Russian and Rashism: are Russian language and literature really so great?

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

In English-speaking countries, governments leave language use to citizens and their choices. Language politics is not actively pursued as a goal in itself or as an instrument for furthering a specific policy. In contrast, this is a norm and even the fundament of politics in Central and Eastern Europe, where the nation – in line with ethnolinguistic nationalism – is defined as all speakers of a language (or speech community).

Not paying attention to this salient aspect of rashism, and to how Russian language and culture are taught and researched at English-medium universities, gives the Kremlin an upper hand in the ongoing worldwide mass media war that accompanies its brutal and unjustified attack on Ukraine. Miscomprehension of this kind is a tactical weakness that de facto privileges Russia in its irredentist empire-building efforts for “gathering all the Russian-speaking lands” within Russia’s frontiers.

Warning

On February 24th 2022, when with Belarus’s assistance the Russian military invaded Ukraine, the West woke up to a drastically changed, definitively post-Helsinki, Europe. The good old principles ironed out in 1975 between the Soviet bloc and the democratic world at the meeting in the Finnish capital were discarded. The inviolability of state borders in Europe is no more. The European Union and NATO stick to the principle of equality between all member states, irrespective of their demographic and territorial size, or the sizes of their armies and economies. In Europe small and big states are equal. Yet, Putin’s Russia will never abide by this rule, which the Kremlin sees as a constraint. Rather Moscow and Beijing agree that “a weak country must obey a strong country.” Hence, Ukraine must obey Russia, while Taiwan must obey China.

The fate of Europe and democracy is now being decided in Ukraine: whether the future will be free and democratic, or rashism prevails. Rashism – alongside Beijing’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; North Korea’s official ideology of juche; Moscow’s “sovereign democracy”; Hungary’s “illiberal democracy”; and Poland’s “good change” – is a new name for authoritarianism. In a time of war and a domestic struggle for power, as now observed in Russia, this system appears to be quickly morphing into full-fledged totalitarianism. As a result, rashism seems set to join the odious ranks of Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism and Moscow’s Stalinism.

Not surprisingly, this portmanteau word composed of “Russia” and “fascism” was actually coined in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. At that time, it was modelled on an earlier neologism, nashism, which referred to the political practices of the Kremlin’s pro-government party United Russia that enables and promotes “sovereign democracy” and Putin’s dictatorship of over two decades. In turn, the term nashism is derived from the name of this party’s youth wing “Nashi” (Наши “us, our people”) that was founded in 2005. The logic of the term nashism reflects the stark bipolar opposition in which Putin steeps his domestic and foreign politics. It is us against them, the “Christian Russia of traditional values” against the “degenerate West”.

Russian ultra-nationalism justifies the persecution of democrats and liberals, the forced assimilation of Russia’s ethnic non-Russians and rabid expansionism for rebuilding a Greater Russia. This amounts to a copy of Italy’s fascism and Germany’s Nazism. The mere rhetorical difference between these two and rashism is that the proponents of the present-day Russian state ideology actually denigrate their democratic opponents by branding them as Nazis and fascists. Yet it is their own programme and actions which are antisemitic, xenophobic and driven by a colonial-style civilisational mission that is bound to result in actual or cultural genocide of the colonised peoples. Rashism is a “schizo-fascism”, because rashists go to lengths to deny the fascist character of their ideology and politics. But it is obvious to outside observers that now Russia is a fascist country.

How the world sees Russian

In the West, rather unwittingly, the perception of the Russian language and culture largely follows the wishes of the Kremlin’s propaganda and ideology of the Russkiy Mir (Russian world). No one questions the fact that Russian is an important language of global communication. After all, it is one of the UN’s six official languages. The Cold War made the West oblivious to the fact that quite strangely – in comparison to Arabic, English, French, Spanish and even Chinese – Russian was official only in a single country, namely, the Soviet Union. This lack of attention to language politics prevented western observers from pondering how come that after the 1991 breakup of the USSR, Moscow may still claim the exclusive ownership of the Russian language. Such a claim directly impinges on the sovereignty of the post-Soviet states. Like in Central Europe, post-Soviet states are legitimised through ethnolinguistic nationalism. In practice, this means that a “proper” state must be earmarked for a single nation who speak their own specific language, be it Estonian, Georgian or Ukrainian.

In the wake of the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, language and culture were still seen as elements of soft power. This all changed when the Kremlin weaponised language and culture for hard power uses, following the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014. Even after this breaking point, most western commentators still failed to see how Moscow’s control over Russian translates into cultural and political influence and control over Russian-speaking communities outside Russia. In turn, the existence of such Russophone communities is used by the Kremlin’s ideologues to propose that Belarus or Ukraine are “pseudo-states”, because Belarusian and Ukrainian are not “real languages”. Hence, in Moscow’s skewed neo-imperial logic, neither the Belarusian nor Ukrainian nation exists. Their existence is an offense to rashists and their vision of a reborn Russian empire. After all, Belarus and Ukraine should constitute the ethnic and economic core of Greater Russia.

Only in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was the rebroadcasting of Russian television and radio stations banned in the post-Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In March 2022, a month after Russia had attacked Ukraine, the EU itself followed with a blanket ban on Russian media outlets that broadcast in Russian and western languages. But somehow Moscow is still able to evade these bans, pumping out Russian propaganda across the European Union, now mainly through the internet. At the same time, the near totalitarian control of the mass media in Russia prevents any western news outlets from broadcasting to the Russian public, who are duped and conditioned by propaganda. On top of that, Russia appears to be winning the propaganda war in the Global South, where the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine is widely seen as justified.

Neo-Russification

Moscow’s official position is that neither the Ukrainian language nor nation exists; and that Ukraine must be “denazified”. What does this denazification mean in practice? At present, in Ukraine the Russian invaders target and destroy museums, monuments, archives, schools and hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children have been already deported to the heartlands of Russia, ensuring speedy Russification. In the areas under Russian occupation the libraries and schools are cleansed of summarily destroyed Ukrainian books. Russian replaces Ukrainian as the language of instruction and Russian syllabuses supersede Ukrainian ones. Russian mobile operators supersede their Ukrainian counterparts in the occupied areas, the Russian rouble replaces the Ukrainian hryvnia and to the levelled Ukrainian cities and towns under Russian control, vans arrive with huge screens on their sides to spread Russian propaganda directly in the streets. The Kremlin’s “denazification” is a new name for the old imperial policy of Russification that entails the forced liquidation of other languages, cultures and nations.

And again, the Kremlin’s fixation on such monumental feats of language engineering as its main instrument for furthering the goals of Russian neo-imperialism has evaded the West’s scrutiny. Eventually, western commentators awoke to the ugly reality of Russian war crimes, only when faced with the widespread employment of rape as an instrument of warfare by Russian troops and with numerous genocidal-scale massacres methodically committed by the Russian army. The thin red line has been crossed. It is undeniable that the Kremlin’s criminal rashism seeks to emulate the Third Reich’s genocidal Nazism in methods, justifications and goals. This includes concentration camps and Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) to kill captured members of the Ukrainian elite and military forces.

Meanwhile, in the western mass media and capitals voices can be heard that what journalists report from Ukraine under the relentless Russian onslaught should not be identified with Russian language and culture. Why not? This callous attitude rightly offends Ukrainians, because it is none other than Russian soldiers and officers, educated and bred on “great Russian literature”, who keep committing heinous crimes in Ukraine. After 2014 some high-minded Ukrainian intellectuals believed that Kyiv’s efforts to limit the supply of Russian books in Ukraine, including those openly anti-Ukrainian, were harmful to freedom of speech and thought. Now they have no doubts of this kind. After the genocidal massacres in Bucha, Borodyanka or Izyum, and over 22,000 casualties in the completely levelled Mariupol, the question about the link between Russian imperialism and culture needs to be urgently and seriously addressed.

Blind in one eye

How did the West manage to fail to take note of Moscow’s continuing weaponisation of culture and language? During the long decades of the Cold War confrontation, “great Russian literature” offered consolation, even a hope that a free Russia of the future is possible, that it may yet turn out to be a “normal European country”. At the same time, western Sovietologists and scholars of literary studies did not question the Soviet practice of not publishing fiction written in other Soviet languages than Russian before a Russian translation was released. Only then would a translation of this non-Russian Soviet novel or collection of poetry into a western language be permitted. But it had to be conducted solely from the approved Russian translation, not from the Ukrainian, Azerbaijani or Georgian original.

Obviously, this ideologised practice of translating Russian translations made non-Russian Soviet literature appear a poor relation to great Russian literature. To this day, in the West, the belief is rife that Ukrainian, with 40 million speakers, or Uzbek, with 35 million speakers, are “small languages”. Hence, a Ukrainian or Uzbek novel can be translated into a western language – for instance, Swedish with ten million speakers – only after it has appeared in a well-acclaimed Russian translation. The Soviet Union split three decades ago, but such practices of Soviet cultural and linguistic imperialism still persist today. Also on this basis, the Kremlin claims its “right” to the post-Soviet countries as parts of the “Russian world”, because they have “no culture worth speaking of” beyond the Russian language. Russian ideologues claim that post-Soviet non-Russian literature is poor and derivative, merely a pale shadow of great Russian literature.

This noxious view has been time and time again repeated by acclaimed Russian authors, including the famous Russian dissident and poet Joseph Brodsky, who found safe haven in the West. Unthinkingly and without having engaged with these non-Russian literatures, western pundits keep nodding in agreement. As a result, they do the Kremlin’s bidding, and extend the western seal of approval to Russian cultural imperialism. Some realise what they are doing and in return expect accolades, help and money from Moscow.

Tolstoy and Brodsky, apart from being representatives of “great Russian literature”, were also unrepentant Russian imperialists. Quite recently, in 1998, Brodsky de facto denied the right of independent existence to the former Soviet bloc countries. Countering Milan Kundera’s 1984 definition of Central Europe as a part of the West that Moscow kidnapped, Brodsky infamously dubbed this region “Western Asia”. He did not balk at equating the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia with Asia, as long as Central Europe would remain under Moscow’s suzerainty. The will and opinions of the nations concerned were of no import to Brodsky. Why should an imperialist care about some “uncivilised natives”?

Principled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – who in his writings tore away the veil of oblivion from the genocidal horror of the Soviet gulag concentration and death camps – in the end proved to be another convinced Russian imperialist. Putin co-opted the writer for his political system and Solzhenitsyn was only too happy to follow. Both abhor the West and share the vision of a “pure Orthodox and imperial Greater Russia”. In 2007, upon receiving in the Kremlin the State Prize of the Russian Federation from the hands of Putin himself, Solzhenitsyn reflected about Russia’s future, saying that “Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively … The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury western civilisation forever.”

This war of Solzhenitsyn’s prediction is now taking place in Ukraine. Democracy, human rights and basic political freedoms are at stake. Some western intellectuals are starting to sense that “great Russian literature” is part and even a weapon of this confrontation. That the beauty of the Russian belles-lettres cannot be responsibly enjoyed in separation from a conscious reflection on the broader context of brutal Russian and Soviet colonialism and imperialism. Despite some qualified and muted criticisms, most Russian authors, quite happily, have supported the imperial expansion of tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation. Whatever the name is at a given moment, it is none other than Mother Russia, the Russian world, or just the empire that remains their lodestar.

A way forward

The recent proposal that western publishers should make the highlights of Ukrainian literature readily available in high quality translations directly from the Ukrainian originals is a good start. But it is late in the day. What about the achievements of Armenian, Belarusian or Tajik literature? Why not extend this translation programme to masterpieces created in the official languages of Russia’s autonomous republics, for instance, in Bashkir, Chechen, Kalmyk, Sakha (Yakut) or Tatar? A whole continent of Soviet and post-Soviet literatures in about 50 languages remains hidden from the western reader’s view behind the impenetrable Iron Curtain of “great Russian literature”.

Even if such a widened programme is realised, the main constraint is the dearth of qualified translators and researchers in these languages. Another bottleneck comes in the form of how the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states are covered at western universities. Attention is almost exclusively paid to Russian language and literature. In the vast majority of cases, at universities in the UK and North America, departments of Slavic studies are “Slavic” in name only. In reality, students are required to master Russian as the obligatory entry gate to the Slavic world. This methodological narrow-mindedness leaves them convinced that Brodsky was right, that there cannot be any great literature in Bulgarian, Czech or Polish, let alone in Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Somehow, an aspiring student of Germanic languages and cultures is not obliged to master German first, before she would be allowed to focus on her beloved Dutch, English or Swedish. Why not then extend this open-minded approach to Slavic studies, so that at least two-thirds of incoming students are encouraged to focus on Slavic languages and cultures other than Russian. Yes, for the time being, Ukrainian language and literature should be the main priority! Likewise, more attention needs to be given to non-Russian languages and cultures in today’s Russian Federation. Currently one can study these only after becoming able to read Russian-language textbooks of such languages. Only rarely are native speakers of these languages employed at western universities. Russian imperialists approve. But do we? Need we be complicit in facilitating and humouring Russian imperialism, or, in other words, rashism?

This is not just an idle proposal of change for change’s sake, but an answer to the West’s blind acceptance of Russian imperialism in culture, as embodied by the unthinking worship of Russian language and literature. After all, it is this unquestioned acceptance that helped guarantee impunity for Putin when he attacked Georgia and grabbed Abkhazia and South Ossetia, annexed Crimea and seized eastern Ukraine, or when he levelled areas held by the democratic Syrian opposition. The Kremlin sweetened this poisonous “deal” dished out to the West with gas and oil, including well-paid sinecures for retired German and French politicians, and dirty money for London’s financiers in the greedy city. Now with Europe’s overdependence on Russian hydrocarbons and money, Putin excels at frustrating the EU and NATO’s united response to Moscow’s ongoing war on Ukraine, that is, the sanctions and deliveries of weaponry for the Ukrainian army. Indeed, it is high time that the West takes its head out of the Russian noose, before it is too late.

Approach with caution

In such a situation, should we keep reading “great Russian literature”? Yes, of course, but let us peruse it critically, as products of tsarist imperialism, Soviet totalitarianism and Putin’s rashism. And importantly, first of all, we need to make up for lost time and get acquainted with the masterpieces of Belarusian, Chechen, Tatar or Ukrainian literature that Russian and Soviet imperialists have done such a good job of hiding from the world in plain sight.

One needs to approach Russian belles-lettres with caution, until a Russian Viktor Klemperer or Primo Levi, and a Russian Thomas Bernhard appear on the literary and intellectual horizon. In Russian literature no robust trend critical of Russian and Soviet imperialism and totalitarianism has yet emerged. Russian authors prefer not to talk back to the powers that be. They leave politics to politicians, and then, in private, where no one can hear, they sob in their writings on the loss of liberty. An overflow of feelings and emotions replaces a sober analysis of the causes of this perennial state of Russian “unfreedom”. It is easier to lament beautifully and give in to evoking the tired trope of the unknowable “Russian soul”, rather than invest time and effort needed for analysing the situation in the form of an excellent piece of fiction.

The direct and unsparing prose of Varlam Shalamov’s stories on the Soviet concentration and death camps was an auspicious beginning. He proved to be a worthy successor of Anton Chekhov, who saw his study of the tsarist penal colony on the island of Sakhalin as his main contribution to literature. Yet, by and large, Russian writers shy away from the task of coming to terms with the imperial, totalitarian and genocidal past of Russia and the Soviet Union. One of the reasons for this is the fact that Putin’s rashist regime now actively rehabilitates Stalinism, the KGB, Russian imperialism, Soviet totalitarianism and Russification as the pillars of a future Greater Russia. To most Russians and Russian intellectuals, brought up in this odious adoration of power and naked violence as a sign of the greatness of their state, the programme is curiously attractive. They know nothing else, even when they sojourn in the West. Their choice is imperial Russia, rashism in short.

A certain hope is that Ukrainian, Belarusian, Tatar or Chechen literature may yet turn out to be a vaccination not only for the West’s blind veneration of Russian literature, language and culture, but also for the Russians’ masochistic love of totalitarianism and unfreedom. Let the healing begin. It is way overdue. I look forward to at least a steady stream of novels, stories, plays and poems translated into western languages from Ukrainian, Tatar, Buryat, Chechen, Sakha, Tuvan, Uzbek… Although, what we really need is an avalanche for countering the ravages that rashism – Russian imperialism and totalitarianism – has left both in people’s heads worldwide and on the ground in Ukraine. Yet, I fear that what will remain of these high-minded promises will be again words, words, words.

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His recent monographs, include Ethnic Cleansing during the Cold War (Routledge 2018), Politics and Slavic Languages (Routledge 2021) and Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia (Routledge 2021). His reference Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe is available as an open access publication.

Putin, Rashism, Russia, Russia's war against Ukraine, war crimes