Die “Russische Partei”: Die Bewegung der russischen Nationalisten in der UdSSR 1953–1985 by Nikolay Mitrokhin (review)

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin’s Russkaia Partiia has been translated into German, eleven years after its Russian publication (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003). The Russian book itself was a version of Mitrokhin’s Candidate of Sciences (equivalent of a Ph.D.) dissertation (directed by Iurii Afanas’ev at Moscow’s Russian State University of the Humanities). Die “Russische Partei” investigates the emergence of a Russian nationalist movement within the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Mitrokhin underlines that this was not just an ideology, but a movement consisting of various networks of like-minded people (Pp. 29–30). Die “Russische Partei” is one of a mere few texts in Russian or the major Western languages dedicated to this topic. Beginning with some isolated remarks by Sovietologists, such as Peter Reddaway, who in the 1960s and 1970s included samizdat literature from the extreme right in their overview of underground or illegal opposition to the Brezhnev regime, scholars such as Liudmila Alekseeva, Mariia Zezina, John Dunlop, Alexander Yanov, Wolfram Eggeling, Dirk Kretzschmar, Nina Tumarkin, Vladimir Shlapentokh, Yitzhak Brudny, and, to some degree, Geoffrey Hosking have discussed Russian nationalism from various perspectives.¹ None, however, had the kind of broad access Mitrokhin enjoyed to both the survivors of the various groups that belonged to this movement, with whom he conducted lengthy interviews after 1991, and to their scattered archives, preserved in a variety of places (including Memorial), as well as to published archival materials and memoirs. Using these materials, Mitrokhin meticulously charts in a comprehensive fashion the movement’s influence in all walks of Soviet life, such as on the Communist Party, Komsomol, publishing houses, or the writers’ union.

It is paradoxical that during its heyday the Russkaia Partiia was a sort of informal civil-society club opposed to the Communist regime, while at the same time it was deeply entangled in various official Soviet organizations, and patronized by some of the country’s most powerful politicians (such as Politburo members D. A. Pol’ianskii and A. Shelepin or Komsomol chief S. P. Pavlov) and public figures (Nobel Prize winner M. A. Sholokhov and the artist Il’ia Glazunov). Given this entanglement, it is hard to agree with Mitrokhin’s suggestion that the nationalists should be counted as another opposition group to the Soviet regime (P. 7). As Mitrokhin notes, nationalists were often ignored by “liberal” memoirists, when they looked back during the 1990s at their struggle against the Communist dictatorship. This is not solely the result of their hostility toward the nationalists, I suggest, but as much a consequence of the fact that the nationalists were not really considered genuine dissidents. Far more than the “liberals,” the nationalists had sympathizers and friends in high places, even if Soviet authorities prosecuted a few extremists of the early movement for their stand in the 1950s and 1960s, and even if a journal such as Veche was self-published and, strictly speaking, a part of samizdat, while its editor Vladimir Osipov served time for his political stand. Mitrokhin’s findings indicate that their ideas found fertile ground among Soviet officials and that the nationalists only suffered the mildest of reprimands for propagating ideas rather far removed from formal Communist or Soviet internationalism. Thus, journals such as Molodaia gvardiia or Nash sovremennik were legal outlets in which the nationalists could present most of their ideas (even if mitigated by Glavlit, which stopped them from publishing overtly anti-Semitic pronouncements), which had no real “liberal” counterpart (perhaps the two fairly brief periods in Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s editorship of Novyi mir – 1953–54 and 1961–65 – represented the height of official tolerance for nonconformist writing from the “leftist” or “liberal” opposition). And “liberal” critics of the regime such as Roi Medvedev, Andrei Amalrik, Andrei Sakharov, or Vladimir Bukovskii certainly did not have...