The Thinking Reed

But it was the historians who made the most impressive effort. In order to justify Russian nationalism a special theory of ‘the lesser evil’ was elaborated, according to which the conquest of Caucasia and Central Asia by the Russians was not at all a misfortune for the subjected peoples but really a stroke of luck, in a way, for they thus avoided ‘something very much worse’: the British yoke. Inclusion in the Tsarist state enabled these peoples to get to know their Russian ‘elder brother’ and to wage a struggle for freedom alongside the Russian proletariat. The crass absurdity of this theory is obvious, if only because it presents as the great good fortune of the Uzbeks and the Georgians the fact that, having fallen under the rule of the autocracy, they were then in a position to fight against the autocracy. It was as though an arrested person were to be told that he was lucky to be in prison, because he could now try to escape. As for the comparison between Russian and British colonialism, the only advantage ascribed to the former was that it was Russian, and here we should mention a point which is objectively correct. As Marx observed in his writings on British rule in India, colonialism actually led to progress in the development of the productive forces of Asia and brought about the only real social revolution the East had known. However, Marx and Engels considered Russian Tsarism a greater evil in Asia (and in Europe) than British imperialism. It is important that while acknowledging the objective advance made in the sphere of the productive forces, they nevertheless did not justify colonialism morally.18

The theory of ‘the lesser evil’, on the contrary, amounted precisely to a moral justification of the Russian state. Fighters for independence like Shamil were depicted as villains and reactionaries (just as the official press does today when writing about Eritrea or Afghanistan). The new version of history was finally established during a discussion in 1951-52 which followed a letter by M.V. Nechkina to Voprosy Istorii in April 1951. The textbooks were urgently revised, popular heroes being transformed into agents of British imperialism.19

Along with the ‘Russian orientation’ in the historiography of the Union Republics, the latter also developed their own ‘little nationalism’, which at that time could still coexist with Russian chauvinism. Thus B. Gafurov, in Tadzhikistan, wrote that the Tadzhiks were the most enlightened people in Asia, that Persia was a cultural periphery of Tadhikistan, and that the Greeks and Chinese of Antiquity were influenced by the Tadzhiks.20 In Armenia the same role was played by G. Goyan. The minor nationalism of the Tadzhiks, the Armenians or the Uzbeks coexisted happily with and supplemented the major nationalism of the Russians. It was clear that the greatest people of all was the Russian people. Its superiority was not contested. On the next rung down stood all the other peoples of the USSR, and beneath them, as the lowest of the low, all the other peoples in the world. As experience showed, playing with ‘little nationalism’ was playing with fire: the ‘younger brothers’ grew up quickly. But in the forties and at the beginning of the fifties the principal concern of the Russian statocracy was to put an end to internationalism.

The decisive onslaught on the internationalist (‘cosmopolitan’) intelligentsia began in January 1949, when Pravda

devoted an entire page to an unsigned article ‘On a Certain Anti-Patriotic Group of Dramatic Critics’. By a strange coincidence, almost all the ‘anti-patriots’ and ‘cosmopolitans’ turned out to be Jews. The newspaper declared that if a play with an ideologically correct theme was put on it must not be criticized severely, even if it was ‘poorly performed’.21 When they criticized such plays art critics were committing anti-state acts:

In the field of dramatic criticism there has been formed an anti-patriotic group of trailers after bourgeois aestheticism, who have wormed their way into our press and are most at their ease in the pages of the journal Teatr

and the newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo.22

Examples were given of the disgraceful statements made by the ‘cosmopolitans’. For instance, the critic Gurevich had said somewhere that ‘complacency is not alien to Russian people.’ That might not seem offensive, but Pravda argued otherwise: