Last week, a columnist for Komsomolskaya Pravda declared Russia was drowning in a sea of meaninglessness, for lack of a National Idea to cling to. The columnist said that Russia had gone through two national ideas – first ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy and National Character’, and then ‘Workers of the world unite’, and now needed another, and quick.

He is not the first Russian to suggest this. Russians have been tortured by their lack of an Idea ever since Peter Chaadev announced Russia had “bestowed not a single idea upon the fund of human ideas.”

Russia’s penultimate president, Boris Yeltsin, went as far as to set up a ‘National Idea Commission’ in 1996. Linguists, lawyers, structuralists, sociologists and other assorted navel-gazers gathered together to contemplate into existence the Big Idea.

After several months, they produced a document, complete with baffling chapter headings such as "The Ideology of Language and the Language of Ideology - A Linguistic Analysis” and one graph labeled "The Distribution of Metaphors Related to the Understanding of the National Idea". Naturally, the document was so meaningless that no one paid it any attention, and the Idea rapidly dissipated, like mist in morning sunshine.

This torturous hunt for a National Idea initially struck me as hilarious, fabulous. It reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s poem, the Hunting of the Snark, where a shipful of misfits set off in search of an imaginary creature.

What nation, I wondered, really had One Idea beneath which it united? What a nightmarish thought, all its citizens wandering like automatons, programmed with exactly the same inflexible Idea. Why can’t we have lots of ideas. Isn’t that a more realistic goal?

But then I thought, perhaps it isn’t such a stupid idea, this Idea business. After all, medieval Europe was basically united by an Idea, if one can term Christianity an idea. When that empire broke up, nation-states defined themselves against each other using, I suppose, national ideas.

Thus England early on defined itself as plucky and independent versus the Catholic continent. Modern France defined itself via the French Revolution, which was in some sense also an Idea – the people constituted the state, regardless of any king. OK, it was the idea of a Swiss man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But the French took it up and made it theirs. And then, after them, several other countries also took up the Idea – Poland, Italy, Germany, Hungary, even Serbia and Portugal. Romantic nationalism spread like a fire across Europe.

Nicholas I, startled by the spread of godless liberalism in the West, called his wisest men together to come up with a brand which could resist the red, white and blue revolutions happening on Russia’s borders. Count Uvarov of the Academy of Sciences came up with a good slogan: “Autocracy, Orthodoxy and National Character”.

It was catchy, but problematic. The problem was the Orthodox church had actually been quite weakened by successive Tsars from Peter on, and had not played a major role in the creation of modern Russia. And as for ‘narodnost’, which narod did you mean? Russia was a multi-ethnic empire, run by Germans. And a great divide separated the narod from the bureaucrats of the autocracy.

Later, in the reign of Alexander II, the national elite were much gripped by the idea of ‘Russification’– bringing together the different classes and ethnicities of imperial Russia under the idea of Russianness. But the effort repelled the non-Russians in the empire, particularly the Poles and Ukrainians, and the chauvinism it inspired in ethnic Russians spilled over into anti-semitic pogroms.

The USSR survived as long as it did, one can conjecture, partly because it was in some sense a solution to the problem of a national idea. On the one hand, it was an internationalist idea, suited to such a multi-ethnic empire as Russia. On the other hand, it fit with the inherently Russian idea of Holy Rus – of the special mission of the Russian people to lead the world to virtue.

One can compare what happened to the idea of communism to what happened with Christianity. Initially, it attracted people as a form of direct, evangelist democracy, which exercised itself in small units – Soviets – comparable to the small sects in which Christianity first existed. The workers genuinely believed that, through such Soviets, they would be able to organize their own existence without the hateful intrusions of an alien bureaucracy.

Alas, it was not to be. Another elite rapidly established itself, with the self-proclaimed responsibility of guarding the purity of the Idea. They were the modern equivalent of the bishops and priests of the great Holy Roman bureaucracy. Every now and then, the Idea would be slightly altered, via Politburo communiqués sent forth like papal bulls.

But what happened to the Holy Roman Empire over a period of centuries happened to the USSR in a matter of decades: the Idea hardened and decayed into formulaic lies that no one believed. It became more and more obvious that the Idea was nothing more than the biggest lie in the history of the world – total control, exercised in the name of total freedom.

Meanwhile, beneath this Great Lie, other ideas simmered – the idea of the Azeris versus the idea of the Armenians; the idea of the Ukrainians versus the idea of the Russians; the idea of the Russians against the idea of the Jews.

As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the journalist Aleksander Nevzorov appeared on TV, standing in front of the demonstrators in Lithuania holding a Kalashnikov. To the music of Richard Wagner (a German), Nevzorov declared the birth of a new Idea –‘Nashi’. “Nashi is a circle of people – let it be enormous, colossal, multimillions – to whom one is related by common language, blood, and motherland.” Nashi, he said, was a movement dedicated to the defence of the Russian Empire in the name of Russians.

As liberal revolutions again occur on Russia’s borders, more and more Russian commentators are rallying round this idea of Nashe – our music, our food, our old Soviet films, our football teams, our sovereignty. To some extent, this is a natural backlash against the ‘anything western is cool’ attitude of the mid-1990s. It may even be desirable, as a way to strengthen Russian national pride so it feels it can operate in the international community on equal terms.

The question is whether the general Nashe movement can tread the fine line between patriotism and nationalism, as the youth group Nashi is trying to do. If it succeeds, it may be a way for Russians to turn outwards to the world with confidence, with a sense of strength and openness, rather than one or the other. True strength, after all, manifests itself in openness to the outside world.

If the Nashi phenomenon fails, and falls into the false consolation of puerile chauvinist nationalism, then the fate of Nazi Germany and the Serbia of Milosevic awaits it – pointless wars, international isolation, and nothing left at the end but less territory, wounded pride and vacuous national mysticism.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

August 31, 2005