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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
“We, the nationals of a big nation, have almost always been guilty, in historic practice, of innumerable cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult innumerable times without noticing it.”
1. “K voprosu o natsional'nostiakh ili ob ‘avtonomizatsii',” Lenin, V. I. Sochinenie, vol. 36, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1957), p. 555.Google Scholar
2. Cited in Dunlop, J. P., The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton, 1983), pp. 231-32.Google Scholar
3. From the abridged version of Rasputin's speech to the Eighth All-Union Congress of Writers, Literaturnaia Gazeta, July 2, 1986.Google Scholar
4. According to unofficial Georgian sources, a majority of the Georgian writers’ delegation of twenty-eight walked out.Google Scholar
5. “Lovlia peskarei v Gruzii,” Nash Sovremennik, No. 5. (1986): 123-41.Google Scholar
6. According to Radio Liberty Research Bulletin (henceforth RL), a selection of Gumilev's poems last appeared in 1967; see RL 154/86.Google Scholar
7. The removal of personnel associated with the cultural stagnation of the Brezhnev era culminated at the Eighth Writers’ Congress with the replacement of Giorgii Markov, president of the All-Writers’ Union, by Vladimir Karpov, editor of Novyi Mir and a former internee of Stalin's camps. Outspoken writers such as Evgenii Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bulat Okudzhava, and Bela Akhmadulina were also elected to the leadership of the union. However, as has been noted by more skeptical Western commentators, the personnel changes are limited, and many of the more conservative elements have retained powerful positions in the literary establishment. See Frankland, M., “Gloomy Signals from the Party Congress,” Index on Censorship (September 1986): 11–13. Recent events in China also show how fragile liberal gains can be in a cultural sphere ultimately subject to state control.Google Scholar
8. Many of the speeches at the congress were published in abridged form in Literaturnaia Gazeta, July 2, 1986. For the text of the congress resolution, see ibid.Google Scholar
9. For assessments of the Estonian and Latvian congresses, see Radio Free Europe Research (henceforth RFE), vol. 11, no. 30, part. 4 (July 1986): 3–39, and RFE, Baltic Area 3 (May 20, 1986), pp. 11-28. Concerns for industrial spoliation in the Baltic republics have demographic implications. Industrialization is associated by most Baits with the influx of Russian skilled workers and an increasingly adverse demographic balance for the titular nationalities. Thus, between 1959 and 1979, the proportion of Latvians in their republic declined from 62.3% to 53.7%, while the Russian proportion increased from 26.6% to 32.8%. In Estonia, the same period saw a decline of Estonians from 74.6% to 64.7% and an increase in Russians from 20.1% to 27.9%; see RL 123/80.Google Scholar
10. In 1984, 72.6 percent of all books and brochures published in the Ukrainian SSR were in Russian; see RL 69/86.Google Scholar
11. Literaturnaia Gazeta, July 2, 1986.Google Scholar
12. Ibid. Google Scholar
13. See, for example, the speeches of Ul'man Umarbekov (Uzbekistan), Vladimir Beekman (Estonia), and Vardges Petrosian (Armenia), in ibid.Google Scholar
14. Ibid. V. Rasputin along with Astaf'ev, Vasilii Belov, and others belongs to what has been termed the “village movement” (derevenshchiki). This group of patriotic writers is concerned with the decline of the Russian village and its values, with the destruction of national monuments and the environment, and with what they see as the harmful moral and social consequences of modernization. At the beginning of this year (1986), a group of leading writers (including the three noted above) signed a statement published in Sovetskaia Rossiia attacking the river project for failing “to ensure the preservation of historical cultural sights in the heart of Russia where the national genius has been at work for a thousand years”. See Sovetskaia Rossiia, January 3, 1986.Google Scholar
15. This unpublished letter (henceforth Bochorishvili) was widely circulated in Georgian intelligentsia circles. A copy is in the author's possession.Google Scholar
16. In its report on the results of the All-Union Congress, Literaturuli Sakartvelo declared, “the vast majority of the delegates discharged the proper responsibility due from All-Union Congress delegation for such an honorable mission and did everything to worthily fulfil it.” Literaturuli Sakartvelo, July 2, 1986.Google Scholar
17. Ibid., July 18, 1986.Google Scholar
18. Compare G. Tsitsiashvili's speech in Literaturuli Sakartvelo, July 4, 1986, and Literaturnaia Gazeta, June 2, 1986.Google Scholar
19. Vardges Petrosian is first secretary of the board of Armenian Writers. Sergei Mikhailkov, a prominent and respected figure in the Soviet literary establishment, is famous for his children's literature. Gavril Troepol'skii was one of the early founders of Nash Sovremennik. Google Scholar
20. Gazeta, Literaturnaia, June 2, 1986.Google Scholar
21. Ibid. Google Scholar
22. Ibid. Google Scholar
23. Ibid. Google Scholar
24. Literaturuli Sakartvelo, July 4, 1986.Google Scholar
25. Bochorishvili; Stolypin, P. A., prime minister of Russia in 1906-11, supervised a period of growing Russian nationalist influence in government. The “Black Hundreds” was a term applied to the more extreme Russian nationalist groups before the revolution, such as the Union for the Russian People.Google Scholar
26. Patiashvili was appointed first secretary of the Georgian party after the incumbent, Eduard Shevardnadze, was promoted to foreign minister in June 1985. Patiashvili has put new vigour into the campaign against corruption and “private property tendencies” in the republic. There has been a high turnover of personnel in the leading party and government organs with many (including former Shevardnadze proteges) dismissed in disgrace. See RL 271/86, 326/85, 369/85, and 276/85.Google Scholar
27. See, for example, Astaf'ev's Pechal'nyi detektiv, a novella which describes the appalling corruption and crime in Russian urban life, in Oktiabr', no. 1 (January 1986): 8-74.Google Scholar
28. In his “K voprosu o natsional'nostiakh ili ob ‘avtonomizatsii',” Lenin remarked that “offended nationals are not sensitive to anything so much as to the feeling of equality and the violation of this equality, if only through negligence or jest …”; Sochinenie, pp. 556-57.Google Scholar
29. “Lovlia peskarei v Gruzii,” Nash Sovremennik, no. 5 (1986): 133.Google Scholar
30. Ibid., p. 127.Google Scholar
31. Ibid. Google Scholar
32. The word for “crab” in Russian is rak. It can also mean “cancer”. No doubt Astaf'ev intended the double entendre.Google Scholar
33. Ibid., pp. 138-39.Google Scholar
34. According to one Western visitor resident in Georgia during this period, Georgians talked about nothing else! Personal communication.Google Scholar
35. Bochorishvili. Google Scholar
36. Ibid. Google Scholar
37. The three were Irakli Abashidze, a Hero of Socialist Labour who attended the first All-Union Writers’ Congress in 1934; Jabua Amirejibi, winner of the Georgian State prize; and Otar Chiladze, winner of the Georgian Shota Rustaveli literary prize. All three are respected and established writers in Georgia. Their reply, tucked away in the letters column of Nash Sovremennik, no. 7 (July 1986): 188-89, is short and rather disjointed. One suspects extensive deletions were made by the journal's editors.Google Scholar
38. This conclusion is based on conversations with Westerners in Georgia during the period of controversy.Google Scholar
39. This is the familiar problem known as “localism” (mestnichestvo). There have been examples in the past of republican elites resisting central policies deemed contrary to their national interests. In Kazakhstan (1954) and Latvia (1959), republican elites were purged by Moscow for attempting to sabotage economic plans that would have involved the influx of non-native (primarily Russian) labour into the republics.Google Scholar
40. Speech to the Georgian Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in 1981; see Zarya Vostoka, January 23, 1981.Google Scholar
41. Kommunisti, January 25, 1986.Google Scholar
42. In 1976, at the Eight Congress of Georgian Writers, the novelist Revaz Japaridze made an outspoken speech against linguistic Russification for which he received rapturous applause from the delegates; in April 1978 there was a dramatic demonstration against the withdrawal of the traditional clause in the Georgian constitution confirming Georgian as the state language of the republic; in 1980, 364 members of the Georgian intelligentsia sent a strongly worded protest to Brezhnev against measures undermining the Georgian language; in 1981, there were five demonstrations against what was seen as Russification policies; and in 1983 there were numerous protests against the official celebration of the Georgievsk treaty (1783), which made Georgia into a Russian protectorate. For further information on these and other protests in Georgia, see B. Nahaylo and C. J. Peters, The Ukrainians and the Georgians, MRG Report no. 50 (London, 1981). J. W. R. Parsons, “National Integration in Soviet Georgia,” Soviet Studies 34, no. 4 October 1982): 547-69. See also RL 80/78, 81/78, 106/80, 146/80, 484/80, 149/81, 453/83, 129/84, 17/86. For the text of the 1980 letter to Brezhnev, see “Pis'ma iz Gruzii,” Russkaia Mysl', December 4, 1980.Google Scholar
43. Tsiskari, no. 7 (1986): 7–43. Gegeshidze recently received praise for his novel, Voice of a Preacher, from a meeting of the critics’ section of the Georgian Writers’ Union. According to a report of the meeting, the novel deals with the “national, political and social problems” of Georgia in the nineteenth century and discusses “the relationship of the individual to his nation.” See Literaturuli Sakartvelo, July 11, 1986.Google Scholar
44. One must be careful when suggesting allegory was the author's intention. However, I hope to show from the rather obvious clues that it was. “Naskhida-ependi” might be translated into English as “Sold-Ependi,” i.e., sold to the Tatars.Google Scholar
45. Tsiskari, no. 7 (1986): 8.Google Scholar
46. Perhaps the most obvious clue to Naskhida's real identity is when he flatters the Shah by telling him it is “the rising dawn from the East” (i.e., from Persia) which brings “light and warmth to Georgia” (ibid., p. 24). This is an allusion to Shevardnadze's notorious declaration to the Twenty-Fifth All-Union Party Congress in 1976 that in Georgia “the sun rises not in the East, but from the north, Russia.” Zarya Vostoka, January 23, 1976.Google Scholar
47. Tsiskari, no. 7 (1986): 30.Google Scholar
48. Ibid., p. 27.Google Scholar
49. Ibid., p. 40.Google Scholar
50. This is not the first time Gegeshidze has used historical analogy to describe Georgian contemporary life. See, for example, his short story “Time” (Zhami), Tsiskari, no. 2, pp. 36–72. Such quasi-Aesopian methods are used elsewhere in the USSR. In 1982 the Azerbaidjanian literary journal Azerbaidjan published a fable entitled “In Harmony” by Mahmed Orudji, which satirizes the Russian-Azerbaidjanian relationship as one between “hens and foxes.” See RL 182/84.Google Scholar
51. Mukhran Machavariani leksebi targmanebi (Tbilisi, 1985), p. 58.Google Scholar
52. Ibid., p. 34.Google Scholar
53. A recent Pravda editorial, for example, called for “special sensitivity and circumspection in all that touches the interests of both large and small peoples and individual national feelings … .” Pravda, August 14, 1986.Google Scholar
54. See, for example, A. Yanov, The Russian New Right; Right-Wing Ideologies in The Contemporary USSR (Berkeley, 1978), and J. P. Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton, 1983). Yanov cites two Russian emigres that “the Russian party is the only unofficial and even oppositionist ideological group which enjoys increasing freedom for chauvinist propaganda and active recruitment of adherents. The Russian party is not yet in power but is already knocking at the door …” p. 6.Google Scholar