Abstract
The Red victory in the civil war which followed the Russian revolution(s) of 1917 led to the creation of a wholly new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, at the end of 1922. The USSR's foundational myths lay in a heroic presentation of the October Revolution of 1917 and of the subsequent exploits of the Red Army in defeating the revolution's enemies – foreign ‘bourgeois’ forces and domestic counterrevolutionary ‘Whites’. The civil war both shaped and legitimized the institutions of the Soviet state. The losing side received little mercy at the hands of the victorious Reds – all the White leaders either escaped into exile or were executed, while throughout the 1920s and 1930s any former ‘Whiteguard’ was liable to arrest at any time as a suspected ‘counterrevolutionary’. At least until World War II, the Soviet state, seen by its rulers as an instrument of class struggle, had no use for the politics of national reconciliation.
With the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 and the re-emergence of a ‘Russian’ state, a new set of national narratives were needed, able to encompass not only the achievements of the Soviet period, but also the Tsarist heritage, the anti-Bolshevik opposition, the post-revolutionary emigration, and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). This book explores the origins, development and political struggles around those post-Soviet narratives of Russian statehood. Although its sub-title is ‘Reds Versus Whites’, this is misleading – there is very little about the Red version of history here. Almost the entire focus is on the emergence and gradual incorporation of the White story.
The historical survey in the first chapter identifies three ‘turning points’ in Soviet times which laid the foundations for the subsequent ‘cultural reconciliation’ with the Whites’ point of view (15). Firstly, Stalin's ‘Great Turn’ of 1929, aimed at developing and strengthening the USSR as a state, led to a less dismissive official view of the Russian Empire as the USSR's precursor. Then World War II, and the need to mobilize all possible support for a ‘patriotic’ rebuff to the Nazi invaders, obliged Stalin's regime to invoke historic Russian military prowess as well as loosen restrictions on ‘traditional’ religious establishments, notably Orthodoxy and Islam. Finally, the relative liberalization of the post-Stalin era, and the release from camps and exile of many political dissenters, allowed a tentative expression of ‘non-conformist’ views. Consequently, when the Soviet Communist Party relaxed its grip in the late 1980s and the USSR itself disintegrated, various alternative narratives of Russian history, and their devotees, were already present in Russian society.
The ROC has since 1991 been the most assiduous purveyor of pro-White and Tsarist narratives, going so far as to canonize the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family in 2000. As the book shows, the Russian state today necessarily has an ambivalent attitude to this church activism. It needs the ROC as one source of national identity and cohesion, but pride in aspects of the Soviet past – first and foremost, the victory over Nazi Germany – remains another important source of patriotic identification. This also complicates the attitude towards the White emigration – those that publicly backed the Soviet side in World War II, such as the White general Anton Denikin, can be officially admitted into the pantheon of Russian national heroes, while those whose anti-Sovietism led them to hope for a German victory remain beyond the pale.
The post-Soviet Russian state has pushed the line of national reconciliation, fostering a syncretic narrative of Russian statehood which embraces all the different forms it has taken over the years and stressing continuity. Unlike its communist-ruled predecessor, the Russian state today does not need to impose a single, obligatory narrative on the whole of society. On the contrary, Laruelle and Karnysheva argue convincingly that the Kremlin needs ‘ideological plasticity’, and to allow ‘a large plurality of opinions in which Reds and Whites are welcome to express themselves’ (80). This was reflected in the low-key but generally uncontentious way the centenary of the 1917 revolution(s) was officially commemorated in Russia, while communists, monarchists and others were free to organize their own events.
This is a useful little book which mainly provides an account of the evolution of the White narrative and relates it to present-day Russian memory politics. It would be very instructive to compare the position of memory politics in Russia with its position in other ex-Soviet states. But that would require a much bigger volume.