The Ideology of NTS

Abstract

The Russian emigre anti-communist organization NTS (originally NTSNP) emerged in 1930 in Belgrade and spread soon to other European capitals containing significant numbers of exiled Russians. The letters NTS stand for Natsionalno Trudovoi Soyuz (National Labor Alliance; the letters NP-of the new generation-were dropped during World War II). Members of this organization now generally referred to as National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, originally belonged to the young generation of exiled Russians who were born in Russia but grew up and received their education abroad. This point is of crucial importance for the understanding of the ideological background of NTS. Although strongly anti-communist since its inception, NTS owed its birth to the generation gap among Russian emigres. The fathers had fought bravely in the ranks of the White Armies on the battlefields of the civil war. Unlike the sons, they did not attribute particular importance to the problems of political ideology. Most of them were monarchists who had inherited their monarchism from their ancestors and gave little thought to the idea of monarchy as such. Basically they were conservatives, often even reactionaries, but instinctively rather than consciously. In contrast to their politically unsophisticated fathers, the sons were engaged in a serious search for the reasons for the February and October Revolutions as well as the defeat of the White Armies. Having grown up outside of Russia, they did not share their fathers' idealization of tsarist Russia. They were convinced that the Revolution would not have succeeded had not something been basically wrong with the Russian empire. When they asked their fathers for explanations, they received no satisfactory answers. It was precisely the political naivete of the older generation of emigres which stimulated the politically more inquisitive sons to form a group of their own for the purpose of discussing the motives