Nationalism Moves Into Mainstream

President Boris Yeltsin aims chauvinistic remarks at Estonia while visiting an exhibition of paintings that exalts Russia's imperialist past. Leading liberals who backed Yeltsin's drive for Russian independence publicly yearn for the days when the Soviet Union was a single country.


"As far as the integration of the Slavic republics is concerned, well, there are probably no real Slavs left," Vladimir Shumeiko, speaker of the upper house of parliament and a man close to the president, said at a press conference Thursday. "We are all Russians. Lets put it that way. All are Russians, we should not be divided."


Russian nationalism is alive and well, and liberals are jumping on the imperial bandwagon.


They could not have ignored the recent election campaigns of Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma and Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko, who unseated incumbents by using a strong populist message laced with nostalgia for the Soviet era. That same recipe won Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party the most votes in Russia's parliamentary elections last December.


Both Kuchma and Lukashenko called for closer ties among the Slavic republics, a call that Russian politicians like Shumeiko are responding to in kind Nor have reformists ignored the campaigns of Zhirinovsky, former vice president Alexander Rutskoi and repatriated writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn to sway the population with calls to expand Russia's borders to those of its imperial heyday. Their message is coated with venom for Yeltsin and the democrats, whom they accuse of selling out Russia's national interests to the West at the expense of the impoverished population during the upheavals of 1991 and 1992.


If Yeltsin wanted to strike a nationalist pose, he could not have found a better place to do it than an exhibition of painter Ilya Glazunov, whose graphic depictions of Russia's glorious past and apocalyptic present have been called "aggressive nationalism" by the liberal weekly Moskovskiye Novosti.


With Glazunov at his side in a carefully arranged appearance at the exhibition last week, Yeltsin indulged in some nationally televised saber-rattling, telling tiny Estonia that Russian troops would remain in the Baltic state unless it outlawed a citizenship law Moscow said violated the rights of Russian speakers there.


Glazunov figured into a recent anti-Western remark by another prominent Russian liberal. Yegor Gaidar, the West's monetarist darling whose alliance was trounced in December by Zhirinovsky's party, was pictured in front of a Glazunov painting in a recent newspaper interview where he blamed his party's defeat on Western campaign advisers.


Other prominent liberals have gone a step further, wrapping themselves in the red flag. Galina Starovoitova, a close Yeltsin adviser during his rise to power, wrote in Izvestia this month that she opposed the 1991 agreement on the Soviet breakup that solidified Yeltsin's preeminence in Russia.


Boris Fyodorov, who as finance minister in 1993 sought to break Russia's ties to the other former republics and its Soviet economic past, wrote this month that he regretted having to refer to his father's homeland in Odessa, Ukraine as part of a foreign country.


This collective reassessment of recent history by the liberal wing is hardly accidental.


Early this year, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev said that Russian democrats had to take the nationalist initiative away from the more radical, aggressive movements -- or else "be swept away by a wave of aggressive nationalism."


Yeltsin began taking pains to seize the patriotic thunder from his nationalist and Communist opponents in his state-of-the-nation address in February, when he made a thundering appeal for loyalty to the fatherland,the constitution, and to Russia's leader.


Yeltsin and Kozyrev set out a tougher foreign policy aimed at projecting a more assertive Russian voice in world affairs, attempting to broker peace in Bosnia, warning NATO to keep out of Eastern Europe and claiming the role of peacekeeper throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union.


These policy amendments have successfully put the message across abroad, but have had mixed success at home where their effects are less felt in people's day-to-day lives. Not so the latest revision, an attempt to promote the economic reintegration of the former republics.


Besides being at the root of Lukashenko's and Kuchma's successful election campaigns, reintegration of the former Soviet states is among the most powerful messages of the radical Russian nationalists. It is also the mantra of moderates who have taken control of the government and parliament, as well as in Russia's provinces.


For liberals it has become painfully clear that they will be left on the fringes of political life unless they take onboard Russia's new mainstream nationalism.


For the question now is not whether some of the former republics will reintegrate, but how. Will there be a largely economic union of sovereign states, or an orthodox empire ruled by an iron hand and hostile to the Western influence that has flooded in since the collapse of the iron curtain?


The democrats are hoping that by steering this debate, they will be able to determine what form the new union of ex-Soviet republics will take.