaps in order to win over the intelligentsia that Gorbachev decided, after twenty-one months in power, to allow the dissident Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow. 26. See Aaron Trehub, "Gorbachev Meets Soviet Writers: A Samizdat Account," Radio Liberty Research, 23 October 1986, 1-3; John B. Dunlop, "Soviet Cultural Politics," Problems of Communism 36, no. 6 (1987): 35-56. 27. V. Shlapentokh (1990), 31,99. 28. Garrard and Garrard, 203. 29. Hosking's emphasis. Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening ofthe Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63. 30. Rosalind Marsh, "The Death of Soviet Literature: Can Russian Literature Survive?" Europe-Asia Studies 45, no.1 (1993): 125. 31. Novyi mir and Znamia, along with Druzhba narodov (Friendship of Peoples) and lunos!' (Youth), served as bellwethers of glasnost, later publishing denunciations of the Stalin period and eventually literary classics such as Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Evgenii Zamiatin's We. 32. One observer noted that "between 1976 and 1980, Soviet libraries received 700 million new books, of which 500 million were written off because no reader had ever checked them out." Reported in Julia Wishnevsky, "The Eighth Congress of Soviet Writers: An Appraisal," Radio Liberty Research, 15 July 1986,3. 33. Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962),200-203. 34. Elections during the congress to the Board of the Writers' Union demonstrated considerable support for perestroika among the Writers' Union activists. Among the Gorbachev supporters were the new first secretary Vladimir Karpov (for the time being), Grigorii Baklanov (soon to be appointed chief editor of Znamia), and Sergei Zalygin

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(made new chief editor of Novyi mir in the summer). The remaining members were Chingiz Aimatov, Iurii Bondarev, Vasili Bykov, Oles' Gonchar, and Georgii Markov, who was the outgoing first secretary; they proved to be either opponents of Gorbachev's program or neutral. Gorbachev and Yakovlev had not anticipated such a radical outcome, for they apparently had hoped that the Writers' Union would elect as first secretary the conservative Iurii Bondarev, who in any event was reputed to be the real power within the union's Russian branch while it was formally under the control of Sergei Mikhalkov. See Rosalind Marsh, History and Literature in Contemporary Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 14. 35. Speeches at the congress take up nearly two issues of Literaturnaia gazeta. See 25 June 1986, and 2 July 1986. 36. As a writer who was also a full member of the CPSU Central Committee, Markov's main talent was to get his undistinguished work published in large print runs. 37. In a 1958 memo concerning the "unhealthy tendencies" in the Moscow Department of the Union of Writers, the Central Committee's Department of Culture noted its many "superfluous people who have no connection with literature." Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (henceforth RGANI), fond (f) 5, opis (op.) 36, delo (d.) 32, pp. 86-87. 38. By the end of the Brezhnev era, Bondarev's novels had left the mainstream of war literature, and works such as The Shore (1975), The Choice (1980), and The Game (1985) came to focus more on contemporary social issues. In 1977 and 1983 he had won the USSR State Prize-an official acknowledgment of the Party's approval. 39. Garrard and Garrard, 193. 40. Dunlop, "Cultural Politics," 42. Markov's opposition to the Gorbachev line was certainly consistent with his past conservatism; but perhaps it was also related to a fear of repercussion from his earlier role in the suppression of the writers (such as Pasternak in the late I 950s) and works that were now beginning to be discussed. See Vera Tolz, "The Twenty-Seventh Party Congress: Old Guard of Soviet Art Has Its Say," Radio Liberty Research, 10 March 1986. Also see Garrard and Garrard, 202. 41. For a thoughtful treatment of the literary debates of the late 1980s, see Walter Laqueur's The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (New York: Collier Books, 1990). Also see Vladislav Krasnov, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle o/National Rebirth (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 42. Among the works of banned literature that were being published in 1987, poetry occupied a particularly prominent place. Aleksandr Tvardovskii's By Right 0/ Memory, for example, appeared in the two leading liberal journals Novyi mir and Znamia, while Anna Akhmatova's Requiem was published in the pro-reform journals Oktiabr' and Neva. The publication of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Vasilii Grossman's Life and Fate, Zamiatin's We, various works by Vladimir Nabokov, and other long-suppressed works of literature would have to wait until the next year, although many of these were under discussion during 1987. 43. Nash sovremennik 7 (July 1986): 29-106; and Nash sovremennik 8 (August 1986): 59-110. 44. See Vera Tolz, "The 'Russian Theme' in the Soviet Media," Radio Liberty Research, 26 January 1987,4-5. 45. /zvestiia, 3 December 1986, 3; Natalia Ivanova, "Ispytanie pravdoi," Znamia I (January 1987): 198-240, especially 198-206, which criticized the recent works of both Belov and Astarev.

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46. Dunlop, "Soviet Cultural Politics," 44. 47. This trend was especially notable in journals of a Russian nationalist-conservative orientation, whose reviewers protected their allies while apparently refraining from attacks that would subject them to the sot of censure they received during the Chalmaev affair. According to one scholar, every one of Molodaia gvardiia's three hundred reviews published between 1981 and 1986 was positive. N.N. Shneidman, Soviet Literature in the 1980s: Decade of Transition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 15. 48. See Julia Wishnevsky, "Who's Afraid of Restructuring in Literature?" Radio Liberty Research, 15 April 1987, 1-6. 49. Dunlop (1993), 125. For Mikhalkov's speech, see Literaturnaia Rossiia, 27 March 1987,2. 50. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 27 March 1987, translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press (henceforth CDSP) 39, no. 21 (24 June 1987),9. I have slightly modified this translation. 51. It should be noted that Bondarev also had personal reasons for his criticism. Several critics had given his novellgra (The Game), which appeared in Novyi mir, nos. I and 2 (1985), unfavorable reviews. See, for example, Komsomol 'skaia pravda, 22 June 1985,

4. 52. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 27 March 1987, 3, in CDSP 39, no. 21 (24 June 1987): 9. Also see the interview with Bondarev in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 25 March 1987,4. 53. In a show of comradely solidarity with the journal Molodaia gvardiia, Nash sovremennik published a long interview with Anatolii Ivanov, Molodaia gvardiia's chief editor. In it Ivanov attacked perestroika, singling out reforms such as the new law that permitted cooperatives, and defended Stalin's terror, which he explained as a consequence of the "complicated times." While praising recent books by Viktor Astafev (The Sad Detective) and Valentin Rasputin (Fire), Ivanov criticized the new "literature of negation and destruction" that was typified by Anatolii Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. "Chernyi khleb iskusstva," Nash sovremennik 5 (May 1988): 171-179. 54. Dunlop (1993), 128-129. 55. Valentin Rasputin, "Pozhar," Nash sovremennik 7 (July 1985): 3-38. 56. For his defense of Pamial', see Rasputin's speech at a VOOPIK meeting in June 1987, published as "Protiv bespamiatstva," Nash sovremennik I (January 1988): 169-172. 57. Quoted in Krasnov, 96. 58. The speeches appear in Literaturnaia gazeta, 6 May 1987,2-9. 59. For a more balanced but essentially conservative critique of rock music, "rock culture," and their place in contemporary Russian life, see Mikhail Dunaev, "Rokovaia muzyka," Nashsovremennik 1 (January 1988): 157-168. 60. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 25 March 1987,4; Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 March 1988,5. 61. Chakovskii was the author of numerous war novels. Blockade, published in installments in the journal Znamia in 1972-73, apologetically described the activities of Stalin during the war. Heller, 168. 62. Vladimir Voinovich, "The Reptiles are Descending on Moscow," Radio Liberty Research, 5 March 1987,4-5. 63. Benedikt Sarnov, "Bor'ba za pravo pisal' plokho," Ogonek 23 (1987): II, quoted in Riitta Pittman, "Perestroika and Soviet Cultural Politics: The Case of the Major Literary Journals," Soviet Studies 42 (1990), 126.

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64. Two months before the Molodaia gvardiia article appeared, one Pamiat' faction had seized on the change in Ogonek's cover and demanded the expulsion of Korotich from the CPSU. The writers who sent the letter to the Central Committee seemed to be following the lead of this fringe group. For a discussion of the letter and the role that Russian nationalists played in the Soviet Union's cultural politics, see Pittman, 126-129. 65. Aleksandr Tvardovskii had been a leading thaw generation writer and editor in 1950s and 1960s, spending much of this period as the editor of the liberal journal Novyi mir, from which position he published Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. In a clear signal that the thaw was over, in 1969 a group of eleven literary bureaucrats, including Mikhail Alekseev and Petr Proskurin-both of whom later became opponents of Gorbachev's reforms-wrote a letter to the journal Ogonek in which they accused Tvardovskii of "anti-Soviet activities." Having run afoul of Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, Tvardovskii was forced to resign from Novyi mir in 1970 and died the following year. The letter was reprinted in the January 1989 issue of Nash sovremennik as part of the conservatives' ongoing struggle against the liberals. "Protiv chego vystupaet 'Novyi mir'?" Ogonek 30 (1969): 26-29. 66. Viacheslav Gorbachev, "Perestroika i podstroika: zametki pisatelia," Molodaia gvardiia 7 (July 1987): 225, 227, 241. V. Gorbachev had long nurtured a reputation as a leading critic of materialist consumer society; by 1987, however, his views had moved closer to those of the Pamiat' organizations, most notably reflected in a March 1987 article where he declared the existence of a Zionist-Masonic conspiracy in the service of the Devil. This conspiracy, wrote V. Gorbachev, was responsible for the dissolution of the Russian family and for the corruption of Russia by sex, alcohol, and drugs. See Viacheslav Gorbachev, "Chto vperedi? 0 romane Belova 'Vse vperedi,'" Molodaia gvardiia 3 (March 1987): 250-277. 67. Indeed, the fact that memos about the article by Viacheslav Gorbachev were being circulated in the Kremlin attests to the level of attention the Soviet leadership paid to the literary debates in the country's journals and newspapers. Anatolii Cherniaev, the author of the memo to the general secretary, considered Molodaia gvardiia to be the intelligentsia's variation of the extremist Pamiat' group. Gorbachev Foundation (Cherniaev collection), fond (f.) 2, opis (op.) I, delo (d.) 57, p. I. 68. For an account of this film's journey from conception to the screen, see David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb (New York: Random House, 1993),42-46. 69. Quoted in Anthony D' Agostino, Gorbachev's Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 109. 70. Cherniaev, 138-139. 71. For a survey of "liberal" analyses of Stalinism, see V. Shlapentokh (1990), 240-42. 72. For Kozhinov's earlier evaluation of Lenin, the "Trotskyists," and Russian national culture, see his article "On Lenin's Concept of National Culture," translated in CDSP 39, no. 13 (20 May 1987): 3-5. 73. See Vadim Kozhinov, "Pravda i istina," Nash sovremennik 4 (April 1988): 160175. For Kozhinov, often accused of being an anti-Semite, Stalin was not the cause of the country's current crisis, for Stalinism could only be understood by treating it as a part of Western intellectual history. Russia, in his view, was the victim of Western ideas perpetrated in Russia by people with foreign last names. See the series of debates with Benedikt Sarnov in Literatumaia gazeta in March 1989, discussed in Krasnov, 171-201. 74. A well-known example of Nash sovremennik's willingness to publish articles with anti-Jewish content was the writings of Vladimir Begun. See, for example, his "Eshche

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raz 0 'zemliachestvakh,'" Nash sovremennik II (November 1988): 186-188. In addition, over the next several years Nash sovremennik would publish a number of anti-Semitic articles by Igor' Shafarevich. 75. A meeting of the editorial boards of the magazines Moskva, Molodaia gvardiia, and Roman-gazeta on 23 January 1989, is further evidence of the links being established between such journals and extremist Russian nationalist groups such as Pamial'. At this meeting, the hall was decorated with the slogan "The Pamial' Movement Will Win." The speakers at this gathering directed their criticism at the liberal journals Znamia and Ogonek and the newspaper Moscow News for their pro-Western biases. See Moscow News, 5-12 February 1989, 15. 76. Anatolii Pristavkin's novel, A Golden Cloud Passed the Night, set in 1944, is about the fate of homeless orphans. It implicitly criticizes Stalin's nationalities policies during World War II, in particular the expulsion of Chechens from their native land. The novel was published in Znamia nos. 3 and 4 (1987). 77. Speeches given at the April plenum appear in Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 March 1988, 2-10. 78. See Julia Wishnevsky, "Reactionaries Tighten Their Hold on the Writers' Union," Radio Liberty Research, 28 March 1988, 1-2. 79. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 28 October 1988,2-9. 80. Kommunist 17 (1988): 22-26. Also see Ogonek 52 (1988): 13-15. A notable guest attending the December plenum was Mikhail Antonov, an economist with strong Russian nationalist convictions, who assailed Soviet economists for embracing "bourgeois notions of wealth." 81. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 23 December 1988, 4, translated in CDSP 41, no. 8 (22 March 1989), 4. 82. A paper shortage in 1990 confirmed such fears about the introduction of market principles in publishing. In making paper allocations, the Goskomizdat could favor certain publishers, usually the larger ones. Meanwhile, the limited amount available for "self-publishing," a writer for /zvestiia observed in the spring of 1990, meant that "the people who get published are those who somehow manage to get their hands on a roll of paper." 1zvestiia, 18 March 1990, 3. Also see Amy Corning, "Problems in the Soviet Book Publishing Industry," Radio Liberty Research, 12 August 1988. 83. While many conservative apparatchiki in the Writers' Union were wary of perestroika's economic elements, many intellectuals, believing that their material conditions were worse than those of Western writers and artists (perhaps because as contact with the West increased in the 1980s they tended to meet only the most successful Western intellectuals), embraced market-oriented reforms in the belief that this would provide them with an opportunity to get rich. See Kotz and Weir, 68-69. 84. Pravda, 13 October 1990, translated in CDSP 42, no.4 (14 November 1990): 30. 85. Moscow News, 15-22 July 1990,3.

4 The Ligachev Line, 1986-1988 "Who in this hall doubts that Comrade Ligachev is a most pure man? A man of the highest moral principles, committed, as they say, body and soul to the business of perestroika? I don't think you could find such a person here." -Eduard Shevardnadze, 21 October 1987, meeting of the CPS U Central Committee "In the West there is much talk about alliances and enmities between Gorbachev, Ligachev, Yakovlev, and so forth: It is pure speculation. There is no disagreement of any kind within our party leadership." - Pravda, 2 June 1988

The writers' struggle discussed in Chapter Three paralleled and in some ways anticipated the divisions that were emerging at the level of high politics during the early years of restructuring. While waging a cultural war with their liberalreformist enemies in Soviet newspapers and journals, the nationalistconservative intelligentsia looked for an assertive patron in the highest echelons of power. In 1987 their attention turned to Party ideologist Egor Ligachev, whose public stance on the excesses of glasnost showed the Russian nationalists that in the struggle against radicalism they could count on some support from above for their positions. Chapter Four discusses the emergence of this principled conservative as a spokesman for those who had the most serious reservations about the excesses of glasnost and the pace and direction of perestroika.

Ligachev and Glasnost Few who had worked with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko Politburos of the early 1980s could have been prepared for the sweeping changes the new general secretary would make in the country's top III

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ruling body during his first three years in power, for the passionate, enthusiastic, and immensely self-confident Gorbachev had also been prudent and cautious in his rise to the to the top. According to political scientist George Breslauer, who has studied the leadership styles of Russian leaders from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, Gorbachev was "an organization man" who believed in the Party's ability to realize the full potential of socialism. Yet by the time he came to power in March 1985 he was also a firm anti-Stalinist-an optimist who was privately convinced that the root of most of the country's problems lay in the corrupted cadres who occupied every rung of the Party-state system. 1 While attempting to enlist the support of the liberal intelligentsia for his reform program, by early 1987 Gorbachev, facing almost no resistance, managed to purge the Politburo of most of its Brezhnev-era holdovers and replace them with new members who he believed were likely to support his line. 2 The new full members included the centrist Nikolai Ryzhkov (b. 1929), Andropov proteges Vitalii Vorotnikov (b. 1926) and KGB chiefViktor Chebrikov (b. 1923), the liberal Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (b. 1928), and Egor Ligachev, who like Gorbachev was an Andropov protege and at this early stage a moderate reformer. 3 Boris Yeltsin (b. 1931) was appointed Moscow Party boss at the end of 1985 and shortly thereafter was made a candidate member of the Politburo, where he remained until February 1988. Although by 1987 the composition of the CPSU's leading body was much more to Gorbachev's liking, the Party apparat, over which Ligachev exercised enormous influence, remained a bastion of conservatism. Control over ideological matters was divided between Aleksandr Yakovlev, who dealt mostly with the mass media, and Ligachev, whose job was to deal with questions of culture, science, and education, until Yakovlev's promotion to full member status in the Politburo in June 1987. From that point onward Ligachev gradually moved away from the media while finding himself at odds with his rival, whom he privately blamed for the emergence of a "dictatorship of destructive forces" in the Soviet mass media.,,4 Sharing the Russian nationalists' concerns about cultural Westernization, the importation of cheap "mass culture," and the defamation of the country's history, Ligachev emerged as the Party's highest-ranking sponsor of the views of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia. 5 Here again Ligachev' s views clashed with those of Yakovlev, who was reviled by Russian nationalist-conservatives for his criticisms of Slavophilism and Great Russian chauvinism in the early 1970s and for his present role as media supervisor. Ligachev's affection for the cultural nationalism of the Russian intelligentsia and his attachment to rural Russia were to some degree an outgrowth of his provincial roots in Novosibirsk and his many years in Tomsk (a regional cultural center famous for its traditional Russian wooden architecture), where he was first secretary of the regional party committee (obkom) from 1965 to 1983. Ligachev had also spent several years in Moscow in the early 1960s working for

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the Central Committee's Russian Bureau, a body that was created by Khrushchev in lieu of a communist party for the RSFSR to oversee Russian affairs but was eliminated in 1966. Ligachev's position as deputy director in the Bureau's agitprop department gave him significant responsibility for ideological work in the RSFSR during these years. After returning to the provinces to work in Tomsk for nearly two decades, in December 1983 Iurii Andropov promoted him to the Central Committee Secretariat, and in April 1985 Gorbachev named him to full member of the Politburo, bypassing the usual period of apprenticeship as a candidate member of that body. In the Politburo and especially in the Secretariat, Ligachev was able to develop a significant degree of control over Party personnel, which strengthened his influence in Party organizations throughout the Russian republic and beyond. Thus while Yakovlev controlled much of the media in 1987, Ligachev had considerable control over the Party apparat. By this time it was widely understood that even if Yakovlev enjoyed unrivalled access to Gorbachev's soul, it was Ligachev, the "chairman" of the Central Committee Secretariat, who was officially the "number two" man in the Soviet leadership. During the first year of restructuring, Ligachev's support for the general secretary's reform program seemed unconditional and absolute. Like Gorbachev, he believed that the Soviet Union's economic slowdown could be traced in part to the failure during the Brezhnev era to seize the initiative in the "scientific and technological revolution" then taking place in the West. 6 Yet he also shared Gorbachev's belief that corrupt cadres were responsible for hol~ing back the realization of Soviet socialism's full potential. Breslauer, by designating Ligachev a "puritan" bent on replacing corrupt bureaucrats and "red directors" with honest and efficient technocrats, nicely captures the spirit of Ligachev's approach to perestroika. 7 While both Ligachev and the general secretary believed themselves to be moving toward the same goal of fixing the stagnant Soviet system, each had a somewhat different approach: for Gorbachev, glasnost was a precondition for reform; Ligachev's emphasis, however, was on tightening party discipline, reinforcing the principle of democratic centralism, and strengthening central planning. 8 He was particularly active in the antialcohol campaign of perestroika's first years, and had in fact had taken decisive measures to decrease alcohol consumption in Tomsk well before arriving in Moscow. Reflecting on perestroika later, he called it "a period conceived as socialist renewal, a deliverance from Stalinist and post-Stalinist entanglements that bound society," but he soon found that perestroika had strayed from its original purpose. As he later testified at Yeltsin's trial of the CPSU in 1992, after 1988 part of the leadership "went over to the position of right revisionism, of the liquidation of the Communist Party, and opened the road to nationalist-separatism and anticommunism." It was then that the "undermining of the Party and the state began.,,9

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From 1986 to 1988 it was not the vaguely-defined campaign for perestroika that aroused Ligachev's suspicion but the Soviet press's embrace of glasnost. Speaking at the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress in February 1986, Ligachev mildly rebuked the Party newspaper Pravda for its "lapses"-in other words, for taking excessive liberties with glasnost, and he advised writers to be guarded in their criticisms.1O While he continued in his public pronouncements to support perestroika and occasionally even to defend the press's pursuit of glasnost, Ligachev coupled his support with warnings. His views on glasnost at this time are best summarized by a speech delivered at a conference for the Social Sciences in October 1986, in which he declared that We cannot agree with those who are trying to stifle criticism, who say "that's enough criticism." This is wrong .... At the same time, we should administer a very resolute rebuff to everyone who tries to use the spirit of the TwentySeventh Congress and the development of criticism for demagoguery, for the achievement of their own selfish aims. It is important that criticism always be followed by constructive action. I I

Likewise, in a speech he delivered on 6 November 1986 in celebration of the October Revolution, Ligachev noted that while the reporting of shortcomings in the press and in speeches was necessary to the cause, he added that the truth reported in the press "must be a whole truth and not a one-sided truth.,,12 Yet Ligachev was not entirely opposed to a critical examination of the past. It was he who gave permission for the film Repentance to be shown to a limited audience in the autumn of 1986. As noted in Chapter Three, the release of this film to a wider audience later in the year and the discussions it raised about Stalin's negative legacies can be counted among the great early successes of glasnost. However, Ligachev's warnings to the Soviet media not to test the limits of what was acceptable became more pronounced during the course of 1987, particularly in cases where historical revisionism showed disrespect for the generations that built socialism and defended it against fascism. I3 The recent criticisms of Stalin were of considerable concern to Ligachev, who viewed the publication of anti-Stalin works as part of a smear campaign designed to discredit the Soviet past. Fearing that an avalanche of negative criticism of the Party would obscure the otherwise generally positive developments in Soviet society, Ligachev, like Gorbachev himself, believed that criticism had to be tempered by constructive contributions. As the influence of the CPSU's Propaganda Department diminished and the liberal press probed the limits of the permissible, it was Ligachev more than any other Soviet leader who drew attention to what he regarded as the negative results of excessive glasnost. What made Ligachev's position so difficult, however, was that his boss drew no clear boundary between what the press was permitted to write and what was forbidden. Having placed liberals in leading positions in the Soviet press, Gorbachev allowed them to do their work under the

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guidance ofYakovlev, while the general secretary generally remained above the fray. In his memoirs Ligachev blamed Yakovlev for the appointment of editors who were "blackening Soviet history," but this was not always the case: Vitalii Korotich, editor of the popular pro-reform weekly Ogonek, was in fact a Ligachev appointee. 14 According to Gorbachev's advisor Anatolii Cherniaev (b. 1921), Ligachev was particularly exasperated by Sergei Zalygin's work at the reformist journal Novyi mir. Speaking at a meeting of the Politburo in June 1987, Ligachev declared that Certain people spread values and ideas that cast doubt on our socialist way. We cannot be neutral about this. Take Sergei Pavlovich [Zalygin], I have a lot of respect for him. But what happens is that one after another there keep appearing in his journal people like [Larisa] Popkova l5 with her "market dominance" or [Nikolai] Shmelev l6 offering us unemployment. And if Sergei Pavlovich is opposed to socialism, we don't need him as an editor. There can be only one criterion; everything that strengthens socialism will be given due attention and consideration. But when someone's trying to slip us capitalism, bourgeois ideology instead of socialism-that's a different matter. That won't be permitted. 17

While attacking the excesses of the glasnost press, in his struggle with Yakovlev over culture Ligachev exhibited a hostility toward the West and its mass culture that resonated with a number of Russian nationalist writers, who in turn acclaimed Ligachev as a spokesman for their views. In this regard, a June 1987 visit by Ligachev to the editorial offices of Sovetskaia kul'tura, a proreform monthly, is revealing. With his rival Yakovlev having just been promoted to full membership in the Politburo, which meant that his own standing as Party ideologist shrank commensurately, Ligachev delivered his most extreme public attack to date on glasnost. The problem with Sovetskaia kul'tura, he declared, was that it wasn't carrying enough articles by Party officials; they ought to be given "a chance to have their say." Explicitly siding with the literary old guard, Ligachev called for greater attention to be paid to the best in Russian and Soviet literature and attacked the literary critics who had begun to retreat from Socialist Realism. "What we need," he told the newspaper's editors, "is constructive glasnost." In the course of Ligachev's talk he specificaIly mentioned the names of the well-known Russian nationalist writers, Valentin Rasputin and Evgenii SvetIanov, whom he said in private meetings with him had recently expressed concern over attempts "to supplant our spiritual values" with "dubious ideas." Furthermore, Ligachev pointed to the discussions at recent meetings of the Writers' Union-in particular the writers' concern with the negative influences of "the West's bourgeois mass culture" in the Soviet Union-as evidence of the intelligentsia's support for the line he was now advocating more openly. 18 Thus, by mid-1987 Ligachev was not only indicating that he shared the ideas of

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the Russian nationalist writers, but it seems that he thought himself their spokesman as well. 19 Although Yakovlev's promotion confirmed his role as the Party's top liaison with the Soviet intelligentsia, Ligachev could not restrain his impulse to involve himself in literary and cultural affairs and to act as a counterweight to Yakovlev's influence. Vitalii Korotich of Ogonek later affirmed that Ligachev would call him to urge him not to push so fast. 20 According to Cherniaev, it was widely known that Ligachev was a supporter of the Stalinist line taken by Molodaia gvardiia in 1987, as he spoke with journal's editors regularly and offered them encouragement for their positions. 21 Likewise, the nationalist journal Nash sovremmenik soon began to recognize Ligachev as the Russian nationalists' best ally in the upper echelons of power, and by the spring of 1988 it was promoting Ligachev, his earlier achievements as head of the Tomsk regional Party organization, and his views on matters such as the antialcohol campaign. 22 As the scope of perestroika widened and Gorbachev came to embrace a more radical critique of the Stalinist system, Ligachev found himself in the position of a principled conservative who wished to contain what he regarded as the destructive ambitions of politicians close to the general secretary. As his main competitor in the realm of ideology, Yakovlev was the main target of Ligachev's frustration. "The radicalism embodied by Yakovlev at the highest level of the Soviet leadership," he later recalled, "threatened to disrupt the tempo of perestroika and accelerate the pace of transformation without taking reality into account. I had to do everything in my power to block these ruinous attempts.,,23 The publication of the infamous Nina Andreeva letter in a Party newspaper in March 1988 was his most celebrated attempt to do just that.

"I Cannot Forsake My Principles" Between 1986 and 1989 Gorbachev's views were constantly evolving as he began to embrace concepts that moved well beyond his earlier amorphous campaigns for perestroika and glasnost. By 1987 his push for uskorenie (acceleration) gave way to new reform ideas that called for a more decentralized economy with a significant role for market forces within the framework of socialist planning. 24 While urging economic restructuring, the democratization of the Party, and the creation of a "law-based state" (pravovoe gosudarstvo) at home, Gorbachev simultaneously launched a stunning foreign policy shift that called for "new thinking" (novie myshlenie) in the sphere of international relations. Fully cognizant of the fact that the USSR could not win the arms race with the United States and that tensions between the superpowers needed to be reduced if perestroika were to succeed, Gorbachev undertook a peace initiative that involved a series of unilateral concessions whose purpose was to convince the West, and the United States in particular, of his seriousness about improving

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the international climate. In signing the INF treaty at the end of 1987 Gorbachev succeeded in getting U.S. President Ronald Reagan to agree to a major arms reduction program that would help to reduce the Soviet military budget, and in January 1988 the general secretary announced that the USSR would begin withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. 25 Thus while perestroika floundered at home, Gorbachev achieved some of his greatest successes in the sphere of for. pol'ICy. 26 elgn At the heart of Gorbachev's "new thinking" on foreign policy was his belief that the USSR should pursue integration with the West as a permanent solution to the Cold War tensions that had divided Europe for more than four decades. In his book Perestroika, published in the USSR in 1987 but intended primarily for Western consumption, Gorbachev placed the Soviet Union-and Russiasquarely within Europe, "our common home.,,27 According to Gorbachev, "Russia's trade, cultural and political links with other European nations and states have deep roots in history. Weare Europeans . . . The history of Russia is an organic part of the great European history.,,28 In launching the "new thinking" campaign, Gorbachev explained the basis of his unexpected shift in policy: "[TJhe interests of societal development and pan-human values," he asserted in November 1986, "take priority over the interests of any particular class.,,29 Gorbachev's demotion of the relevance of class to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy was met with predictable resistance from Egor Ligachev, who, as noted above, was suspicious of the West and hostile to its "mass culture." Directly contradicting his superior, in August 1988 he declared that "[wJe proceed from the class nature of international relations.,,3o This disagreement over the ideological basis of Soviet foreign policy captures the nature of the gulf that was growing between Gorbachev and Ligachev in 1987 and 1988. Gorbachev's ideological flexibility irritated Ligachev, who was disinclined to tinker with the Marxist-Leninist principles that he knew served to legitimize the regime's power. In this regard Ligachev was far from alone, as his criticisms of the "unhealthy" manifestations of perestroika were regularly supported by longtime Politburo member Mikhail Solomontsev, Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov, and KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov. 31 From 1988 onward Politburo members Vladimir Shcherbitskii, Viktor Nikonov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Nikolai Sliunkov, and Vitalii VorotrIikov increasingly took conservative positions as well. 32 Although no direct attacks on Gorbachev were made in Politburo sessions until 1989, opposition to Gorbachev increased markedly after he placed political reform on the agenda in early 1987, now urging the "democratization" of the Party and the "end of the nomenklatura approach.,,33 At a meeting of the Central Committee in January proposals were put forward for the election of cadres in Party organizations at the local level (workplaces, towns, cities), while secretaries of Party committees at the regional and republican levels would be chosen by that level's Party committee on the basis of a secret ballot. 34 While outward sup-

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port for democratization was unanimous in the Central Committee, Gorbachev later recalled that "[t]here were warning signs that the Party elite would not quietly accept the loss of their privileged position.,,35 As the battles over glasnost heated up over the following year, the general secretary was well aware that his program faced substantial opposition within the Party apparat and other sectors of Soviet society and therefore found it necessary to steer a careful course between critics from the "left" and from the "right" while maintaining his commitment to reform. 36 On the "left" (as he defined it), most of the various pro-reform forces, from the former dissidents to "informal" groups like Democratic Perestroika that proliferated with the regime's encouragment, still had their hopes vested in Gorbachev. But the "left" also had critics among its ranks, including the popular and energetic Boris Yeltsin, who in November 1987 lost his position as Moscow Party boss after complaining about Ligachev's obstruction of perestroika and warning the Central Committee about the dangers of a new "cult of personality" forming around the general secretary. At a meeting with leaders of the Soviet mass media on 12 January 1988, Gorbachev complained about the critics on the "left" who grumble "that restructuring has stopped, and call for more resolute measures, for personnel reshuffles and so on." On the other hand, critics from the "right," concentrated in the Party apparat, claimed that the "foundations of socialism" were "being undermined by perestroika.,,3? The publication in a Party newspaper of a letter titled "I Cannot Forsake My Principles" ("Ne mogu postupat'sia printsipami") by a chemistry instructor at a Leningrad institute, Nina Andreeva (b. 1938), confirmed Gorbachev's suspicions and convinced many readers that the reform program was in danger. 38 According to numerous credible accounts, Egor Ligachev personally encouraged the editors of Sovetskaia Rossiia to publish the antiperestroika manifesto. 39 The letter, published while Gorbachev was preparing to depart for Yugoslavia, appeared first in the 13 March edition of Sovetskaia Rossiia, a CPSU daily with a circulation of 5.2 million copies. 4o As if on command, the article was quickly reprinted in several regional newspapers, including Uralskii rabochii, Gor'kovskaia pravda, Vechemii Donbass, Voronezhskaia pravda, Omskaia pravda, and Novgorodskaia pravda. 41 In part the Nina Andreeva letter was a response to the reviews of Mikhail Shatrov's new play about Lenin and Stalin, Onward, Onward, Onward-a play that Andreeva herself confessed that she had not read. 42 Although the reviews were mixed, what disturbed Andreeva were those that exalted a play that seemed to denounce Stalin: "There is rapturous praise," she wrote, "for novels and movies that lynch the epoch of 'storms and onslaught,' which is presented as a 'tragedy of the peoples. ", Although she claimed to share the people's anger and indignation over the repressions of the 1930s and 1940s, Andreeva defended Stalin-a "controversial and complex figure"-and Stalinism as products of a complicated time when difficult choices had to be made. While it was one thing

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to address the personality cult and its effects, as Khrushchev did in his "secret speech" in 1956, it was quite another to denigrate Stalin's role in the construction and defense of socialism. Quoting Winston Churchill, Andreeva concluded her discussion of Stalin by noting that "He took over a Russia still using the wooden plow, and left it equipped with atomic weapons." Just as she defended Stalin, Andreeva also came to the defense of the Russian people, who she claimed were being smeared by a certain "desire to categorize the slightest expressions of Great Russian national pride as manifestations of the chauvinism of a great power." "For some reason," she wrote, "we are ashamed to say that it was the Russian proletariat, which the Trotskyists slighted as 'backward and uncultured,' that carried out, in Lenin's words, 'the three Russian Revolutions,' or that the Slavic peoples were in the vanguard of mankind's battle against fascism." This defense of the role of the Russians in the revolution was not unrelated to her criticism of another group of troublemakers: the Jews. Alarmed by the demands of "militant cosmopolitanism," (i.e., Jews who were pressing for exit visas from the socialist system), Andreeva saw supporters of these "refuseniks" as guilty of "class and nationality betrayal." Not even the "neo-Slavophiles" were spared her criticism. Andreeva condemned in particular their "one-sided assessment of collectivization" as well as their ideological errors concerning the October Revolution. Such indiscriminate disparaging of the Soviet past by both the neo-liberals and the neo-Slavophiles, she insisted, was polluting the minds of young people in the Soviet Union and producing "ideological confusion.,,43 Nina Andreeva's views in themselves were perhaps less important than the fact that this was the first overt attack on perestroika and its architects in the mainstream Soviet press-and that some well-placed members in the CPSU hierarchy apparently agreed with her. According to the Italian Communist Party newspaper L 'Unitii, Andreeva's original letter, hand-dated 7 September 1987, had, according to the orders of "someone" in the Politburo, been pared down by the editorial staff of Sovetskaia Rossiia and shaped into a political manifesto, shorn of many of its original anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist statements, while some new elements were added, in particular the attacks on Shatrov's play.44 According to another account, the day after the article's publication (with Gorbachev in Yugoslavia and Yakovlev en route to Mongolia), Egor Ligachev summoned to the Kremlin the editors of the main newspapers, including Sovetskaia Rossiia's Valentin Chikin, a like-minded thinker with whom Ligachev had had earlier contacts. "I read an excellent article in Sovetskaya Rossiya, a wonderful example of Party political writing," Ligachev said. "I hope you have all read it. I would ask you, comrade editors, to be guided by the ideas of this article in your work.,,45 Since both Gorbachev and Yakovlev read the article while out of Moscow, their response was delayed, giving Yakovlev in particular time to formulate his arguments against this "anti-perestroika manifesto" before a discussion of the

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letter was finally taken up at by the Politburo on 24-25 March. Although the general secretary was apparently upset by the article's appearance, he left it to the characteristically cool and logical Yakovlev to take up this struggle with "conservatism" with the other Party leaders. 46 In a long monologue before the assembled members of the Politburo, Yakovlev analyzed the Andreeva article, specifically addressing Andreeva's concern about the preservation "of the national pride of Great Russians." He noted, for example, that Andreeva's letter repeatedly referred to the irretrievable loss of many Russian cultural monuments-"as if Stalinism didn't bear the main guilt for this." The feelings provoked by this letter, Yakovlev concluded, "are directed toward racial [national] conflict. ,,47 Yakovlev's concerns were seconded by Iurii Solov'ev (b. 1925), the chief of the ultraconservative Leningrad Party organization. Solov'ev complained in particular about informal groups such as Parniat', an extreme Russian nationalist organization that was gaining considerable notoriety at that time in Russia's larger cities. (Pamiat' is discussed in detail in Chapter Five.) In Solov'ev's view, not only was Pamiat' a nuisance that made unreasonable demands, such as access to radio and printing materials, this group, he claimed, "wants to appear to be an opposition" and is "preparing for a political struggle.,,48 Vladimir Dolgikh, a holdover from the Brezhnev Politburo, added that it was necessary to pay more attention to questions emanating from the masses, lest it fall to extremists such as Pamiat' to speak in the name of the Russian people. Delayed action on ecological issues, he pointed out, had given such groups the opportunity to portray themselves as speaking out in the capacity of defenders of the people. 49 Whatever the Soviet leaders' opinion of Pamiat', one consequence of the Andreeva letter was that it forced the Party leadership to consider how Russian nationalism and the issues raised by nationalist organizations could be exploited to the benefit of antiperestroika forces. Indeed, Gorbachev, who was an admirer of many of the very same Russian nationalist intellectuals who criticized his reforms, was well aware of the power of their ideas. Ligachev, for his part, said little during the meeting. While never assuming personal responsibility for the letter's publication, he made clear where he stood on the main issue it addressed-the excesses of glasnost in the Soviet media. The press is unable to reflect the truth about the most important historical and political events taking place in our country, and most of all in the party. There is one truth and only one truth. There isn't always an objective picture given about the heroic and tragic pages in our history. There are certain organs of the press that offer distortions, literally only the negative factors, and they see the past only in a negative light. Of course there are opportunities to have discussions about these questions, but we are not always using them wisely. Even when considering the great feats of the people, some writers and cinematographers are trying to inject elements of negativity. 50

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Having deliberated on the meaning of the Nina Andreeva letter, the reformist leadership of the Politburo, namely Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and Vadim Medvedev (who was yet another ideologist), concluded that an official response to it was necessary in order to clarify once and for all the leadership's stance on the irreversibility of perestroika. The official rejoinder, drafted mainly by Yakovlev, appeared in a Pravda editorial on 5 April and was subsequently reprinted in all major Soviet newspapers. It signified that the reformers well understood that the letter was more than just the work of a single malcontent-it was a manifesto around which reactionary forces could rally in their attempt to contain and, if possible, roll back perestroika. 51 Yakovlev, who had long been detested by the Russian nationalists who never forgave him for his attack on Russian chauvinism in the early 1970s, passed on the opportunity publicly to address the Russian nationalist issue-perhaps because he remembered that the last time he did so he was punished with a decade in Canadian exile. Three weeks elapsed between the original appearance of Nina Andreeva's letter and Yakovlev's response in Pravda. During the interim the Soviet public might have been tempted to conclude that Gorbachev' s reform program had been undermined by a conservative ideological coup in the Kremlin-that the article's appearance was the result of some edict from above by Ligachev and supported by the Central Committee. 52 Beginning with the Pravda editorial, however, the pro-reform forces in the Party struck back. Throughout April, Pravda, /zvestiia, and other newspapers supportive of the Party's reformist line condemned Andreeva's letter. However, some dissenting voices could be heard on the pages of Molodaia gvardiia and Sovetskaia kul'tura, each of which carried readers' letters that denounced the excesses of glasnost. 53 Gorbachev also spoke directly to his fellow Politburo members of the need to repel the conservative forces who he was convinced were responsible for holding back the reform effort: it was "necessary," he said on 31 March, "to break up this nomenklatura.,,54 The Party apparat, concluded the general secretary, would have to be isolated and removed from the reform process. Just as the furor over the Andreeva letter began to ebb, in mid-April Gorbachev held a series of conferences with the first secretaries of the Central Committees of the republican Communist Parties and the heads of the regional Party committees. Since it was at the local level that the Nina Andreeva letter was most acclaimed and reprinted, it would seem that these meetings were at least partly designed to ensure the support of local Communist Party leaders, whose total loyalty to Gorbachev was questionable even three years before the coup. In addition to discussing the problems presented by the resistance of the nomenklatura and the demands emanating from the republics, Gorbachev also took the opportunity to clarify his feelings about the appearance of the Andreeva letter in newspapers throughout the country: "Everyone understands," he told the Party secretaries, "that such an article does not simply appear on its own." Such an

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undertaking would be too difficult for a simple chemistry teacher from Leningrad. 55 Indeed, the letter's publication was quite intentional, reflecting Ligachev's confidence that there was widespread opposition to the general secretary's policies and that he himself had accrued sufficient support and power in the ranks of the Party to lead this opposition. By creating the Nina Andreeva Frankenstein, Ligachev and his group, which at this point appeared to have included KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov and fellow Politburo members Vladimir Shcherbitskii and Aleksandr Nikonov, were taking advantage of the nationalist backlash that was just beginning within the Russian republic and among ethnic Russians in the other republics. "Not wanting to find themselves on the wrong side of the issue of Russian nationalism," writes Anthony D' Agostino, "Ligachev and his supporters were tempted to appeal to these potential allies.,,56

The Nineteenth Party Conference Attempting to recover from the ill effects of the Nina Andreeva letter, Gorbachev used the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988 as an opportunity to shore up support for perestroika. The very fact that the general secretary called for a Party conference-the first since Stalin had called one in February 1941 to rally the Party and the country to fight in the event of an impending German invasion-suggested that Gorbachev felt he needed to obtain a renewed mandate to continue with his reform program. He wanted to use the conference as an instrument to overcome what he understood to be the deeply entrenched opposition within the Party apparat-an opposition that was highlighted by the general secretary's difficulties in getting pro-reform delegates elected to the conference. 57 On the eve of the June CPSU Conference, the Soviet leader nevertheless attempted to put on a conciliatory face, stressing the importance of unity and of "restoring the spirit of comradeship.,,58 Ligachev, who was well aware that he was being identified as a "conservative" in an increasingly factionalized Politburo, had been uncharacteristically silent about ideological issues since the Politburo's condemnation of the letter. Appearing to be in accord with the general secretary's emphasis on unity, he continued to deny that he was in any wayan opponent of perestroika. Speaking in the industrial city of Togliatti on 4 June, Ligachev declared that Some people have recently been trying to create the impression that resistance to the policy of restructuring is growing. Clearly, this is necessary to somebody.... Enemies in the West (and some among us) insinuate the idea that disagreements supposedly exist in the Soviet leadership, in the Politburo. What can one say about this? First of all, this is done repeatedly, which means deliberately .... All members of the leadership headed by M.S. Gorbachev are pro-

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foundly committed to the cause of restructuring, actively participate in the formulation of its policy, in the implementation of the policy, and together with the people, devote al\ their efforts and experience to this.59

Despite Ligachev's disclaimer, which echoed earlier denials by Gorbachev of a split in the leadership, the cracks in the Party edifice were turning into deeper fissures. Gorbachev, his opponents were beginning to grumblealthough privately for the moment-had gone well beyond perestroika's original mandate to reinvigorate the socialist system. Their worst fears about Gorbachev's radicalization were confirmed at the CPSU Conference at the end of the month, for it was here that the general secretary introduced a number of major concepts of Western democratic thought and practice into Soviet political discourse. In the words of political scientist Archie Brown, "the resolutions passed and decisions taken by the conference at Gorbachev's instigation set the Soviet Union on a course of transition from reformist to transformative change of the political system.,,60 At the height of his power within the system, Gorbachev now began fundamentally to change it. Although Western political concepts, such as the principle of the rule of law, were increasingly influencing Gorbachev's thinking, his main intention at this time was the transfer of political power from the Party apparat and the bureaucracy to state bodies and the local soviets, where the general secretary expected that support for perestroika was stronger. Gorbachev's principal suggestion, however, was that the Soviet president (which he intended to be himself) should be elected by an obedient new parliamentary body-what nine months later would become the Congress of People's Deputies-and entrusted with overseeing domestic and foreign policy. The apparat could hardly have failed to notice what now appeared to be the thrust of the general secretary's new strategy: in his attempt to restructure the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was going to circumvent the Party. With the Party leadership irreparably split and the conservative apparat isolated from the reform process, the stage was set for a "war for control over party and state institutions. ,,6 I The antiperestroika opposition, far from being a bogeyman that Gorbachev and Yakovlev could use to frighten people into supporting their policies, had become an undeniable reality.62 And like Gorbachev and his supporters, they demanded to have their say. The most outspoken critic of perestroika at the Nineteenth Party Conference was the writer Iurii Bondarev, who censured the Soviet leadership for launching a radical new program of democratization and economic reform without having the slightest idea where it would lead the country: "Could our restructuring be compared to an aircraft that has taken off without knowing if there is a landing strip at its destination?" he asked. Bondarev's denunciations of the excesses of glasnost, discussed in detail in Chapter Three, were by now quite familiar to the Soviet public. At the Party

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Conference, however, they were repeated with even greater force and to a vastly wider audience. Sounding much like comrade Ligachev, Bondarev went on to criticize the slanderous attacks of the liberal media. "[A] section of our press has perceived, or rather exploited, restructuring as a means for the destabilization of all that exists, for the revision of beliefs and morals." Citing a list of "remarkable talents" now being slandered-notably the Russian nationalists Vasilii Belov, Viktor Astafev, Valentin Rasputin, Mikhail Alekseev, and Il'ia Glazunov (among others}-he further charged the Soviet press with responding "in the form of a serpentine hissing" to words such as "fatherland," "motherland," and "patriotism." Nevertheless, even Bondarev could summon a flash of humor about "the fear of the press" as he repeated a popular joke then circulating around Moscow: "Do you know the difference between a man and a fly now? Both a fly and a man can be swatted by a newspaper." What Bondarev feared most, however, was where the liberals' criticisms were leading the country: Extremist criticism, with its despotism, lack of culture, lust for power, and cynicism in its assessment of events, seems to be above and beyond the interests of socialist progress. It wants to claim for itself the new title of "foreman of restructuring." However, in actual fact, it preaches its main postulate: Let all weeds bloom and all evil forces contend: only with chaos, confusion, muddle, intrigues, and an epidemic of literary scandals, only by shaking faith will we be able to cobble together a uniform thinking that suits us personally. Yes, this criticism lusts for power and, casting off morals and conscience, may bring ideology to the brink of crisis. 63

While Bondarev's criticism could be taken at face value as an attack on the excesses of glasnost, it was actually an assault on the entire ideological thrust of the reform program. Bondarev correctly perceived that perestroika was moving beyond a program oflimited "restructuring" and would inevitably amount to the dismantling of a system which had served at least a segment of Soviet society, if only a small one, quite well in terms of both status and material rewards. Egor Ligachev was likely among the many delegates who applauded Bondarev's words. In his own speech, Ligachev mostly limited himself to selfdefense against the attacks of the seemingly marginalized Yeltsin, who continued to criticize him for being an obstacle to reform. Ligachev, true to his character, tried at once to be ideologically principled while remaining outwardly loyal to the general secretary. Endorsing Bondarev's sentiments "fully and wholly," he nevertheless affirmed his ritual support for perestroika: "We are deeply committed to the policy of restructuring. We see the point of our life in this great cause.,,64 In Ligachev's mind, however, his boss had strayed from the original plan agreed upon three years earlier. Despite Bondarev's and others' criticisms of perestroika, Gorbachev emerged from the conference as the victor. The Nineteenth CPSU Conference succeeded in shoring up support of much of the Party leadership for both the

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broad principles of reform and for Gorbachev's specific suggestions--even if it failed to win over the vast apparat. Although for the time being Ligachev remained Gorbachev's "number two" in the Politburo, the sudden convening of a Central Committee plenum at the end of September, announced while Ligachev was away on vacation, confirmed the loss in status not only of Ligachev, but of "conservatives" in general at the top of the Party leadership. This reorganization, or the "September coup," was intended to "restructure" the Secretariat and the Politburo. In another strike at the conservative old guard, the general secretary deprived the Party Secretariat, headed by Ligachev, of much of its power. In addition, the duties of ideology chief were transferred to Vadim Medvedev, a supporter of Gorbachev's policies, while Ligachev was awarded the agriculture portfolio-a convenient way of removing him from the more sensitive areas of perestroika. Moreover, Ligachev's ability to influence foreign policy was drastically reduced by the transfer of control over the International Department to Yakovlev. 65 A Central Committee plenum soon after the reorganization ratified the personnel shifts that in effect eliminated the unofficial position of a "second secretary" in the Politburo and broke the authority of that body's ideologists. The fact that ideology was represented in the Politburo by no fewer than three individuals (Ligachev, Yakovlev, and Medvedev) was certainly an indication of its lessened sense of importance. 66 Indeed, beyond the use of empty slogans such as "Back to Leninism!" the reformers' battle for restructuring was being fought less on the grounds of Marxist ideology than under the cloak of calls for more "democracy." What followed after the plenum and the reorganization of the apparat was, as political scientist Gordon Hahn noted, "chaos, confusion, and division" in the Party and increased resistance to Gorbachev's reform program on the part of its orthodox defenders. 67 While reformers embraced the line taken by Gorbachev, some of the hardliners displayed open sympathy for the patriotic stances taken by the leaders of the burgeoning Russian nationalist movement. Some began talking about creating a new Communist Party for the RSFSR-the only republic that lacked its own party-as a possible counterweight to the reformist Politburo. (This is the subject of Chapter Six.) As perestroika moved into a new phase in the summer and autumn of 1988, Ligachev stepped up his appeals to the country's "patriotic" elements. In particular he defended the patriotism of the military, which, accustomed to glorification during the Brezhnev era, had now come under attack in the liberal press for allegedly ruining the country's economy.68 He also continued to make overtures to the Russian nationalists, who saw in him their most influential supporter in the Party. In July 1988, for example, Ligachev demonstratively attended the exhibit of Il'ia Glazunov, an artist who was admired by millions of Russians (including both Mikhail Gorbachev and especially his wife, Raisa) and who had been a spiritual leader of the Russian nationalist movement since the 1960s. 69 A notable feature of the exhibit was its display of the long-banned "The Mystery

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of the Twentieth Century," which juxtaposed such figures as Lenin, Tsar Nicholas II, Charlie Chaplin, and the Beatles. Trotsky is shown among the figures of the revolutionary period; Stalin lies in a blood-red coffin; Solzhenitsyn is clad in prisoners' garb. 70 Ligachev gave his stamp of approval on the artist's work, reportedly heaping praise on it.71 In courting the "patriotic" sectors of society, Ligachev attended gatherings of Russian nationalist writers and gave speeches at meetings of VOOPIK, a society dedicated to the preservation of historical monuments that, like the Writers' Union, was under the control of reactionary nationalist elements. He called the editors of newspapers and journals, congratulating and encouraging those whose line he agreed with, and criticizing those who took too many liberties with glasnost. In the coming years Ligachev would establish contacts with radical nationalist-communist groups like the United Workers' Front (OFT), the Movement of Communist Initiatives (DKI), and Nina Andreeva's Edinstvo (Unity), while becoming a member of the hardline "Soiuz" faction in the new Congress of People's Deputies.72 This is discussed in later chapters. Yet it was in the Russian provinces that Ligachev did the greatest damage to Gorbachev's cause, for his followers were in the regional Party committees. While fully agreeing with the general secretary that a renewal of cadres (i.e., getting rid of corrupt Brezhnev-era officials) was necessary for the Party, he filled these positions with conservative regional officials rather than with people from the Moscow intelligentsia. That is, Ligachev used his position in the Secretariat to ensure that the strongest supporters of perestroika would not be unleashed on Russia's provinces. Although it would be misleading to lump together the political views of the millions of apparatchiki, it is worth noting that many, hailing from the provinces, were strongly influenced by the neoSlavophile and Russian nationalist views of Russia's cultural elite-the derevenshchiki and the contributors to journals such as Nash sovremennik and Molodaia gvardiia. In many cases, their allegiance to communism was superficial, dictated by political ambition and the requirements of the moment. As the political philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko later recalled, "Even prior to perestroika, a significant part of the CC [Central Committee] apparat regarded Communism as a fayade. These people weren't really the guardians of Communism, as much as they were the guardians of the rules of the game handed down from above.'.?3 Despite his reservations about glasnost, it would be mistaken to depict Ligachev as an extremist or even as an outright opponent of restructuring at the height of his influence in 1987-88. From the beginning Ligachev believed it was necessary to reform the system; but at the same time he was fundamentally opposed to changing it. The system, he believed, could be made to work. As television commentator Vladimir Pozner later wrote: Ligachev certainly wanted change for Soviet society, but he wanted the kind of change that would preserve the Party's power and preeminence, preserve the Union, and preserve socialism as he understood that idea. Ligachev wanted to

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do away with the conditions that spawned apathy, corruption, and crime. He was a Stalinist-not in his desire to restore the gulag, but in his firm belief in centralized power, public ownership, collective farming, and a one-party system. 74

Although Ligachev increasingly opposed the general secretary's politics, it seems unlikely that he aspired to Gorbachev's position. Anthony D'Agostino portrays the Ligachev of 1987-1988 as a figure analogous to Mikhail Suslov in Brezhenv's Politburo-"a defender of collective leadership against possible incursions by a too ambitious general secretary.,,75 In his memoirs, Ligachev claims that his aim was to protect the general secretary and the country from the influence of Politburo "radicals" such as Yakovlev and Shevardnadze-and later the Russian "democrats" under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin. 76 Such "radicals," "pseudo-democrats," and "right-wingers," as Ligachev and other "conservatives" called the various liberal reformers, exploited the current political thaw for their own selfish and destructive purposes. As he warned in June 1989, a time when nationalist explosions threatened to tear the Soviet Union apart: Under the mantle of democracy and glasnost extremist, antisocialist, and nationalist elements have become active. They are putting up slogans against the party, the socialist system, the Soviet Army, and the law-enforcement organs. Their actions are ultimately against restructuring and the socialist renewal of society.77

Bruised by Gorbachev's September coup and constrained by a petrified Marxist-Leninist ideology that by 1988 had lost much of whatever had remained of its popular appeal, Egor Ligachev continued to give signals to like-minded apparatchiki and intellectuals to support the orthodox wing of the Party's efforts to rescue the Soviet Union from the perils of improvised restructuring. His supporters among the reactionaries in the Writers' Union responded with vigor. At a plenum of the board of the union's Russian branch in late 1988, Nash sovremennik editor Sergei Vikulov suggested that the present leadership should follow the example set during World War II, when the Soviet Union was saved by its appeal to Russian nationalism as a mobilizing force. 78 As if responding to this call, in the nearly three years between Gorbachev's coup of September 1988 and that of the Emergency Committee in August 1991, Party conservatives intensified their contacts with the new nationalist and Stalinist organizations and adopted many of their ideas in an effort to gain popular support and put an end to perestroika.

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Notes I. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22-28. 2. During the first two years the general secretary replaced 60 percent of the country's oblast' and raion secretaries with younger people who he thought would be receptive to his "new thinking." William Odom, The Col/apse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 136-137. 3 Shevardnadze replaced Andrei Gromyko, who was kicked upstairs and named the chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet-a powerless post that formally made Gromyko the head of the Soviet state. 4. Ligachev, 104. For the confrontations between Ligachev and Yakovlev over the media and television in particular, see Ellen Mickiewicz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia, revised and expanded (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 36-41. 5. For Ligachev's role during the early years of perestroika, see Baruch Hazan, Gorbachev and His Enemies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Jonathan Harris, "Ligachev on Glasnost and Perestroika," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1989); Luke March, "Egor Ligachev: A Conservative Reformer in the Gorbachev Period," Research Papers in Russian and Eastern European Studies (Birmingham, UK: The University of Birmingham Centre for Russian and East European Studies, November 1997). 6. Ligachev, 45. 7. Breslauer, 31,45. 8. Hazan, 15. 9. Ligachev testimony on 5 October 1992, quoted in F.M. Rudinskii, "Delo KPSS" v Konstitutsionnom Sude (Moscow: Vylinna, 1999),98; Ligachev, 131. 10. Julia Wishnevsky, "The Chief Kremlin Ideologist on Theater Repertoires," Radio Liberty Research, 22 September 1986, 1-3. II. Pravda, 2 October 1986, 1-3, translated in CDSP 38, no. 40 (5 November 1986): 9. 12. Moscow television, translated in the FBIS-SOV, 7 November 1986, 9-10. 13. See, for example, Ligachev's speech at the Central Committee Conference with mass media executives. Pravda, 17 September 1987, 2. 14. Korotich, a Ukrainian, had once written a harshly anti-American book titled The Face of Hatred. Upon reading it, Ligachev approved of Korotich's appointment to Ogonek. Ligachev, 96-97. 15. In May 1987 Larisa Piiasheva (Popkova) published a letter in Novyi mir that argued that only a market system could bring prosperity and that socialist planning could not be combined with a market system, as some economists were arguing. "Either plan or market, either command economy or competition." L. Popkova, "Gde pyshneee pirogi?," Novyi mir 5 (1987): 239-241.

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16. Nikolai Shmelev was a moderate advocate of free market reform. Like Larisa Pi iasheva, he published an article articulating his economic views in Novyi mir ("A vansi i dolgi," published in June 1987). 17. Cherniaev, 112. 18. Sovetskaia kui'tura, 7 July 1987, 2. 19. Hazan, 23. 20. D' Agostino, 232. 21. Gorbachev Foundation (Cherniaev collection), f. 2, op. 1, d. 57, p. 1. 22. See Evgenii Chernykh, "Nastuplenie prodolzhaetsia," Nash sovremenmk 5 (May 1988): 150-160. 23. Ligachev, 109. 24. The debate about economic change evolved rapidly after 1987. The idea put forward by Gorbachev in 1987 of economic reform that retained economic planning was quickly challenged by more radical economists. By 1989 terms such as "socialist market economy" and "planned market economy" came into use, implying that the economy should become more market-oriented than socialist. A further step was taken in 1990 when the terms "socialist market," "mixed economy," and "regulated market economy" came into use, and the goal for some economists soon became the creation of a "freemarket economy." See Kotz and Weir, 83-90. 25. The INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, signed in December 1987, called for the elimination of Soviet SS-20s and the Western cruise and Pershing missiles that were subsequently deployed in Europe in response to them. The USSR, having deployed the greater number of missiles, agreed to destroy several times as many missiles as the USA. 26. Gorbachev's foreign policy successes, in contrast to his domestic failures, owed much to the fact that in this sphere he had to contend with less institutional resistance. Brown, 131. 27. Gorbachev (1987), 194. 28. Gorbachev (1987), 191. 29. Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 November 1986, quoted in Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1996), 163. 30. Pravda, 6 August 1988, quoted in Neumann, 163. 31. While Gorbachev and his advisers emphasized the need to cooperate with the West, KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov emphasized "the increased threat from the West," warning that Western intelligence services were trying to sow national discord and promote dissident activities in USSR. In his view, the new positive image of socialism resulting form perestroika had led Western intelligence not to curtail but rather to intensifY its anti-Soviet activities. Pravda, 11 September 1987, quoted in Hazan, 158159. 32. Gorbachev (1996),230,317; March, 12. 33. Gorbachev (1996), 197. 34. Yet by 1989 very few Party secretaries had been chosen in competitive, secret ballot elections, as power continued to flow from the top down in the CPSU. Kotz and Weir, 98-99. 35. Gorbachev (1996), 199.

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36. Generally speaking, in this study the "left" refers to those who desired more rapid and sweeping political change, while the "right" refers to those who sought to put a brake on the reform process. In the view of Ligachev, however, it was the pro-market reformers who were on the "right," while orthodox Marxist-Leninists remained on the "left." See Ligachev's memoirs, 91. 37. Pravda, 13 January 1988, quoted in Hazan, 31. 38. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 13 March 1988, 3. 39. David Remnick describes in detail how the campaign was orchestrated between the time the first draft of Andreeva's letter was received by the newspaper on I February to the time an embellished version was published on 13 March. Remnick (1993), 73-77. Also see Roxburgh, 83-87. For Ligachev's denial of his involvement in the publication of this letter, see his memoirs, 298-311. Ligachev is not alone in believing that he was Gorbachev's scapegoat. See Kotkin, 71, 81; V.D. Solovei, "Evolutsiia sovremennogo russkogo natsionalizma," in Iu. S. Kukushkin, et aI., Russkii narod: istoricheskaia sud'ba v XX veke (Moscow: TOO "ANKO", 1993), 288. 40. This was not the first time that Ligachev used the occasion of Gorbachev's absence to advance his own line. In August 1987, while Gorbachev was on a long vacation and Ligachev was in charge, Pravda published a full-page article attacking the liberal press's recent fixation with Stalin's repressions. Ligachev echoed the line advanced by Pravda in a speech several days later. See Elizabeth Teague, "Signs of a Conservative Backlash," Radio Liberty Research, 18 November 1987, 1. 41. Gorbachev Foundation (Cherniaev collection), f. 2, op. I, d. 30, p. I. 42. As a proponent of the "good Leninlbad Stalin" school of Soviet historiography, Shatrov exerted considerable influence on Gorbachev and later joined his Presidential Council. He is an excellent example of a writer whose work met the political needs of the regime. In Onward, Onward, Onward, he depicted the infallible Lenin as leading the country to liberation, but the unfortunate consequences of the revolution are laid at the feet of his unworthy disciples, most notably Stalin. See Marsh (1995), 65-70. 43. In discussing these "two ideological currents," Andreeva made reference to a recent article by Prokhanov in which he contrasted two ideological groups: "Westernizers" who tum to the West for answers to the country's current problems, and "preservers" (okhraniteli) who instead embrace the "Russian idea." He criticized both extremes for attacking each other and instead urged a return to "the socialist ideal" which would reconcile the Westemizers' desire for technological progress with the neo-Slavophiles' yearning for the country's spiritual nourishment. Aleksandr Prokhanov, "Kult'turakhram, a ne strel'bishche," Literaturnaia Rossiia, 22 January 1988,3. 44. The "original" letter by Andreeva contained greater praise for the pre-revolutionary Russian past, including a tribute to Peter I, as well as stronger attacks on Russia's "Zionists" and the "scandalous nationalism of insignificant nations such as the Tatars of Crimea and Zionist-type Jews." See Giuletto Chiesa, "Secret Story Behind the AntiGorbachev Manifesto," L 'Unitii, 23 May 1988, translated in FBIS-SOV, 31 May 1988, 55-58. 45. Roxburgh, 85. 46. Valery Boldin, a onetime assistant to Gorbachev who was later involved in the coup against him, claimed that at first Gorbachev found nothing wrong with the letter. Unfortunately Boldin does not explain why the general secretary subsequently changed

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his mind. See Valery Boldin, Ten Years that Shook the World (New York: Basic Books, 1994),168. 47. Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 2, unenumerated document (Politburo meeting of 24 March 1988), 3-8. Thanks to Sergei L. Kuznetsov of the Gorbachev Foundation for providing me with access to this significant document. 48. Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 2, un enumerated document, 36-37. 49. Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 2, un enumerated document, 40. 50. Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 2, unenumerated document, 13-14. 51. Pravda,S April 1988, 2. 52. RudolfG. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: lstoriia i vlasti, 1945-1991 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia gosudarstvennoi sluzhby pri Prezidente Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1998), 536. 53. See the letter by M. Malakhov in Molodaia gvardiia 4 (April 1988): 257-261, and letters in Sovetskaia kul'tura, 30 April 1988. 54. Cited in Gordon Hahn, Russia's Revolution from Above, 1985-2000 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 66. 55. Gorbachev Foundation (Cherniaev collection), f. 2, op. I, d. 33 and d. 34. Quote is from d. 34, p. 6. Russian television commentator Vladimir Pozner claims that the actual author of the revised letter was Ligachev's aide Valerii Legostaev, who later served as Ligachev's liaison to the antiperestroika political organizations that were emerging in 1989-1990. Vladimir Pozner, Eyewitness (New York: Random House, 1992), 62. 56. D' Agostino, 193-194. 57. Hazan, 172-180. 58. Wall Street Journal, II May 1988, quoted in Hazan, 55. Cherniaev writes that Gorbachev was still reluctant to split with Ligachev and his supporters-namely Vorotnikov, Solomontsev, and Gromyko--despite the urgings ofCherniaev and Yakovlev. See Cherniaev, 156, 164. 59. Pravda,S June 1988, 2. 60. Brown, 173. 61. Hahn (2002), 67. 62. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, however, dismiss the idea of an organized opposition to Gorbachev before 1991. "Party officials had been visibly opposed to perestroika since 1987, but did little to change the course of the country due to lack of courage, customary obedience, and lack of political alternatives to Gorbachev." Ellman and Kontorovich, 25. 63. Bondarev also implicitly warned his listeners against the electoral reforms the conference was about to approve by citing the dire results of free elections in the USSR Union of Cinema Workers, where "[t]he best, the outstanding directors and actors were not voted on to the secretariat or the board." He suggested that great cultural figures such as the film director Sergei Bondarchuk and the artist Il'ia Glazunov (who had failed to be elected to the board of the Artists' Union) were discriminated against precisely because of democracy, which had posed a mortal danger to the most gifted people ever since "six black beans, indicating six votes against ... sealed the death sentence on Socrates." Pravda, I July 1988, translated in FBIS-SOV, 5 July 1988, 6-9. Also see Wishnevsky, "Nash sovremennik Provides Focus for 'Opposition Party,'" 2. 64. Pravda, 2 July 1988, quoted in Hazan, 198-199. 65. Gorbachev also had Andrei Gromyko and Mikhail Solomentsev relieved from their duties as members of the Politburo; candidate members Vladimir Dolgikh and Petr

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Demichev, along with Central Committee Secretary Anatolii Dobrynin, were all retired on pension. Viktor Chebrikov, replaced by Vladmir Kriuchkov as KGB chief, was named a Central Committee Secretary, while Gorbachev took Gromyko's old ceremonial post as chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, effectively making Gorbachev the Soviet "president" in addition to general secretary of the CPSU. 66. This is argued by D' Agostino, 211. However, one may counter that the decline in the importance of ideology began with the death of Suslov in 1982, after which the position of propaganda chief was frequently rotated. 67. Hahn (1995), 202. At the same time, Ellman and Kontorovich point out that Party discipline prevented the conservatives from reacting to Gorbachev's coup immediately. Although most members of the Politburo were opposed to the Party reorganization, they voted for it anyway. Ellman and Kontorovich, 167. 68. See David Hollaway, "State, Society, and the Military under Gorbachev," International Security 14, no. 3 (Winter 1989-1990): 5-24. 69. While his detractors have, with some truth, assailed Glazunov as a Russian chauvinist, an anti-Semite, and a tool of the Kremlin (and, as one anonymous critic put it, "a real twentieth century phenomenon-a hack and a person who bends easily with the times"), Russian nationalists proudly portrayed him as a man who was unafraid to use his art to speak the truth about the greatness of the Russian people and the tragedy of Russian history. In a way, his standing in the Soviet world was a barometer ofthe official view of Russian nationalism. When it was in favor in the I 970s, Glazunov's work received positive reviews in the official press; he received the honor of being named a "People's Artist of the RSFSR," and was summoned to paint official portraits of Soviet leaders. When the leadership sought to play down Russian nationalism, Glazunov would sometimes find his work banned. 70. An updated version of the work, displayed in Moscow in the winter of 1999-2000, adds figures such as Yeltsin and Gennadii Ziuganov. Gorbachev, surrounded by a Snickers candy bar and a Pepsi logo, is portrayed wearing a medal that says "Best German." 71. New York Times, 30 July 1988, A9. 72. In May 1989 Nina Andreeva founded her own movement, "Edinstvo" ("UnityFor Leninism and Communist Ideals"), and in late 1991, after the Communist Party was banned, she organized the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. 73. Cited in Ellman and Kontorovich, 186. 74. Pozner, 59. 75. D' Agostino, 102. 76. Ligachev, 112. 77. Ligachev speech in Pravda, 17 June 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 19 June 1989, 117. 78. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 23 December 1988, 4.

5 "Russophobia": Perestroika and the Russian Question "Russia shared everything-experience, possibilities, resources; Russians went out to develop lands in harsh latitudes, they helped to establish industry in difficult climatic conditions and participated in its development. And they stayed in those areas; they live and work there. We Russians performed this process as a normal one; how can there be any talk of' colonizers '?" - Mikhail Gorbachev, May 1990 "The status of a so-called superpower, compliance with which has drained our Russian economy, the stress on military force, and the striving for political domination should remain in the past. We want to see Russia as an influential member of the international community, with its standing based on reborn economic might and moral and spiritual purity." - Boris Yeltsin, April 1991

Chapter Five discusses the rise of the "Russian question" in the context of the national unrest that gripped the USSR in the late 1980s. In particular, this chapter, in conjunction with Chapter Six, explains how the simultaneous explosion of the national issue and the political crisis brought on by the radicalization of the reform program accelerated the realignment of political forces that had been taking place in Russia on a cultural level for more than two decades. Just as the new politics of democratization and elections led to the rise of anti-Party politicians throughout the USSR, humiliated apparatchiki were forced to move into open opposition to Moscow and reform. For many Party conservatives, Russian nationalism was no longer an ideological challenge that needed to be kept under control, but had now become a valuable ally in the struggle with rival nationalisms and in the fight against cultural Westemization and the disintegration of the Soviet state. Likewise, in the view of many Russian nationalists, the Communist Party, whatever its past mistakes, was indispensable for the maintenance of order and the preservation of an indivisible Soviet state. 133

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With collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of 1989, for the first time in nearly half a century the durability of the USSR came into question. The fear of the Soviet Union's possible collapse, nearly unthinkable when perestroika began, spurred the formation of an unofficial coalition of antiperestroika forces based on strategic partnership in the political arena. Whereas in the mid- to late-1980s Russian writers such as Vasilii Belov, Iurii Bondarev, and Valentin Rasputin were mainly reacting to the Western cultural influences on the Russian intelligentsia and the country's youth, by 1990 Russian nationalist activists began to mobilize around what had become the dominant issue, the one upon which all other matters depended: the preservation of the Soviet state. Here the leading lights of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia found themselves in general agreement with conservative Party leaders and hundreds of regional apparatchiki, many of whom in turn sympathized with the Russian nationality principle, along with the central place of Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the basis for a strengthened Union state.

Nationalism in the Republics While perestroika as a program of economic and political reform proceeded unevenly from 1986 to 1989, the effects of glasnost, upon which the success of restructuring depended, were astounding. No longer limited to exposing the shortcomings of the Soviet bureaucracy, as it had been originally conceived by Gorbachev's reform team, the glasnost campaign was used by critics of the country's past rulers to expose and destroy long-cherished elements of Soviet mythology. Under the guidance of Aleksandr Yakovlev, the liberal Soviet media unmasked the evils of Stalin's rule, examining the damage inflicted on both the Party and Soviet society as a whole. While the glasnost media launched into an unprecedented discussion of the country's past, the Soviet cultural elite-novelists, literary critics, poets, historians-along with ambitious politicians wrested the initiative in restructuring from the Party. This happened not only in the RSFSR, but in all the Soviet republics, and especially in the republics located on the USSR's western border. In perestroika's early years, an "informal" movement ultimately consisting of thousands of groups mushroomed with the official sanction of the CPSU in an attempt to generate a "revolution of consciousness.,,1 Although nominally in favor of perestroika and thus for a time useful to the reformers in the Kremlin, in reality these informal groups represented a wide spectrum of political opinion. Most threatening to the Party were the "democratic" movements that began to form by 1988 in the Union republics, including the RSFSR; some quickly evolved into national movements that endangered the cohesion of the "voluntary" union of peoples. The sharp upsurge of nationalist activity and interethnic disputes in the late 1980s highlighted the inescapable fact that the empire was quickly unravel-

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ing at its periphery: in July 1988, demonstrations in the Baltic capitals marked the forty-seventh anniversary of the massive deportations that followed the republics' annexation into the Soviet Union; the following September a state of emergency was declared in the volatile Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Annenian enclave in the Azerbaidzhan republic. With the regime's glasnost policy and the accompanying loosening of the regime's coercive power, local political elites, empowered by a new set of arguments about national sovereignty, were able to mobilize national groups on behalf of nationalist goals. 2 Yet the rise of nationalist feeling throughout the USSR in the late 1980s was in part a product of the structure of the Soviet system and the policies implemented by Moscow over the course of nearly seven decades. 3 As discussed in Chapter One, the Soviet Union became the fIrst state in history to be formed on the basis of ethnically-based geographical units. Indeed, Lenin's insistence on a federal structure for the country facilitated the growth of national feeling in the non-Russian republics almost from the beginning. Although Soviet authorities, beginning with Lenin and Stalin, encouraged the development of national cultures, they ruthlessly crushed nationalism in the republics. Even after Stalin's rehabilitation of Russian culture and the imposition of Russian hegemony throughout the USSR, Khrushchev and Brezhnev tolerated the cultivation of national culture as long as economic growth continued and the worst excesses of nationalism were contained. 4 Although national leaders who supported the use of the native language were in charge of the nonRussian republics, the reality was that the USSR remained essentially Russocentric: ethnic Russians were viewed as the core of the Soviet state, held together in part by the Russian diaspora in the republics; the Russian language was the officiallanguage of government; and Russian culture was a universal point of reference. Still, despite their dominance in the Communist Party and in other Soviet institutions, in the last decades of the USSR's existence Russians were among the country's most aggrieved national groups. As discussed in Chapter Two, during the 1960s and 1970s a growing Russian national consciousness was stimulated in part by factors that were tied to the position of the other Union republics, specifIcally, the awareness of a "demographic problem" that saw the growth rate of ethnic Russians shrink while that of the Soviet Union's Islamic peoples rose. 5 With opportunities in the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics declining in the 1970s and 1980s as native populations were better able to secure managerial posts, thousands of Russian (and other Slavic) settlers who had worked in the less-developed border areas felt discriminated against and began returning to the RSFSR. 6 Moreover, heavy investment in regions such as Kazakhstan and the Baltic republics led many Russians to believe that the nonRussian republics were thriving on subsidies that came at the expense of the RSFSR.

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While many Russians began to feel that their hegemonic position was threatened by these demographic changes and Soviet economic policies that ostensibly favored non-Russian regions, the titular nationalities of the nonRussian republics, better educated than ever before and armed with a growing intelligentsia and secure Soviet legal status, to some extent came to view themselves as equal partners with the Russians. However, their rising social status conflicted with their dissatisfaction with their stagnant economic situation and their political impotence. This dissatisfaction was directed against the Union "center," or Moscow, which was in tum identified with Russians. 7 As a consequence of the Kremlin's policies of perestroika and glasnost, by the late 1980s some national leaders in the non-Russian republics had begun to take seriously the notion, enshrined in the Soviet Constitution, that the Union republics were sovereign. 8 Ultimately, the growth of national movements and interethnic conflicts provoked a defensive reaction on the part of Russian nationalistconservatives and Soviet patriots who sought to preserve a centralized empire squarely under the rule of Russians. The nationalist explosion in the republics began with the December 1986 riots in Alma-Ata when Dinmukhamed Kunaev was replaced by a Russian as first secretary of the Communist Party in Kazakhstan. 9 Despite the large proportion of Russians living in Kazakhstan and the acclaimed successes of Soviet internationalism in that republic, in 1986 the slogan "Kazakhstan for the Kazakhs!" became a rallying point around which to oppose the directives of the Union "center" while underlining anti-Russian national feelings in that republic. Little more than a year later clashes between Armenians and Azeris in the Nagorno-Karabakh region resulted in riots and Moscow's intervention in the conflict. Christian Armenians were upset with Gorbachev, and by extension with the Russians, for failing to provide adequate protection from the Muslim Azeris. Azeris, for their part, found intolerable Moscow's apparent favoritism toward the Armenian minority in their republic-an attitude they believed was tied to the religious solidarity that had united Russians and Armenians for centuries. 10 Either way, the legitimacy of Moscow's hold on much of the Caucasus region was challenged. Still more threatening to the integrity of the Union were the displays of nationalism in the Baltic republics, where the formation of "fronts," permitted by Gorbachev with the expectation that they would support his restructuring program, quickly led to movements for sovereignty in 1988-1989. This began first in autumn 1988 in the Estonian SSR, where a nationalist faction of the republic's Communist Party organization won control and set up a "popular front" with non-Party groups in support of perestroika. The thrust of its appeals quickly turned against the Russian language and the republic's Russian population, whom it tended to regard as at best immigrants, and at worst colonizers. The Latvian Popular Front was even more hostile to Russians, while the Lithuanians, although more tolerant of Russians (largely because Russians constituted a con-

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siderably smaller proportion of the population there), eventually proved to be the most intransigent opponents of the dictates of the Union "center." I I Gorbachev, it is well known, underestimated the power of the national factor in the Baltics and elsewhere, and refused either to crush the nationalists outright or seriously to address the issues they raised. Unable or unwilling to forge a national consensus on national relations or republican rights, and opposed to granting any concessions to nationalist forces out of a fear that doing so would only encourage the development of tendencies that threatened the integrity of the Soviet state, Gorbachev unwittingly allowed the national situation to spiral out of control. 12 Although he said little on the subject before 1989, Gorbachev understood, as he told a group of intellectuals in January of that year, that "the success of restructuring will depend to a decisive extent" on how national problems are managed. 13 What Gorbachev also surely realized, however, was that any "solutions" to nationality disputes would be perceived as zero-sum, advancing one group's rights at the expense of another; this may have contributed to his reluctance to act in any substantive way until 1989. Thus, for more than two years after the first large-scale protests in Alma Ata, the nationalities problem was hardly addressed at all. This only exacerbated the sense of uncertainty felt by many Russians about their status in the USSR. As national political life revived in the Baltic, Central Asian, and Transcaucasian republics, these republics began to witness on a smaller scale the nationalist mobilization of their Russian-speaking populations. Russians who lived in the Baltic republics (as well as their sympathizers in the RSFSR), for example, were convinced that they were becoming the victims of discrimination, particularly in regard to the new language laws passed in early 1989 that favored the republics' titular languages. 14 Rather than living as colonial masters in the Baltic republics, as Russians were accused of doing, the Russian populations there believed that they were being reduced to the status of second-class citizens in what was for the majority their place of birth. 15 Rising anti-Russian feeling in the Union republics exacerbated the Russians' defensiveness. This situation was compounded by the attempts of a number of autonomous republics within the RSFSR-namely Tataria, Iakutia, Bashkiria, Buriatia, and Tuva-to achieve Union republic status. 16 Russian nationalist feeling was further intensified by the loss of the USSR's "outer empire" in Eastern Europe, as Russians (and non-Russians) quickly came to understand the fragile nature of the Soviet Union itself. Yet perhaps it was Russia's confrontation with its own grisly past, its difficult present, and uncertain future that had the most devastating impact on Russian national identity, pushing many Russians into taking an aggressive posture in defense of the Great Russian people, their culture, and their state. Indeed, in recent years the revelations about Stalinism and the Gulag, about the tragedy of collectivization and decades of environmental devastation, forced Russians to examine their own complicity as a nation in the Soviet experiment. Moreover, Russians were keenly aware that it

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was they who the non-Russian nationalities directly associated with central power and its abuses during the preceding seventy years. Once in the habit of identifying themselves first as "Soviet" (while allowing for the fact that they were indeed ethnically and culturally Russians) and citizens of a great power, Russians suffered a loss of confidence in the late 1980s; that loss of confidence sometimes manifested itself as nationalist self-assertion. Wounded by the revelations about the recent past and the undeniable fact of the USSR's poverty relative to the West, Russians organized their own movements in defense of Russian culture, the Russian language, and the country's history. This defensive reaction became more pronounced as outspoken and assertive leaders emerged in the burgeoning Russian nationalist movement in 1989. By this time, Russian nationalists began to appropriate some of the tactics used by the non-Russian groups, creating their own cultural organizations, "front" groups, and workers' collectives. Using the freedoms the Gorbachev regime granted for the purpose of bolstering the reform effort, these groups proved to be among the most hostile to the reforms initiated by Gorbachev.

Russian Nationalist Initiatives "From Below" Pamiat' The Russian nationalist group which gained the most notoriety in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s was Pamiat'. 17 The organization, whose name was inspired by Vladimir Chivilikhin's novel Pamiat' (Memory, 1982), was founded in Moscow in the early 1980s as one of a number of patriotic groups engaged in cultural activities, such as the restoration of monuments and churches. Although originally attached to the USSR Ministry of the Aviation Industry, Pamiat' soon became independent and attracted followers who identified with its Russian nationalist ethos. By 1985 its leading spokesman was Dmitrii Vasil'ev (19452003), a photographer, actor, and former assistant to the Russian nationalist artist Il'ia Glazunov. As a consequence of the latitude allowed by the Kremlin's glasnost policy beginning in 1986, under Vasil'ev the society became increasingly politicized, as an anti-Jewish campaign superseded Pamiat"s more benign goals of restoring monuments and battling alcoholism. 18 Soon Pamiat' members wearing black T-shirts emerged as the ugly face of Russian Black Hundredism not only in the Soviet capital, but in Leningrad and Novosibirsk as well. 19 While Parniat"s propaganda contained the kinds of attacks on Zionism and cosmopolitanism typical of the late Stalin and Brezhnev eras, the organization's leaders went even further and developed a theory that there was a conspiracy of international Zionism and freemasonry directed against Russia. The triumph in 1917 of Bolshevism, which interrupted the harmony that reigned in prerevolutionary Russia, was the outcome of this conspiracy. An essential element

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in such propaganda was the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," excerpts from which Vasil'ev read aloud at group meetings. 2o For this last act Pamiat' was officially disbanded at the beginning of 1986 and ejected from its premises at the Gorbunov House ofCuture in Moscow. Another favorite object ofPamiat's attacks was Aleksandr Yakovlev, whose criticism of Great Russian chauvinism in the early 1970s and whose support of the glasnost press was well known among Russian nationalists. 2l Likewise, recalled former Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, the usually restrained Yakovlev would go into a rage at the mere mention ofPamiat,.22 Before the organization's splintering, its manifestos suggested that Pamiat' leaders accepted Soviet state structures, in particular the Army and security services, as long as the Russian patriotic element in the ruling ideology was maintained at an appropriate level. During the early Gorbachev years, Pamiat' publications even claimed to identify with the perestroika program, petitioning for legal recognition "so that we can consolidate all the patriotic forces in favour of the Party's new political course.,,23 By the end of 1987, however, the organization had begun to split into different factions whose leaders adopted varying attitudes toward the present leadership.24 Just the same, the treatment meted out to the various Pamiat' groups by local Communist Party organizations varied from city to city, which suggests that the Kremlin had not developed a firm, consistent, and enforceable policy toward the extreme wing of the Russian nationalist movement. In Moscow, Pamiat' demonstrations in May 1987 led to a meeting between representatives of the society and Boris Yeltsin, then the Moscow Party boss. This resulted in accusations, later proven unfounded, that Yeltsin was a Great Russian chauvinist. Yeltsin defended this error in judgment by claiming that his position required him to listen to all points ofview. 25 Almost immediately after this meeting newspaper articles appeared in the Soviet press that were critical of Pamiat"s activities. Meanwhile, after Yeltsin's ouster as Moscow Party chief at the end of the year, city authorities attempted to isolate Vasil'ev's group by sponsoring a more obedient Pamiat' faction headed by Igor' Sychev. This faction began to articulate an extreme National Bolshevik ideology which stood in contrast to the monarchism of the main Pamiat' branch under Vasil'ev. 26 No doubt the sympathy of the Moscow Party organization at this time owed much to the fact that it shared with Sychev the same goals (support for Soviet institutions) as well as the same enemies (economic reform, intemationalism).27 While Pamiat' was often perceived as a single homogenous group of chauvinist thugs, there were several ideological strains within the movement. Some Pamiat' leaders were avowedly monarchist; yet others believed it possible to reconcile their Russian patriotism with the existing communist political system, as long as their demands were met. 28 Unlike the "liberal" and "democratic" informal groups that mushroomed between 1986 and 1988, political scientist Michael Urban noted, Pamiat' was "above all an anti-political organization that

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functioned on the political field primarily as an objection to the fact that politics was becoming possible.,,29 While the Moscow Party organization succeeded in creating its own "good" Pamiat' to draw away support and attention from Vasil'ev's "bad" Pamiat', the way that the Leningrad Party leadership dealt with the group was especially curious, prompting open questions about the nature of the relationship between the Soviet authorities and the extreme Russian nationalists. 3o Leningrad officials, for example, facilitated the activities of that city's Pamiat' organization by issuing official permits for its meetings in Rumiantsev Garden in the summer of 1987. The Vasiliiostrovskii (a district within Leningrad) soviet executive committee (ispolkom) permitted further Pamiat' meetings in the summer of 1988.31 Such authorization was given despite the difficulties "democratic" groups such as human rights organizations encountered in their efforts to hold public meetings. That the latter were compelled to remain out of public view while Pamiat' was authorized to hold demonstrations in such conspicuous locations only fueled suspicions about the Party's and the KGB's apparent tolerance of Russian nationalist extremism. These meetings continued despite the objections of Leningrad First Secretary (until late 1989) Iurii Solov' ev, who, at least when among his Politburo colleagues, refused to lend any credibility to any group that posed as an "opposition" and made demands upon the local Party leadership.32 Nevertheless, as a letter to Moscow News noted at the time, if a powerful Party secretary "was 'categorically against,' then for such meetings to take place one after another there must be some[ one] who is 'categorically for. ",33 Likewise, an earlier article in Sovetskaia kul'tura expressed concern about members of the Party and Komsomol who participated in Pamiat"s meetings. Why, its author asked, "do party organizations, establishments and enterprises where different leaders of Pamiat' work, look through their fingers [look the other way] at such 'social' activity?,,34 A partial answer to this question is the likelihood that at first the Soviet leadership, like many Russians, understood Pamiat' to be little more than a small group of people, led by a small circle of opportunists, who were concerned less with politics than with the past and the preservation of monuments. 35 However, as Pamiat' continued to attract negative attention in the late 1980s, its existence may have become quite useful to various factions of the Soviet leadership. John Dunlop wrote that Gorbachev used Pamiat' "like he and his followers have used [the] Nina Andreeva [letter], as a kind of scarecrow, to bring sympathizers closer, and to forge allies, basically telling them, 'Support us, or you'll get Pamiat. ",36 Indeed, as the situation in the country grew more unstable, the existence of groups like Pamiat' gave substance to the Party's claim that it played a necessary role in maintaining law and order. One high-ranking former KGB official claimed on Soviet television that the KGB provided funds to an unspecified Pamiat' faction to undermine democratic changes and mobilize support for

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the Communist regime-much like the pre-revolutionary secret police tried to exploit the patriotism of trade unionists in order to encourage loyalty to the tsarist regime. 37 Some elements in the Party, the KGB, and the armed forces were sympathetic to Pamiat"s aims. In early 1991, KGB chief (and future coup plotter) Vladimir Kriuchkov publicly praised the patriotic activities of the Pamiat' organizations, while expressing reservations about their extreme methods. 38 The treatment meted out to Konstantin Smirnov-Ostashvili and his Pamiat' organization is a case in point. 39 In early 1990 Smirnov-Ostashvili's group, called the "Union for National-Proportional Representation," broke into the Moscow Central House of Writers, where the writers' group "Aprel''' (April), a liberal organization within the Moscow Writers' Union, was holding a meeting. Despite an hour of brawling during which several writers were beaten, nobody was arrested on the spot. Only after the leading Aprel' writers conducted a campaign in the press did the authorities react and try Smirnov-Ostashvili under Article Seventy-Four of the RSFSR Criminal Code, which banned racist propaganda. The investigation revealed that before the events in the Central House of Writers, Ostashvili's accomplices had gathered in the CPSU building of the Sevastopol'skii district, and that after the incident he was briefly detained by the militia and released without even being questioned. 40 Whatever the reasons for their support, significant material assistance to the various Pamiat' organizations came from local Party organs: favored Pamiat' groups were provided with building space and access to printing presses and materials that were often denied to groups with a more "democratic" orientation. As far as the local authorities were concerned, it is likely that many believed that even if their activities were distasteful and sometimes violent, the Russian nationalist extremists posed less of a threat to the established order than did the "liberals" and "democrats." Likewise, numerous Russian nationalist cultural figures who were above Pamiat's thuggish methods nevertheless defended the group's patriotism. 41

Otechestvo Following numerous regional and ideological splits in the movement, by spring 1989 there were no fewer than nine separate Pamiat' organizations in Moscow, Leningrad, and other major Soviet cities, as well as a number of organizations that were very similar. 42 By this time, however, Pamiat' was nearly a spent political force, having been rendered a fringe phenomenon by the growth of a prodemocracy movement in the RSFSR as well as by the competition that resulted from the formation of numerous other Russian nationalist associations, most of which were less extreme and less threatening than Pamiat'. One such competitor was Otechestvo ("Fatherland"), an association with closer links to the Russian

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nationalist intelligentsia. Like Pamiat' in its early days, Otechestvo made it clear that it looked for good relations with the CPSU leadership and publicly supported perestroika.43 Otechestvo's formal founding congress was held in Moscow in March 1989.44 Its founders included Moskva editor Mikhail Alekseev, Nash sovremennik editor Sergei Vikulov, Eduard Volodin (b. 1939), who was a secretary of the scientific council of the USSR Academy of Sciences for Problems of Russian Culture, and the journal Molodaia gvardiia, which provided a meeting space in the early stages of the group's formation and acted as a forum for the dissemination of its ideas. Another sponsor, the Moscow branch of VOOPIK, offered the use of its conference hall for Otechestvo's founding conference and served as the group's headquarters during at least part of 1989. In May, Apollon Kuz'min, a neo-Slavophile historian whose articles appeared on a regular basis in Nash sovremennik, was selected to be the organization's chairman, while Afghan war veteran (and later RSFSR vice president under Yeltsin) A1eksandr Rutskoi (b. 1947) was named assistant chairman. 45 One of the organization's main goals was the preservation of the Soviet Union, a task that, as Kuz'min stated, could be carried out only by the Russians: "Openness [otkrytnost '] is a trait of the national character that makes the Russian people capable of maintaining the wholeness of a huge, multinational state-this has been proven by a millennium of history." Kuz'min argued that, unlike the case of Great Britain, which lived at the expense of her colonies, in the Soviet Union the non-Russian republics had long benefited from their relationship with the Russians. The economic hardships experienced by Russians in the RSFSR, he claimed, were largely a result of the fact that the other republics lived at Russia's expense. 46 The Leningrad branch, formed around the same time as Moscow's Otechestvo, published a program that similarly demonstrated its support for strong authoritarian central government based on Russian traditions. Rejecting the idea of a multiparty system, the Leningrad Otechestvo maintained that only the Communist Party could provide the stability necessary to maintain strong government in the USSR. Demonstrating its support for the existing authorities, including the CPSU, the military, and the KGB, the organization naturally hoped to gain reciprocal endorsement. 47

Other Russian Nationalist Initiatives While organizations such as Pamiat', usually associated with thuggish extremism, and the more cultured Otechestvo attracted a great deal of attention during this period, a number of other nationalist initiatives were undertaken in late 1988 and 1989 that reflected a sharp upswing in national consciousness on the part of Russia's cultural elite. With the formation of such cultural associations, more

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points of contact were being created that linked the Russian national-patriots with reactionary Party officials. Among these organizations were the Association of Russian Artists (Tovarishchestvo russkikh khudozhnikov), founded in Moscow in November 1988 by, among others, the writers Valentin Rasputin, Vasilii Belov, Iurii Bondarev, Viktor Astafev, and Stanislav Kuniaev (all members of the editorial board of Nash sovremennik), historian Vadim Kozhinov, literary critic Mikhail Lobanov, and Molodaia gvardiia editor Anatolii S. Ivanov. 48 Although its programmatic goals were mainly cultural, concerning the preservation of archival materials and historical and cultural monuments, its "Appeal to the Artists, Scholars, Cultural Figures, and Toilers of Russia" contained an overt political message: "The once powerful union of the peoples of Russia, joined together by steadfast unity, is experiencing a difficult period, during which, under the guise of demagogic slogans, nationalist groups ... are seeking to destroy the unity of the peoples." It also reserved a portion of the blame for Russia's present situation for the Soviet regime, as its past policies of terror and repression had contributed to the moral collapse of the country.49 The unmistakably political content of this "Appeal" suggested that the Association of Russian Artists was not merely the cultural organization it claimed to be. Another "cultural" organization that formed around this time was the Union for the Spiritual Revival of the Fatherland. 50 The group's leader was Mikhail Antonov, an economist and unabashed Russian chauvinist who had gained some notoriety for his involvement in a group led by the economist A. Fetisov, which in the 1960s launched samizdat attacks on the Soviet system. 51 Both a Russian Orthodox believer and a Leninist (an ideological orientation that was not unusual in national-patriotic circles), Antonov advocated neither the free market nor a command economy, but seemed to reject the values that promoted economic efficiency as altogether alien to the spirituality of Russians. Like the orthodox Marxist-Leninists, Antonov believed that the introduction of free market principles into the existing Soviet system would tum a weakened USSR into an economic appendage of the West. 52 In his opinion, Russia needed to combat its moral decline not with the economics of perestroika but with patriotism. "We will defend and elevate the sacred notions of Native Land, People, Fatherland," the organization's program declared. "And then there will be no room in our lives for this lack of spirituality and for cosmopolitanism, for theorists and implementers of the destruction of the people's memory and our common history.,,53 The sharp upswing in Russian national consciousness, manifested in the mushrooming of these "cultural" organizations, was, as during Khrushchev's thaw, in part an unintended and unanticipated consequence of the glasnost campaign. By loosening the restrictions on the Soviet press, glasnost had unintentionally provided Russian "patriots" the means with which to mobilize popular support for their goal of restraining the Westernizing impetus of the perestroika

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program. Likewise, Gorbachev's political reforms had a dramatic effect on the ability of various interests to communicate their political messages. With elections to a new Congress of People's Deputies (USSR CPD) in early 1989, oppositional groups-including those "democrats" dissatisfied with the pace and scope of perestroika, as well as "popular fronts" (particularly in the Baltic states) concerned with national issues-were provided with a forum which allowed them to disseminate their views to the broader Soviet public. Discussions in the CPD about the economic and political status of the non-Russian republics in tum contributed to the revival of the Russian question in 1989.

Elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies Increasingly influenced by Western political concepts, after 1988 Gorbachev attempted to transform the totalitarian Soviet political system into one based on quasi-democratic principles and the rule of law. As discussed above, the Soviet leader embraced radical political reform because of the difficulties he encountered in attempting to overcome the resistance of the Party apparat. By transferring political power from the Party apparat and the bureaucracy to state institutions and local soviets, Gorbachev expected that the goals of perestroika could be reached with less Party interference. However, this attempt to renew the Party by subjecting it to its greatest purge since the days of Stalin failed to bring about the desired result. Since resistance within the Party apparat threatened the entire perestroika program, Gorbachev turned to political reform: resistance could be overcome with the support of a parliament and public opinion. In short, the general secretary wanted to use elections to the new parliament much the way he had used glasnost-"to activate mass-level participation as a way to pressure the party-state bureaucracy into complying with his reforms.,,54 Elected in March 1989, the USSR CPD consisted of 2,250 deputies, twothirds of whom were elected on the basis of territorial and nationality criteria, much like the old 1,500-member USSR Supreme Soviet. The other 750 seats in the CPD were reserved for public organizations such as the CPSU, trade unions, cooperative organizations, and the Komsomol, thereby ensuring sufficient representation for the Party-state bureaucracy. Rather than allowing for organized competition between different political parties, the elections essentially pitted reform-minded candidates of the CPSU against their more orthodox comrades. Although the election of this first CPD fell far short of Western criteria for representative democracy (there were any number of cases of direct and indirect manipulation of elections by Party bosses), it nevertheless marked a clear departure from the traditional pattern of Soviet elections by which "voters" ratified a list of candidates hand-picked by the Communist Party. The election also demonstrated the extent to which the relevance of traditional communist ideology in

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Soviet politics had declined, now partially eclipsed by the heightened prominence of nationalism and religion. Although 87 percent of those elected to the CPD were Party members, this "victory" actually reflected declining popular confidence in the CPSU when one considers the difficulties encountered by non-Party candidates in getting nominated. 55 Popular rejection of the Party bosses was clear not only in the nonRussian republics but also in the RSFSR, where 78 percent of the high-level Party officials competing in two-person contests lost, as did nearly half of middle-level officials. 56 In Moscow, the mayor and the second highest CPSU official were defeated, while the maverick Boris Yeltsin, who had been in political exile for the past year for his attacks on Ligachev and his insinuation that the general secretary was encouraging the development of a "cult of personality" around himself, won nearly 90 percent of the vote against a Party-backed candidate. In the USSR's second largest city, Leningrad, voters rejected the top five Communist officials in the local power hierarchy, including the first secretary of the Leningrad obkom (and Politburo member), Iurii Solov'ev. While the CPD on the whole was a conservative body, most conservatives were not elected directly by the people but were chosen as representatives of the public organizations with which they were affiliated. Like the fledgling democratic movement, Russian nationalists put up their own candidates and organized meetings in their support. For example, on 23 January 1989, in a Moscow hall decorated with anti-Semitic slogans and Pamiat' banners, the neo-Stalinist journal Molodaia gvardiia, the Moscow Writers' Union journal Moskva, and the literary journal Roman-gazeta (under the control of the widely acknowledged leader of the Russian nationalist movement, Valerii Ganichev), organized a meeting during which a number of speakers attacked their reformist opponents. 57 In one case Russian chauvinists from Pamiat' violently disrupted a meeting of their "democratic" opponents. 58 Despite such efforts to thwart their liberal adversaries, the elections proved disappointing for the Russian nationalists, whose candidates either failed to win nomination or were soundly defeated. For example, in Moscow's Cheremushki district Mikhail Lemeshev, an economist, ecologist, and conservative Russian nationalist, lost to the liberal historian Sergei Stankevich, while in Volgograd the writer Iurii Bondarev, who proposed to restore the city's former name, Stalingrad, was also defeated. 59 The Russian nationalists who did make it to the CPD did so not via direct election but through the public organizations that nominated them: writer Vasilii Belov, for example, through the CPSU and Valentin Rasputin through the USSR Writers' Union. This failure at the polls suggests that under present circumstances conservative Russian nationalism appealed only to narrow sectors of Russian society and that liberal ideas were beginning to capture the imagination of the Russian public. As a forum for the discussion of an immense range of issues, the Congress of People's Deputies was an impressive spectacle for the millions of Soviet citi-

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zens who watched the proceedings on television. Although the CPD was dominated by, according to one representative, "an aggressively obedient majority," assertive deputies such as academician Andrei Sakharov and historian Iurii Afanas'ev spoke relatively freely by Soviet standards, occasionally even challenging the Soviet leadership.60 Gorbachev himself was attacked by some radicaldemocratic deputies for preventing the USSR from moving ahead with reform. While it was new and exciting, the CPD was no more than a deliberative body. Legislative power was the preserve of the Supreme Soviet, a standing parliament of 542 members drawn from the ranks of people's deputies. In June, champions of radical reform in the Supreme Soviet formed the Interregional Group of Deputies, a faction in which ideological distinctions replaced the geographical distinctions of the CPD. 61 The deputies' barely restrained criticism of Soviet leaders at sessions at the CPD, combined with the formation of the Interregional Group in the Supreme Soviet, marked the evolution of the democratic intellectuals' position towards something of a "loyal opposition."62 Nevertheless, people who tuned into the televised proceedings, used to consensus and the politics of obedience, were more likely to take notice of the dissension in the parliament and within the Party than of the opposition's loyalty. Indeed, by the time the CPD convened the "democrats" (as they soon began calling themselves) had been radicalized under circumstances that saw the collapse of the fraternal communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the rise of nationalist activities in the Soviet republics. The democrats' suspicions that the Party was incapable of truly reforming itself were heightened by scandals like the massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi in the Georgian republic in April 1989. The result was greater sympathy on the part of Russia's self-described democrats for the complaints and aspirations of the Union's other nationalities, many of whose representatives used the Congress to advance the goals and objectives of their republics. Since Russian liberals found themselves in the position of defending the rights of the Soviet republics and of the country's national minorities, Russian and Soviet "patriots" were able to depict them as national traitors to whom the interests of Russia and its people were completely alien. The country, the national-patriots began to lament, was in the grip of"Russophobia"-the unwarranted suspicion and distrust of Great Russia.

Russophohia The emergence of popular fronts in the republics and the complaints of the nonRussian deputies at the Congress exacerbated the already rising defensiveness of many Russians both outside and within the RSFSR about their uncertain position in the Soviet empire. With anti-Soviet and anti-Russian nationalist feeling burgeoning in the Soviet republics, there was considerable concern among Russian nationalists about the fate of Russians living outside their republic. Within

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the non-Russian republics, and particularly in the Baltic republics and the Moldavian SSR, this concern gave rise to the fonnation of "interfronts" and "intermovements." In January 1989 the International Front of Working People ofLatvia was created by minority Russians (who constituted 34 percent of the republic's population) who were loyal to Moscow and the old Party and state apparat; its members were suspicious of refonn in general and in particular of the republics' movements toward independence. This tactic was soon copied in other republics with the creation of similar organizations whose purpose was to convince Russians and others that the Baltic nationalists were extremists hostile to Russians and that these "extremists" enjoyed little support among the population. 63 At the forefront of Russia's national awakening, if one could call it that, was the RSFSR Writers' Union. As discussed above, in late 1988 and early 1989 key leaders of the Russian writers' organization, such as Iurii Bondarev, Vasilii Belov, and Valentin Rasputin, had taken leading roles in various Russian cultural initiatives. By mid-1989 such figures were pontificating on the national question in the pages of Sovetskaia Rossiia, Literaturnaia Rossiia, Nash sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and elsewhere. 64 The ideas expressed in these organs, and especially in Nash sovremennik, often reflected the notion that defending the rights of Russians in the non-Russian republics was tied to restoring the dignity of besieged Russians as a whole, to the maintenance of the Soviet Union as the successor to the tsarist empire, and to continued support for the stability provided by seven decades of Communist rule. On I June 1989, Vasilii Belov fired the first major Russian nationalist broadside at a session of the USSR CPD. While repeating the familiar attacks on pro-perestroika newspapers such as Moskovskie novosti (Moscow News), Belov called attention to the plight of the long-suffering Russian people as victims of both a demographic catastrophe and institutional inequality. He correctly pointed out that the RSFSR, unlike the other Union republics, lacked its own state and Party organs, and urged that these inequalities be corrected.65 Belov's speech, later reprinted in Nash sovremennik, was followed several days later by a rousing address from people's deputy Valentin Rasputin. Responding to the non-Russian deputies' allegations of discrimination and maltreatment, to great applause Rasputin asked the Congress: Would it perhaps be better for Russia to leave the union, considering that you blame it for your misfortunes, and consider that its weak development and awkwardness are what are burdening your progressive aspirations? Perhaps that would be better? This incidentally would help us solve many of our own problems, both present and future.

Rasputin's frustration was sincere, but his proposal that Russia leave the Soviet Union certainly was not. It was a theatrical perfonnance whose purpose was to show the non-Russian deputies "how tired we are of being the scape-

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goats, and of enduring the treachery and slurs." Rather than splitting up the Union, the better solution, suggested Rasputin, was "to rectify the situation together.,,66 Whatever the case, the speech did not escape the notice of the country's non-Russians, some of whom may have found in Rasputin's dramatization encouragement for their own secessionist views. Although other Russian publicists, and certainly staunchly nationalist organizations such as Pamiat' and Otechestvo, had already begun to express their frustration regarding the position of Russians and their republic in the Union, Rasputin and Belov were among the first widely known figures publicly to do so and thus helped to inaugurate a broader discussion about the subject. The day after Rasputin's speech was broadcast on Soviet television, an article titled "Crisis of the Nation?" by the writer Vladimir Bondarenko appeared in the RSFSR Writers' Union weekly Literaturnaia Rossiia. The crisis to which Bondarenko referred was not that of the USSR, but "of the Russian nation (russkoi natsii)," which he claimed was "on the verge of dying." To Bondarenko the main reason for the centrifugal forces that were tearing the Union apart was Russia's poverty and the disrespect it received by the other nations that comprised the Soviet Union. 67 What was necessary was a revival of Russian self-awareness and equality for Russians in Soviet institutions. The sentiments of these writers were backed by scholars who similarly tried to draw attention to the plight of Russians in the USSR. An article by Galina Litvinova (a CPSU member) that appeared in the June 1989 issue of Nash sovremennik pointed out how the condition of the Russian nation had actually regressed under Communist rule. Litvinova argued that as a result of the favoritism shown toward national minorities ever since 1917, Russians, rather than dominating the Soviet Union, were one of the country's most disenfranchised groups. As a way of rectifying seven decades of anti-Russian discrimination, Litvinova proposed raising the status of the RSFSR to that of other Union republics. This would be accomplished by the creation of a Central Committee of the Communist Party of the RSFSR and corresponding bodies in the Komsomol and trade unions. 68 Moreover, Russians would benefit from the creation of an RSFSR Academy of Sciences on par with those of the other Union republics, and from de facto implementation of proportional representation in the country's political and social structures. 69 By the summer of 1989 the journal Nash sovremennik had emerged as the country's principal organ for the trumpeting of the Russian nationalists' cries of "Russophobia." Its board included, among others, one of the country's most popular novelists, Valentin Pikul' (see Chapter Two), and respected nationalist writers Vladimir Soloukhin and Valentin Rasputin, in addition to the neoSlavophile historian Vadim Kozhinov. Also on the editorial board of Nash sovremennik was Igor' Shafarevich (b. 1923), a mathematician who until 1989 was best known in the West as a contributor to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's collection of essays From Under the Rubble, itself an important contribution to Rus-

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sian nationalist thought in the 1970s.7o During 1989, Nash sovremennik published in installments Shafarevich's provocative and polemical essay, titled "Russophobia." Originally written in the early 1980s, "Russophobia" was an anti-Semitic tract shorn of the cloak of anti-Zionism under which such sentiment was usually hidden. Here Shafarevich criticized the views of Harvard historian Richard Pipes, emigre historian Alexander Yanov, and several former dissident emigre writers of Jewish ancestry who had articulated views that were critical of Russia's historical development. Contrary to the assertions of such authors, the totalitarian state, Shafarevich pointed out, was developed in the West by Thomas Hobbes-not by Russia. So, he insisted, was the idea of socialism, which "had no roots at all in the Russian tradition before the nineteenth century." Far more provocative, however, was Shafarevich' s division of the people of Russia into "great people" and "little people": the first constituted the great mass of Russians, the narod ("people"); the latter were the creative elite-by which he principally meant the Jewish intelligentsia-which he claimed dominated contemporary Russia. According to Shafarevich, not only did anti-Russian Jews (the "little people") exert a negative influence in Russia's historical development over the preceding century, but the "unprecedented surge of Jewish national strength" in contemporary Soviet political life has once again stirred up "Russophobia" throughout the country.71 The theme of "Russophobia" was immediately embraced by other Russian nationalist writers and publicists, especially on the pages of Nash sovremennik. In the June issue where Litvinova's article and the first installment of Shafarevich's essay appeared, Stanislav Kuniaev, writing principally about the "Russian-Jewish question," accused the Soviet Russian-language press of spreading Russophobia in the country. Defending the "international" character of Russia and Russians, Kuniaev wrote that Russophobes falsely accused Russians of mistreating the country's non-Russian peoples. The reality of Soviet life, he countered, was that it was Russians who had suffered the worst discrimination. During the Soviet era, "repressions were promised only to the Russian movement. For the others-pluralism, understanding, patience, negotiations."n A Literaturnaia Rossiia interview in August 1989 with Eduard Volodin, then emerging as a key figure in Russian national-patriotic circles, cut to the heart of the matter: far from being exploiters of the country's non-Russians, Russians were the nationality most oppressed under the Soviet system: not only had their republic been cheated out of Russian territory (principally the Crimea) by Stalin and Khrushchev, but the 18 percent of the country's Russians living outside the borders of the RSFSR lacked representation in the organs of power and in the societal institutions of the republics in which they lived. 73 Therefore Russians were not colonizers, the argument went, but victims. No less threatening than the decline ofthe position of Russians in the Soviet Union, Russian nationalist intellectuals claimed, was the envy of the West that accompanied glasnost and perestroika and that was the corollary of Russopho-

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bia. In an article in Sovetskaia Rossiia, village prose writer Vladimir Lichutin castigated as Russophobes the liberals who dominated the Soviet press and embraced Western-style economic reforms for their country. "Sheltering behind democracy and the slogans of the beginning of the century, they are ordering our life according to their own mentality and nature and swaddling us in their habits." In Lichutin's view, "Something is adopted from the outside world only if it enables you to fill out and deepen what you have acquired over the centuries: everything else is tinsel, sequins, carnival leftovers which are crammed into the bin along with the garbage." Unfortunately, Lichutin lamented, Russophobia has once again flowered, which means that envy of everything foreign .... Nihilists have now relit the beckoning lights over the swampy mires, luring the people into quagmires and promising for the umpteenth time "heavenly" delights on earth, and people who are tired of eternal shortages have set out spellbound toward the lights, as yet ignorant of their downfall. 74

Alarmed by the pervasiveness and intensity of anti-Soviet, and by extension, anti-Russian feeling throughout the USSR, Russian nationalists became convinced that the country was headed toward a catastrophe. Believing that the stakes were nearly as high as they had been in 1941, they resolved that Russians who love their country (patriots) must overcome their past differences and defend the Fatherland from its enemies. This, in any case, was the strategy of the secretaries ofthe Russian Writers' Union.

"Socialism and the Fatherland are in Danger" The polemics of writers paralleled and often anticipated analogous social and political struggles on the national stage. While the national-patriots who led the Russian Writers' Union publicized the woes of Russians within and beyond the boundaries of the RSFSR and organized new Russian social, cultural, and political organizations, the union itself split into irreconcilable factions which to some extent reflected the more general divide in Soviet politics between reformers and conservatives. One result was that some writers who had once so powerfully lamented the destruction of the Russian countryside and its peasantry now found themselves in the paradoxical position of forming a united front with those who professed the ideology that led to the national tragedy in the first place. On 10 March 1989, just before elections to the Congress of People's Deputies took place, "Writers for Perestroika" (Pisateli v podderzhku perestroiki) held the inaugural meeting of the "April Committee," or as it was more generally known, Aprel'. A liberal organization within the Moscow branch of the Soviet Writers' Union, its leaders included the poet Evgenii Evtushenko, Ogonek editor Vitalii Korotich, and Anatolii Pristavkin, the author of a recent anti-Stalin novel. Claiming to unite the democratic forces in Soviet literature,

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Aprel' was committed to a broader freedom of opinion for Soviet writers and supported the thrust of Gorbachev's reform program. At the group's inaugural meeting, Pristavkin, the group's elected chairman, called for a full disclosure of the Writers' Union's role in the purges and suppression of Soviet writers; he also called for the reinstatement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the publication of his works in the country.75 During the course of 1989, Aprel' declared its firm opposition to Great Russian chauvinism, and even weighed in on the side of the Baltic republics in the heated dispute over the question of their annexation by the USSR in 1940, which Aprel' writers acknowledged as an "indisputable fact.,,76 Just as Aprel' criticized the union for its refusal for democratize its bureaucracy, many conservative writers saw in the Aprel' initiative an attempt to destroy the Writers' Union. Another faction that resisted the Russian nationalists and literary bureaucrats who dominated the RSFSR Writers' Union was concentrated in the Leningrad writers' organization. A split between the liberal reformers who controlled the Leningrad branch and the conservative-dominated UW RSFSR was precipitated by a dispute on literary policy involving the publication in the journal Oktiabr' in the spring of 1989 of two controversial works written by onetime dissidents Andrei Siniavskii and Vasilii Grossman. 77 While critics accused the authors and the journals that sponsored them of helping to spread Russophobia in the country, writers on each side of the barricade continued to hurl epithets at each other in the press and at union meetings: writers and politicians who defended the movements in the Baltics were called "fascists," while liberals charged the RSFSR Writers' Union leadership with anti-Semitism. 78 The war in the RSFSR Writers' Union that followed reached a fever pitch at its Sixth Plenum, held on 13-14 November 1989, just days after Germans began to tear down the Berlin Wall. 79 The record of this plenum merits discussion because it effectively demonstrates how the principal divide in the Russian Writers' Union was not necessarily one between Communists and opponents of Soviet socialism, or between Marxist-Leninists and Russian nationalists, but rather between reform Communists and liberal democrats on one side (represented in the union by Moscow's Aprel' and the bulk of the Leningrad organization) and a collection of orthodox Communists, National Bolsheviks, and Russian nationalist-conservatives on the other. Indeed, this alignment of forces in the Writers' Union reflected the political situation in the country as a whole through the first half of 1990--a time when the democrats began splitting from the Communist reformers as the "conservatives" continued to narrow the differences of opinion among themselves. The controversy surrounding the journal Oktiabr' was among the most heatedly debated issues at the meeting. 80 In the opinion of Nash sovremennik editor Stanislav Kuniaev, who had replaced the retiring Sergei Vikulov in August 1989, the decision to publish the "Russophobic" chapters in Oktiabr' was simple "hooliganism." Kuniaev was backed by his colleague Anatolii Znamen-

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skii, who proclaimed that the problem was the "people from the supreme clan," who for the last seventy years had been working to destroy Russia. Today, fellow anti-Semite Sergei Voronin agreed, this pernicious influence lives on in the Leningrad organization, which was now dominated by "Jewish nationalists." Since only 20 percent of the writers in the Leningrad organization, Voronin claimed, were Russians (russkie), the solution was for them to split from this Jewish-dominated body. His rallying call to the city's new patriotic writers' organization, "Sodruzhestvo" (Community), was echoed by, among many others, Valentin Rasputin, who depicted the plight of Leningrad's Russian writers in the most apocalyptic terms: "After all," he said, "the national minority [read: Russians] in which Sodruzhestvo has found itself must not be allowed to perish." The situation grew still uglier as the most ardently nationalistic, and often antiSemitic, Russian writers who dominated the plenum repeatedly shouted down attempts by representatives of the groups under attack-the Leningrad organization and Aprel'-to defend their organizations. Alarmed by the rise of "Russophobia" throughout the USSR, the Russian national-patriots were convinced that the continued existence of the Writers' Union was in mortal danger. Still more alarming was the threat to the integrity of the Fatherland itself, whose salvation they believed required decisive and immediate action. Yet these writers disagreed among themselves about what was meant by the term "Fatherland." "Socialism and the Fatherland are in danger!" had become a typical refrain for Russian national-patriots during 1989, and at the plenum this slogan was proclaimed by Iurii Borodkin. However, while his colleague Ivan Shestalov agreed that the "Fatherland" was in danger, he emphasized that perhaps it was "not this socialist Fatherland" that was endangered but "our Russian (rossiiskoe) Fatherland, in which we have lived together for a thousand years." Nevertheless, by the end of 1989 it appeared that the supporters of the "Russian Fatherland" and of the "Socialist Fatherland" could set aside their ideological differences to focus on what they considered to be the real enemies: the Jewish writers in Leningrad, the liberal writers of Moscow's Aprel', the pro-Western democrats and reformers who had usurped power in the Soviet press and in the Kremlin, and the nationalists in the republics who were actively plotting the destruction of Soviet power. Perhaps most remarkable of all was the union leadership's reaction to a speech given by Vladimir Karpets, a onetime member of the editorial board of Molodaia gvardiia who was now an open monarchist. After listening to the speeches of some of the organization's most extreme Russian nationalists and anti-Semites, Karpets approached the rostrum to give one of the final addresses of the plenum-a highly unorthodox speech that amounted to nothing less than a Russian nationalist attack on Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 1985, hope arose among us that the time of troubles which began in 1917 would come to an end.... Perhaps it is no accident that we are constantly reminded that what is happening is a revolution, a continuation of the revolution,

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and that the next party congress will be the one to restore the Leninist norms of life. God forbid!81 ... So just what, ultimately, are we to do? We're having 1917 shoved at us; let's counter it with 1612.82 We need the full and complete restoration of Russian statehood. [Applause.] ... I must say that first of all we need to begin by restoring the nationwide glorification of all the latter-day saints and martyrs, starting with the tsar's family. [Applause.] And that is what will unite us all.

After calling on the audience to "be faithful to our motherland and our murdered Sovereign," Karpets, to the dismay of many in the audience, asked the assembled writers "to stand to honor the memory of all who have perished [the audience rises], starting with the tsar's family!" At this point in the transcript there were "Cries of confusion and protest" in the hall, and the stenographic record of Karpets's speech suddenly ends. The speech was perhaps an extreme example of the powerful effect a healthy dose of glasnost and the consequent diminished fear of official reprimand had on the courage of some writers. What is perhaps most revealing about the state of the RSFSR Writers' Union, however, was the reaction of the speakers who followed Karpets. For FeJiks Kuznetsov, Iurii Bondarev, and the others, this attack on the legitimacy of the last seventy years of Soviet power seemed hardly to be the greatest challenge with which they were confronted at the plenum. While Kuznetsov expressed his "complete disagreement with Karpets" on the latter's assessment of Lenin and the October Revolution, he added that "Karpets has the right to think the way he does. Today, with such broad political pluralism, there's not a single point of view whose existence may be denied." Likewise, when Iurii Bondarev, for example, referred to "our opponents" or "extremists," he was not indicating monarchists like Karpets who disavowed the Bolshevik revolution, but rather liberal groups such as Aprel', "who want to use every possible means to fool, dupe, and deceive the trusting reader and to slander the writers ofRussia."s3 One critic of the line taken by Molodaia gvardiia thusly summarized the ideological contradictions of the national-patriots: "On the one hand, the October Revolution is the result of a conspiracy against the Russian people, while, on the other hand, we [the national-patriots] cannot allow anyone to even threaten its ideals.,,84 Thus, when it came to the matter of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the great October Revolution, under the circumstances the secretaries of the Russian Writers' Union could simply agree to disagree; Jews and liberals, separatists and Russophobes-these were the real enemies. It was just at this time, in the autumn of 1989, the nationalist leaders of the Russian Writers' Union entered the political arena as they prepared for the upcoming elections to the RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies (discussed below). Just days before the election, on 2 March 1990, seventy-four writers appended their signatures to an inflammatory letter, published in the RSFSR Writers' Union weekly, Literaturnaia Rossiia. 85 Addressed to the USSR and

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RSFSR Supreme Soviets and the Central Committee of the CPSU, the "Letter of the Seventy-Four," as it came to be called, is a testimony to the widespread feeling among Russian intellectuals that Russian history and the Russian people themselves were being unfairly maligned; it also signaled the Russian nationalists' desire for a larger stage from which to make their pronouncements. The letter's tone was aggressively defensive: refuting accusations of "Russian fascism" and "chauvinism," the writers insisted on "the absence of antiSemitism in Russia" (while at the same time they denounced the "Zionists" and "pro-Zionists" in the Soviet press!) and named specific press organs that it deemed unfriendly to the Russian people, including Ogonek, Sovetskaia kul'tura, lzvestiia, Oktiabr', lunost', and Znamia. Among the letter's claims was that liberals had fabricated the RSFSR Writers' Union's alleged connections to the notorious Pamiat'-a group whose impact, the authors claimed, had in any event been blown out of proportion by the liberal media. "[T]he phantom of 'Russian fascism' today is aimed at 'justifying' all-round discrimination against Russia, discrimination that has lasted a long time and may be planned to continue in the future." This phantom, the nationalist writers claimed, was also capable of diverting attention away from the country's external enemies while justifying the destruction of the Soviet army. While they complained about the "unhindered export of Zionism into our country," the Russian writers rejected a proposed "law on anti-Semitism" that they believed granted preferential privileges to one group: if passed such a law would in essence amount to a "LAW ON THE GENOCIDAL DESTRUCTION OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE." Demanding that action be taken to put "an end to the anti-Russian, anti-Russia ideological campaign in the press and on radio and television," the writers called for taking "THE FATE OF OUR HOMELAND, RUSSIA, INTO OUR OWN HANDS!" 86 That this was a political manifesto was beyond doubt: for weeks afterward Literaturnaia Rossiia published the names of other cultural figures who wished to support its line. It was also a blatant grab for literary property and resources. By asserting that the circulation of patriotic periodicals was only a fraction of that of "the Russian-language periodicals that preach Russophobia and insult the national dignity of the Russian people," the writers were making clear their desire to take control over other newspapers and journals that enjoyed wider circulation. This position was soon endorsed by the Board of the RSFSR Writers' Union, an increasingly politicized body whose aim was to remove the reviled Aleksandr Yakovlev ("certain individuals from the Politburo") from his leading position so that the glasnost press could be silenced and their own views could then exert greater influence in the country. To reinforce the message, over the next few weeks the "Letter of the Seventy-Four" was reprinted in nationalist periodicals such as Nash sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and Moskva, as well as in various provincial periodicals, and was endorsed by organizations such as the Rossiia club and the United Workers Front (OFT) of Russia. Although the

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campaign did not succeed, the Russian nationalist writers were gaining more confidence that theirs was the voice of the unfairly maligned Russian people.

Russian Patriots Organize By the time this letter appeared in Literaturnaia Rossiia, Russian nationalist intellectuals had already gone well beyond their traditional arenas of literature and culture and had become political actors. As noted earlier, influential union secretaries such as Stanislav Kuniaev and Iurii Bondarev, using their positions at and the resources of organs such as Nash sovremennik and Sovetskaia Rossiia, helped to set up pro-Russia political organizations and spoke at their meetings. Among their most significant political initiatives was the founding in September of the United Council of Russia (Ob 'edinennyi sovet Rossii, or OSR), dominated by Kuniaev, the national-patriotic publicist Eduard Volodin, and Sovetskaia literatura editor Aleksandr Prokhanov. In an interview with Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), a publication of the Soviet defense ministry, Prokhanov described the OSR as "a response to the havoc wrought in the past. ... Its philosophical formula is to restore and formulate the Russian idea of acceptance and good." According to Prokhanov, such noble sentiment was evident at the movement's founding congress, where "[t]he ideas of openness, goodness, and a lack of aggression and expansion were proclaimed." Such characteristics "are historically innate in the Russian nation, which is too huge and great to harbor evil, pursue any self-seeking aims, indulge in envy, or torment itself with imaginary suspicions." Most importantly, the United Council of Russia was devoted to "the cause of strengthening Russia [the RSFSR] as the consolidating point of the USSR, and bolstering the Soviet state as the historic emergence of a united, multinational, socialist motherland. ,,87 While distancing itself from the likes of Pamiat' (whose representatives nevertheless attended the Council's founding congress), the OSR made a pointed appeal to the conservative elements in the military establishment, whose leaders increasingly shared the OSR's goal of ending perestroika and buttressing the strength of the Soviet state. Sympathetic to the plight of the Russian population living in the non-Russian republics, the OSR's leaders called for greater representation "of Soviet Russia in the republics for [the purpose of] helping the Slavic and Russian-speaking population in defense of their civic [and] political rights, of their culture and language.,,88 By the end of 1989, the United Council of Russia, now calling itself the Bloc of Public-Patriotic Groups, would campaign for the election of its candidates to the new Russian parliament. This is discussed in Chapter Six. While the OSR was an independent organization-perhaps better described as an umbrella grou}>-led by Russian nationalistic intellectuals, pro-empire forces were also organizing in the USSR Supreme Soviet. There the bulwark of

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the patriotic forces was the Russian Deputies Club (later called "Rossiia"), created in October 1989 with the help of the RSFSR Writers' Union. 89 The creation of Rossiia was partly a response to the fonnation in June of the democraticallyoriented Interregional Group of Deputies ofYeltsin and Afanas'ev. The deputies in the Rossiia faction (whose founders included--once again-Belov, Rasputin, Bondarev, and Kuniaev) complained that the Interregional deputies paid little attention to Russian concerns, only to more general political questions. This, they argued, justified the fonnation of a Russian (rossiiskii) club to apply itself to the needs of the RSFSR and the more than twenty million Russians living beyond the Russian republic. In an article published in Nash sovremmenik at the end of the year, the Russian deputies argued that "Russians as a nation and the RSFSR as a republic have been deprived of full political representation" and demanded that the government examine the "problems of the RSFSR and of the entire Russian nation (russkoi natsii)," including the conditions faced by the millions of Russians living outside their republic. 9o If Politburo members Vitali Vorotnikov (RSFSR Supreme Soviet Chainnan) and Aleksandr Vlasov (Chainnan of the RSFSR Council of Ministers), as the RSFSR's principal leaders, weren't willing to organize Russian deputies to look at specifically Russian concerns, the Russian deputies would have to do it themselves. There was, however, an implied threat in their platfonn: although Russians were prepared to defend their interests "by parliamentary means," if this method were to fail then "the people itself will begin to fight using all means at its disposal.',9l By the end of 1989, the Rossiia deputies and their allies in the RSFSR Writers' Union were convinced that, as a headline of the Rossiia club's newspaper apocalyptically warned, "The Fatherland is in danger!"n The cure for Russia's ills, these deputies and like-minded writers and politicians argued, was the republic's sovereignty within the USSR and the creation of a Russian Communist Party to look after Russian interests long neglected by the CPSU's leading bodies. 93 CPSU hardliners soon took up the call for the creation of a new party for the RSFSR, hoping that it would serve as a base for opposition to both radical refonn and nationalist separatism in the other republics. Only by strengthening Russia and her state and Party institutions, they concluded, could the vast country assembled during the course of a millennium by the tsars and maintained during seven decades of Soviet power remain intact. Thus it was to the "great power" conception of eternal Russia as the benign and altruistic integrator of peoples, that Communist hardliners such as Egor Ligachev, Boris Gidaspov, and Ivan Polozkov now turned in order to save the Fatherland. As the intelligentsia's role was eclipsed by the rise of new political forces, the focus in 1990 would shift from the writers' cultural debate to a political struggle for the future of Russia and the Soviet state.

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Notes 1. See Vladimir Brovkin, "Revolution from Below: Informal Political Associations in Russia, 1988-1989," Soviet Studies 42, no. 2 (1990): 233-258; Marcia A. Weigle, "Political Participation and Party Formation in Russia, 1985-1992: Institutionalizing Democracy?" Russian Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 242-254. Also see Geoffrey Hosking, Jonathan Aves and Peter J.S. Duncan, The Road to Post-Communism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1992). Quote from Weigle, 244. 2. Beissinger, 57; Tishkov, 45. 3. Suny, passim. 4. Suny, 87,112,117; Kaiser (1994), 94-147. 5. Between 1959 and 1979 the Muslim population of the USSR increased 45 percent, while the ethnic Russian population rose only 13 percent. Gail W. Lapidus, "Gorbachev and the 'National Question': Restructuring the Soviet Federation," Soviet Economy 5, no. 3 (1989): 228. 6. Sheehy in McAuley, 80-81. 7. Leokadia Drobizheva, "Perestroika and the Ethnic Consciousness of Russians," in Gail W. Lapidus et a!., eds., From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101-102. 8. A focus of nationalist mobilization in the Baltic repubhcs and in Georgia in November 1988 was the draft USSR constitution, as it gave the new USSR Congress of People's Deputies the right to strike down republican laws that conflicted with all-Union laws. Beissinger, 181. 9. Three years later, in 1989, Nursultan Nazarbaev, a native Kazakh, was appointed first secretary of the republic. 10. d'Encausse, 31-46, 58-63. 11. Mark Beissinger points out that many people in the non-Russian republics converted to the nationalist cause in 1989-1990 because they no longer believed in the leaders who had brought about the crisis in the Soviet Union. This was true, for example, of the citizens of Ukraine, where nationalism was weak until 1989. Beissinger, 191-196. 12. Beissinger uses the "tidal metaphor" to explain nationalist mobilization in the USSR. In his view the Soviet Union was not a Pandora's Box of nationalist discontent that would inevitably result in the state's collapse. Instead, he believes that "the disintegration of the Soviet state could not have taken place without the effects of tidal influences of one nationalism on another." Having curtailed the coercive powers of the state, Gorbachev was unable to stop the multiple waves of nationalist revolt from influencing each other. Beissinger, 35-36. 13. Cited in Gleason, 7. 14. In January 1989, each of the Baltic countries passed laws that favored the native language. Throughout 1989 similar measures were being contemplated in other Soviet republics. See Michael Kirkwood, "Glasnost', 'The National Question' and Soviet Language Policy," Soviet Studies 43, no. I (1991): 75-77; Laitin, 87-91. 15. According to the 1989 census, a majority of Russians living outside the RSFSR were born in their republic of current residence. Slightly under half the Russians living in the Baltics had been born there. Interestingly, during the 1980s, a period of reverse migration of Russians from the non-Slavic regions, Russians continued to migrate to the

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Baltic republics (and the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics). Only in 1989 did the trend of Russian migration to the Baltics begin to reverse itself as many ethnic Russians began migrating to the RSFSR. This trend was most pronounced m the cases of Russians migrating from Latvia and Estonia. See Kaiser (1994), 166, 181-182, 186-187. 16. Drobizheva in Lapidus, et aI., 102. 17. For the most thorough analysis of the various Pamial' groups and their ideologies, see Michael Hughes, "The Rise and Fall of Pamyat '?" Religion, State and Society 20, no. 2 (1992): 213-229. Also see Julia Wishnevsky, "The Origins of Pamyat," Survey 30, no. 3 (1988): 70-91; Walter Laqueur (1993), 204-221. The entire issue of Nationalities Papers 19, no. 2 (1991) is devoted to Pamiat'. Useful Russian-language sources include the vanous publications by the Panorama Research group, such as Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii (1996), 10-18, and Verkhovskii, et al. (1998),41-52. A valuable collection of Pamiat' documents is found in V.N. Berezovskii, et aI., Rossiia: Partii, Assotsiatsii, Soiuzy, Cluby (Moscow: RAU, 1991), Book 5,86-119. 18. In comparison to what would come after 1988, during the mid-1980s the antiSemitic tone of Pamiat"s manifestos was relatively muted, likely because their authors feared prosecution under Article Seventy-Four of the RSFSR Criminal Code, which banned racist propaganda. 19. The term Black Hundreds (chernosotentsi) refers to the reactionary, antirevolutionary, and anti-Semitic groups that formed in Russia during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. Tolerated by the tsarist government, they were predominantly associated with the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1905-06. See Laqueur (1993), 16-28. 20. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a forgery made by the tsarist secret police in 1897. Portraying a Jewish plot to take over the world, the document remained a manifesto of anti-Semitism and was translated into dozens of languages worldwide. In 1993 a Moscow district court finally ruled that the document was a forgery. Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1993, (8 April 2004). 21. "Iz stenogrammy vystupleniia v Sverdlovske sobranii aktivistov "Pamiati." Gorbachev Foundation (Cherniaev files), f. 2, op.1, d. 57. 22. V.1. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak . .. Iz dnevnika chlena Politbiuro TsK KPSS (Moscow: Sovet veteranov, 1995),300; Cherniaev, 111-112. A transcript ofa Vasil'ev speech in which he attacks Yakovlev may be found in the Cherniaev files at the Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 1, d. 23. 23. Quoted in Hughes, 216. 24. The main Pamial' faction in Moscow, under Vasil'ev's leadership, was by 1988 called "The National-Patriotic Front Pamiat'." It remained by far the largest of the Pamial' splinter groups. While it consistently campaigned for the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church's role in Russian life, the political orientation of Vasil'ev's Pamial' also became increasingly monarchist, reflecting a move away from whatever support it once gave to the values and institutions of the communist political system. 25. For Yeltsin's meeting with Pamiat' leaders, see Moscow News, 24-30 May 1987,4. A more detailed account can be found in Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1992),48-55. 26. In general, the ideology of Sychev's group was distinguished by its reverence for Stalin and in particular Stalin's campaign against "Zionism." After 1989 Sychev's group increasingly supported Orthodoxy and monarchism, and around this time began to estab-

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lish ties with another group headed by Valerii Eme!'ianov, a long-time anti-Semitic activIst (and a convicted murderer) who, rather than supporting Russian Orthodoxy, believed that it was responsible for the distortion of Russia's cultural development. Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii (1996),16-17; Verkhovskii, et al. (1996), 32. 27. The Moscow city soviet executive committee's (ispolkom) tolerance for Sychev had its limits. In late 1989 it gave Sychev and his Pamiat' faction permission to lay flowers at the monument to Minin and Pozharskii in Red Square, in commemoration of the liberation of Moscow from Polish troops in 1612. However, the approved action grew into an unauthorized meeting, for which Sychev was tried in December. See Vecherniaia Moskva, 1 December 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 5 January 1990, 77. 28. Such demands included, for example, the Tiumen' organization's insistence that the state undertake measures to combat "Russophobia" and improve and normalize the demographic situation of Russians (russkie). In Leningrad, Pamiat' activists demanded access to printing materials and radio. See Vestnik patrioticheskogo dvizheniia "Pamiat '," no. 3 (1989): 45-46; Gorbachev Foundation, f. 2, op. 1, unenumerated document (Politburo meeting of24 March 1988),36-37. 29. Michael Urban, Vyacheslav Igrunov, and Sergei Mitrokhin, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 99. 30. In the spring of 1988, several members of VasiI'ev's group went on a political hunger strike to back their organization's demands for official registration in that city. This public demonstration of opposition in the spring of 1988 rankled the local Party boss Iurii Solov'ev and the Leningrad KGB, which gave Vasil'ev an official warning for his group's antisocial activities. The Secretary for Ideology of the Leningrad regional Party committee (obkom) at the time was Aleksandr Degtiaev, who received the hunger strikers and negotiated an end to their strike. As a condition of its registration, however, Degtiaev demanded that the Leningrad group give up the name "Pamiat'" and dissociate itself from Vasil'ev. Following the example of the Moscow Party committee, the Leningrad obkom was apparently not averse to creating for itself an obedient Pamiat', analogous to the Sychev group. Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii (1996),17. 31. Peter J.S. Duncan, "The Return of St. Petersburg," in Geoffrey Hosking, Jonathan Aves and Peter J.S. Duncan, eds. The Road to Post-Communism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1992), 123. 32. See Solov'ev's comments about Pamiat' at the Politburo meetings of 24-25 March 1988, when the Nina Andreeva letter was discussed, summarized in Chapter Four. 33. Moscow News, 14-21 August 1988,2. 34. Sovetskaia kul'tura, 18 June 1987,3. 35. A memo produced in June 1987 by Politburo members Yakovlev, Ligachev, and Chebrikov came to this conclusion. See Cherniaev, 111. 36. Dunlop, "Pamiat' as a Social Movement," 23. Also see Petro (1996),58. Vladislav Krasnov similarly suggested that the KGB had infiltrated Pamiat"s leadership and fed it the anti-Semitic line for the purpose of discrediting Russian nationalism for both sympathetic Soviet intellectuals and the Western public. Krasnov, 27-28. 37. Sovetskaia kul'tura, 16 September 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 6 October 1989, 63-65; Joel C. Moses, "The Challenge to Soviet Democracy from the Right," in Robert T. Huber and Donald R. Kelley, eds., Perestroika-Era Politics: The New Soviet Legislature and Gorbachev's Political Reforms (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), 108; Hughes, 221-222.

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38. Hughes, 221. Despite Kriuchkov's admiration ofPamiat"s activities, another KGB General, Aleksandr Karbainov, declared that the KGB "takes an extremely negative stand towards Pamiat' in all its manifestations and modifications." Moscow News, 25 February - 4 March 1990, 14. When asked his opinion of Pamiat' in an interview in April 1990, Lieutenant-General A. Kurkov, the head of the Leningrad oblast' KGB administration, replied that several of "the dozen or so people" who constituted this society were given wammgs the previous year because of their actions. See Rabochaia tribuna, 24 March 1990, translated in FBIS-SO V, 6 April 1990, 84. Clearly Kurkov was not willing to enforce the law in regard to Pamiat' to the same extent that the KGB caused difficulties for the "democratic" groups that were becoming active in 1989-1990. 39. Ostashvili's group, active in Leningrad, sponsored an organization called the "Club of Friends of the Journal Nash sovremennik," which even had official premises. Like the other Pamiat' groups, the ideology of this faction was somewhat contradictory: it supported Soviet institutions such as the KGB and army, while hoping to reconstruct the Soviet state on rehglOus foundations. 40. According to the prosecutor in the trial, Andrei Makarov, the investigation that followed "was conducted in order to make the activity of the Ostashvili group and of other similar groups merely an incident in the Central Literary House and to present it as common hooliganism" rather than an organized plot carried out with the assent or even active participation of local authorities. Although Ostashvili was found guilty in October 1990 and sentenced to two years in a labor camp (subsequently reduced to eight months, before the end of which, in April 1991, he hanged himself), his was the only such case that came to trial. Interview with Makarov in Komsomol 'skaia pravda, 13 October 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 31 October 1990, 22-25; Reznik (1996), 188-189; Verkhovskii, et al. (1996),32. 41. Valentin Rasputin publicly endorsed Pamiat' in a June 1987 congress ofVOOPIK. See Valentin Rasputin, "Protiv bespamiatsva," Nash sovremennik I (1988): 169-172. Likewise, Stamslav Kuniaev regarded Pamiat' as "an uncultured but very patriotic movement that could become useful." In a personal interview, Kuniaev told me that although he thought highly of Pamiat', he was never a member. La Repubblica, 27 January 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, I February 1990, 6; personal interview with Kuniaev, 21 July 1999. 42. Dunlop, "Pamiat' as a Social Movement," 23. 43. Vestnik patrioticheskogo dvizheniia "Pamiat', " no. 3 (1989),47-48. 44. A more extreme organization called Otechestvo had been in existence in Sverdlovsk (present-day Ekaterinburg) since 1987. For details about Otechestvo's founding, see Literaturnaia Rossiia, 31 March 1989, 10; Sovetskaia Rossiia, 26 March 1989, 6; Douglas Smith, "Moscow's 'Otechestvo': A Link Between Russian Nationalism and Conservative Opposition to Reform," Report on the USSR, 26 May 1989,7. 45. Jim Butterfield and Marcia Weigle, "Unofficial Social Groups and Regime Response in the Soviet Union," in Judith Sedaitis and Jim Butterfield, eds., Perestroika from Below: Social Movements in the Soviet Union (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 183; Apollon Kuz'min, "Vysshaia tsennost'-Otechestvo," Molodaia gvardiia 10 (October 1989): 4-11. 46. Interview with Kuz'min in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 23 June 1989, 14. 47. Robert W. Orttung, "The Russian Right and the Dilemmas of Party Organization," Soviet Studies 44, no. 3 (1992): 450-451.

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48. John B. Dunlop, "Two Noteworthy Russian Nationalist Initiatives," Report on the USSR, 26 May 1989,2; Duncan, "The Rebirth of Politics in Russia," 84. 49. Quoted in Dunlop, "Two Noteworthy Russian Nationalist Initiatives," 2. 50. Literaturnaia Rosslia, 31 March 1989, 8-9; Douglas Smith, "Formation of a New Russian Nationalist Group Announced," Report on the USSR, 21 June 1989,4-8. 51. This landed Antonov in a Soviet psychiatric hospital for several years after his arrest in 1968. 52. See Antonov's articles "Speshim-kuda i zachem?," Literaturnaia Rossiia, 31 March 1989,8-9; "Vykhod est!," Nash sovremennik 8 (August 1989): 71-110, and no. 9 (September 1989): 139-158. For a summary of Antonov's views, see Robert Otto, "Contemporary Russian Nationalism," Problems of Communism 39 (1990): 99. 53. Quoted in Douglas Smith, "Formation of a New Russian Nationalist Group Announced," 6. 54. Thomas F. Remington, The Russian Parliament: Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989-1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 26. 55. See Vladimir N. Brovkin, "The Making of Elections to the Congress of People's Deputies (CPD) in March 1989," The Russian Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 422-426, 432437; Dawn Mann and Julia Wishnevsky, "Composition of Congress of People's Deputies," Report on the USSR, 5 May 1989. 2. 56. Kotz and Weir, 101. 57. Moscow News, 12-19 February 1989,7. 58. On 9 January 1989, thugs from Igor Sychev's Pamiat' broke up a residents' meeting held to nominate Ogonek editor Vitalii Korotich in Moscow's Dzerzhinskii district. Duncan, "The Rebirth of Politics in Russia," 72. 59. Like many conservative Russian nationalists at the time, Lemeshev ideologically "supported" Pamiat', but was never a member of the organization. Pamiat' in tum supported Lemshev's campaign against Stankevich (one of its leaflets read "JEWS! Vote for STANKEVICH, he's OUR man!"), as well as Rasputin, Belov, and Soloukhin. Pamiat' also backed Aleksandr Rutskoi in Moscow's Kuntsevo district. He won in the first round but was defeated in the second. Personal interview with Lemeshev, 28 June 1999; M. Urban, et aI., 136 60. The quote is from Iurii Afanas'ev, cited in Remington, 31. 61. The Interregional Group of Deputies was led by the "democrats" Boris Yeltsin, Iurii Afanas'ev, Gavriil Popov, Andrei Sakharov, and Viktor Palm, an Estonian scientist. 62. Judith Devlin, The RIse of the Russian Democrats (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Algar, 1995),136-137. 63. In the Moldavian SSR, where Russians made up 13 percent of the population, their main political organization in Kishinev was the Unity Internationalist Movement in Defense of Perestroika (Intermovement); other cities with large Russian-speaking populations formed United Councils of Work Collectives. Organizations with similar names were formed by Russian-speakers committed to the status quo in the Estonian SSR. In the Lithuanian republic Russian-speakers who opposed the independence movement formed the "Unity" Movement. The "interfronts" and "intermovements" were not always popular among Russian-speakers. A survey conducted in April 1989 in Estonia found that less than one-third of Estonians supported the local Intermovement and United Councils of Work Collectives. David J. Smith, Estonia: Independence and European Integration

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(New York: Routledge, 2002), 49; John T. Ishiyama and Mirijke Breuning, Ethnopolitics in the New Europe (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 84-86; Kolsto, 113. 64. By this time, the RSFSR Party newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia, under editor Valentin Chikin, had moved decisively in the direction of conservative Russian nationalism. According to Leokadia Drobizheva, a content analysis of Sovetskaia Rossiia showed that the use of the term "Russian patriotism" had increased fivefold from 1957-58 to the end of the 1980s, while there was a simIlar increase in the usage of old Russian folklore terms. Leokadia Drobizheva, "Perestroika and the Ethnic Consciousness of Russians" in Gail W. Lapidus, Victor Zaslavsky, and Philip Goldman, eds., From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107. 65. Literaturnaia gazeta, 7 June 1989, 5. Also see Vasilii Belov, "Vystup1enia na s'ezde narodnikh deputatov SSSR," Nash sovremennik 8 (1989): 136-138. These publications appeared to have edited the printed version of this speech to remove Belov's attacks on "Zionists." See Giulietto Chiesa's description of Belov's speech in her book, Transition to Democracy: Political Change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993),85-87. 66. Rolf H.W. Theen, ed., The US.S.R. First Congress of People's Deputies, Vol. 2 (New York: Paragon House, 1991),424-426. 67. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 7 June 1989, 2. 68. For several years the leaders of Pamiat', followed by other Russian nationalist groups, had been making similar demands, including the need for a Russian Communist Party for the RSFSR. See, for example, the statement made by National Patriotic Front "Pamiat''' member Aleksander Kulikov on the need for Russian organs, including a Russian Communist Party. Sovetskaia kul'tura, 25 June 1989,2. 69. Galina Litvinova, "Starshii iii ravnyi," Nash sovremmenik 6 (June 1989): 10-20. This was not the first time she had pointed out the demographic situation in the RSFSR. In 198 I she published a book called Law and Demographic Trends Processes in the USSR, which amounted to a scathing criticism of Soviet policies. See Brudny's reference, 147-148. 70. Igor' Shafarevich, "Separation or Reconciliation?-The Nationalities Question in the USSR," in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, et aI., From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974),88-104. 71. Igor' Shafarevich, "Russophobia," Nash sovremennik 6 (June 1989): 167-192, and no. II (November 1989): 162- I 72. 72. Stanislav Kuniaev, "Palka 0 dvukh kontsakh," Nash sovremennik 6 (June 1989): 158. 73. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 25 August 1989, 2-4. 74. Sovetskaia Rossiia, IS October 1989, translated III FBIS-SOV, 18 October 1989, 95-97. 75. N.N. Shneidman, Russian Literature 1988-1994: The End of an Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 12. 76. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 22 September 1989,8. 77. Several Russian writers, led by Mikhail Antonov, Igor' Shafarevich and V. Klykov, were outraged by Oktiabr' editor Anatolii Anan'ev's decision to publish "Walks with Pushkin" by Abram Terts (nee celebrated dissident Andrei Siniavskii) and Vasilii Grossman's Everything Flows, each of which the offended Russians considered to be

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libelous and Russophobic. See Abram Terts, "Progulki s Pushkinym," Oktiabr' 4 (April 1989): 192-199; Vasilii Grossman, "Vse techet," Oktiabr' 6 (June 1989): 30-108. The disputes are discussed in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 4 August 1989,4; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 1 December 1989, 18; Literaturnaia gazeta, 6 December 1989. 78. Herman Ermolaev uses Grossman's Everything Flows and Belov's Everything Lies Ahead to illustrate the ideological divide in the Soviet literary world in the late 1980s. While Belov's work "pictures the West as ruled by the diabolic power of money and transmitting immorality to Russian urbanites," Grossman's story "stresses the contrast between the freedom-loving, revolutionary West and the slavish, repressive Russia." Ermolaev, 251. 79. The sources I have used for describing this plenum are the following: "Selected Excerpts from the Speeches of Writers at the Plenum of the Board of the Writers Union of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic," Nedelia, 20-26 November 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 21 December 1989, 95-99; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 1 December 1989, translated in CDSP 42, no. 1 (7 February 1990): 5-9; "Vse zaedineno! Stseny pravleniia soiuza pisatelei RSFSR 13-14 noiabria 1989 goda," Ogonek 48 (1989): 6-8,31; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 1 December 1989, 2-13. None appears to be a complete stenographic record of the plenum, and in fact Literaturnaia Rossiia criticized Nedelia and Ogonek for publishing fragments of the speeches out of context, while itself publishing an abridged record. 80. At the November plenum the board of the RSFSR Writers' Union decided to replace the offending editor of Oktiabr', Anatolii Anan'ev, with neo-Slavophile Vladimir Lichutin, but Anan'ev refused to surrender his post. Soon afterwards the USSR Writers' Union, perhaps under pressure from Aprel', revoked the 1969 resolution of its Russian branch that expelled Solzhenitsyn from the union. 81. The passage that begins with "Perhaps ..." was omitted from Literaturnaia Rossiia's version of the plenum. 82. This refers to the end of the Time of Troubles that had begun with Boris Godunov's accession in 1598. The Romanov dynasty was established in 1613. 83. Despite the undeniable evidence of anti-Semitism at this and other writers' meetings, deputy chairman lurii Bondarev was nevertheless able to ask the assembled writers, "Where is proof ofthat anti-Semitism?" 84. Izvestiia, 2 January 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 5 January 1990,91. 85. 221 more writers eventually added their names to the growing list that was published by Literaturnaia Rossiia in March and April 1990. 86. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 2 March 1990, 2-4; Nash sovremmenik 4 (April 1990): 136145. The letters signatories included familiar names such as Petr Proskurin, Anatolii Ivanov, Tatiana Glushkova, Mikhail Lobanov, Sergei Vikulov, Stanislav Kuniaev, Igor' Shafarevich, Vadim Kozhinov, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and Galina Litvinova. Vasilii Belov added his name three weeks later. 87. Interview with Prokhanov in Krasnaia zvezda, 24 October 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 31 October 1989,75. 88. Founding members of the United Council of Russia included representatives from the Association of Russian Artists, the Russian Cultural Foundation, the Leningrad and Moscow United Workers' Fronts, Otechestvo branches in Moscow, Leningrad and Tiumen', the Union for the Spiritual Revival of the Fatherland, the Unions of Patriotic Organization of the Urals and Siberia (both created in June 1988), the "Fatherland" Mili-

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tary-Patriotic Union, the Union for the Struggle for Popular Temperance, and the Interfronts and Intermovements of the Baltic republics and the Moldavian SSR. The United Council's program called on "all of Russia's patriots for unity and consolidation with the healthy voices of the party, [and on] fraternal peoples of all union republics for the preservation of our common socialist home." See Verkhovskii, et al. (1996),37; also see Dunlop (1993), 132-133; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 22 September 1989, 5.

89. The Rossiia club was co-chaired by United Workers' Front (discussed below) leader Veniamin Varin, Anatolii Salutskii (a secretary of the board of the UW RSFSR), USSR Supreme Soviet members En Kim and Vladimir Stepanovich, and Central Committee member Dmitrii Barabashov. Rossiia's founding conference was held on 24 October 1989 at the offices of Sovetskaia Rossiia. Its founders also included Nash sovremennik, Literaturnaia Rossiia, the United Workers' Front, Edinstvo, the All-Russian Cultural Foundation, and the Public Committee for Saving the Volga. By December 1989, the Rossiia club could claim approximately 150 deputies, making it a powerful foil to the liberal Interregional Group. By mid-1990, Rossiia had effectively dissolved into the Soiuz parliamentary faction. Rossiia [a publication of the Rossiia Deputies' Club], no. I (November 1989). Also see Literaturnaia Rossiia, 27 October 1989, 4. 90. "Obrashchenie k narodnym deputatom SSSR," Nash sovremmenik 12 (December 1989): 3-6. 91. "Obrashchenie k narodnym deputatam SSSR," Nash sovremennik 12 (December 1989): 3-6; Literaturnaia Rossiia, I December 1989, 13. 92. Rossiia 3 (January 1990): I. 93. Rossiia 5 (April 1990): I.

6 A Consolidating Force: Creating a Russian Communist Party "We don't need a great shock. We need a great Soviet Russia! Russia has always been and remains a world power! She will do everything so that the Soviet Union remains." - election slogan of the Patriotic Bloc, December 1989 "At a press conference in Genoa or some other place I asked him, 'Yegor Kuzmich (Ligachev), you deify Lenin. I too have respect for Lenin and I still treat Lenin very seriously. But Lenin was against the creation of a Russian party.' And he replied, and this was in an international conference, mind you, 'Well, it was in order to topple you, Mikhail Sergeyevich.'" - Mikhail Gorbachev, March 2000

Chapter Six discusses the efforts by Russian nationalist-conservatives in the CPSU to mobilize and create an institutional base capable of countering the reformist forces in the RSFSR legislature and influencing the CPSU's ideological orientation. By mid-1990 their efforts resulted in the creation of the new Communist Party of the RSFSR, popularly known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP). While the RCP's activities are examined in later chapters, this chapter discusses the means by which this body was created and the intentions of its leading advocates. Although Soviet leaders had always avoided creating a party to represent the USSR's largest republic, believing that the CPSU itself represented the interests of Russians, Gorbachev, now confronted with the results of his efforts to democratize the Party and Soviet society, had little choice but to accede to the creation of a body that provided refuge to those who sought to roll back perestroika.

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The Political Context of Russian Nationalist-Conservative Mobilization While the collapse of the USSR was almost unimaginable as late as 1988, by the end of the year questions about the nature of the relationship between the republics and the Union "center" had became central to the debate about Soviet reform and provoked further questions about the country's future as a union of sovereign republics. Under pressure from the Baltic and other non-Russian nationalists-pressure that intensified as an anticommunist revolt got underway in Eastern Europe- in the autumn of 1989 the CPSU finally abandoned its old approach to the nationalities question, which had called for the sblizhenie (drawing together) and sliianie (blending) of the Soviet peoples. In response to demands from the leaders of the Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Moldavian communist parties (CPs) for a new Union Treaty, in September the Central Committee adopted a new "CPSU Nationalities Platform."l The platform proposed to create a new Union that would grant greater authority to republics while devolving power from the CPSU to the republican CPs. The idea was to appease the republics while maintaining Moscow's authority-in other words, to reshape the USSR as a multinational state with a strong center and strong republics. Henceforth, the political struggle would center not only around history, culture, and economic reform, but over the shape and future of the Union itself In attempting to redefine the relationship between the center and the republics, the Baits led the way: in January 1988 a group of Estonian officials, journalists, and academics published a proposal for the republic's autonomy within the USSR (it was rejected by the Estonian CP), and as the nationalist tide swelled in 1989 each of the Baltic republics declared its sovereignty within the USSR in the belief that it was their constitutional right to do so. Meanwhile, the unity of the CPSU suffered a devastating blow in December 1989 when the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence from the mother party. 2 Having found it preferable to ally with the independence-seeking nationalists rather than to seek Moscow's assistance in crushing them, the Lithuanian leadership set a precedent that was soon followed by the other non-Russian CPs. With Gorbachev unable to persuade the Lithuanians to retreat-and unwilling to use force (beyond an ineffective embargo in 1990) to rein them in-the splintering of the Communist Party and of the USSR began in earnest. As Mark Beissinger observed, "The nationalist revolutions of the USSR were not isolated occurrences, but rather transnational phenomena, gaining force and sustenance from one another's activities.,,3 Thus the events in the Baltics were bound to reverberate throughout the USSR, affecting not only the non-Russians of the Soviet periphery but also the Russian-speaking communities that resided in every Union republic, including the RSFSR. Russians in the RSFSR were slow to mobilize, but when they finally did so in 1990 they were unusually divided. Russian elites-intellectuals, politicians,

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and Party-state apparatchiki-associated themselves generally with one of three camps: at one end were the liberals and radical reformers who urged Gorbachev to speed up perestroika. At the other were conservative Communists and Russian nationalists, most of whom feared the real and anticipated consequences of Soviet reform and wished to roll back perestroika; many were no longer certain that Gorbachev and the central Party leadership would act to preserve the power of the CPSU and the integrity of the Soviet state. Holding the shrinking middle were the followers of Gorbachev. By 1991, however, even the moderate reformers aligned with Gorbachev would find themselves forced to choose between the ascendant "democrats" and the increasingly defensive "conservatives." These widening political divisions could not have been institutionalized without a relaxation of the CPSU's control over Soviet society. Under pressure from the liberal reformers, in early 1990 Gorbachev, perhaps fearful of a possible conspiracy by Party conservatives to remove him from power, decided to weaken his opponents by striking at Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, which since 1977 held the Communist Party to be "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of state and social organizations.,,4 By eliminating Article Six, Gorbachev legalized the creation of other political parties and in effect created a multiparty system to go along with the new popularly elected legislatures in the Union republics. With the Party now having to compete for influence, it had no choice but, said Gorbachev, to "cleanse itself of everything that linked it with the authoritarian-bureaucratic system."s To further strengthen his own power and liberate himself from this "colossus of conservatism" (as he put it), Gorbachev at the same time created a presidency-a powerful post that would permit its holder to rule by decree and cancel legislation passed by the republican legislatures. It was a post that he intended to occupy and did, as he was elected president by an overwhelming majority of deputies to the USSR CPD in March. 6 (Gorbachev's decision not to be elected by popular vote ultimately came at a price, as he deprived himself of the legitimacy enjoyed by Yeltsin when the latter became the popularly-elected president of the RSFSR in July 1991.) The abrogation of the CPSU's monopoly on power, followed by the creation of republican institutions in the RSFSR in the spring and summer of 1990, provided new opportunities to transfer the struggle over the future of perestroika from the halls of the Writers' Union (and its periodicals) and the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, each of which until that point was little more than a debating society, into actual politics at the level of the Russian republic. As the intellectuals' cultural debate gave way to an open political struggle for power in Russia, the contestants created bases for themselves by taking hold of key institutions: for the liberal "democrats" led by Boris Yeltsin, it was the Russian parliament (the RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies); for the nationalistconservatives it was the Communist Party of the RSFSR (RCP).

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The struggle between these two camps was reminiscent of Russia's traditional "WesternizerISlavophile" debate, as each side developed its ideas around a particular set of arguments about the country's past and future in an attempt to win the Russian public-and, of course, Gorbachev himself--over to its cause. Although individuals on each side of the debate held diverse and often contradictory opinions, the views of each camp can be summarized in general terms. The "democrats" (as they called themselves) played the role of contemporary "Westernizers": inspired by Western political arrangements and economic institutions, they believed that the Union "center" prevented Russia from pursuing more rapid and thorough reforms. Ultimately they offered a vision of Russiawhich they defined as the RSFSR-as a nation-state claiming its proper place in Western civilization. The concerns of the "conservatives," on the other hand, echoed those of the nineteenth century "Slavophiles": opposed to simply copying putatively Western models of economic, political, and social development (capitalism, bourgeois democracy, mass culture) and alarmed by the rise of nationalism in the non-Russian republics, the alliance of Russian national-patriots and conservative Communists instead offered a vision of Russia-which in their view comprised all or nearly all of the USSR-as a unique multinational civilization led by Russians and based on historical Russian traditions.

Gorbachev and the Nationalities Question In the drama that resulted in the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, the two leading players on the Soviet stage were Mikhail Gorbachev, who sought to retain a largely centralized but reformed Soviet state, and Boris Yeltsin, who pushed Gorbachev for faster and more comprehensive reform and ultimately orchestrated the RSFSR's withdrawal from the Union. It is to their views on the Russian question that we now tum. Although Gorbachev sympathized with the democratizing aims of the "Westernizers" and believed that Russia (including its Soviet incarnation) had always been a European country whose culture was rooted in Western civilization, his attitude toward the place of Russians in the Soviet empire was ambiguous, appearing to shift with the needs of the moment. Having disposed of nearly all representatives of the non-Russian republics on the Politburo (except Shevardnadze, a Georgian and a Gorbachev appointee, and Shcherbitskii, a Ukrainian and Brezhnev-era holdover) in his first two years at the helm, in the early part of his tenure the general secretary was sometimes misperceived as a "Russianizer.,,7 In reality, Gorbachev, like Nikita Khrushchev, considered Russian nationalism to be distasteful and disruptive to the country's fragile ethnic balance. Gorbachev himself hailed from a thoroughly multi ethnic region of the USSR-Stavropol-where in addition to Russians there also lived "Karachais, Circassians, Abazians, Nogais, Ossetians, Greeks, Armenians, Turkmen and

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other nationalities." Later reflecting on his Stavropol roots, Gorbachev recalled how "Life in this multi-ethnic society taught tolerance and consideration and respect towards others.,,8 Although no Russian nationalist, Gorbachev's views, like those of most Russians in the Soviet leadership, were Russocentric, if only in the sense that he never questioned the essentially Russian nature of the Soviet regime and the right of Russians to rule the country's dozens of smaller nations and nationalities. An admirer of the village prose writers, whom he believed represented the real soul of the russkii narod, Gorbachev was well aware of the difficulties that a heightened sense of Russian nationalism might create for a country that was struggling to come to terms with its troubled past and uncertain future. Thus, while maintaining that the Soviet Union continued to be a multinational country with equal rights for all republics, Gorbachev nevertheless understood that he had to placate the Union's dominant nationality. Viewed in this context, the attempt to formulate and implement a new policy of conciliation in regard to the Russian Orthodox Church was perhaps the Soviet leader's most significant concession to the forces of Russian nationalism in the late 1980s. Although during his first years in power he continued the antireligious offensive begun in the early 1980s by his mentor, Iurii Andropov, by 1988 the outlines of a more flexible policy on religious matters had begun to take shape, accompanied by improvements in the position of religious organizations. As a first step toward recognizing the Russian Orthodox Church as a legitimate public organization, in the spring of that year the general secretary met with its entire Holy Synod, which received permission to reopen several monasteries and several hundred churches. 9 Although the regime's desire for improved relations with the West (and the latter's requirement that the Soviet leadership address human and religious rights concerns in the USSR) likely contributed to this shift in policy, its timing was also partly coincidental with the fact that the year 1988 celebrated the one-thousandth anniversary of Christianity in Russia. Since the glasnost policy had given the Church and its adherents a new voice in Soviet society, the Kremlin reformers believed it was necessary to heed it if they were to succeed in restructuring the Soviet Union. Thus Gorbachev's pursuit of perestroika in the religious sphere was part of a larger goal of establishing some sort of social consensus as the general secretary steered the Soviet ship into uncharted waters. 10 Gorbachev's sporadic attempts to mollify Russian nationalist feeling should be seen in a similar light. In perestroika's early phase, this was limited to his assent to the efforts of Ligachev and other conservative leaders to co-opt Russian nationalist sentiment in support of a program of cautious economic reform and discipline in the workplace. II It was during this period, for example, that Gorbachev courted "liberal" nationalists such as village prose writer Sergei Zalygin and the respected scholar and Russophile Dmitrii Likhachev: Zalygin was called on to head the journal Novyi mir in the summer of 1986, and in November

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Likhachev was named chairman of the Soviet Culture Fund, an organization whose principal goal was to recapture and preserve the Russian past in an attempt to make it an acceptable part of the Soviet present. 12 Seeking to cast Russia's revival as a central part of the general reform of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev hoped to prevent Russian nationalism from becoming the exclusive domain of chauvinists and reactionaries and thus occasionally endorsed some of their positions. As a politician trying to bring about a societal consensus, Gorbachev believed that he could not afford to ignore Russian "patriotic" sentiment, even if that sentiment was often critical of his reform program. Although it was the liberal press that was his main instrument during the first years of perestroika, Gorbachev did not fail to take note of the criticisms that came from the Russian nationalist quarter. Forced to confront the Russian question, Gorbachev sometimes flirted with this potentially powerful sector of society. 13 Indeed, as he worked to reduce Cold War tensions with the USA and its partners in Western Europe, Gorbachev paid close attention to the remarks of even the most virulently anti-Western Russian nationalist writers such as Vasilii Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Petr Proskurin, and Iurii Bondarev, believing that they represented the thinking of ordinary Russians. 14 At the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988, Gorbachev listened as Bondarev, one of the Russian nationalist movement's most prominent spokesmen, assailed the perestroika program; yet the general secretary appeared to be more concerned with the audience's positive reaction to the speaker than the criticism itself 15 Hoping that he could find a compromise between the liberal and conservative camps, Gorbachev never hindered the nationalists' activities, and in the summer of 1989 he even agreed to the appointment of Stanislav Kuniaev, a radical nationalist, to the top post at the influential journal Nash sovremennik. Arriving to the apex of the Soviet system believing that the nationality problem was for all intents and purposes solved, Gorbachev refrained from seriously addressing nationalities issues until they began to spin out of control in regions like Nagorno-Karabakh, where Armenians and Azeris began slaughtering each other, and the Baltic republics, where anti-Soviet feeling was powerful but non-violent. Thus, when considering Gorbachev's approach to the Russia question it is important to remember that his policy toward the Union republics and the nationality question in general developed in the midst of an evolving crisis which saw, for example, the Lithuanian government take an anticommunist platform and finally, in March 1990, declare its independence from the USSR. After the convening of the USSR Congress of People's Deputies in the spring of 1989, which provided a platform for aggrieved nationalists from the Union republics to express their views, Gorbachev realized that could no longer ignore the issue, including the complaints that emanated with ever-greater force from the country's dominant nationality. In September a special Central Com-

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mittee plenum devoted to nationalities adopted as policy the renegotiation of the Union Treaty (of 1922) and resolved to take additional measures that would devolve authority away from the center and protect the interests of the USSR's national minorities. In his own report to this body, the general secretary finally acknowledged the Russians' grievances: the "unfavorable demographic trends" of the last few decades in the RSFSR, the neglect of "truly Russian lands," and the "distortions" which had "negatively affected Russia" as well as the other Union republics. 16 On the language issue, Gorbachev took the traditional position that the universal use of Russian in the USSR was necessary as the principal means of communication between nationalities. The general secretary approvingly suggested that many comrades "think it expedient to give the Russian language the status of a common state language throughout the USSR," although he admitted that "we must acknowledge the right of all national minorities to use their own native languages.,,17 Such remarks came at a time when several republics, in particular the Baltic republics, had already begun enacting language laws which favored the republics' titular nationalities-a source of distress to Russian residents, many of whom had never bothered to learn the local language. In hindsight, we can see that the struggle over language policies in the non-Russian republics was a significant step in the direction of independence-a course that Gorbachev hoped to arrest by promising the republics greater autonomy within the Union. The Party, he emphasized at the plenum, would follow the Leninist principle of "the right of all nations to self-determination. ,,18 Noting that Russians lived in all the Soviet republics, after 1989 Gorbachev continually stressed that independence for secessionist republics could be realized-but only after the settlement of numerous interethnic issues, and only once a mechanism for secession had been worked out. 19 The nationality issue exasperated Gorbachev, who seemed to believe that all the USSR's nationalities profited from the historically magnanimous attitude of the Russians and the benefits of the highly integrated Soviet economy. The idea that the republics could succeed on their own was not only preposterous (was the generosity of the Soviet regime and its Slavic core not responsible for the relatively high living standards enjoyed by the Baltic peoples?) but was also fraught with danger. In January 1990 Gorbachev made a high-profile visit to the renegade Lithuanian republic, whose communist party had declared its independence from the mother party less than a month earlier. With most Lithuanians, or at least the 250,000 who rallied in Vilnius to greet him, now favoring independence for their republic, the general secretary warned them of the tragedy they were inviting. There were fifteen million ethnic Russians living in the Ukraine, he pointed out, and 40 percent of the Estonian population was Slavic. "And suddenly Estonia raises the question about leaving the Soviet Union?" "This path," he cautioned the Lithuanians, "can lead to casualties and blood.,,20

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For Gorbachev, who was struggling to hold together this unwieldy empire of 280 million, one of the country's most troublesome developments was the collapse of a unifying Soviet identity and the cultivation of separate ethnic identities in many of the Union republics. However, while it was one thing for the Estonian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian republics to nurture separate identities that conflicted with their larger Soviet identity, it would be quite another thing if this process were to go too far in the RSFSR, since it was the largest Union republic and the linchpin upon which the existence of the federation depended. "If Russia rises up," Gorbachev repeatedly told his advisors in 1989, "then things will really break loose!"21 Aware that the RSFSR was in fact the Union's most dangerous republic, Gorbachev took steps to weaken its cohesion-with the intention of making it a viable entity only within the larger framework of the Soviet Union-by encouraging the autonomous units in the RSFSR to declare their from It. . 22 . sovereIgnty Meanwhile, the Soviet leader attempted to mollify disgruntled conservative Russian nationalists by bringing some of their leaders into his circle. It is likely with this end in mind that Gorbachev, elected to a five-year term as Soviet president by the USSR Congress of People's Deputies in March 1990, selected Valentin Rasputin and United Workers' Front (discussed below) leader Veniamin Varin (b. 1940), who was also a leader of the Rossiia deputies' club, to serve on his advisory board, the Presidential Council. 23 Created to bypass and to some extent to replace the Politburo, which henceforth only rarely convened, the Presidential Council was a motley collection of sixteen politicians, academics, and writers, more likely assembled on the basis of Gorbachev's intention to represent various groups in the country than on their ability to work together as a cohesive body.24 The selection of Rasputin and Varin to work in this ineffective body should therefore be viewed as an attempt to assuage those sectors of society---conservative and Russian nationalist-they were thought to represent. 25 With the CPSU and the Soviet state facing their greatest challenges since World War II, Gorbachev tried above all to be a conciliator. Having presided over the unleashing of the disparate and often antagonistic forces of Soviet civil society, Gorbachev had to placate them as well. In order to prevent Russian patriotism from becoming the domain of hardliners in the Party and the conservative Russian nationalist intelligentsia, Gorbachev, despite his personal disinclinations but in line with his preservationist political instincts, was likewise forced to play the "Russian card," approving, under considerable pressure, the formation of the Communist Party of the RSFSR as a conservative counterweight to the reformist Russian legislature under the control of Boris Yeltsin. This is discussed below.

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Boris Yeltsin's Russia In his book on the decades-long crisis that preceded the collapse of the USSR, historian Giuseppe Boffa wrote that the fall of the Soviet system became possible when the path of Russian nationalism as a cultural and political trend, already in progress for more than two decades, crossed with a decisive and ambitious politician named Boris Yeltsin. 26 Forced out of the Politburo at the end of 1987, little more than a year later the disgraced apparatchik from Sverdlovsk (today, as during the tsarist era, called Ekaterinburg) resurrected his political career as an assertive voice in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies. A challenger of entrenched power, his first big propaganda campaign was directed at the privileges of the nomenklatura. Yeltsin went so far as to direct this charge against Gorbachev personally, accusing him of extravagant expenditures on his dachas and on his wife, Raisa. Thus during the first stages ofYeltsin's political rebirth, as one of the leaders of the Interregional Group in the USSR CPD, he embraced a sort of antiestablishment populism that was extremely effective in gaining him political recognition. At this time Yeltsin was best known for his public accusations that conservative forces in the CPSU and the state bureaucracy were responsible for the failure to implement real perestroika in the economic sphere. However, another way Yeltsin gained supporters was his assumption of the mantle of democratic radicalism after the death of Andrei Sakharov in December 1989. It was then that Yeltsin began to emerge as a champion of political and economic reforms based on Western democratic and market models. At first his stance on what kind of economic reforms he supported was unclear; however, when economists such as Leonid Abalkin, Stanislav Shatalin, and Grigorii Yavlinskii began to press for the creation of a market economy (which, of course, meant different things to different people and was a cause of further divisions among the reformers) and privatization in 1989-1990, Yeltsin seized the initiative and made this the centerpiece of his economic program for the RSFSR. 27 Elected to the post of chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (the de facto Russian chief executive until the office of the presidency was created in the spring of 1991) in May 1990, Yeltsin quickly brought into his coalition a significant number of officials from the apparat, many of whom saw him as a decisive and authoritative figure who could solve problems, in contrast to the vacillating Gorbachev. 28 While Yeltsin gained popularity as an antiestablishment reformer, his real trump card was a liberal, civic variety of Russian nationalism--one that was far more Westernizing than Slavophile. In particular, he promoted the idea of Russian "sovereignty" within the Union and a break with the socialist past. Yeltsin' s nationalism, unlike that of the notorious Pamiat' and similar extremist organizations, was neither anti-Semitic nor chauvinistic, but at the time appeared to be broadly reminiscent of that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-which is to say, antiimperial, but without Solzhenitsyn's emphasis on Russian Orthodoxy and his

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other neo-Slavophile tendencies?9 In his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, published in 1974 (but ignored by its intended readers), Solzhenitsyn had been among the first to argue that Russia had paid too high a price for empire. The Soviet leadership, he wrote, needed to put Russia's own house in order before concerning itself with matters elsewhere. Writing from his Vermont home sixteen years later, his vision of a renewed Russia was outlined in an article published in the September 1990 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta ("How Are We to Organize Russia?,,).3o Here Solzhenitsyn appealed to Russians to renounce the idea of a one and indivisible motherland; instead he advocated a "Russian (Rossiiskii) Union" composed of the USSR's predominantly Slavic countries. Although Solzhenitsyn insisted on redrawing the territorial boundaries of the republics in order to give back to Russia "traditional" Russian lands, he rejected the use of violence to achieve this end; thus Solzhenitsyn was willing-with the greatest reluctance-to sanction the creation of a post-Soviet Russian state based on the borders of the RSFSR. 31 Yeltsin, who recommended that other RSFSR deputies read Solzhenitsyn's essay, similarly came to believe that Russia, which he explicitly defined as the RSFSR, must worry first and foremost about herself; the other republics were for her little more than a heavy colonial burden. The Union-"the empire"-had bled Russia white, while the "center" (the bureaucrats in Moscow who made the decisions for the entire USSR) continued to hold back substantive reform. 32 Yet in sharp contrast to Solzhenitsyn, a Russian nationalist who for decades had lamented the fate of the Russian people under communism, Yeltsin, like many of the Russian "democrats" who supported him, paradoxically possessed a scant sense of national consciousness. As he told a Russian journalist in September 1990: I do not yet have a national self-awareness, I have no sense of Russia-not only its statehood and history but also the feeling of territorial space.... I used to see myself as a citizen of the country and not of Russia, and also as a patriot of Sverdlovsk oblas!, since that is where I worked. And the concept of "Russia" was so conventional for me that, in my daily work as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk party obkom, most of the time I did not even go through the Russian [RSFSR] authorities. I would go directly to the CPSU Central Committee, the Union government, and sometimes to the country's leaders. 33

Here Yeltsin seemed to suggest that he, like other Russians, had been effectively denationalized and that his identity was more deeply rooted in local attachments and a broader Soviet patriotism rather than in a distinctly Russian national consciousness. Yet in this statement Yeltsin also acknowledged a fundamental reality of the pre-perestroika USSR: if you were from the other republics, your voice was merely parochial; but as a Russian, you spoke for the entire Soviet Union. 34

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It is difficult to discern exactly when Yeltsin came to the realization that the

empire stood in the way of Russia's democratic transition-or of his own political ambitions. However, it was in January 1990, during the political campaign that preceded the elections to the RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies, that he first put forward the idea of Russia as "an independent Republic so as to be no longer associated with the central power.,,35 From this time onward Yeltsin was an outspoken proponent of decentralizing power from the "center" to the republics and of Russian sovereignty within the USSR. Only dimly aware of the existence of "Russia" before his entry into Russian national politics, by early 1990 Yeltsin had transformed himself into what might be called an "RSFSR nationalist." Historian Roman Szporluk, writing in the summer of 1989, defines this mode of Russian nationalism as "anti-empire ... but not anti-socialist or anti-Soviet in principle. It calls for an institutional arrangement for the RSFSR that would amount to the removal of the Russian nation from the position of imperial nation of the USSR. ,,36 While shifting first to a "democratic" position and ultimately taking an anticommunist stance, Y eltsin' s first preference was to maintain the Soviet state-one without Gorbachev and dominated by himself. 37 Regardless of whether or not "democracy" fit his own personal ideology, Yeltsin certainly understood that a shift in emphasis from "socialism" to "democracy" and a market economy would better serve his own political needs. 38 In an effort to loosen the center's iron grip on the country's economy and resources-and thereby augment the republics' control over their own economic resources-Yeltsin cemented his ties with the leaders of the other Union republics, who themselves in many cases had allied with independence-seeking nationalist movements. Most significantly, in March 1990 Lithuania declared its independence from the USSR. Three months later, on 12 June, the newly-elected RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies approved its own "Declaration ofSovereignty." This declaration, which was quickly followed by an amendment that asserted the superiority of Russian law over Soviet law, marked a fundamental change in the relationship between Union "center" and the republics. As Yeltsin, now the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (the Russian legislature's upper chamber), explained in a television interview in June 1990: For all these seventy-three years, Russia has not had statehood. It was an adjunct of the center, and all of the failures ... which took place at the Union level were always identified with Russia, as if Russia were to blame for everything in general. Therefore, even from this point of view, Russia should have both its own borders, its own sovereignty, and its independence in virtually everything, apart from that share we leave to the center. 39

For Yeltsin and his followers, who were mostly grouped around the Democratic Russia umbrella organization that supported him during the electoral campaign, the Declaration of Sovereignty was a means of pressuring Gorbachev to

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proceed with the decentralization of economic decision-making and to cooperate more closely with the Russian government on the matter of economic reform. Although the vote in favor of Russian sovereignty was nearly unanimous (908 for, twelve against, and nine abstentions), this is better interpreted as an unthinking response to the rise of nationalist feeling in the other republics rather than as a step toward the RSFSR's independence from the Soviet Union. Yeltsin's camp generally spoke of Russia's revival in terms of the country's national liberation. As Mark Beissinger wrote, "Russian liberals did not define themselves as nationalists. They saw themselves as struggling primarily against the communist regime, not for the nation.,,40 Their focus was not the ethnic Russian nation, but equal rights for all citizens of the RSFSR, regardless of nationality. Indeed, Yeltsin refused to compromise with exclusivist ethnic chauvinism and, unlike his opponents in the national-patriotic movement, refused to exploit the grievances of Russians in the non-Russian republics to broaden his political base. 41 Yeltsin' s government further contributed to the decoupling of Russian ethnonational consciousness from RSFSR civic consciousness by signing bilateral treaties with Russia's neighbors: in December 1990 the RSFSR recognized the existing boundaries separating it from the Ukrainian republic (boundaries that many ethnic Russians thought to be unfair and historically unjustifiable); and in January 1991, just as Soviet forces attacked Vilnius in an effort to crush the Lithuanian independence movement (and provide a lesson for the other republics), the RSFSR signed a treaty with Estonia on the basis of equal rights for both republics. Thus, in his struggle against the Union "center," Yeltsin transformed the RSFSR into "Russia"-a sovereign republic within the USSR, equal to the other Union republics. Yet by recognizing the sovereignty and the existing boundaries of the other republics, Yeltsin turned the Russians living in those areas into "foreigners.,,42 While Yeltsin's opponents, the "empire-savers," also supported Russian sovereignty, they could not bear the thought of the twentyfive million Russians living outside the RSFSR being treated as foreigners for whom "Russia" had no responsibility; and, while they too supported Russian "sovereignty," they repeatedly attacked Yeltsin for leaving Russians outside the RSFSR to their fate. 43 Yeltsin, however, was conscious of the conservative nationalists' attempts to portray themselves as the country's only patriots and countered their accusations that he was abandoning Russians who lived outside the RSFSR by occasionally acknowledging their plight. Yeltsin' s solution to their situation was to assure them that they indeed had a motherland in "Russia" (the RSFSR), where they would be welcomed back and assured jobs and housing. If the Russians living on the periphery wanted to return to Russia, he declared in early 1991, "then we will create proper conditions for them there." Otherwise, disputes between the Russian populace and the governments of the non-Russian republics

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in which they lived should be resolved not with tanks, but by using legal methods or, at worst, the threat of sanctions. 44

Initiatives in Leningrad In addition to the liberal nationalism of Yeltsin and the ethnic nationalism of the national-patriots (discussed in Chapter Five), there was in Soviet Russia an alternative form of nationalism that can broadly be described as "statist." This variety of Russian nationalism was oriented toward Russia's resurrection as a great power (derzhava). If Yeltsin's vision of Russia as a normal nation-state integrated into the institutions of the West appealed to the country's "democrats" and "liberals," then derzhavnost' (the idea of Russia as a "great power"), a political philosophy that was most famously articulated by the writer Aleksandr Prokhanov, found its constituency in Soviet institutions such as the KGB, the Party bureaucracy, and the armed forces. For the "statists" (gosudarstvenniki), loyalty to the state built by the Russians-frrst the Russian Empire and now the USSR-took precedence over loyalty to any particular national groUp.45 Although this position to some extent differentiated the statists from the Great Russian chauvinists on the political fringe, who elevated the position of ethnic Russians over the other peoples of the USSR, the differences between them were mostly a matter of emphasis and style, for both the chauvinists and the statists understood ethnic Russians to be the builders, the leaders, and the backbone of the Russian and Soviet states. Both generally believed that the strengthening of Russia and of the Union amounted to the same thing. Moreover, whatever the ideological differences among the various groups of Russian nationalists, their enemies were the same people: Russian "democrats" who pursued Westernizing reforms, nationalist-separatists in the Union republics, and the heretics in the Kremlin who had unleashed those forces in Soviet society that were hastening the collapse of a superpower. Nostalgic for the memory of the USSR's international status on the eve of Gorbachev's election as general secretary back in 1985, by 1990 disgruntled Communists and Russian national-patriots alike began to attack Gorbachev, if only indirectly, in defense of their "great power" values. Hoping to forestall and reverse the decay of the empire, these forces were among those that in 1989 began openly to advocate the formation of a Russian Communist Party--one that would counteract the reformist tendencies of the CPSU. Since all the Soviet republics had their own communist parties within the framework of the CPSU, then to avoid discrimination, the initiative's supporters argued, Russia must have her own party. The notion of forming a Russian Communist Party, diligently avoided by Soviet leaders for nearly seven decades, had support from various quarters throughout the RSFSR, including those "liberals" who saw the party as a step in

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the direction of Russian sovereignty, as well as "conservatives" who believed that only a Russian Communist Party and a strong Russia would be able to preserve the Union in its existing form. However, it fell to the latter-more precisely, to a group of Leningrad Communists working outside the formal structures of the Party-to seize this initiative. Like Gorbachev, these forces defended the Union; unlike the general secretary, however, these forces were unwilling to consider any substantive change in the relationship between Moscow and the republics. Their understanding of the Soviet Union was rooted in the Russian imperial idea: that the Union was the historical heir to the Russian Empire; that this empire was an organic outgrowth of centuries of Russian statebuilding; and that Russia has always been and remains fundamentally different from the countries of the West. In their view the empire was eternal, indivisible, and indisputably Russian. Among Russian cities, it was Leningrad, the capital city of tsarist Russia and Moscow's historic rival, where the Party's hostility to the forces of restructuring appeared to be strongest. The Leningrad Party organization, long dominated by the industrial-military complex (whose members formed a large proportion of the region's intelligentsia), was among the most conservative and intolerant in the RSFSR. 46 During 1989 and 1990, the Leningrad apparat was involved in several initiatives designed to buttress the strength of hardline forces in the Party, which had the simultaneous effect of extending the Leningrad apparatus's ties with the Russian nationalist movement. These included the formation of the United Workers' Front (Ob' edinennyi front trudiashchikhsia, abbreviated OFT) in June 1989, and the creation of the Communist Party of the RSFSR one year later. The founding of the OFT was partly a response to both the incipient formation of the reform-minded Leningrad Popular Front (LNF) and the danger that the Communist Party might adopt a social democratic orientation. It was also a response to the setback suffered by the CPSU's orthodox wing in the elections earlier that spring, when voters rejected the top five Communist officials in the local power hierarchy, including the first secretary of the Leningrad obkom, Iurii Solov'ev. In the months that followed this humiliation, the Leningrad Party organization, hoping to create a counterweight to the democrats, helped a group of former candidates to create the United Workers' Front. Rather than endorsing the Party's efforts to reform itself and the USSR, the OFT instead looked to support the "healthy forces" in the CPSU-meaning the orthodox wing of the Party. Conceived as an organization that would mobilize Russian industrial workers-who it alleged were being victimized by Gorbachev's reforms--on behalf of conservative goals, the OFT became one of the driving forces behind the creation of a Russian Communist Party in 1990. 47 The OFT emphasized essentially the same principles articulated by Egor Ligachev: a return to traditional Marxist-Leninist (as opposed to social democratic) ideology, centralized economic planning (as opposed to market reform),

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and the centralized Soviet state (as opposed to the devolution of power to the republics).48 Like the nationalist organization Otechestvo, the OFT managed to reconcile support for the existing authorities with its sympathy for the Russian nationality principle. One of the OFT's founders, Veniamin Yarin, a former steelworker from Sverdlovsk and a deputy to the USSR CPD, emerged as one of the principal spokesmen for the populist, Russian nationalist elements of the organization's platform, unambiguously describing the basis of his organization's program as "the fate of Russia.,,49 However, the USSR's other Slavs were also to playa role in the empire's revival. As the OFT platform of December 1989 stated: "The national pride of the Russians and their Slavic brothersUkrainians and Belorussians and all Soviet people-can, in the opinion of the United Workers' Front, become one of the mighty moral and political motivating forces of perestroika. ,,50 In addition to its links with conservative circles within the Communist Party, the OFT also enjoyed close ties with nationalist organizations such as Otechestvo; together these groups demonstrated in December on Leningrad's Vasil' evskii Island in protest against the destruction of Russian culture and history.51 In September, the Leningrad OFT and Otechestvo also participated in the founding of the United Council of Russia (OSR), the bloc of Russian patriotic organizations clustered around the Russian Writers' Union (discussed in Chapter Five). As Yitzhak Brudny has noted, this link between the OFT and the conservative Russian nationalist intelligentsia was significant because it was the first major attempt in Soviet politics to institutionalize an antiperestroika coalition that presented itself as a viable alternative to both the Gorbachev-led CPSU and, by early 1990, to the liberal Democratic Russia. 52 Although it was merely an "informal" organization acting outside the framework of the CPSU, and although it failed to garner the support of large numbers of workers, the OFT, with the help of the Russian nationalists with whom it was allied, was able to exert considerable influence on Soviet politics in 1989 and 1990. While exciting the fears of Gorbachev and his reform team about the dangers of political extremism, the OFT moved a number of prominent conservative Party members to support the creation of a separate allRussian Party body, whose establishment, the OFT program claimed, was "a condition of ensuring the motherland's integrity and independence.,,53 Indeed, the founding of the Communist Party of the RSFSR was perhaps the most direct and fruitful manifestation of the alliance between national-patriotic and reactionary Communist forces in Leningrad. Despite denials by OFT leaders that their organization was an invention of the apparatus, from its inception the OFT enjoyed the support of the Leningrad Party authorities, including First Secretary Iurii Solov'ev, who, along with several other apparatchiki, attended the Leningrad branch's founding congress. Several leading local Party officials became members of the OFT's Coordinating Council; conversely, the first secretary of the Petrograd raikom (district

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Party committee) demanded the expulsion from the Party of one Communist for being a member of the OFT's pro-reform rival, the LNF. 54 Boris Gidaspov (b. 1933) who replaced Solov'ev in July 1989, publicly supported the "patriotic position" of the OFT, while criticizing the LNF.55 Likewise, Leningradskaia pravda, the newspaper of the Leningrad city and regional Party organizations, gave considerable publicity to the OFT, while denying it to the LNF. While Leningrad Party officials such as Solov'ev and Gidaspov endorsed the reactionary OFT, some city organs also tacitly sanctioned---or at least tolerated-the more overtly Russian nationalist groups then beginning to form. As discussed in Chapter Five, in 1987 and 1988 Party officials facilitated the activities of the Leningrad branch of Pamiat' by issuing official permits for some of its public meetings. 56 Moreover, in the spring of 1989 the Patriot society, led by the veteran "anti-Zionist" publicist Aleksandr Romanenko, was registered by the Petrograd raikom, and Patriot rallies were authorized by Leningrad's Kuibyshev and Dzerzhinskii district committees. 57 These official authorizations came at a time when it was exceedingly difficult for groups of a more "democratic" orientation to get permission to assemble for rallies. 58 Although Iurii Solov'ev publicly criticized the local leadership for its failure to deal effectively with groups such as Pamiat', whose ideology, he declared, "is incompatible with socialism's positions and basic ideals and values," there were clearly officials in the Leningrad Party organization who sympathized with and supported them. 59 In the wake of his defeat in the 1989 elections and reports of corruption, Solov'ev was dismissed from his post in a July plenum of the Leningrad obkom, attended by Mikhail Gorbachev. 60 Solov'ev was replaced by Boris Gidaspov, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences who since 1977 had been the director of the State Institute of Applied Chemistry.61 Promptly revealing himself to be an opponent of the liberalizing thrust of Gorbachev's perestroika, Gidaspov swiftly augmented his power by combining the Leningrad gorkom (city party committee) and obkom first secretaryships in November-an act that was without precedent in Leningrad. 62 By late 1989, the new Leningrad Party chief had emerged as the city's Janus-faced image of technocratic conservatism, looking at once both to Party hardliners and to the Russian nationalist movement for support to counter what he regarded as the greater threat: the democratic reformers. A poster displayed at a Communist rally on 22 November 1989 that compared Gidaspov to Nina Andreeva was perhaps an exaggeration-indeed, it was a comparison that Gidaspov himself was quick to deny.63 Still, it appears that by 1989 Gidaspov had come under the influence of the mood in the Leningrad Party organization and took a position of strict fundamentalism, which he combined with support for Russian patriotic positions. 64 Like the established spiritualleader of the CPSU's conservative "opposition," Egor Ligachev, Gidaspov had strong reservations about the direction that Gorbachev seemed to be leading the country and was increasingly disturbed by the slackening of Party discipline

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under Gorbachev's leadership.65 While playing the Russian national card in order to consolidate his own power, Gidaspov, along with the OFT, assumed an important role in the creation of the Communist Party of the RSFSR in the spring of 1990.

The Patriotic Bloc and the 1990 RSFSR Elections While the initiative to create a party for the Russian republic gathered momentum in Leningrad and other cities in late 1989, prospective candidates for the forthcoming elections to the new Russian Congress of People's Deputies (RSFSR CPD), from which the members of the smaller but more important Supreme Soviet would be drawn, were making preparations. Having learned an important lesson in electoral politics from their failures in the elections to the USSR CPD the previous spring, national-patriotic forces now teamed up with disgruntled Communists in an effort to mobilize popular support for their candidates for the new RSFSR legislature. In December 1989, the United Council of Russia (OSR), an umbrella organization of several national-patriotic groups that in most cases were affiliated with the leadership of the Russian Writers' Union (discussed in Chapter Five), combined with a number of other groups to form a national organization that called itself the Bloc of Public-Patriotic Groups of Russia. This occurred one month before the Russian "democrats" formed their own national organization, Democratic Russia. 66 All together, twelve organizations signed the bloc's program, which was published at the end of the year in Literaturnaia Rossiia. The offices of this weekly organ of the Russian Writers' Union served as the bloc's power base. 67 The bloc's platform reflected the thinking of the reactionary leadership of the union-a compromise of neo-Stalinist and conservative Russian nationalist opinion. It called for an "end to the duping of the Russian people" with the West's "mass culture" and "the unrestrained propaganda of immorality and individualism, pornography and violence." Public ownership of property, the platform asserted, was a choice "made in 1917 by the people themselves and no parliament, no government, has the right to change it." Asserting its opposition to the attempts of other republics to separate from Soviet Russia, which it defined as "an independent socialist republic belonging to the USSR," the Patriotic Bloc also sought provisions for the protection of ethnic Russians living outside the RSFSR against racial discrimination and for an active role for the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious organizations in the development of Russia's spiritual life. Moreover, it demanded the creation of institutions previously denied the RSFSR, such as a Russian Academy of Sciences and a Russian Communist Party, as well as an end to the RSFSR's subsidizing of the other republics. 68 While Russian democrats would only belatedly begin to focus on

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Russian rather than all-Union concerns, the Patriotic Bloc (followed quickly by the democrats) emphasized the Russian republic's sovereignty within the Soviet Union. By focusing on the RSFSR's leading role within the Soviet Union, the patriots linked the Russia question with the fate of the USSR. As noted earlier, conservative Russian nationalists had recently begun to draw attention to the decades-long neglect of the Russian republic and of Russians, while emphasizing the sacrifices Russians had made for the benefit of the Soviet Union's other nationalities. However, many among them also claimed that despite the mistakes of the previous seventy years, the Soviet state and the Communist Party were the guarantors of stability and of Russian political and cultural traditions. In short, most of the Communist conservatives and Russian nationalists who comprised the Patriotic Bloc shared a vision of the present-day Soviet Union as the heir to the multinational Russian Empire and the preserver of Russian traditions against the nefarious influence of the corrupt West. The RSFSR, their program emphasized, was not synonymous with "Russia" (as Yeltsin would define it), for "Russia" was any region in the Soviet Union where Russians lived. It noted that the territorial boundaries of the RSFSR were arbitrarily set in the 1920s and arbitrarily changed in subsequent decades (an allusion to Khrushchev's handing over the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 and similar "gifts" to the other republics); thus, should any republic opt to withdraw from the USSR, Russia would endeavor to ensure that ancient Russian lands were not surrendered. The Patriotic Bloc's program also took a decidedly negative view of Soviet economic reform, which it portrayed as legalized banditry. Advocating continued public ownership as the basis for the national economy, the program denounced the liberal reformers who, it claimed, would tum Russia into a Western colony.69 As the liberal Moscow News noted at the time, "The programme boils down to just two concrete proposals: take the booty grabbed by the 'shadow economy' leaders and return Russia to the Russians.,,7o Overall, it reflected an apocalyptic state of mind that foresaw, if the USSR continued on its present course, the breakup of the Soviet Union and civil war. Such predictions were, as it turns out, not altogether off the mark. Aleksandr Prokhanov, an OSR leader and perhaps the most important contemporary ideologist of the Russian imperial (and "statist") nationalism, predicted this outcome in his article, "The Tragedy of Centralism," published in January 1990, just one week after the appearance of the Patriotic Bloc's program. The country, he wrote, was on the edge of catastrophe: Russia and all things Russian were under attack by forces that were using Russophobia as "a political instrument for the destruction of the multinational state, which has been largely nurtured by the Russian ability to unite." As the fraternal communist parties of Eastern Europe collapsed and Germany prepared for its inevitable reunification, all of Russia's twentieth-century gains, Prokhanov lamented, were

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about to be lost, while "the bones of Russian soldiers rattle in their unmarked graves." The blame for the crisis, Prokhanov declared, "lies with the liberals," who were "oriented spiritually and intellectually toward the democratic West" and were "conducting an irresponsible experiment." Like the Bolsheviks in 1917, these liberals were now "thoughtlessly repeating the experience of the destruction of centralism.,,71 While Prokhanov rejected Marxism and deplored the early Bolshevik experience as a catastrophe for Russia and for the Russian people, he was convinced that in the long term the Communist Party led the country down the path to independence from the rotting West. At present, however, the CPSU, having been "cut up into segments of factions," could no longer act as a consolidating force. Only the Soviet Army, "with its tradition oflinking past to the present, old and young, is a guarantee of stability and sovereignty." But for that stability to hold, pleaded Prokhanov, Russians must lay to rest the specters of past conflicts and instead seek consensus. We must pull the knife out of our back. We must stop, (and] exorcise the blood spilled in the thick of our seventy-year history.... Now finally we must scrape red and white bones together into a common fraternal grave. On this grave we must celebrate a national memorial service, and bring about brotherly and universal reconciliation. Let us put an end to the feud. It is on this fraternal grave that today's general and clergyman, party member and 'informal' will appear.

Although Prokhanov was an unreconstructed Soviet imperialist, in this article he hinted that there may be little choice but to allow some of the republics to leave the USSR. Of course, the Soviet ship would be seriously damaged if the separatists sailed away in their "national lifeboats," but Russians, abandoned by their captains in the Kremlin, would repair their sinking vessel and sail on. "Russian statehood, which embodies the 'Russian idea' politically, economically, and spiritually, will be built anew. It will gather the best from its long thousand-year kingdom and the seventy years of Soviet history that have flown by in a moment." 72 The publication of this article and the simultaneous formation of the Patriotic Bloc were significant milestones in the development of the antiperestroika coalition. As Jack Matlock, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, later wrote, Prokhanov's article "provided a justification for the political union of Russians with a chauvinistic bent, most of whom were emotionally attached to the tsarist system and therefore anti-Bolshevik in principle, with the current Communist Party apparatus, the military, and the police.,,73 Despite significant ideological differences of opinion within the Patriotic Bloc, it united under one banner-the preservation at all costs of the moral-political, ideological, and territorial power of the USSR-Stalinist communism with conservative Russian nationalism. Echoing the cries of the Russian nationalist writers at their meetings in recent years, the coalition's ideological message was the need to preserve

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the "spiritual values" on which the country's social stability was based against the assault of the West's decadent influence. "We don't need a great shock," its platfonn concluded. "We need a great Soviet Russia! Russia has always been and remains a world power! She will do everything so that the Soviet Union remains.,,74 The Patriotic Bloc was fonned for the particular purpose of coordinating the electoral campaign of the Russian nationalists as they prepared for the elections to the Russian parliament in early 1990. Since its candidates were competing against rival democratic groups and liberals in the CPSU, the Patriotic Bloc found support in the conservative Party apparatus, which provided the its candidates with media endorsement in the months leading up to the Russian elections. 75 Nevertheless, the election was by any measure a bust for the nationalpatriots. 76 None gained the majority voted needed for election on the ftrst ballot, and only sixteen of the sixty-one candidates supported by the Bloc made the second round where the two top vote-getters competed. Of these, nearly all of the national-patriots, including luminaries such as the artist Il'ia Glazunov, Nash sovremennik editor Stanislav Kuniaev, writer Vladimir Bondarenko, and academician Eduard Volodin, were defeated-in many cases by "democratic" opponents. 77 If the national-patriots enjoyed the advantages of support in the apparatus and generous media coverage, then one wonders why they fared so poorly in the RSFSR elections. One reason was that they were poorly organized at the grassroots level. Whereas Democratic Russia staged two large mass rallies in the center of Moscow in the weeks before the election, the patriots managed to throw together a single poorly-attended rally (perhaps 1,500 people) at the Ostankino television broadcasting complex (quite a bit further away from the action in central Moscow) and smaller ones at the Luzhniki sports complex. Furthennore, the Patriotic Bloc failed to exhibit a signiftcant presence on the street, whereas its rivals in Democratic Russia energetically campaigned by distributing numerous leaflets, despite the difftculties involved in getting access to printing facilities. 78 It is also possible that Russian voters rejected the Patriotic Bloc because its candidates had discredited themselves by their close association with the Party apparatus. For example, in Leningrad, the main organization campaigning for the election of both conservative Russian nationalists and Party bureaucrats, the OFT, in reality enjoyed little support among the workers. Its unpopularity was hardly mitigated by its overt relationship with conservative Party offtcials who had been defeated in the previous year's elections to the USSR CPD. 79 One analysis of the RSFSR election results revealed that the candidates endorsed by the Patriotic Bloc who emphasized their support for the continued political dominance of the CPSU fared especially poorly; those who accentuated the Russian nationalist elements of their programs seemed to have been somewhat more successful. 80

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Perhaps most significantly, the Patriotic Bloc's nationalist program simply failed to resonate with voters who found greater appeal in the anti-nomenklatura rhetoric of Boris YeItsin and his allies in Democratic Russia. Portraying the elections as the first step in Russia's national liberation, the liberals of Democratic Russia, with their emphasis on democratic institutions, economic reform, and Russia's political and economic sovereignty, capitalized on the anticommunist and anti-imperial mood of the populace and downplayed any tendencies toward backward-looking Russian nationalism or support for a Russian or Soviet empire. 81 With Boris Yeltsin decisively defeating the Party-backed candidate Ivan Polozkov (b. 1935) in the contest for Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (the RSFSR CPD's standing legislature), the Russian parliament served as a power base for the liberal reformers led by Yeltsin and Democratic Russia. 82 Whatever the successes of the Russian democrats and failures of the national-patriots, the fact that CPSU candidates won 86.3 percent of the seats to the RSFSR CPD should not be overlooked. Like the USSR Supreme Soviet, this was a Communist-dominated body (and one that Boris Yeltsin had to contend with for nearly two years after the destruction of the Soviet regime). However, this represented a broad range of opinion, for by the spring of 1990 the CPSU was in shambles, divisible into any number of groups and tendencies, including a reform-communist Democratic Platform, a fundamentalist Marxist Platform, and a neo-Stalinist Communist Initiative Movement (DKI). As political scientist Michael Urban observed: These elections underscored the fact that the CPSU was not a political party by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it amounted to a collection of offices still possessing enormous resources-both its own property and its control of access to state offices at the all-union level and in those localities of Russia where it had not been dislodged from power-over which opposing forces within it would struggle. Thus the elections intensified the level of struggle within it, accelerated its disintegration in the coming months, and encouraged the departure from its ranks of ambitious politicians.83

Since the 1990 RSFSR election had proved a failure for the Russian nationalist candidates, the Patriotic Bloc, now lacking a specific purpose, quickly disintegrated. Nevertheless, the campaign that preceded the election was significant in that it served as a precedent for future alliances between neo-Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, and other conservatives with Russian nationalist tendencies. Having failed the test of popular election and alienated by the reform leadership of the Communist Party, this broad coalition was prepared to shift the core of communist orthodoxy to a new body within the factionalized and weakened CPSU-a Russian Communist Party. This body, many of its supporters hoped, would reinforce orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology while engaging the forces of Russian nationalism for the dual purpose of maintaining the Party's control

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over the country and mobilizing Russians in the battle against radical restructuring. The country's politics were now defined by a fatal paradox that obliterated any possibility of moderate, CPSU-led reform: the two broad political forces that were hostile to the general secretary-the democratic reformers and the Russian nationalist-conservatives-were also hostile to each other. During 1990 each tried to use the new RSFSR political structures against each other and against Gorbachev and his circle: for Democratic Russia, it was the revamped Russian parliament and the RSFSR government; for the conservative wing of the CPSU, the new Communist Party of the RSFSR. Gorbachev, now caught between these two flames, for the brief remainder of his tenure could do little but maneuver between them.

Creating a Russian Communist Party I: Perspectives within the CPSU Pressure for the creation of Russian institutions-foremost a communist party to represent the interests of the RSFSR--came from various quarters of Russian society and found their expression in Russian Writers' Union organs such as Literaturnaia Rossiia and Nash sovremennik. 84 Within the CPSU, the notion of creating a Russian Communist Party began to germinate as the nomenklatura grew increasingly dissatisfied with Gorbachev's efforts to shift responsibility from Party institutions to state bodies. 85 The Party institution that had suffered the most from Gorbachev's attempts to neutralize CPSU hardliners was the Central Committee Secretariat, which since Gorbachev's Party reorganization in September 1988 had been purged of hundreds of apparatchiki and now rarely met. 86 Concerned about restructuring policies that undermined the Party's authority, the political challenge presented by the democrats, and the secessionist dangers that threatened the unity of the country, Party conservatives turned to the creation of a Russian party as a counterweight to the reformist-dominated CPSU Central Committee and as a substitute for the now-defunct Secretariat. The deliberations on the matter of creating Party organs for the RSFSR illuminate some of the concerns about the Russian question shared by Gorbachev and his circle. Although at first reluctant to make any concessions to the Russian nationalists' demands, even the general secretary eventually realized that in steering a course between both "democratic" and "conservative" critics he would have to make some concessions to the political demands emanating from various circles in the RSFSR, including nationalist ones. The Politburo took up the matter of a Russian Party organ at a meeting on 14 July 1989, where the subject was the nationalities policy of the CPSU. Vitalii Vorotnikov, a Politburo member since Andropov's days as general secretary and chairman of the presidium of the old RSFSR Supreme Soviet since the previous

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October, presented a report on those tendencies in Russia that favored the creation of new RSFSR structures and in particular a Russian Communist Party. A moderate conservative in Gorbachev's reformist Politburo, Vorotnikov was not especially sympathetic to Great Russian chauvinism, but as the highest government official in the RSFSR (at that time, as the RSFSR government had not yet been reorganized) he represented the interests of the Russian republic in the Soviet leadership.s7 Indeed, less than two weeks earlier, speaking to Party officials in the Cheliabinsk region, he echoed the Russian nationalists' complaints that the Russian republic was falling behind other Union republics in terms of educational and cultural establishments, that the republic lacked its own academy of sciences, and that there were not enough republican newspapers and journals. Vorotnikov even went on record as supporting the creation of"RSFSR organs of certain social organizations."ss But now speaking to his colleagues in the Politburo he cautioned against creating a communist party for the Russian republic, suggesting that to do so would compromise the Party's attempts to strengthen the Union. Vorotnikov's concerns were shared by Party ideologist Vadim Medvedev, who warned that "if we do this, that is to give her [the RSFSR] more rights, then centrifugal forces will destroy the federation." KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov agreed that creating more structures for the RSFSR would only contribute further to the Union's disintegration; however, he urged the Party "to speak more precisely about the Russian [russkom] people" in order to undercut the argument that Russian interests were being ignored. Aleksandr Yakovlev, an opponent of nationalism of any kind, was more alarmed than anyone by the growth of Russian nationalist tendencies and acknowledged that this was a delicate situation that required "an approach analogous to that in the other republics. In no way as an older brother."s9 Although at this meeting the Politburo arrived at no conclusion regarding the creation of a Russian Party organ, Gorbachev nevertheless realized that the problem could no longer be ignored. Several days later, at a Central Committee meeting on 18 July 1989, during the course of which a number of highly placed Party officials criticized Gorbachev's policies, two regional first secretaries, Iurii Manaenkov (Lipetsk) and Boris Volodin (Rostov), informally proposed the creation of a Russian Party body to satisfy the demands emanating from various quarters in the RSFSR. Rather than backing these calls for the creation of a full-blown Russian Communist Party, Vorotnikov more cautiously suggested creating a Russian Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee, as had existed under Khrushchev. 90 Aleksandr Vlasov (b. 1932), who before the reorganization of the RSFSR government in 1990 was the chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers (effectively the Russian prime minister), took a similar view on the matter of creating a Russian Communist Party.91 A Soviet leader with wide experience in different ethnic regions of the USSR, Vlasov, like Vorotnikov, was a channel within the Party for the demands of Russian nationalists, some of which he pub-

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lidy supported. In early September 1989, as the country prepared for an important conference on nationalities, Vlasov publicly called for more Russian newspapers, a Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, an RSFSR Academy of Sciences, and other republican organizations-including "RSFSR structures in the Party." He furthermore defended the Russian people from the charge of "great-power chauvinism." "The Russian people feel understanding and respect for all the country's nations and ethnic groups. The great-power chauvinism displayed by the extremists of certain informal associations is alien to them.,,92 Like Vorotnikov, when speaking before the Party's highest bodies Aleksandr Vlasov took a more cautious approach to the Russian question and warned against creating a communist party for the RSFSR. At a Central Committee plenum in September, for example, Vlasov read aloud from a document from the Lithuanian Communist Party (which was itself on the verge of declaring its independence from the CPSU) that welcomed an independent communist party for the Russian republic. A schism within the CPSU brought on by the creation of an independent Russian party, Vlasov told the Central Committee, would play right into the hands of the Lithuanian Communists. 93 This was a compelling argument against the strengthening of Russian republican organs vis-a-vis the center. Yet many Russians in the conservative wing of the Party seemed to draw the opposite lesson from the Lithuanians' withdrawal: in their view, in order to reinforce the cohesion of the Union, the RSFSR and its institutions must be strengthened. Thus top RSFSR leaders such as Vlasov and Vorotnikov found themselves in quite a predicament in the summer and autumn of 1989: if they ignored or downplayed the demands of Russian nationalists and the regional apparat, they risked being viewed by Russians as ineffective advocates for the RSFSR; however, if they supported Russian (rather than all-Union) solutions to Russian troubles, they ran the risk that this would be viewed as Russia raising its "imperial" voice. Now that separatist tendencies in the non-Russian republics had come out into the open, accompanied by a rise in Russian nationalist sentiment and escalating Russian demands for the protection of RSFSR structures and institutions, Vlasov and Vorotnikov-not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev himself-were under pressure not to be outflanked by the national-patriots on matters relating to Russian interests. For the time being, the CPSU leadership took little action on the matter of creating a Russian Party body. Indeed, from the time the question was first raised, Gorbachev opposed the idea, as he, like several of his colleagues on the Politburo, realized that the expansion of the rights of republican Party organizations undermined the integrity of the CPSU as a united political organization and as the most important integrating force of the USSR. The creation of a Russian Communist Party, he believed, posed a special problem, for it would inevitably tum the CPSU into a confederation of republican communist parties, incapable of formulating a united line. Moreover, the general secretary also understood that 54.5 percent of the CPSU's members were in local Party organizations on

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RSFSR territory, and that an all-Russian Party body would potentially be powerful enough to overwhelm the CPSU. It would mean that Russians, consolidated in their new party, would come to dominate both the central Party leadership and the parties of the republics. 94 As far as Gorbachev and his circle were concerned, a communist party for the RSFSR with its own central committee would weaken the CPSU and could perhaps serve as the base for a conservative challenge to his reform program and to his authority in the Party and country. Although Gorbachev was slow to recognize the gravity of the nationalist threat posed by the non-Russian republics, he was absolutely correct about the form a Russian Communist Party would take. Supporting the views of Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and Vadim Medvedev on this issue, in a November meeting of the Central Committee Vorotnikov urged his colleagues not to capitulate to these forces. Yes, nationalistic forces from other republics have moved to Russia. Yes, we need sovereign rights [for the RSFSR], autonomy. But only in the framework of the Union. Only in this way. We cannot forget that the RSFSR is the core of the Union .... Our [Russian] responsibility for the unity of the Union is greatest of all. We must not yield-we must contain the centrifugal forces. I ask, for whom is the RCP convenient? For us? No. I am against this. It will be a step toward the disintegration of the CPSU. For whom is it convenient to lure us toward Pamiat', to monarchism? Again the tactics are to draw the Russian person out of himself, and then to accuse him of all sins. 95

While Vorotnikov tried to persuade his Russian colleagues not to pursue a course of action that would undermine the cohesion of the CPSU and the USSR, activists both within and outside Party structures continued to urge the creation of a Russian Party organization. As noted earlier, from the autumn of 1989 onward the Rossiia club in the USSR CPD drew attention to this anomaly and urged the creation of Party structures for the RSFSR. 96 Similar pressures also mounted within the CPSU, demonstrated at the September and December 1989 Central Committee plena and in letters to the Central Committee's journal, Izvestiia TsK KPSS.97 Moreover, active support for the initiative came from the RSFSR Komsomol, which hoped that a new communist party for the RSFSR would stem the country's moral decline and give Komsomol structures greater responsibility in the area of policy formulation. 98 Indeed, as an issue that aroused passions both within and outside the inner circles of the Party, the Russian Communist Party initiative helped to bring together a broad coalition that was at best conservative in its attitude toward the reform program, yet sympathetic to Russian nationalism-"or at least conscious of its potential as a supplementary ideological cohesive for maintaining the CPSU's authority in order to save the union from perestroika. ,,99 By the end of the year, under considerable pressure from Party conservatives, a temporary compromise was reached with the Politburo's resolution to

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create a Bureau for Russian Affairs within the central Party apparatus. 100 Even Gorbachev was compelled to acknowledge that this was "a first step in the formation of the republic's new party structures.,,101 Although the Russia lobby appeared to have won a minor victory in getting the Central Committee's consent for the creation of a Russian Bureau, the republic's local Party organizations were entirely left out of the process and thus continued to argue for the establishment of a Russian Communist Party that would give them real power and influence. In addition to Gorbachev and Vorotnikov, the final version of the Russian Bureau had fourteen other members, including Leningrad's Boris Gidaspov and Moscow gorkom First Secretary Iurii Prokorev, both of whom would be peripherally involved in the August putsch against Gorbachev. Krasnoiarsk obkom First Secretary Oleg Shenin, a future member of the Emergency Committee (GKChP) that assumed power during the coup, was also appointed to the Russian Bureau, which allowed him to expand his Party and military ties as well as his connections with Russian nationalists. 102 Other appointees to the Russian Bureau included USSR Writers' Union head Vladimir Karpov, Iurii Manaenkov (who had proposed the creation of an RSFSR party organ in June), Sovetskaia Rossiia editor Valentin Chikin (responsible for the publication of Nina Andreeva's antiperestroika manifesto the previous year), and several other highranking Party members. In order to prevent hardliners from taking control of the Bureau, Gorbachev procured its leadership for himself while, with the exception of Chikin and Gidaspov, keeping out the most ardent supporters of the RCP initiative. Many of these men already held powerful positions in the CPSU apparatus; thus one can assume that the activities in the Russian Bureau were not expected to take up much of their time. Indeed, the fact that the Russian Bureau's leadership consisted of a group of men who had obligations to the other high Party posts was one of the arguments articulated in favor of the establishment of a Communist Party body for the RSFSR. 103 However, one might also conclude that the heavy representation of Central Committee apparatchiki in the Russian Bureau's membership and at its meetings was an indication of the Central Committee's significant role and interest in Russian affairs. 104 Like the Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee for the RSFSR that existed under Khrushchev, the new Russian Bureau was created to discuss Russian problems. 105 However, since Gorbachev did not want a repetition of Khrushchev's mistakes, whereby the Bureau for the RSFSR duplicated the functions of the Politburo, the new Bureau was created with no specific apparatus of its own and thus lacked the means to implement its own policies. 106 Although it accomplished little else during its short life (which consisted of three meetings in the first half of 1990), the Russian Bureau provided a forum where its members could continue to work to generate support within the Central Committee for the Russian Communist Party initiative. This facilitated the further consoli-

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dation of ties between orthodox Communists and Russian nationalists in the Central Committee apparatus and within the RSFSR. Meanwhile, reactionary forces continued to focus their efforts on the creation of a Russian Communist Party-an institution with conceivably greater potential than the Russian Bureau to counteract the reformist wing of the CPSU. As a future Politburo member of the Communist Party of the RSFSR, Iurii Mel'nikov, said at the time, the Bureau was "no more than a temporary measure.,,107

Creating a Russian Communist Party II: Perspectives from Leningrad Since the Central Committee had failed to take the lead on the matter of creating a Russian Communist Party, the initiative was taken up outside the formal structures of the CPSU. Assuming leading roles in this initiative were activists in the United Workers' Front (OFT) and organizations with which it had strong tiesincluding the Leningrad Party apparatus. While acting outside CPSU Central Committee structures, the OFT sought to influence the Party's policies by creating an "Initiative Congress" with the intent of founding an organ that would counteract the reformers' perestroika. At the founding congress of the Sverdlovsk branch of the OFT in September 1989, the Russian branch of the OFT called upon the CPSU to foster the creation of a Communist Party for the Russian republic. Within days, the first gathering of initiative committees for the creation of a Russian Communist Party took place in Kuibyshev. The initiative committees' appeal reflected the Russian patriotic orientation that would be characteristic of the future Communist Party of the RSFSR: The Russian people (Russkii narod) in reality have repeatedly shown their unbending devotion to socialist internationalism; this does not contradict the fact that the Russian individual (russkii chelovek) also considers it his patriotic duty to do everything possible for the strengthening of the economic life of Russia and the rebirth of her historical and cultural values. . . . We caIl upon all patriots of Russia to unity and consolidation with the healthy forces of the party and fraternal peoples of the union republics. We are for a united multinational state of working people and a powerful Union of socialist republics because such a Union has the ability to secure a dignified life and the development of each Soviet person, independent of his nationality. 108

By early February 1990, the leaders of the OFT, working with Party secretaries in the Leningrad region's large enterprises, formed a single "Initiative Committee for the Preparation of the Founding Congress of the Russian Communist Party on Leninist Principles.,,109 This later became the nucleus of the reactionary Communist Initiative Movement, or DKI. 110 The Initiative Commit-

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tee's program for the creation of a Russian Communist Party, published in Leningradskaia pravda (an organ of the Leningrad obkom and gorkom) on 20 March, was a call to return to fundamental Leninist principles, such as democratic centralism, the leading role of the working class, and the rejection of privilege. However, it also advanced the National Bolshevik idea of the unique, indigenous character of Russian communism. III The Initiative Committee resolved that the new party for the Russian republic would have to be created "from below," since, in its view, the CPSU Central Committee had been too passive on the matter and the Russian Bureau was entirely isolated from regional and local Party organizations. 1I2 The proposal was backed by some of the most powerful secretaries of the Russian Writers' Union, whose Seventh Plenum met just as the Initiative Committee published its program. I 13 In the first days of April, the Initiative Committee began to send letters to all the Party organizations in Russia, with the aid of the Leningrad obkom leadh· · · to convene a congress £or th e · 114 T ersh Ip. e commIttee announced Its ·mtentIon purpose of declaring the existence of a Russian Communist Party on 21-22 April, nearly two months earlier than the All-Russian Party Conference then being prepared by the Russian Bureau. lls The timing of the Russian party's founding congress was a matter of utmost importance to the Initiative Committee, for in its view the new party had to be created before the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress, planned for the end of June, in order to obstruct the plans of the Democratic Platform to further democratize the Communist party.116 The Initiative Committee's program was unambiguous about this strategy: The holding of an RCP congress would enable Communists to come to the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress ideologically and organizationally unified and capable of directing the congress's efforts toward the development of the Party as a communist one, and of preventing its degeneration into a social democratic party that would objectively relegate the interests of the majority of the working people to the background and lead to a restoration of capitalism. I 17

Thus, while the CPSU Central Committee dragged its feet on the matter of creating a Russian party body, the OFT and the Initiative Committee, acting outside the higher bodies of the CPSU, took steps toward setting up a party that would reflect their own conservative and Russian nationalist orientation. And by setting up the Russian party before the upcoming CPSU Congress, its founders could circumvent the efforts of both the radical democrats and Gorbachev (who, by the spring of 1990, had accepted the inevitability of an RCP) to influence its orientation by presenting the new party as a fait accompli. I IS The Initiative Committee, however, could not simply impose its will on Gorbachev and the Party leadership. Therefore, it cemented an alliance with the Leningrad Party leadership under First Secretary Boris Gidaspov, whom its leaders hoped would use his influence and contacts to further the cause of creating an RCp. 1I9 In Soviet press interviews in the spring of 1990, such as the one

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published in Nash sovremmenik in May, Gidaspov publicly backed the idea of creating the new party and emphasized the leading role played by the Leningrad Party organization in this process. 120 He also saw to it that the Leningrad Party apparatus he controlled gave the RCP founders financial and technical support. 121 On 21-22 April 1990, the first Initiative Congress for Reviving the Russian Communist Party was held in an office building owned by the Leningrad Party, the House of Political Enlightenment. 122 Approximately six hundred delegates, claiming to represent 1.5 million Russian Communists, attended the Initiative Congress. In the foyer they could easily find photocopies of articles by nationalist writers Iurii Bondarev and Stanislav Kuniaev, as well as Pamiat' leaflets. Inside the hall, the organizing bureau threatened that executive bodies of the RCP would be created whether a founding congress under CPSU auspices was held or not. 123 By the close of the congress, the new party had become a reality, with plans for the formal Founding Congress of the RCP set for the All-Russia Party Conference on 19 June, shortly before the opening of the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress. Conceiving the Russian Communist Party as a creation "from below," its founders hoped to present their party not as a creation of the reformist wing of the CPSU, but as a body that could consolidate Russia's nationalistconservative forces and thereby exert pressure on the reformers in the Kremlin. As political scientist Gordon Hahn observed: The potential of the prospective RSFSR CP CC [Communist Party Central Committee) apparat as a refuge for released and anti-reformist [officials] could not have been lost on the CC apparatchiki then being purged .... Nor could its potential as a powerful political resource enjoying the support of tens of communist and nationalist organizations, such as OFT, DKI, Andreyev's [sic?] 'Yedinstvo', 'Otechestvo', 'Soyuz', and 'Otchizna' have gone unnoticed within a CC apparat that had become the main target of increasingly popular reformers both inside and outside the CPSU. 124

By the spring of 1990, Gorbachev and the other members of the Politburo reluctantly acknowledged that the creation of a Russian Communist Party at the upcoming All-Russia Party Conference was practically unavoidable. At a Politburo meeting on 3 May, Iurii Manaenkov once again was one of the initiative's most ardent spokesman, providing what some may have considered to be a compelling argument in favor of the project. He maintained that a multiparty system had become a reality in the Soviet Union, and that in Russia alone there had emerged "around forty parties and social-political movements." At the moment they are in an embryonic state, he argued, but tomorrow there will probably be only two or three strong parties, and in the absence of a Russian Communist Party there will be no force to oppose them. In addition, Manaenkov said,

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there was also public opinion to consider: the Russian people want their own communist party. 125 Continuing to take the opposite position, however, were Gorbachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev. Gorbachev countered Manaenkov's argument by pointing out that a new Party organization in Russia would allow Russian Communists to dictate to the rest of the party.126 Yakovlev was among those most alarmed by the incipient creation of a Russian Communist Party and its potentially negative effects on Party unity. 127 The existence of a new RCP, he argued, would sharpen interethnic tensions rather than help consolidate the country's many nationalities. As Vorotnikov had earlier used the case of the Lithuanian party, Yakovlev used the example of a recent meeting of the Moldavian Party organization at which he was present, where the leaders expressed the hope that the creation of a Russian Communist Party might be hastened so that the Moldavians (Moldo. ht orgamze . th· vans ) mig elr own party ce II s. 128 Egor Ligachev, who several months earlier had been exiled to agricultural supervision and was thereby removed from real power (although he still exercised significant influence as a spiritual leader of the orthodox Communist faction in the CPSU), also had strong opinions about the initiative. Naturally, his opinions conflicted with those of his old rival, Yakovlev, who was suspicious of any initiative that had a national basis, and most of all of any initiative that might appear as if Russia were raising its "imperial" voice. Believing that Russia's Communists spoke for the entire Union, Ligachev declared that it was time for them to have their own party; it was necessary "to create a Communist Party of Russia, and not a republican party organization. To conduct this congress as a [founding] congress, which must confirm the creation of this party, to form a leadership as a national [leadership].,,129 Sympathetic to the cause of the conservative apparatchiki now seeking refuge in a new Russian Communist Party, Ligachev told a television audience that the new party "should be created before the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress"-meaning that he, too, believed that it was necessary to present the new party's creation as afait accompli in order to ensure that its conservative defenders, rather than the reform wing of the CPSU, would be in a position to shape the organization. I3O Since the CPSU leadership had failed to "purifY" itself by purging its time-servers and ideologically suspect elements, Ligachev, like many of the initiative's supporters, concluded that the new Russian party would consolidate the CPSU's reliable, conservative forces, and act so as to "strengthen the CPSU and the wholeness of the Union.,,131 Although a lifelong Marxist-Leninist, Ligachev had come under the influence of the Russian nationalists and well understood the value of public identification with Russian patriotism at a time when Soviet reformers were embracing Western-and for many, alien-political values. He also sensed that socialism was not incompatible with patriotic and even chauvinistic sentimentssentiments that would not be out of the mainstream in the new Communist Party of the RSFSR. Understanding well that Party conservatism shared many con-

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cems with Russian nationalist conservatism, Ligachev, by backing the creation of a Russian Communist Party, appeared to be willing to engage a more nationalist-tinged variety of socialism in order to maintain the Communists' hold on power in Russia.132 Although he would not be the new party's leader, there is little doubt that he directly or indirectly helped to inspire its orientation.

Gorbachev and the Rep By the time the Politburo met to discuss this issue in early May, the central Party leadership had lost control of the preparations for the Russian Party Congress, allowing the new party to take the initiative in forming its own antiperestroika political program.133 As one author has noted, the creation of the RCP was "a classic case of Gorbachev reacting too late to events.,,134 While Leningrad activists busied themselves with preparations for the party's founding congress, Gorbachev finally endorsed the idea, apparently convinced by the argument that in a multiparty system, which had become a reality in March 1990, Communists in the RSFSR would need their own party.135 "[I]t would be some sort of paradox, an absurdity," he finally concluded at a 9 June meeting of the Russian Bureau, "if there were all [these] parties and not a communist party of Russia.,,136 His change of heart, or at least the timing of his approval, was probably influenced by the previous day's surprise Declaration of Sovereignty by the RSFSR parliament. (It would be ratified on 12 June.) Whatever the case, Gorbachev may have succumbed to the logical proposition that in the absence of CPSU control over the Russian parliament (as had formerly been the case when a Politburo member would run the old RSFSR Supreme Soviet), the faster a Russian Communist Party is created, the faster the republic's political questions could be taken under control. However, one thing, he told the Russian Bureau, would have to be clear: "This will not be a Russian Communist Party, but a Communist Party of the RSFSR. Like, for example, the Communist Party of Ukraine [or] the Communist Party ofBelorussia.,,137 With the Russian republic taking what appeared to many to be a secessionist course, Gorbachev now decided to give the initiative his firm support, but not without serious misgivings about the attempts by Russians to create their own separate institutions. "Up to this time 1 thought that we, Russians (rossiiane), lead everything, because as you and 1 decide each question, it speaks for the entire Union." Exasperated, he then asked the assembled members of the Russian Bureau, some of whom, as members of the Russian parliament, would soon be voting on the Declaration of Sovereignty: "Russia wants to isolate itself? It wants to draw into itself? Does this mean the fall of the Union?,,138 From the moment Russia declared its sovereignty and the primacy of its laws over all-Union laws, this was indeed the fundamental question: would Russia's ambitious leaders pull the republic out of the Union? Russians, he re-

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minded his colleagues, had a special responsibility for maintaining the empire created by their ancestors: "We Russians [rossiiane), what we have was brought together by our fathers-these are our surroundings, this is our fate, we grew thus and formed." If there was some sort of misfortune, then the Russians [rossiiane] before everyone took this misfortune on themselves. This was already shown in their history-the Russian individual [russkii chelovek] was disposed to cohabitate [sozhitel 'stvovat 1; he has neither haughtiness nor scorn. 139

In these revealing comments, Gorbachev unabashedly emphasized the primary role played by Russians in creating the country in which they now lived. Russians, he was telling the Russians who sat in the Russian Bureau, should and would continue their selfless leadership of the USSR. 140 When speaking to the delegates assembled at the Russian Party Congress ten days later, the general secretary emphasized the oneness of Russia and the Union: "When uttering the word 'Russia,' we must always keep in mind the equally central phrase 'the Union. '" "Tear this intertwined root system," he warned, "and it will not be quite Russia, not quite the same Russia that was bequeathed to us and should be handed carefully to our descendants.,,141 Despite this mildly imperial rhetoric, variations of which he would repeat many times over the next year, Gorbachev denied that the Soviet Union was the continuation of the Russian empire or that Russians were an imperialist people. "The Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917," he told the CPSU Central Committee in December, "and no one can reproach the Russian people with having effected imperial domination over other peoples. ,,142 With words designed to allay the fears of non-Russians while mollifying the concerns of the Russians who could not imagine Russia without its empire, Gorbachev, as was often the case, was trying to have it both ways. Thus, in contemplating the political reorganization of the Union, Gorbachev found himself facing the most agonizing dilemma of his presidency: how was it possible to satisfy the competing aspirations of all the Soviet republics without antagonizing the Russians? How could he reconcile the principle of democratization for all the peoples of the Soviet Union with his desire to maintain a strong Union center, without which he believed both the Union and his reforms were doomed to failure? During an earlier meeting of the Politburo on 1 March 1990, he outlined his answer to this question: We need to draft a Union treaty and publish it, and it must be thoroughly discussed, without haste, in the press and in society-everywhere. Particularly so that everyone will see what the various nations would risk it they withdraw from the Union. Of course we cannot fall into the old [tsarist] slogan "One and Indivisible." But the question must be posed in such a way as to neutralize the desire to leave the Union. It is possible to have a federation with the different republics having different status; consequently different relations will result be-

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tween the republics and the Center. After all, even in the Russian empire the status of different parts of the empire varied. There was the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Kingdom of Poland, the Khanate ofBukhara, and so on. 143

These passages reveal much about Gorbachev's understanding of Russia, the USSR, and the country's complex nationality issues. Gorbachev truly believed that the Soviet Union could be maintained in something approximating its present form. Convinced that Moscow's authority could be squared with the national principle in the republics, he believed that the aspirations of nonRussians could be satisfied under enlightened Russian rule. However, it is difficult to see how such an arrangement could work, for neither the nationalists in the non-Russian republics (many of whom, at least in the Baltics, were really aiming for independence, not "sovereignty") nor the liberals in Russia (who wanted democratic and economic reform in addition to equality between the RSFSR and the other republics) could be satisfied with this formula. Nor would such an arrangement satisfy the demands of the Russian nationalistconservatives who gathered in the Communist Party of the RSFSR. For their leaders the main issue-the one from which all else flowed-was the maintenance of a strong Union state led by a revived and confident Russia. At its founding congress, held in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin (and attended by the icon of antiperestroika sentiment, Nina Andreeva), the new party, calling itself the Communist Party of the RSFSR, elected as its first secretary Krasnodar Party chief Ivan Polozkov, who the previous month had been defeated by Yeltsin in the contest for chairman of the new Russian Supreme Soviet. 144 As a result of internal struggles over, for example, whether or not the party should accept the notion of private property or support the transition to a market economy, the founding congress failed to adopt any program at all. Thus the party's position was largely defined by the views of its conservative first secretary. 145 Speaking at the Russian Party Conference on 20 June, Polozkov made clear what the orientation of the new party would be: Many of our present difficulties are the result not only of the deformation of socialism during the time of the cult of personality, voluntarism [a reference to Khrushchev] or stagnation [a reference to Brezhnev], but also mistakes in the course of perestroika, particularly the spread of ideological disorder in the party, which Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev, member of the CPSU Central Committee Politburo member innocuously called "certain" uncertainty. Now, we all see how dearly the CPSU pays for the state it is in. 146

Within days of the conference, perhaps twenty thousand people in Moscow alone quit the Party in protest against Polozkov's selection; and by the Party's own estimate by end of July it lost 162,750 members from throughout the RSFSR, which represented a loss of about 1.5 percent of Russia's Commu-

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nists. 147 The reaction of Leningrad's liberal mayor Anatolii Sobchak-a Ye1tsin ally who would abandon the CPSU during its Twenty-Eighth Congress two weeks later-to the founding of this party foreshadowed the nature of future relations between it and the democratic movement. I wouldn't call such a party a Russian Communist Party, but would call it a party of political morons. I say that because these are people calling us to return to the past. They're people who want our country to go through what it's already been through, and with these people I will fight without any compromise. 148

The founding of the RCP preceded by two weeks the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress, at which Boris Yeltsin and other prominent members of the Democratic Platform, including Sobchak, demonstratively quit the Party. 149 In the time between these two events the RCP began to create its own party bodies and its own Politburo. Finally selected in September, the RCP Politburo included Ivan Polozkov, Aleksandr Mel'nikov, Valentin Chikin, and Gennadii Ziuganov (and later Iurii Belov and Boris Gidaspov), each of whom had come under the antiGorbachev mood prevalent in the conservative wing of the CPSU while sharing a positive attitude toward conservative Russian nationalism. Some, such as Viktor Tiul'kin, made little effort to hide their chauvinistic attitudes. Speaking from the rostrum at the party's founding congress Tiul'kin declared that "Only those who cannot utter the letter 'r' [read: Jews] can be against the creation of the RCp.,,150 Although Egor Ligachev was not awarded an official post in its leadership, he applauded the RCP's creation and recognized its value as a consolidating force for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's preservation, he told the Russian Communists, depended on them, as they were "more responsible than others for its integrity.,,151 With the formation of the conservative-dominated RCP and the example set by the departing Ye1tsin and his followers at the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress, a profound shift took place within the CPSu. Despite Gorbachev's victory in forcing the Party leadership to accept his relatively liberal vision of the future of socialism in the USSR, the mass exodus from the CPSU during the summer of 1990 drained it mostly of former supporters of the general secretary, now even further disillusioned by the selection of the conservative Polozkov as the new RCP leader. Meanwhile, Russian members of the CPSU (i.e., Communists who were residents of the RSFSR) were automatically "registered" in the new party, allowing the RCP to consolidate itself as the stronghold of the more orthodox elements that remained. 152 Many moderate Russian Communists were squeamish about being subordinate to Polozkov; however, if one wanted to leave the Russian party officially, one had to state specifically that he had joined the CPSU and not the Communist Party of the RSFSR. 153 Thus the formation of the Russian party meant the end of Russian Communists' direct subordination to the CPSU, and the beginning of a Russian Communist "opposition" to both the re-

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form wing of the Party and the Yeltsin-led Russian government. 154 This is the subject of Chapter Seven.

Notes I. On the original Union Treaty of 1922, see Chapter One, note 18. 2. Concerned about the prospect of losing in the local elections planned for early 1990---free, multiparty elections that would determine who controlled the Lithuanian government-on 29 December 1989 the Lithuanian Communist Party voted to separate from the CPSU. 3. Beissinger, 88. 4. "Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," as appears in Donald D. Barry and Carol Barner-Barry, Contemporary Soviet Politics: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987),334. 5. Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 199 I), 320. 6. The vote was 1,774 in favor of Gorbachev, 164 against, and 74 abstentions. 7. d'Encausse, 10-I3. As late as July 1990, when the CPSU approved a rule change that would give representation to each of the fifteen Party organizations in the Politburo, no fewer than ten of the twelve members of the CPSU Politburo were ethnic Russians. 8. Gorbachev (1996), 2 I. 9. John B. Dunlop, "Gorbachev and Russian Orthodoxy," Problems of Communism 38 (1989): 97; Jane Ellis, "Hierarchs and Dissidents: Conflict over the Future of the Russian Orthodox Church," Religion in Communist Lands 18, no. 4 (1990): 3 10. 10. Sabrina Petra Ramet, "Religious Policy in the Era of Gorbachev," in Philip Walterst, ed., Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993),35. I I. Dunlop (1993), 12-13. 12. The board of the Soviet Culture Fund included, among many others, Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, and Russian nationalist cultural figures Iurii Bondarev, I1'ia Glazunov, and Valentin Rasputin. I3. In his memoirs, his aide Anatolii Chemiaev wrote that on several occasions Gorbachev told him that the Russians would never forgive him for "the collapse of the empire," and that the "great-power forces are rumbling louder and louder." Cherniaev, 189. 14. Chemiaev, 213-214. 15. Even after Bondarev's attack on perestroika, Gorbachev insisted that he accompany him on a trip to Poland in which the general secretary would be meeting with Polish intellectuals. After protests by members of Gorbachev's team, Bondarev was excluded from the trip. Cherniaev, 164-165. 16. Mikhail Gorbachev, The Nationalities Policy of the Party in Present-Day Conditions: Address and Report of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee at the Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee, September 19, 1989 (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1989), 30-3 I. 17. Gorbachev (1989), 42-43.

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18. Gorbachev (1989), 27. 19. In April 1990 Gorbachev managed to push through a Law on Secession that dealt with the legal questions regarding secession from the USSR by laying down a careful procedure for conducting a referendum of pennanent residents of the republic in question. Secession would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority of the republic's electorate (not just those who actually voted), and the transition would take place over a period of five years. See Henderson in McAuley, 49-50. Naturally, the secessionist republics saw this law less as a mechanism for than an obstacle to secession. 20. Pravda, 12 January 1990, I. 21. I checked this translation against the original Russian-language version of Cherniaev's memoirs. "Esli Rossiia podymetsia, vot togda i nachinaetsia!" Cherniaev, 228. 22. See John Dunlop, "Russia: Confronting a Loss of Empire," in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, eds., Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50-51. 23. The Presidential Council included Anatolii Luk'ianov, foreign policy advisor and Politburo member Evgenii Primakov, Politburo members Nikolai Ryzhkov, Iurii Masliukov, and Aleksandr Yakovlev (and later Vadim Medvedev), Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Minister of Internal Affairs Vadim Bakatin, Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov, Gorbachev's assistant Valerii Boldin, writers Chingiz Aitmatov and Valentin Rasputin, radical economist Stanislav Shatalin, and OFT leader Veniamin Yarin. 24. According to Gorbachev aide Valerii Boldin, the President quickly lost patience with the Presidential Council, some of whose members-particularly Yarin and Rasputin--directly criticized perestroika, and it soon lost influence. See Boldin, Krushenie p 'edestala: Shtrikhi k portretu MS. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 373374. By November 1990, coinciding with Gorbachev's "turn to the right," Gorbachev abolished the Presidential Council in favor of a Security Council. 25. Yarin's decision to accept Gorbachev's invitation to work in the Presidential Council probably cost him the leadership of the OFT. During 1990 this staunch defender of the working class apparently fell under the influence of Gorbachev and Yakovlev and in September an OFT congress recommended his expulsion from the organization. Interview with Yarin in /zvestiia, 18 March 1991, 3; Molniia 2 (November 1990): 4. 26. Giuseppe Boffa, Ot SSSR k Rossii: Istoriia neokonchennogo krizisa 1964-1994 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996),211, 226-227. 27. Kotz and Weir, 133-134. 28. Historian Dmitrii Volkogonov, Iurii Petrov, Georgii Arbatov, Iurii Skokov, and Nikolai Golushko are just some examples of the nomenklatura who flocked to Yeltsin in 1990-91. With the exception of Arbatov, and to some extent Volkogonov, they had been opponents rather than supporters of perestroika Lilia Shevtsova argues that, contrary to popular myth, Yeltsin did not bring the "democrats" into power but rather much of the ruling class (and its political mores) remained intact. See Boffa, 228-229; M. Urban, et aI., 127, 263; Lilia Shestova, Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), 15-19. 29. In sharp contrast to Yeltsin and other "Westernizers," Solzhenitsyn idealized the peasant commune and, always suspicious of liberal democracy, favored a return to the monarchy.

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30. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Kak nam obustroit' Rossiiu?," Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 September 1990, 3-6. This pamphlet was published in English as Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). Also see David G. Rowley, "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism," Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 3 (July 1997): 321-337; Krasnov, 31-69. 31. Later Solzhenitsyn came to regard the Soviet Union's collapse as "a colossal historical defeat for Russia," and his writings in the late I 990s revealed a propensity for an increasingly conservative Great Russian nationalism. Quoted in Devlin (1999), 69. 32. This vision of a "small Russia" was not popular among liberals until very late in the Gorbachev era. Until the end of 1989, few liberals were ready to support the idea of self-determination for the republics, fearing that this would endanger the Gorbachev regime. See V. Shlapentokh (1990), 254-258. 33. Quoted in John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 142. 34. Roman Laba, "How Yeltsin's Exploitation of Ethnic Nationalism Brought Down an Empire," Transition 2, no. 1 (12 January 1996): 7. 35. Solovyov and Klepikova, 196. Gorbachev believes that it was Yeltsin's intention all along to destroy the USSR. See his On My Country and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 110. However, Andrei S. Grachev, Gorbachev's press secretary in the months following the August putsch, believes that Yeltsin had no intentions of breaking up the Soviet Union until the autumn of 1991, a period when he increasingly came under the influence of his own inner circle. In Grachev's view, Gennadii Burbulis, Yeltsin's second-in-command, harbored the ambition of being a Russian vice president, while Y eltsin' s nomenklatura supported Russia's bid for independence in order to divide up the spoils among themselves. See Grachev's Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995),66, 108, 137. 36. Szporluk (1989), 519. The leading advocate of the civic concept of the Russian (rosssiiskaia) nation at this time was Valerii Tishkov, an historian who was the chairman of the Russian State Committee for Nationality Affairs during the early Yeltsin years. 37. It was, it should be noted, Ukraine's decision in December 1991 to declare independence from the USSR that ultimately destroyed the Union. 38. Bunce, 108-109. 39. Quoted in Morrison, 161. 40. Beissinger, 389. 41. Yet Yeltsin was not oblivious to the politics of ethnonationalism: in the RSFSR parliamentary election of 1990, he won the support of many non-Russians in the republic by consenting to the handing over of a number of key posts in his administration to representatives of the RSFSR's national autonomous republics. He furthermore promised autonomy to all the peoples of Russia, explicitly telling the Bashkirs in August 1990 to "Take as much power as you yourselves can swallow." See Laba, 8. 42. Dunlop, "Russia: Confronting a Loss of Empire," 52-54. 43. Roman Szporluk coined the term "empire-savers" in a 1989 article. He contrasted the "empire-savers," which he defined as those for whom "the preservation of the territorial integrity of the [Soviet] state is more important than anything else," with the "nationbuilders," a heterogeneous category whose members focused on creating a specifically "Russian" identity. See Szporluk (1989): 15-35.

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44. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 14 March 1991, cited in John Dunlop, "Russia: Confronting a Loss of Empire," 53. 45. Astrid Tuminez discusses two varieties of statist nationalism: "moderate" statism and "aggressive" statism, which she distinguishes not by their ideology but by their advocacy of moderate or aggressive methods to fulfill Russia's national mission as a great power. Tuminez, 191-195. 46. Duncan, "The Return of St. Petersburg," 121-122. 47. The OFT's origins can be traced to the political clubs organized by Leningrad's scientific intelligentsia between 1986 and 1988. Members of the Society of Scientific Communism (Obshchestvo nauchnogo kommunizma) united activists from various strata of Soviet society under the motto "For Leninism and the Communist Orientation of Perestroika" and participated in the election of people's deputies of the USSR, particularly members of the Leningrad city soviet. Leaders of the club recommended a series of lectures for labor collectives in the Leningrad region; among the lecturers it endorsed were Nina Andreeva and Aleksandr Romanenko, author of The Class Essence of Zionism. See Sovetskaia kul'tura, 16 September 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 6 October 1989, 63-65; A. V. Gromov and O.S. Kuzin, Neformaly: Kto est kto? (Moscow: Mysl', 1990), 211-225. 48. A fuller treatment of the OFT program is found in Orttung (1992), 452-458. On the OFT's founding congress, see Trud, 24 June 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 7 July 1989, 82-84; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 6 October 1989, 4-5; and Literaturnaia Rossiia, 13 October 1989, 10-11. 49. Broadcast on the television show "Vremia," 17 September 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 18 September 1989, 75-76. 50. For the entire text of the OFT's program, first published in Moscow in December 1989, see Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993), 219-228. Also see the collection of OFT documents in Berezovskii, et aI., Book 5, pp. 2062. 51. Orttung (1992), 454. Ligachev's aide Dmitrii Legostaev, a consultant to the Central Committee's organizational department, served as its envoy to the OFT, as well as to the Russian Communist Initiative Congress and Edinstvo. Hahn (1995), 83. Also see Legostaev's report on the various tendencies within the Leningrad Party organization in lzvestiia TsK KPSS 4 (1991): 51-56. 52. Brudny, 238. 53. Quoted from OFT program of December 1989, as it appears in McFaul and Markov, 225. 54. One reason the Leningrad Party leadership supported the Leningrad OFT was that the latter advocated changes in the election rules to local soviets that would have awarded two-thirds of the seats in Leningrad's city parliament to factory workers-a move that in effect would have prevented the election of representatives from the democratic intelligentsia. Such a proposal must have seemed particularly appealing in light of the drubbing taken by Leningrad's party officials in the March 1989 elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies. In any event, the initiative never came to fruition, as hundreds of Leningraders protested against the plan to pack the city council with conservatives. See Tolz, "Politics in Leningrad and the Creation of Two Popular Fronts," Report on the USSR, 21 July 1989, 39; Robert W. Orttung, From Leningrad to St. Petersburg (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 91-126; Hahn (1995), 216.

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55. See for example, Gidaspov's speech in Leningradskaia pravda, 22 November 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 December 1989, 53. Gidaspov praised the OFT despite the views set forth in the Leningrad Party organization's platform of December 1989, which claimed to be "against extremist displays in the activities of a series of organizations, including a number of the largest-the Leningrad People's Front and the United Workers' Front-which threaten to destabilize political conditions in the region." Izvestiia TsK KPSS I (1990): 83-84. 56. V.M. Borisov, a Leningrad official responsible for that district, claimed that he was obliged to issue the group an official permit for its meetings under pressure from the Leningrad obkom of the CPSU. However, in September 1988 the meetings were banned for their propagation of nationalism and anti-Semitism. See Duncan, "The Return of St. Petersburg," 123; Julia Wishnevsky, "The Origins of Pamyat," 83. 57. Valerii Konovalov, "Neo-Nazis in the USSR: From 'Mindless Childish Games' to a Program of Action," Report on the USSR, 16 July 1989, 10-13. 58. Moscow News, 4-11 June 1989, 2; also Leningradskaia pravda, 29 April 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, II May 1989, 69-70. For Romanenko's views, see Reznik (1991),115-128. 59. Leningradskaia pravda, 10 December 1988, translated in FBIS-SOV, 10 January 1989,68. 60. Solov'ev's removal as Leningrad Party boss suggested that either the Party was beginning to take public opinion into account, or that he was being punished for his opposition to glasnost and Gorbachev's political reforms. See Orttung (1995), 26-31. Subsequently, in early 1990, Solov'ev was expelled from the Party for "expressing immodesty and violating norms of Party life," as reported by the television show "600 Seconds." He had pulled strings to buy a cheap second-hand Mercedes. See Tolz, "Politics in Leningrad and the Creation of Two Popular Fronts," 39-40; Moscow News, 19-26 February 1990,5. 61. In the 1980s Gidaspov had developed Tekhnokhim, an association of Leningradbased research institutes closely connected to the Soviet defense industry. 62. In November 1989 Anatolii Gerasimov resigned as first secretary of the Leningrad gorkom and the offices of regional and city first secretary were combined under Gidaspov. 63. This rally, organized on the initiative of Party committees from various local enterprises, featured a number of speakers who expressed their dismay at the CPSU's declining authority and membership as well as at the crisis in the country as a whole. Democratic forces assessed this rally as an attempt at a "right-wing coup." As Robert W. Orttung wrote in his book on the democratization of Leningrad, "By making a highly visible gesture against reform, the Leningraders hoped to mobilize other conservative groups within the party against further democratization." Orttung (1995), 71. Also see Izvestiia, 26 November 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 27 November 1989,87-89; Komsomol'skaia pravda, 30 January 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 1 February 1990, 61; Moscow News, 2-8 July 1990, 6-7. 64. Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva: Vzgliad iznutri (Moscow: Bylina, 1994),136. 65. On the eve of the Central Committee plenum in January 1991, Gidaspov published a scathing article in Pravda in which he criticized the course reform in the Soviet Union had been taking, in particular attacking Gorbachev (indirectly) for deliberately reducing

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the role of the Party. Pravda, 12 January 1991, 3; Alexander Rahr, 'The CPSU Strikes Back," Report on the USSR, 8 February 1991, 1-3. 66. For the fonnation of Democratic Russia, see M. Urban, et aI., 178-179, 224-227. 67. Literaturnaia Rossiia had been the object of the struggle between the liberal and conservative factions of the RSFSR Writers' Union in late 1988 and early 1989. Following the publication of an article critical of Russian nationalism in late 1988, the newspaper's editor, Mikhail Kolosov, was dismissed by the Secretariat. Its new editor, Ernest Safanov, shaped the newspaper more to the liking of the nationalist members of the Soviet literary establishment by turning it into an antiperestroika publication. See Brudny, 211-215. 68. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 29 December 1989, 2-4; also in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 30 December 1989, 3. 69. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 30 December 1989; Moscow News, 25 March - I April 1990, 8; Otto, 102-103. 70. Moscow News, 25 March - I April 1990, 8. 71. This was a variation on Prokhanov's division of the Russian intelligentsia into "preservers" (okhraniteli) of the Russian Idea and "Westernizers." See his earlier article, "Kul'tura-khram, a ne strel'bishche," 3. 72. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 5 January 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 26 January 1990, 93-98. Also see Vera Tolz and Elizabeth Teague, "Prokhanov Warns of Collapse of Soviet Empire," Report on the USSR, 24 January 1990, 1-3. 73. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 305. 74. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 9 February 1990, II. This slogan bears a strong resemblance to a phrase in Petr Stolypin's famous speech to the Russian Duma in 1907: "THEY WANT GREAT UPHEAVALS-WE WANT A GREAT RUSSIA!" See Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, trans. H.T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989),561. 75. The 23 February 1990, issue of Literaturnaia Rossiia published a list of sixty-one candidates living in Moscow who supported the program of the Patriotic Bloc and who were standing for election to the RSFSR Congress. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 23 February 1990,5. 76. The RSFSR elections of March 1990 were designed to be considerably more democratic than the all-Union elections the previous year. For example, unlike the situation in the USSR CPD, in the Russian congress no seats were reserved for public organizations. There was also more at stake in these elections, as also being elected were the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, the supreme soviets of autonomous republics in the RSFSR, and regional, city, and local soviets. The Party still had advantage of media control, but unlike the previous year's elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, the republican elections in 1990 offered voters a real choice among competing programs. In the RSFSR there was the official CPSU program, the "Democratic Platfonn" of refonn Communists, and the program of the Patriotic Bloc. However, since the contiutional amendment that rescinded the CPSU's monopoly on power was not enacted until 14 March 199{}-afier the election-it was not a multiparty election. 77. Moscow News, 2-8 April 1990, 4; Julia Wishnevsky, "Patriots Urge Annulment of RSFSR Elections," Report on the USSR, 28 March 1990, 18-21; John B. Dunlop, "Moscow Voters Reject Conservative Coalition," Report on the USSR, 5 April 1990, 15-17.

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78. In Moscow, candidates from Democratic Russia won 63 out of 65 seats in the RSFSR CPD; In Leningrad they won 25 out of 34 seats. In contrast, only two candidates from the Patriotic Bloc won in Moscow. 79. Vera Tolz, "Informal Political Groups Prepare for Elections in the RSFSR," Report on the USSR, 16 February 1990,27. 80. Dunlop, "Moscow Voters Reject Conservative Coalition," 15-17. Also see Timothy J. Colton, "The Politics of Democratization: The Moscow Election of 1990," Soviet Economy 6, no. 4 (1990): 285-344. 81. M. Urban, et aI., 190-193; Weigle, 258. 82. While the RSFSR CPD served as a power base for the Russian democrats, they did not control the parliament. Since elections to the parliament took place before the creation of genuine political parties, deputies acted independently. In general, politics in the RSFSR CPD revolved around a struggle between two factions, Democratic Russia and Communists of Russia (organized by the Party apparat), above which stood the Supreme Soviet Chairman Boris Yeltsin, who was occasionally able to manipulate the deputies on both sides to achieve a majority on a given point. Even within the two main blocs there was little voting discipline, which severely compromised the legislature's ability to function effectively. See M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 200, 204; Brendan Kiernan, The End of Soviet Politics: Elections, Legislatures, and the Demise of the Communist Party (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993),202. 83. M. Urban, et aI., 174,211-213; Stephen White, "Background to the XXVIII Congress," in E.A. Rees, The Soviet Communist Party in Disarray: The XXVlII Congress of the Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 20. 84. The Russian Popular Front (Rossiiskii nardonogo fronta, or RNF), an informal group that claimed to be in the liberal wing of the democratic movement, had called for the creation of a communist party for the RSFSR (and other structures for the RSFSR, such as an Academy of Sciences) since late 1988. See "Programma Rossiiskogo narodnogo fronta podderzkhku perestroika," December 1988, Tsentralnyi arkhiv obshchestvennikh dvizhenii Moskvy (TsAODM), f. 8661, op. I, d. 3, p. 44. 85. For the creation of the Communist Party of the RSFSR, see Orttung (1992) and Hahn (1995), 206-266. 86. The Politburo and Secretariat each met only 34 times in 1989; in the first six months of 1990 the Politburo was meeting only once a month, and then only to consider Party matters. White,"Background to the XXVIII Congress," I I. 87. According to Gordon Hahn, Vorotnikov was the first high-level Central Committee apparatchik the RSFSR Communist Party initiative movement attempted to lobby (unsuccessfully). See Hahn (1995), 226. 88. Pravda, 2 July 1989, 2. 89. Vorotnikov, 281-282. 90. Also see the interview with Vorotnikov in Moscow International Service, 30 August 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 6 September 1989, 68-71; Alexandr Rahr, "Gorbachev Faces Revolt in Party Apparat," Report on the USSR, 2 August 1989, 7-9; Pravda, 2 July 1989, 2. In addition, see Vorotnikov's discussion of the 17 October 1989 meeting of the Central Committee CPSU. Vorotnikov, 309-310.

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91. Vlasov lost his position as Russian prime minister following Yeltsin' s election to chairman of the RFSR Supreme Soviet and his appointment of Ivan Silaev to the prime minister's post in June 1990. 92. lzvestiia, 2 September 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, 5 September 1989, 74-79. 93. lzvestiia TsK KPSS 4 (1990): 96-97. 94. Pravda, 10 December 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, II December 1989, 59; V. Medvedev, 137. 95. 18 November 1989 meeting of the Central Committee CPSU, as reported in Vorotnikov,315. 96. See Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 October 1989, 3; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 8 December 1989, 10; Alexander Rahr, "Gorbachev and the Russian Party Buro," Report on the USSR, 19 December 1990, 1. 97. Note, for examples, letters by G. Litvinova, V.G. Briusilov, V.T. Fomichev, and N.M. Averkov in Izvestiia TsK KPSS 10 (1989): 146-147. 98. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 10 April 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 19 April 1990, 109. 99. Hahn (1995), 221. 100. The formation and activities of the Russian Bureau are described in Hahn (1995), 233-254. 101. Pravda, 10 December 1989, translated in FBIS-SOV, II December 1989,60. 102. Hahn (1995), 242-245. 103. See, for example, Iurii Manaenkov, "Kompartiia Rossii: za i protiv," Partiinaia zhizn' II (June 1990): 6. 104. Hahn (1995), 247. 105. At the Russian Bureau's first meeting on 15 January 1990, it discussed the Russian government's draft "Concept for the Economic Sovereignty of Russia." At its second meeting on April 3, the Bureau dealt with organizational matters for the convening of a Russian Party conference in June. See RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 28, 2-3; lzvestiia TsK KPSS5 (1990): 14-19. 106. Rahr, "Gorbachev and the Russian Party Buro," 2. 107. Rossiia 5 (April 1990): I. 108. Berezovskii, et aI., Book 5, 30. 109. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 13 April 1990, 3; Orttung (1992), 457. 110. The main function of the DKI, in the words of its leader Aleksei Sergeev, was to pressure the leadership of the CPSU and RCP not to tum their organizations into social democratic parties. DKI was squarely linked with the armed forces and organizations of the communo-nationalist type, such as OFT, Soiuz, Otchizna and Edinstvo. It later opposed the project to restructure the USSR as a Union of Sovereign States and in August 1991 its leaders supported the coup. See the analysis of DKI in Izvestiia TsK KPSS 4 (1991): 51-56; Berezovskii, et aI., Book I, pp. 129-158, contains a collection of DKI's documents. III. Leningradskaia pravda, 20 March 1990, 2. 112. Interview with Leningrad Initiative Committee organizer Iurii Terent'ev in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 13 April 1990, 3. 113. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 23 March 1990, 10. 114. Robert Orttung noted that in February 1990, "the obkom gave the new party enough money to print its documents and send them to approximately 3000 regional, city,

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and ob/ast' party committees in the RSFSR. The obkom also paid for telegrams telling the committees when and where the first congress of the party would be held." Orttung (1992),460. Also see Pikhoia, 584; Literaturnaia Rossiia, I June 1990, 4-5. 115. The Russian Bureau had decided to conduct the All-Russia Party Conference on June 19 in Moscow. See Izvestiia TsK KPSS 9 (1990): 24. 116. The Democratic Platform was a reformist faction within CPSU that had organized in January 1990 in preparation for the upcoming Party congress. Its leaders, including Yeltsin, Viacheslav Shostakovskii, Gavriil Popov, and Iurii Afanas'ev, rejected "democratic centralism" and pushed for the further democratization of the Communist Party. 117. Leningradskaia pravda, 20 March 1990,2. Speaking at a CPSU Central Committee meeting in February, Ivan Polozkov had earlier made a similar argument, saying that the Russians themselves-not the CPSU-should choose the delegates to the Russian Party Conference to be held in June, which would be the founding congress of a Russian Communist Party. See /zvestiia TsK KPSS 3 (1990): 61. 118. Precisely for this reason, the date of the Russian Party Conference and the matter of selecting delegates caused no end of debate in the Russian Bureau, which had been charged with these tasks. However, Gorbachev hoped to stack the Russian Party Conference, which was expected formally to declare a Russian Communist Party, with the same delegates selected for the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress-a strategy which he believed would help to keep this event under his control. Moreover, he wanted to postpone the election of the new party's leading organs until after the congress, at which the general secretary planned to rescue a sinking perestroika and radicalize the reform process. His plans encountered resistance from the conservatives, who hoped to arrive at the Russian Conference with a fully formed Russian Party organization under their control. See the debate in the Russian Bureau, RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 29, 7-41. 119. Orttung (1992), 459-460. 120. "U nas khvatit voli," Nash sovremmenik 5 (May 1990): 3-5. 121. Nonetheless, as Gordon Hahn points out, the OFT and DKI tried to hide the Party apparat's involvement in their organizations. See Hahn (1995), 216-217. 122. Moscow Television Service, 21 April 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 23 April 1990, 127-128. 123. Moskovskie novosti, 29 April 1990, in CDSP 42, no. 18 (6 June 1990): 15. 124. Hahn (1995), 247. Hahn is presumably referring to Nina Andreeva's Edinstvo and not the Russian nationalist organization in the Moldavian SSR of the same name. DKI refers to the radical Communist Initiative Movement; Otchizna ("Fatherland") was a patriotic veterans' organization with close ties to the Communist Party of the RSFSR. Soiuz, a bloc in the USSR CPD consisting of Soviet patriots, is discussed in detail in Chapter Seven. 125. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 28, p. 9. 126. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 28, p. 9. 127. Yakovlev's opponents claimed that he went so far as to organize a press campaign directed against the creation of a Russian communist party. S. Kislitsyn, V. Krikunov, and V. Kuraev, Gennadii Ziuganov (Fler-I, 1999),48. 128. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 28, pp. 15-16. 129. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 28, p. 12. 130. Moscow Television Service, May 8, 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 8 May 1990, 36-37.

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131. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 22 June 1990, 3. 132. By this time, Ligachev had also become a member of the parliamentary faction Soiuz, some of whose leaders viewed the CPSU as a consolidating force but had in fact renounced the communist utopia. 133. Orttung (1992), 461-462. 134. Morrison, 159. 135. See Gorbachev's speech to the RSFSR parliament on 23 May 1990, reported in Pravda, 25 May 1990, I, 5. 136. Although he conceded the fact of the new party's existence, Gorbachev nevertheless still hoped to influence the RCP's orientation in an attempt to keep it out of the hands of the opposition. See the memo titled "On the Question of Creating a Communist Party of Russia," dated 7 June 1990, and signed by V. Medvedev, G. Razumovskii, and Iu. Manaenkov. RGANI, f. 89, op. 8, d. 72, pp. 4-5. Also see the transcript of the session of the 9 June 1990 session of the Russian Bureau. RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 29, pp. 9-43. 137. RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 29, pp. 6,21. 138. RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 29, p. 5. 139. RGANI, f. 89, op. 23, d. 29, pp. 5-6,27. 140. Gorbachev's ideas about the role Russians have played in the creation and maintenance of the Russian/Soviet state are further developed in a speech to a group of Moscow Communists in mid-May. See Pravda, 14 May 1990, 1-2. 141. Quoted in J.L. Black, ed., USSR Documents Annual 1990: Restructuring Perestroika, Volume 2 (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1991),46,53. 142. Morrison, 191. 143. Gorbachev (2000), 106. 144. In their memoirs, Vadim Medvedev and Vitalii Vorotnikov contend that the choice of Polozkov by the delegates of the Russian Party Conference was unpopular among members of Gorbachev's inner circle, who preferred Valentin Kuptsov or Vadim Bakatin. Gorbachev himself suggested their names, as well as that of Oleg Shenin, who was later implicated in the coup against him. However, during his failed campaign become Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet the previous month, Polozkov had gained much popularity among hardliners; this forced Gorbachev to accede to Polozkov's nomination. 145. It wasn't until October that the RCP was able to publish a draft version of its basic guidelines, in which it repeatedly called for the "stabilization" of the country's economic and political life, while reaffirming the sovereign RSFSR's position as an "inalienable part of the Soviet Union." The final document, published in November, writes Orttung, "was a clear call to arms against the country's democratic political system and the proposed introduction of a market economy." Orttung (1992), 466-467; Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 October 1990,3. 146. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 June 1990,6. 147. Associated Press, 19 August 1990. 148. London lTV Television Network, 19 June 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 26 June 1990,91. 149. Many members of the Democratic Platform, which was dominated by the Moscow intelligentsia, opposed the formation of a separate communist party for the RSFSR. 150. Igor' Bunich, 2010to partii: Keis Prezidenta (Minsk: Alkiona, 1994), 269.

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151. Pravda, 30 June 1990, 2, cited in Hahn (2002), 141. In his memoirs, Ligachev is quite explicit on this point: "It is incumbent on Russians above all others to support internationalism and the unity of the Union-that is our predestined role. That does not mean I am calling on Russians to sacrifice without adequate reason. I am certain that the peoples of our country properly appreciate the role of the Russian people. But the growing threat to society of nationalism and chauvinism includes Russia, and we Russians must be internationalists, patriots of Russia, the Land of the Soviets." Ligachev, 197. 152. Gordon Hahn's study of the Party reorganizations of the late Gorbachev period reveals that the RCP Central Committee became a refugee for apparatchiki alienated by perestroika. It absorbed 275 of the 603 apparatchiki who were purged as a result of Gorbachev's reorganization of the CPSU Central Committee apparat. Hahn (2002), 141, 281-282. 153. Pikhoia, 589. 154. This is certainly the way Polozkov claimed to see the new party. As he testified at the Russian Constitutional Court in 1992, the RSFSR government consisted of people who didn't recognize the authority of the RCP. Thus, even though the CPSU was the ruling party in the Soviet Union, in the Russian republic the RCP was in opposition. The RCP, Polozkov maintained, was an independent party within the structure of the CPSU, but it was absolutely isolated from her organization. Regarding itself as free of the reformist political line adopted by the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress, the RCP's Politburo had its "own vision of perestroika." (Rudinskii, 92.) It should also be noted that throughout its life the Communist Party of the RSFSR was technically an "unofficial" (neformal'nyi) group, lacking a program or rules, and thus it did not enjoy the same rights as officially registered groups.

7 The Apparatchiks' Party "It is at this difficult time, when political confrontation is switching to

civil confrontation and blood is being spilled, and when anned fonnations of an extreme nationalist persuasion have appeared in the republics, we must, as has been the custom in Rus' since time immemorial, brace ourselves and display wisdom and the patience inherent in Russians at a time of severe ordeals in order that our multinational power might know and feel that it has something on which to lean at a time of difficulties." - Boris Gidaspov, June 1990 "You can have pluralism at the level of debates and political streams, but you must have a single ideology on a statewide scale." - Ivan Polozkov, January 1991

By mid-1990, as the Party prepared for its Twenty-Eighth Congress, the CPSU was a political party in name only, grouped around three separate platformsthe Democratic Platform, the Bolshevik Platform, and the Marxist Platformand classifiable into any number of tendencies. 1 While those reform Communists who stuck with Gorbachev urged him to truly democratize the Party and the Soviet state, their orthodox counterparts in the apparat were furious at the general secretary for launching a revolution and then allowing it to spin out of control. For the latter the changes of the last few years were too much to bear: the shocks of glasnost, the disappointments of economic reform, the loss of Eastern Europe and the inevitability of German unification, the rise of anticommunist and anti-Russian nationalism in the republics-not to mention the blows to the power and prestige of the Communist Party, which Gorbachev appeared to have done little to prevent and much to facilitate. Although still outwardly loyal to the general secretary, by the middle of 1990 conservatives in the Russian republic had begun to mobilize against perestroika in an effort to restore order in the country. 211

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Chapter Seven discusses the Communist Party of the RSFSR (RCP), its top leaders' outrage at the results of perestroika, and the strategy they devised to save the country. The main focus is on the rhetorical shift of the RCP's principal leaders, First Secretary Ivan Polozkov and ideologist Gennadii Ziuganov, who, in an effort to broaden their party's appeal, downplayed Marxist-Leninist ideology while emphasizing the "patriotic" orientation of their party. Having resolved upon a strategy of uniting "red" and "white" forces, the RCP portrayed itself as the only organization capable of uniting the Russian people against the "democrats" in the RSFSR and the separatists in the republics whose aim was to destroy the Soviet-the Russian-Fatherland.

The Rhetoric of Ivan Polozkov The Russian Party Conference of June 1990--the first major Party gathering since the Nineteenth CPSU Conference two years earlier-gave the Party's leading conservatives an opportunity to express their concerns about perestroika and the fate of the country. While refraining from attacking Gorbachev directly, there could be little doubt about the intended target of their reproaches. Leningrad First Secretary Boris Gidaspov criticized the Secretariat, the Politburo, and the CPSU Central Committee for their "virtual estrangement from the most important political events in the country," while he encouraged the "radicalism" of the new Communist Party of the RSFSR. What is happening at this moment, said Krasnodar Party chiefIvan Polozkov, is the "[0]rganized demolition of the CPSU from the inside." He further reproached the Party leadership for concentrating too much power in the hands of a radical (reformist) Politburo, for the failures of the Russian Bureau, and for "the many misfortunes of perestroika.,,2 Of course, said Egor Ligachev, the country could not go back to the way things were before 1985: "We were all in favor of perestroika during its first years." But since that time the Party had fallen victim to the "sweeping revisionism" of those who called for the restoration of private property and the market. 3 Two weeks later the CPSU held its Twenty-Eighth Congress. Its platform, drafted several months earlier and approved by the Central Committee, was titled "Toward a Humane and Democratic Socialism." While the reformers saw the Congress as a chance to rescue their ailing program, for the CPSU's conservative wing it represented a chance to halt the country's slide into anarchy. This growing hostility to reform in the ranks of the CPSU was shown by the failure of Aleksandr Yakovlev to be elected to the Central Committee. Hardliners, led by Ligachev, took the offensive against Gorbachev, some hoping to provoke the general secretary into resigning. The main danger to the country, Ligachev admonished the delegates, was not the "iron hand" of the conservative forces, but the "anti-socialist, nationalist-separatist forces, which split party organizations,

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which undermine the Soviet federation, and restore a bourgeois order in various republics. ,,4 Recognizing the threat posed by the conservative forces that dominated the early part of the Congress, Gorbachev's strategy was to build a centrist coalition that would bridge moderate forces on both the "left" and the "right" while isolating the true hardliners. While his refusal to accede to the Democratic Platform's demands (which included the abolition of democratic centralism and the disbanding of Party cells in the workplace, army, and police) appeased the moderate conservatives, the general secretary's stand only confirmed the radical delegates' conviction that the reform process had already bypassed the Party. Even with the radicals-including Yeltsin (recently elected chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet), Gavriil Popov (chairman of the Moscow soviet), Anatolii Sobchak (mayor of Leningrad}-demonstratively quitting the CPSU during the Congress, those who remained were split. Gorbachev's efforts to rein in the centrifugal forces that were splitting the Party and the country were further hampered by the fact that the radicals, many of whom were deputies to the republican legislatures, were now free to challenge the CPSU from outside. Despite the defection of the radicals and Gorbachev's growing unpopularity among both the radical reformers and hardline conservatives (some of whom, most notably Egor Ligachev, urged him to give up his Party post), Gorbachev was reelected general secretary by a vote of 3,411 in favor and 1,116 against. This victory allowed him to portray himself with some credibility as the sole and indispensable leader who could hold the Party and the country together. Ligachev made a bid for power when he put himself forward for the job of deputy to the general secretary, but in the voting was crushed by the Gorbachev-backed moderate Vladimir Ivashko. 5 Although Ligachev's line was defeated-and his career in Party politics was soon to come to an end when he was stripped of his posts in September-his unambiguous challenge to the general secretary indicated, as Gorbachev later recalled, that "the fundamentalist forces in the Party intended to operate only as a faction, in opposition to the reformist leadership.,,6 It was this wing of the Party that now gathered around the new RCP, whose creation had been the subject of speculation for a year but at the Russian Party Conference had become a fact. From its inception the RCP was under the control of such oppositionalistsone might say Ligachevists-and was headed by one of its most reactionary public figures, Ivan Kuz'mich Polozkov. Their intention was to tum the Communist Party of the RSFSR into a stronghold of struggle with the reformist leadership of the CPSU. Opposed to Gorbachev's attempts to transform the CPSU into a social democratic party, the RCP offered a different platform-one that envisaged turning the CPSU into an organization whose main task was less that of defending socialism than that of defending all the territorial conquests made by Russia (and the USSR) throughout its history. Hoping to gamer support for the cause of saving the Union in its existing form-as a federation of socialist

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republics dominated by Moscow-the RCP's leaders attempted to broaden their party's appeal by turning to Russian nationalism as a consolidating force. In this regard the RCP's leaders, like many of its supporters and sympathizers in the national-patriotic movement, stressed two main ideas: 1) that the Soviet Union was the continuation of the thousand-year-old unique civilization gathered around the selfless Russians; and 2) that today's Russian republic, along with the Russian diaspora in the other republics, was the glue that held the Union together. In their view the RSFSR, as the USSR's core and the Russians' "historical homeland," must be strengthened in order to restrain the centrifugal forces that were tearing the Union apart. When the new Communist Party of the RSFSR was formed in the spring of 1990, it had no program or rules. With its positions not entirely clear at the outset, they were initially defined mainly by the views of its first secretary, Ivan Polozkov, who embodied the militantly antiperestroika mood of the CPSU's lower echelons. 7 Before his election to the leadership of the Communist Party of the RSFSR, Polozkov had been a lifelong Party apparatchik who, like many regional Party leaders, spent the first part of the perestroika era publicly voicing his ritual support for the Party's reform program while privately nurturing serious doubts. It is difficult to say exactly when Polozkov lost patience with Gorbachev, but he could not have been pleased when in September 1986 the general secretary censured the entrenched apparat while on a visit to Krasnodar, where Polozkov was serving as the kraikom's first secretary. Broadcast to the entire country on television, Gorbachev's attack focused on those Party leaders whose "main concern is to preserve the old, obsolete ways, to preserve their own privileges. . .. We can see them shouting about restructuring from every platform, and louder than anyone else, even as they apply the brakes to its implementation on all kinds of pretexts, including the most specious ones."g Krasnodar, a multinational region of five million located just north of the Caucasus area, had long been considered one of the most important regions in the Russian republic, as it contained one of the republic's two points of access to the Black Sea while enjoying the agricultural benefits of being in the heart of the rich Black Earth Zone. 9 Appointed first secretary of the Krasnodar kraikom in June 1985 in the wake of a recent purge of the local Party organization, Polozkov's main duty, as he and other regional secretaries understood it, was to fulfill the economic plan. 1O "One thing was expected from me," he later recalled, "naturally, first and foremost-big harvests!"ll Polozkov was also expected to implement Gorbachev's restructuring, and in 1988 he cut as much as 40 percent of his kraikom staff. But political and economic perestroika, he came to realize, would interfere with his ability to fulfill the plan. Once expected to involve themselves in the details of economic production, now the local CPSU first secretaries were also expected to become politicians, campaigning for election in order to retain their offices. The latter, many local secretaries grumbled, demanded entirely different sets of skills and dis-

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tracted them from the most important task, economic management, which the general secretary was now shifting to other bodies, Committed to socialism in its traditional Soviet form, Polozkov, who dominated the Krasnodar Party organization for five years, lagged far behind the Gorbachev curve, Well into the perestroika era Polozkov continued to invoke by-then-outdated slogans such as "acceleration" and "intensification" at a time when the Party leadership in Moscow had moved on to discussing the market. The Krasnodar chief rejected out of hand the idea of a market economy, realizing that in such a system the regional first secretaries would be deprived of their economic coordinating function. Indeed, in contrast to the spirit of a reform program that encouraged the growth of small-scale private enterprise (for example, businesses such as shops and restaurants, in addition to services such as car mechanics) independent of Gosplan, Polozkov gave the orders to shut down many of the first cooperatives in his Krasnodar region. 12 Sharing the local Party officials' concerns about the negative consequences perestroika would have on their work, Polozkov became, according to John Webb, "the semi-official spokesman of Russia's embattled regional first secretaries.,,13 The target ofPolozkov's wrath, and that of many other regional secretaries, was Gorbachev. Polozkov reportedly went so far as to advise colleagues not to obey the general secretary unconditionally.14 By no later than 1989 it had become Polozkov's conviction that Gorbachev had crossed the line from socialist reformer to the chief saboteur of Soviet communism. Like the writer Iurii Bondarev, who at the Nineteenth Party Conference had compared perestroika to a plane that takes off without a destination in mind, Polozkov began to criticize Gorbachev for having undertaken the reform process without a clear concept and for removing the Party apparat from economic management. 15 The arrival in 1989 of the first refugees (Meskhetian Turks, expelled from Uzbekistan) in Krasnodar-an area that Polozkov understood had great potential for ethnic conflict-could only have confirmed Polozkov's belief that Gorbachev was leading the country to catastrophe. 16 Thus, by the time he thrust himself into the Russian national politics in 1990, Polozkov was well-known as a direct, uncompromising, orthodox Communist, proud of the achievements of the planned economy and intolerant of breaches in Party discipline. Nina Andreeva, the author of the antiperestroika manifesto published in Sovetskaia Rossiia two years earlier, went so far as to call Polozkov a true defender of Marxism-Leninism and a person of "rare geniUS.,,17 Despite such endorsements, from the very beginning under Polozkov's leadership the RCP, like the CPSU and the country as a whole, was disunited: within months of his selection reformers in the RCP were already calling for the resignation of the first secretary. 18 As the RSFSR's leading Communist, Polozkov found himself in the paradoxical position of defending the interests of the Russian republic while attempting to reinforce the Soviet center. As one of the few deputies to the Russian par-

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liament to vote against the Declaration of Sovereignty, Polozkov consistently maintained that there should be no divisions between the Union and the RSFSR. Yet with the "democrats" in control of the Russian legislature and Yeltsin taking a decisive stand against the USSR "center," Polozkov, as head of the Russian Communist Party, could not be seen as ignoring the interests of the Russian republic. Although he came around to supporting the sovereignty of the RSFSR, for Polozkov Russian sovereignty meant little more than a widening of existing republican rights-not a qualitative change in the relationship between the RSFSR and the USSR, as Yeltsin was demanding. Indeed, during the year he led the RCP, Polozkov was never able to resolve the contradiction inherent in a position that advocated both increasing Russia's republican rights and strengthening the Union as a whole. Although ideologically orthodox during his three decades of Party work, Polozkov had no choice but to adapt to the dominant environment, which at least in Moscow favored the positions embraced by the democrats in the RSFSR legislature. Thus, despite his public opposition to entrepreneurship in the form of cooperatives, soon after being selected as the RCP's general secretary Polozkov began to reconsider the virtues of the market, "since our economists and our politicians found no other way of getting our economy out of the situation it is in now.,,]9 In some ways the program of action of the Communist Party of the RSFSR, which finally appeared in August 1990, seemed to be little different from the program formulated by the government of Boris Yeltsin. 20 Calling for "the real economic autonomy of the Russian Federation," and supporting the transition to a "regulated market economy," the program, had it appeared a year earlier, would certainly have been a radical document. However, given the rapid pace of change in Soviet Russia, the RCP leadership was well behind the curve, occupying the position of an essentially conservative body that wanted to stop the headlong plunge into the anticipated horrors of full-scale capitalism. 21 Having conceded the "objective necessity" of economic reform in the direction of a market economy and private ownership, the hardline leaders of the RCP looked not to the selfish and individualistic West for inspiration, but rather to the economic models provided by China, South Korea, and Singapore, which they saw as closer to Russia's collectivist traditions. In other words, having converted, if only half-heartedly, to the idea of a market economy, they were convinced that it would take a strong, authoritarian regime-one capable of suppressing the resistance of the masses-to make it work. For the moment, however, more important than economic reform in the RSFSR was the restoration of order throughout the Soviet Union. Discussing the RCP's program of action in September, Polozkov emphasized to his followers that their party's purpose was to strengthen, not weaken, the CPSU, and "to oppose separatist, nationalist, schismatic tendencies in society.,,22 It is in the context of the Soviet Union's national, political, and economic crises, as well as the ideological crisis in the Party, that Polozkov's conversion

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to the politics of Russian national communism is more readily understood, for it was only when the leading role of Russians in the empire was challenged and Russian Communists began to mobilize against perestroika that Polozkov became an outspoken proponent of Russian derzhavnost', or "great power" nationalism. Unable to stanch the flow of Communists out of the CPSU and RCP, it soon became clear to the RCP leaders-and to Polozkov and ideologist Gennadii Ziuganov in particular-that to save the Fatherland, it was necessary to broaden the party's message in an effort to appeal to the broadest array ofpatriotic forces in Russian society. Thus, as the economic and political crises in the country continued to worsen, by the end of 1990 the Communist Party of the RSFSR declared itself open to dialogue and cooperation with "all those who care about the future of the Fatherland." From this group Polozkov naturally excluded the "democrats" (or "pseudo-democrats," as he called them), whose aim he believed was to sell Russia to the transnational corporations as a raw materials provider and "to spiritually corrupt the Soviet person, deprive him of his national pride and dignity, and tum him into a slave of mass culture.,,23 Having defined its enemies, the RCP now began to seek allies-whether socialist or Slavophile-whom its leadership hoped would rally around it to save the Soviet Fatherland. Likewise, some of these forces, whatever their feelings about communism, saw in the "Polozkov party" or "the apparatchiks' party," as it was sometimes called in the press, the lesser of several evils. Some Russian nationalists believed by this time that the country was in a transitional stage during which the Communist Party, whatever its past mistakes, should remain in charge as an authoritarian caretaker-but only if its leaders made it clear that Russia's national interests (i.e., patriotism) superseded the precepts of MarxismLeninism as the party's ideological basis. Hoping that this would be the case with the RCP, many Russian nationalist intellectuals placed their hopes in the new party, including the Writers' Union's powerful secretaries. 24 Even some Pamiat' organizations welcomed the appearance of the RCP; one cell reportedly went so far as to praise Polozkov as the potential "saviour of Russia.,,25 At the heart of the RCP's popular appeal-to the extent that it was popular at all beyond this conservative base-were its claims to patriotism and its determination to restore stability in the country. In an article published in Nash sovremennik shortly after the party's creation, Prokhanov proclaimed the RCP's potential for reclaiming the close relationship with the Russian people that the CPSU had once enjoyed but long ago abandoned. The party of Lenin, he asserted, "was not a party of the people." But during the tragic Great Patriotic War the people came to see the Party as a "unifYing force." With the war won and Russia's enemies defeated, the party of power (vlast') was finally reconciled with the people (narod), only to see its moral authority diminish over time under less capable custodians. While the people may have laughed at the CPSU of Brezhnev, wrote Prokhanov, the present-day RCP is indeed the "party of the people," capable of decisive leadership and willing to reconcile with the coun-

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try's patriotic forces. "The RCP and the patriotic movement need each other. The ideology of the RCP must begin with the ideology of national survival.,,26 With Prokhanov's help-he was known as the "nightingale of the general staff' (solovei genshtaba) for his pro-military novels and his contacts with the military-Polozkov and the RCP leadership attempted to strengthen the party's ties with the country's armed forces and security organs, which by this time were among the most aggrieved sectors of Soviet society.27 Ever since the Mathias Rust incident in 1987, when a German teenager landed a small plane next to Red Square undetected by Soviet defense systems, distrust between Gorbachev and the military had been growing: while Gorbachev fumed about the conspiracy he believed the generals had undertaken to embarrass him, the country's military leaders grew disgusted at the attacks on the military in the glasnost press and were frustrated by Gorbachev's attempts to implement reforms that reduced its budget (cut by 14 percent in 1990), its strength, and its ability to project its power abroad. 28 The feeling of having been abandoned by the general secretary was exacerbated by calls from the liberal camp for the depoliticization of the armed forces, about 75 percent of whose officers were members of the CPSU. 29 Polozkov, like his ideological comrade-in-arms Egor Ligachev, seized the opportunity to ingratiate himself and his party with the military as its prestige sank to an all-time low. As the former navy wrestler told an interviewer in September 1990, the RCP "is interested that the army should remain a strong, combat-ready, spiritually and morally sound force, that it should be united with society.,,30 Like Prokhanov and other patriots, during 1990-1991 Polozkov repeatedly expressed his dismay at the Army's denigration in today's Russia. Fully cognizant of the military's wounded pride, and willing to use this to his political advantage, he stressed that the RCP viewed negatively the liberal media's attempts to discredit the military "and belittle the prestige of the motherland's armed defenders." The military, Polozkov emphasized, would always be supported by the Russian Communist Party; indeed, from its creation the RCP had developed "a warm and solicitous attitude toward the Army, a comprehension of its difficulties and problems.,,3l Likewise, shortly after his selection as RCP first secretary, Polozkov extended qualified support to the so-called "black colonels"-including Soiuz leader Viktor Alksnis, Nikolai Petrushenko, and Albert Makashov (an unrepentant Russian chauvinist and anti-Semite)-who, despite their ambivalent attitude about the communist utopia, had deputized themselves as the forces oflaw and order in a disintegrating country. Yet there was also an ethnic dimension to Polozkov's pandering to the Soviet military that should not be overlooked (nor should it be overstated): while nationalities policy in the Army was designed in theory to contribute to the sblizhenie (drawing closer) and sliianie (merger) of nations, in reality the Soviet Army was dominated by Slavs. The fact that in 1990, according to General Igor Rodionov, 97 percent of the officer corps was of Russian, Belorussian, Ukrain-

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ian, or Tatar extraction,32 must have made it at least somewhat susceptible to the nationalist sentiments peppered throughout Polozkov's speeches-or at least it was an obvious constituency for the leader of Russia's Communists. 33 Attempting to widen still further the party's support base, the RCP leader also found religion, as he now began to speak in favor of new relations between the Communist Party and religious believers. This "mistrust and lack of understanding between Communists and believers must recede into the past," he declared in the autumn of 1990. 34 In an earlier interview that summer, Polozkov described the Russian Orthodox Church as the CPSU's "natural ally in the drive for the protection of morals and against ethnic conflicts.,,35 No top CPSU official had ever before made such an explicit appeal to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church, Polozkov told an interviewer in the February 1991 issue of Molodaia gvardiia, "is not only one of the cornerstones of Russian spirituality, but also a most important foundation of all Russian statehood.,,36 Although Russia has always been a polyconfessional state, he told an audience of nationalpatriots at a conference in February 1991 (more on this event below), We also cannot overlook the fact that religious trends which oppose the traditional confessions and undennine the foundations of morality and human spirituality are invading the life of Russia's peoples. Upholding freedom of conscience in principle, we Communists are ready to cooperate with Russia's traditional confessions [read: Russian Orthodoxy] and with all religious associations which make it their aim to revive national spirituality and to restore the uniqueness of the individual as an organic component of the national-state organism. 3 ?

As noted earlier, since 1988 Gorbachev had been publicly addressing the concerns of religious believers in the USSR in an attempt to revitalize the spiritual life of the country and to shore up support for his perestroika; but only in mid-1990 did the conservative wing of the CPSU begin to make amends with the Russian Orthodox Church. Moreover, to exploit the Orthodox Church's fiustrations with competing religions, as Polozkov was doing, was quite different than Gorbachev's attempts to show sensitivity to the concerns of religious believers in genera1. 38 The attempt to appeal to Orthodox believers not simply as believers but as Russians became an important element of the RCP's endeavors to appeal to Russian nationalist sentiment as a rallying point for its antiperestroika program. Russian Orthodoxy, of course, in one way or another touched not only Russian-speaking citizens of the RSFSR, but also Russians (and some Ukrainians, Belorussians and others) who happened to live in the other Soviet republics. The interests of the RCP's leadership, Polozkov let it be known, did not stop at the borders of the RSFSR: his party claimed to be concerned with the fate of Russian-speaking peoples in all the republics. As tensions rose between ethnic Russians and the titular nationalities of the Moldavian SSR and the Baltic republics,

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Polozkov defended Russian-speakers who claimed to suffer discrimination as a result of the recently-enacted laws which elevated Moldovan (Romanian), Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian to the position of state languages in those republics. Moreover, no later than August 1990, Polozkov began meeting with representatives of the pro-Soviet "interfronts" composed mainly of Russian-speakers in the republics. Following one such meeting, he asserted that it was the duty of the RSFSR government to guarantee the return of Russians from the other repUblics. 39 "We will not," he repeated in November, "leave in the lurch those for whom Russia is the historical motherland.''''o Russian nationalists, of course, were making the same point, and they attacked Boris Yeltsin for his pro-Baltic stance. In January 1991, a group of Russian nationalists, including Valentin Rasputin, Vasilii Belov, Aleksandr Prokhanov, Eduard Volodin, and Vladimir Krupin, wrote an open letter to Yeltsin in which they maintained that his main duty as head of the Russian republic was to protect the interests of Russians wherever they live. "Only a politician indifferent to the fate of the Fatherland," the writers declared, "could hand out willynilly free economic zones and sovereignties on the territory of Russia, dismembering the Russian state . . .''''1 This was a cudgel with which the RCP leadership, like the Russian nationalist writers, regularly beat the Yeltsin administration. With some justification they portrayed Yeltsin as being more interested in creating an alliance with the Baltic leaders directed against the Union "center" than in protecting the rights and interests of Russians outside the RSFSR. 42 Although Polozkov may have exaggerated the abuses suffered by Russians in the non-Russian republics, he was well aware of the refugee crisis that resulted from the return of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the nonRussian republics-a demographic trend that accelerated in 1990 and 1991 as a result of the tense national situations in the republics. The Krasnodar territory he had headed from 1985 to 1990, located in the southern part of the RSFSR, was the destination of thousands of people of various nationalities, including Russians, who were leaving the neighboring Transcaucasian republics to escape interethnic conflict. 43 Yet by repeatedly baiting his listeners with tales of the abuse of ethnic Russians in the Baltics and elsewhere, Polozkov proved to be no less insensitive to the nationality problems in the USSR than the Russian nationalists, who generally refused to acknowledge the natives' legitimate grievances (such as the unwillingness of most Russians living outside the RSFSR to learn the language of their adopted republic). Although RCP leaders were genuinely concerned about the non-Russian republics' treatment of their Russian residents, they could also be confident that their criticisms would appeal to the national-patriots who had been making the same claims. 44 Indeed, Polozkov's addresses and interviews left little doubt about his views regarding the place of Russians in the empire. While usually careful to portray the Soviet Union as a country that united a multitude of na-

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tionalities in one great continental civilization, he also reserved a special place for ethnic Russians in the socialist Fatherland. "I see Russia as a union of peoples based on a treaty whereby the interests of all of its peoples, of all of its autonomous units, and the interests of the Russian people (russkogo naroda) are taken into consideration.,,45 While it could be misleading to read too closely into a politician's use of the words "russkit' and "rossiiskii" (and "rossiane") it should be pointed out that politicians, like Russian writers, were well aware of the implications of their word selections. By 1990 the ethnic term for "Russian" seemed to have disappeared from the democrats' lexicon-an apparently conscious and deliberate choice-and had become, for at least that turbulent period, an indicator of a Russocentric political perspective at best, and, at worst, of Russian national chauvinism.

Enter Ziuganov By the autumn of 1990 Ivan Polozkov, like his former boss Egor Ligachev, had come to see the growth of Russian nationalism as a positive response to nationalism on the Soviet periphery. Far from challenging Communist rule, the new Russian nationalist organizations were a potential source of support for his party; thus they represented a constituency that needed to be cultivated. Such a unification of commissars and national-patriots was the strategy proposed at the party's November plenum, at which it was agreed that the party would declare, in Polozkov's words, "a kind of moratorium in the political struggle and [begin] a search for sensible compromises in the name of a reborn and renewed Russia and the preservation of the unified Soviet state.,,46 Of course, a considerable part of the CPSU apparat, and probably Polozkov himself, had long been susceptible to Russian nationalist ideology; yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Polozkov's public baptism in the waters of Russian nationalism was also somehow related to the arrival of Gennadii Ziuganov to the leadership of the new party. In the autumn of 1990, Polozkov and his RCP colleagues invited the Orel native to join the RCP's Politburo. Aleksandr Prokhanov, soon to be one of Ziuganov's collaborators, later described how the future leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the RCP's post-Soviet successor) was shaped by his rural roots. There are no space plants, no airports, nothing that we associate with the technological era in the OreJ region. But there are many wheat fields, Russian folklore songs and [G]reat Russian culture. This is the background of the Russian province-poor in material things, rich in spiritual things-and this is the basis of [Ziuganov' s] personality.47

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From 1974 to 1983 Ziuganov was a regional Party secretary in Ore1 (home to one of the infamous "psychiatric hospitals" used to treat dissidents during the Brezhnev era), where he was in charge of ideology and propaganda. Although he was cognizant of the gathering crisis in the Soviet system, Ziuganov nevertheless considered the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev years to have been "a liberal state without repression," as he remarked some years later. 48 In 1983 Ziuganov was summoned to work in the Department of Propaganda of the CPSU's Central Committee, where he became a deep admirer oflongtime KGB chief Iurii Andropov. Ziuganov was deeply disappointed at Andropov's death, and later came to believe that with his early demise the country had lost an opportunity to revive the socialist economy and reinvigorate communist ideology. During his six years in the ideology department (as the Department of Propaganda was renamed in 1989) Ziuganov acquired the reputation, according to emigre historian Alexander Yanov, as a "dissident" reformist within the Soviet Communist Party system--especially as the department lost influence during the perestroika years under Gorbachev. Believing perestroika to have been the product of a twenty-year CIA conspiracy to undermine the Soviet Union from within by educating Soviet citizens and turning them into Trojan horses, Ziuganov was convinced that these traitors had destroyed the Party from the inside. 49 Rejecting the liberal Westernizers, this left the burgeoning patriotic movement as Ziuganov's alternative source of ideological support. The creation in 1990 of the Communist Party of the RSFSR offered Ziuganov and like-minded comrades the possibility of creating what they regarded as a new "centrism." In an article published in Sovetskaia Rossiia in March 1991, Ziuganov claimed that the RCP rejected the approaches of both the "ultraconservatives," who wanted to return the country to its pre-perestroika conditions, and that of the "right," which would result in the restoration of capitalism. 50 For Ziuganov, the first road would lead once again to the old stagnation and thereby prevent any possibility of society's renewal, while the second would mainly serve the "pseudo-democrats, nationalists, and separatists," many of whom were already supported by checks from the West. There is, Ziuganov wrote, a third alternative: that of gradual, evolutionary reform. 51 This, he claimed, was the method of the RCP. To reinvigorate communist ideology, Ziuganov, Polozkov, and other RCP leaders (for example, Boris Gidaspov, Valentin Chikin, and more ambiguously Aleksandr Rutskoi) looked to the patriotic movement. For these politicians patriotism represented the desired third road between Marxism and democracyan alternative to communist internationalism and cosmopolitan democracy. 52 While perestroika was the result of the liberal-reformists' search for a new source of legitimacy by embracing a more Western orientation, Ziuganov, now the RCP's chief ideologist, turned to Russian sources for the Party's and the country's renewal.

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For Ziuganov, the solution to the impasse the empire now faced was a return to the authoritarian tradition of the "Russian idea," based upon the classics of nineteenth-century Slavophiles Ivan Kireevskii and Aleksei Khomiakov and later developed by Pan-Slavist Nikolai Danilevskii, fiction writer Fedor Dostoevsky (noted for his anti-Westernism), and philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev. Its main thesis was the conviction that Russia was by its very nature and separate development collectivist in its orientation and was therefore morally superior to the materialistic and individualistic West. Unlike the nations of the West, Russians, innocent of the sin of ownership, have never been "bourgeois" and are totally unsuited to be bourgeois.53 By early 1991 Ziuganov had emerged as one of the most outspoken proponents of Russian great-power nationalism, and moreover was the architect of the party's strategy of drawing closer to those patriots who, whatever their political orientation, placed the highest value on saving the Fatherland from disintegration and from the pernicious influence of the West. Although Ziuganov's reformulation of communist ideology downplayed Lenin's infallible pronouncements in favor of the nineteenth-century patriots of tsarist Russia, strategically-in particular in his decision to work within a union of Communists and Russian nationalists-he borrowed a page from the pre-revolutionary thought of the founder of the Soviet state: when in the opposition it was most important to defeat the government in power, and "only then to decide all remaining questions.,,54 Although Ziuganov penned these words in 1992, such opportunism was evident during 1990-1991 as the RCP leadership began to organize a strategic union of "reds" and "whites." This strategy was intended to bring into its fold conservative Russian nationalists (who had had been almost entirely excluded from the Yeltsin-dominated RSFSR parliament) and orthodox, patriotic Communists (who under Gorbachev found themselves outside the corridors of power) into a broad extraparliamentary movement under the aegis of the RCP. In order to appeal to the "patriotic" elements of Russian society, the ideology of the RCP, then, would need to be sharply distinguished from that of the reformist wing of the CPSU (not to mention that of the "democrats" of the Russian legislature). Thus the RCP's leaders emphasized the "single stream" thesis, which linked the contemporary USSR to Russia's imperial past in an effort to communicate the idea to "reds" and "whites" alike that the Soviet regime had successfully preserved the achievements and unique traditions of prerevolutionary Russia and therefore was the only force that was capable of protecting the country's "great power" interests. 55 This idea was at the heart of a speech delivered by Polozkov to the RCP Central Committee in March 1991."We are the rightful inheritors not only of seven decades of post-revolutionary development," Polozkov declared, "but of a great power with one thousand years ofhistory.,,56 The implication was that seventy years of communism was less a triumph over Russia's historical backwardness than the apotheosis of a millenium of Russian history. "Russia," he contin-

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ued, "has become indissolubly linked with the collectivist idea[ls] of social justice, solidarity, and comradeship. They are inborn in it [Russia], and it cannot survive a break on such a scale." Portraying the Communist Party of the RSFSR as the upholder of Russia's collectivist traditions and as the natural leader of Russia's patriots, Polozkov told his comrades that the new situation called for ideological and practical adjustments: The nature of recent events forces us to conclude that our recent assessment of the situation as a confrontation between the advocates of the socialist choice and the restoration of capitalism, while remaining true on the whole, no longer fully expresses the essence of our present moment. We must recognize profoundly for ourselves, and explain it and din it into the minds and hearts of every citizen, that what is at stake is the fate of the Fatherland and whether its thousand-year history will continue.,,57

For Polozkov, it was not so much the dream of building the communist utopia that was at stake but the survival of Russia and its putatively unique social and political traditions. This speech, delivered by the highest-ranking figure in the USSR's largest republican Communist Party, was the ultimate recognition of the failure of orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology to rally the Russian people around the Party in its time of crisis. As during the Great Patriotic War, the success of communist ideology now depended on its capacity to accommodate the un-orthodoxy of Russian patriotism. For the Russian Communists, the class struggle as the defining feature of human social relations was now subordinate to a higher cause: the struggle for the Fatherland. Another noteworthy ideological aspect of Polozkov's speech to the RCP Central Committee was the near absence of the ritual homages to the founder of Soviet communism himself, Vladimir II'ich Lenin. For the past year, Polozkov had been regularly assailing "radical" opponents who besmirched the name of Lenin and the socialist principles for which he struggled his entire life. During this speech, however, Lenin's name was invoked only toward the end, and even then not as the wise and daring leader of the world's first successful (ostensibly) proletarian uprising or even as the founder of the world's first communist state, but as the man "who proposed and implemented the only possible program for saving Russia from the national catastrophe into which it had been plunged by its talentless rulers."s8 Seen from this perspective, Lenin was less the founder of a new civilization than the restorer of Russian power-a patriot who protected Russia from the Western barbarians and safeguarded the country's ancient traditions.

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"For a Great, United Russia" During the winter of 1990-1991, a period when Gorbachev had moved closer to the hardliners who urged him to use presidential power to establish order in the country (this is discussed in Chapter Eight), the RCP was at the height of its influence. As Yeltsin took an increasingly anticommunist and anti-imperial position in his struggle against the Union "center," the future of the USSR-and the leading position of Russians in it-was in doubt. It was during this period that the Russian nationalist tendencies in the RCP's leadership fully emerged from the shadows of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. "Our task," Polozkov told an RCP plenum in November, "is to direct the growing national self-awareness into a noble patriotic channel. To do everything within our power to ensure that the wounded dignity of the Russian people and of all Russians does not assume perverted forms."s9 It was at this time, in the autumn of 1990, that Polozkov began to make public calls for "a broad people's movement-a union of patriotic and democratic forces in the name of saving the Fatherland." Its aims would be "to defend civil peace in the republic and the country, to set up a shield against violence, destruction, and chaos, to establish real people's control over processes of social transformation, and not to allow the transition to the market [economy] behind the backs of the working people.,,60 Such pleas for action and unity were clearly intended to appeal to the imperialist, conservative wings of the Russian nationalist movement-Russians who identified Russia with the empire (rather than with just the RSFSR) and saw Russians as its rightful leaders. As previously noted, the locus of this movement had long been the Russian Writers' Union, whose leaders were making similar calls for patriotic unity. At a union plenum in March 1990, as the elections to the RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies were taking place, Aleksandr Prokhanov declared that its leaders no longer had time to write books; they were now engaged in purely political activities. Although the Patriotic Bloc he had helped organize for the parliamentary elections was, in Prokhanov's mind, "an embryo political party for national revival," it had failed to elect its candidates and quickly disintegrated. 61 Despite the national-patriots' humiliation at the polls, there was no denying that by this time the movement's core-the Russian branch of the country's most powerful and influential creative union-had transformed itself into what was essentially a political body, albeit one with shrinking resources. 62 Conversely, for the time being the matter of material resources was not the main problem for the Communist Party of the RSFSR; its shortcomings were less material than intellectual. The RCP leadership understood the value of the Writers' Union's articulate leaders-most significantly, national-patriots such as Aleksandr Prokhanov and Iurii Bondarev-in helping to realize the strategy of forming a broad-based coalition in opposition to perestroika, to the anti-communism of the Russian democrats, and to the republics' drive for independence.

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From the very beginning of the RCP's existence, its leaders, in particular Polozkov and Ziuganov, cultivated the Russian nationalist intellectuals. Just as Ligachev had made overtures to Russian nationalist writers during the cultural debates of the late 1980s, Polozkov likewise held numerous meetings with Russian nationalist writers and offered his encouragement and support for their "patriotic positions.,,63 Despite the writers' conflicted and contradictory feelings about the successes and failures of seventy years of Soviet communism, in the winter of 1990-1991 many rallied behind the Russian party and its leaders as perhaps the country's last, best hope. In the September 1990 issue of Nash sovremnennik, Aleksandr Prokhanov asserted that "The RCP and the patriotic movement need each other.,,64 He later recalled that many of his comrades in the patriotic movement, including of course a significant number of activists in the RSFSR Writers' Union, believed that over time the RCP would transform itself "from a Marxist party into a party of national interests.,,65 Showing their support for the Rep, the writers assembled at the Seventh Congress of the RSFSR Writers' Union in December 1990 greeted the guest appearance of Ivan Polozkov with a standing ovation. 66 Although far from all RCP supporters were satisfied with the work of Polozkov-some believing him to be too timid with Gorbachev, while others believed him to be too reactionary-many saw in him a symbol of resistance to perestroika and to the dissolution of the Union state. Gennadii Ziuganov, who had earlier begun attending meetings of the Russian Writers' Union, also spoke at the congress, where he called on his audience to support "a reasonable ideology of statehood.,,67 Under the circumstances it was imperative, he declared, to unite "all the healthy forces in the country"-including the workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia-into a "union of patriotic forces." It appears that this was the first time Ziuganov had publicly articulated his belief that Russian nationalist patriotism could serve as an ideological cohesive for the Soviet state. The process of national-patriotic consolidation was punctuated by the conclusion of a de facto alliance between the RCP and other "parties and movements for the socialist choice," made public in mid-February 1991 when twentynine patriotic organizations issued a joint declaration against the "fascist forces" [read: democrats and national separatists] who were coming to power throughout the Soviet Union. Under such conditions, the statement declared, it was time "for the consolidation of all patriotic and international forces of the country." The declaration was signed by the Soiuz faction of the USSR CPD (discussed in Chapter Eight), the RCP, the Interfronts of the USSR, the Rossiia deputies' club, various branches of the OFT, the Marxist Platform of the CPSU, the Communist Initiative Movement (DKI), Edinstvo (Unity), the Leningrad branch of Otechestvo, and numerous other, often overlapping, organizations. 68 This declaration foreshadowed one of the most striking developments in the national-patriots' attempt to form a political alliance. At the end of February 1991, a conference of patriots called "For a Great, United Russia!" was held in

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the October Hall of Moscow's House of Unions. Ziuganov, the RCP leader responsible for ideology and interaction with public organizations and movements, organized the conference and sat on its presidium together with Aleksandr Prokhanov, the quasi-fascist Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii, representatives of the "Anti-Zionist Committee," the radical DKI, the society "Lenin and Fatherland," and members of the Central Committees of the CPSU and RCP. Other representatives included former Russian nationalist dissident Vladimir Osipov, Soiuz deputy Nikolai Petrushenko, the "anti-Zionist" publicist Aleksandr Romanenko, RSFSR Writers' Union First Secretary (since the previous December) Iurii Bondarev, and future coup plotters Vasilii Starodubtsev and Valentin Varennikov. Indeed, the conference roster was a virtual "Who's Who?" of the Russian patriotic movement, ranging from Marxists to monarchists, from Stalinists to neo-Slavophiles. Addressing the conference, Prokhanov summed up the one common concern that brought these patriots together at the House of Unions: they assembled "not for the defense of people's power, or of the army or of individual monuments or even culture. We came here to save a disintegrating thousand-year state.,,69 As national chauvinist speakers peppered their orations with numerous references to the "Zionocracy," the Communist participants who sat with them spoke about the unification of "red" and "white" ideas. 70 The keynote speaker was Ivan Polozkov, now at the peak of his influence among the Russian nationalist-conservatives who had placed their hopes in the RCP. 71 Well aware of the prestige of the Russian Orthodox Church within nationalist circles, Polozkov extended an olive branch to it, asserting that his party was "prepared to collaborate with the traditional confessions of Russia." Portraying the RCP as a defender of the rights of Russians living outside the RSFSR, he also discussed the plight of Russians living in the Baltics, where the natives "openly discriminate against the Russian-speaking population." In some places Russians are becoming superfluous people in their own country. Particularly tragic is the fate of millions of Russians living not in the RSFSR but in the other union republics. These "occupiers"-descendants of Russians who have lived on these lands for decades and even centuries-are being driven out of the Baltic region, Transcaucasus, Moldova, and Central Asia. We already have 600,000 Russian-speaking refugees-our brothers and sisters forced to move to their historical motherland because of the raging of nationalism.72 It was an unusual speech from the Russian republic's highest-ranking

Communist official. Never once mentioning the word "communism" or invoking the hallowed (or, in some circles, reviled) name of Lenin, Polozkov pleaded with his audience to overcome the antagonisms that had divided Russians since the October Revolution. While the Communists want to restore stability and order, the "democrats," he said, were using the mass media to propagate the idea

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that the Communist Party wants to return the country to totalitarian rule. But this, of course, was one of their many lies, Polozkov insisted. All who love Russia, he said, must unite against these "anti-national and anti-state forces" that were coming to power under the guise of "democracy." The most significant achievement of the patriots' conference was the establishment of the Coordinating Council of Patriotic Movements (later renamed the Coordinating Council of Popular-Patriotic Forces) led by Ziuganov, Prokhanov, and the nationalist publicist Eduard Volodin, who chaired it. An umbrella organization that quickly claimed the allegiance of nearly forty (often overlapping) groups and associations, its goal was to unite all Russian national-patriotic forces, regardless of their ideological or political dispositions, in the name of the struggle for the preservation of Russian statehood. 73 Attempting to orchestrate the various "red," "white," and "brown" groupings, the Coordinating Council was a direct precursor to the National Salvation Front (FNS) that was founded in the autumn of 1992.74 Like the FNS in 1992-1993, the short-lived Coordinating Council of Patriotic Movements attempted to bring together former ideological foes under the banner of the "Russian idea"-a line of thought which, as has already been noted, advocates a specifically Russian path of development different from that ofthe West. The Coordinating Council's appeal "To the Peoples of Russia," issued on the day of the conference, emphasized this theme of reconciliation: We, patriots of our land, should forget our differences and dissimilarities, our grievances and pains, our inflictions upon each other on the path to our great and long-suffering historical fate. We must pardon the injustices, because we have one ideal-Russia; we have one belief-in her hidden destiny. Only unity in the face of Russian (rossiiskoi) misfortune and brotherhood in this time of Russian (rossiiskikh) adversity can save the Motherland and her people and preserve the wholeness of the Union. 75

To lead this movement, the Coordinating Council declared in another document from the conference, Russia's patriots looked to the Communist Party of the RSFSR. "We appeal to the Communist Party of Russia, the only powerful structure that has not yet been destroyed, inside which the universal Russian ideal breathes. It is time for her to take leave of her political drowsiness and create an ideology of national salvation ....,,76 The message was clear: Patriots of Russia, Unite! It was indeed a far cry from the traditional communist slogans concerning the unity of the international working classes. Commenting on these declarations some time later, sociologist Liah Greenfeld aptly remarked that the bloc's Communist leaders "consider the demise of their own ideology so unimportant as not to be worth mentioning.,,77 Indeed, it appeared that the leaders of the RCP, no less than the reform wing of the parent party, had lost faith in the ability of Marxism-Leninism either to stimulate the Russian masses or to act as a guide for the creation of the communist utopia.

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Although Marxist-Leninists throughout the communist world were learning that when it came to choosing between national and class loyalties it was the former that offered more promising prospects, some in the Russian nationalist movement were uncomfortable with their alliance with the apparatchiki. Vladimir Bondarenko, Prokhanov's deputy at Den', believed that the future lay not with the Communists but with the army, "the only force capable of saving Russia." With the army in control, the splintering of the USSR could be halted and the economic reforms reversed. "The army," he wrote in July 1991, "has always been on the side of the State .... If the Party leadership is destroying the State, [then] the army has no vested interest in that leadership." Therefore, he asserted, the patriotic movement would be better off without the Communists. "No matter how good the current leaders of the RCP are," Bondarenko concluded, "the initials themselves are enough to put people off. We must say goodbye to National Bolshevism."78 While agreeing with Bondarenko that the army was the country's best hope, Aleksandr Prokhanov was more optimistic about the RCP's potential for playing a transitional role in the transformation of Russia from a communist system to a national-imperial one. As he told Ziuganov in an interview published in Den' several months after the August coup, "The patriotic movement hoped that the RCP, if it had enough time, would transform itself from a Marxist party into a party of national interests.,,79 Time, however, was a luxury it did not have, as 1991 was the year of Yeltsin, who by then was bent on destroying communism--even ifhe had only the vaguest notions about what would replace it. While the RCP never was able to complete the transformation, as Prokhanov envisioned, from "a Marxist party into a party of national interests," as a political force communism managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union to reemerge as one of the strongest political forces in Yeltsin' s Russia. As the RCP's successor and Yeltsin's most significant opponent throughout the 1990s, the Ziuganov-led Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) spoke the language of both Marx and Berdiaev, of Lenin and Dostoevsky, of class interests and of patriotism. Since the more radical and fundamentalist Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations failed to capitalize on the miserable conditions endured by most Russians in the 1990s and thus gained little popular support during the Yeltsin decade, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that communism, in the form of Ziuganov's CPRF, endured as a political force in Russia only, or at least largely, because it embraced Russian nationalist positions as it abandoned much of ideology that it had guarded for more than seventy years.

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Notes I. In late 1989, Viacheslav Shostakovskii, soon to be a leader of the Democratic Platfonn, identified no fewer than eight "tendencies" in the Party. See Stephen White, "Background to the XXVIII Congress," in Rees, 20. 2. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 June 1990, 3, 6. 3. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 22 June 1990, 3. 4. E.A. Rees, "Nationalities Policy," in Rees, 98. 5. Gorbachev backed Vladimir Ivashko, a Ukrainian, arguing that the post ought to go to a non-Russian. 776 Communists voted for Ligachev and 3,642 against. See Gorbachev (1996), 368-369. Ligachev, Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, and Ryzhkov subsequently left the Politburo and were replaced by a group of political unknowns-a group that Gorbachev could perhaps more easily ignore. Although Ligachev was stripped of his Party posts in September, he remained active in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies as a member of the pro-empire Soiuz faction. 6. Gorbachev (1996), 369. 7. Polozkov's political biography during the first years of perestroika is covered in Jonathan Harris, "Adrift in Turbulent Seas: The Political Struggles of Ivan Kuz'mich Polozkov," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1993), 3-17. 8. Robert G. Kaiser (1991), 136. 9. Although dominated by Russians, who made up about 86 percent of the population in 1989, there were 100 distinct national groups represented among the Krasnodar krai's population of five million. John Webb, "Krasnodar: A Case Study of the Rural Factor in Russian Politics," Journal o/Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (1994): 252. 10. During the Brezhnev era Krasnodar had a reputation for hosting an extensive partymafia network, and immediately after coming to power in 1985 Gorbachev sent V.I. Razumovskii, a Krasnodar native, to clean up the Party organization there. Reportedly, up to 98 percent of Krasnodar Komsomol secretaries were replaced in this purge. Razumovskii was subsequently replaced by Polozkov as first secretary of the kraikom. Webb, 232-233. II. Sovetskaia Kuban ',26 June 1990, quoted in Webb, 233. 12. See interview with Polozkov in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 2 March 1990, 15. 13.Webb,233-234. 14. Rahr, "Gorbachev and the Russian Party Buro," 2. 15. Hahn (2002), 130. 16. Many of the Meskhetian Turks, identified by Stalin as a disloyal nation, had been deported from the Georgian SSR during World War II and settled in the Uzbek SSR. Ethnic conflict in Uzbekistan, however, drove approximately 90,000 Meskhetian Turks from their homes beginning in 1989; by the end of 1990 about 13,000 had settled in the Krasnodar territory in the RSFSR. 17. R.G. Kaiser (1991),339. Despite her endorsement, Polozkov wisely kept his distance from Nina Andreeva. See Pravda, 24 June 1990, 2.

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18. Communists were leaving the party at an alanning rate. The RCP leadership admitted that 162,750 members (including 90,000 workers) quit in July 1990, amounting to about 1.5 percent of the CPSU members in the republic. Polozkov's opponents claimed that many of those who turned in their party cards did so because of his election as party leader. Associated Press, 19 August 1990; TASS, 4 September 1990. 19. United Press International, 23 June 1990. 20. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 August 1990, 1-2. 21. Party ideologist Gennadii Ziuganov compared Russia's rush toward capitalism with the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s. Interview with Ziuganov in So vetskaia Rossiia, 7 October 1990, I. 22. Materialy uchreditel'nogo s 'ezda kommunisticheskoi partii RSFSR (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 124. 23. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991,63. 24. The Secretariat of the RSFSR Writers' Union unambiguously supported the creation of a Communist Party for the Russian republic. See its address "To the People and Deputies of Russia!" in Literaturnaia Rossiia, I June 1990, 2. 25. Quoted in Michael Hughes, "The Never-Ending Story: Russian Nationalism, National Communism and Opposition to Reform in the USSR and Russia," The Journal of Communist Studies 9, no. 2 (1993): 5 I. Pamial' ideologist Aleksandr Kulakov said in an interview that he regarded the Russian Communist Party "positively": "We support it as a government structure, although we understand that only a few schizophrenics speak seriously about communism today. There are no communists in the RSFSR CPo ... I do not consider Polozkov to be ideal. But of all the existing evils, he, perhaps, is the least." Moscow News, 2-9 September 1990,3. 26. Aleksandr Prokhanov, "Ideologiia vyzhivaniia," Nash sovremennik 9 (September 1990): 8. 27. See Sovetskaia Rossiia, 5 September 1990,2-3. 28. See Odom, 107-108; See Stephen Foye, "Maintaining the Union: The CPSU and the Soviet Armed Forces," Report on the USSR, 24 May 1991, 1-8. 29. Soviet Minister of Defense (and future coup plotter) Drnitrii Yazov was a particularly vocal critic of the Party's liberals, whom he accused of taking advantage of the country's difficulties to split the Party, liquidate the socialist system, and destroy the Union state. Although appointed to his post by Gorbachev because he was seen as an "outsider" who would be able to sell perestroika to the military, Yazov quickly came under the influence of the dominant environment in the military establishment. By 1989 military journals such as Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (Journal of Military History) appeared to be downplaying Marxism-Leninism in favor of a Russian nationalist perspective--a view with which Yazov clearly sympathized. At the time it was well known that he enjoyed close ties with the reactionary leadership of the Russian Writers' Union and with Prokhanov in particular, whose controversial new newspaper Den' (The Day) was secretly housed in a military installation. 30. Krasnaia zvezda, 4 September 1990, I. 3 I. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 22 February 1991, 2. 32. This figure is cited in Odom, 45. Also see Nahaylo and Swoboda, 336. 33. Although I have not examined the military journals of that period, Yitzhak Brudny and Stephen Carter have pointed out that several of the major journals published by the Main Political Administration, such as Sovetskii voin, had begun taking on a Russian

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nationalist tone as early as 1987. By 1989-1990 the journals Kommunist voruzhennykh and Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal had also gone in this direction. Most notable was a series of essays published in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal by Karem Rash in 1989 (and later reprinted in abridged form in Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik) that promoted the military as the guardian of Russia's national and imperial traditions while criticizing the policies of glasnost and perestroika. By this time prominent Russian nationalist journals and newspapers such as Nash sovremennik, Molodaia gvardiia, and Literaturnaia Rossiia had begun to rally in defense of the military and its policies. See Brudny, 232-234; Stephen Carter, "The Ideology of the Soviet Military," Radio Liberty Research, 27 August 1991; Mikhail Tsypkin, "Karem Rash: An Ideologue of Military Power," Radio Liberty Research, 2 August 1990, 8-11. 34. With considerable chutzpah, Polozkov blamed others for the recent "politicization of the religious sphere," and called upon political parties "to refrain from exploiting the moral prestige of religion for their own interests." Pravda, 5 September 1990, translated in FBIS-SO V, 7 September 1990, 56. 35. TASS, I July 1990. 36. Molodaia gvardiia 2 (February 1991): 17. 37. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 6 March 1991,61-63. 38. By 1990 Russian Orthodox believers had begun to experience renewed tensions with other confessions-in particular with Uniates (Eastern Rite Catholics) who had recently begun seizing churches in western Ukraine. 39. Official Kremlin International News Broadcast, 6 August 1990; Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 October 1990, 9. Letters written by Russians who complained of discriminatory treatment in the republics in which they lived were published in Izvestiia TsK KPSS 1 (1991): 100-105. However, these should necessarily not be taken as representative. In his book on the Russian diaspora communities, Piil Kolsto points out that many Russians living in the Baltic republics-especially the well-integrated Russian minority in Lithuania-actually sided with the native popular fronts and separatists. See Kolsto, 116-117, 140. 40. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 November 1990, 3. 41. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 19 January 1991, cited in Dunlop, "Russia: Confronting a Loss of Empire," 56. 42. For example, following the KGB debacle in Vilnius in January 1991, the RCP criticized Yeltsin for failing to meet with the Russian-speaking populations of Lithuania and for supporting the positions of Sajudis leader Vytautas Landsbergis. See the RCP Politburo's statement in Nezavisimaia gazeta, 22 January 1991,3. 43. According to statistics compiled by Aleksandr Susokolov, from 1988 to 1990 the Krasnodar territory received some 100,000 Russian migrants. Aleksandr Susokolov, "Russian Refugees and Migrants in Russia" in Shlapentokh, et al. (1994), 185. 44. Otechestvo founder Apollon Kuz'min, for example, in early 1989 wrote that "Russia hating" and "anti-Soviet activity" were the same thing and that the nationalist movements in the Baltic had committed both sins. Brudny, 221. 45. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 20 April 1991, 3. 46. From Polozkov's speech at the Moscow conference of patriots on 27 February 1991. Sovetskaia Rossiia, I March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 6 March 1991,57-58. 47. Washington Post, 2 June 1996, AI.

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48. Ziuganov also said of the Brezhnev period, "In my hometown, only two people were arrested at that time, and they were both criminals. One must examine very carefully who was sent to the gulag and why." Washington Post, 2 June 1996, A I. 49. KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov entertained the same theory, and in particular saw Aleksandr Yakovlev, who had studied at Columbia University, as one of the "agents of influence" who helped bring down the Soviet Union. See his memoir, Lichnoe delo (Moscow: Olimp, 1996), vol. 1,294-298. 50. Sovetskaia Rossiia became the official newspaper of the RCP on 15 October 1990, and it remained under the stewardship of Valentin Chikin, who was made an RCP Politburo member. 51. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 5 March 1991, 1,3. 52. See Literaturnaia Rossiia, 21 December 1990, 13; Alexander Yanov, Posle El'tsina:" Veimarskaia" Rossiia (Moscow: Moskovskaia gorodskaia tipografiia A.S. Pushkina, 1995), 167-169. 53. Jeremy Lester, "Overdosing on Nationalism: Gennadii Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation," New Left Review 221 (1997),38. 54. Quoted in Yanov (1995), 169. 55. Although Gorbachev had begun to come around to the idea that Russian and Soviet history ran more or less in one "single stream," he nevertheless held the view that despite the overall correctness of the Soviet path of development, seventy years of communism had cut Russia off from world civilization and that the country now needed to be reintegrated into the world system that the Party had rejected in 1917. 56. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991,63. 57. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991,61. 58. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991, 70. 59. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 November 1990,1-3. 60. Pravda, 15 December 1990, 2. 61. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 16 March 1990, 6. 62. After failing in their bid to get nationalist candidates elected to the RSFSR CPD, in June 1990 its leaders founded "Edinenie" ("Unity"), whose basic goal was, according to its program, "to sow the feeling of PATRIOTISM and a blood tie to the Russian soil, people, and spiritual world." Edinenie's president was Iurii Bondarev, and its seventymember presidium included Vasilii Belov, Petr Proskurin, Stanislav Kuniaev, and Aleksandr Prokhanov. See Krasnaia zvezda, 17 June 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 29 June 1990, 112; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 26 October 1990, 6; and John B. Dunlop, "New National Bolshevik Organization Formed," Report on the USSR, 17 August 1990, 7-9. 63. For example, Polozkov expressed support for the famous "Letter of the Writers of Russia," signed by seventy-four writers of a national-patriotic orientation and published in Literaturnaia Rossiia in March 1990. (See Chapter Five, pp. 162-163.) A few days later Polozkov sent a congratulatory telegram to the Russian Writers' Union seventh plenum in which he said that he was glad to see like-minded people. He also held a meeting with Russian writers just after the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Conference in July. The telegram appears in Literaturnaia Rossiia, 13 March 1990, 2. Also see Sovetskaia Rossiia, 4 August 1990,2; Moscow television, 12 October 1990, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 October 1990,44. 64. Aleksandr Prokhanov, "Ideologiia vyzhivaniia," Nash sovremennik 9 (September 1990): 8.

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65. Gennadii Ziuganov, Drama vlasti: Stranitsy politicheskoi avtobiografii (Moscow: Paleia, 1993), 53. 66. Gennadii Ziuganov and Valentin Kuptsov were among the Russian Communists who joined Polozkov in attendance at the writers' congress. Unsurprisingly, the patriots dominated this congress, which, according to one report, "demonstrated a total unity of opinion on the subject of 'the Army and the state.'" As at the last congress of the Russian Writers' Union, "the left rarely raised their voice, while the centrists were often not even aIJowed to speak." Observers described this meeting, which was held in an army theater, as being more like a political rally than a Writers' Union meeting. /zvestiia, 16 December 1990, translated in Russian Press Digest, December 16, 1990; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 21 December 1990, 13. 67. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 16 November 1990, 8. 68. Krasnaia zvezda, 16 February 1991,2. 69. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2 March 1991,2. 70. A.N. Tarasov, G. Iu. Cherkasov, T.V. Shavshukova, Levye v Rossii: Ot umerennykh do ekstremistov (Moscow: Panorama, 1997), 142. 71. Ironically, this speech by leader of the Communist Party of the RSFSR was followed by one from a representative ofthe Union of Descendants of the Russian Nobility. 72. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 28 February 1991, 2. Although Polozkov exaggerated the plight of the Russian refugees, he was largely correct. According to Robert J. Kaiser, between 1989 and 1991 the net migration from the Central Asian republics was 868,000 people, of whom approximately 288,200, or one-third, were Russians. During this period a further 197,000 Russians left the republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaidzhan. (It should be pointed out that the trend of Russian out-migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus had been taking place since the 1970s, occurring at the same time as natives returned to their homelands in the these republics, but was accelerated during 1989-1991 and continued after the USSR's collapse.) The bleeding was lightest in the Baltic republics, from which about 28,000 Russians migrated during this period. Kaiser (1994), 167, 181-182. 73. TASS, 18 April 1991. 74. The FNS participated in the ill-fated armed insurrection in Moscow that centered around the White House in the autumn of 1993. 75. Berezovskii, et aI., Book 5, pp. 3-4. Also see Veteran 13 (March 1991): 5. A separate resolution, "To the Peoples of the Soviet Union," stressed the longstanding ties between ethnic Russians and all the other peoples of the country. Over the centuries, "[ w]e have created a combined family, regardless of nationality, having only love and understanding for our neighbors." Having fought together in the Great Patriotic War in defense of the Motherland, together the peoples of the Soviet Union revived the national and economy and built a new life. "Thousands of Russians and people of other nationalities followed the bidding of their hearts and went to the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, and the Baltic region with the single aim of helping their brothers rebuild settlements out of the ashes and ruins of a city." More recently, however, the situation has become such that "Russians (russkie) and other peoples are becoming unwanted" and their rights as people are violated in their very own state. All of the peoples of the Soviet Union must overcome the "impatience" that has appeared in recent years and put an end to the "feelings of distrust, misunderstanding, and hatred towards the peoples of other nationalities that manifest themselves from time to time."Berezovskii, et aI., Book 5, p. 5.

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76. Berezovskii, et aI., Book 5, p. 6. 77. Liah Greenfeld, Review of Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution, by Jacob L. Talmon, in History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993): 340. 78. Den " 14-20 July 1991, quoted in Devlin (1999), 110. 79. Den', 17-23 November 1991,3.

8 A Word to the People "I glanced into the Large Hall. There were a great many uniforms and on the stage army marshals led by the Minister of Defence, Yazov himself, were sitting in the presidium among the secretaries of the Writers Union. The first secretary of the Union ... Vladimir Karpov was speaking: 'Why do you allow yourselves to take orders from a man in a suit? We suffered incalculable losses in 1941 because our army was then commanded by a civilian, by Stalin. Today, fifty years later, the situation is the same. The Fatherland is in Danger!' The applause was thunderous. The army had found moral support among the writers."

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Vitalii Shentalinskii, Arrested Voices, 1996

"For me Gorbachev is a frightening, demonized, terrible figure, who, reigning on the Russian throne for more than six years, left it in ruins, a wasteland. He instills hatred in me. He is a medium through which forces found beyond the USSR-in the West, in the [United] States-managed to exert their influence on this huge country and thus brilliantly succeed, without the use of nuclear means, in destroying her." - Aleksandr Prokhanov, 1993

Chapter Eight discusses the political struggles that took place in the USSR during the months that led up to the failed coup attempt. It focuses in particular on the alliance of "empire-savers"-hardliners in the RCP, nationalistconservatives in the Soviet legislature, and the heads of the power ministrieswho tried to convince Gorbachev to stop by force the centrifugal forces that threatened to destroy the Soviet Union. Previous chapters have shown that by the middle of 1990, Gorbachev, instead of leading the Soviet reform process as he had done during most of his first five years in power, found himself wedged between two broad visions of the future of Russia then contending for power and influence. On one side were the liberal democrats of the Russian legislature who struggled for republican sovereignty against the "center" in order, they claimed, to implement democratic 237

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and market-oriented reforms. On the other side stood the leadership of Communist Party of the RSFSR and its allies in the patriotic movement, for whom the maintenance of a unified Soviet state under Russian control took precedence over everything. Caught between these two visions was Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who had staked out a middle ground as a moderate reformer who believed that the Union must be preserved while satisfying the aspirations of its constituent nationalities. Yet in the months after the acrimonious Twenty-Eighth Party Congress, it could no longer be doubted that what was once unthinkable had become a reality: the Soviet Union was unraveling. The process had begun in earnest a few weeks earlier, on 12 June 1990, when the RSFSR parliament declared the republic's sovereignty within the USSR. By October the other republics had followed suit, with the Baltic republics, which had made their intentions clear many months earlier, going so far as to declare their independence from the USSR. Further complicating the situation were the federal structures of the Russian and Georgian republics, where the leaders of several "autonomous" units began to claim sovereign rights. As the head of the Soviet state, it must have been agonizing to witness the breakup of an extremely troubled country whose security he had been entrusted with maintaining; yet sanctioning its dissolution was as out of the question as the application of brute force to maintain it. Thus Gorbachev arrived at a compromise solution: to create a new Union Treaty that would reconcile these competing interests--one that granted elements of sovereignty while retaining central control. To the leaders of the nine Union republics who negotiated with Gorbachev in the spring of 1991, a solution that envisioned both stronger republics and a stronger center was unworkable; they called for a looser federation of sovereign republics. However, to its opponents-the "empire-savers"-the resulting new Union Treaty, set to be signed in August, was tantamount to dismantling the Union. In the opinion of his harshest critics, Gorbachev was not only willing to sacrifice socialism and the centralized structures of the Soviet Union, but was giving away historically Russian lands that had been gathered over centuries. The manifesto "A Word to the People," published in July, gave vent to their frustration: "It is time to shake off our torpor and together as a nation seek a solution to the present impasse," its authors pleaded. "Russia, our only and beloved! She calls for help.") Among the manifesto's twelve signatories were one of the top leaders of the RCP, three of the country's leading nationalist writers, and two Soviet generals. All were Russians and self-styled "patriots," convinced that the centrifugal processes that were leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union must be halted and reversed; one month later, as a new Union Treaty was set to be signed, several of these patriots would be arrested as conspirators in an anti-Gorbachev coup.

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Soiuz Chapter Seven discussed how the dominant segment of the RCP leadership came to embrace the ideology of Russian national communism in its efforts to consolidate popular support in the RSFSR for a rollback of perestroika and the preservation of a great state built and led by the Russian people. As the RCP conducted its struggle against the Yeltsin government and the democraticminded deputies of the Russian parliament,2 another group of "statists"-that is, supporters of a strong, centralized state under Moscow's control--operated at the all-Union level. Soiuz ("Union"), a faction in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, stood foremost for a powerful and united Soviet Union with Russian as the official language of the entire country. Although a CPSU member since 1974, by the end of the 1980s Soiuz leader Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Alksnis (b. 1950), like many Soviet citizens, had come to harbor doubts about the communist utopia. Alksnis, a people's deputy from a Soviet military base in Latvia, considered himself to be neither a socialist nor a nationalist. A Latvian born in Siberia, Alksnis was a direct product of Soviet nationalities policy: the Russian-speaking Alksnis was, if such a creature truly existed, homo soveticus. His patriotism was based on what he believed to be the "state interests" of the Soviet Union, rather than on any uniquely Russian claim to empire. Asserting that his parliamentary faction was "free of ideology," Alksnis in fact claimed to oppose the national idea altogether. Once a supporter of the Latvian Popular Front, he abandoned it when it began to take a nationalist position and to advocate Latvian independence. Unchecked nationalism, in Alksnis's view, had "led to the gross violation of the elementary rights of the nonindigenous, above all Russian-speaking population" and racial discrimination in the republics. 3 His defense of communism-when he bothered to defend itwas based less on ideological conviction than on his view of communism as a unifying principle with which to oppose separatism in the USSR.4 The Soiuz faction he headed had its origins in the Russian Deputies' Club (RDC) within the USSR CPD. As noted in Chapter Five, the RDC had been organized in autumn 1989 in order to unite the greater part of the conservative deputies from Russia in defense of Russian privileges in the USSR. The excessive nationalism of its founders, who were tied to the Tiumen' branch of Otechestvo, found little success in the RDC, and by the end of the year the club was swallowed up by the "Rossiia" club. In Rossiia, headed by Veniamin Yarin (also of the United Workers" Front and later a member of Gorbachev's ill-fated Presidential Council), the nationalists took a subordinate position to the "Soviet patriots," who tended to be more ideologically orthodox. The Rossiia club, in tum, was dissolved into the Soiuz group during the first half of 1990. Although only a handful of deputies associated themselves with the faction at its founding at the end of 1989, by 1 December 1990, when it held its constituent congress, Soiuz claimed 350 deputies in the USSR CPD, and as many as

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600 by the following spring, all united around the idea of maintaining the Union state in its present configuration. 5 At its core were the imperialist circles connected with the military-industrial complex, the conservative section of the Party apparat, and the Russian national-patriots. The aims of Soiuz, according to historian Aleksei Kiva (writing in May 1991-a period when the faction's influence had already begun to decline), amounted to "a coup d'etat" that would overturn many of the political reforms achieved during the previous two years. With Stalinist communism utterly discredited, Kiva claimed, the Soiuz deputies wanted a return to the "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Spirit" of the reign of Tsar Nicholas 1. 6 While this was an exaggeration, it is accurate to say that Alksnis and the core of Soiuz represented a "Soviet imperialist" variant of traditional Russian great-power nationalism (derzhavnost'): they were united by a common desire to return to the great-power status enjoyed by the USSR in Brezhnev's time-a time when the country also seemed to enjoy a certain social peace under the rule of its overwhelmingly Russian leadership. The most important features of Soiuz's program were its support for the imposition of authoritarian rule in the USSR and for a crackdown on separatist movements-particularly in the Baltics, where Alksnis predicted the outbreak of civil war if the Army did not soon intervene. 7 For a time, the leaders of Soiuz acknowledged the need for a new Union Treaty, but not in the form proposed by Gorbachev's circle, according to which some powers hitherto exercised by the center would be delegated to the republics. What sort of constitutional changes they had in mind was unclear. What was clear was Soiuz's authoritarian, and to some extent Russian nationalist-imperialist, tendencies. By early 1991, Alksnis, like the RCP leadership, began to speak of creating a national salvation committee for the USSR, similar to the ones that were created in the Baltics. 8 While the committee he envisioned would be dedicated to preserving the Union, he made it clear that it would be "one not [my italics] designed to save socialism, like ... Polozkov wants." In Alksnis's imagination such a salvation committee would unite people with diametrically opposed views, from Communists to democrats to monarchists. "The next step," Alksnis told an interviewer in February, "is to institute a state of emergency all over the country. To ban all political parties and movements, the Communist Party included." Only then, with the disorder brought to an end and the authorities firmly in control, could a market economy and a multiparty democratic system take root. 9 As the democratic forces surged in 1990 and 1991 throughout the USSR, and in Russia in particular, RCP leaders Ivan Polozkov and Gennadii Ziuganov believed Alksnis and his parliamentary faction to be among the remaining "healthy forces" in Soviet society and eagerly sought cooperation with the "black colonels" who called for order in the country. "These are honest people," Polozkov told the RCP's Central Committee, "dedicated to socialism and their motherland, who feel the economic and political upheavals deeply and react keenly to the reactionaries' [read: democrats'] brazen actions."JO Likewise, de-

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spite his calls for getting rid of all political parties, Alksnis occasionally voiced his support for the RCP, urging it to "shake off its grogginess" and pursue its line more forcefully. Upon the Russian Communists' ability effectively to defend its interests depend "the hopes of the entire country."ll At the time some Soiuz deputies wanted to impose the RCP as the country's ruling body, with Ivan Polozkov replacing Gorbachev as its general secretary. A principal reason the RCP leadership courted Soiuz and the "black colonels" was the conviction that, whatever the feelings of the "great-power" nationalists about Marxist-Leninist ideology, the greater threat to the Communist Party and the country's territorial integrity was posed by the "democrats" in the Russian legislature and the national separatists in the republics. Internal Party memos illustrate the RCP leaders' concerns about the threat presented by the democrats. At the end of June 1990, just weeks after the RSFSR parliament approved its Declaration of Sovereignty, RCP secretary Valentin Kuptsov (b. 1937) distributed a note in which he warned that oppositional forces were preparing in the coming months to seize power in the country.12 Likewise, in an October 1990 report circulated to CPSU secretaries and the Presidential Council, Polozkov expressed alarm at the increasing influence of Democratic Russia, an umbrella organization that embraced many groups with a democratic orientation and supported YeItsin. Its founding meeting, Polozkov noted, was characterized by "vehement anticommunism" and the "personal ambitions [and] grudges" of its leaders, who he believed intended to form a single anticommunist bloc, seize power, and remove the CPSU from the political arena. This, Polozkov warned, would lead to "chaos, anarchy and civil war." To prevent this outcome, it was necessary to take "urgent measures.,,13 The willingness of the RCP leadership to work with non-Communist "patriotic" forces underscores the unusual and contradictory situation in which the party found itself throughout its short life: at the republican level, the RCP constituted an opposition to the Russian government, which consisted of people who didn't recognize its authority; at the Union level, however, the RCP was the largest body within the ruling CPSU. Therefore, as Polozkov and his colleagues understood the situation, while the CPSU was the ruling party in the Soviet Union, in the Russian republic the Communists were in the opposition. 14 Moreover, the RCP leadership also actively opposed the social democratic wing of the CPSU. Indeed, as Polozkov later testified in 1992 at the Russian Constitutional Court, the RCP Politburo considered itself free of the political line adopted at the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress; allegedly denied material support from the mother party, the RCP had its "own vision of perestroika.,,15 Believingcorrectly-that they worked under conditions of growing anticommunism, RCP leaders felt free to conduct their policies independently of the CPSU and to pursue contacts with reactionary associations such as Soiuz, Edinstvo, and Otchizna 16 (a nationalist veterans' organization to which Polozkov belonged)-

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groups whose political line more closely matched their own than did the social democratic wing of the CPSU. Despite Gorbachev's alleged failures to uphold socialist principles, the RCP still needed the conciliatory Soviet president to reign in the other republics. Russian Communist leaders such as Polozkov and Ziuganov despised Gorbachevin fact, each at one point or another called for him to step down from the Party leadership--but they recognized that their own appeal was limited only to conservatives and national-patriots in the RSFSR. Like the leaders of Soiuz, the RCP leadership hoped to push Gorbachev in the right direction and convince him that continued liberalization, radical economic reform, and political decentralization could lead only to catastrophe for the Union. Meanwhile, the "urgent measures" the RCP leadership pursued included solidifying an alliance with all the country's "healthy forces"-whatever their attitude toward communismwho shared the common goal of preserving a centralized and Russia-dominated empire.

Gorbachev's "Turn to the Right" Despite his apparent "victory" at the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress in the summer of 1990, at which he was confirmed at his post as CPSU general secretary (he was simultaneously Soviet president), Gorbachev was increasingly isolated, unwilling and unable to abandon the Party that he knew was betraying perestroika. "But you must understand me," he told his aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, "I can't let this lousy, rabid dog off the leash. If I do that, all this huge structure will be turned against me.,,17 The reform team that he once relied on, including Yakovlev, Vadim Medvedev, Georgii Shakhnazarov, and Cherniaev-the very people who were urging him to split the Party and abandon the conservativesfound themselves on the sidelines as power gradually slipped from the hands of the general secretary. Meanwhile, the chasm that separated Gorbachev from the liberal intellectuals-the same group whom he had spent the last five years cultivating-widened ever further as they increasingly defected to the camp of his enemy, Boris Yeltsin, whom many Moscow intellectuals had once disparaged for his populism and lack of polish. By trying to keep his feet planted firmly in both main camps, by the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev appeared to have lost the confidence of nearly everyoneexcept the committee that awarded him a Nobel Prize in October. The "500-Day Plan" of radical economic reform, which set the ambitious goal of introducing a market system so quickly that it would "deprive the economic bureaucrats of their most potent weapon, procrastination," sputtered, as Gorbachev, who showed little understanding of how a market economy actually functions, decided to merge a radical program drawn up by economist Stansislav Shatalin with a more moderate program put forward by the USSR government headed by

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Nikolai Ryzhkov. 18 Criticizing Gorbachev's compromise plan as unworkable, Yeltsin, who by now was determined to eliminate socialism in Russia, threatened to implement the market-oriented economic reforms in the RSFSR alone if necessary and to make "horizontal arrangements" with the other republics. Under these circumstances, on 9 September 1990 a majority of the deputies to the Yeltsin-Ied RSFSR Supreme Soviet supported a motion calling for the Ryzhkov government to resign. 19 It then adopted a resolution which flatly stated its belief that the USSR government was incapable of leading the country out of a crisis that saw the Soviet economy actually begin to contract in 1990; moreover, "it is not capable of fulfilling its constitutional duties to protect the sovereignty of the RSFSR; it has lost the trust of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet; [it] does not enjoy the support of the broad masses.,,20 All agreed that the country was indeed on the brink of catastrophe. As the Soviet economy began to contract in 1990 and breadlines appeared even in Moscow, hardliners in the Party leadership urged Gorbachev to take decisive action. 21 Leningrad First Secretary Boris Gidaspov complained at a 16 November meeting of the CPSU Politburo: "I go to work in the morning. I look at a hundred, a thousand people in line [for groceries]. I'm thinking that someone must be screwing in the store window-and in Leningrad a counterrevolution is beginning. And we are not saving the country." Among the failures Gorbachev was charged with at this meeting were his unwillingness to rely on the CPSU and his refusal to reassert the Party's control over the country. "You need to take power in your hands," Polozkov urged the general secretary, "To say tomorrow: I am taking power." Gorbachev: "What will happen with the government?" Polozkov: "It isn't necessary. It is out of control. And the apparat isn't necessary." [Nursultan] Nazarbaev [Kazakh SSR]: "The apparat isn't necessary. And it is necessary to curtail the ministries, nothing will happen there." Polozkov: "Your mistake-I say this to the circle of like-thinkers-is that they began perestroika with the breakdown of the fundamentalism on which the party was built ... " Gorbachev: "What are you saying?" Polozkov: "Your mistake is that today you don't lean on the party!" Gorbachev: "To me there is nothing left to lean on! There is no apparat. The government is on its own. There is no presidential structure. Only I am holding you up. Indeed I, as the President-we mustn't go into this, but in reality I have no supports left.

In Polozkov's mind there was only one viable solution left: a dictatorship that would put an end to the chaos that was enveloping the country and ripping the republics from their moorings.

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[I]n Russia a question is presented to me: Why doesn't our President grab something to put out the fire that is consuming the country? Today I met with veterans. They say: Let Mikhail Sergeevich act and we'll support him, let him establish order. You, Mikhail Sergeevich, need to say: 'Citizens, comrades, I am taking power myself, I will answer.' [You must] Disband the Presidential Council, which is laughed at. Create a committee from the best organizers of industry, so that the mechanism works. Plant different people in the mass media so as to curb the journalists. Take the best general or admiral so that he'll take into his hands the administrative organs. 22 Polozkov was far from alone in urging the president to take authoritarian measures to restore order in the country. Just three days earlier, Gorbachev had attended a meeting in Moscow with more than one thousand military men who were deputies either to the national legislatures or the USSR Supreme Soviet. As noted earlier, the Soviet armed forces, whose leaders were frustrated by Gorbachev's policy of military reform and the switch to a new defensive doctrine, were one of the most aggrieved sectors of Soviet society. Their frustration was exacerbated by the humiliation of withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the danger of separatism within the borders of the USSR, which left the armed forces effectively in the role of occupying troops in the midst of a hostile civilian population. In what may have been a stage-managed event at the Central House of the Soviet Army, Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov presented the president a long list of grievances as the deputies regaled the president with horror stories about ethnic strife in the republics. Like the deputies in Soiuz (to which many of these officers belonged), they urged the president to restore order. No longer able to afford to downplay their concerns or underestimate their power to bring perestroika to a swift end, Gorbachev promised the Soviet armed forces his unwavering support. Acutely aware of the power of the forces unleashed by his very own glasnost, daunted by the magnitude of economic restructuring, and genuinely alarmed at the prospect of losing the Union, in the autumn of 1990 the increasingly unpopular president did an about-face, over the course of a few weeks transforming himself from Gorbachev the Reformer into Gorbachev the Preserver. Saving the country from collapse, he seemed to conclude, required an authoritarian tum. Abandoning the "500 Days" program of economic reform and his collaborative efforts with Yeltsin's legislature in the RSFSR, during the winter of 1990-1991 the president worked more closely with the RCP leadership while acceding to the demands of the military and the Soiuz faction of the USSR CPD for the restoration of order?3 He agreed that under the circumstances, the stability of the country "requires extraordinary measures.,,24 If the Union was going to be preserved, for the moment Gorbachev needed its most stalwart defenders, even if their views on how best to save it and on what basis were at variance with his own.

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Personnel changes came quickly: at the beginning of December, Gorbachev replaced Vadim Bakatin, his relatively liberal Minister of Internal Affairs, with Boris Pugo, a former KGB chief in the Latvian republic. Pugo's deputy in the MVD was to be General Boris Gromov, a former commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. 25 By the end of the year Gennadii Yanaev was named to the new post of USSR Vice President, and in mid-January 1991 Nikolai Ryzhkov, incapacitated by a heart attack, was replaced by Valentin Pavlov as Prime Minister. (All three-Pugo, Yanaev, and Pavlov-were later implicated in the August coup.) Accompanying this personnel shift was a series oflaw-and-order decrees, issued by the Soviet president, leading to Eduard Shevardnadze's resignation in December 1990 and his warning of an impending dictatorship. While attempting to heal the breach with the armed forces and security services, Gorbachev's government also extended an olive branch to certain allUnion political organizations whose main concern was the territorial integrity of the USSR. One such organization was the Centrist Bloc, composed of more than twenty political groups, including Vladimir Zhirinovskii's Liberal Democratic Party, Valerii Skurlatov's Russian National Front, and Viktor Alksnis's Soiuz faction in the USSR CPD. 26 Although these groups represented diverse aims and constituencies, they were united in their aim of preserving the Union by relying on existing Army, KGB, and MVD structures. Casting themselves in the role of a "third force" between the government and the democratic opposition, the Centrists were, by their own admission, "closer to the Winter Palace than to the Smolnyi," which is to say that they stood in opposition to the CPSU but nevertheless recognized it. 27 Its leaders also blamed the Baltic republics, rather than the center, for exacerbating the country's ethnic tensions, and urged the introduction of direct presidential rule in the region. Centrist Bloc leaders were granted an audience with Ryzhkov on 31 October; a meeting with USSR Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatolii Luk'ianov followed the next day. Centrists claimed to have had informal meetings with the Soviet president as well. 28 Although little came of these meetings and in any event the Centrist Bloc soon collapsed, they nevertheless suggest that the Gorbachev government, and in particular the KGB, felt more comfortable with the "great-power" nationalists who claimed to stand for "law and order" than with the elected democrats in the Russian legislature--{)r that at the very least Gorbachev was still weighing his options. The KGB, Gorbachev's main source of information (along with aide Valerii Boldin, who gave him reviews of newspaper articles and other sources that the president no longer had time to read in the original), appeared to exert a great deal of influence on the Soviet president during this period. 29 Regular meetings with KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov encouraged Gorbachev's hostility toward the democrats while reassuring the president of the loyalty of the security services. Having surrounded himself with hardliners, Gorbachev appeared to have

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completely broken away from the team that had aided him in launching perestroika some years earlier.

Gorbachev vs. Lithuania In tackling the issue of national separatism, Gorbachev's main problem continued to be Lithuania. While Gorbachev claimed not to oppose the republic's exit from the Soviet Union in principle, from the very beginning he invariably stressed the need for a constitutional mechanism for the implementation of that right. "I am all for self-determination all the way to secession from the Soviet Union," Gorbachev told a group of Lithuanian intellectuals in January 1990. Then appearing to retreat (or unaware of the contradictory meaning of his words), he added that "Sovereignty is a natural desire, but within the framework of a federation.,,3o Following the election of the Sajudis-Ied government of the ardently anticommunist Vytautas Landsbergis two months later, Lithuania declared its independence. A long standoff between Moscow and the Lithuanian republic followed, during which the Kremlin imposed an embargo on the republic's imports of natural gas from the RSFSR in an effort to show Lithuania the futility of attempting to go it alone. As Lithuania continued to resist and Gorbachev made his famous "shift to the right," physical force was applied to bring order to the renegade republic. The trigger was a series of demonstrations in Vilnius in January 1991, followed by the rump Lithuanian Communist Party's proposal that Gorbachev introduce presidential rule in the republic. His patience nearing an end, Gorbachev ordered the Lithuanian government to restore constitutional order. The bungled KGB operation in Vilnius that followed was perhaps intended to accentuate the seriousness with which the Kremlin viewed the situation. 3 ! By issuing law-and-order decrees (including the sudden recall of fifty- and hundred-ruble notes in an effort to combat black marketeers, the introduction of military patrols in Soviet cities, and the granting of new powers to the KGB which permitted its agents to raid the premises of businesses suspected of financiaI wrongdoing), verbally attacking the democrats, and cracking down on the national separatists, Gorbachev's moves only fueled the ambitions of the leaders of the separatist republics and of Yeltsin in particular, who waged a battle against the center for the supremacy of Russian over Soviet laws. Yeltsin actively and demonstratively supported the cause of the Baltic republics (for which he was denounced by the RCP Politburo), signing bilateral treaties with them as "order" was being restored in Vilnius. In an effort to dissociate himself and the RSFSR from any Russian "imperial" tendencies-tendencies that he associated with the USSR "center"-Yeltsin appealed to Russian soldiers serving in the Baltic republics to consider carefully any orders "to act against legally created

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bodies, against the peaceful civilian population that is defending its democratic achievements.,,32 While urging the Russian-speaking populations of these republics to remain calm so that peaceful negotiations could take place, Yeltsin managed to anger Russian-language speakers in Estonia by excluding their representatives from the treaty negotiations and refusing to meet with them during a visit to Tallinn at the height of the crisis in Lithuania. 33 Concluding that Gorbachev, by failing to impose presidential rule, had betrayed them, and that they were being abandoned by Yeltsin and the RSFSR government, representatives of the Russian-speaking populations in the Baltic republics turned to the "empiresavers" in the RCP and the Soiuz deputies for protection. In the wake of the Lithuanian crisis, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev lost any remaining support he had formerly enjoyed in reformist and democratic circles. As he plotted his own eventual assumption of a Russian presidency, in a February 1991 television broadcast Yeltsin pointedly suggested that Gorbachev resign from his post as Soviet president. 34 Gorbachev's attempt to appease his hardline critics was only marginally more successful, as declarations of support from the RCP leadership and the Soiuz deputies alternated with continued criticism from the very same quarters. While Polozkov called for a return to the "class struggle," Oleg Shenin, a secretary in the RCP Central Committee, called for a purge of the Party's liberals and democrats. 35 Sovetskaia Rossiia, a newspaper that now belonged to the Russian Communist Party (and under Valentin Chikin's stewardship had become a megaphone for National Bolshevism), seemed to go out of its way to damage Gorbachev's (and Yeltsin's) credibility: it went so far as to publish an article urging Gorbachev's replacement by a national salvation committee. 36 While still immensely popular abroad-which was another source of domestic hostility to the Soviet leader, as he seemed to be more comfortable with foreign leaders than with Soviet ones-in Moscow Gorbachev had alienated virtually everyone. Refusing to ally with the democrats, many reformers who had once supported Gorbachev now defected to Yeltsin's camp. Furthermore, by not cracking down harder on the Russian democrats and the separatists in the republics the president had failed to convince his conservative critics that he was capable of establishing order. In the USSR Supreme Soviet, Soiuz deputies bemoaned the loss of Eastern Europe, were outraged by Germany's unification, and were astonished at Lithuania's continued intransigence-and for all of this they blamed Gorbachev, whose retirement some of their leaders demanded with increasing conviction. At the same time, despite their growing hostility to Gorbachev, his hardline critics could not afford to depose him: most were merely trying to pressure the president to pursue what they believed to be the correct course of action. Indeed, the "empire-savers" realized that Gorbachev, the centrist and conciliator, for the moment remained the key figure holding the republics together. Even his offer to give up his position as head of the CPSU in April 1991-no doubt a bluff-was overwhelmingly rejected by the CPSU Central

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Committee. Although many among their ranks by now truly despised and distrusted him, the conservatives who constituted much of the vast CPSU apparat needed Gorbachev, and for nearly six months he tried to appease them as he struggled to hold the Union together.

The Union Treaty and Referendum Although allied with the security services and Party hardliners during this period, the Soviet president did not abandon his attempt to restructure the Soviet Union along a new set of constitutional principles that he hoped would satisfy the non-Russian republics. These efforts, and the new Union Treaty they produced, are what ultimately triggered the coup attempt against him in August 1991. In the course of negotiating a new relationship between the "center" and the republics, Gorbachev was compelled to accept the principle of republican "sovereignty"-an idea first formulated at sessions of the USSR Congress of People's Deputies in 1989-as the republican legislatures made a series of declarations of sovereignty during the spring and summer of 1990. Concluding that there was now little choice but for Moscow to arrive at some sort of compromise with the aspirations of the Union republics, Gorbachev acknowledged that for a long time the USSR had been in fact not a federation but a unitary state; now, however, it was time "to revive Lenin's idea about a union of sovereign states, which is how he saw a federation.,,37 For the next year Gorbachev clung to "Leninist federalism" as the formula that would grant the republics limited sovereignty while leaving the "center" with the bulk of decision-making power. However, what Gorbachev had in mind was less a treaty negotiated by equals than a series of limited concessions from Moscow. Moreover, during the interregnum the political situation in the non-Russian republics had been completely transformed: by late 1989 a nationalist movement-Rukh-had been established in Ukraine; Azerbaidzhan and Georgia soon adopted their own laws on sovereignty; and by the spring of 1990 the Baltic republics were determined to achieve nothing less than full independence from the USSR. It was characteristically optimistic and perhaps naive to believe, as the Soviet president apparently did, that at this late stage a new Union Treaty would solve the country's nationality problems. Nevertheless, a draft treaty was published on 24 November I 990--a time when Gorbachev was in no mood for concessions to the separatists in the republics or the democrats in Russia. 38 Despite some innovations, including renaming the Union the "Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics," the draft treaty fell short of expectations. Reserving most powers to the center and containing no provisions for secession at all (although, interestingly, signatories could be expelled), the draft treaty immediately proved to be unacceptable to the leaders of the republics. Determined to resolve the prob-

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lem once and for all, Gorbachev invited the republic governments to negotiate another draft treaty that would further reduce the center's prerogatives and give still more power to the republics. The "empire-savers" saw this as a sign of weakness on Gorbachev's part-that by negotiating with the republics the president was only encouraging them to up their demands. Most vocal were the Soiuz deputies, a large proportion of whom opposed any concessions to nationalist forces in the republics that might weaken the grip of the center. In an attempt to legitimize the formulation of a new Union Treaty Gorbachev planned an all-Union referendum on the matter, to be held in March 1991. Certain that this would yield an affirmative answer to the question of preserving the USSR "as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics," the Soviet president believed that this referendum would give him a popular mandate to revise on a negotiated basis the treaty that had bound the Union republics together for nearly seventy years. While expressing his willingness to negotiate the matter, he nevertheless sometimes sounded much like the hardliners with whom he was allied that winter. In a television speech in February 1991, the Soviet president claimed that over the course of several centuries "a great Eurasian state"-"a unique civilization, the result of joint endeavors of all our nationalities"-had formed on the territory of the USSR. 39 While, he claimed, it was true that some of this territory was acquired by conquest, "as has happened everywhere and on all continents," many peoples "joined Russia voluntarily"-a process that "was facilitated by the openness of the Russian people and their willingness to work together as equals with peoples of other nationalities." While such imperial rhetoric was certainly out of tune with popular opinion throughout the USSR, Gorbachev did point out certain Soviet realities that were difficult to ignore-namely that millions of Soviet citizens lived in republics that were not "their own," and that millions of others come from mixed marriages. (Indeed, about 30 percent of all marriages in the USSR were between couples of different nationalities.) In addition, the president sensibly pointed out the reality that the USSR was an integrated economic system, characterized by the mutual dependency of the enterprises in the republics. How, he wondered aloud, would the republics survive if they broke these ties? Perhaps the most important reason for the republics to opt for the preservation of the Union, Gorbachev asserted, was the matter of security, for which a large Union state provided advantages. "And besides, who would want to undertake to divide up the nuclear missile and strategic potential of the USSR Armed Forces?" Based on these arguments, Gorbachev asked the Soviet people to go to the polls on 17 March to answer "yes" or "no" to the following question: "Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal, sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?,"'o In the weeks and days leading up to the referendum, Soiuz deputies and RCP leaders actively campaigned for a "yes" vote with the understanding that

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the essential nature of the relationship between the center and the Union republics would remain unchanged. 41 A joint statement issued on 16 February by twenty-nine public and political organizations and movements "of socialist orientation" (including the RCP, Soiuz, the United Workers' Fronts of the USSR and Russia, and the RSFSR Writers' Union-all of which would soon join the Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces) urged Soviet citizens to vote in favor of preserving the Union at the referendum. For them the blame for the country's current problems belonged not to seventy years of cultural and ideological repression and state mismanagement, but instead lay with the liberal democrats and national separatists. "Using the slogans of national revival and sovereignty as cover," the patriots' statement declared, "fascist-type forces have come to power in some areas of the country. Calling themselves democrats, they preach nationalism, chauvinism, and brazenly trample upon human rights. They have been working purposefully to break up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.,,42 The message was unambiguous: the democrats and separatists had to be stopped before the Soviet peoples woke up one day to find themselves in separate, mutually hostile countries. On the issue of preserving the Union, the patriots' views found some support within a recovering and increasingly influential Russian Orthodox Church. On the eve of the referendum, the outspoken Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and All-Ukraine, well known for his Russian nationalist outlook-and for a lifetime of service to the Communist Party-proclaimed that the Russian Orthodox Church has always been in favor of unity, "especially of Slavs." "A united and mighty Fatherland," Filaret added, "is the guarantee of our freedom, democracy, of economic enlightenment, [and] the unity of our church. ,,43 Of course, Russian Orthodoxy had long been a focal point of the Russian nationalist movement; within the Church, however, nationalist tendencies were given further impetus by the revival of the Uniate (Eastern Rite Catholic) Church in western Ukraine, a region where Orthodox churches were presently being seized by Uniate supporters. The potential loss of Church influence and even property in the Ukrainian republic resulted in a situation whereby some Church hierarchs looked to the Soviet state, led by the Communist Party, as an ally and protector of Church interests. As Filaret told USSR Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatolii Luk'ianov in a private meeting with other Church hierarchs in early 1990: "In conflicts between nationalities ... the rendering of the Soviet Union into fragments, we see the weakening of our government. And the Church always believed that the unity of our government is conducive to its [the Church's] strength and authority.,,44 The Polozkov-led RCP was at the height of its influence during this period, and its leaders, or at least some of them, sympathized with the plight of the Russian Orthodox Church. As noted in the previous chapter, Polozkov went out of his way to show his support for the Church, which he viewed as a specifically Russian institution in need of political support-especially in the Ukrainian re-

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public where its position, and that of the Communist Party, were threatened. For the nationalist-conservatives, the attacks on the property of the Russian Orthodox Church were just another sign that Russians no longer commanded respect throughout the USSR. Attempting to drum up support for the referendum within the splintering RCP, Polozkov focused less on preserving the unitary socialist state than on saving the civilization that had been created and sustained by the efforts of the Russian people-a single, distinctive, indissoluble civilization, fundamentally different from that of the West. The USSR is the greatest historical gain of the twentieth century, having been made possible thanks to the collective actions of the Russian [russkie] people and of the other peoples of our country over the course of many centuries. It is a unique, multinational political association that took shape in an evolutionary way.... Certain lovers of pipe dreams [read: Yeltsin, and also Gorbachev] are calling for a "return to the mainstream of civilization." But it is impossible not to see that the USSR is a development of the best traditions of statehood [and] of its constituent peoples, and in this sense it is one of the main centers of world civilization. 45

The RCP leader went on to describe to his colleagues what would happen to this civilization if the borders delineated in the old Union Treaty were to become real international borders. In doing so he appealed to their darkest fears about the ethnic hatred, and in particular, resentment of the Russians, that pervaded every corner of the empire. A strong, Russia-led Union was necessary to prevent the climate of Russophobia from degenerating into large-scale violence. Today you can hear it said that Russia is great and bountiful and can survive perfectly well without the Union. That is a profound delusion. If the republic secedes from the Union, the problem of millions of Russian and Russianspeaking people beyond its borders will be sharply exacerbated. When symbolic borders become real borders, they will be like a knife through the living body of the Russian ethnos and will inflict a wound that will never stop bleeding. Who needs that kind of sovereignty?46

In an article published in the party newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia, RCP ideologist Gennadii Ziuganov also argued for a "yes" vote on the referendum, warning of the new "Lebanons" and "Karabakhs" that would inevitably break out throughout the USSR if the national separatists succeeded in breaking up the Union. Like Gorbachev, he said that certain economic realities needed to be taken into consideration that militated in favor of retaining a centrally-controlled Soviet state. While acknowledging the absurdities of the command economy as it developed in the USSR, Ziuganov pointed out that

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The breakup of the Union will be a destructive shock to the united economic organism of this country that has been gathered over the centuries. Here is just one example. There are 1,500 kinds of essential agricultural commodities and manufactures necessary for the population being produced by only a single enterprise that supplies the entire country. I agree that this is completely abnormal. But this is reality. And how will things be if the Union breaks Up?47

In other words, the republics, Ziuganov argued (as Gorbachev was doing), needed the Union just as much as the Union needed the republics. Support for Gorbachev's referendum also came from leaders of the armed forces, some of whom seemed to forget that their duty was to serve the state rather than influence the public. "[OJur motherland's freedom and independence are inseparably linked with the unity of its people," Dmitrii Yazov said in a statement published by the Defense Ministry daily Krasnaia zvezda the day before the poll. To this he added an appropriate lesson from Russian history that should be heeded: "While Rus' was fragmented into appanage principalities, aggressors mercilessly tore it to pieces.,,48 While the Army, the Rep, and the latter's allies in Soiuz and in the national-patriotic movement attempted to rally popular support for the referendum, leaders of Democratic Russia were more cautious, suspecting that a "yes" vote would be tantamount to giving the center carte blanche to continue to run the country as it had before. If we answer "no," Yeltsin explained on the eve of the referendum, the Union is not going to disappear the next day.49 Addressing the Russian parliament two weeks later, Yeltsin articulated his view of Russia's destiny: Russia used to be, is, and will continue to be great, both by virtue of its geographic position, as a bridge between Europe and Asia, and by virtue of the size and diversity of its population, its wealth of natural resources, and-most important-by virtue of its inexhaustible spiritual potential and very rich history. The status of a so-called superpower, compliance with which has drained our Russian economy, the stress on military force, and the striving for political domination should remain in the past. We want to see Russia as an influential member of the international community, with its standing based on reborn economic might and moral and spiritual purity.50

Although the contrast with Polozkov's understanding of Russia as a "great power" could hardly be more stark, it is difficult to know for certain if at this point Yeltsin envisaged a truly independent Russia. It is probable that Yeltsin was not yet aiming at the breakup of the Soviet Union, but rather wanted to play a greater role in negotiating the treaty so that it would conform to his own vision of a decentralized Union composed of truly sovereign states. 5I As he explained in a Russian radio program on 15 March: "Weare for a Union of free republics, not colonies of the center.,,52 On this basis, Yeltsin reluctantly supported the Union referendum. Meanwhile, he used the occasion of the referendum to pose a

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separate referendum question to citizens of the RSFSR concerning the creation of a presidency for the republic. No doubt he intended to be the occupant of this office. Although his rhetoric against the predominance of the "center" won Yeltsin an extraordinary degree of popularity (and authority-with some justification his opponents accused him of acting like the head of the Russian government, when he was still merely the chairman of its highest legislative organ) in the spring of 199 I, Russian voters overwhelmingly supported Gorbachev' s initiative: more than 7 I percent of Russia's voters and 76 percent of all participating Soviet voters (six republics refused to conduct the referendum at all, their leaderships considering themselves already outside the legitimate authority of Moscow) favored the preservation ofthe Soviet Union as a "renewed federation.,,53 While Soiuz deputies had joined the CPSU and RCP leadership in their enthusiastic support for a "yes" vote on the referendum, they were alarmed at their reward: a draft Union Treaty, published just one week before the referendum was to take place, that in effect proposed to strip the center of much of its power. 54 What was apparently not enough to satisfy Yeltsin was in fact far too much to swallow for the "empire-savers" in Soiuz: its leaders and their allies in the national-patriotic movement were convinced that they had been duped by the Soviet president. Gorbachev in turn believed that citizens who voted "yes" approved the draft Union Treaty and that those republics that had refrained from conducting the referendum would eventually see the light and sign on. Having failed to reconcile the irreconcilable, Gorbachev was rapidly losing whatever remained of the confidence of the hardline and patriotic forces. For the preceding year most were willing to believe that the president was the only person in the country with the authority to rein in the renegade republics; but the publication of the draft treaty put an end to any hopes they had that Gorbachev was able or even willing to hold the Union together in its existing form. Shortly after the referendum, the outspoken Alksnis remarked (in an obvious reference to the Gorbachev plan): "One proposal that has been made runs as follows: Let us give the republics all their sovereign rights, and then they will return some to central power. I do not agree. No state in world history has yet been built up from below.,,55 What was necessary, concluded the Soiuz leaders, was not negotiations, but a six-month state of emergency throughout the Soviet Union and the enforcement of the existing constitution. If the president could not rectify the existing situation by following this prescription, volunteered Gorbachev's critics in Soiuz, the deputies themselves would gladly assume responsibility for running the ailing Soviet state. 56 While trying to hold the balance between the hardliners and the leaders of the republics, Gorbachev tried to allay the fears of the former with the assurance that the nature of the Union would not change as a result of the new treaty. "The Union will live on. Russia's role in it at this new stage will be no less than it has been in previous decades and centuries. This is one of the characteristics of our

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multinational state. That is how it was formed historically.,,57 It is difficult to tell if such blatantly imperial statements truly reflected Gorbachev's position, or if he was merely attempting to mollify his critics in the RCP and the nationalpatriotic movement. Whatever the case, for both Gorbachev and the "empiresavers" the simple truth was that the "center" and Russia were one and the same, Yeltsin's contraposition of the two notwithstanding. Nevertheless, having made the choice to save the Union by negotiating a treaty that would be acceptable to the leaders of the Union republics, to make it work Gorbachev realized that he had to abandon his tactical alliance with the hardliners. 58 Recognizing that Yeltsin was easily the most popular political figure in the country and that this ambitious figure was likely to be installed as the president of the RSFSR, Gorbachev apparently concluded that he had little choice but to work with him if some form of the Union was going to be maintained. 59 With the Union Treaty on the table, presidential elections in Russia set for June, a democratic movement that was continuing to attract popular support, and Yeltsin's stock ever rising, the conservative forces in Soviet politics-in the Party, in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, among the Russian intelligentsia, in the security organs-soon found themselves overwhelmed by a tide that was clearly turning in favor of Russia's Yeltsin-Ied democrats. Looming in the minds of the country's millions of Party members and apparatchiki was a frightful question: if the "democrats" take power, what happens next?

Dual Power With the country sliding toward disintegration and Yeltsin beginning to build up the state structures of the RSFSR, Gorbachev became more willing to negotiate the differences between his conception of the new Union and that of the republics in the hopes of preserving some sort of Union that maintained the existing boundaries of the USSR. The result was the "Nine Plus One" process ofnegotiations between Gorbachev and the heads of nine Union republics at the Moscow suburb Novo-Ogarevo. Having failed to convince the republics to accept his earlier (and from their view, essentially empty) concessions, Gorbachev's goal now became the radical transformation of the Soviet Union into a democratic federal state. Historian Anthony D' Agostino has called Gorbachev' s approach to the country's nationality problem "utopian": Could Gorbachev have believed he was solving the problem? The republics given their internal independence within the Union were, in the drift of things, bound to impose more severe linguistic rules for commerce and administration. Russians would be increasingly discriminated against, as they had been in the Baltics. At some point, one could imagine several million Russians deprived of

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full citizenship and driven out ... back into the Russian republic. After that, the republics could become more genuinely sovereign, casting off their Soviet skin.6o

These were precisely the arguments that RCP leaders and the Soiuz deputies made against devolving power to the republics. While the result of the negotiations did not please everyone, least of all the deputies of Soiuz, at least it seemed to satisfy its two principals. As Yeltsin later wrote, "Gorbachev and I felt unmistakably that our interests finally coincided. Gorbachev preserved his seniority and I preserved my independence. It was an ideal settlement for both of US.,,61 Having reached agreement with Yeltsin and the leaders of the other eight republics willing to sign the Union Treaty, the meaningful differences between Gorbachev and the "conservatives" had once again become more pronounced than those between the Soviet leader and the "democrats." Gorbachev, his critics concluded, had once again abandoned the Party. Published on 24 April 1991, the draft treaty negotiated at Novo-Ogarevo momentarily put a brake on the centrifugal forces that threatened to destroy the power of the center altogether. Its publication was followed by several months of negotiations over thorny issues such as the future of state-owned properties in the republics, control of the military and natural resources, and the intricacies of the tax system. A third version of the treaty appeared for discussion in June: in it the central government was granted the authority to protect the USSR's sovereignty and territorial integrity, while retaining its control over the armed forces, border guards, and interior troops. The "center" would also control foreign policy and foreign economic activity in addition to the overall budget. The republics were to gain control over their land and natural resources, and were granted the right to establish direct diplomatic and trade relations with foreign states. Of the greatest symbolic significance was the fact that the republics were to be called "sovereign states." The broader areas of disagreement resolved (although the devil still lay in the details) by the end of July, Gorbachev announced that the treaty was set to be signed on 20 August. Despite protests from some Russian democrats, who argued that the treaty would still preserve the unitary nature of the Union, Yeltsin intended to sign the treaty on behalf of the RSFSR. 62 Delegates from the Kazakh and Uzbek republics were also to sign on that day, while the remaining republics (with the exception of the Baltics, who had unambiguously chosen to leave the Union, and possibly Moldova and Armenia) would sign the treaty later. The "empire-savers" were infuriated at the devolution of powers Gorbachev was willing to accept. The Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces-the hodgepodge collection of more than forty (by their count) communist and national-patriotic groups organized earlier in the year by Gennadii Ziuganov, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and Eduard Volodin-unequivocally condemned the

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treaty. In a published statement they urged both Gorbachev and Yeltsin to exit the political arena in order to prevent a national catastrophe from taking place.63 Soiuz deputies railed against the Novo-Ogarevo project and called for the imposition of a state of emergency to prevent the country from completely unraveling. A new Union Treaty, they now concluded, was altogether unnecessary: it was enough simply to amend the existing treaty.64 Whereas Gorbachev concluded that a new Union Treaty-which he now conceived as creating a truly voluntary federation that granted substantial rights to the republic-would at least preserve some sort of Union, the empire-savers viewed the "Union of Sovereign States," as the country would be called, as the final abolition of the Union state. Many believed that Gorbachev, who had already betrayed the Party and its ideals, had now betrayed the country. While the hardliners waited in vain for Gorbachev to act decisively to restore order in the country, Yeltsin managed to use his wave of popularity to create a presidential post for the Russian republic-a move that would give him considerably more power than he had as chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Fearing the likely consequences of a Yeltsin presidency (which, given his extraordinary popularity at the time, must have appeared almost inevitable), the RCP leadership and the patriotic movement as a whole rejected his latest gambit. The Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces condemned Yeltsin' s plan for a June election as "unconstitutional," since the RSFSR election law he had forced through allocated just twenty days to nominate presidential candidateshardly enough time for candidates to mount a proper campaign and drum up support. Since the national-patriots would have insufficient time to rally around an agreed-upon candidate, this would virtually assure Yeltsin of a divided opposition and ultimately victory. 65 The patriots' arguments against such an election also claimed to rest on principle: an election for president of the RSFSR, they emphasized, would be destructive for the Soviet Union as a whole; it would "put an end to [the USSR] as a single state and start the tragedy of inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts.,,66 Likewise, the RCP leadership thought dubious the very idea of presidential elections in Russia, and warned that this would lead to a situation of "dual power." Nevertheless, Polozkov eventually accepted the idea with irrefutable logic: "Why should Russia have no president if Moldova has one?,,67 (He later changed his mind again and declared the election illegal.) Realizing that he was unelectable, Polozkov decided not to run for the position himself-and in any event the RCP suffered from the paradox that as an unregistered political organization that operated within the framework of the CPSU, legally it could not field its own official candidate. Therefore the RCP leadership, like that of Soiuz, threw its support to Nikolai Ryzhkov (who by now had recovered from his heart attack) and his running mate Boris Gromov (the deputy chief of the MVD), the team perceived as having the best chance to defeat Y eltsin. 68

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Despite all the Party's resources and the best efforts of its propaganda machine (which gave extensive press coverage not only to Ryzhkov, but also to the extremist Albert Makashov, former Centrist Bloc leader Vladimir Voronin, former interior minister Vadim Bakatin, and even Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii), on 12 June 1991 it was Yeltsin who, riding a surge in popularity in the wake of the recent miners' strikes, easily won the Russian presidency. Voter indifference to the Communist candidates stunned the CPSU leadership: after the election they could no longer deny the divergence between the people's expectations and the course being followed by the Party. As Iurii Manaenkov wrote in a report to the Central Committee on the presidential election: "The CPSU has finally lost authority. We stand without cadres or power.,,69 Likewise, RCP second secretary Aleksei II'in was forced to admit that the conservatives in his party had resoundingly lost the war of ideas to the reformers: "It is no secret that an absolute majority of CPSU members in the Russian parliament ... support the Democratic Russia bloc"-the same bloc that had propelled Boris Y eltsin, who by now was a convinced anticommunist, to the Russian presidency.70 Having assumed the office of the Russian executive, it was not long before Yeltsin found himself mired in a struggle with the same Russian parliament he had once headed. But that drama, culminating in Yeltsin's attack on the White House in October 1993, still lay ahead. In the late spring of 1991 the Communists had not yet been defeated, but the political initiative was clearly no longer in the hands of the Party. Indeed, there was hardly any Communist Party left at all: divided into numerous factions and losing its members to new movements and parties, the CPSU (and its Russian branch) was rapidly disintegrating. As during the period of "dual power" in the autumn of 1917, power lay in the streets to be grabbed by the most determined and organized force. The decisive RSFSR President Boris Yeltsin was that force. In the spring and summer of 1991 he succeeded in refashioning his image from the "man of the people" who dared to provoke the Soviet establishment to a Russian patriot intent on liberating his country from communism and the burdens of empire. At his 10 July inauguration he appropriated the most powerful symbols of Russian nationalism, which included receiving a blessing from patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Even the flag that flew over the ceremony was the blue, white, and red commercial flag of the Russian Empire (hitherto a symbol of his enemies, the Russian national-patriots), while the band played the final chorus from Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar. 71 "Great Russia," he said in his inaugural address, "is rising from her knees. We will, without fail, transform her into a prosperous, democratic, peaceful, law-abiding and sovereign state."n From his position of relative strength, Yeltsin continued to build up the Russian state apparatus while immediately beginning to tear down that of the Communist Party. A presidential decree issued on 20 July required all CPSU organizations operating in enterprises or institutions on Russian soil (with the

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exception of certain USSR governmental bodies) to be dissolved within two weeks. "Departization" (or "departification") aimed, according the text of the decree, "to prevent the intervention of social organizations in the activity of state organs.,,73 In short, Yeltsin was attempting to secure the power and authority of the RSFSR government by destroying the rival structures of the CPSu. At the same time, Democratic Russia launched a petition drive for a referendum on nationalizing the CPSU's property in the RSFSR. Its quick success in gaining the necessary signatures suggested that the worst still lay ahead for the Communist Party. As political scientist Michael Urban wrote, "If departization would chop the party-state's structure off at the knees, then nationalizing the CPSU's property would crush its organizational spine.,,74 Thus the situation was bleak for all segments of the patriotic alliance in July 1991. The existing Union was imperiled, and Gorbachev, the key to its preservation, had effectively allied with the democrats and was preparing a new Party program that was distinctly social democratic in orientation, as it supported the conversion to a mixed economy, recognized the right to hold private property, and asserted that Marxism was no longer the sole foundation of socialist theory. The CPSU's conservative wing was indignant: by approving this program Gorbachev had added an ideological betrayal to the political one he was committing with the Union Treaty. Furthermore, the signing of the new Union Treaty would mean the early dissolution of the USSR Congress of People's Deputies and other Union structures and their replacement with new bodies representing the interests of the republics. As a result, the CPD's leading faction, Soiuz, would be destroyed and its members would likely face poor prospects in a subsequent electoral campaign. And, most painful of all for those who remained with the Party, the CPSU was being removed from power-and facing possible banishment-in the Russian republic. Under these circumstances a small group of "patriots" boldly appealed to the Russian people to save the Fatherland in a letter published in the RCP newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia.

A Patriotic Manifesto By the time "A Word to the People" was published on 23 July 1991, Gennadii Ziuganov, one of its signatories, had already earned a reputation as both an outspoken opponent of the Westernizing reforms of the Soviet leadership and a superb political organizer. In the spring of that year Ziuganov scored points with orthodox Marxist-Leninists for his scathing attack in Sovetskaia Rossiia on his former boss, Aleksandr Yakovlev, following the latter's repeated warnings about the dangers posed by the Russian Communist Party. Ziuganov's response to Yakovlev, titled "The Architect among the Ruins," accused the former CPSU ideology chief of being an agent of influence planted by the United States to undermine the Soviet Union. 75 As a result of the schemes of Yakovlev and his

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followers, asserted Ziuganov, "What we witness now is a national disaster comparable to the civil war or the Nazi invasion.,,76 That the article was published on the eve of an RCP plenum was not fortuitous; in an effort vaguely reminiscent of Ligachev's orchestration of the Nina Andreeva affair three years earlier, Ziuganov was attempting to rally all antiperestroika forces around the RCP against the resurgent reformist wing of the Party. In addition to his work within the RCP, Ziuganov strove to consolidate the country's antidemocratic and antireform activists under his own leadership within the national-patriotic movement. Of course, the locus of the Russian nationalist movement had long been the Russian branch of the Soviet Writers' Union, with whose reactionary leaders Ziuganov assiduously cultivated contacts. As discussed in the previous chapter, he attended some of its meetings and even gave a speech at the writers' volatile Seventh Congress in December 1990. In the Russian Writers' Union Ziuganov found a like-minded thinker in Aleksandr Prokhanov, the writer-activist who had helped organize the United Council of Russia at the end of 1989 and in February 1991 took a seat on the presidium of the Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces. Partly in response to the USSR Writers' Union's loss of the liberal (and profitable) Literaturnaia gazeta, which declared its independence at the end of 1990, Prokhanov launched the nationalist newspaper Den' (The Day), an organ of the USSR Writers' Union from which he and other nationalist extremists regularly attacked Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Russian democrats. 77 Although Prokhanov himself was never a member of Ziuganov's party, he nevertheless recognized the RCP as "a party of patriots"-a "very strong component" of the patriotic movement. 78 In an interview in the autumn of 1991, Prokhanov recalled "a sunny summer day" a few months earlier, when Ziuganov visited the writer's office at Den' with a proposition "to realize our age-old dream: to start a patriotic movement that would integrate everyone-from monarchists to communists." While Gorbachev was destroying the country, Ziuganov complained, the CPSU had fallen apart, divided into a national (narodnaia) party-which was prepared with the remaining patriots to fight for the Motherland-and an "oligarchical" one (meaning the liberal wing), consisting of serfs who were opening the gates to the enemy. Ziuganov asked Prokhanov to formulate an appeal to that would begin the process of forging closer ideological and political unity among Russia's patriotic forces. 79 Since the RCP's influence had been eclipsed by the democratic movement, it was now necessary for the patriots at last to strike out on their own, without the cover of the discredited Communist Party and its MarxistLeninist ideology. Previous chapters have discussed earlier attempts to consolidate the various patriotic groups and associations into a single all-Russian movement. Even moderately successful efforts to unifY the dozens of reactionary communist and nationalist organizations that mushroomed after 1988 were only short-lived alliances that quickly dissipated or slipped into inactivity in the absence of a spe-

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cific purpose. The Patriotic Bloc that materialized in early 1990 in preparation for the RSFSR parliamentary elections failed miserably and soon disappeared; likewise, the Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces that was formed early in 1991 seemed to be capable of doing little more than issuing statements and organizing rallies that attracted far fewer supporters than did the democratic rallies. Their lack of political skills and their loathing of democratic politics only partly explain their failure to gamer widespread popular support or to consolidate forces for a protracted period in any meaningful way. Their failure may also be explained by the sheer immaturity of political pluralism in a country that was only now becoming acquainted with the notion of (relatively) free political activity and the art of political compromise. While the national-patriots were able to identify common threats and on that basis were able to form loose alliances, strong personalities and nuances of ideology seemed to take precedence over building solid political structures. These shortcomings were characteristic of Russia's "democratic" organizations as well-but they proved to be devastating for the national-patriots, who lacked a single leader with the stature of Yeltsin or a unified ideology as compelling as the democratic and antiestablishment creed that united the pro-Yeltsin forces. 8o In sum, the national-patriots were able to work together only temporarily and only for a specific purpose: to try to defeat reformers in the Russian parliamentary elections in the spring of 1990, and a year later to build support for the Union referendum. (Indeed, it is a pattern familiar to those who observed the constellation of political forces that supported Gennadii Ziuganov' s bid for the Russian presidency in 1996.) Now, in the summer of 1991, with continued Communist rule in doubt and a new Union Treaty in preparation that threatened to weaken Moscow's control over the empire, came the boldest effort yet by the national-patriots to push the Soviet government into taking sterner measures against the democrats and national separatists. On 23 July 1991, the patriotic manifesto, "A Word to the People," appeared on page one of the RCP daily Sovetskaia Rossiia, as well as in Moskovskaia pravda and Leningradskaia pravda, and in regional Party and military newspapers and magazines shortly thereafter. 81 It was a call for Russians to defend their country from internal saboteurs. It was a desperate appeal for national unity in the face of impending disaster. It was, claimed its critics, nothing less than a declaration of civil war. In his classic tome on the Soviet-German war of 1941-1945, Alexander Werth argued that Stalin's appeal in early July 1941 to the citizens of the Soviet Union, in which he called upon them not as "comrades" but as "brothers and sisters," had a tremendous impact on public opinion and was crucial to the war effort. Reflecting on the mood of the Russian populace in the wake of the German attack, Werth wrote that

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this was not a time for recrimination, and, whatever had gone wrong, whatever mistakes had been made, the only thing to do was to fight the invaders. The mystique of a great national war, of a life-and-death struggle took root in the Russians' consciousness within a very short time; and the "national war" motifs of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3 made such a deep impression precisely because they expressed the thoughts which, in the tragic circumstances of the time, the Russian peopk-consciously or unconsciously-wanted to hear clearly stated. Here at last was a clear programme of action for a stunned and bewildered nation. 82

"A Word to the People" was intended to have a similar effect. When Prokhanov and Ziuganov addressed their fellow Russians as "brothers" rather than "comrades," using the language of war to cast the present circumstances-which were indeed bad-in the worst possible light ("retreat at the last line of opposition," "fields of destruction," "times of black invasions"), they similarly hoped to galvanize the Russian people to resist their country's annihilation by "the destroyers and the usurpers." As in the early summer of 1941, "we are late in awakening and we are late in noticing our misfortune, when our home is already burning to the ground." Now it was time to put aside differences and together defend the Fatherland from the enemy's attack. The authors called upon workers, peasants, scholars, the Army, artists and writers, the Orthodox Church "and the faithful of all types," women and veterans, liberals and monarchists and Communists, to "take the path of the salvation of the state." We appeal to representatives of all professions and positions, of all ideologies and faiths, and of all parties and movements for whom our differences are nothing in the face of the common misfortune and pain and in the face of the common love for our Homeland, which we view as united, indivisible ...

The appeal's authors vented their collective fiustration at the paralysis of the Communist Party, "which bears the entire responsibility for the victories and failures of the preceding seventy years, but also for the six last tragic years." Having renounced power, "The communists, whose own leaders are destroying the party, throw down their party cards and rush to the camp of the enemy-they abandon and betray their former comrades and demand the gallows for them." Abandoned by their rulers, the Russian people should rely on the Army as "the bulwark of all the healthy forces in society." Meanwhile, the manifesto emphasized, in the shadows were capable statesmen and engineers, economists and thinkers, all waiting for the opportunity to lead the country to salvation. At the bottom of the manifesto were twelve signatures, including those of its authors, Prokhanov and Ziuganov, as well as those of the nationalist writers Iurii Bondarev and Valentin Rasputin (where, one may ask, were the signatures of Vasilii Belov and Stanislav Kuniaev?), publicist Eduard Volodin, and Army Generals Valentin Varennikov and Boris Gromov. 83 Three of the signatories

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were secretaries of the RCP Central Committee. The following month, two others whose names appeared at the end of the appeal, Peasants' Union Chairman and RCP Politburo member Vasilii Starodubtsev and the hitherto little-known industrialist Aleksandr Tiziakov (as well as Varennikov), were arrested for attempting to take over the country as members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP). For many patriots, "A Word to the People" was a welcome, if belated, response to the colIapse of authority in the USSR. At the next plenary session of the RCP, Central Committee member Vladimir Shevtsov urged the party's leaders to support the manifesto. 84 Although himself not a signatory, Liberal Democratic Party leader (and failed, but surprisingly popular, candidate for the Russian presidency) Vladimir Zhirinovskii responded to "A Word to the People" with a call for a military coup to save the USSR. Likewise, Soiuz leader Viktor Alksnis immediately defended both the manifesto and the Army's involvement in politics. 85 Under the "conditions of general disintegration," Aleksandr Prokhanov declared in mid-August, the Army "wiII have to become master of the country." He added that Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov (who shortly would be identified as one of the main ringleaders behind the August putsch) was sympathetic to the patriotic movement the manifesto was intended to inspire, but in his position was not able to give it his overt support. 86

Polozkov's Fall The nearly simultaneous appearance of "A Word to the People" and Yeltsin's "departization" decree produced a swift reaction from the Communist Party appara!. Telegrams from regional Party committees were dispatched to the CPSU Central Committee plenum that was then in session to discuss a radical new Party program, a highly un-Leninist document that proposed to reconcile socialism with the market and fundamentalIy transform the Communist Party. These messages expressed in most emphatic terms the regional secretaries' frustration with the general secretary for alIowing the Russian president to obliterate (unconstitutionalIy, in their opinion) over 200,000 Party celIs in one felI swoop. Some called for the convening of an extraordinary Party congress for the dual purpose of drafting an alternative Party program and removing Gorbachev from his general secretary's post and even expeIIing him from the CPSU. 87 Perhaps the ultimate significance of these telegrams is their indication that in the weeks before the August coup there was strong and widespread support in the Russian provinces for the removal of the general secretary. While considering what could be done about Gorbachev, the Russian Communists decided that Ivan Polozkov was a liability they could no longer continue to suffer in his post as RCP first secretary. Just as liberals had never been comfortable with Polozkov in charge, orthodox cadres felt that he not been

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tough enough with Gorbachev and had been unable to stop Yeltsin's meteoric rise. 88 Perhaps worst of all, Polozkov had failed to stop the hemorrhaging of his party as tens of thousands of Communists turned in their cards each week. The Party, Polozkov was forced to admit that spring, had failed to "play the leading role in all spheres oflife.,,89 In an April 1991 interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Polozkov lamented the demise of the Communist Party and the country it was supposed to lead. The truth is, Polozkov told his interviewer, "We were better off in 1986 when perestroika was still moving up." But within two years perestroika was taken over by "a team exclusively oriented toward the West, the market economy, and privatization." For the "chaos" that started in 1988 Gorbachev was largely to blame, as he had failed in his principal duty to keep order. Instead, the general secretary had allowed the country to sink into ruin. Until recently our country was a great world power. A country with a huge potential that suddenly found itself on its knees in the role of a beggar. Was there some natural disaster, a conflagration? No. So it is inevitable to wonder whether it really was necessary to permit such a degeneration for the sake of the transition to a market economy. I have been saying this for at least five years, and I do not intend to consider myself partly to blame, together with members of the "team" that permitted all this.90

As he criticized Gorbachev and his "team," Polozkov's own team was splintering apart. By his own admission, from January 1990 until January 1991 more than 1.3 million Russian Communists had left the Party, and the RCP continued to hemorrhage in the months afterward. 91 Yet Polozkov did not regret these losses, since these people were the least ideologically committed to the RCP's cause. Indeed, the greater concern was the potential treachery of the people of "different ideological and political positions" who remained in its ranks. "Why have they not left? Primarily because they are counting on weakening the party from within and hoping for its degeneration.,,92 The greatest blow to the RCP occurred in June when an ambitious Central Committee member, Aleksandr Rutskoi, a Russian nationalist who had already upset his party's leadership the previous month when he accepted Yeltsin's nomination as his running mate in the presidential elections, decided to establish the reform-oriented Democratic Party of the Communists of Russia. 93 While Polozkov was willing to accept a split in the Party that would allow its conservative wing to free itself from further political compromises with the radical reformers, the loss was too much for other RCP leaders. Polozkov, they concluded, was incapable of holding the party together. Some Siberian Party organizations had been calling for Polozkov's resignation since June; they were backed by the powerful Leningrad First Secretary Boris Gidaspov and "Rossiia" leader Sergei Baburin, a young Siberian lawyer whom Polozkov had once praised for representing "the future of the party and

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Russia.,,94 Standing at the head of a divided and demoralized-and seemingly about to be banned-political organization, Polozkov had little choice but to accede to the pressures from his critics on both the "left" and the "right." The RCP leadership now decided to go with Gorbachev protege Valentin Kuptsov, a centrist with somewhat greater appeal for the party's reformist wing, to replace the increasingly unpopular, withdrawn, and disoriented Polozkov. 95 Less than two weeks after the publication of the patriots' appeal, Polozkov delivered a final speech to an RCP plenum before tendering his resignation. The speech included one final tirade against the "liberal radicals" who were destroying Russia, and it appropriately summarized his thoughts about Russia and its new leaders. "By pushing Russia into the Western ways, they trample on our people's humanitarian traditions, which were accumulated during the thousand years-old history of our state.,,96 With these parting words, delivered two weeks before the coup that put an end to Communist rule in the Soviet Union, Polozkov's major contribution to Soviet Russian politics had come to a close. Despite the fact that Polozkov was, albeit for a short time, the leader of one of the largest communist parties in the world at a critical juncture in the history of communism, scholars of perestroika have largely neglected this significant if uninspiring transitional figure. Wearing old-fashioned thick black-framed eyeglasses and speaking in a southern accent similar to Gorbachev' s, the squarejawed Polozkov looked and sounded the part of a regional Party functionary. In an era that teemed with colorful political personalities-the charming, talkative, and arrogant Gorbachev, the decisive and mercurial Boris Yeltsin, the venerated dissident Andrei Sakharov-Polozkov was plain and uncharismatic-an altogether ordinary apparatchik. Although he failed to be a forceful political leader and was far from an original thinker, Polozkov nevertheless represented an important trend in Russian politics after 1989. Like Egor Ligachev, whose career in the CPSU came to an early end just as Polozkov's star was rising, Polozkov was a committed Marxist-Leninist of the old school; also like Ligachev, he understood the powerful emotive qualities of Russian nationalism and used it to rally support for the conservative apparat's program of rolling back perestroika. Russian cultural nationalism had been a trend in Russia for twenty years before the rise of Gorbachev, but it took his thaw and its unanticipated social and political reverberations for the Russian movement to emerge as an independent force in Soviet high politics. And it took the conservative leaders of the RCP-a body that was far more overtly accommodating toward Russian nationalism than the parent organization had been under Gorbachev's rule (or ever, for that matter)-to bring together the country's numerous Russian nationalist, neo-Stalinist, and other "patriotic" groups into a movement united around a tangible set of goals (preventing the country's disintegration and fighting its Westernization), while attempting to reconcile the competing ideological visions that had long divided "reds" and "whites."

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Of course, as long as the Soviet Union continued to exist, the nationalpatriotic movement never rivaled the broad popularity of its democratic counterpart. But the establishment of the Communist Party of the RSFSR briefly gave Russian nationalist-conservatives who sought order and empire a symbol and a party around which to rally. Encouraged and influenced by the political instincts of the RCP's chief ideologist, Gennadii Ziuganov, for one year Polozkov was Russia's highest-ranking political figure to propagate the ideology of contemporary Russian national communism. While this gray figure has usually been treated, when he is mentioned at all, as a mere footnote in the history of the dying days of the Soviet Union, he may alternatively be considered one of the founders of a Russian patriotic movement that was reborn as the Union crumbled. On 3 August 1991 a distraught Ivan Polozkov met with Gorbachev one last time. He called the Soviet president a traitor to his face, and three days later was retired from the RCP Central Committee. 97 Like his former superior Ligachev, Polozkov was reassigned to an agricultural post. It was the first civilized retirement of a Communist Party first secretary in Russian history. The second was not far away.

From "Words" to Deeds Under the impact of Yeltsin's "departization" decree, the Communist Party of the RSFSR, like its parent body, had completely lost its bearings and struggled to regroup. Gennadii Ziuganov was among those nominated for the vacated position of first secretary, but withdrew his candidacy in favor of Kuptsov ostensibly because of the latter's experience with economics and his ability to reconcile different points of view. 98 With Kuptsov at its head, the party hoped to change its political image and keep its reform wing from defecting to Rutskoi's party. Nevertheless, Kuptsov was careful to leave the door open to cooperation with extremist groups like Nina Andreeva's Edinstvo and the DKI: "This wing is not leaving the party," he told an interviewer shortly after assuming office. "They are prepared to collaborate, and I think that we are making contacts.,,99 In fact, such contacts had been made long ago by Polozkov, Ziuganov, Boris Gidaspov, Valerii Legostaev, and others. As an organization that bore the onus of seventy years of communist failure and was associated with the CPSU's most conservative currents, the RCP was fighting a losing battle against a surging democratic offensive. One may speculate that Ziuganov withdrew his candidacy for the RCP's top post because he did not want to go down as the last first secretary of the Communist Party of the RSFSR. Or perhaps Ziuganov was simply being realistic: if the hardline Polozkov failed to reinvigorate a divided party, what chance did Ziuganov, who had criticized Gorbachev by name and accused Aleksandr Yakovlev of working in

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the service of foreign powers (were these not breaches of Party discipline?), stand of uniting the party under circumstances which saw its reformist elements bolting en masse? Although Ziuganov had discovered a certain talent for reconciling different points of view-monarchists, Orthodox believers, and Leninists, for example-the prospect of bringing together the "democratic" and "conservative" wings of the RCP was beyond both his abilities and inclinations. While the new first secretary Valentin Kuptsov spoke positively about the party's moves toward social democracy and cooperation with the Yeltsin government, Ziuganov turned his attention to the patriotic movement. As the CPSU and its Russian branch fell into disarray during the summer of 1991, Ziuganov, while still actively working with other RCP leaders, continued to pursue political interests outside the party. In particular he continued his work with Aleksandr Prokhanov and Eduard Volodin on the Coordinating Council of Popular-Patriotic Forces. In mid-August, only days before the coup, Prokhanov proudly described this organization as a broad people's movement that brought together "Marxists-Leninists, Marxist-Stalinists, members of the Russian Communist Party, social-democratic liberals, extreme pro-fascist organizations, writers, artists, people from the Army, major industrialists, monarchists and pagans" under the slogan "One and Indivisible."lOo Having failed to unify in any meaningful way for the 1990 elections to the Russian parliament, the patriots vowed to forget their political differences and to act as a unified force that would put Russia back on track. This would involve a return to centralized economic management in the hopes of achieving the level of production that existed in 1985; the preservation of collectivized agriculture; stopping Western capital from robbing Russia blind; and building a new Russia in accordance with its own historic traditions. 101 Presenting itself as a "third" alternative political force between the CPSU and the democrats, under the impact of the publication of "A Word to the People" it continued to attract patriotic political and cultural associations to its National Bolshevik platform, with the result that "patriots" such as LDP leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii soon signed on. 102 While the national-patriots struggled to form a cohesive movement to counter the democratic insurgency, the CPSU continued to collapse. On 16 August 1991, four days before the scheduled signing of the new Union Treaty, Soviet newspapers reported that Aleksandr Yakovlev, now along with Eduard Shevardnadze a leader of the Movement for Democratic Reforms, quit the Communist party.103 Already facing likely expulsion from the ranks of the CPSU, Yakovlev coupled his announcement with a largely unnoticed warning: "an influential Stalinist grouping has taken shape in the Party's leadership core," he said, without naming names, and it is "making preparations for social revanche and for a Party and state COUp."I04 On the same day, Sovetskaia Rossiia carried another appeal from Russia's patriotic movement, titled "From 'Words' to Deeds." Readers were rhetorically asked, "What must be done right now, today?" The answer:

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First and foremost, halt the disintegration of the state, the economy and culture, stop the rampage of crime and prevent a national disaster, the threat of which is becoming obvious. Preserve that historically unique entity, the USSR, and its foundation, the Russian Federation. The will of the people, as expressed in the [March] referendum, is the highest lawf"105

Although the authors of this statement may not have been aware of it, plans for a coup to save the Soviet state were already underway. The events surrounding the August coup attempt, and in particular Gorbachev's role in it, still remain unclear. While several analysts have suggested that Gorbachev may have been complicit in the putsch, there is little mystery about the motives of the conspirators. 106 The main impetus behind the plotters' decision to act was the impending signing of the Union Treaty, which the putschists believed would result in the end of the unitary Soviet state. 107 On 4 August 1991, Gorbachev left Moscow for a vacation in the Crimea. The next day, the plotters began meeting in a KGB "safe house" in Moscow, where they agreed on a course of action: to force the Soviet president either to declare martial law or to claim illness and resign in favor of Vice President Gennadii Yanaev. A delegation that included Gorbachev's chief of staffValerii Boldin, Politburo member Oleg Shenin, Oleg Baklanov (who was the first deputy chairman of the USSR Defense Council), and General Valentin Varennikov was sent to Gorbachev's vacation home in Foros to secure the president's acquiescence to their plan. Having failed to co-opt the Soviet president into joining their conspiracy, on the evening of 18 August 1991-three days after the publication (against Gorbachev's wishes) in Moscow News of the draft Union Treaty, which, its opponents were convinced, left little substantive power to the "center"-the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) went into action. The next morning the Soviet news agency TASS issued the GKChP's "Appeal to the Soviet People." The document began: In a dark and critical hour for the destiny of our country and of our peoples, we address you! A mortal danger hangs over our great homeland! The policy of reform initiated by M.S. Gorbachev, conceived as a means to ensure the dynamic development of the country and the democratization of the life of its society, has, for a number of reasons, come to a dead end. 108

The implications of this declaration were clear: perestroika was over; the new Union Treaty was dead; order was being restored. Despite the fact that its authors were Communists and among the country's leading government officials, the declaration was completely nonideological. In explaining their actions to the people, the Emergency Committee mentioned neither Lenin nor socialism; their objective was to save a great power from ruin.

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Despite this confident declaration, the coup attempt crumbled almost immediately as Yeltsin, who inexplicably was not arrested, rallied a defiant Moscow populace to a successful resistance to the emergency regime. (The significance of Yeltsin's role is subject to debate: without Gorbachev on board and without a resolute display of force, it seems that the conspiracy was bound to fail.) In the days after 21 August, when the coup attempt collapsed, seven highranking government officials were arrested for their involvement in the GKChP. They included Vice President Yanaev, Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov, Minister of Defense Dmitrii Yazov, Oleg Baklanov, Aleksandr Tiziakov, a representative of the military-industrial complex, and Vasilii Starodubtsev, a leader of the agricultural sector. Boris Pugo, the Minister of Internal Affairs, committed suicide on 22 August, before he could be apprehended. Besides the coup's eight ringleaders, a number of other high-ranking figures were arrested and investigated for their involvement in the putsch, including Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet Anatolii Luk'ianov, Oleg Shenin, Valerii Boldin, several key KGB figures, and General Valentin Varennikov. Nearly all had been members of Gorbachev's inner circle; three (Varennikov, Tiziakov, and Starodubtsev) were signatories of the patriotic manifesto "A Word to the People."I09 Peripherally involved in the coup was Leningrad obkom First Secretary Boris Gidaspov, who on Shenin's orders began in the early morning hours of 19 August to destroy secret documents. To prepare the Russian people for this extraordinary day and to rally popular support for the "restoration" of Soviet power, he used the Leningrad media, including the television show "600 Seconds," the Leningrad Party newspaper Leningradskaia pravda, and the Leningrad obkom-financed (and anti-Semitic) magazine Narodnoe slovo. Gidaspov went so far as to personally give Leningradskaia pravda the order to reprint "A Word to the People." In addition to the instructions he received from Shenin, Gidaspov also received a directive from the Secretariat of the RCP Central Committee "in every possible way to provide support for the measures of the GKChP.,,1l0 Reactionary forces also went into action in the provinces, far from the news cameras in Moscow and Leningrad. In Samara, a provincial city in southern Russia, the extreme nationalist General Albert Makashov, commander of the Volga-Urals Military District (and member of the RCP Central Committee), deputized himself as an agent of the GKChP. 111 On his orders camouflaged jeeps filled with special forces raced to the addresses of those designated for arrest and internment. ll2 Ignoring the KGB and MVD, Makashov personally gave the order "to strengthen the patriotic work of the soldiers [and] officers" on the theoretical basis of the ideas put forward in "A Word to the People."I13 Gennadii Ziuganov, co-author of "A Word to the People," has acknowledged that those who called him "the chief ideologue of the GKChP" did so "not with-

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out grounds." The manifesto he wrote with Prokhanov, he admitted, "turned out to be in consonance with the 'Appeal to the Soviet People' issued by the GKChP on 19 AuguSt.,,114 Like the document authored by Ziuganov and Prokhanov the previous month, the "Appeal" was a call to action: the Emergency Committee intended to put an end to democratic reform and restore the great power status of a united and indivisible Soviet Union. Significantly, "Appeal to the Soviet People" never once mentioned "socialism" or the "Communist Party." Having abandoned all hope of creating the communist utopia in Russia, the conspirators acted first and foremost to save a "great power." It is certain that they, like thousands of other patriotic Russians, drew inspiration from "A Word to the People" and its authors' confidence that Russians would act to defend their homeland from its destroyers. Indeed, how else can one explain the complete lack of military preparation on the part of the coup's plotters? Likewise, the national-patriots who had authored "A Word to the People" in July not only approved of the GKChP, but in fact had formulated the patriotic ideology of national salvation that justified the Emergency Committee's existence. In short, Ziuganov and Prokhanov dared the country's security organs to take action. Although beyond a visit to the offices of the RSFSR Writers' Union (see the Epilogue) there was no coordinated attempt on the part of the GKChP to draw the leading national-patriots into the conspiracy, the GKChP's discourse clearly was inspired by the patriots' earlier efforts to appeal to Russians by invoking national concepts rather than socialist ones. 115 Gennadii Ziuganov may have indeed been the "chief ideologue" of the Emergency Committee, or at least one of them, but the conspirators' actions appeared to have been taken him utterly by surprise. While Prokhanov was busy at the Central House of Writers supporting the coup, Ziuganov, by his own account, was vacationing in the Northern Caucasus, where a colleague informed him of the coup. 116 When informed of the composition of the GKChP, Ziuganov later wrote, "my sympathies were on their side."ll7 However, by the time he returned to Moscow, it was all over: the Emergency Committee, the coup, the Communist Party, and for all intents and purposes, the Soviet Union. 1I8 "Democracy," it appeared at the time, had triumphed in Russia. Indeed, it must have been galling for Ziuganov to learn that in Moscow Boris Yeltsin, speaking to the crowds while standing atop a Soviet tank, was at that moment the embodiment of Russian patriotism. But that image was to fade quickly as the country's economic performance plummeted and Yeltsin began to dismantle the Soviet empire. Indeed, of the two coups of 1991, Yeltsin's was by far the more successful: on 7-8 December, Yeltsin and the presidents of the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics, Stanislav Shushkevich and Leonid Kravchuk, met at a hunting lodge near the city of Brest and decided to dissolve the Soviet Union and create in its place the Commonwealth of Independent States. Not quite three weeks later Gorbachev resigned his position as Soviet president and the Soviet Union was dissolved.

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Notes 1. Sovetskala Rossila, 23 July 1991, 1. 2. By no means were all of the deputies to the Russian parliament were "democraticminded" supporters of Yeltsin's policies, even if most supported his drive for Russian sovereignty. After a flurry of activity between the spring and autumn of 1990 in which the RSFSR CPD passed laws on Russian sovereignty and economic rights, the pendulum swung toward the conservative forces-a shift that made it more urgent for Yeltsm to create a presidency for the RSFSR in the spring of 1991. Remington, 94. 3. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 November 1990, 1-2. Alksnis was also an official representative of the "Ravnopravie" (Equal Rights) faction of the Latvian legIslature, whIch defended the interests of the non indigenous, mainly Russian-speaking, population. 4. McFaul and Markov, 229-230. 5. Verkhovskii and Pribylovskii (1996),19; Verkhovskii, et al. (1998),63. 6. /zvestiia, 12 May 1991, 3. 7. Argumenty ifakty 4 (January 1991), translated in FBIS-SOV, 29 January 1991,29. 8. Alksnis falsely claimed that the Baltic national salvation committees were created on Gorbachev's initiative, and that Moscow abandoned them afterwards. Argumenty i fakty 4 (January 1991), translated in FBIS-SO V, 29 January 1991, 29. 9. Moscow News, 10-17 February 1991,7. 10. Sovetskaia Rossila, 7 March 1991, translated m FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991,61. 11. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 21 November 1990, 1-2. 12. Pikhoia, 595. 13. RGANI, f 89. op. 12, d. 29, pp. 1,5. Another RCP leader, Leningrad's Iurii Belov, compared the intentions of Democratic Russia to those of Hitler's Nazis. Democratic Rossiia, Belov asserted, spoke of using only legal means to come to power, but like the Nazis intended to root out their Communist enemies when they got there. "Democracy," Belov warned in a newspaper article, "is being exploited in order to establish a new totalitarian regime." Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 December 1990, 1-2. 14. Rudinskii, 92. Ziuganov later went so far as to declare that the RCP could not have been considered part of the CPSU. He reasoned that since the RSFSR had declared its sovereignty and its laws took precedence over those of the Union, then the RCP was sovereign in its relationshIp with the CPSU. See his My Russia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997),57-58. 15. Rudinskii, 249. In 1992 pro-Communist deputies filed a suit with the Russian Federation Constitutional Court to judge the constitutionality of Yeltsin's banning of the CPSu. With anti-communist parliamentarians filing their own counter petition, alleging that the CPSU was never really a political party but had taken on the functions of the state, the Constitutional Court combined the cases. The "trial of the Communist Party" took place throughout most of 1992 and resulted in a compromise decision: Yeltsin's ban was judged unconstitutional, allowing the RCP to organize as a legal party; however, it could not claim old CPSU property. 16. Originally created in December 1990 as a parliamentary faction in the RSFSR CPD, in June 1991 "Otchizna" (Fatherland) was transformed into an all-Russian patriotic organization, composed mostly of veterans committed to Russian statehood within the

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borders of the USSR. Otchizna's chairman, Lieutenant-General Boris Tarasov, declared that its leaders were obligated "decisively to speak out in defense of the sovereignty and national dignity of the Russian (russkogo) people," including those Russians living beyond the borders of the RSFSR. Krasnaia zvezda, II June 1991, 2; Sovetskaia Rossiia, 10 July 1991, I. 17. Cherniaev, 280. 18. Since May 1989, Ryzhkov had been chairman of the Council of Ministers USSReffectively the Soviet prime minister. Quote from Matlock, 408. 19. Ryzhkov did not surrender his post until 14 January 1991. 20. In the opinion of former Soviet television commentator Vladimir Pozner, this resolution is what convinced Gorbachev to tum his back on both the liberal democrats as well as on the centrists who had hitherto formed the backbone of his support. Pozner, 108. 2 I. By 1990 the Soviet economic situation had gone far beyond the problems posed by slow growth and inefficient management, for the partial relaxation of administrative controls had resulted in economic chaos. Stuck somewhere between central planning and the market, the Soviet economy had actually contracted by 4 percent in 1990 (for the RSFSR this figure was 5 percent) as shortages of materials and spare parts began to hit key sectors such as transportation, agriculture, and oil and gas. This was accompanied by a breakdown in the retail distribution system. Queues for items such as bread and sugar began fonning in 1990 even as millions of tons of grain were left rotting in the fields. Figures are cited in Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001),177. 22. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 30, pp. 20, 25-26. 23. While Gorbachev may have rejected the "500 Days Program" for the USSR, the RSFSR Supreme Soviet decided to proceed with its implementation in Russia. 24. RGANI, f. 89, op. 42, d. 30, p. II. 25. Gromov would later be a signatory of the "A Word to the People" manifesto in July 1991. 26. Skurlatov was the author of the infamous "Code of Morals" distributed in the Komsomol in the mid-I 960s. By 1989 this quasi-fascist had reinvented himself as a "democrat" and Yeltsin supporter. Zhirinovskii's party received a great deal of Soviet press coverage when it was registered in the spring of 1990, leading many observers to suspect that Zhirinovskii had friends in high places-particularly in the KGB. Nearly from the beginning the LDP was receiving money from the RCP Central Committee, which also financed other nationalist organizations such as the Russian National-Patriotic Workers Party. See Bunich, 301-302. 27. Krasnaia zvezda, 16 January 1991,6. 28. According to the Centrists' spokesperson, Vladimir Voronin (who in the year 2000 became the president of independent Moldova), at the autumn meetings the Soviet leadership and representatives of the Centrist Bloc spoke about the possible formation of a government of national accord. Moscow News, 18-25 November 1990, 6. Centrist leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii also had at least one meeting with KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov, on 30 January 1991, in the wake of the KGB operation in Vilnius. In his memoirs Kriuchkov wrote that he told Gorbachev about the meeting and recommended that he pay attention to Zhirinovskii and that the general secretary should instruct comrades from CPSU to make more active contacts with representatives of the Liberal Democratic Party.

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Gorbachev did not agree. Kriuchkov also denies that the KGB cultivated Zhirinovskii; it was Zhirinovskii who proposed the meetings. See Kriuchkov, Book 2, 11-14. 29. Cherniaev, 339. 30. Quoted in Saulius Girnius, "Gorbachev's Visit to Lithuania," Report on the USSR, 19 January 1990, 5. 31. According to Kriuchkov, at the end of December 1990 Gorbachev gave him (and MVD chief Boris Pugo and Minister of Defense Dmitrii Yazov) orders to speed up preparations for taking "concrete measures" to deal with the situation in Lithuania. In response, on 10 January 1991 Gorbachev was given a decree authorizing the dispatch of the KGB's special forces ("AI fa" group) to Vilnius. It went into action three days later on the invitation of a Lithuanian "Committee for National Salvation." See volume two of Kriuchkov' s memoirs, 30-32. Gorbachev's denial of responsibility for the Vilnius incident, if true, suggested that he had lost control over Soviet security organs. See Matlock, 454-457; also see Gorbachev's defense in his Memoirs (1996), 576-581. 32. Riga Domestic Service, 13 January 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 14 January 1991,94. 33. Sovetskaia Estoniia, 15 January 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 5 February 1991, 72; Krasnaia zvezda, 14 January 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 16 January 1991,91. 34. Moscow television, 19 February 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 20 February 1991, 79. 35. RFE/RL Daily Report, 4 February 1991. 36. See Eduard Limonov's article in Sovetskaia Rossiia, 30 January 1991,3. 37. Pravda, 25 May 1990,5. 38. Pravda and Izvestiia, 24 November 1990, 1-2. 39. Although this notion was not entirely consistent with his earlier references to "universal human values" and the country's return to the fold of world civilization, Gorbachev, unlike Polozkov (see below), did not make a point of contrasting this civilization to that of the West. 40. Pravda, 7 February 1991, 1-2,andlzvestiia, 7 February 1991, 1-2. 41. In the RSFSR, Yeltsin managed to pair the question on the preservation of the Union with another question on the establishment of a Russian presidency. Naturally, the RCP and Soiuz deputies campaigned against Yeltsin's presidential initiative, recognizing that this would lead to a situation of "dual power" in the country. 42. Krasnaia zvezda, 16 February 1991, translated in Russian Press Digest, 16 February 1991. The statement was issued less than two weeks before the related conference of patriotic forces organized by Ziuganov, at which Polozkov gave the keynote speech. 43. Krasnaia zvezda, 16 March 1991, 1,3. 44. RGANI, f. 89, op. 8, d. 41, pp. 17-19. 45. Polozkov's words echoed ideas that had originally been developed by the Eurasianists of the 1920s, including the Russian emigres Nikolai Trubetskoi, Petr Savitskii, Petr Suvchinskii, and Georgii Florovskii. Eurasianism, with a particular focus on its geopolitical element, later became a central feature of Ziuganov's ideological synthesis. A classic treatment of Eurasianism is found in Nicholas Riasanovsky, "The Emergence of Eurasianism," California Slavic Studies 4 (1967), 39-71. Also see Dmitry V. Shlapentokh, "Eurasian ism: Past and Present," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 30, no. 2 (1997): 129-151. 46. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 15 March 1991,60-70.

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47. Gennadii Ziuganov, "Bez masok i v maskakh," reprinted in his Drama vlasti: Stranitsy politicheskoi avtobiograjii (Moscow: Paleia, 1993), 36-39. 48. Krasnaia zvezda, 16 March 1991, I. 49. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 16 March 1991,2. 50. Moscow radio, 29 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, I April 1991, 79. 51. Alfred B. Evans, "Yel'tsin and Russian Nationalism," The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 21, no. I (1994): 37. 52. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 16 March 1991, 2. 53.80 percent of voters in the nine participating republics went to the polls. The three Baltic republics, plus Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova (as it now called itself), refused to conduct Gorbachev's referendum. 54.izvestiia, 9 March 1991,2. 55. Dagens Nyheter, 24 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 27 March 1991,28. 56. TASS, 23 April 1991; Pravda, 22 April 1991, 2. 57. Pravda, 29 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, I April 1991,45-50. 58. Gorbachev's change of heart was likely also influenced by the support given the democratic movement in the spring of 1991 by the striking miners, who began to couple their material demands with explicitly political ones. 59. Contrary to Gorbachev's intentions, his harsh attacks on Yeltsin during the winter of 1990-91, in combination with other political blunders, only seemed to make the Russian leader more popular. After Yeltsin called for Gorbachev's resignation from the Soviet presidency, Gorbachev proclaimed a state of emergency (the Soviet equivalent of martial law) in Moscow and flooded the city with 50,000 soldiers and numerous tanks. This only worked to the benefit of the democratic movement and Yeltsin in particular, who was able to use the Russian Congress's indignation at Moscow's actions to pressure it to accede to the creation of the new post of RSFSR president, which Yeltsin intended to fill. 60. D' Agostino, 299. 61. Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle/or Russia (New York: Times Books, 1994),38. 62. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 8 August 1991, I. 63. Molniia 15 (April 1991): I. 64. TASS, 21 April 1991; TASS, 23 Apri11991. 65. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 12 May 1991,3. 66. Russkii vestnik 9 (1991), translated in Russian Press Digest, II May 1991. 67. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2 April 1991, translated in Russian Press Digest, 2 April 1991; TASS, 23 May 1991. 68. One of Ryzhkov's authorized representatives during the presidential campaign was Valentin Rasputin, who for many years had been a critic of Soviet policies. For Rasputin, the main priority was defeating Boris Yeltsin, who he believed sought to destroy the Union. See Sovetskaia Rossiia, 6 June 1991,3. 69. RGANI, f. 89, op. 22, d. 81, pp. 13-14. 70. Glasnost', 4-10 July 1991, 13. 71. Glinka's opera, A Life/or the Tsar, was first performed in 1836. Since it fused the typical melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of Russian folk music with the forms and techniques of Italian opera, it is seen as a turning point in Russia's musical history. After the USSR's collapse Yeltsin attempted to replace the "Hymn of the Soviet Union" with the

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Glinka chorus, but it never caught on, at least partly because the Glinka melody never received new words. 72. Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 435. 73. "Ukaz Prezidenta RSFSR 0 prekrashchenii deiatel'nosti organizatsionnykh struktur politicheskikh partii i massovykh obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v gosudarstvennykh organakh, uchrezhdeniiakh i organizatsiiakh RSFSR" (20 July 1991), in John Lowenhardt, The Reincarnation of Russia: Struggling with the Legacy of Communism, 1990-1994 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 98. 74. M. Urban, et aI., 244. 75. One could also see Ziuganov's article as a thinly-veiled attack on Gorbachev at a time when Party discipline would not have permitted a subordinate to censure the CPSU general secretary directly-although Ziuganov would soon accuse Gorbachev of being no communist, and "not even a social democrat-but a typical, classic liberal bourgeois." Kislitsyn, et aI., 58-59. 76. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 7 May 1991, 7. A year later, at the CPSU trial at the RF Constitutional Court, Ziuganov seized the opportunity directly to confront his former boss with the same accusations he had in the Sovetskaia Rossiia article, namely that Yakovlev was an "agent of influence" planted in the Kremlin by the CIA. See Rudinskii, 337-339. 77. The arguments over Literaturnaia gazeta and Den', as well as over Oktiabr' and Znamia, which also withdrew from the control of the union, illustrate the struggle that was taking place between liberals and conservatives in the Writers' Union over property and resources. The decision to create Den' was made in secret, as Writers' Union secretaries who might oppose it were not consulted. Interestingly, the editorial offices of Den' were actually located at a military installation in Moscow. According to an unnamed official at the Moscow garrison's investigation department, future coup plotter and Army General Valentin Varennikov gave the order that allowed Den' to occupy its offices, while the Ministry of Defense supplied it with furniture and office equipment. See Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 August 1991, 3. 78. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 3 September 1991, translated in CDSP 43, no. 38 (23 October 1990): II. 79. Ziuganov (1993),53; Den', 17-23 November 1991,3; Aleksei I. Podberezkin, Chto takoe "Dukhnovoe Nasledie" i pochemu ono podderzhivaet na prezidentskikh vyborakh G.A. Ziuganova (Moscow: Obozrevatel', 1996). 80. Marcia Weigle argues that the inability of Russian political organizations to develop solid structures and bases of social support derived largely from the "tradition of a state-dominated Russian society" and did not reflect the inherent weaknesses of the new political organizations in failing to attract broad sectors of Russian society. See Weigle, 267-269. 81. A similar manifesto known as the "Letter of the 53" was published in Sovetskaia Rossiia on 16 December 1990, just before the KGB operation in Vilnius. Addressed to "Comrade M.S. Gorbachev," the letter proposed the taking of "immediate measures against separatism, subversive anti-state activity, instigation, and inter-ethnic discord, by making use of the law and powers granted to you ...." Its signatories included three future coup plotters-Oleg Baklanov, Aleksandr Tiziakov, and General Valentin Varennikov-as well as the writers Iurii Bondarev, Stanislav Kuniaev, and Aleksandr Prokhanov. Patriarch Aleksei II also appended his signature to the document, thus giving the

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impression that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church agreed with the patriots' calls for a strong hand. 82. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984), 132. 83. Varennikov had played a role in organizing the military operation in Lithuania in January. 84. Pravda, 7 August 1991,2. 85. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 30 July 1991, 3. 86. Kommersant 32 (1991), translated in Russian Press Digest, 12 August 1991. Yazov, like Ligachev, Polozkov, and Ziuganov, had extensive contacts with the reactionary leadership of the RSFSR Writers' Union. See Krasnaia zvezda, 21 February 1991, I, translated in FBlS-S0V, 22 February 1991, 72. 87. The Central Committee received telegrams from, for example, Rostov, Kirov, Vyborg, and Cheliabinsk. See RGANI, f. 89, op. II, d. 180, pp. 2-5. The Soviet press carried similar but more carefully worded letters and telegrams from various Party committees; in one such letter Gennadii Ziuganov warned that Yeltsin' s decrees would lead "to totalitarianism and dictatorship." Glasnost', 1-7 August 1991,3. 88. Reformers in the Moscow Party committee showed their disdain for Polozkov by denying him an apartment in the city during his tenure as RCP leader. 89. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 25 April 1991, translated in Russian Press Digest, 25 April 1991. 90. La Repubblica, 21-22 April 1991, translated in FBlS-S0V, 23 April 1991, 54. 91. By May 1991, the RCP's membership had lost about two million members since its founding nearly a year earlier. Meanwhile, the CPSU as a whole lost more than four million members. For a long time Polozkov refused to acknowledge this reality, as he insisted that the influx of new members into the Party nearly made up for its membership losses. See his interview in Molodaia gvardiia 2 (February 1991), 8. Rossiia 17 (27 April - 3 May 1991), translated in FBlS-USR [Foreign Broadcast Information Service: Soviet Union Republic Affairs], 25 June 1991, I. 92. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 25 April 1991, translated in FBlS-USR, 14 June 1991,43. 93. Rutskoi had been the leader of the Communists for Democracy faction in the Russian parliament since March 1991 before agreeing to be Yeltsin's running mate and vicepresident. Earlier he had made his reputation as a hero in the Afghan war and was a founding member of the Moscow branch of the nationalist Otechestvo organization in 1989. Yeltsin likely chose him as a running mate in order to draw votes from conservative sectors of the population and to win the support of at least part of the Army. 94. No doubt personal ambition also played a role in the efforts to oust Polozkov, as Baburin, who nurtured grand aspirations to lead a Marxist-Leninist-nationalist revival in Russia during the Yeltsin decade, began spreading false rumors ofPolozkov's resignation in early July. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 22 June 1991, translated in Russian Press Digest, 22 June 1991; Kommersant 26 (1991), in Russian Press Digest, I July 1991; United Press International, 6 July 1991. 95. See Harris (1993), 25-26. 96. TASS, 6 August 1991. 97. Moskovskaia pravda, 26 April 1992, translated in Russian Press Digest, 26 April 1992. 98. Official Kremlin International News Broadcast, 13 August 1991.

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99. Glasnost', 15-21 August 1991, I. 100. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 17 August 1991, translated in CDSP 43, no. 33 (18 September 1991): 27. 101. Kommersant 32 (1991), translated in Russian Press Digest, 12 August 1991. 102. Glasnost', 8-14 August 1991,5; Krasnaia zvezda, 29 March 1991, translated in FBIS-SOV, 9 April 1991,40. 103. The announcement came two weeks after Yakovlev abandoned his post as advisor to Gorbachev, having concluded that the Party was not capable of reforming itself along democratic lines. 104. Moscow All-Union Radio Mayak Network, 16 August 1991, translated in FBISSO V, 19 August 1991, 19. On earlier occasions both Yakovlev and U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock each had personally warned Gorbachev that a plot was being hatched. Matlock, 54 I -544. 105. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 16 August 1991, translated in CDSP 43, no. 33 (18 September 1991): 28. 106. Books by John Dunlop and Amy Knight are among those that have questioned Gorbachev's role in the coup. Gorbachev, of course, refutes any such accusations. See Dunlop (1993), 186-255; Amy Knight, Spies without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Mikhail S. Gorbachev: The August Coup: The Truth and Lessons (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Cherniaev, 371-423. 107. See Kriuchkov's memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 133-142. 108. TASS, 19 August 1991. 109. Gorbachev claims that at a Politburo meeting in March 1990, in which the Lithuania situation was being discussed, General Varennikov proposed that the state should proclaim a state of emergency and impose presidential rule, while troops were sent into Lithuania under the pretext of an appeal from "patriotic forces." See Gorbachev (2000), 10 I. 110. According to Igor' Bunich, who describes the confusion in Leningrad on the eve of the coup, the signatures of Kuptsov and Ziuganov did not appear on this document. Bunich, 387-388. I I I. M. Mateev, "Samarskii oblastnoi i gorodskoi sovety narodnykh deputatov v dni GKChP Avguste 1991 g." (9 April 2004) 112. Two years later during the clash between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament in October 1993, Makashov led a mob into the Moscow suburbs to seize the Ostankino television tower. 113. Bunich, 395. 114. Vladimir Pribylovsky, "Russian Presidential Candidates-1996: Zyuganov Gennady Andreyevich" (9 May 2004). 115. Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle/or Hegemony in Russia (London: Verso, 1995), 135-138. I 16. Ziuganov was arrested neither in August 1991 nor in October 1993 following the failed parliamentary insurrection against the government of Boris Yeltsin. After appealing to Russians to come to the defense of the White House, where the Russian parliament was housed, Ziuganov managed to escape from it the day before Yeltsin had it bombed. Ziuganov subsequently denied any connection with the coup leaders of October 1993. 117. Quoted in Kislitsyn, et aI., 69-70.

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118. Ziuganov was later criticized by hardline forces for his absence during the putsch and his failure publicly to support it at the time-despite later taking credit for providing its ideological inspiration. The RCP, however, clearly supported the actions of the eight coup leaders: on the second day of the coup the RCP newspaper Sovetskaia Rossia published a number of telegrams in support of a restored dictatorship in the Soviet Union. See Sovetskaia Rossiia, 20 August 1991, 2.

9 "Russia to the Exit!" "It is a dangerous illusion that the collapse of the USSR will stop at the borders of the RSFSR. The deliberate destruction of the USSR cannot fail to bring with it the disintegration of the very republics that are aspiring to become independent states. These processes are already underway, notably in the RSFSR: the fate of Russia and the fate of the Union are, after all, indissolubly linked." - N.A. Pavlov of the Rossiia deputies' faction in the USSR CPD, February 1991 "In general, I am confident the socialist idea has a future, simply because it rests on social equity and brotherhood, values for which Jesus Christ sacrificed his life." - Gennadii Ziuganov, August 1991

The Soviet Writers' Disunion Shortly after defeating the coup plotters, RSFSR President Yeltsin suspended the Communist Party's activity in the Russian republic, and later banned the Party altogether. With Gorbachev marginalized and Yeltsin enjoying a moral prestige that would never be equaled again, the country's political context was utterly transformed as the democrats, now at the peak of their confidence, quickly filled the power vacuum left by the banned CPSu. As the Communist Party split into numerous workers' and social democratic groupings and central authority continued to disintegrate, the split in the Soviet Writers' Union (UW USSR) was finally formalized as the national organizations left the mother body. Meanwhile, suspicion and distrust had grown so great in the union's Russian branch that its two main wings-the liberal-reformists and the nationalistconservatives--could no longer share the same space, or the same name. In the beginning of July, six weeks before the coup and three months before the planned Ninth USSR Writers' Congress, a group of sixty-one writers led by poet Evgenii Evtushenko, mostly liberal members of the Aprel' group, issued a 279

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statement in which they denounced the union as "a creature of Stalin," and declared their intention to create a "Union of Independent Writers" (Soiuz nezavisimykh pisatelei). It offered membership to writers "of all republics and nationalities" on an individual basis, even if the republic in which they lived were to leave the USSR. In addition, the new union staked its claim to at least part of the resources of the UW USSR, "whose accumulations are the property of all writers."] In effect, just as Yeltsin was preparing to execute his "departization" decrees, Evtushenko had launched a takeover bid of the Writers' Union. The reaction of the union's leaders was predictable: the Russian branch of the Writers' Union, still dominated by a clique of conservative Communists and reactionary Russian nationalists, rejected any claims that an independent union had on its property. After four years of mutual abuse in journals and at union meetings, the split in the Russian Writers' Union was nearly complete. The last straw came during the coup and the days that followed. On 20 August, Acting First Secretary Sergei Kolov called a meeting of a select group of secretaries who sat on the board of the USSR Writers' Union. 2 Among those in attendance were former chairman Sergei Mikhalkov, secretary Aleksandr Prokhanov, and Viacheslav Gorbachev of Molodaia gvardiia. Exactly what they discussed remains unclear, although it is known that Sergei Bobkov, an aide to Soviet Vice President Gennadii Yanaev, turned up to obtain official support from the Writers' Union for the Emergency Committee. According to Mikhalkov, although some of the secretaries individually supported the Emergency Committee's aims, "not one member of the Secretariat said that he supported the conspiracy." In the end, Bobkov went away empty-handed, as the Writers' Union did not pass any resolutions or issue any statements in support of the GKChP. After the collapse of the coup, on 23 August Evtushenko and his allies, many of whom had some time earlier stopped receiving invitations to Writers' Union meetings, went to the Central House of Writers to discuss what had transpired on 20 August. 3 There Evtushenko accused the board of unanimously supporting the coup-Mikhalkov's denials notwithstanding. Oktiabr' editor AnatoIii Anan'ev, who like Evtushenko had long been a target of the conservatives' opprobrium, added that the boards of Den', Literaturnaia Rossiia, Moskovskii literator, Nash sovremennik, and Molodaia gvardiia "took part in preparing the putsch." The liberal writers demanded the resignations of the secretaries who took part in the secret meeting, including Acting First Secretary Kolov and Nikolai Gorbachev, who was the administrator of the Litfund, the union's financial department. To their list of targets they added the signatories of the famous "A Word to the People" (Prokhanov, Iurii Bondarev, Valentin Rasputin) manifesto, resolving that this document provided "ideological support for the antistate committee." To complete their coup, the liberals appointed a new temporary Secretariat, headed by Evtushenko himself and consisting mostly of members of Aprel'.4 One of its first acts was to close Prokhanov's newspaper, Den '. Meanwhile, to defuse the charges that they supported the Emergency Committee, on

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26 August the secretaries of the RSFSR branch of the Writers' Union passed a resolution that condemned the coup and declared the branch's support for the Russian government. 5 Tensions were already at a fever pitch when the Russian Writers' Union convened an extraordinary plenum on 30-31 August. Following the insults of the first day's meeting, on 3 I August observers witnessed a near brawl at the Central House of Writers when the prefect of Moscow's Central District arrived to close the building, charging the union with helping to lay the ideological framework of the coup and ordering the suspension of its activities. 6 Refusing to leave the building, the writers continued their meeting, which finally ended when the conservative writers, emotionally crying "Russia to the exit!" declared the withdrawal of the Russian Writers' Union from the parent body and stormed out of the hall. The heir to this organization, called the Union of Writers of Russia (Soiuz pisatelei Rossii), soon declared itself to be the legal successor to the USSR Writers' Union throughout the Russian Federation-which meant that it claimed its property as well. 7 Soon thereafter the liberal writers announced the formation of an alternative Union of Russian Writers (Soiuz rossiiskikh pisatelei), most of whom supported Aprel' and had opposed the coup. It too claimed for itself rights to the assets of Russia's literary establishment. 8 Thus, as the Soviet Union disintegrated during the autumn of 199 I, the RSFSR Writers' Union, while stilI existing on paper, split into two mutually hostile national organizations, numerous regional splinter groups, and an independent club composed of older writers who wanted nothing to do with this political war. While the Russian writers fought a vicious battle for the resources of the parent body, the Writers' Unions of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Ukraine, and Belarus each declared its complete sovereignty from the "big" union. 9 The USSR Writers' Union, like the CPSU and the Soviet state, simply imploded.

"Slavophiles" and "Westernizers" While the liberal writers launched a bid to take over the Russian Writers' Union, the "democrats" were busy seizing the Russian state. Immediately after the coup was defeated, a triumphant Boris Yeltsin forced a humbled Mikhail Gorbachev to suspend CPSU activities and resign his post as general secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev retained his title as Soviet president, but after 2 I August the continued existence of the country he headed was in doubt. On 24 August the Ukrainian republic, after Russia the key to maintaining the Union, declared its independence (subject to a referendum in December); by the end of the month Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaidzhan, Uzbekistan, and Kirgizia (as they now called themselves) followed suit. The remaining republics did so during the course of September, by which time the USSR Congress of People's Deputies

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had agreed to disband itself For all intents and purposes, during the autumn of 1991 the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, consigned along with the Communist Party to Trotsky's famous "ash heap of history." 10 The putschists had attempted to sabotage the Union Treaty with the goal of preserving the USSR as a centralized empire; instead their actions only accelerated the country's disintegration. The collapse of the USSR, however, did not stop at the borders of the Russian republic. This was due in no small part to the actions of Boris Yeltsin and his doctrine of "sovereignty from the ground up." As chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin not only declared his support for Russian sovereignty in the spring of 1990, but also called for renegotiating the relations between the RSFSR's central structures and those of the republic's ethnically-defined autonomous units. Within months of the RSFSR's declaration of sovereignty, every one of Russia's autonomous republics followed its lead. In September 1990 Yeltsin told the autonomous republics to "take all the sovereignty you can swallow," which he coupled with the advice that they would be better off consolidating within the RSFSR against Gorbachev and the "center."!! But as some demanded the fulfillment of truly sovereign status in the spring of 1991, Yeltsin and his government began to have reservations. Thereafter relations between the RSFSR government and autonomous units such as Tatarstan, North Ossetia, and Checheno-Ingushetia (as it was known before splitting apart into Chechnia and Ingushetia) deteriorated. These relations significantly worsened after the August coup. Especially ominous were the tensions developing between the RSFSR "center" and Checheno-Ingushetia, where the Chechen nationalist Dzokhar Dudaev came to power. Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ally of Yeltsin (for the moment) and his replacement as the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, issued warnings to the most sovereignty-minded republics that Moscow might dissolve their legislatures. Meanwhile, Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in ChechenoIngushetia and dispatched troops to the republic--decisions that were quickly reversed due to the impossibility of enforcing the RSFSR's demands.!2 In short, by late 1991 Russian leaders had awakened to the fact that their republic was vulnerable to the same centrifugal forces that had torn apart the USSR. With some alarm, political philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko noted at the time that "the disintegration of the USSR along the lines of its internal borders is leading not only to the death of the Soviet empire but to the disintegration of the state's historical core. Many areas that were settled by Russians over the centuries are now outside the bounds of the new Russian state." To be sure, at the end of 1991 perhaps twenty-five million Russians, now separated from the 148 million residents of Russia, suddenly found themselves inhabiting fourteen new countries. Just as significant to Tsipko, however, was that the momentum of disintegration would continue even after the dissolution of the Soviet state: "As soon as Ukraine or Belorussia succeeds in finally separating from the RSFSR, we will witness the birth of many sovereign Russian

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states.,,13 Even people who were otherwise sympathetic to the democrats' struggle against the center began to wonder ifYeItsin's doctrine of "sovereignty from the ground up" was not undermining the RSFSR's territorial cohesion in the same way it had that of the USSR.14 On this issue, even some of the most zealous "democrats" who had defended the Russian republic from the machinations of Soviet reactionaries in August found themselves drifting toward the "great power" ideas of the national-patriots in the months that followed. In June 1992 Sergei Stankevich, a pioneering "democrat" and adviser to Yeltsin, asserted that Russia, despite the USSR's collapse, remained a great power, able and willing to defend its interests and the interests of ethnic Russians living in what Russians now call the "near abroad." In the newly emerged sovereign states outside Russia there are over twenty-five million people affiliated with us historically and culturally. Russia is responsible for their destinies. And it will not allow anyone to humiliate them, to slight them, to discriminate against them. Let alone to kill them. From now on in dealing with Russia you will be facing not a ruined empire, but a power [derzhava]. The Russian power has a millennium-long history, legitimate vital interests, and longstanding serious traditions in defending these interests. 15

Likewise, as Foreign Minister of the RSFSR during the Soviet Union's last months, Andrei Kozyrev had pursued the line that Russia should join the community of civilized (meaning Western) countries; yet as Foreign Minister of the independent Russian Federation he immediately took a more assertive stand in defense of Russia's great-power interests. "The developed countries of the West are Russia's natural allies. The time has come to firmly declare that we are not adversaries, and that we are by no means poor younger brothers who dutifully follow the orders of a rich and ill-intentioned West that want to buy Russia.,,16 After holding his position for several months Kozyrev finally concluded that "You can only be a Westernizer when in opposition.,,17 Eduard Volodin, the chairman of the Coordinating Council of PopularPatriotic Forces, was quick to take note of this irony. "It may be remembered," he wrote only a month after the coup attempt, "that it was after 21 August [1991] that talk of Russia's unity and indivisibility first passed the 'democrats" lips." Such words were formerly swearwords in their circles, and they categorized them as part of the vocabulary of out-and-out "Russian chauvinists." But possession of power automatically requires these words as a description of the political organization of Russia, unless those who have taken hold of power wish to Balkanize or Lebanonize Russia within its current artificial border. 18

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While a number of Russia's "democratic" revolutionaries soon grew uncomfortable with a weak Yeltsin government that continued to pursue painful economic reforms and a "small Russia" policy, the national-patriots, now deprived of their chief sponsor, the Communist Party of the RSFSR, began to revaluate their own position in the transformed Russian political environment. Some patriots saw the destruction of the Communist Party as an opportunity to free themselves of the political and ideological compromises that they were forced to endure in exchange for the protection and resources offered by sympathetic Communists. Pondering the fate of the CPSU, Russian nationalist writer Vasili Belov could only wish "good luck" to the Party he had alternately criticized and supported. "It was love without joy, and parting will be without sorroW.,,19 Likewise, Aleksandr Prokhanov was ambivalent about the demise of the Communist Party. Shortly after the failed putsch, he remarked that the patriotic alliance of Russian nationalists and orthodox Communists was simply "a forced symbiosis": Before the coup, the patriotic movement included a communist bloc-the Russian Communist Party-as a very strong component, and we hoped to be able to transform this Communist party into a party of national interests, that is, a party of reforms and a party espousing a national idea; to free it from that international cosmopolitan ideology, which has become utterly inoperative; and to make use of the Party's potential, its structures and its organizational experience. Now that is finished. I think the Communist Party is finished for the near future, and possibly forever. On the one hand, this makes it difficult for us: A whole fragment has left (and the Russian Communist Party was fundamentally a party of patriots). It will be difficult, because we have lost that illusion. And on the other hand, it makes things easier, because the Russian Communist party will no longer create confusion for our ideology.... And now we will be free to formulate our own ideology without the Communists. 20

While the democrats' seizure of Russia had convinced many nationalpatriots that a new dictatorship was being established, Prokhanov was able to see a silver lining in this very dark cloud, for at least now with the removal of the CPSU from the political arena the "Russian idea" had been freed from the ideological baggage of internationalist communism. Eduard Volodin similarly assessed the new situation: And the first thing that all of us should realize is that what happened in August and is continuing now is a political coup which wiped out the artificial "opposition" between Communists and "democrats." ... Dispersed on "different sides" of the barricades, Communist leaders ... have delivered the patriotic movement from the illusions and compromises which it had to make during the period when the Communist Party, far from being a "union of like-minded individuals," was an element of the state structures. 21

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Freed from the dominance ofthe Communist Party for the first time in more than seventy years, politics in Russia was now characterized by a struggle between "democrats" and "patriots," both of which, Volodin added, "have their own truth and their own concept of Russia. ,,22 Volodin thus identified the most important ideological fault line in the political life of late Soviet Russia. It was a line that ran between "democrats" and "patriots," between "Westernizers" and "Russophiles" (or, to use the more traditional term, Slavophiles). Perhaps it would be more accurate still to say that the struggle was between "Atlanticists" and "Eurasianists." Whatever one chooses to call them, Russia's two main political forces during the last years of perestroika (and for some time afterward) consisted of those who believed that the West could in one way or another-in the areas of technology, economic practices, or political principles-serve as a source of inspiration for the rebirth of the country, and those who rejected a putatively "Western" path of development in favor of a uniquely "Russian" solution to the country's ills. While sharing the common goal of improving the spiritual and material welfare of Russia, one group saw the country's future in Europe, as a part of Western civilization, and viewed Russia's traditional political culture as an impediment to reform; the other understood Russia and Russianness as distinct from and morally superior to Europe and its traditions. At a time when it seemed possible for Russia to shed its authoritarian traditions, by 1990 many Russian reformers-Yeltsin and Yakovlev, as well as Gorbachev-had come to believe (or at least to say aloud) that Russia, long separated from the West, was now taking its proper place as a liberal European state. Radicals within the democraticiWesternizing/Atlanticist (a group that would not include Gorbachev, a Leninist to the end) camp saw the Soviet Union and its peoples as victims of communism and believed that the destruction of the power of both the Party and the "center" was necessary for Russia's national liberation. While "Westernizers" wanted the country to become a "normal" nationstate, liberated from the command economy and adorned with democratic institutions, the national-patriots and empire-savers clung to Russia's traditional authoritarian notions of state power. Many among them recognized the Communist Party, despite its mistakes, as the legitimate-or at any rate a necessaryguardian of that power. While the national-patriots conceded the necessity of limited economic reforms and some political liberalization, most opposed systemic transformation and were suspicious of Western-style, parliamentary democracy. Despite the signs of decay they sawall around them the patriots continued to see Russia as a "great power." In their view, Russians were the altruistic builders of a unique civilization, one that encompassed an area stretching from Brest to Baku to the Bering Strait; to surrender what had taken a millennium for Russians to create would be an act of madness. Of course, various shades of opinion filled the gaps between these two extremes. Gorbachev himself might be described as half "Westernizer" and half "Slavophile"-an Atlanticist by conviction and a Eurasianist by necessity-and

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his struggle and failure to reconcile these two visions of Russia in a way captures the essence of this age-old political divide. The competition between these two visions of Russia-Western-oriented, one might say, and resolutely non-Western-constitutes the predominant political dynamic of the country's modern history, in the nineteenth century as at the end of the twentieth. It is also striking that despite the gap of ISO years between the beginning of the Slavophiles' struggles with the autocracy and the collapse of communism in Russia, in both periods it was competition with the West that acted as the motivating force behind the development of national Russian consciousness. 23 Indeed, the ideology of the Russian nationalists of 1988-1991 (and here I am speaking principally of Russian nationalist intellectuals), like the classical Slavophilism of Ivan Kireevskii, Aleksei Khomiakov, and Konstantin Aksakov, aimed to stimulate the development of an historically weak Russian national identity in deliberate opposition to the West. While an understanding of the historic tensions between "Slavophile" and "Westernizing" ideas is necessary for a deeper appreciation of the political struggles that defined the late Gorbachev era, it should be remembered that the political struggles of the perestroika era concerned not only ideas, but also status and power. Let us consider the crisis faced by another elite group in Russian history: the eighteenth century Russian nobility. A discussion of their circumstances may yield some insights into the predicament of the Communists and nationalists whose beliefs and actions are at the heart of this book. According to sociologist Liah Greenfeld, more than two centuries ago the Russian elite experienced a crisis that was caused principally by the nobility's growing status anxiety, which in turn stemmed from the expansion of the nobility's ranks to accommodate the state's growing need for servants. Peter the Great's introduction at the beginning of the eighteenth century of the Table of Ranks, which offered noble status to commoners who had realized a certain level of accomplishment, was the root cause of the nobility's crisis of identity, for the consequent growth of the nobility offended the exclusivist mentality of the Russian elite. At the same time, a growing awareness of the West-another consequence of Peter's reforms-stimulated the development of a sense of national identity, which continued to exist side by side with the nobility's traditional identity as members of an exclusive caste. As a result of the confluence of these factors, a Russian national consciousness began to take shape among the Russian elite. As Greenfeld writes, Nationality elevated every member of the nation and offered an absolute guarantee from the loss of status beyond a certain-rather high-level. One could be stripped of nobility, but ... not of nationality. There was in nationalism an ensurance of a modicum of unassailable dignity that was one's to keep. And so, Russian aristocrats were gradually turning into nationalists: They were beginning to experience the therapeutic effects of national pride, and their identity as noblemen was giving way to the national identity of Russians. 24

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In a sense, what Greenfeld wrote of the eighteenth-century Russian aristocracy was also true of the USSR's political and intellectual elites at the end of the twentieth century. Like the earlier crisis of the nobility, a crisis of identity within the Soviet elite in the late 1980s, brought about in part by the failures of Soviet communism and the Westernizing economic and political reforms undertaken to revitalize it, facilitated a sympathy for and identification with older, more deeply rooted ideas about nationality. Although it is true that by the time Gorbachev came to power communist ideology had already lost much of its appeal even within the Party, the general secretary's attempt to change the ideology that underpinned the very existence of the Soviet regime brought about a crisis no less traumatic than the one suffered by the eighteenth century Russian nobility. By claiming that Lenin represented "true" socialism and that everything afterward was therefore a deviation from true socialism, Gorbachev brought the legitimacy of the entire system into question. 25 With the status and self-esteem that the Soviet elite must have enjoyed as the leaders of the socialist world now threatened, many sought an alternative source of pride: while the reformers enjoyed the country's greater proximity to the West (some openly displayed their unashamed admiration of it) and saw it as a model for Russia's future development, many conservatives, like the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, were realizing that having the West as a model could only result in self-contempt, as Russia could not hope to meet this standard. Aleksandr Prokhanov, a Soviet loyalist, recognized the dilemma posed by perestroika from nearly the beginning. In a speech delivered to the USSR Writers' Union in April 1987, he declared that There is a view, prevalent enough, that perestroika was sparked by the strategic lag of the USSR behind the civilization of the West. Soviet hospitals offer poorer treatment than Western ones. Soviet computers calculate more slowly than Western ones. Soviet cornfields are barer than Western ones. And this lag, ruinous for defense, social development, social development, the whole of national life, has forced us toward perestroika. And its meaning and mission is to catch up to the West. ... This view of "catching-up perestroika" places us in the tail of Western civilization, forcing us to copy its forms, whether of appliances, of rock groups, of interviewing methods, or of management and economic models. Such copying deprives us of our sovereign path; it gives rise to an inferiority complex; it offers trivial courses and schemes to a unique society that has chosen socialism, [thereby] dooming us to despair. Culture cannot reconcile itselfto this. 26

For Prokhanov, as for the many Soviets who were proud of their country's past and its achievements, having the West as a model could only have a negative psychological impact on the country and its peoples, for this would doom Russia forever to the role of an imitator. However, a healthy pride in the Russian

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past and Russia's unique national characteristics, coupled with the conviction that the socialist choice made in 1917 was a distinctly Russian choice, could compensate for the failings of communism and the country's inability to meet Western standards. While Marxism-Leninism may have lost much of its validity in the contemporary world, membership in the Russian nation was permanent. Recognizing both the limited popular appeal of orthodox MarxismLeninism and the reality of its political failures, as perestroika turned into a revolution political actors of all persuasions were forced to choose a side, and in the process to reinvent their political identities. Their choices were either 1) to lend their support to a reform program whose path clearly led to the West, even if that entailed relinquishing Moscow's grip on the empire, or 2) to reject this path and offer an alternative to a largely discredited Marxist-Leninist ideology. As long as reformers were at the helm in the CPSU (and in the RSFSR parliament after 1990), opponents of perestroika's Westernizing thrust felt compelled to work with other conservative forces, many of whom were Russian nationalists of some sort, in an effort to put an end to restructuring and reinforce the existing Union structure. Just as the reformers had sought legitimacy for their course by turning to the intelligentsia and ultimately the public for support, the conservatives were compelled to do the same. Thus as the CPSU's reformers moved in the direction of Western-style social democracy, the conservative wing of the Party increasingly responded in the language of Russian nationalism: the country, the latter argued, must return to a separate and distinctly "Russian" road of development. While it is certainly possible to imagine a compromise between these extreme positions-and indeed, by the early 1990s it often seemed as if there were nearly as many political organizations and movements in Russia as there were possible combinations of political ideas-for most Russians the choice was indeed that stark, as the shrinking support during 1990-1991 for Gorbachev's middle ground attests. Perestroika failed in part because of Gorbachev's inability to reconcile the irreconcilable. For perestroika to succeed, Gorbachev needed the broad-based support of the country's largest national group, the Russians; but since traditional communist ideology and the Leninist nationalities policies of "drawing closer" and "merging" had been largely discredited by the late 1980s, Russian support for restructuring within the existing socialist system could have been achieved only by appealing to Russians as Russians rather than as Communists or as Soviet citizens. Following the counsel of advisors such as Aleksandr Yakovlev, Anatolii Cherniaev, and Georgii Shakhnazarov, each of whom strongly opposed any reliance on Russian national feeling, by 1990 the Soviet leader had not moved beyond some form of National Bolshevism, which was limited mainly to defining the Soviet Union as the historical and geopolitical heir of the Russian Empire-a position that Gorbachev tempered by asserting Russia's European heritage.

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Gorbachev's failure to co-opt Russian national identity into his reform program allowed the Russian democrats and the national-patriots to offer competing conceptions of Russian identity, each of which was at variance with Gorbachev's efforts to maintain a united and reformed Soviet state while (his mildly imperial rhetoric aside) generally denying the preeminent place of Russians within that state. The national-patriots fought for a strong Soviet state based on the restoration of Russia as a "great power." Boris Yeltsin, on the other hand, offered Russians their own state, a "small Russia" shorn of the burdens of empire. It is striking and historically exceptional that of the two, Yeltsin was by far the more successful. As his biographer Leon Aron wrote: "Yeltsin and his allies snatched the powerful idea of Russian national 'renewal' from Party conservatives and 'national-patriots' and pressed it into the service of democratic modernization. The reemergence of 'sovereign' Russia, if only largely symbolic, coincided with its conscious striving for democracy, decolonization, demilitarization and the status of 'equal among equals' vis-a.-vis its neighbors.,,27 Indeed, for the moment at least, the democratic and liberal ideas of the glasnost era enjoyed greater success in penetrating the consciousness of the Russian people, and for a brief but critical period Yeltsin succeeded in fashioning himself as the embodiment of these ideas. It is doubtful that any Soviet leader could have successfully reconciled the competing pressures for rapid reform and retrenchment, for democracy and authoritarian measures, for devolution and centralization, as Gorbachev did after 1988. Part Slavophile, part Westernizer, yet still quite Soviet, Gorbachev spent the last three years of his rule caught between those who pushed him to move more rapidly in the direction of political and economic reform, and those who urged retreat and reliance on traditional Russian patriotism. The liberals supported him until Yeltsin assumed the mantIe of radicalism and even anticommunism; thereafter their support went to the leader of the RSFSR. The hardliners, on the other hand, increasingly defensive and incapable of offering a plausible alternative to Gorbachev, stuck with him until the political circumstances in Russia had shifted decisively in the direction of the democrats. By the summer of 1991 the man who for six years had been the leader of what had historically been one of the most repressive political machines in human historythe CPSU-and who was now the architect of a treaty that would undercut Moscow's power over the republics, could speak convincingly neither about democracy nor the primacy of the Party-state. He had become useless to either side.

Conclusion Whereas Gorbachev after 1989 came to embrace some form of social democracy (while never renouncing Lenin), Gennadii Ziuganov, an ideologist of MarxismLeninism during his career in the CSPU, reinvented himself as a Russian na-

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tional communist. Ziuganov has portrayed himself as a guardian of Russia's national interests rather than those of a particular class; a supporter of believers' rights and especially of Russian Orthodoxy; a philosopher who quotes Lenin in the same breath as he cites nineteenth-century thinkers such as Fedor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Herzen. For Ziuganov, socialism is the natural outgrowth of the Russian character and of the Russian historical experience; conversely, for him the "Russian idea" is a profoundly socialist idea. Appealing to Russia's special sense of destiny, Ziuganov's ideology attempts to embrace all Russians who love the Fatherland. Its goal is to transcend the long-standing antagonisms between "reds" and "whites." It is, in short, the ideology of Russian national com. 28 mumsm. Moreover, it is the ideology of opposition. In the year-and-a-half during which the Communist Party was banned, Ziuganov was an active leader in numerous nationalist organizations, such as the Russian National Assembly, Otchizna, and the All-Russian People's Union, while retaining his cochairmanship of the Coordinating Council of Popular-Patriotic Forces. In February 1993, several months after the RF Constitutional Court overturned Yeltsin's ban on the CPSU, Ziuganov stood at the head of a revived Communist Party. The new Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) was organized on the basis of the CPSU's old regional organizations, giving the party distinct material and organizational advantages over its competitors-and also making it a potentially attractive ally for the relatively impoverished Russian nationalists who, like the communists, loathed Yeltsin and his reform government. Having secured much of the CPSU's property in the Russian Federation, Ziuganov revamped the ideology of Soviet communism and attempted to create a broad alliance of communists and nationalists in opposition to the Yeltsin regime. The high point of this convergence was realized in 1996, when Ziuganov, backed by a coalition of patriotic organizations, competed with a temporarily rejuvenated Boris Yeltsin in a popular but ultimately losing campaign for the Russian presidency. This book has attempted to make these post-Soviet developments more comprehensible by recreating the Russian political atmosphere of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has shown that attempts to consolidate a national-patriotic movement of conservative Communists and Russian nationalists began well before Ziuganov's near victory in 1996, and even several years before the creation of the National Salvation Front in October 1992. 29 Egor Ligachev, perestroika's leading conservative critic and ultimately an enemy of Gorbachev, had been the first and most conspicuous member of the CPSU leadership to test the ideological compatibility of orthodox communism and Russian nationalism during the Gorbachev era: he had orchestrated the Nina Andreeva phenomenon; he personally encouraged the Russian nationalist/neo-Stalinist line taken in journals such as Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik; and in the late 1980s he was correspondingly regarded by the conservative secretaries of the RSFSR Writers'

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Union-a body that had long been the locus of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia-as a key ally in the fight against the excesses of glasnost. Although Ligachev's patriotism, more so than Ziuganov's, was generally rooted in a "Soviet" rather than a particularly "Russian" consciousness, both shared along with the Soiuz deputies and other associations of a "patriotic" orientation a common vision of Russian-Soviet derzhavnost '-the conception of the Russian-Soviet state as a "great power," unique in its historical development and morally superior to the corrupt and materialistic West. Building on Ligachev's early efforts, during 1990-1991 Gennadii Ziuganov, Ivan Polozkov, and like-minded comrades in the RCP leadership made a significant contribution to the realignment of political forces in Russia, helping to fashion an alliance of Communist hardliners and Russian national-patriots. Although within the RCP there were tensions between Marxist-Leninist reformers, neoStalinists, and Great Russian chauvinists, during its short life the RCP, like (and in concert with) the Russian Writers' Union, assumed a coordinating role within the national-patriotic movement. Moreover, the RCP leadership's receptiveness to nationalist motifs demonstrated that conservative Communists were, in some respects, no less flexible on ideological matters than were their opponents in the CPSU's reform wing: they, too, seemed to have lost faith in the ability of Marxism-Leninism either to rally the Russian masses or to deliver the goods. As Yeltsin and the Russian democrats seized power in the autumn of 1991, the nationalist and ethnic dimensions of politics in Russia were defeated at the popular level, at least in the short term. This was the product of several factors. Perhaps most significant is the fact that many of the ideas that might have served as a basis for building a mass Russian national movement had long been part of the ideology of Soviet communism, including such ideas as Russia's messianic role in the world, the notion of a special unique path of development for the country, and support for collective social and economic behavior rather than the individualism usually identified with Western societies. Since these ideas had been part of communist rhetoric, for many Russians they were discredited along with the CPSu. A case can also be made that during the course of seventy years of Soviet power, the Russian people, as the linchpin of a sprawling empire, had been denationalized to a greater extent than most other Soviet peoples. Given their relatively privileged position in the USSR-most notably in the nonRussian republics-their national self-awareness formed later and in response to the nationalism of other Soviet peoples. As long as there was a Union center, Russians, especially those living outside the borders of the RSFSR, could identify with and feel secure within a great state, which many indeed regarded as the continuation of the Russian empire. Only when the cohesion of that empire was threatened did the Russians' national self-awareness begin to assume a politicized form-and by then it was too late to save the empire. As the Soviet Union began to unravel, the potential for a broad-based Russian nationalist movement certainly existed, but this movement was underdevel-

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oped and fractured---divided most generally between those who advocated anticommunist positions and those who retained some residual belief in MarxismLeninism and favored using the Russian Communist Party as a consolidating force. For the moment, the democratic and liberal ideas of the glasnost era enjoyed greater success in penetrating the consciousness of the Russian people. However, with the failure of the August putsch, the subsequent collapse of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime's inability to solve the country's most pressing economic and social problems, the politics of antiliberal Russian nationalism enjoyed great potential indeed.

Notes I. Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 July 1991,9; Literaturnaia gazeta, 7 August 1991,2. 2. Kolov had been acting first secretary since November 1990, when Vladimir Karpov unexpectedly resigned as a result of the dispute over Literaturnaia gazeta. 3. Kolov reportedly left upon the arrival of the Evtushenko group, who afterwards accused him of removing some incriminating documents from his office. Ritta H. Pittman, "Writers and the Coup: The Chronology of Events in Summer 1991," Rusistika 4 (December 1990): 23. 4. New elections took place a week later. Timur Pulatov was elected the union's first secretary; co-chairmen included Evtushenko, Ales' Adamovich, Chingiz Aitmatov, Andrei Vozneskenskii, Fazil Iskander, Boris Mozhaev, Anatolii Pristavkin, and nine others. Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 August 1991,3. 5. Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 August 1991,3. 6. Literaturnaia Rossiia, 6 September 1991, 3; Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 September 1991,3. Both the RSFSR Writers' Union and Den' quickly returned to business in the weeks that followed the coup attempt. 7. Since 1994 the Union of Writers of Russia has been led by Valerii Ganichev, an influential Russian nationalist since the 1960s. See Chapter Two. 8. Moskovskii komsomolets, 3 September 1991, translated in CDSP43, no. 38 (23 October 1991, 19-20; Literaturnaia Rossiia, 20 September 1991, translated in CDSP 43, no. 38 (23 October 1991),21-22; lzvestiia, 11 September 1991, 3; Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 September 1991, 3; Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 October 1991, 9. 9. Writers from most of these republics had left the USSR Writers' Union more than a year earlier. For discussions of the fate of the Writers' Union following the coup attempt, see Shneidman (1995), 15-19; Rosalind Marsh, "The Death of Soviet Literature: Can Russian Literature Survive?" Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. I (1993): 115-139. 10. The idea of retaining a political union (the Union of Sovereign States) on the basis of a new treaty between the republics was dealt a death blow when the people of Ukraine voted for independence in a referendum on 1 December 1991. The republic's new president, Leonid Kravchuk, declared that the negotiations then taking place at Novo-Ogarevo were at en end. With the Ukrainians declaring their independence from the USSR, YeItsin no longer had any use for Gorbachev, and instead worked with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus to ensure a civilized management of the split.

"Russia to the Exit!"

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II. Gail W. Lapidus and Edward W. Walker, "Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: Center-Periphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia," in Lapidus, ed., The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995),82-83. 12. Yeltsin's decree is translated in J.L. Black, ed., USSR Documents Annual 1991: Disintegration of the USSR, Volume I (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1991),303-305. 13. 1zvestiia, I October 1991, translated in CDSP 43, no. 39 (30 October 1991), 1-4. 14. Lapidus and Walker, 84-85 15. Rossiiskaia gazeta, June 23, 1992, quoted in Nikolai Rudensky, "Russian Minorities in the Newly Independent States: An International Problem in the Domestic Context of Russia Today," in National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. Roman Szporluk (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1994),72. 16. 1zvestiia, 2 January 1992, translated in CDSP 44, no. I (5 February 1992): 22. 17. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 3 September 1992, quoted in Neumann, 186. 18. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 28 September 1991, 3. 19. Moskovskyi komsomolets, 3 September 1991, translated in CDSP 53, no. 38 (23 October 1991): 20. 20. Komsomol'skaia pravda, 3 September 1991, translated in CDSP 53, no. 38 (23 October 1991): 13. 21.Sovetskaia Rossiia, 28 September 1991,3. 22. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 28 September 1991, 10. 23. See Liah Greenfeld, "The Formation of the Russian National Identity: The Role of Status Insecurity and Ressentiment," Comparative Studies in SOCiety and History 32, no. 4 (1990): 549-591; Greenfeld (1992), 189-274. The awakening of Russian national consciousness-if not exactly Russian nationalism-may be said to have begun in the eighteenth century as a reaction to Peter the Great's westernizing reforms and the conspicuous presence of foreigners at the St. Petersburg court in subsequent decades, especially during the rule of Empress Anna Ivanovna (1730-40). Also see Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 1-84. 24. Greenfeld (1990), 568. 25. R. Judson Mitchell and Randall S. Arrington, "Gorbachev, Ideology, and the Fate of Soviet Communism," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 33, no. 4 (December 2000): 457-474. 26. Literaturnaia gazeta, 6 May 1987,4. 27. Aron, 388-389. 28. See Jeremy Lester, "Overdosing on Nationalism"; James Scanlan, "The Russian Idea from Dostoevskii to Ziuganov," Problems ofPost-Communism 43, no. 4 (1996): 3542; Sven G. Simonsen, "Gennadiy Zyuganov: Hankering for the Good Old Days," in Politics and Personalities: Key Actors in the Russian Opposition (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1996), 197-217. 29. The National Salvation Front (FNS) was an ill-fated alliance of communists and nationalists organized in October 1992 on the basis of a shared opposition to the policies of the Yeltsin government. In addition to Ziuganov, its leaders included Viktor Alksnis, Sergei Baburin, Valentin Chikin, Albert Makashov, Vladimir Osipov, Aleksandr Prokhanov, Valentin Rasputin, and Igor' Shafarevich.

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Index

Abalkin, Leonid, 173 Afanas'ev, Iurii, 146, 156, 161,207 Afghanistan, 59, 90, 117, 245 Aksakov, Konstantin, 5, 286 Alekseev, Mikhail, 52, 89, 97, 108n65, 124, 142 Aleksii, Patriarch of Moscow and AllRussia, 62, 274n81 Alksnis, Viktor, 218, 239-241, 245, 253, 262,270n3,270n8,293n29 All-Russian Party Conference, 192, 193, 197, 206n105, 207nl 15 and nn117118,208nI44,212,215 All-Russian People's Union, 290 Anan'ev, Anatolii, 163n77, 163n80, 280 Andreeva, Nina, 118, 180, 197, 202n47, 215, 230n 17, 290; Edinstvo and, 126, 132n72, 207n124, 265; letter of, 101, 116, 118-122, 130n39 and n43 and n44, 140, 190 Andropov, Iurii, 70, 71, 84, 85, 104n17, 112, 169, 186,222 anti-Semitism: Communist Party and, 38, 46, 51, 75n52; Nina Andreeva letter and, 119; Russian nationalist organizations and, 145, 158nnI8-19, 159n36, 203n56; Stalin and, 38; writers and, 53, 55, 57-59, 7lnl, 75n47, 92,94,96,100, 103n10, 108nn73-74, 149, 151-152, 154, 163n83. See also anti-Zionism. anti-Zionism, 53, 57-58, 75n48, 119, 130n44, 138-139, 149, 154, 158n26, 180,227. See also anti-Semitism.

Antonov, Mikhail, 71nL 109n80, 143, 161nn51-52, 162n77 Aprel', 141, 150-153, 163n80, 279-281 April Committee. See Aprel'. Armenia, 30, 41n18, 57, 65, 234n72, 255,273n53,281 Association of Russian Artists, 143, 163n88 Astafev, Viktor, 58, 92, 98, 106n45, 107n53, 124, 143 August 1991 putsch,2, 127, 190, 201n35,229,245,248,262,266-269, 279-284,292 Azerbaidzhan, 1, 19,29,47,57,65,67, 234n72, 248, 281; Nagomo-Karabakh and, 135-136, 170 Baburin, Sergei, 263, 275n94, 293n29 Bakatin, Vadim, 200n23, 208n144, 245, 257 Baklanov, Oleg, 267, 268, 274n81 Baltic region, 6, 151,245, 273n53; demographics and, 66-67, 78n98, 157n15, 234n72; independence and, 238,248; interfronts and, 147; language laws and, 171; nationalism and, 46,48,147,166,170,219,232n44; popular fronts and, 135-137, 144; Russian-speakers in, 227, 232n39, 247; sovereignty and, 8; Yeltsin and, 220, 246. See also Estonia, or Latvia, or Lithuania Begun, Vladimir, 58, 75n52, 108n74 Belorussian SSR, 29, 30, 31, 41n18, 65, 152n15,269 311

312 Belorussians, 38, 44n59, 62, 64, 179, 219 Belov, Iurii, 198, 270n13 Belov, Vasilii, 88, 95, 124, 134, 143, 163n78, 163n86, 170, 220, 284; Association of Russian Artists and, 143; Edinenie (Unity) and, 233n62; Everything Lies Ahead and, 91-93, 106n45, 163n78; Nash sovremennik and, 58, 93,147; Pamiat' and, 161n59; Rossiia deputies' club and, 156; RSFSR Writers' Union and, 147; USSR Congress of People's Deputies and, 145, 147148, 162n65; village prose and, 48, 53, 72n9 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 23, 25, 223, 229 Bloc of Public-Patriotic Groups. See Patriotic Bloc, 155, 181 Boldin, Valery, 130n46, 200n24 Bolshevik Platform of the CPSU, 211, 266 Bolshevism (Bolsheviks), 1,6, 13, 14, 22n44,23-30,33,4Inl0,49,80,94, 99, 139, 151, 183,229,247,271,288; nationalities policy and, 28-33; religion and, 33; October revolution and, 54-55; and religion, 33, 42n34 Bondarenko, Vladimir, 148, 184, 229 Bondarev, Iurii, 52, 147, 153, 155, 163n83, 170, 193, 199n12, 199n15; Association of Russian Artists and, 143; Edinenie (Unity) and, 233n62; elections to Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) and, 145; "For a Great, United Russia!" and, 227; glasnost and, 79, 89-90, 92-94, 96-98, 123-124; "Letter of the Fifty-Three" and, 274n81; Nineteenth Party Conference and, 123-124, 13ln63, 170, 215; novels of, 106n38, 107n51; perestroika and, 96, 123-124, 131 n63, 215; Rossiia deputies' club and, 156; Russian Communist Party and, 193, 225; Soviet environmental policy and, 86; the West and, 101, 134; "A Word to the People" and, 261, 280; Union of Writers (RSFSR) and, 89, 92-93, 100,IOI,106n34

Index Borodkin, Iurii, 152 Brezhnev, Leonid, 45, 56, 62, 64, 71, 73n23,76n70,82 Brezhnev regime, 7,16,51-71,92,103; nationalities policy of, 24-25, 45, 53, 64, 76n71; Russian Bureau and, 73n18; intellectuals and, 16,49,60, 63,70,71, 72n10, 74n39, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87; Russian nationalism and, 24, 51-65,69-71,80,82,83,135; Russian Orthodox Church and, 60-63; Union of Writers (USSR) and, 82, 103n8 Bureau for Russian Affairs. See Russian Bureau Caucasus region, 30, 37, 67, 135, 136, 137,214,220, 227,234n72,269.See also Armenia, Azerbaidzhan, or Georgia Centrist Bloc, 245, 257, 271n28 ChaImaev, Viktor, 52, 53, 54-55, 63, 72nI6,98,107n47 Chebrikov, Viktor, 112, 117, 122, 129n31, 132n65, 159n35. See also KGB Chechnia, 1,46, 109n76,282 Chemiaev, Anatolii, 83, 98, 108n67, 115,116, 13ln58, 199n13,242, 288 Chikin, Valentin, 52, 119, 162n64, 190, 198,222, 233n50,247,293n29 Chivilikhin, Vladimir, 52, 53, 54, 72n9, 138 Cold War, 84, 117, 170 Communist Initiative Movement (DKI), 185, 191, 193, 206n11O, 207n121, 207nI24,226, 227,265 Communist Party of the RSFSR. See Russian Communist Party (RCP). See also Ivan Polozkov and Gennadii Ziuganov Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), 18,23,221,229, 233n, 290 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): Central Committee of, 37, 45,47,51,52,55,56,58,62,69, 73n18, 82,85, 86,87,91,97, 105n23, 106nn36-37, 108n64, 111, 113, 117,

313

Index 118, 121, 125, 126, 132n, 142, 154, 166, 174, 186-193, 196,197,202n51, 203n65, 207n117, 209n152, 212, 222, 227, 240, 248-249, 257, 262, 275n87; Leningrad committee of, 120, 140141,145, 159n30, 178-180, 191-193, 202n54, 203nn55-56,203n60, 268; membership of, 26, 69, 188-189, 197198, 231n18, 275n91; Moscow committee of, 112, 118, 139, 140, 159n30, 275n88; Nineteenth Conference of, 122-125,170,212,215; Politburo of, 35,45, 52,53, 56, 57, 69, 73n23, 74n26, 75n42, 75n44, 82,84,85,92, 101, 103n10, 105n23, Ill, 112, 113, 115,117,119,120-122,125,127, 131n65, 132n67, 139, 140, 154, 156, 168,172,173,186-191,193,195, 196,197, 199n7, 205n86, 212, 230n5, 243,267, 276nl09; Secretariat of, 55, 58,69,73, 113, 125, 126, 186, 205n86, 212; Twenty-Eighth Congress of, 194, 198, 211, 212, 238, 242 Congress of People's Deputies (RSFSR), 153, 167, 175, 205n82; elections to, 181-185, 204nn75-76, 270n16 Congress of People's Deputies (USSR), 123,126,154, 157n8, 167, 170, 172, 173, 230n5, 239, 248,254, 258, 280281, 282; elections [0, 144-146, 184, 202n54, 204n76; Gorbachev and, 144, 136, 167, 170, 172; Interregional Group of Deputies and, 146, 156, 161n61, 164n89, 173; Rossiia (Russian Deputies' Club) and, 154, 156, 164n89, 172, 189,226,239,263,279; Soiuz faction of, 126, 164,n89, 206nlI0,207nI24,208nI32,218, 226,227, 230n5, 239-241,242,244, 245,247,249,250,252,253,255, 256, 258, 262, 272n41, 291 Constitution ofthe USSR, 30, 35, 68-69, 136, 167 Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, 209n154, 241, 270n15, 274n76,290

Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces (Coordinating Council of PublicPatriotic Forces), 228, 250, 255, 256, 260,266,283,290 CPRF. See Communist Party of the Russian Federation Declaration of Sovereignty (RSFSR), 3, 175,195,216,241,282 Demichev, Petr, 51, 87, 13ln65 Democratic Platform, 185, 192, 198, 204n76,207nI16,208nI49,211,213, 230nl Democratic Russia, 175-176, 179, 181, 184, 185, 186, 205n78, 205n82, 241, 252,257, 258, 270nl3 Den', 229, 259, 274n77, 280, 281,292 Departization, 258, 262, 265, 280 derevenshchiki. See village prose DKI. See Communist Initiative Movement Dolgikh, Vladimir, 120, 131 n65 Dudaev, Dzokhar, 282 Dudko, Dmitrii, 62 Edinstvo (Unity), 126, 132n72, 164n89, 193,202n51,206nII0,207nI24,226, 241,265 Emergency Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP). See August 1991 putsch environmental concerns, 48, 70, 71, 8586,95, 137 Estonia, 7, 8, 29, 41n18, 42n28, 47, 66, 67,68, 136, 158n15, 161n63, 166, 171, 172, 176,220,247. See also Baltic region Eurasianism, 272n45, 285 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 88, 89,101,151, 279, 280, 292n3 Fetisov, A., 143 Filaret, Metropolitan of Kiev and allUkraine, 250 Ganichev, Valerii, 52-54, 73n25, 75n43, 145, 292n7

314 Georgia, 18, 19n1, 24, 29, 30, 32, 34, 57,65,67, 146, 157n8,230nI6, 234n72, 238, 248, 273n53, 281. See also Caucasus region Gidaspov, Boris, 156, 180-181, 190, 192-193, 198, 203n55, 211, 212, 222, 243,248,263,265,268 Glasnost, 84-101, 114-127, 134-135; Gorbachev and, 79-80, 84, 86, 113; Ligachev and, 88,92, Ill, 114-127, 130n40; writers and, 85-10 I Glav lit, 81-82 Glazunov, II'ia, 49, 52, 53, 74n32, 124, 125-126, 131n63, 132n69, 138, 184, 199n12 Gorbachev, Mikhail: August 1991 coup and, 2, 267-268; foreign policy of, ll6-117, 129n26, 169, 170; Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) and, 144-146, 167, 170, 172; criticisms of, 215,243-244,247,249,255,256, 263,265, 274n75; economy and, 242243, 244; glasnost and, 79-80, 84, 86, 113; KGB and, 245-246, 272n31; Ligachevand, 112-113, 117, 122, 124125, 12~ 130n4~ 145, 165, 16~21~ 213; military and, 117,218,249; nationalities policy of, 7, 168-172, 248249, 253-255; "new thinking" and, 116-117, 18n2; non-Russian republics and, 136-137, 166, 171-172, 200n19, 246-247,248-249,254-255; opposition to, 117-ll8, 127, 131n62, 177, 242,253,256,262, 274n75; Party apparat and, 121-123, 125, 144, 186, 248; perestroika and, 83-84, 86, 87, 104n116, 116-117, 122-123, 129n24, 144,169-170; Politburo and, 84, 85, 112,120-121,125, 131n65, 168, 187, 230n5, 276n109; Presidential Council and, 172, 200nn23-25; Russian Bureau and, 190-191, 195-196; Russian identity and, 133, 195- I 97, 253-254, 285-286; Russian nationalism and, 168-172, 196-197, 289; Russian Orthodox Church and, 60, 169; Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee and, 125, 186; Soviet presidency and,

Index 167,172; Stalinism and, 99; writers and, 79-80,83,86,90,95,120, 199n15; Yeltsin and, 1, 168, 201n35, 243,244,246,254-255, 273n59,281, 292nlO Gorbachev, Viacheslav, 98, 100, 108n, 280 Goskomizdat, 81, 82, 87, 109n82, Gromov, Boris, 202n47, 245, 256, 261 Grossman, Vasilii, 106n42, 151, 162n77 Gumilev, Lev, 11, 21n34 Gusev, Vladimir, 52 II'in, Aleksei, 257 Interfronts, 147, 161n63, 220, 226 International Front of Working People of Latvia. See Interfronts Interregional Group of Deputies, 146, 156, 161n61, 164n89, 173 lunast', 54, 88, 100, 105n31, 154 Ivanov, Anatolii, 71nl, 74n38, 107n53, 143, 163n86 Ivanov, Iurii, 58 Ivashko, Vladimir, 213, 230n5 Izvestiia, 92, 121, 154, Karpets, Vladimir, 152-153 Karpov, Vladimir, 105, 190,237, 292n2 Kazakhstan, 37, 41n18, 66, 67, 135, 136, 157n9, 255 KGB, 51, 53, 69, 7lnl, 222, 245; August coup and, 267-268; Centrist Bloc and, 245, 271n28; Chebrikov and, 112, 117, 129n31, 132n65;Gorbachev and, 245-246; Kriuchkov and, 132n65, 141, 187, 200n23, 233n49, 245,267,268, 271n28; Pamiat' and, 140-141, 159n30, 159n36, 160nn3839; Russian Orthodox Church and, 61-62, Vilnius incident and, 232n42, 246, 271n31, 274n81; Zhirinovskii and, 271nn26-28 Khasbulatov, Ruslan, 282 Khrushchev, Nikita, 46, 47, 54, 57, 61, 64, 72n3, 73n18, 76n71, 82,112,119, 168 Khrushchev regime: antireligious campaign of, 49, 61; nationalities policy

Index of, 45-47, 49, 51,135,149,182; Russian Bureau and, 113, 187, 190; thaw and, 87,89,92,99, 143 Kirgizia, 19n1, 41n18, 69, 281 Kolov, Sergei, 280 Komsomol (Communist Youth League), 45,73n24, 140, 144, 148,27In26; journals of, 52, 54, 100; Russian nationalists and, 49-52, 54, 73n25; of RSFSR,189 Korotich, Vitalii, 97, 98, 108n64, 115, 116, 128n14, 151, 161n68 Kozhinov, Vadim, 52, 53, 72nI6, 94, 99, 100, 108nn72-73, 143, 148, 163n87 Kozyrev, Andrei, 283 Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), 155,252 Krasnodar, 197,212,214-215,220, 230nn9-1O and n 16, 232n43 Kravchuk, Leonid, 269, 292 Kriuchkov, Vladimir, 132n65, 141, 159n38,187,200n23,233n49,245, 267,268, 271n28. See also KGB Krupin, Vladimir, 100, 101,220 Kulakov, Aleksandr, 232n25 Kunaev, Dinmukhamed, 136 Kuniaev, Stanislav, 14, 184, 193, 274n81; Association of Russian Artists and, 143; Edinenie (Unity), 233n62 and; Nash sovremennik and, 52,100-101,151,170; Pamiat' and, I 60n4 I ; Rossiia and, 156; Russophobia and, 149, 151; United Council of Russia (OSR) and, 155 Kuptsov, Valentin, 208n144, 234n66, 241,264,265,266,276nlI0 Kuz'min, Apollon, 142, 232n44 Kuznetsov, Feliks, 153 Landsbergis, Vytautas, 232n42, 246 Language: laws concerning, 37, 137, 157n 14, 171, 220; Soviet policy and, 30-32,37,39,47,64,65-66,69,70, 171 Latvia, 8, 29, 41n18, 47, 66, 68, 72n5, 73nI9,89, 147, 158n15, 220, 239,

315 245, 270n3, 281. See also Baltic region Latvian Popular Front, 137, 239 Legostaev, Valerii, 13ln55, 202n51, 265 Lemeshev, Mikhail, 145, 161n59 Lenin, Vladimir, 23-33; Great Russian chauvinism and, 23, 24, 30, 32, 34; nationalities policy of; 7, 28-34, 135; October revolution and, 23-24, 26-27, 224; religion and, 32-33, 42n33, 61 Leningrad Communist Party organization. See also Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leningrad People's Front (LNF), 178, 180,203n55 Leningrad writers' organization. See Union of Writers of the USSR Leningradskaia Pravda, 180, 192, 260, 268 "Letter of the Seventy-Four," 154-155, 233n63 Liberal Democratic Party, 227, 245, 257,262,27In28 Lichutin, Vladimir, 150, 163n80 Ligachev, Egor, 111-127; glasnost and, 88,92, III, 114-127, 130n40; Gorbachevand, 112-113, 117, 122, 124125, 127, 130n40, 145, 165, 169,212, 213; Molodaia gvardiia and, 98, 116, 290; Nina Andreeva letter and, 118122, 130n39, 13ln55; 259, 290; Nineteenth Party Conference and, 122124; perestroika and, 113, 117, 1I8, 122, 124,212; Russian Communist Party and, 194-195, 198; Russian nationalism and, 9, Ill, 112, 125-126, 156,169, 194-195, 209n151, 264, 290-291; Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee and, 113, 125126; and Soiuz, 208n132; TwentyEighth Party Congress and, 194; United Workers' Front (OFT) and, 202n51; the West and, 115, 117, 122; writers and, 16, 98, 112, 115-116, 125-127,226; Yakovlev and, 99, 1121l3, 115, 116, 125, 127, 128n4; Yeltsin and, 124, 127

316 Likhachev, Dmitrii, 89, 169-170 Literaturnaia gazeta, 54, 55, 56, 58, 87, 93,96,98,174,259,274n77,292n2 Literaturnaia Rossiia, 73n21, 147, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 181, 186, 204n67, 204n75,280 Lithuania, 8, 29, 41n18, 66, 136-137, 220; Communist Party of, 66, 171, 188,194, 199n2,246; independence movement of, 170, 171-172, 175, 176, 246-247; Russification and, 68, 69, 78n98; Russian-speakers in, 69, 161n63, 232n39 and n42; Vilnius incident and, 19n1, 246, 272n31, 275n83, 276n109. See also Baltic region Litvinova, Galina, 148, 149, 162n69, 163n86,206n97 LNF. See Leningrad People's Front Lobanov, Mikhail, 54, 74n33, 98, 143, 163n145 Luk'ianov, Anatolii, 200n23, 245, 259, 268 Makashov, Albert, 2, 218, 257, 268, 276n112 Manaenkov, Iurii, 187, 190, 193,194, 206nl03,208nI36,257 Marxist Platform, 185,211,226 Medvedev, Vadim, 121, 125, 141, 142, 187,189,200n23,203n64,206n94, 208n136 Mel'nikov, Aleksandr, 198 Mikhalkov, Sergei, 52, 89, 92-93, 106n34,280 Moldova (Moldavian SSR), 19n1, 41nI8,47,67,68,194,220,227,255, 256,271,273n53,281 Molodaia gvardlia, August 1991 putsch and, 280; circulation of, 74n39, 100; editorial board of, 13,52,54,55, 152; glasnost campaign and, 98, 100, 121; Ligachev and, 98, 116, 290; Otechestvo and 142; perestroika and, 107n53; Pikul' and, 58; Polozkov and, 219; Russian nationalism and, 13,52-56, 73n21, 74n32, 74n38,98,

Index

107n47, 108n67, 109n75, 142, 145, 153, 154 Moscow Communist Party organization. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union Moscow News, 93, 109n75, 140, 147, 182,267 Moscow writers' organization. See Union of Writers of the USSR Moskva, 54,55, 73n21, 74n39,89,90, 97, 100, 109n75, 142, 145, 154 Nagomo-Karabakh, 135, 136, 170,251. See also Azerbaidzhan Nash sovremennik: anti-Semitism and, 100, 109,n74, 149; August 1991 putsch and, 280; circulation of, 74n38-39; editorial board of, 52, 54, 58, 93, 143, 148-149, 170; Russian nationalism and, 54, 55, 58, 90, 100101,126, 147-149, 154, 155, 156, 160n39, 186; Russophobia and, 148149,151; Siberian fivers diversion project and, 85 National Bolshevism, 22n44, 54, 192; perestroika era, 14, 22n44, 90, 94, 139,151, 185, 192,229,247,266, 288 National Salvation Front (FNS), 228, 290,293n29 Nationalism: theories of, 9-12; in nonRussian republics, 134-138, 157n8, 157nll, 157n14, 166, 170, 171 nationalities policy: under Brezhnev, 2425 45, 53, 64, 76n71; under Gorbachev,7, 168-172,248-249,253-255; under Khrushchev, 45-47, 49, 5 1,64, 135,149, 182; under Lenin, 7, 28-33, 135; under Stalin, 33-40 neo-Slavophilism, 14,48-49,56,99, 119, 130n43, 148, 174,227 Nikonov, Anatolii, 52-55, 117, 122 Nineteenth Party Conference. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union Novo-Ogarevo, 254-256, 292 NOVYl mir, 54, 55, 72n9, 87, 88, 92, 97, 105n31, 115, 169

Index OFT. See United Workers' Front Ogone~ 73n21,87,93,97-98, 108n64, 108n65, 109n75, 115, 116, 128n14, 154 Oktiabr', 54, 88, 92, 106n42, 151, 154, 162n77,163n80,274n77,280 Osipov, Vladimir, 52, 71nl, 227, 293n29 OSR. See United Council of Russia Ostashvili, Konstantin. See SmimovOstashvili Otchizna (Fatherland), 193, 206nllO, 207nI24,241,270nI6,290 Otechestvo (Fatherland), 141-142, 148, 160n44, 163n88, 179, 193,226, 232n44, 239, 275n93 Ovechkin, Valentin, 48 Pamiat' (Memory), 58, 100, 101, 107n56, 108n64, 108nn66-67, 109n75, 145, 14~ 154, 155, 158n18, 158n24, 159n28, 161nn58-59, 162n68; Communist Party and, 120, 139-141, 159n27, 159n30; founding of, 138-139, 180; KGB and, 140-141, 159n30, 159n36, 160nn38-41; Russian Communist Party and, 193, 217, 231n25 Patriotic Bloc (also Bloc of PublicPatriotic Groups), 155, 165, 181-185, 225,260 Pavlov, N.A., 279 Pavlov, Sergei, 52, 115 Pavlov, Valentin, 245, 268 Peasants' Union, 262 Perestroika: criticisms of, 9, 96, 100, 101-102, 109n83 118-120, 123-124, 212,215, 232n33, 263, 287; origins of, 83-84, 104n16; economy and, 80, 83,85,91, 101-102, 109n83, 116, 128n15, 129n24, 169,214-215,242244, 272n21; Petrushenko, Nikolai, 218, 227 Pikul', Valentin, 57-59, 75n54, 148 Pimen, Patriarch of Moscow and AIIRussia, 62 Pokrovskii, Mikhail, 35, 36, 41nl 1

317 Polianskii, Dmitrii, 57, 74n26, 103nlO Politburo. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union or Russian Communist Party Polozkov, Ivan, 9,53; Gorbachev and, 208n144, 214-215,242-244, 263, 265; Krasnodar party organization and, 211nlO, 214-215; perestroika and, 197, 209n154, 214-215, 241, 263; RSFSR presidency and, 256; Russian Communist Party and, 9, 17, 53,156,197-198, 207n117, 213-221, 223-228, 240-241, 262-265, 275n91; Russian Orthodox Church and, 219, 227, 232n34, 250-251; Union Treaty referendum and, 251; writers and, 226, 233n63, 234n66; Yeltsin and, 185, 197 Popov, GavriiI, 161n61, 207n116, 213 popular fronts, 136-137, 144, 146, 232n39,239 population, of non-Russian republics, 68-69; ofRSFSR, 37, 42n28, 66, 73n19, of Russians, 20n8, 29, 37, 50, 66-68,70, 135, 147, 157n5, 158n15, 161n63, 234n72, 282; of USSR, 50 Presidential Council, 95, 130n42, 172, 200nn23-25, 239, 241, 244 Pristavkin, Anatolii, 100, 101, 109n76, 151, 292n4 Prokhanov, Aleksandr: articles, by, 130n43, 182-183; August 1991 putsch and, 269, 280; Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces and, 228, 255, 266; Den'and, 229, 231n29, 259, 280; "For a Great United Russia!" and 227; Gorbachev and, 237; military and, 183,218, 231n29; novels by, 59,90, 218; Patriotic Bloc and, 183,225, Russian Communist Party and, 217218,226,229,249,259,284; United Council of Russia (OSR) and, 155, 182,259; the West and, 90, 287-288; "A Word to the People" and, 261-262, 269,280; Yeltsin and, 220; Ziuganov and, 221,259, 261,269 Prokofev, Iurii, 190

318 Proskurin, Petr, 92-94, 108n67, 163n86, 170,233n62 Protocols a/the Elders a/Zion, 139, 158n20 Pugo, Boris, 245, 268, 272n31 RAPP. See Russian Association of Proletarian Writers Rasputin, Valentin: Association of Russian Artists and, 143; Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) and, 145, 147-148, 156; as derevenshchik, 48, 72n9; environmental activism of, 8586; and glasnost, 85, 95; and Ligachev, 115; Nash sovremennik and, 85-86, 148; National Salvation Front and, 293n29; novels by 48, 88, 95; Pamiai' and, 107n56, 160n41, 161n59; perestroika and, 95; Presidential Council and, 95, 172, 200n24; and Rossiia and, 156; Sodruzhestvo and 152; Soviet Culture Fun and, 199n12; "A Word to the People" and, 261,280; Yeltsin and, 220, 273n68 RCP. See Russian Communist Party Rodina (Motherland) club, 49 Rodionov, Igor, 219 Romanenko, Aleksandr, 58, 180, 202n47,203n58,227 Roman-gazeta, 73n21 and n25, 109n75, 145 Rossiia (Russian Deputies' Club). See Congress of Peoples Deputies (USSR) RSFSR. See Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic RSFSR Writers' Union. See Union of Writers of the RSFSR Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), 34, 81, 103n3 Russian Bureau of the Communist Party, 73n18, 113, 187, 190-192, 195-196, 206n105, 207nl15 and n118, 212 Russian Communist Party (Communist Party of the RSFSR): Central Committee of, 209n152, 223, 224, 227, 240,247, 262,263,265, 268,271n26; creation of, 16, 148, 148, 185-199, 207n 118, 214; Communist Party of

Index the Soviet Union (CPSU) and, 16, 185,197-198,209nI54,213,216, 241-242; Gorbachev and, 187-189, 193-198,213,242,244,247; ideology of, 53, 208n145, 212-229; membership of, 231n18, 263, 275n91; military and, 218-219, 240-241; Politburo o~ 198, 209nI54,221, 233n50, 241, 246, 262; RSFSR government and, 177,178, 179, 209n154, 214; Russian Orthodox Church and, 219-220, 250251; Secretariat of the Central Committee of, 268; Soiuz and, 240-241; Union Treaty referendum and, 249253; writers and, 226; "A Word to the People" and, 238, 261-262; Yeltsin and,220, 232n42,246, 256,265,284 Russian Deputies Club. See Congress of Peoples Deputies (USSR) Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR): autonomous republics o~ 32, 41n18, 42n28, 137,238, 282; creation of, 6, 30, 32, 41n18, 43n40; Criminal Code o~ 141; Declaration of Sovereignty of, 3, 175, 195, 216,238,241,282; elections in, 145, 153,175,181-185, 204n76, 205n78, 256; Gorbachev and, 171-172; independence of, 3, 176, 281-282; migration to, 67, 135, 157n15, 227, 230n16; minorities in, 46, 64; non-Russian republics and, 176, 181,243; population of, 37,65,66, 73n19; presidency of, 167,253,254,256, 272n41,273n59; Russian identity and, 50, 168, 173176, 182; russification in, 65; sovereignty of, 8, 175-176, 195, 216; Supreme Soviet of, 154, 146, 173-176, 185, 185, 186, 195, 204n76, 205n82, 213,243,253,256,282 Russian National Assembly, 290 Russian National Front, 245 Russian Orthodox Church: Brezhnev regime and, 61-63; Gorbachev and, 60, 169; Khrushchev regime and, 49, 61; Lenin and, 32-34, 42n34; Polozkov and, 219, 227, 250; Russian identity and, 6, 60-63; Soviet state and,

Index 60-63, 250; Stalin regime and, 34, 38, 61 Russian Party Conference. See AllRussian Party Conference Russian Writers' Union. See Union of Writers of the RSFSR russification, 5-6, 35, 37, 41nl 10,46, 64-68,82 Russophobia, 16, 146-154, 182,251 Rutskoi, Aleksandr, 142, 161n59, 222, 263, 265, 275n93 Ryzhkov, Nikolai, 112, 1 17,200, 230n5, 243, 245, 256,257, 271nnI8-19, 273n68 Sajudis, 232n42, 246 Sakharov, Andrei, 105n25, 146, 161n61, 173,264 Semanov, Sergei, 52, 53, 55, 72n16 Semichastnvi, Vladimir, 52 Sergeev, Aleksii, 206nl 10 Sergeev, Iurii, 96, 100 Shafarevich, Igor', 109n74, 149, 162nn70-71, 163n77, 163n145, 293n29 Shakhnazarov, Georgii, 84, 242, 288 Shatalin, Stansislav, 173, 200n23, 242 Shatrov, Mikhail, 87-88, 118-119, 130n42 Shelepin, Aleksandr, 51, 52, 57, 73n23, 74n26,75n43,87 Shenin,Oleg, 190, 208n144, 247, 267, 268 Shestalov, Ivan, 152 Shevardnadze, Eduard, I I I, 112, 127, 128n3,168,200n23,230n5,245,266 Shevtsov, Ivan, 52, 55, 58, 75n46, 104 Shevtsov, Vladimir, 262 Shushkevich, Stanislav, 269 Siniavskii, Andrei, 54, 151, 163n77 Skurlatov, Valerii, 245, 271n26 Slavophilism, 4-5, 9, 33, 48, 53, 112, 168,223,285-287. See also neoSlavophiles Smirnov-Ostashvili, Konstantin, 14 I, 160n39 and n40, 245, 271n26 Sobchak, Anatolii, 198,213

319 Sodruzhestvo (Community), 152 Soiuz. See Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) Soloukhin, Vladimir, 48, 53, 54, 94, 148, 161 Solov'ev, Iurii, 3,120,140,145,178, 179,180,203n60 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 87, 126, 148; Lenin, 26 and; Russia and, 20n3, 26, 173-174, 200n29, 201n31; Sovietregime and, 71n1, 89; Union of Writers and, 151, 163n80; village prose and, 72n9 Sovetskaia kul'tura, 87, 98,115,121, 140, 154 Sovetskaia literatura, 155 Sovetskaia Rossiia, 52, 54, 73n21, 150, 155, 222, 251, 266-267; Nina Andreeva letter and, 118-119,215; Russian Communist Party and, 247; Russian nationalism and, 147, 162n64, 164n89; "A Word to the People" and 258,260 Soviet Culture Fund, 170, I 99n I 2 Stalin, Josef, 8, I 1,26,32,98-99; nationalities policy of, 33-40; Russian nationalism and, 35-39, 135; the Russian Orthodox Church and, 38, 61 Stalinism: glasnost and, 91, 98-99, 114, 118-120, 137-138; Gorbachev and, 99, 112; Khrushchev and, 47; Ligachevand, 112, 116, 127; neoSlavophilism and, 49, 99, 108n73; Russian nationalists and, 13, 53, 101 Stankevich, Sergei, 145, 161n59, 283 Starodubtsev, Vasilii, 227, 262, 268 State Committee for the State ofEmergency (GKChP). See August 1991 putsch Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 86, 128n3, 132n65, 144, 146, 185,244, 245, 250. See also Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. See RSFSR Suslov, Mikhail, 58, 132n66

320 Sychev, Igor', 139, I 59n26 and n27, 159n30, 161n58 Tadzhikistan, 1,31, 41n18, 73n19 TiuI'kin, Viktor, 198 Tiziakov, Aleksandr, 262, 268, 274n81 Transcaucasian region. See Caucasus region Trotsky, Lev, 34, 43n42, 98, 126,282 Trotskyism, 99, 119 Tsipko, Aleksandr, 126,282 Twenty-Eighth Congress ofthe CPSU. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union Ukraine, 29, 30-31, 43,n40, 46, 47, 57, 61,62,65,66, 72n3, 76n59,89, 157nll, 157n15, 171-172, 176, 182, 201n37, 232n38,248,250,269,281, 282,292nlO Cniate Church, 76n59, 76nn59-60, 232n38,250 Cnion for the Spiritual Revival ofthe Fatherland, 143, 164n88 Union of Russian Writers, 281 Union of Writers of the RSFSR (UW RSFSR), 52,92, 100, 101, 159, 163n; August 1991 putsch and, 269, 280281; congresses of, 226, 259; creation of 50, 73n 17; leadership of, 52; Leningrad branch of, 151- I 52; Moscow branch of, 73n17, 106n37, 150-151; periodicals of, 51; political struggle in 150-157, 204n67, plenums of, 101102,151-153,192, 233n63; Russian Communist Party and, 217, 225-226, 231 n24; Secretariat of the Board of, 92, 101, 204n67, 231n24; split in, 280-281 Union of Writers of Russia, 281 Union of Writers ofthe USSR (UW USSR), 79-103; August 1991 putsch and, 280-281; congresses of, 85-86, 88-90, 104nll, 279; Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, 81-83; creation of, 50, 81; culture war in, 91-103; glasnost and, 85- I 03; perestroika and, 10 1-102, 105n34; Secretariat of the

Index

Board of, 81, 82, 89, 96, 280; Solzhenitsyn and, 163n80 Union Treaty (original, 1922),30, 41n18, 171; (proposed, 1991),238, 240,248-256,258,260,266,267 United Council of Russia (OSR), 155, 163n88, 179, 181, 182,259 United Workers' Front (OFT), 126, 154, 155, 163n88, 164n89, 184, 200n25, 202n51,202n54,203n55,206nl10, 207n121, 226, 250; founding of, 178181, 202n47; Russian Communist Party and, 178, 181, 191-193 Ustrialov, Nikolai, 22n44, 33, 54 Uzbekistan, 19n1, 41n18, 66, 73n19, 89, 215,230nI6,255,281 Varennikov, Valentin, 227, 261-262, 267-268, 274n77, 274n81, 275n83, 276nl09 Vasil'ev, Dmitrii, 138-140, 158n24, I 59n30 Vikulov, Sergei, 54, 74n38, 96, 97, 100, 127, 142, 161, 163n86 village prose, 48-49, 51, 53, 72nn9-1O, 74n39, 79, 91, 126, 150, 169 Vilnius. See Lithuania Vlasov, Aleksandr, 156, 187-188, 206n91 Volodin, Boris, 187 Volodin, Eduard, 142, 149, 155, 184, 220,228,255,262,266,283-285 VOOPIK, 18,49,51,52, 72nnI4-17, 107n56, 126, 142, 160n41 Voronin, Sergei, 152, Voronin, Vladimir, 257, 271n28 Voronov, Gennadii, 5 I, 57 Voronov, Iurii, 87 Vorotnikov, Vitalii, 112,117, 131n58, 139,156, 158n22, 186-190, 194, 205nn87-90,205n95

"A Word to the People," 238, 258-262, 266,268,269,280 Writers' Union. See Union of Writers

Index Yakovlev, Aleksandr, 56, 154,212, 230n5,233n49,242,266,276nnl03104; Brezhnev regime and, 65, 75n42; cultural policy and, 85, 87, 90, 96; glasnost and, 87, 134; Gorbachev and, 83,85,96,99, 106n34, 113,276nl03, 288; Ligachev and, 112, 113, 115116, 125, 127, 128n4; Nina Andreeva affair and, 119-121; Pamiat' and, 139; Russian Communist Party and, 194, 197, 207n127, 258; Russian nationalism and, 45, 56-57, 75nn42-43, 112, 120-121,139,187,288;Ziuganov and,258-259,265-266,274n76 Yakunin, Gleb, 62 Yanaev, Gennadii, 245, 267, 268, 280 Yarin, Veniamin, 164n89, 172, 179, 200nn23-25, 239 Yashin, Aleksandr, 48, 72n9 Yavlinskii, Grigorii, 173 Yazov, Dmitrii, 117, 200n23, 231n29, 237,244,252,262,268,272n31, 275n86 Yeltsin, Boris, 8, 9, 15,28,53; August 1991 putsch and, 268; Baltic republics and, 220, 246; as chairman ofRSFSR Supreme Soviet, 173, 175, 185, 205n82, 213, 243, 257, 282; Congress of People's Deputies (USSR) and, 145, 161n61, 173; Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, 198,213, 257-258,262,265, 270n15; Democratic Platform and, 207n116; Democratic Russia and, 175, 185; dissolution of USSR and, 269, 292nlO; economic reform and, 173, 175-176; Gorbachev and, 1, 168,243,244,246,247,254255, 273n59, 281, 292nlO; Interregional Group of Deputies and, 156, 161n61, 173; Ligachev and, 127; as Moscow party boss, 112, 118, 139; Russian Communist Party and, 246247; Politburo (CPSU) and, 112, 173; presidency ofRSFSR and, 167,247, 253, 270n2, 272n41, 256-258; RSFSR sovereignty and, 2, 175, 201n35, 252253,282-283; Russian identity and,

321 13,133,174,175,176,182,252,285, 289; Russian nationalism and, 13, 133, 139, 173, 175, 176; Russian Orthodox Church and, 257; Russianspeakers in non-Russian republics and, 176-177, 232n42, 247; Union Treaty referendum and, 252 Young Guardism, 52-56. See also Molodaia gvardzia Zalygin, Sergei, 72n9, 86, 87, 101, 106n34, 115, 169 Zhirinovskii, Vladimir, 2, 227, 245, 257, 262, 266,271n26,271n28 Ziuganov, Gennadii: August 1991 putsch and, 268-269, 277n118; Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and, 24, 229, 290; Coordinating Council of Patriotic Forces and, 228, 25-256; "For a Great United Russia!" conference and, 226-227; Gorbachev and, 242, 265, 274n75; Prokhanov and, 221, 228, 229, 259, 261, 269; Russian Communist Party and,212,217,222-223,229,259, 265-266, 270n14; views of, 11, 21n37, 23-24, 217, 221-223, 231n21, 258-259,289-291; writers and, 226, 227, 234n66, 259; Union Treaty referendum and, 251-252; "A Word to the People" and, 258, 261; Yakovlev and, 258-259, 265-266, 274n76; Yeltsin and, 275n87, 276n116, 290 Znamenskii, Anatolii, 152 Znamia, 87, 88, 92, 105n31 and n34, 106n42, 107n61, 109n75, 154, 274n77

About the Author

Kevin C. O'Connor is an Assistant Professor of History at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet History from Ohio University and is author of The History of the Baltic States (2003) and Culture and Customs of the Baltic States (2006).