The return of White Russia

29 October 2005

Paul Robinson attends a reburial in Moscow that could signal the rebirth of Russian nationalism

At a party held in the President Hotel later that evening, a lady of a certain age sitting next to me reveals herself to have been an interpreter for Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet general who defected to the Germans in the second world war and raised an anti-Soviet Russian army. I know what people think of the Vlasovtsy, she tells the diners, but I know that many of them were good men. Later she apologises. Has she spoken out of turn? she asks. No, everybody replies. Not at all. How times have changed.

Not everybody is quite so jubilant. The next day I meet my friend again. Though a Putin fan, he regards most of those who now rule Russia as unreconstructed Soviet apparatchiks. The reburials are a fraud, he claims. The nomenklatura are usurping the memory of the Whites to legitimise their own rule. The talk of unity and reconciliation is a means by which they suggest an equivalence between Red and White, both equally guilty and equally right. The honouring of the Whites washes away the sins of the Reds.

There is some truth to this. Undoubtedly, there is a political purpose to ceremonies such as these. The focus on unity suggests that all Russians should abandon party divisions. It helps to suppress political competition, and to create a sort of corporatist, nationalist unity which favours those in authority. Still, by celebrating Denikin and Il’in, their anti-communism, nationalism and Orthodoxy, the Russian state is making a statement about the country’s future which, for those of us who remember the Soviet years, is a statement we can only welcome.

After the burial I wandered through Red Square. Lenin’s tomb looked deserted and forlorn. His honour guard has abandoned him for others.