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The Soviets' Achilles' Heel: The Nationality Question
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13961 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
2,671 Words |
| Author
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Uri Ra'anan
Uri Ra'anan is professor of international politics and
director of the International Security Studies program at the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, as well s a fellow of
Harvard University's Russian Research Center. |
In recent months, exacerbation of the nationality problem in the Soviet Union has become evident. On the one hand, there have been bold demonstrations by Crimean Tatars demanding to be returned to their homes (from which Stalin deported them after the Nazi invasion of the USSR), and by Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians protesting the forcible incorporation of their countries into the Soviet Union and the increasing Russification of their cities. Ukrainians, moreover, have displayed their resistance to the growing replacement of their native tongue by the Russian language in cultural and administrative institutions.
On the other hand, using the opportune cover of glasnost, a particularly ugly and potentially dangerous manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism, indeed racism, has come into the open. Starting as a movement supposedly concerned about the environment and the preservation of historical monuments, Pamyat (memory) has assumed the dimensions of a counterculture, perhaps even an embryonic rival political movement to the Communist Party. Pamyat has been allowed to publish its "message" more or less explicitly, from time to time, and to organize public gatherings with increased frequency, harping upon paranoid themes concerning alleged plots by "Freemasons" and "Zionists" against Mother Russia. The themes it has evoked have uncanny resemblance to the Black Hundreds of czarist times, who organized programs under the slogan of "beat the Jews and save Holy Russia."
Indeed, Pamyat has led to phenomena reminiscent of an even more recent past; there have been gatherings in public parks of Russian youths, undisturbed by the militia in many instances, wearing swastika armbands and giving the Hitler salute.
What makes these manifestations all the more remarkable is the startling passivity of the Communist Party and the administrative organs, which normally would crack down with lightning speed on the slightest display of individual dissent. (Glasnost has not eliminated this practice when "liberal" dissent from the party line, as opposed to criticism of mere bureaucratic shortcomings, is concerned.)
Moreover, there is evidence of mild encouragement of Pamyat, not just mere apathy, on the part of the relevant Soviet organs. On at least one occasion, Pamyat representatives were received by a candidate member of the Politburo, Boris Yeltsin. From the point of view of the Pamyat representatives, the positive far outweighed the negative aspects of that meeting. They were given no more than a mild tap on the wrist and were
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