Monarchists, nationalists, and pagans in the USSR

A short note on outside vs. inside influences.

Aug 31, 2023

When I first started writing about weaponized immigrants some years back, I was mainly focused on the way that America and Israel hoped to spread various kinds of nationalisms inside the USSR to achieve their own aims. For the U.S. it was to part of grand plan to break up the Soviet Union. In Israel’s case, the aims were more modest: the founding members of the state wanted to bring Soviet Jews over to Israel to bolster the Zionist project. So in the beginning, I was focused on outside forces — and that’s still a big part of it. But there is another side to this story, the homegrown side.

All the nationalist ideas that the west threw at the Soviet Union wouldn’t have made much of a dent if there hadn’t been a receptive audience on the other side — which of course there was. But even more important than that: there were various scenes in the Soviet Union — in the intelligentsia and inside the state apparatus — that were developing and rediscovering various nationalist and religious and pagan and traditionalist ideas and beliefs (some of them very weird and funny) on their own, all without need for outside intervention. This was happening in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in parallel with the growth of Jewish nationalism among Soviet Jews.

This history is interesting on its own but I’m realizing more and more that it’s also important for my own revisionist look at Soviet Zionist history. Why? Because it shows the spread of “older” ways of thinking about the world wasn’t unique to the Jewish community. What was going on with the Jews — their abandonment of their Soviet identity for a hardcore nationalistic one — fit into a much larger cultural trend and reaction that was sweeping society. It was a sign that the Soviet project was changing culturally and ideologically from within…and starting to fail. A lot of people were rejecting their internal Soviet Man and replacing it with whatever made sense to them: monarchism, Russian Orthodoxy, nationalism, pan-Slavism…

All this naturally has a connection to Russia today, as we discussed on the last episode of The Russians.