Russian national consciousness

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russians suddenly showed up in the Russian Federation. This is irrefutably evidenced by the new version of the concept of the State National Policy, which will be proposed to the President, who recently called himself the most effective nationalist in the country.

“The Russian state took shape as a unity of peoples, the backbone of which was historically the Russian people,” says the new document. “The modern Russian society unites a single cultural (civilizational) code based on the preservation and development of Russian culture and language, the historical and cultural heritage of all peoples of Russia”.

It also sets the task of "ethnocultural development of the Russian people" and "strengthening the status of the Russian language as a state language." Significant threats include such as "exaggeration of regional interests and separatism, including through support from abroad", illegal migration and imperfection of the system of adaptation of migrants, the formation of closed ethnic enclaves, the outflow of the Russian population from the regions of the North Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East. East.

One can only hope that this project, on the way to the presidential signature, will not lose these formulations, on the contrary, they will be sharpened for a better understanding by all (and above all by officials conducting national policy on the ground) of the simple truth: there will be no Russia without Russians. For Russia to be, Russians are needed, there must be more Russians and that we become more and more Russian - a people with a deep and proud historical identity and self-confidence. It is necessary, as the Minister of Education Count Uvarov once put it, "to develop the Russian nationality on its true foundations and thus make it the center of state life and moral education."

On the contrary, the path to the death of the country is to make Russians feel like a persecuted and oppressed minority, feel the desire to get on a tractor and "escape from Russia", and not to Khabarovsk, but much further.

The fact that a part of Russian citizens developed the appropriate sentiments is also to blame for the authorities, which for decades reduced the unity of Russia to “not offending proud peoples”, and many Russian nationalists who grabbed onto the psychology of the minority and began to cultivate it, and the media, with fiercely denying the very existence of Russians - everything is alien to us, everything is unkind here, and even there are no Russians as such, Russian is not a noun, but an adjective.

Sometimes this utter game in a fit of national self-criticism was repeated even by some patriotic thinkers. “One of the traits of the Russian character is the ability for the most harsh self-criticism. In this respect, we are, perhaps, superior to anyone,”noted the well-known Eurasian literary critic VV Kozhinov. He explained this by the fact that "the Russians call themselves an adjective name, that is, there is a certain uncertainty, since the Russians appear not so much as a nation, but as some kind of beginning that holds together a huge subcontinent." Thus, the publicist (however, he was not the first and he was not the last) gave an object lesson of the very insecurity and excessive national self-picky and self-criticism that he spoke about.

Their root cause, of course, is not in an imaginary "adjective", but, therefore, in the vagueness of Russian national identity.

Towards a noun

For the first few centuries of its history, the name of the people who created the Russian state was “Rus” (the correct singular number is “Rusyn”). The adjective “Russian” was used as a definition for a particular noun - “language” (in the sense of people, gens), “land”, “prince”, “people”, “ambassadors”, “law”, “power”, “clan "," volost "," side / country "," city "," metropolis "," sea "," boats "," name "," servants "," sons "," voi "," regiments "," holiday "," cognition "," aspiration "- all this in the ancient Russian literature of the XI century is defined as" Russian "(the second" s "appeared under Western influence only in the XVII century).

This use of words was the only norm of the Russian literary language before the Peter the Great reforms, extending to any other ethnonyms - "German people", "Lithuanian people", "Persian people", "Turkish people". "Ellipsis", as linguists say, that is, the omission of the word "people" and the substantiation of the adjective "Russian", begins to appear only in the middle of the 17th century, and initially it can be explained by the scribe's tiredness from tautologies.

Apparently, the first use of the substantive adjective "Russian" is found in the Cathedral Code of 1649:

"Polonians who were married to Russians … they were ordered to live in freedom, wherever anyone wants." However, the real linguistic shift belongs to the Peter the Great era, when the Russian language was subjected to the most powerful influence of the Western European (primarily German) languages. It was then that instead of nouns with the definition of "Russian" and the forms "Rus", "Rusyn", etc., the substantive adjective "Russian" began to be used as an ethnonym, and until the beginning of the 19th century, as a phenomenon of low calm, it competed with high Slavism. calm "Russian".

It is characteristic that in the article "On Love for the Fatherland and National Pride" Karamzin consistently uses the word "Russian" as a substantive, and in the "Note on Ancient and New Russia" and "History" more and more space is taken by "Russians", but until the end " Russians”are still not being ousted.

It is impossible to explain the old Russian tendency to self-criticism by such a relatively new linguistic phenomenon as the use of an "adjective" as an ethnonym. On the contrary, the assertive "Russian" in the 19th-20th centuries becomes the banner of the national way of thinking, the symbol of the nationalist trend, which designates itself as "Russian outlook", "Russian direction", "truly Russians", "Russian party".

If we are to look for the reasons for the corrosive Russian self-criticism, it is in the Russian intelligentsia, which is the only one and is its bearer (among the common people, if proverbs, epics and historical songs are considered the expression of their views, we will not notice any national self-criticism). And this feature is connected, first of all, with the fact that our intelligentsia does not consider and would not want to consider the adjective "Russian" to define itself. Part of our intelligentsia wanted and wants to be foreign - universally human-cosmopolitan or connected with one or another specific (but not Russian) people.

There is something to blame not only the liberals, but also some nationalists. They often would like to elevate themselves to the position of a "constructing" nation, and therefore sometimes deny the historical existence of the Russian nation, so that such a "trifle" as the millennial building of the Russian nationality, statehood and faith would not interfere on the site of the "national building".

Paradoxically, the thousand-year-old Russian nation and the more than two-hundred-year history of conscious Russian nationalism of the "modern" type remain among this holiday of self-eating as a miserable orphan. Therefore, it is necessary to repeat once again some things that seem to me personally self-evident.

The Russian nation exists

The Russian nation is one of the oldest nations in Europe, listed in any more or less serious study of the history of nations and nationalism.“The old nations of Europe in 1789 were in the west - the English, the Scots, the French, the Dutch, the Castilians, and the Portuguese; in the north - Danes and Swedes; and in the east - Hungarians, Poles and Russians,”wrote the British explorer Hugh Seton-Watson in 1977.

Russian nationalist thought is at least no younger than German. Her first detailed manifesto, the aforementioned article by Karamzin "On love for the Fatherland and national pride" with its famous "Russian must know his own worth", refers to 1802, without being, of course, the first expression of conscious Russian national feeling. The tradition of Russian intellectual nationalism has dozens of names of the greatest thinkers, writers and poets.

The term "Russians" denotes a vast community of people already in antiquity (especially today), linked by a common origin, language, identity and a long-term unity of political fate (if not always relevant, then always desired by this community).

The concept of the Russian nation covers not only the ethnographic group of the Great Russians, but all the Eastern Slavs. The groups of Little Russians and Belarusians had peculiarities in their political and linguistic development, but until the beginning of the era of political construction of nations in the twentieth century, they did not break with the self-awareness of Russian unity (or at least trinity), and even now this gap is largely artificial and violent. …

The word “Rus” appears in historical sources of the 9th century, and already in the middle of the 11th century it refers to a vast supra-tribal historical, cultural and political community, to which the concepts of “land”, “people”, “language”, “power” are applied. There is no reason to deny this community the name "nation", at least in the sense that is put into it by the authors who speak of "nations before nationalism."

“Russia is the oldest nation-state in Europe,” noted the prominent Russian publicist and political thinker I. L. Solonevich.

The Russian nation appears in the historical arena at the same time as most of the other Christian nations of Europe. If you look at the map of the continent of the X-XI centuries, for the most part we will see on it the same countries and peoples as today, with very, very few exceptions. England, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Portugal appeared on the map during this period. The kingdoms of Germany and Italy were formed as part of the Holy Roman Empire, although they did not achieve real political unity. In the north of the Iberian Peninsula, the Christians of León and Castile conducted a reconquista with the Moors, preparing the appearance of Spain. This was the period of the "great origin of peoples", and the Russian nation was born at this very moment.

In no period of their history did the Russians lose the memory of their community and did not forget its name. Neither in the period of the so-called fragmentation, nor in the era of the Mongol conquest, did the ideas about the Russian land, Russian unity and the general Russian cause disappear completely. “Let the Russian land settle down and let there be justice in it,” the Tver merchant Afanasy son Nikitin, who is lost behind three seas, in the sands and mountains of the East, expresses his innermost dream.

The successful formation in the 15th – 16th centuries of a centralized state - Russia - was due to the fact that from the very beginning it acted as an early national state, uniting a national community under a single power and shaping its political, cultural and economic institutions.

When Ivan III demanded the lands of Western Russia seized by Lithuania (in particular, Kiev), he emphasized that he was demanding the Russian land back by the right of the Russian sovereign: “The Russian land is all by God's will from the old days from our ancestors, our fatherland; and we now feel sorry for our fatherland, and their fatherland is Lyatskaya land and Lithuanian."

Russian self-awareness was an extremely important factor in the building of the state. For centuries, France had to be assembled from heterogeneous pieces, and Ivan III and Vasily III in half a century collected all the Russian lands outside Lithuania - and no separatism was found in them. Only 70 years after joining the Moscow State, Pskov withstands the siege by Stephen Bathory, feeling itself as an organic part of the unified Russian state. Neither during the Livonian War, nor during the Time of Troubles, Novgorod does not try to seize the opportunity for separatist inclinations - the Novgorod treason is obviously rooted only in the inflamed tyrannical brain of Ivan IV. Urban uprisings that are not uncommon in these cities never bear a separatist coloration, testifying that the polis principle has taken root in them much deeper than the separate state one.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Russian nation proved that it not only exists, but is also capable of independent, organized actions even in the absence of a monarch-sovereign. Russian communities were able to restore statehood and monarchy in conditions of political disintegration, and this struggle was perceived as a struggle for the national, and not only for the state principle. As they wrote in 1611 to Moscow from the besieged Smolensk:

“At that time in Moscow, the Russian people rejoiced and began to talk among themselves, as if all the people in the whole earth would unite and fight against the Lithuanian people, so that the Lithuanian people from all the Moscow land would come out all and one thing.”

The Russian nation, having synthesized the Slavic everyday and Byzantine religious and humanitarian principles, managed to develop an original culture and a fairly developed civilization, which took a place among other civilizations, being subjected to their intense influence, but not being absorbed by them.

The problems of the development of the Russian nation were created by the cultural pseudomorphosis of the 17th – 18th centuries associated with the church schism, the adoption of Western culture by the Russian monarchy and the nobility, and the actual enslavement of the Russian peasantry. The nation was culturally divided.

At the same time, the degree of this split should not be exaggerated - the absolutism of the 18th century in all European countries without exception created tendencies that contradicted nationalism. In the 19th century, the autocracy, the nobility, and all educated strata were rapidly nationalized, creating in a short time one of the most highly developed national cultures in Europe. From an early nation-state, Russia was transformed into an empire, which, however, increasingly acquired the character of a national empire.

Count Uvarov, one of the creators of Russian nationality policy, wrote to Emperor Nicholas I, summing up the results of 16 years of running the Ministry of Public Education:

"The new generation knows Russian and Russian better than our generation."

One should not succumb to the propaganda cliches of antimonarchist journalism, which presented the Romanov dynasty as "Germans on the throne." Even the most cosmopolitan of the Russian tsars of the 19th century, Alexander I, ultimately ended his life as a simple Russian peasant - a holy old man (which almost none of the serious researchers of the Alexander era doubts).

Often, in order to present the Romanovs as Germans, one has to go for an outright forgery, such as the phrase allegedly said by Nicholas I: "Russian nobles serve the state, German ones serve us." There are no documentary sources of this phrase older than the Soviet publicistic brochure of the historian A. E. Presnyakov, published in 1925. In fact, the emperor said exactly the opposite: "I myself do not serve myself, but you all." If Nicholas I was angry at the publicist Yuri Samarin, who wrote against the dominance of the Germans, for what, then for the impression created among the readers that the monarchy was not faithful enough to the national interests of the Russian people, with which the emperor categorically disagreed. And his grandson, Alexander III, received the nickname "Russifier of All Russia".

I propose to melt Minin

The social crisis of the twentieth century caused catastrophic damage to the Russian nation, destroying or expelling a significant part of the national intelligentsia, which possessed the most developed national identity. For a long time, the Russian in all its manifestations was persecuted or distorted.

“I propose to melt Minin,” wrote one proletarian poet. Meanwhile, other rootless officials ordered the destruction of monuments on the Borodino field as having no artistic value, and Admiral Nakhimov was dismantled in Sevastopol because his appearance offended Turkish sailors.

The Bolshevik People's Commissar Chicherin was proud of his efforts to dismember Russia: “We gave Estonia a purely Russian piece, we gave Finland to the Pechenga, where the population stubbornly did not want it, we did not ask Latgale when transferring it to Latvia, we gave purely Belarusian lands to Poland. This is all due to the fact that in the current general situation, in the struggle of the Soviet Republic against the capitalist encirclement, the supreme principle is the self-preservation of the Soviet Republic as a citadel of the revolution … We are guided not by nationalism, but by the interests of the world revolution."

The most terrible consequences had the internal dismemberment of Russia into republics and autonomies, accompanied by Ukrainization, Belarusianization and the transformation of Russians into kind of “guests” in Kazakhstan, Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Yakutia, etc. Everyone knows very well what consequences this had in 1991 (but it could have been even worse if the State Emergency Committee had not thwarted the adoption of the union treaty, which elevated the autonomies to the status of union republics).

Despite all this, the Russian national consciousness continued to develop even during the Soviet period, retaining a higher tone than the national consciousness of many Western nations. The war, in which the authorities were forced to turn to Russian patriotism, helped a lot. The early Brezhnev years played a role when the government allowed some forms of national cultural revival.

In view of the ban on the imperial Russian beginning, Ancient Russia became a refuge of national identity. People with unprecedented diligence studied ancient Russian literature and icons, traveled along the Golden Ring. A photograph of the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl appeared in almost every Russian home as a symbol of the Russian ethnic origin.

That is why, when the collapse of the early 1990s shook everyone and everything, the Russians still survived as a whole, although the rampant Russophobia in the media was such that it seemed that the nation should die of impotence and shame - or fall apart. Many then threw up the idea that there are no Russians, this is an "adjective", but you have to be Cossacks, Pomors, Siberians - and so on up to Vyatichi and Mary.

Fortunately, we seem to have survived this period of self-eating and self-dissolution. But there is nothing much to rejoice so far.

Today the Russians find themselves in the tragic position of a divided nation. Split not only by the administrative borders of the Soviet republics, which suddenly became international, but also in the sense of the ethnopolitological nomenclature. In many national republics within the Russian Federation, Russians (despite the fact that they constitute either the majority or the second largest ethnic group) are actually in the position of guests - continuously discriminated against, persecuted, forced to learn foreign languages for themselves. And when indignation breaks out, we are told: “Do not dare to offend the proud peoples” (it turns out that it is possible to offend Russians in this logic, we are not proud). All this threatened a great disaster.

Now we are clearly starting to come to our senses. First, external pressure forces them to rally.

Secondly, the external example shows to what horror the countries (the most democratic and with the most excellent standard of living) reach if they lose their national origin. Let us recall the recent case when in Marseilles they refused to name a street in honor of a French policeman who died in a terrorist attack, as this could "offend the new citizens of the country."

Thirdly, in the modern world, anti-globalism, nationalism, "identity" (a newfangled word meaning adherence to one's own civilizational identity) nevertheless come into force. Today it is already a little unfashionable to be an all-tolerant common man. The only question is whether a person will become an adherent of his tradition or some kind of stranger (for example, he will leave to fight under a black banner in the sands).

For a modern state and a modern nation, being yourself is the only way to survive, not to cease to exist at all. And it is very good that understanding of this is waking up.