Authors

Enrico Osvaldi¹;  ¹ Georgetown University, United States

Discussion

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine has thrown the issue of post-Soviet change back into the fore. Even before the attack works like Laruelle had already begun questioning the revival of virulent and aggressive nationalism within Russia and of imperial symbols within its political spaces and imagination. The proposed paper will observe the interactions between fascism and communism, and its resulting syncretic ideologies, from the point of view of Smenovekhovets theorist Nikolai Ustrialov. As the Soviet regime attempted to regain support among the intelligentsia, it reached out to figures like Ustrialov to create bases of bourgeois support in academia and literature. The paper will observe the career of Ustrialov service as professor at the Harbin Polytechnic. It shows his relevance in working as a keen political observer, and ultimately synthesizer, of fascism and communism. Rapprochement proved productive if ultimately fatal years for Ustryalov, who published extensively seeking to find a syncretic third way while ostensibly working to make the regime congenial in the eyes of the old elites. Yet archival evidence shows that Ustrialov’s ideas were observed quite closely even at the highest echelons of power and went through periods of relevance and condemnation. While Ustrialov would eventually be disgraced and perish in the purges, his ideas produced a unique blend of “national-Bolshevism” which is a mirror of Ustrialov’s own network of radically different connections and reads. The paper sheds new light on nationalist sentiments within the USSR and the intelligentsia(s)’ entanglements and interests. I aim to show how while the theme of nationalism was considered taboo within the USSR, it nonetheless attracted great attention in many strata of society and was allowed to make a comeback through sanitized spaces. Furthermore, I posit Harbin as a liminal space of Soviet policy, a space of surveillance where the regime experimented with projects and ideas that were otherwise impossible within the Soviet empire itself. Until the end of the Second World War, the city hosted the biggest White Russian community in the world, one tight and active in fighting the Soviet Union. I propose viewing Harbin through the Foucauldian concept of “heterotopia”, a space of alternate and sanitized political imagination and social engineering, away from the Soviet project yet close enough to be controlled. This space allowed a flourishing of ideas that intermingled with far-right worldviews, while keeping intellectuals in a close grip. This revival cast a long shadow on Russian politics all the way to figures like Limonov and Dugin. This study lays the groundwork for a significant shift in the contemporary understanding of the Soviet Union, showing it instead as a much more conservative power, and to systematically uncover the deep roots of modern-day Russia’s turn towards an illiberal and authoritarian nationalism.