Fortunately for the Russian nationalists, no one in the West has so far catalogued that long and ancient list of 'mortal threats', varying over the course of centuries, from which Russia was destined to save the world but never did. Why has no one ever posed this devastating question to the Russian nationalists? Yet, even if someone had said to them the obvious 'Physician, heal thyself!', it would scarcely have cured them of their parochial messianism. Dialogue, as we have seen, is something alien to them in principle. They believe only n monologue. For centuries they have listened only to themselves. Yet such a catalogue would at least show their good-hearted Western fellow- travellers what a precarious position they place themselves in by supporting this mess an;c fervour.
But that is an aside. Certainly, the 'Russ < n patriots' who s gned The Nation Speaks, for all their biological and racial pretensions, remain within the mainstream of Russian extremist nationalist thought, with its provincial messianism, its faith in the unique salvation qualities of Russia and its slavish justification of the empire. Our slogan', they proclaim, 'is a United Indivisible Russia.'13
Hitler s Mistake
Yet here arises a logical contradiction n their racial concept They are well aware that they are not pioneers in the business of saving Aryan civilization, That title must undoubtedly belong to Hitler. But Hitler, like the Russian 'patriots of the civil war from whom they borrowed the slogan 'A United Indivisible Russia', suffered a resounaing defeat. They cannot forget that they are the ideological heirs of failure. It is therefore imperative for them to find a rationalization for this failure — and they do.
These 'Russian patriots' portray Hitler's defeat as having been brought about by his betrayal of the righteous principle of race war. It is true that, 'he declared a merciless war on degeneration But he was in no pos .tion to complete this task because he was by no means ruled by the racial principles he proclaimed, but rather by a narrow nationalistic egotism. He even declared as inferior, peoples on the same level as the Germans '14 However, if Hitler s main mistake, from the point of view of 'Russian patriots', was that he substituted nationalist piinciples for racial ones, then, above all, they should have tried to avoid doing the same thing themselves Alas, as for Hitler, in the final analysis the salvation of the world is reduced to the creation of a powerful national state to serve as the centre of gravitational attraction for the healthy elements of all fraternal (sic!) countries'.15 At the same time, m this state the Russian people . must necessarily become the dominant nauon.'16 In other words like Hitler, the Russian racists turn out to be merely nationalists.
Russian Orthodox Heathens'
he logical problems ;n the 'Russian patriots', racial conception are compounded by their attitude toward Orthodoxy. As the national religion, Orthodoxy (not just Christianity) is declared by them to be indispensable to the Russian empire and thus to saving the world. 'Throughout Russian history, the Orthodox church has played an enormous positive role . . . the savage anti-clerical orgy [of the 1420s] was part of a campaign by the forces of chaos against Russian national culture. In a national state, the foundation of which we place as our goal, traditional Russian Religion must take its proper honoured place.'17
Statements such as these confuse the issue for Russian nationalism's Western fellow-travellers. How, one asks, should the authors of The Nation Speaks be categorized? Should they be wr :ten off as 'reactionary racists', or National Bolsheviks as Darrell Hammer prefers to call them?18 If so, how can we square this whh Dunlop's classification system according to which their very attachment to Russian Orthodoxy makes them good national its, quite distinct from the repulsive National Bolsheviks? As we have seen, 'Russian patriots' are far from being atheists or pagans. They are believers in the Russian Orthodox church. Moreover, Orthodoxy is, for them, not just ihe highly esteemed traditional Russian Religion (with a capital R), but the only branch of Christianity capable of saving the world. Christianity's other branches have betrayed the racial principle and. are in essence aiding 'worldwide disintegration':
Today the spirit of evil, having disguised its horns under a Beatles haircut, is trying to conduct its demoralizing and Disintegrative activity within individual branches of the Christian Church by other means, preaching the ideology of the Jewish diaspora, egalitarianism, and cosmopolitanism, thus aggravating the process of worldwide miscegenation and degradation 19
One has only to compare this passage with 'The Letter of the Three', published in Veche and signed by a priest and an Archdeacon of the Russian Orthodox church, to be convinced of the source of the Russian patriots' manifesto, Nasha Strana ['Our Country'] — a thoroughly Russian Orthodox newspaper with a Black Hundreds mentality — published The Nation Speaks for the first time in Russian outside the Soviet Union, calling it 'the beginning of a spiritual awakening' in Russia.20 There can be no doubt, therefore, that the authors of The Nation Speaks were 'good Russian nationalists', vozrozhdentsy, in Dunlop's terminology — only at the same time they are also racists and, even worse, followers of Adolph Hitler. Not surprisingly, their Western fellow-travellers cannot explain th s paradox. To them, it remains a theoretical problem with no solution. But there are other paradoxes and sources of confusion within the thinking of the 'Russian patriots'.
A Few Words about National Uniqueness
The struggle for national uniqueness is part of the great battle between the forces of life and death n the universe. 21 Oddly enough, however, the Russian patriots' are concerned with ]ust one type of national uniqueness in the context of Russia — imperial. They become cynical and bitter as soon as the discussion turns to the national uniqueness of other peoples witl n the empire. It disturbs them that for some reason the existence of the Belorussian nation is artificially supported, though the Belorussians have no sense of themselves as such, and the Belorussian language is merely a collection of western Russian dialects.'22 They are honestly offended by the fact that, 'all the so-called union republics have their own Communist parties except Russia. The result is a disproportionate strengthen ng of the most powerful of the regional groupings — the Ukraine.'23
Two peoples provoke the greatest displeasure among 'Russian patriots': the Ukrainians and (who else?) the Jews One would think that these peoples' active struggle to assert their own national uniqueness, it ought to place them on the 'correct' side of the barricades in the 'great battle between the forces of life and death in the universe'. Yet, the conclusions of the 'Russian patriots' in this regard, once again, do not follow from their own assumptions. They consider that 'entire provinces of the Ukraine by righis ought to be part of Russia', and complain of 'such crying injustices as the transfer to the Ukraine of the Crimea, where a predom nantly Russian population is now forced to study Ukrainian'.24 As for the Crimean Tartars, whom Stalin drove from their historic homeland, their national uniqueness is of so little concern to the 'Russian patriots' that they do not even receive a mention ;n their manifesto. Yet this is hardly surprising when we consider their views on the possible independence of even so powerful a nation as the Ukrainians.