THE ISSUES OF PRESERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONAL CULTURE OF THE RUSSIAN DIASPORA IN THE PRC

Abstract

The article proves that the national issue, the national ideas and the national policy in the socio-political life of the multifaceted Russian emigration of China occupies a special place. The national processes considered by the authors, which took place in the USSR in the 1920s and 1940s, stirred up emigrant public opinion. Various emigrant publications from time to time gave their own assessment of the nation-building in the Soviet Union and of the constitutions of the USSR adopted in 1924 and 1936. Thus, the moderate democratic emigration considered it necessary in the future, i.e. after the liberation from Bolshevism, to preserve the provisions about the legal equality of nations fixed in the Soviet basic law. At the same time, it did not hide fears related to the Ukrainian, Polish and other separatist manifestations, which, under certain circumstances, could provoke the collapse of Russia. The representatives of the part of the Russian diaspora, that had a Russian identity, opposed separatism, which was destroying the unity of the three branches of the single, in their opinion, East Slavic people; they sharply criticized the policy of the Siberian oblastnichestvo (separatism), which was trying to separate Siberia from Russia. On the pages of democratic emigrant publications, they criticized Ukrainian, Polish, Georgian and other nationalists who tried to split Russia, to reduce it to national states. The novelty of the article is obvious, since the authors clearly define that the formation of the Soviet culture was understood by some emigrant scholars as a process of obscuring its Russian national component. Observed in parallel with the development of national cultures of non-Russian peoples, it could, in their opinion, warm up separatist tendencies in the USSR.