Soviet Patriotism

From internationalism to patriotism

In the official language of the years just after the revolution, patriotism was a suspect word: the fatherland was what the ruling class called the thing it sent workers to die for. That usage changed in the mid-1930s.

Two things lay behind the change. One was the international situation: with the German and Japanese threats growing, the state needed a language of mobilisation for the coming war, and class vocabulary alone was judged insufficient. The other was domestic: once the 1936 constitution declared socialism victorious, the USSR was a country with an achievement to defend.

The shift showed most clearly in history writing. After the 1934 reform of history teaching, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Peter I and Alexander Suvorov returned to the textbooks not as class enemies but as defenders of the fatherland. Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) is the emblematic product.

What the war changed

After the German invasion of 1941 this language became overwhelming. The war's official name, the Great Patriotic War, echoed the name given to 1812, and the new decorations were named for Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nevsky. In 1943 the Comintern was dissolved, a new state anthem replaced the Internationale, and restrictions on the Orthodox Church were partly eased.

After victory the centre of gravity tilted further towards Russia. Stalin's toast at the Kremlin reception of 24 May 1945, singling out the Russian people among the peoples of the USSR, is the symbolic moment at which elder brother doctrine entered the official narrative.

How it was used after the war

Post-war Soviet patriotism had a defensive face. From 1946 Zhdanov tightened control of cultural life, and respect for Western scholarship and art was attacked as kowtowing to the foreign. From 1948 the campaign against rootless cosmopolitanism applied that logic above all to Jewish intellectuals; the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Doctors' Plot were its culmination.

What any assessment has to register is that the doctrine was not one thing. Soviet patriotism worked as an integrating language for a multinational state and, at the same time, as a channel for Russian centrality. In the post-war republics there were repeated attempts to write local histories and cultures into the common Soviet inheritance, and how much room they were given depended on how that nation's relationship to Russia was narrated.