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Constant attempts since 1917 to make the new name stick ("Don't say Russia, say the Soviet Union or U.S.S.R.") have been fruitless. Popular wisdom never accepted the word "Soviet," but went on saying "Russia." This stubbornness now finds justification, as the Soviet Union breaks apart, and no new name is yet agreed. "Russia," "St. Petersburg" and the other "old" names are rushing back with a vengeance. Boris Yeltsin's Russia is the largest and potentially richest country in the world. It has nuclear weapons and is flexing its muscles. Mr. Yeltsin pretends Russia is just an equal among other equal republics. His already frightened neighbors, like mice near an elephant, know better than to believe his reassurances.
"Soviet" was never a bad word in isolation. It means "council" in Russian. The "Councils of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies" were the allegedly democratic bodies that ruled early Communist Russia and its colonies after the revolution. One main revolutionary slogan was Vsya vlast' sovetam (All Power to the Soviets). The "so-" part of Soviet means "together" (and it occurs again in so-yuz for "union" which is a "yoking together"). The "viet" segment of Soviet represents an old Indo-European root for "knowing, knowledge or wisdom." In English, this root appears in "wit" and "wise," and even more pertinently in the name of the old Anglo-Saxon parliament -- the Witena-gemot (a "council gathering of wise people"). So "Soviet" means knowing or debating together in council.
The early Soviet Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem on the "Soviet Passport" in which he tried to instil the pride of patriotism in this strange new nationality. In the early years, before Iosif Stalin clamped down, many Russian communists naively assumed that the world proletariat would rise up to join Soviet Russians in world revolution. Red Army leader Lev Trotsky insisted that revolution in one country alone could not work. Stalin disagreed, insisting that the U.S.S.R. concentrate exclusively on itself. Stalin first exiled Trotsky and then, in 1940, had him killed in Mexico.
MANY COUNTRIES, like France, China and Germany, have straightforward, long-lasting names linked to their main nationality. When a country simply called Russia acquires a cumbersome new appellation, one may reasonably question the permanence of the new name.
The designation "Soviet Union" (Sovetsky Soyuz in Russian) and, lengthier yet, "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik) never caught on as Russia's new name (except perhaps when abbreviated to the Cyrillic CCCP on hockey sweaters). Russia, first tribal, then princely, finally imperial, has existed in mostly expanding territorial form for over 1,000 years now. Its greatest land setback was the sale of Alaska (known until then as "Russian American") to the U.S. in 1867.
Constant attempts since 1917 to make the new name stick ("Don't say Russia, say the Soviet Union or U.S.S.R.") have been fruitless. Popular wisdom never accepted the word "Soviet," but went on saying "Russia." This stubbornness now finds justification, as the Soviet Union breaks apart, and no new name is yet agreed. "Russia," "St. Petersburg" and the other "old" names are rushing back with a vengeance. Boris Yeltsin's Russia is the largest and potentially richest country in the world. It has nuclear weapons and is flexing its muscles. Mr. Yeltsin pretends Russia is just an equal among other equal republics. His already frightened neighbors, like mice near an elephant, know better than to believe his reassurances.
"Soviet" was never a bad word in isolation. It means "council" in Russian. The "Councils of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies" were the allegedly democratic bodies that ruled early Communist Russia and its colonies after the revolution. One main revolutionary slogan was Vsya vlast' sovetam (All Power to the Soviets). The "so-" part of Soviet means "together" (and it occurs again in so-yuz for "union" which is a "yoking together"). The "viet" segment of Soviet represents an old Indo-European root for "knowing, knowledge or wisdom." In English, this root appears in "wit" and "wise," and even more pertinently in the name of the old Anglo-Saxon parliament -- the Witena-gemot (a "council gathering of wise people"). So "Soviet" means knowing or debating together in council.
The word never really caught on abroad (although the much more recent sputnik did in 1957, at least for a time). The first earth satellite was real, and it changed our world. The clumsy "Soviet," on the other hand, went through many spelling changes in English (sovyet, soviet, sovet) and people still quarrel over how to pronounce the first syllable (as in "sober" or in "soft?") in English.
The early Soviet Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem on the "Soviet Passport" in which he tried to instil the pride of patriotism in this strange new nationality. In the early years, before Iosif Stalin clamped down, many Russian communists naively assumed that the world proletariat would rise up to join Soviet Russians in world revolution. Red Army leader Lev Trotsky insisted that revolution in one country alone could not work. Stalin disagreed, insisting that the U.S.S.R. concentrate exclusively on itself. Stalin first exiled Trotsky and then, in 1940, had him killed in Mexico.
Stalin, a narrow-minded product of a Georgian seminary, viewed human nature simplistically. Essentially, he was asserting: "Be good or I'll kill you." Being good meant that authors were to become "engineers of human souls," improving people with flowery works of "socialist realism," that peasants had to suppress any land-owning instinct and join collective farms (many millions perished in the Ukrainian collectivization of the 1930s), and that children had to denounce their parents if the latter criticized the wonderful Soviet paradise. Stalin even made one such little sneak, Pavlik Morozov, a national hero around 1930.
All this time, a new breed of human being, a homo sovieticus, selfless, not nationalistic, was supposed to be emerging to embellish Stalin's union. Of course, you cannot make people good through secret-police terror. True, nationalist chauvinism, at least in its outward manifestations, was suppressed for a time under Stalin's policies. He insisted that all cultural festivities be "nationalist in form and socialist in content." This tended to mean: folkloric in dress, using the national languages and cultures, but strictly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist in their ideologies -- and not at all threatening to other nationalities in the union.
Many of the smaller nations complained they were being "russified." Indeed, great population movements occurred during the industrialization period of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The people on the move took their Russian, Ukrainian or other non-local language with them and often inspired in the local inhabitants the same fears as French-speaking Quebecers express when they complain about "assimilation" by English-speakers in Montreal. However, if a co- ordinated direct assault on the local languages of the smaller Soviet peoples had really been waged during the Soviet period, these peoples would not now be emerging as independent countries with their native tongues in such good shape.
It is impossible to determine objectively where Russia would have been now, economically and demographically, if the 1917 revolution had not occurred. We know that famine and economic troubles in 1904 and 1905 sent many hard-working new settlers to North America. The massive Russian losses at the front in the early years of the First World War were irreplaceable. We do not know whether Lenin, had he lived after 1924, would have continued his successful New Economic Policy (NEP), which eased food shortages, or whether he too would have abruptly ended it on ideological grounds. It is also impossible to say whether the mass murderer of the 1930's, Iosif Stalin, was the ultimate main cause of the collapse of the Soviet communist system.
We do know, however, that in 1952, the year before he died, former seminarian Stalin advanced a peculiar proposal for money to be abolished in the U.S.S.R. and barter to be introduced to replace commodity exchange. The idea that "money is the root of all evil" was widespread throughout Western and Eastern Christianity. In some ways, the communist aberration can be best understood as a heresy of Christianity (as Russian thinkers like Nikolai Berdyaev have pointed out). Stalin evidently long retained the image of Christ whipping the money lenders out of the Temple.
Unfortunately, the belief that private property in land is in some way also wrong is deeply rooted in Russians, as recent opinion polls in the free Russian press have shown. The belief has roots in the "peasant communes" which under Tsars provided a minimum level of security for members. Russians have abandoned the Marxist authoritarian brand of utopianism as a failure, but they have not yet accepted a "market economy" which we insist is their only salvation. We shall see how hard Mr. Yeltsin pushes his reforms when unemployment and price rises really start to hurt and the old social safety net crumbles. He may then recoil from radical change and start down the old confused Russian path of "muddling through." Given the pain of any sharp change in Russia, a slower, non- ideological approach may avoid explosions and civil war. Unfortunately, a "free market economy," in a Russia which does not have one, is itself an ideological concept that could destroy the very democratic values it seeks to foster in the long term.
The Soviet Union has now slipped away. The old and new Russian replacing it has many problems, but its own identity is not one of these.
(Copyright The Kingston Whig-Standard 1991)