Gennady Zyuganov, the general secretary of the CPRF, no longer seems to be interested in the world revolution or in the realization of Marxism-Leninism. Like Zhirinovsky, his sole interest has become the restoration of the former Soviet empire. Like the former Slavophiles he indulged in “Third Rome” fantasies. Moreover, could one imagine a general secretary of the former CPSU, opening his autobiography with the sentence: “I am Russian by blood and spirit and love my Native land”?[6] Certainly not. Zyuganov, however, had no problem with this exaltation of his “Russian-ness.” Nicole J. Jackson, referring to Zyuganov’s “extreme nationalist discourse,” wrote:
Gennady Zyuganov promoted a form of national socialism which argued that the class struggle had been replaced by a clash of civilizations between Russia and the West which threatened Russia’s existence. This mix of ideas allowed Zyuganov to promote an alliance of communists and nationalists, “the red-brown alliance,” which demanded that Russia be allowed to pursue its own unique path of development based upon spiritual values—although the content was mostly unspecified.[7]
In fact, Zyuganov was not the first to replace the class struggle inside a country by the struggle between countries. It was done before him by Enrico Corradini, the cofounder of the Italian nationalist association ANI, which would merge with Mussolini’s movement in 1923. According to Corradini “have” and “have-not” nations competed for economic advantage in perpetual war. “This new imperialist theory did not only legitimate fascist wars of conquest, but offered an alternative to Marxist class theories.”[8] At the same time the foreign policy objectives of the Communist Party were reduced to a mainly negative policy of systematically opposing the United States. The United States was considered to represent the main global power that could obstruct the reestablishment of the former empire. That the latter had become the ultimate goal became clear from the 1995 election platform of the party, which called on the peoples of the “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union to recreate a single unified state in good will.”[9] What is interesting here is the use of the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union.” Zhirinovsky described the demise of the Soviet Union in similar words in his book Last Push to the South. It is an expression full of sinister consequences. If you consider the Belavezha Accords of December 8, 1991, in which Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—the original three signatories of the Treaty of the Union of 1922—decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, to be illegal, this necessarily means that you consider all the subsequent treaties, signed by the Russian government with the new governments (e.g., on the delimitation of the frontiers), to be null and void. Despite the reassuring use of the words “in good will,” it is clear that if one follows the logic inherent in the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union,” the use of military means to reintegrate these territories would not be an act of aggression, as defined in the Charter of the United Nations, but a legal act of a central government to reintegrate rebellious provinces.
The dominant Kremlin party United Russia has treated both the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party as extremes on a left-right scale with United Russia in the middle. This had the benefit that it attributed to United Russia the role of a “center” party. It was, as so often in Russia, a pure question of labeling. The “liberal-democrats” and the “communists” share essentially the same ultranationalist ideology and form an extreme right bloc in the Duma. The most important difference between the two parties is a difference in style. Zyuganov is a gray party apparatchik who lacks the personal charisma of Zhirinovsky. He is also less outspoken and does not share Zhirinovsky’s more extreme positions concerning a Russian expansion into Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.
“UNKULTURAUFSTIEG”: THE SPREAD OF ULTRANATIONALIST IDEAS
In the first decade of the twenty-first century we can observe in Russia the spread of a new culture and the dissemination of new ideas in society. Sociologists usually describe this as a process of Kultursenkung, which means that “high” culture, starting in the elite, “trickles down” from the elite into the general population. However, such a top-down process does not seem to apply in this case. It is not so much elite culture, as rather Unkultur—a lack of (high) culture—that spreads in society. For this reason it is, perhaps, preferable to call this process Unkulturaufstieg: a bottom-up process in which nonculture spreads from the lower echelons of society to reach, ultimately, the elite circles. An interesting historical example of such a process of Unkulturaufstieg (without calling it so) is given by Andreas Umland. It concerns the spread of anti-Semitism in pre–World War I Germany.[10] Umland observed that the development of anti-Semitism in Germany was marked by a fundamental discontinuity.
At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the young German party system experienced a significant change by the descent of its most explicitly antisemitic components.[11] [This was surprising, because] only a few years before, some seemingly vigorous ultra-nationalist parties, founded during the 1870s–1880s, had been on the rise, and, together with the increasingly antisemitic Conservative Party, won a majority in the 1893 Reichstag elections. Also, a multitude of antisemitic literature had been circulating in Germany for more than two decades at this point.[12] [Yet, this did not prevent the fact that] the electoral fortunes of the antisemitic parties, other than the Conservative Party, declined in the first decade of the 20th century.”[13]
It could be said that this was good news. But was it? Apparently, it was not, because “the decline of the antisemitic parties was… not symptomatic of a decline in antisemitism, for these particular parties had already performed their historic role of moving antisemitism from the street and the beer hall’s Stammtisch into the electoral booth and the seat of parliament…. The antisemitic parties had rendered themselves moot. They could quietly disappear, leaving the political terrain to more potent successors who were fit for the next upsurge in antisemitic expression and activity.”[14] In fact, what Umland is describing here is a process of Unkulturaufstieg—the spread of uncivilized ideas “from the street and the beer hall’s Stammtisch [table]” to society as a whole—including its higher echelons. Umland also observed an interesting parallel between the situation in Germany in the first decade of the last century and the situation in contemporary Russia. In the second half of the 1990s we could equally observe a generalized rise of illiberal trends and anti-Western opinions in the Russian population. However, at the same time, “those anti-liberal Russian parties that in the middle of the 1990s still had relative success at the elections (for instance the Communist Party or the Liberal-Democratic Party), despite these tendencies, could not improve their attractiveness for the electorate.”[15] Umland rightly concluded that the German experience should be a warning against premature optimism concerning the state of affairs in Russia. As was the case in pre–World War I Germany, the present period in Russia is one in which chauvinist and ultranationalist ideas are permeating society. This process of Unkulturaufstieg is especially visible in the United Russia party, a party that has put so much effort into presenting itself as a moderate “center” party.
6
Gennady Zyuganov,
7
Nicole J. Jackson,
8
Marcel H. Van Herpen,
9
CPRF Platform in
10
Cf. Andreas Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society? Contextualizing the Recent Decline of Extremely Right-Wing Parties in Russia,” WCFIA Working Paper 02–03 (Boston: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2002). http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/555__Toward_An_Uncivil_Society.pdf.
Cf. also Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien: Vorkriegsdeutschland und Russland im Vergleich,”
14
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,