Window on Eurasia

Russians Risk ‘National Suicide’ by Turning Away from Traditions

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 31, 2006 – According to the scholar who helped to develop
President Vladimir Putin’s new demographic program, the Russian
nation and consequently the Russian state as well risk committing a kind of
collective suicide if they continue to turn away from their national
traditions.

And the impact on official thinking of his views, laid out in an
interview posted online yesterday, was highlighted by comments Putin
aide Vladislav Surkov made yesterday to a Moscow roundtable on “A
Sovereign State under Conditions of Globalization: Democracy and
National Identity.”

Stepan Sulakshin, a statistician who heads the Moscow Center for
Problem Analysis and State Administration Planning, told a Russtrana.ru
interviewer that his organization had been tasked to come up with “a
state policy for getting Russian out of its demographic crisis”
[https://ec.ut.ee/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid-27010].

Sulakshin, who has been doing analysis for and giving advise to senior
Moscow leaders for almost 20 years, said that “it is well known”
that if nothing is done to address the projected declines in the
Russian population, the number of Russians will be only “two-thirds as
large” in 40 to 50 years as it is now.

If that happens, he continued, “the history of the Russian state can
end as well,” something whose consequences would be “very difficult
for all those who live in Russia regardless of whether they are
representatives of the dominating ethnos – the Russian one – or are
members of other national minorities living on its territory.”

Many demographers act as if this process is something they can do
nothing about, the result of broad global and historical trends,
Sulakshin said. “But when we began to take up this theme,” he
continued, “the special methods of historical-mathematical and
comparative analysis showed that the causes of depopulation can be
addressed.”

He quoted English historian Arnold Toynbee to the effect that
“civilizaitons become not the victims of murder but the victims of
suicide” in order to support his conviction that states and societies
are themselves responsible for these outcomes rather than simply
passive observers.

And then Sulakshin advanced the core of his argument: “A state is
united and stable when it is built around a single culture, a single
language, a traditional confession, single traditions, single customs,
and single sets of values which motivate the individual, the group and
society to this or that type of behaviour.”

The Moscow mathematician added that “the classical Russian family”
consists of three generations, grandparents, parents and children,
which allows the grandparents to “transmit to their grandchildren
behaviours and life values” at each stage of their lifes. And he said “these
are the links of one chain which has carried Russia historically.”

In support of his argument, Sulakshin pointed to Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin’s behaviour just before and during World War II. Stalin, the
contemporary analyst continued, “after its bout of internationalist,
anti-Russian and destructive policies” returned the country to its
“Russian sources.”

Official media began “to recall Russian historical heroes.” Films
about its national history began to be made. The slogan “proletarians
of all countries, unite” disappeared from the newspapers, and the
Orthodox Church was allowed to revive itself. – all things that
infuriated orthodox Bolsheviks but allowed the Soviet Union to win the
war.

Later, however, Sulakshin argued, the Soviet state retreated from this commitment to national values and that led to the decline of the Russian nation and to the destruction of the Soviet Union as a state, a
disaster that he suggests Russians must learn from even now.

Sulakshin offered as a general principle the idea that whenever a
society attempts ot change its “civilizational matrix, nothing good
will come from that.” And consequently, he insists, “national
identity is in fact both a factor and a condition of the survival of
Russia, including in the direct demographic sense.”

On the one hand, Sulakshin’s argument is typical of the followers of
such thinkers as the late Eurasianist Lev Gumilyev, a group that is
extremely active on the rightwind of the Russian political spectrum.
But on the other, his comments and the fact that officials are using them
in the way that they appear to be make them rather more significant.

Indeed, one indication of their impact came the same day his interview
appeared when Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Presidential
administration, not only repeated them almost verbatim but said Russia
must revive national traditions to retain its place on the
international stage
[https://ec.ut.ee/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.annews.ru/news/detail.php?ID=17734%26print=Y].

 

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