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The Emerging Russian Consensus
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18281 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
3,051 Words |
| Author
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Nicolai N. Petro
Nicolai N. Petro is lecturer in political science at the
University of Pennsylvania. He recently served as policy
adviser in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the
Department of State, and as political attaché at the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow. |
As accustomed as we are becoming to the rapid changes in the Soviet Union, few analysts were prepared for such scenes as:
· At the end of the latest congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev insists that the only way the party can survive is to embrace more radical market-oriented reforms and a multiparty system. Still, at the close of the congress 200,000 Muscovites converge on Red Square, calling for an immediate end to the Communist Party's monopoly on power, some of them carry aloft the white, red, and blue pre-Revolutionary Russian flag.
· Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected head of the Russian republic, quits the Communist Party. The mayors of Leningrad and Moscow quickly follow suit. When he convenes the Russian Supreme Soviet the next day, Yeltsin is greeted by a standing ovation for his action. When the applause dies down, Yeltsin asks Father Vyacheslav Polosin, a dissident priest, now a member of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, to begin the session with a brief blessing.
· At the most recent meeting of the Russian Writers' Union, Vladimir Karpets, a 34-year-old writer and lawyer, denounces Lenin and the October Revolution for destroying age-old Russian values. He concludes his speech by calling on those presents to stand and “honor the memory of all innocently murdered Russian people, starting with the tsar's family.” The majority stands.
After witnessing such scenes, long-time Soviet watchers can only shake their heads in disbelief and ask are we talking about the 1990s or the 1890s? It was widely accepted among Western scholars that Great Russians (the largest population in USSR), at least tacitly endorsed the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, and that symbols of old Russia - the flag, Orthodox Christianity, the monarchy - had long since lost popular support. If the other nationalities chafed against Soviet domination, at least the regime could count on the core support of Russian nationalists. The emergence of a grass-roots Russian national movement opposed to the regime caught many by surprise.
It may strike some in the West as odd that the Great Russians increasingly argue that they need to be liberated from communist rule as much as any other nationality. It is often assumed that Russians occupy a privileged position. People point to the fact that Russian is the common language of the USSR, that key posts in the Communist Party have traditionally been reserved for ethnic
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