The Orthodox Ethic: Thoughts on the Russian Economy from the Nationalist Opposition

Abstract

It is a widespread assumption that Russia's national patriotic opposition had no specific concept for economic reform. According to Walter Laqueur: 'The Russian Right has traditionally shown little interest in economic policy. It has all along expressed its strong dislikes but it has hardly ever presented viable alternatives.' Anders Aslund, similarly, suggested that the communist and nationalist 'line of thought has hardly anything new to offer, and does not seem to carry significant political weight'.1 The national patriots' solutions to Russia's economic difficulties were, indeed, of little immediate practical use. However, they did reveal characteristic aspects of the national patriotic mood which has been a significant influence upon post-Soviet politics. The national patriots were an amorphous group of neo-communist and Russian Orthodox activists, who became involved in Russian politics from 1989 onwards. At first they opposed the impending demise of the Soviet Union; thereafter, they fought the reforms promulgated by the government of Boris Yeltsin. The apparently contradictory alliance of Left and Right, or Red and White, which constituted national patriotism, found common ground in an anti-western stance and an imperialist Russian nationalism. Whilst the national patriots formed a number of ephemeral political parties and movements, their most stable institutional bases were the monthly literary journals and the weekly newspapers devoted to national patriotic ideology. These publications provide the main sources for this article.2