Russia Profile
November 3, 2005
Re(pro)creating the National Idea
The Difficulty in Creating Something New
Comment by Alexei Pankin
Besides being married to Yelena Rykovtseva, Alexei Pankin is the Comment and Opinion editor of the daily newspaper Izvestia. He submitted this comment to Russia Profile.
My grandfather, who remembered the days when Moscow�s streets still bore their pre-revolutionary names, never could get used to the new names they were given during the Soviet era. He always called Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street Maroseyka, and Chernyshevsky Street Pokrovka. There was nothing ideological in this; he simply used the names he was used to. He hardly even noticed when these streets reverted to their original names after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I lived for many years on Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street and the decision to return it to its historic name only irritated me. There was nothing ideological to my irritation, I was simply used to the Soviet-era name the street bore and to this day I still say without thinking �on Khmelnitsky� and not �on Maroseyka.�
For any state, especially a new state like the Russian Federation, it is only natural to look to history for support, and to attempt to make it a part of the national idea � the sense and purpose of the state�s existence. The administration of former president Boris Yeltsin attempted to do this principally by denying the communist era, renaming the streets and removing Soviet-era statues. With these actions, they did little more than copy the Bolsheviks, who razed the old world to clear the way for the new. When Vladimir Putin came to power, he attempted to draw on different historical eras to form a national idea. The result, however, is very inorganic and eclectic.
For example, there is no rational justification for the decision to change Russia�s national anthem from Mikhail Glinka�s Patriotic Song back to the Soviet national anthem, which is familiar to all living Russians, but then to abolish the revolutionary holiday of Nov. 7 and replace it with Nov. 4, a date that means nothing to Russians � young or old.
When it comes to history, the current authorities are like a sort of King Midas in reverse � everything they touch turns into fragments of clay. Take, for example, the way the authorities celebrated the 60th anniversary of Victory Day. No one would dispute, it would seem, that if there is a genuinely great date in our history, the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 9, 1945 is it. Although the celebrations should have boosted Russian patriotism and paid tribute to the rapidly-dwindling generation that suffered and fought during the war years, the celebrations were reduced to official pomp, while society found itself consumed once again by heated debates over whether or not today�s Russia should apologize for the sins of the Soviet Union.
Secondly, consider the reburial of White Russian General Anton Denikin. It is probably good that he has been reburied in his homeland, but it was not very comforting to see all the state pomp that accompanied this event. When we consider the objectives pursued and means used by Denikin during the Civil War, all desire to consider him a hero vanishes.
As I see it, there are two reasons why official attempts to find a national idea in the country�s history are doomed to failure. First is the highly contradictory and complex nature of our history � all the great movements forward rested primarily on the absence of personal rights and freedoms. Secondly, today�s Russia is a state that arose not out of an idea, but out of a conflict between two political rivals: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Instead of being vanquished by the ideals of democracy, communism committed suicide. Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, laid the foundations of the market economy while the Soviet Union still existed. More than a decade after the failed coup of 1991, most of the population sees it as more of a farce than as a great battle between good and evil.
I think that if we really do need a national idea, we should not look for it in our history, nor should it be created through state efforts. It would be better for us to learn to love and respect our history, not to close our eyes to what took place and what we cannot change. It would be better for us to accept our history, and let each of us deal with it in our own way.
For people that have begun building an independent state practically from scratch, far more promising is the search for a national idea focused on the future. Thus far, the president has offered only the idea of doubling GDP � an economic indicator. But although this goal is worthy, it is hardly the grand purpose that will harness and inspire all the energy, fervour and competitive spirit present in the Russian character.
If we listen to the ticking of the demographic time bomb, we should focus instead on the nation�s physical survival. The Russian population is falling by 1 million people a year. Fixing Russia�s demographic crisis is an ambitious and sufficiently grand objective. It is not just an abstract idea, but a goal that concerns people�s everyday lives.
Everyone, it seems, is aware of the danger of our nation marching towards extinction. Alexander Solzhenitsyn formulated the goal of saving ourselves from this fate as a national idea in his last television interview. But, thus far, the country does not have a leader who is genuinely committed to this goal and capable of getting the whole population working on the solution.