Abstract
The concepts of nation and nationalism are controversial and difficult to define. If we were discussing national tensions in the USSR in general, our starting-point would have to be Stalin’s 1913 definition, which to this day remains the official Marxist-Leninist platform on nationality (as no such definition exists in the original ‘classics of Marxism’). Stalin’s definition leaves no room for evolution, for the appearance of new nations, or for nations without a common territory or language, such as the Gypsies or the Jews of the diaspora, for instance.1 As culture, according to Marxism, is determined by economic relations, there is no room for spiritual culture, let alone religion, as a determining factor of national identity. Hence this definition is inacapable of explaining either the Jewish national phenomenon or the contemporary dual revival of nationalism and religion in the supposedly internationalist Soviet Union (as well as in most other Communist-dominated states), nor does it explain how the two phenomena are mutually related and nourish each other.
A nation is a historically established stable community of people, which came into being on the basis of common language, territory, economic life and psychic constitution, expressing themselves in a common culture.
(Iosif Stalin)
A nation is a spiritual whole, created and sustained by a community of culture and spiritually inherited from the past, living in the present while being created for the future.
(Peter B. Struve)
A nation is a mystical organism, a mystical personality, … an eternally living subject of the historical process. It includes all past generations as much as the present ones … National existence overcomes time … That is why there is a religious foundation, a religious depth in the national consciousness.
(Nicholas Berdiaev)
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Notes and References
For a broader discussion of this subject, see, Pospielovsky, ‘Russki natsionalizm, marxizm-leninizm i sud’by Rossii’, Grani, nos 111–112 (January–February 1979) pp. 418–23.
Zoia Krakhmal’nikova, ‘Vozvrashchenie bludnogo syna’, Nadezhda, no. 4 (USSR: Samizdat; Frankfurt/M.: Possev, 1980 ) pp. 347–8.
Pospielovsky, ‘The Resurgence of Russian Nationalism in Samizdat’, Survey, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1973 ) pp. 51–74.
For a more detailed discussion of the film, see
John B. Dunlop, The New Russian Nationalism ( N.Y.: Praeger, 1985 ) pp. 67–73.
For more details on the Change-of-Signposts movement and the National Bolsheviks, see: M. Agursky, Ideologiia natsional-bol’shevizma ( Paris: YMCA Press, 1980 ) passim; and Pospielovsky, Russian Church, vol. 1, pp. 87–9.
Pospielovsky, ‘The Neo-Slavophile Trend and Its Relation to the Contemporary Religious Revival in the USSR’, in Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics, Pedro Ramet (ed.); ( Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984 ) pp. 43–5.
Alexandr Vasil’ev, ‘Real’naia ideologiia praviashchego sloia’, Posev, no. 9 (September 1986) pp. 26–8. Similar information was supplied to this author by Yuri Kublanovsky, an outstanding contemporary Russian poet and a 1982 exile from the Soviet Union, an Orthodox Christian from a Communist family background. Oral interview, Paris, July 1983.
A. Solzhenitsyn and Igor’ Shafarevich, Dye Press-konferentsii ( Paris: YMCA Press, 1975 ) p. 49. The term ‘National Bolshevik’ was first used by Karl Radek in 1918 in relation to the Hamburg German CP organization which he accused of co-operating with extreme German nationalists. Agursky, Ideologiia, pp. 62–3.
See my ‘Russki natsionalizm’, n. 42 (Grani, 111–12, pp. 444–6); and Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983 ) pp. 218–27.
As note 14 above. Also, Pospielovsky, ‘Nationalism as a Factor of Dissent in the Contemporary Soviet Union’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1974) p. 102.
Likhachev, Zametki o Russkom ( 2nd edn, M.: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1984 ) pp. 39–44.
Krakhmal’nikova, ‘Krizis krasoty’, Nadezhda, no. 6 (Samizdat, 1980; Frankfurt/M., 1981) pp. 379–96.
Likhachev, ‘Im neobkhodimo doverie’, Litgaz., 20 May (1987).
E. Losoto, ‘V bespamiatstve’, Koms. pravda, 22 May 1987.
Osipov, ‘Russkii khudozhnik Il’ya Glazunov’, Veche, no. 9 (1973) AS 1665.
Gordienko, ‘Aktual’nye problemy kritiki ideologii sovremennogo russkogo pravoslaviia’, in Ateizm, religiia, sovremennost’ ( L.: Gos. muzei istorii religii i ateizma, 1977 ) p. 88.
P. Urzhumtsev, ‘Khristianstvo i natsional’nyl vopros’, Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, no. 4 (April 1962) pp. 42–7.
A. Nazarov, ‘Natsional’noe vozrozhdenie — nasushchnaia neobkhodimost’’, VRKhD, no. 135 (1981) pp. 280–81.
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© 1988 Dimitry V. Pospielovsky
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Pospielovsky, D.V. (1988). (Orthodox) Religious Revival and (Russian) Nationalism. In: Soviet Studies on the Church and the Believer’s Response to Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19357-8_9
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