Few terms have become as pronounced in contemporary Russian state discourse as Russophobia. As relations between the Russian Federation and the “collective West” deteriorated under Vladimir Putin, the Russian establishment increasingly alleged that its international opponents were driven by an irrational hatred of the Russian people, language, and culture, and that they supported and inspired “Russophobes” within the domestic population to carry out their nefarious aims against Russian statehood.Footnote 1 For Putin’s regime, the rhetorical advantages of the term Russophobia are clear: it feeds into the narrative that the country’s foreign aggression is a measured response to valid security concerns, frames domestic opposition and anti-Putin émigrés as a “fifth column,” and acts as a tool of intimidation.Footnote 2 In a broad sense, Russophobia defines the nation by negation—in terms of the hatred others ostensibly hold toward it—and thereby gives the regime a broad and flexible means to unify the population in a posture of righteous victimhood.Footnote 3 From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russophobia has the added benefit of holding an air of scholarly credibility, as it is a term that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century and has found adherents among commentators on foreign policy toward Russia.Footnote 4
In invoking Russophobia, the Putin regime is not just acting according to a political calculus but drawing on a discernable direction in Russian nationalist thought leading back to the late Soviet period. This paper is about Russophobia as a term of political discourse, not a category of analysis.Footnote 5 Some scholars have approached “Russophobia” in the manner attempted here, though the topic has yet to receive the scholarly attention garnered by other aspects of Russian nationalism, such as neo-Eurasianism.Footnote 6 In their respective accounts, Robert Horvath, Julia Brun-Zejmis, and John Dunlop locate the emergence of the discourse of Russophobia in Soviet dissident circles of the 1970s, and specifically the efforts of some young intellectuals to find alternatives to communist ideology, which had been discredited by the end of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Thaw.”Footnote 7 Perhaps the fullest explanation comes from Brun-Zejmis, who posits that a part of the intelligentsia turned to “Russophobia” to overcome their own despair over the state of Soviet society, a national inferiority complex vis-à-vis the west, and even a sense of imperial guilt.Footnote 8 These scholars are also unanimous in viewing the most important text for establishing “Russophobia” as being the work of the same name penned by mathematician and erstwhile human rights defender Igorʹ Rostislavovich Shafarevich, which first appeared as samizdat in the early 1980s. During perestroika, Shafarevich’s work was published in part in the official press and became a “rallying point” for powerful currents of national chauvinist, anti-western and antisemitic politics.Footnote 9
The linking of contemporary “Russophobia” to Shafarevich and nationalist thought in late Soviet samizdat makes good sense. Yet the intellectual discussions that generated contemporary Russophobia discourse occurred in a strikingly transnational framework that remains to be fully explored. Shafarevich’s Rusofobiia was influential (and notorious) because it presented an essentially antisemitic agenda in a scholarly and dispassionate guise; namely, through a critique of the machinations of radical “small peoples” throughout history and an emphasis on the “concentration of Jewish names” among the early Bolsheviks.Footnote 10 A reader of Shafarevich’s influential text will also note that it engaged in debates with Russians located beyond Soviet borders, both the historical émigrés he blamed for bringing socialism to Russia a century before and the contemporary exiles whom he accused of propagating Russophobia.Footnote 11 The prominent place of émigrés in this text suggests the importance of studying how migrating Russian people and ideas contributed to the generation of “Russophobia.”Footnote 12
Scholarship on the late Soviet intelligentsia has not done enough to consider the transnational communications embedded in the Cold War landscape. To be sure, scholars have noted the contribution of the Cold War west’s informational resources to the formation of what Ann Komaromi has called the “pluralized underground” in late Soviet society, particularly through western radio broadcasting in the languages of the USSR as well as texts published abroad and smuggled back into the country (tamizdat).Footnote 13 Moreover, a diverse literature exists on perceptions of the west among different groups of the Soviet population during the late Soviet period.Footnote 14 However, most scholars of Soviet dissent see institutions and activities devoted to influencing opinion in the USSR from beyond its borders—such as radio broadcasts, émigré journals, or book smuggling networks—as mere supporting structures for developments in the USSR.Footnote 15 In contrast, literature focusing on such Cold War anti-communist activities, whether carried out by western governmental programs or non-governmental organizations, has examined their impact in terms of lowering superpower tensions or undermining Soviet legitimacy but has had less to say about their influence on national and other identities.Footnote 16 The approach adopted here is a different one. It sees oppositional intellectuals in the USSR and actors in the west—particularly émigrés from the USSR but also American Cold Warriors—as members of a single political and intellectual field, in this case one from which “Russophobia” emerged.
This article explores the transnational and specifically émigré context of the discourse of Russophobia in the late Cold War through a specific case study: the Russian Service at Radio Liberty (RL), the US-sponsored radio broadcaster based in Munich and New York. The essay begins by discussing Russian nationalists in the late Soviet intellectual underground, stressing how RL and other Cold War informational agencies abroad served as their audience, amplifier but also frustrater. The discussion then shifts to the émigrés at the Russian Service of RL, examining polemics involving different generations of exiles about the nature of Russian identity, WWII, and antisemitism. The final section of the paper considers how émigrés and dissidents in the USSR found common ground in nationalist positions that invoked Russophobia, illuminating the role played in the process by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. “Russophobia” and the internal divisions among intellectuals it exposed, the paper will conclude, exercised a deleterious effect on Russian nation-building during perestroika and beyond.
Nationalist Dissidents and the International Cold War
The fundamental starting point for “Russophobia” was the “Russophilia” that enveloped parts of the educated class in the late Soviet period. Important for contextualizing the resurgence of intelligentsia nationalism was the general shift toward the expression of Russian national identity in the postwar Soviet Union. In the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the destabilization of communist ideology it brought about, actors in the party-state came to tolerate a panoply of expressions of Russian national identity. Spaces for Russian national feeling emerged in a wide variety of party-state institutional settings: the cultural establishment (where “village prose” writers gained prominent positions), mass organizations such as the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, and even the ranks of the Young Communist League.Footnote 17 Though Nikolai Mitrokhin’s influential study groups the different manifestations of post-Khrushchev Russian national mobilization into a single “Russian party,” they were in fact marked by considerable variety. If some Soviet subjects combined fealty to the Russian nation with belief in Soviet communism—frequently in the form of “national Stalinism”—others moved away from communism altogether. To this latter category belonged young Soviet intellectuals who discovered and came to champion pre-1917 Russian history, the Orthodox Church, and the pre-collectivization peasantry.
The paradoxical effect of greater official toleration for national ideas was that relatively few Russian nationalists broke decisively with the regime. Many of the Russian nationalists who did take the step of articulating anti-Soviet Russian nationalism emerged from the wider dissident movement that arose in the country in the 1960s.Footnote 18 In the Russian capitals, dissidents unified around calls for the Soviet government to adhere to its own laws, sparking a “chain reaction” in which intellectuals defended victims of state repression and became “dissidents” in the process.Footnote 19 Over time, the most active members of this movement turned to the defense of human rights, a commitment that entailed mobilizing public opinion in the Cold War west to place pressure on the Soviet government (a strategy that dissenting Soviet national and religious minorities soon adopted as well).Footnote 20 Russian nationalists often emerged from the same milieu as the dissident movement, but they rejected its universalist approach to laws and ethics and its reliance on western notions of rights. Instead, Russophile dissidents believed in a distinctive Russian historical path and espoused the rebirth of a non-Soviet Russia without western influence.
Nationalist intellectuals developed “Russophobia” as a diagnosis for an anti-national disease they diagnosed in their erstwhile intellectual companions. Such a dynamic was evident in the biography of Vladimir Nikolaevich Osipov, a leader of the intelligentsia nationalist underground. Osipov had been involved in opposition circles connected to the poetry readings at Maiakovskii Square in 1960–61, a cause célèbre of the Khrushchev Thaw. While incarcerated in Dubravlag in Mordovia in the 1960s, he converted from communist revisionism to nationalism and Orthodox faith.Footnote 21 After his release, Osipov founded the first major Russian nationalist samizdat journal, Veche (Assembly). Despite his own persecution at the hands of the state, Osipov’s journal adopted an editorial position of ostensible “loyalty to the existing order” and engaged in polemics underway in the Soviet press (a distant echo of the state’s cooptation of Russian nationalism discussed above).Footnote 22 Meanwhile, the journal polemicized with Osipov’s former comrades in dissident circles. Osipov proclaimed that he was still an ally of the human rights defenders but now attacked them in charged terms as “contemporary nihilists” who “betrayed their national traditions” by “chasing after foreign wisdom.”Footnote 23
Such bitterness found expression in samizdat debates about history that set the context for “Russophobia.” In 1969, the samizdat publication Metanoia (spiritual regeneration) sparked furor when contributors to the volume criticized the role of Russian messianism in the country’s history and postulated that the October Revolution had Russian-national origins.Footnote 24 In Iz-pod glyb (From Under the Rubble), Solzhenitsyn—who generally associated himself with the wider samizdat and dissident movements—turned against the authors of Metanoia. In fact, he proceeded in ad hominem fashion, positing that any Russian who blamed communism on the Russian nation was engaging in “hatred” and “self-hatred.”Footnote 25 Such a démarche—which suggested that anyone who detracted from a nationalist narrative on Russian history and culture was abandoning and even slandering the nation in toto—formed a consistent trope of “Russophobia.”
The position Osipov, Solzhenitsyn, and other nationalists adopted toward non-nationalist dissidents has to be understood in terms of the wider contexts of the Cold War and antisemitism. Though they espoused an anti-western ideology, Russian nationalists found themselves reliant on the USSR’s Cold War enemies in practical terms in much the way that other dissidents were. Of necessity, they used foreign radio and tamizdat to spread their message to a wider public in the USSR, and also received publicity and various kinds of material aid from abroad that helped them navigate the difficult lot of dissidents in the period.Footnote 26 Reliance on the foreign information apparatus was distasteful for nationalists who were skeptical of western objectives in the Cold War.Footnote 27 In fact, Russian nationalist oppositionists in the USSR were well aware that the “voices” were reluctant to promote their cause and tended to give wider and more sympathetic coverage to the human rights movement.Footnote 28 Moreover, Russian nationalists, whatever their position on national relations in the USSR, viewed with alarm western analyses that presented Soviet rule as being a Russian empire in disguise.Footnote 29 The nationalists thought that the western backers of dissent adopted a double standard by promoting all national movements in the USSR except for the Russian one. For instance, a collective letter by Veche editors and contributors criticized RL and the Paris-based Vestnik Rossiiskogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia (RSKhD, Herald of the Russian Student Christian Movement) for having limited interest in the Russian samizdat journal, even as they opened their airwaves and pages to movements of minority peoples of the USSR that “hated all things Russian.”Footnote 30
The Russian nationalists’ bitterness toward western Cold Warriors was connected to another crucial nexus of tension of intelligentsia history in the period: antisemitism. Especially since the Holocaust and the Stalinist antisemitic campaign that followed, Soviet Jews had faced difficult questions of belonging in the Soviet and Russian contexts.Footnote 31 As Yuri Slezkine argues, many educated Jewish youths came to associate themselves with the critical intelligentsia, including the nascent dissident movement, contributing to Soviet officialdom’s perception that Jews en masse were politically unreliable.Footnote 32 In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, an anti-Zionist campaign in the USSR produced an antisemitic atmosphere redolent of late Stalinism and spurred mobilization for Jewish emigration, a cause that would be taken up by the US foreign policy establishment (the so-called “refusenik” movement).Footnote 33
Antisemitism proved to be a troubling issue for the Russian nationalists and their brand of dissent. Intelligentsia observers suspected with some basis that nationalist dissidents, in denouncing “cosmopolitan corruption” and characterizing their opponents in the Soviet intelligentsia as “defenders of the non-national,” were adopting coded antisemitic language.Footnote 34 For instance, the first mention of Veche on the RL airwaves involved allegations of antisemitism, a result of accusations made by dissident Petr Ionavich Iakir (who had apparently discovered antisemitic writings among Osipov’s papers).Footnote 35 After this inauspicious start, creators of nationalist samizdat journals were generally careful to avoid open expressions of antisemitism, with the editors of Veche going so far as doctoring materials smuggled to the west that contained ideological messages that would not be met with approval there.Footnote 36
Jewish emigration and the geopolitics surrounding it only sharpened the question of antisemitism by connecting it to the west. In the perception of some nationalists, Jewish emigration was a concrete manifestation of a commonality of interests between the anti-Russian Cold War west and a subset of the Soviet population that lacked respect and sympathy for Russia. Even Solzhenitsyn, who expressed support for the right of Jews to emigrate to Israel, was angered that the topic dominated the attention of western journalists, detracting from his own message about the historical suffering of the Russian nation.Footnote 37
The nationalist underground in Russia, then, produced a set of commitments that would provide a basis for “Russophobia”: a fixed and dogmatic national-historical narrative, a rejection of the west’s perceived bias in favor of minorities and especially Soviet Jews, and resentment toward fellow intellectuals who seemed to be doing the west’s bidding.Footnote 38 To understand how these sentiments coalesced into “Russophobia,” one must turn to the Russian diaspora and the ways that emigration from the USSR hardened national divisions.
A Russian Civil War in Munich: Radio Liberty
For an observer at the time, it would have seemed unlikely that Radio Liberty would become embroiled in a conflict over “Russophobia.” By 1970, Radio Liberty had become an established entity in the Cold War. The émigré staff of RL’s Russian Service was dominated by people with common conservative nationalist ideological positions, if not similar biographical backgrounds. Some of the RL employees stemmed from the so-called “first wave” of emigration, meaning the large numbers of people who had left the lands of the old Russian Empire in the wake of revolution and Civil War (1917–22). As Oleg Beyda argues, the bulk of the first wave exiles in Europe and elsewhere had hoped for the defeat of the USSR in WWII and some had served the Axis powers.Footnote 39 The other Russian émigrés at RL stemmed from the “second wave,” meaning people belonging to the much smaller cohort of Soviet subjects who left the country during WWII (and identified as Russian).Footnote 40 Second-wave émigrés were more often associated with wartime collaboration than their émigré elders, and several leading figures at the RL Russian Service had collaborated with the Axis forces during WWII in different capacities and had been staunch supporters of the Russian Liberation Army, led by captured Soviet general Andrei Andreevich Vlasov.Footnote 41 Although the émigré waves differed, their representatives at RL worked basically in harmony, in part because many of them belonged to the controversial anti-communist émigré organization Narodno-trudovoi soiuz (NTS, National Labor Alliance).Footnote 42 In principle, the conservative émigrés followed an editorial policy at the radio imposed by its American managers; in practice, the former imparted their own views on the air, particularly on weekends when they could take advantage of lowered American oversight of programming.Footnote 43
In the early 1970s, the modus operandi between American Cold Warriors and anti-communist Russian émigrés that had lasted for years came under strain from multiple directions. First, the future of the radio was cast into doubt when the US press exposed CIA funding of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe (RFE, the parallel broadcaster to east European countries), leading to embarrassing debates about the radios in the US Congress.Footnote 44 Though Congress eventually stepped in to fund RFE and RL, the years of highly public attacks on the latter across American society were a source of insecurity for the émigrés, as was RL’s forced merger with its sister station RFE and resulting downsizing in 1976.Footnote 45 Second, the starkly anti-communist émigrés at RL viewed the Richard Nixon administration’s policy of détente skeptically, often seeing it as a cowardly retreat in the struggle against world communism.Footnote 46 Moreover, the advent of détente inevitably brought about stark editorial changes at RL, which was now called on to defend the principle of superpower co-existence and to cover Soviet developments in a more even-handed way than it had done before.Footnote 47 RL employees criticized the new “diplomatic politeness and ostensible objectivity” of RL as an abandonment of the anti-communist cause.Footnote 48
Especially disruptive for RL employees was the decision of the radio’s leadership to recruit for work considerable numbers of recent émigrés from the USSR, people stemming from the so-called “third wave” émigrés who consisted of mostly Jewish “refuseniks” and dissidents.Footnote 49 Apart from seeing the move as a means to weaken NTS influence at the station, the RL administration recruited recent émigrés with the rationale that they were “better qualified and educated” than the older émigrés and had a stronger understanding of contemporary Soviet realities.Footnote 50 The recruitment of new émigrés at RL spurred clashes involving different cohorts of exiles. Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing for at least a decade, RL’s Russian Service was seized by internecine fighting that gave rise to internal complaints and memorandums, accusatory articles published in the Russian émigré and American presses, complaints sent to politicians and international organizations, as well as shouting matches, demands for apologies, and at least two legal proceedings.
The rampant conflict at the RL Russia service in the 1970s and 80s reflected the divergent backgrounds and life experiences of the older staff and the new recruits. As a RL memorandum put it, the first- and second-wave émigrés were overwhelmingly ethnic Russian and Orthodox in faith (at least nominally). In contrast, most of the new recruits were highly educated intellectuals who had spent their entire lives in the developed Soviet system and were “Jewish and/or had no allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church.”Footnote 51 In ideological terms, the older émigrés looked back to the tsarist period as well as the wartime Vlasov Movement when envisioning Russia of the future. In sharp contrast, the third-wavers found their political ideas in the dissident language of human rights. These divergent backgrounds and worldviews created ample opportunities for mutual hostility. Leaving aside the question of Jewishness for a moment, the old émigrés saw the newcomers as narrow-minded Soviet subjects (“yesterday’s Soviet journalists”) who had sought a comfortable life abroad, in contrast to the earlier cohorts of émigrés who had been driven from their homeland.Footnote 52 For their part, the new recruits to Radio Liberty viewed with suspicion the old émigrés’ adherence to the pre-revolutionary Russia of Tsars and Orthodoxy and the wartime Vlasov movement, working on the assumption that “xenophobia, militancy, and residual anti-Semitism” were “endemic” to such an articulation of Russian nationalism.Footnote 53
As a result of these tensions, RL programming became subject to the kinds of conflicts over Russian identity and history that had gripped samizdat in the USSR. In the same years that third-wave émigrés arrived at the station, Russian-language programming at the station underwent significant changes. More attention was devoted to contemporary Soviet culture, the dissidents, and ethnic and religious minorities, including a program specifically dedicated to Soviet Jews (a first for RL).Footnote 54 Orthodox religious programming was de-emphasized, with the show “Not by Bread Alone” being taken from father Aleksandr Nikolaevich Kiselev and Lev Aleksandrovich Rahr—both second-wave émigrés who had been associated with the Vlasov army and continued to defend it—and remade as an ecumenical and “non-sectarian” broadcast under recent émigré and reformist Orthodox priest Mikhail Giorgievich Meerson-Aksenov (of Jewish background, as some at the station perhaps saw as being relevant).Footnote 55
The conflict at the Russian Service centered on questions of national belonging and exclusion. In 1975, the main editor of the Russian Service, third-wave émigré and former Soviet literary critic Vladimir Borisovich Matusevich, stated at a meeting that RL was “broadcasting not to Russian but to Soviet listeners.” Longtime radio employee Viktoria Grigorʹevna Semenova wrote a scathing open letter to RL management about Matusevich’s comments, presenting them as proof that the radio’s Russian programs were not “imbued with a Russian spirit” but were instead Soviet in character.Footnote 56 Semenova’s protest became a cause célèbre when the émigré press published exposés on the situation at RL, bringing more voices into the acrimonious debates at the station.Footnote 57
On a surface level, Semenova had a point. There was an ambiguity in the mission of the Russian Service, which had the dual tasks of serving as a “national voice” for Russians as well as a “general service” broadcasting to people across the USSR in the imperial-Soviet lingua franca.Footnote 58 When Semenova commented that the Russian Service had lost its “Russian spirit,” she was alleging that the service’s “pan-Soviet” function was unfair. Why should Russians, alone among the Soviet peoples, be denied a “national voice” at RL?Footnote 59
Behind such arguments, though, was the conviction that the new policy line at RL represented no less than an affront to Russianness itself. Semeneva and other old émigrés viewed “Soviet” as being an antipode of all things “Russian,” meaning that Matusevich’s call to broadcast to a Soviet audience meant recognizing the Soviet state’s success in disempowering and even deracinating the Russian people. No less important, Orthodox faith was a crucial component of Russianness for Semeneva and other longstanding RL employees, so much so that they usually spoke of “Russophobia and atheism” in the same breath.Footnote 60 Another sign of the central place of religion in the conflict came when Matusevich made a comment about the Soviet housing shortage that likened finding an apartment to the miracle of the “Virgin Birth,” a statement that older émigrés at the station and some émigré clergy members protested as blasphemous.Footnote 61 Clearly, the old émigré backlash against personnel and editorial changes at RL represented their perception that Russian identity had been “threatened” and their “personal mission” “undercut,” as former RL administrator Mark Pomar puts it.Footnote 62 One sees here an émigré variant of an argument made in Russian samizdat: that Russian-speaking (and particularly Russian-Jewish) intellectuals sought to carry out the “de-nationalization of Russia.”
The émigrés’ third-wave employees saw things very differently. The notion of broadcasting to a Soviet audience was an obvious and uncontroversial fact to third-wave émigrés, as even the most hardened of dissidents had internalized socialism as “an accepted way of life” and something to be “taken for granted.”Footnote 63 More to the point, third-wave émigrés at RL were convinced that the Semenova affair was a matter of antisemitism, pure and simple. In this view, her characterization of RL programming as not being “imbued with a Russian spirit” was a coded way of stating that too many Jews were employed at the station. Indeed, Semenova recommended that Soviet Jews be given their own Service at RL instead of serving at the Russian one, a claim that gave credence to the charges of antisemitism.Footnote 64 The Russian Service’s Program Manager, John Lodeesen, who was himself of Jewish origin, strongly agreed that antisemitism was at the core of the dispute. Lodeesen explained in a memorandum that staff from Jewish backgrounds “lose their tempers when they know they are being attacked on anti-Semitic grounds—AND THEY KNOW” (emphasis in the original).Footnote 65 Indeed, it is indisputable that there were antisemitic attitudes among some of the older émigrés at RL. For instance, second-wave RL employee and Vlasovite Oleg Antonovich Krasovskii suggested in a private letter that in order to be “one of our own” (svoi v dosku) in his social circles one had to “not tolerate the Yids.”Footnote 66 The antisemitic underpinning of the émigré conflict at RL was so stark that the KGB sought to exploit it. A 1975 letter signed simply “Russian nationalists,” almost surely a KGB provocation, appeared at the RL offices that listed off the Jewish employees of the Russian Service while labeling several of them “Russophobes.”Footnote 67
The question of antisemitism was connected to the sensitive issue of the wartime pasts of the older émigrés. It was rare for RL employees to speak openly about the wartime biographies of the older émigrés, but third-wavers commonly presumed that the latter were “fascists.”Footnote 68 The former Soviet lawyer Lev Izrailevich Roitman hinted at this unspoken assumption in a letter to RL director Francis Ronalds: “As you are well aware of, among Radio Liberty employees there are not just a few people with a, lets put it mildly (sic), ‘peculiar’ biographies.”Footnote 69 In private, the discussions of the third-wavers were much more explicit. A new hire at RL was warned to steer clear of influential broadcaster and NTS member Evgenii Ivanovich Garanin as rumor had it that he had “sentenced Soviet citizens to death during WWII.”Footnote 70
The notion that the old émigrés had “peculiar” biographies reflected reality. As already mentioned, some of the older RL employees had collaborated with the Axis powers in various capacities, and Garanin himself had served as a Russian-language propagandist in the Wehrmacht and then as prosecutor in Vlasov’s short-lived Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.Footnote 71 It is also the case that cultural differences informed these accusations and suspicions. As American managers at RL noted, the third-wavers were mistrustful by nature and “brought with them a Soviet work culture that resulted in anonymous denunciations and formal complaints about colleagues.”Footnote 72 With regard to the Garanin example mentioned above, an American employee identified the émigré who had warned the newcomer about war crimes as Viktor Ivanovich Fedoseev. When confronted, Fedoseev explained his action in suggestive terms: “in the Soviet Union where word of mouth is the only way that protective information can be passed, it is quite normal to do this sort of thing.”Footnote 73 In short, one might posit that the third-wave émigrés engaged in their own kind of collective marking of the enemy, in this case in response to the nationalism and, in some cases, antisemitism of the older émigrés.
Though these furious polemics took place in the specific setting of the Russian Service in Munich, they were connected to dissident politics within the USSR. The very fact that the third-wave exiles were recent Soviet transplants ensured that their activities in emigration would be shaped by the liberal intelligentsia or dissident milieux from which they had come. Moreover, the émigrés at RL acted with an eye fixed on developments in the USSR, with both sides claiming that their opinions and editorial lines resonated more with Soviet listeners than those of their opponents.Footnote 74 To this end, the competing camps promoted Soviet dissidents and samizdat authors who embraced their own points of view. For instance, Semenova was infuriated when a RL journalist described the nationalism of the aforementioned Osipov as kvasnoi patriotizm, an ironic term describing unlimited praise of things Russian.Footnote 75 In short, as the émigrés fought each other they also helped to impose their understanding of “healthy” and “unhealthy” national forms of dissent and identity, reaffirming the divides among dissenters that had already emerged in the samizdat underground.
The transnational ramifications of the conflicts at RL were more complex still, as they occurred inside a US-funded institution in the Cold War west. The American managers of RL were ambivalent about the ideological perspectives aired in the polemics between old and new émigrés. As American liberals, they tended to support the Soviet human rights movement, seeing it as being redolent of American-style democratic values.Footnote 76 If the radio embraced Russian nationalism, in this view, the end result might be to create a post-Soviet Russia that would eventually come to threaten US national interests (“trading a shah for an ayatollah,” as one commentator put it).Footnote 77 On the other hand, RL Director Ronalds had longstanding friendly ties with the Russian émigrés at the station, while he and others believed that opening the airwaves to Russian nationalist programming might have an impact on Soviet listeners. As a result, the radio’s managers found themselves pulled in multiple directions by the infighting of the Russian staff.
The challenge the RL administration faced in dealing with émigré conflicts at the station was deepened by the reality that they reverberated far beyond it. For instance, when the divisive third-waver Matusevich was removed from the main editorship of the Russian Service in the wake of the Semenova scandal (though remaining at the station), he penned a letter alleging that fascist antisemites had taken over RL and threatened to bring the matter to the attention of US Jewish organizations.Footnote 78 The threat was not an empty one: after a critical story on the RL controversies was published in the Washington Post, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith wrote a query to the radio about antisemitism, forcing the American managers to engage in complicated efforts to mediate between the divided émigré radio staff and interests in the United States, including those of Jewish organizations that had gained new influence in the period through their fight for Jewish emigration from the USSR.Footnote 79
Radio Liberty was called on to serve as a “surrogate free press” for the USSR, but it also distilled and telescoped differences in Russian national identity by gathering together very different cohorts of émigrés. In the process, the milieu at the radio and in the diaspora more broadly extended and radicalized the discourse of Russophobia that had emerged in nationalist samizdat in the USSR. But the national conflicts at RL did not remain in the diaspora but rather fed back into Soviet public opinion, creating the context for Russophobia to become a crucial trope of nationalist discourse in the longer term.
Russian Nationalists reach across the Iron Curtain
No figure was more important for the cross-border generation of “Russophobia” than Solzhenitsyn, the nationalist writer and icon who underwent repression and official vilification in the USSR and was expelled from the country in 1974. Though Solzhenitsyn seems not to have used the word, his polemical writings in samizdat helped to generate the “us and them” approach to the intelligentsia that formed the basis of “Russophobia” (as already discussed). Perhaps not surprisingly, soon after being forced out of the USSR Solzhenitsyn became immersed in the drama at RL. Shortly after his arrival in Europe, he met with RL administrators and communicated that he had been an avid listener of RL—the only foreign radio station a Russian could recognize as “his own,” he opined—and especially admired its religious programs.Footnote 80 From their perspective, RL administrators were eager to draw on the reputation and insights of the most famous of Soviet dissidents.Footnote 81
Commentators have noted that the exiled Solzhenitsyn became partially disillusioned with the US and the west, in part due to what he saw as Americans’ tendency to “identify Russia with communism” and refusal to acknowledge Russia’s national interests.Footnote 82 An important yet poorly studied aspect of this wider trajectory was Solzhenitsyn’s engagement with the Russian diaspora. From childhood, Solzhenitsyn had held a keen interest in the Russian emigration, which he took to represent “Russia’s other path, the path not taken.”Footnote 83 Once in exile, Solzhenitsyn interacted with émigrés up close and was able to ponder their connection to national history in greater depth.
Solzhenitsyn adopted a fixed and uncompromising view of the émigré “waves.” He remained well-disposed toward people from the first and second waves, even if he became critical of their political organizations such as the NTS.Footnote 84 The first wave émigrés were carriers of the spiritual culture of pre-revolutionary Russia, he thought, and therefore worthy of respect. Solzhenitsyn viewed the second wave émigrés—people of the same generation and with the same experiences as some of his fellow prisoners in the Gulag—as tragic figures who had “experienced the agonies of the Soviet system” yet continued to work for their homeland.Footnote 85 In contrast, Solzhenitsyn developed a highly negative view of the recent émigrés, both the dissidents and refuseniks. The third-wave émigrés had “turned their backs on Russia,” refusing to suffer alongside their Russian brethren.Footnote 86 Moreover, he saw the third-wavers as hypocrites; though many of them had “belonged to the Soviet elite and had actively served in the government apparatus of lies,” they made careers for themselves abroad by speculating on their reputations as opponents of communism.Footnote 87 In his memoir, Solzhenitsyn expressed disgust of third-wavers who “were welcomed with reverence and offered posts as university professors, were given great prominence in the Western media,” and “elbowed their way with ease into the émigré press and the Russian-language radio stations, forcing out the older generation.”Footnote 88
One should question Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the diaspora, and not only because his depiction of the largely Jewish third-wavers as greedy and cynical might be read to carry antisemitic overtones.Footnote 89 In particular, Solzhenitsyn’s assertion that first- and second-wavers were forced from the homeland while third-wavers left voluntarily was too simplistic.Footnote 90 A cynic might also see Solzhenitsyn’s ego at work in his evaluation of the émigré generations, for the first- and second-waves had a particularly reverent attitude toward him as a symbol of the old Russian spirit that had come back to life under Soviet conditions.Footnote 91 What is beyond question is that the writer had developed a categorical approach to émigré affairs and was willing to use his considerable reputation to influence them, even as he generally tried to maintain distance from the diaspora. Roughly a year after his emigration, Solzhenitsyn responded to appeals from staff members at RL by writing to the Executive Director of Radio Liberty, protesting the situation at the station. “The ‘Russian Section’ does not try hard enough systematically to make the distinction between the two terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet,’” he opined—clearly a defense of Semenova’s claims that the radio lacked a “Russian spirit” (discussed above).Footnote 92 Solzhenitsyn’s intervention had an impact on the station. The conservative faction reestablished some authority at the Russian Service after the Semenova scandal, and the pro-Russia line would receive a far greater boost when a RL director more amenable to Russian nationalist programming, George Bailey, was appointed by the Reagan administration.Footnote 93
In exile, Solzhenitsyn also contributed to the articulation of “Russophobia” by connecting disloyal Soviet émigrés to western Cold Warriors. Notable in this regard was Solzhenitsyn’s feud with Harvard historian Richard Pipes. The controversy arose with the publication of Samosoznanie (self-awareness) in New York by recent dissidents and émigrés from the USSR, including Valentin Fedorovich Turchin, Boris Iosifovich Shragin and the already mentioned Meerson-Aksenov.Footnote 94 What drew the particular ire of Russian nationalists was the inclusion in the volume of a translation of Pipes’s conclusion of Russia under the Old Regime, which argues that Soviet totalitarianism was an outgrowth of tsarist autocracy (as already mentioned, an issue already hotly debated in samizdat). Solzhenitsyn led the charge against Pipes, publishing a rebuttal in Foreign Affairs alleging that Pipes presented the Russian nation as being “good for nothing throughout its thousand years of history” and “anti-human in its essence.” Rather than treating Pipes as an outlier, Solzhenitsyn took the historian’s alleged hatred of Russia to be basically representative of the community of western specialists on Russia, a group that he saw as having come under the undue influence of cohorts of third-wave émigrés.Footnote 95
Solzhenitsyn not only developed a form of nationalism that emphasized the dangers of Russophobia but played a crucial role in connecting émigré nationalists to likeminded dissident circles in the USSR (and vice versa). Indeed, one can place him at the center of a diffuse community of Russian nationalists stretching across the Cold War divide. The exiled writer’s influence in the USSR was maintained by the reading of his works on air at RL. Instructive in this regard are the files of Radio Liberty’s Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research Department, which was tasked with gathering information on listeners (for instance, from Soviet travelers abroad and foreign travelers to the USSR). These documents leave little doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s works as well as national-conservative and Orthodox programming in general found an audience in the USSR, even if the relative size of the different listening communities was a contentious issue at RL.Footnote 96 One anonymous listener from the Russian provinces wrote a letter to the station pointing to the central role of RL as a “tribune” for samizdat works of Solzhenitsyn and praised RL as being crucial for the emergence of a “young, democratic, Christian intelligentsia.”Footnote 97 Such a conclusion dovetails with Marlene Laruelle and Margarita Karnysheva’s contention that pre-revolutionary Russian and émigré texts and ideas gained influence among a part of the intelligentsia in the late Soviet years.Footnote 98
The nationalist influences worked in both directions. In addition to producing samizdat texts broadcast by RL, Russian nationalist dissidents in the USSR might offer direct input to the station, such as when nationalist authors involved in Solzhenitsyn’s volume From the Depths offered critiques of religious broadcasting on the “voices” to two western scholars visiting the USSR (who dutifully passed on to RL the content of their conversation).Footnote 99 The émigrés and nationalist dissidents understood that they were part of a single communicative space facilitated by western Cold War networks.
Samizdat, tamizdat, and radio networks were complex and indirect, and above all they relied on the very western political agendas that were commonly mistrusted by Russian nationalists. Given these realities, it should come as no surprise that émigré nationalists at RL and elsewhere sought to exploit what opportunities they had to establish direct ties with Soviet dissidents located in the USSR. This was no easy task; émigrés who had left during WWII and after were treated with extreme suspicion by the Soviet state, meaning that RL Russian Service employees seldom maintained contact with family or friends who had remained in the USSR.Footnote 100 And while expanding opportunities for tourism brought émigrés into contact with Soviet citizens both in the USSR and beyond its borders, these interactions were also frequently monitored by Soviet intelligence agencies.Footnote 101
As a result of such complications, attempts to build relationships between nationalists in the USSR and the diaspora could be complex and strained. An example was the artist Ilʹia Sergeevich Glazunov, a self-proclaimed monarchist and Orthodox believer (one of his works depicted Nicholas II, Solzhenitsyn, and Stalin side by side).Footnote 102 Remarkably, Glazunov was successful in the Soviet artistic establishment despite espousing ideas that were highly provocative in the Soviet context. In 1968, he met the NTS leader Nikolai Nikolaevich Rutych (Rutchenko) in Paris, from whom Glazunov learned about his own émigré uncle who had worked as a translator with the Wehrmacht and been engaged with the NTS on occupied Soviet territory during WWII.Footnote 103 When Glazunov exhibited his work in West Germany in the mid-1970s, he again interacted with several anti-communist émigrés. The previously mentioned Krasovskii befriended him, but some other émigrés suspected that he was tied to the KGB and kept their distance.Footnote 104 In this case, fears of the hidden hand of the KGB and the chronic mistrust of émigré anti-communist circles prevented the building of cross-border nationalist ties.
A step toward the consolidation of the transnational community of Russian nationalists came in 1981, when the previously discussed RL employee and Vlasovite Krasovskii founded a nationalist journal. He named the journal Veche (The Assembly) after the samizdat journal of a decade before and dedicated the first issue to the previously mentioned Osipov (who was then serving a second sentence at Dubravlag). While it resembled its samizdat predecessor in some ways, the Munich-based incarnation of the journal differed in taking an uncompromising anti-communist stance, claiming to have learned the lesson of patriots who had sought to work inside the regime’s structures.Footnote 105 Veche was the first major Russian nationalist “thick journal” in the diaspora in the period that drew on émigré and samizdat authors, and Krasovskii attempted to smuggle the journal into the USSR, apparently with some success.Footnote 106 In intellectual terms, Veche overcame the taboo placed on articulating far-right opinions that had long stymied Russian nationalists working under the supervision of western Cold War institutions such as RL. A common theme in its pages was that Russophobia ran rampant in the west and among third-wave Soviet émigrés, an editorial line that represented a consolidation of the usage of “Russophobia” that had become common in the Russian diaspora.Footnote 107
Veche was a manifestation of the broader trend by which émigré and dissident nationalists found common ground, helping to consolidate “Russophobia” as a core component of Russian nationalist thought. In 1981, the KGB warned of a new “tendency” toward “Russianism” among the Soviet intelligentsia that was being “actively incited and encouraged by foreign ideological centers, anti-Soviet émigré organizations and bourgeois mass media.”Footnote 108 Émigrés were essential agents in the construction of this “tendency” and the language of Russophobia that characterized it.
Conclusion: The Legacy of “Russophobia”
The language of Russophobia that pervades Putinism—according to which the collective west is fundamentally anti-Russian and has infected some domestic elites in Russia with disloyalty to the nation—was a product of late Soviet intellectual life. More than being simply an outgrowth of the Russophilic moods among parts of the late Soviet intelligentsia and their attempts to find a surrogate for Marxism-Leninism, “Russophobia” emerged in a wider, transnational Cold War context. In the late Soviet political underground, Russian nationalists discovered to their dismay that Cold War institutions of the west viewed their cause with skepticism while encouraging minority national movements in the USSR and especially the campaign for Jewish emigration, resentments that found expression in their attacks on intelligentsia figures who questioned nationalist positions in samizdat. Clashes over Russian national identity deepened when they were transplanted to the Russian diaspora, particularly as older émigrés at the forefront of anti-communist politics abroad confronted recent cohorts of Soviet émigrés (including but not limited to the Jewish “refuseniks”). At Radio Liberty, these intra-emigration tensions produced a highly toxic atmosphere that cemented Russian nationalists’ opposition to the west, liberal intellectuals, and Jews that had begun in Soviet samizdat. The diasporic politics of “Russophobia” were then exported back to the USSR through the airwaves of RL and other foreign radio services, as well as through independent efforts of émigrés to challenge the longstanding confines of discourse on the Russian nation in the Cold War west.
It was the context of perestroika that allowed the political discourse of Russophobia to enter the wider political culture of Russia. When Gorbachev came to power and eased censorship, the expression of nationalistic, xenophobic, and antisemitic sentiments that had previously been articulated only in samizdat journals and in the Russian diaspora now found open expression, for instance through the nationalist organization Pamiatʹ (Memory). On a deeper level, the construct became part of the political vocabulary of perestroika-era society “because it filled a vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world,” as Horvath points out.Footnote 109
The transnational and émigré contexts that had generated “Russophobia” were still evident in perestroika-era political language. The end of the Soviet Union’s informational isolation—marked and also symbolized by the end of state jamming of RL and the other “voices”—made the problem of the west particularly troublesome for Russian nationalists. As a result, the disagreements over emigration and the nation that had animated the diaspora became an important question in perestroika-era discourse. A frequent target of accusations of Russophobia were émigrés of the late Soviet period whose works were now being published legally in the USSR for the first time. In a 1989 article, “The Phenomenon of Emigration,” Shafarevich warned of the dangers posed by the returning émigrés for the future of Russia. Like the pre-1917 Russian émigrés, he claimed, the third-wavers had left the country not as refugees but as revolutionaries and opportunists. Only people who rejected the homeland could emigrate and then speculate on their reputations as dissidents in order to ingratiate themselves with the nation’s enemies.Footnote 110 Despite his nationalist credentials, Solzhenitsyn also faced such attacks by some nationalists in the 1990s, who linked him to Zionist and Satanic plots to destroy the empire.Footnote 111 Striking here is how nationalists during perestroika and beyond continued to point to the third-wave émigrés as carriers of Russophobia, suggesting how the heated national debates that had engulfed the Russian diaspora provided essential reference points for expressions of Russian nationalism.
The costs of “Russophobia” for post-Soviet Russia’s political development were steep. At a moment when a redefining of Russian identity and national statehood seemed to be imminent, a discursive construct that relied on a victimhood complex, an image of unlimited foreign hostility, and a conviction that some intellectuals were insufficiently “national” became lodged in the language of political and intellectual elites.Footnote 112 From its inception, “Russophobia” posited that disloyalty and allegiances to outside forces lurked within the intelligentsia. Such perceptions helped to forge the perestroika-era alliance between conservative nationalists and Soviet patriots, who shared common enemies in form of reformers, democrats, liberals, and often Jews.Footnote 113 Moreover, “Russophobia” was bound to increase given the political and economic dislocation of the period. After Boris Nikolaevich Elʹtsin dispersed the oppositional Supreme Soviet in 1993, the language of Russophobia was taken up by the main opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Its leader, Gennadii Andreevich Ziuganov, believed that there existed a “plot against post-Soviet Russia, inspired by ‘Russophobia,’ that involves international actors at every level of political interaction in a vast conspiracy.”Footnote 114 The discourse of Russophobia’s inherent xenophobia and suspicion left intellectuals badly divided and poorly prepared for the momentous tasks of navigating the end of empire, transitioning to a pluralist society and constructing a capitalist economy. In this sense, the language of Russophobia showed how divides in the late Soviet intelligentsia and diaspora had a toxic effect on post-Soviet political culture, setting the stage for Putin’s neo-imperial agenda years later.
Benjamin Tromly is Distinguished Professor of History and James Dolliver National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Puget Sound. He teaches courses in modern European history, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. His teaching interests include Russian and east European History, totalitarianism, the Cold War, European intellectual history, collective memory, and European nationalisms. Tromly is the author of two books: Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khruschev (Cambridge, 2014), and Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia (Oxford, 2019). He has published in major journals in the field.
