By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
What differs Russia
from the West? Historically, the most fundamental distinction is confessional. As
is well known, more than a thousand years ago Russia accepted the eastern
branch of Christianity, Orthodoxy, which had far-reaching consequences for
Russia's entire history. Being considered the only pure and true religion,
Orthodoxy was used as an argument against the secularised
and superficial West, where Catholicism was based on the rationalist heritage
of pagan Rome and Protestantism was conducive to excessive individualism.
Actually, Russia
separated itself from the mainstream of Christian civilisation
that flowed westwards. As a consequence, Russia played no part in Europe's
classical heritage represented chiefly by Roman law, i.e. a rationalised
legal system. Instead of feodalism Russia had a
patrimonial rule" and Gemeinschaft instead of Gesellschaft prevailed.
This being the case,
in pre-revolutionary Russia, the process of modernisation
and secularisation of state and society was much
slower and less influential than in most West European countries where religion
had been separated from politics at an early stage. The Russian Church was
never an independent institution as it had from the very beginning placed
itself more docilely than any other church at the disposal of the state. `For
Byzantine theorists it was axiomatic that the church could not subsist without
the protection of the state'.
The relationship
between church and state was symbiotic: being upheld by the secular authority
the spiritual one supported the former and its policy. In a word, as the
Emperor's will was justified by religion, a real secularisation
of state power was excluded. The inherent conservatism of the Orthodox Church
made it perceive church tradition, not the Gospels, as the ultimate authority.
Even in our days, this traditionalist thinking sometimes manifests itself
within the Russian Orthodox Church as well as in the rhetoric of some national
patriot thinkers.
In the nineteenth
century then, there was a continuous exchange of ideas between Slavophilism and
German nationalism. The influence of German idealistic romanticism on original
Slavophilism in general has already been mentioned. More specifically, Johann
Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history (see title-word Herder in Flew 1979,
135) inspired the Slavophiles
to emphasise the organic character of development and society.
Yet the Russian idea was not at all a copy of German national thought ('Teutonophilism') as it was coloured
by Orthodoxy and, consequently,still represented
traditionalism.
The degeneration of
the Russian idea towards the advocacy of imperial chauvinism and Panslavism, and outright anti-Semitism during the three
last decades of the nineteenth century had its approximate nationalist parallel
in Germany. According to A. Dugin, `the national
archetype of the German soul and the geopolitical position of the Germans make
them like the Russians most predisposed to the ideology of the ‘Third Way’.
The intellectual
interaction between both currents of thought manifested itself in reciprocal
influences. Among the thinkers belonging to the second generation of
Slavophilism, Nikolai Danilevsky (1822-85), the chief
theoretician of Panslavism, deserves to be mentioned
as having anticipated geopolitical thinking. In his magnum opus, Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and
Europe) of 1869, he advanced a theory of cultural types of civilisations
as the main divisions of mankind. Of these different cultural types conceived
by him as `self-contained and self-sufficient entities, the `Slavic
cultural-historical type' was considered superior.
Paralleling the
German nationalists' idea of reuniting all Germans by means of seizing all the
territories that they inhabited, Danilevsky preached
a Slavic Anschluss of sorts. He advocated the repossession of Constantinople,
the capital of the former Greek-Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and urged the Slavs
to liberate themselves from Turkish and German domination and join Russia in
forming one great Slavic empire headed by the Russian tsar. Danilevsky
became `the most eloquent spokesman of the believers in a Russian imperial
mission.
In Danilevsky's writings, there are some remarkable signs of
modern secularised political thought contrasting with
his usual Orthodox traditionalist argumentation. He actually advocates a policy
of strength in declaring that Russia could only fulfill her historical mission
after transforming herself into a giant superpower. The alleged `spiritual
decay' of the West as well as Russia's alleged national interests served for Danilevsky as a moral justification of a strategy of
imperial expansionism. In plain language, in his argumentation, Orthodox
messianism was replaced by geopolitical thinking.
The third generation
of Slavophilism that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century professed
nothing but unbridled anti-Semitism. When Danilevsky
had been an exponent of the confrontation between Russia and a `rotten West',
the new nationalists presented a more simplified view, that of a worldwide
Jewish conspiracy.
Formally, until 1917,
Russia's foreign policy was coloured by this Orthodox
messianism as seen in part 1 of Russia’s New Map. Actually, the Russian tsars
were realists and resorted more and more to a pragmatic policy of furthering
Russia's own imperial interests dictated by geography. Expansionism served the
purpose of creating new and safer borders. This could be seen in the drive
towards the north and the east where Russia got sea borders in the sixteenth
century. Later, the need of warm-water ports became more and more pressing to
meet strategic trade interests. This implied expansion to the west and the
south. Peter I and Catherine II made Russia a Baltic and a Black Sea power in
the eighteenth century. Russia waged numerous wars against Turkey in order to
conquer Constantinople and get access to the Mediterranean. Russia failed to
achieve this goal as Turkey was backed up by the European great powers France
and England who did not want Russia growing too strong.
However that may be,
in Russia the germs of geopolitical thinking had been born behind the scenes of
official religious messianism. During the second half of the nineteenth
century, with the emergence of imperial statist nationalism, the real
geopolitical motives for Russia's continuing territorial expansionism were more
or less openly admitted, as Danilevsky's writings
testify to . In a word, instead of serving as God's instrument in history,
Russia had to further its own imperial interests exclusively and accomplish her
own geopolitical mission in a Darwinist world of struggle for survival. This
new thinking resulted in two inter-related geopolitical doctrines - the Russian
imperial idea and panslavism. The former emanating
from the establishment proclaimed legitimism and traditional conservatism. In a
way, this idea proclaimed already self-sufficiency, more or less. Panslavism for its part, was a movement among
national-minded thinkers and publicists like Danilevsky
who pleaded for a great Slavic empire headed by the Russian tsar.
Under the Soviet
regime 1917-91, these geopolitical considerations continued to serve as the
basic principle in foreign policy. Stalin's spectacular great power policy
during and after World War 11 is a good case in point. In fact, his
geopolitical orientation was a synthesis of the old imperial idea (autarchy)
and panslavism. The former manifested itself in
Stalin's policy of isolationalism, the latter in the
incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc, the so-called socialist
camp. In Soviet propaganda, however, expansionism was never called by its
proper name - geopolitics was officially considered a reactionary bourgeois
doctrine - but explained as being part of the international class struggle as
promoting the cause. Thereby Soviet power policy could be justified as
promoting the cause of the international proletarian movement.
In the 1920s and
1930s, Danilevsky's geopolitical ideas were to be
paralleled and even surpassed by the German national socialists' geopolitical
projects. The aforementioned semi-fascist Russian extreme right is often called
the `Black Hundred' (chernosotentsy). The name refers
to the paramilitary groups that belonged to the Union of Russian People (Soiuz Russkogo Naroda), the most
important rightist party that had emerged before the first Duma elections in
1906.
The new message of
the Black Hundred was that the fundamental confrontation of the contemporary
world was `Russia versus Jewry'. The idea of a Jewish conspiracy against Russia
was gaining ground among Russian nationalists mainly as a result of the
appearance of the notorious
Protocols of the
Elders of Zion (Protokoly Sionskikh
Mudretsov), an infamous forgery attributed to the
tsarist secret service, the 'Okhranka'.
The anti-Jewish
dimension of the Russian idea had already become a key issue in Russian
domestic politics by the 1880s. However, this phenomenon differed from the traditional
confessional anti-Semitism that had been cultivated from time immemorial by the
Russian Orthodox Church. The new kind of anti-Semitism had come from the
crisis-stricken Germany, where it served as a backlash movement against the
accomplished political and economic Emancipation of the Jews.
Among the German
modern anti-Semites, there were the radicals who represented racial biology,
and the moderates who wanted to oust the Jews from public service (ibid.). The
latter category was to become predominant among Russian rightists after the
revolutions in 1917 when the Russian Jews got access to government offices.
As an ideological
phenomenon, the Black Hundred was `a halfway house between the old-fashioned
reactionary movements of the nineteenth century and the right-wing populist
(fascist) parties of the twentieth'. Adhering to Orthodoxy and monarchism, its
members were traditionalists, whereas, as one of the leaders of the movement
years later declared, the spirit of this Russian movement was almost similar to
that of national socialism. The view that there was a coincidence of interests
between Jewish revolutionaries and Jewish capitalists, in fact, anticipated one
of the main planks of nazism.(1)
The Black Hundred
advocated direct action against the Jews, the alleged enemies of the Russian
people. In plain language, the Russian semi-fascists initiated pogroms and
eliminated Jewish deputies to the Duma. The state subsidised
these activities, which were carefully coordinated with the efforts of the secret
police (the okhranka) to quench the socialist and
liberal opposition.
It should be noted
that the Black Hundred as a political phenomenon does not belong to history
only. In 1990, the aforementioned Union of Russian People (Soiuz
Russkogo Naroda) was refounded
at a meeting in the House of the Soviet army in Moscow. Furthermore, a paper by
the name Chërnaia sotnia
(Black Hundred) appeared since 1994 in one of the towns of the Moscow region.
In tsarist Russia
before 1917, all the extreme right organisations
described the socialists and the liberals as a destructive anti-Russian force.
They referred to the large proportion of Jews in the upper echelons of the
opposition parties - particularly within the Menshevik and Kadet
parties. The subsequent rise of Jews to prominence within the Bolshevik party
was seen as an additional proof of a Jewish conspiracy.
The exchange of ideas
between German and Russian rightist movements was to culminate in the export of
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Germany in 1918. By that the Russian
semi-fascist nationalists repaid their debt for the German anti-Semitic
doctrine that had been conveyed to them in the 1880s.
In the 1920s and
1930s, Russian rightist émigrés cultivated the notion that the October
revolution had been the work of the Jews, who now were the new masters of
Russia. In Germany, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the idea of
Bolshevism's identity with World Jewry became a major component in the
anti-Jewish arsenal of nazi propaganda.
After the Bolsheviks'
seizure of power and their victory in the civil war, the extreme right could
openly continue its activities only abroad, in the Russian émigré community. In
this study, the role of rightist Russian émigrés in Germany before and after
Hitler's Machtübernahme (seizure of power) deserves
to be dwelt upon in the first hand. However, émigré movements in other
countries will be taken in account when related to nazi
Germany.
In the early 1920s,
the proponents of the Black Hundred ideology exchanged views with German
extreme nationalists. As a complete ideology, national socialism was still in
the making. While the Russian rightist émigrés adapted themselves to the
ideological situation in Germany, their own ideas influenced greatly their
German confreres. This being the case, Hitler's national socialism was, at
least partially, inspired by foreign, i.e. Russian, rightist ideas.
The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion with their rampant anti-Semitism has already been mentioned. The
idea of an international Jewish conspiracy fell on fertile ground in Germany
which had suffered a humiliating military defeat. As is well known, the Jewish
question became one of the cornerstones of national socialism. The rather
placid German anti-Semitism had become saturated by its rampant Russian
equivalent. Thus, the `Protocols' served as an important source for Hitler when
he was writing Mein Kampf. As we mentioned on our web
log three years ago, among the émigrés, there were those going to the extreme
in advising how to resolve the Jewish problem. Fëdor Vinberg, a Baltic German and former colonel in the tsarist
army who had turned writer, declared that the Aryan nations could be saved only
if the Jews were exterminated. Thus, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief nazi ideologist in Germany, had his precursor of the Final
Solution.(1)
Among the Russian
rightist émigrés, there were a great many indulging in expectations of a coming
civil war in the Soviet Union which would lead to the fall of the Bolshevik
regime. In plain language, they counted on nazi
Germany as the only power capable of defeating Stalin.
Paradoxically, the
most striking of the Russian rightist influences on national socialism
manifested itself in Hitler's anti-Slavic and Russophobian
foreign policy. This paradox was due to the active role played in the émigré
community by F. Vinberg. In his view, the Russian
people should not be idealised but punished for
having betrayed the tsar. In practical politics, there were numerous Russian
prominent émigrés who were working for the nazis
after Hitler's rise to power. Among these collaborators, N. Markov, G.
Schwartz-Bostunich, General V. Biskupsky,
and the aforementioned V. Vinberg deserve further
comment.
In the late 1920s and
the 1930s, as well as during World War II, there were several groups in the
Russian émigré community that could be called fascist or national socialist.
The most numerous among them - the Russian Fascist Party (RFP) - existed in Harbin, Manchuria, 1931-45. The party requisites
(uniforms, badges etc.) copied those of the German nazis,
whereas RFP's political programme resembled
Mussolini's in one respect: the principle of a corporative system of society.
Orthodoxy as well as the idea of a great Eurasian empire constituted the
Russian component of'RFP's ideology. Yet, the RFP was
unable to mobilise the masses because the number of
Russian émigrés in Harbin was already considerably small. Furthermore, it was
economically totally dependent on the Japanese Kwantung Army, which was at the
time in charge of Manchuria.
The other émigré
parties representing the extreme right - the All-Russian Fascist Organisation (VFO) in Connecticut, USA, and the Russian nazi party in Germany (ROND) are not dealt with in this
study as they were less influential than the RFP. Yet, the only two of the
Russian émigré movements of lasting importance were the NTS and Eurasianism. With some reservation, they could be
considered remote `relatives' of fascism or national socialism. The National Labour Union (Natsional'no-Trudovoi
Soiuz) is better known under its Russian abbreviation
NTS. Today, it is the only émigré group still in existence. It was founded originally
in Yugoslavia in 1930. In July 1941 its leadership moved to Berlin. Consisting
of members of the younger generation of émigrés, the NTS represented
anti-communist activism. The central aim was to continue the struggle for the
`white idea' in Russia, and throw down the Soviet regime. In the 1930s and
during the World War I, the NTS was anti-liberal and had a more or less favourable view on fascism and national socialism (cf., Laqueur 1993, 82). Liberalism and liberal democracy were
rejected. Instead a corporative system of society was suggested. Furthermore,
before and during World War II, there were open manifestations of antiSemitism in the NTS publications (ibid.). However,
with all the proximity to national socialism, the NTS had an ideological profile
of its own.
The NTS in the 1930s
and during World War II was strongly influenced by the ideas of Ivan Il'in, a former professor of philosophy at Moscow
University who had been expelled from Russia in 1922. In pamphlets and articles
Il'in professed a `white activism' of sorts; in fact,
he advocated the armed overthrow of the Bolshevik regime by a revolutionary
minority. His nationalist teaching was akin to fascism. At the same time, this
ideology was different including elements of Orthodoxy as well as of monarchism
(cf., Utechin 1964, 273). The basic political
philosophy of the NTS has been solidarism coloured by
Orthodoxy as an alternative to the theory of class struggle. Solidarism implies
harmonious relations between classes that being tantamount to national unity.
In the organic worldview of the NTS, the nation is considered to constitute a
living super-organism with a long life (cf., Stolypin 1986, 26).
On the whole, NTS was
closer to conservative authoritarianism than to totalitarian national socialism.
Yet, as Laqueur concludes, this did not prevent a
close cooperation with nazi Germany, in particular
during World War 11 (Laqueur 1993, 83). Many NTS
members worked for Alfred Rosenberg's Eastern Ministry in occupied Russia.
Others joined the Russian pro-nazi daily Novoe slovo (The New Word) in
Berlin.
The greatest
political undertaking of the NTS, however, was its close cooperation with
General Andrei Vlasov (1900-46) and his Russian
Liberation Army ROA (Russkaia Osvoboditel'naia
Armiia) composed of Soviet prisoners of war. As is
well known, having been captured by the Germans in 1942, Vlasov
agreed to cooperate with the Wehrmacht in order to save Russia from Bolshevism.
The post-NTS version
of its own history claims that the NTS as well as the ROA constituted a `third
force' instead of siding with Hitler or Stalin. After the war Vlassov was executed as a traitor in the Soviet Union.
However, in the years of glasnost, some Soviet historians and publicists tried
to reinstate his ideas and his army. In 1990, the Vlasovites'
union (Soiuz Vlasovtsev)
was formed `to defend the maligned memory of the Vlasov
army'. The debate on Vlassov's role in history is
still going on. In 1996, a nationalist newspaper called Klich
(The call) began to appear in Moscow as the mouthpiece of the Social movement
ROA. The notorious General Viktor Filatov serves as
editor-in-chief.
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