Putin

Survival needs no justification, but tribulation is always easier to bear in the name of something higher. For Russians that has traditionally been what they themselves call “the Russian Idea,” meaning a sense of national identity and purpose crystallized into a specific vision and a way of life. The Russian Idea also has a a quasi-mystical nationalistic aura about it, “the conviction that Russia has its own independent, self-sufficient and eminently worthy cultural and historical tradition that both sets it apart from the West and guarantees its future flourishing,” wrote Tim McDaniel in The Agony of the Russian Idea.

The Russian sense of national self, like the history that produced it and the history it produces, clearly tends toward the extremes rather than to cluster around some middle point. The country’s greatest twentieth-century philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, wrote in his book The Russian Idea:

The Russians are a people in the highest degree polarized: they are a conglomeration of contradictions. One can be charmed by them, one can be disillusioned. The unexpected is always to be expected from them…. In respect of this polarization and inconsistency the Russian people can be paralleled only by the Jews: and it is not merely a matter of chance that precisely in these two peoples there exists a vigorous messianic consciousness…. Never has Russia been bourgeois.”

And another philosopher, V. M. Mezhuev, put it another way: “We are not suited for moderation and measure, which are the marks of rationality.”

In the view of these two philosophers the Russian collective psyche keeps its balance by going from one extreme to the other, rather than by seeking a midpoint. This makes Russia both fragile and tenacious, able to survive any ordeal, but unable to construct states that do not sooner or later implode. To some extent, it is precisely that fear of the tendency to fly off to extremes that causes Russians to create rigid hierarchical states that in time ossify and break apart to release the very forces they were created to contain.

Out of the thousands of signs, markers, and symbols of a national identity, anthem and flag have to rank high. A piece of decorated cloth, a few minutes of music, might not seem important in and of themselves, but their lack, or, as in Russia’s case, their presence in a stunted form, is indicative of a profound malaise, a failure to achieve integrity, that touches every schoolchild who must salute the flag and sing the national anthem.

The Bolsheviks had a flag and a song. Post-Soviet Russia really has neither. Instead of creating a flag as new as the new Russia, the government adopted a tricolor from the late tsarist period. From top to bottom it is white, blue, and red. Whether there’s any subliminal significance to the counterrevolutionary white being on top with the revolutionary red on the bottom is anybody’s guess. To provide some aesthetic/emotional continuity the music of the Soviet anthem was kept, but the words were rewritten. Lenin was now tossed out as Stalin had been in an earlier rewrite. God, however, is back.

But these are very new and still raw “traditions.” It means that parents and children will have grown up saluting different flags, singing different anthems.

There is a similar problem with holidays. Victory Day, May 9, celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, and New Year’s are the only holidays that provide some kind of continuity with the Soviet past. Though a large portion of the population is Russian Orthodox, many Russians aren’t religious, and there are also ten to fifteen million Muslims in Russia, not to mention Jews and Buddhists. No holiday with a religious tinge can become truly national.

For schoolchildren there’s not only the problems of flag and anthem but the problem of what history they’re taught. As it used to be said with a more sinister tone in Soviet times, it’s even harder to predict the past than the future.

The question remains—how to integrate the Soviet past into the post-Soviet present, what sense to make of it. “Russia should not repent for Soviet history,” said Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin. Others would vehemently disagree.

Principally, the issue revolves around the image of Stalin, an icon that has been neither utterly smashed nor quite restored to a place in a new pantheon.