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Have actually considered writing a paper on the weird crossover between Tsarist-era nostalgia and Stalin-era nostalgia. It seems so bizarre to Western outsiders.. simultaneously fetishising Cromwell's Protectorate and Charles the first's bumbling absolutism? It's fascinating how opposed ideological / historical images can find rapprochement under neo-Slavophile thought. If anything, it's a reduction of substance to pure image - Stalin the national savior, the Orthodox purity of Tsarism, etc. It's crazy how they can backwards argue themselves up into a world view where these strains of thought are in any way compatible.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:03
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Ardennes posted:It makes a lot more sense when you consider the fact that Stalin actually backed off his anti-religious campaign during the WW2 and allowed the partial rehabilitation of some groups such as Cossacks. Even relatively minor things from our perspective (like bringing back St.George Ribbons) mattered quite a bit from a symbolic perspective at that point. Furthermore, Stalin began pushing Russian language and culture much more than Lenin did (who had favored far more linguistic and cultural autonomy for ethnic minorities). If you look at Stalin through simply the frame of hard right/far-right Russian nationalism there is plenty to find acceptable including the brutality he inflicted. From a Western perspective, he as bad or worse than Hitler, from a Russian nationalist perspective he was the savior of the nation that defeated both Russia's internal and external enemies and "returned" Russian language and culture to its rightful place. I understand this - he was "the great Russian chauvinist", etc. Nonetheless the quasi-rehabilitation of the Church & appeals to nationalism during WW2 were political contingencies rather than an ideological turn. Although the heights of paranoia during the yezhovshchina weren't reached after the war ended, coded comments made by Solzhenitsyn were enough to get the man sent off for 're-education'. I understand that fringe / nationalist figures will do all they can to cherry pick history in order to fit their world-view, but this Czarist Stalinism seems a particularly egregious example of weird history. There's been a consistent movement (in the west and in Russia) to 'de-ideologisize' Stalin, to paint him simply as an authoritarian brute, a power-hungry madman. I don't personally buy this line - I think that everything he did was more or less guided by an (admittedly warped) ideological imperative. See: Socialist Realism, the Caucuses banditry period, etc. This is why the whole thing is crazy and masochistic. If someone in '47 had openly called for a Czarist restoration, while admittedly praising the Great Leader, they'd have ended up floating in the loving Neva. Hindsight does crazy things to analysis, leads us down all sorts of bizarre paths of justification. It is, at its core, an insanity. Wishing repression upon oneself - I'm sure Freudian hacks could make reams of lovely arguments about this complex. It's the same thing when you see the Azov Battalion doing Nazi salutes and posing with Swastikas. It's like - dude do you not realize what Hitler thought of Slavs lol.
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Aug 24, 2016 11:37
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I actually saw that on the news. Weird seeing a Goon on TV. And yeah that Remain guy is always there chillin'. He's much more urbane than Brian Haw was
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Oct 10, 2018 16:07
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