Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution by Kevin O'Connor (review)

Abstract

586 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 O'Connor, Kevin. IntellectualsandApparatchiks:Russian Nationalism and theGor bachevRevolution.Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2006. viii + 321 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $68.00. Kevin O'Connor's study ofRussian nationalism seeks to explain why people who had previously been loyalmembers or affiliates of theCPSU abandoned 'their lifelong commitment to communist internationalism in favour of res toring a "Great Russia, One and Indivisible'" (p. 9). This, O'Connor argues, is a paradox thatneeds to be understood if we are to understand the collapse of theUSSR fullyand also if we are to understand post-Soviet developments. O'Connor isvery informative on the development ofRussian nationalism, and in particular its 'Red' variants, under Gorbachev. He is not so successful at explaining the paradoxical shiftfrom internationalism to nationalism. The main reason for this is that the shift from internationalism to nationalism was not that great a leap formany, so that there is not thatmuch to explain. O'Connor's first two chapters ? on the relationship of Russians and the RSFSR to the Soviet system between 1917 and 1953 and the emergence of a cultural nationalism and more 'russified' political environment during the period 1953-85 ? show that themovement from 'internationalism' toRussian nationalism had happened before perestroika. As a result,when constraints on ideological development and giving ideology organizational formwere eased, where else was a portion of the party and its intellectual support going to go ifnot to nationalism and patriotism along a well-trammelled route? This duly happened when perestroika allowed for spaces inwhich synthesized national ism and statist socialism could develop organizationally. This also explains some of the failure of the nationalists during perestroika: unlike the liberals they were pedalling used wares. The quotations O'Connor provides in the final chapter from Russian nationalist intellectuals pondering lifeafterCommunism in late 1991 and 1992 implicitly recognize that the longstanding crossover between Russian national ism and Communism was a problem for the movement, and O'Connor goes someway to recognizing it too when he contrasts the nationalist/conservative offer of theUSSR plus a revivifiedRussia with El'tsin's more successful of fer of national revival through downsizing. As he argues, this leftno room forGorbachev to use Russian identity so that the development of Russian nationalism was important to the failure of perestroika. However, O'Connor does not analyse the failure of nationalism as a movement during perestroika particularly, nor its subsequent very constrained success which may, in part, be because a section of the nationalist movement is still pushing the same line. Instead O'Connor provides a very comprehensive description of how the nationalist movement developed under Gorbachev. He tells this storyby look ing at the 'culturewar' (p. 79) between nationalists and liberals among writers that took place between 1985 and 1988, and the development ofwhat he calls the 'Ligachev line', the positions taken by Egor Ligachev on perestroika and glasnost', before looking at the rise of nationalist movements in the Soviet republics, the emergence of nationalist informalmovements inRussia (includ ing Pamyat' and Otchestvo) and how the increasing prominence of liberals and their independence fromGorbachev after the 1989 Congress of People's reviews 587 Deputies pushed the nationalists and party conservatives towards a belief that the dangers to Russia and to 'socialism' were one and the same. This is then followed by an analysis of the formation of the Russian Communist Party (RCP) and its activities, and the part played by nationalists associated with it in the final endgame of Soviet disintegration. The style adopted in these chapters does not help to extend analysis of themovement from international ism to nationalism. Many of the chapters, which are quite often long, do not have clear conclusions. The narrative moves on from one chapter to another as the impact of an event has worked out and the next big event is introduced. This makes following the themes of the book hard and focuses attention on events to the detriment of any larger argument. As a result, what O'Connor presents is a freshand very detailed reading of nationalist concerns and what they understood to be the problems faced by theUSSR during perestroika. This in itselfhas some value since itamounts to a history of...