The strange fascism of Russian expat ethnic nationalists
There’s this account on Twitter called Russians With Attitude which gained a lot of followers over the past few months as they share information about the Ukraine war from a Russian nationalist perspective. It’s run by some expats who have a totally bizarre fascistic ethnic ideology that is so incoherent and deranged that I am constantly amazed by it.
How can something that lacks such basic internal coherence exist? Yes, it’s true, it has zero power and influence in the actual world, even in Russia itself where this kind of bizarre ethno-nationalism is relegated to the outer fringes in the same way that groypers are in the US political scene. But it has this pseudo-intellectual affect, this pretense that they’re really smart and edgy and know all about history, which makes the deranged things they regularly say all the most fascinating as a specimen of what the human mind can conjure up.
Let me give you the latest example that prompted me to write this, and I’ll probably end up doing another post about another amazing moment of theirs when they said that Nicholas was on the verge of taking Berlin and Constantinople in 1917 but was only thwarted by Lenin and the evil Bolsheviks who were secret agents of the Germans and British (???), the implications of which are just fucking insane as a moment’s thought should tell you, but I’ll go into it in more detail later.
This time I want to focus on this strange recurring obsession they have with reducing everything that happens politically to ethnicity, and in the most crude and simplistic way. Basically the view is that every ethnicity has an immutable essence, that essence is either Good or Bad (if it’s pro-Russian ethnicity it’s Good, if not then it’s Bad, with one major exception I’ll get to), and everything that happens in the world can be understood solely through this lens. So Latvia is doing something that is Bad for ethnic Russians? Forget about the political, social, economic, cultural history of the Balkans and how Latvia in particular had a very strong communist movement during the October Revolution and Civil War, and how that ended up being eroded over time already during the Civil War itself and the subsequent period, and then the rise of fascistic tendencies promoted by Nazi Germany, etc. etc. That’s all irrelevant. You don’t have to understand any of that. The only thing you have to know is that Latvians are ethnically Bad, genetically predisposed to hating ethnic Russians, so if they’re Bolshevik in one period and then Nazi in another period and now NATO, that’s only an expression of this underlying unchangeable essence.
Notice how “Latvians” are reduced to this monolithic unchangeable category, and all actual history, ideological variation, change, etc. is totally erased from view in favor of a totally made-up ethnic genetic ideology that magically changes from one end of the spectrum to the other, like the Hegelian Spirit moving History forward in its never ending quest to thwart the Great Russian Ethnicity.
Now I said there is one exception to their ethnic-essentialism, and it’s the fact that they see the Soviet Union both as an expression of the greatness of ethnic Russians, so they often have these nostalgic sentiments about elements of Soviet history, but then also they can’t obviously praise it as a good thing because it’s an inherently anti-ethnic project so they argue that the Soviet Union was actually the result of a German sabotage coup plot that then morphed into a anti-Russian ethnic project propped up by the non-Russian Soviet Republics who somehow were able to enforce their will onto the Russians. And then you end up parsing the entirety of Soviet history through looking at the ethnic backgrounds of this or that figure, totally uninterested in their political views and actions, the underlying social and economic conditions that gave rise to them, etc. It’s all just this shadow-boxing with these monolithic blocs of ethnic groups that again magically go from Good to Bad to Good to Bad again. For example the Chechens used to be Bad because they were anti-Russian, but now they’re Good because they’re pro-Russian. The Tatars are Good now, but then can suddenly become Bad, and then of course their entire history is rewritten based on the fact that they are now Bad. If the Latvians had been pro-Russia now, suddenly the entire history of them would be re-written in the same vein, to emphasize how fundamentally Good they really are. Belarusians are obviously Good, while Ukrainians are obviously Bad, even though ethnically they are both Slav just like Russians. Of course anyone who does not conform to the model is not a True Chechen, Tatar, Latvian, Belarusian, etc.
What is lost in this confused miasma of deranged fascist mythology is not only any sense of actual history, but also any notion of class differentiation internal to these ethnic categories that are arbitrarily drawn. A communist, anarchist, socialist, liberal, conservative Russian does not feel like they are part of some unified project that can only be expressed in one distinct ideological programme. If that were the case, then the Russians With Attitude expat freaks would have their deranged ideology be the ruling one inside Russia, where they claim the Good Russian ethnic group is firmly in power, yet they also express these frustrations with Putin and this broader power elite for not going far and deranged enough for them. But why wouldn’t they? You just ascribe magical powers to their genetic make-up, why the fuck are you now retracting those powers from them when they don’t meet up to your standards? Why are you suddenly, at this point, reintroducing social, economic, cultural, political analysis to explain away what your deranged fascist mythology was incapable of accounting for? This is plugging the gaping holes in your entire worldview, and you’re so blinded by it that you can’t even see that that’s what you’re doing constantly, all the time. Go ahead and explain away Yeltsin in the same way: an ethnic Russian who came to power by destroying the Soviet Union and thereby restoring the Pride and Virtue of the Ethnic Russian People who were now no longer burdened by the Evil Ethnic Minority Soviet Republics who had been Oppressing and Marginalizing them by forcing them to send them their resources and intelligence. Strangely this proud moment for ethnic Russians coincided with the total decimation of Russian society which it still hasn’t recovered from, remaining, in the hands of Yeltsin’s successor and also ethnic Russian Putin a third-rate power that can’t even decisively defeat Ukraine on the battlefield. A pathetic shadow of what the Soviet Union accomplished, amazingly with its anti-ethnic nationalist ideology guiding its political structure. It’s almost as if reducing everything to ethnicity is something a fucking idiot does. And this is what is presented with pseudo-intellectual rhetoric. “Look at us expats who have read some basic humanities and now know all these terms that they use there, aren’t we smart? Isn’t our view of the world so intelligent and clarifying?”
No, you’re a fucking idiot, like all the fascist mystics who popped up all over the post-Soviet landscape, from the Baltics to Ukraine to Russia. They’re all now invested in these deranged nationalist mythologies that are just superficial coverings over underlying material conditions shaping what actually happens in these societies. You want to know why the Latvians decided to join NATO? Because that’s where the capital was after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the implosion of Russia. What the fuck do you expect a tiny nation that can only exist as a subsidiary of a larger economic power to do? It’s like the Netherlands being a neo-colony of Germany. Yeah, no shit, that’s what their entire economic foundation is dependent on.
Incidentally, these Russians With Attitude freaks also love to complain about how these other fascists with their own versions of ethnic Good and Bad groups, decide to get rid of Soviet era monuments and names and anything related to communism. They post with such outrage that a street in Ukraine or Poland or Latvia was renamed from a Soviet general or marshal or cosmonaut to something else, that some war memorial to Soviet Red Army troops was demolished. What the fuck are you crying about you fucking lemmings, they’re just doing what you do in the Russian context in their own contexts. You say that Soviet Communism was an evil foreign German Jewish (yes, don’t just keep that implicit, don’t be a fucking coward and pretend like you don’t put Jews in your ethnic categorizations: I’m sure you have a lot to say about Trotsky et al.) coup plot, which instituted a anti-nationalist regime that destroyed the true will of the ethnic Russians and by extension the other ethnic groups who during the period of the Tsar were happily subordinated to the Great Russian lordship over them. So why the fuck are you now crying about them taking down monuments to this evil communist regime?
Oh right, it’s because you realize that the vast majority of the people inside Russia actually also believe that its greatest achievements were accomplished during the Soviet period, and that they don’t believe in your deranged fascistic fairy tales which are by the way the exact carbon-copy of Reaganite far right conservative rhetoric. So you have to appeal to them. And then you go back to writing fanfic about some obscure fascist White generals during the Civil War who were easily defeated by the Bolsheviks despite the fact that they had literally all the imperialist powers in the world backing them. What an amazing accomplishment for a small band of weak, ethnically inferior rootless cosmopolitans who were supposedly despised by the entire population, especially the Good ethnic Russians. But as I said before I’ll write about this aspect of their derangement in more detail later.
What is the lesson? Marx said it best when he replied to the ethnic German nationalists of his era in the following way:
If you try to erase the material conditions underlying what happens in the political domain from view, and only see it through the lens of ethnicity, race, religion, all these superficial coverings, you will only hear back what you shout into that ancient, mythical forest. The echoes of your own impotent derangement.