Smenovekhovstvo

Origins

The movement grew out of Smena Vekh (Change of Signposts), a collection of articles published in Prague in July 1921 by six liberal émigré writers: Yuri Klyuchnikov, Nikolai Ustryalov, Sergei Lukyanov, Alexander Bobrishchev-Pushkin, Sergei Chakhotin and Yuri Potekhin. Its title was aimed polemically at Vekhi (1909). The authors treated the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power as facts that had to be accepted in order to rebuild a strong, united Russian state.

Programme and the Soviet response

The Smenovekhovtsy held that Bolshevik power had already 'regenerated' and now acted in Russia's national interest, predicted that the NEP would turn Bolshevism into an ordinary bourgeois state, and urged émigrés to return and serve it. Ustryalov summed up the position by likening the USSR to a radish, red on the outside but white within. The movement's press was subsidised by the Soviet government: the Paris journal Smena Vekh (October 1921 to March 1922, 20 issues) was followed by the Berlin newspaper Nakanune (On the Eve, 26 March 1922 to 15 June 1924, 651 issues), the only émigré paper admitted into Soviet Russia.

At the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922 Lenin said the Smenovekhovtsy expressed 'the moods of many thousand bourgeois and Soviet officials who are participating in our new economic policy,' and welcomed Ustryalov's candid declaration as the class truth of the class foe. At the Fourteenth Congress in December 1925 Stalin invoked Ustryalov in his polemic against Zinoviev.

Opposition and fate

Conservative émigrés, above all the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS, founded in 1924), treated the movement as capitulation to the Bolsheviks and counterposed to it the principle of irreconcilability. The Smenovekhovtsy were repeatedly accused of links with the OGPU, which did in fact take part in spreading such ideas among émigrés.

All six authors of the collection eventually returned to the USSR, and five of them were shot during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Ustryalov, in 1937, was one of them. Only the biologist Sergei Chakhotin, who moved to the USSR in 1958, escaped repression. Historians still dispute whether the movement was inspired by the Bolsheviks or merely used by them.