Nationalist, heretic or populist?

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Notes

I am grateful to Andreas Umland, of course, for the reading list he supplies. Although some of the pieces are irrelevant (e.g. Kurliandskii) or too simplistic (Popovich) to merit attention here, others are worth serious consideration. Many are discussed in my 2009 Russian edition of National Bolshevism or in my new book, Propaganda State in Crisis (forthcoming from Yale University Press).

On the broader official Soviet roll-back of postwar non-Russian ethnic self expression see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism chap. 10.

Iu.O. Martov accused V.I. Lenin of Bonapartism in March 1918; Trotskii applied the critique to Stalin nine years later. See, for instance, Piskun.

Soviet ideological consistency during these years is evident in the regime's continuing commitment to class analysis, collectivism, redistribution and state planning, as well as its enduring hostility toward market forces, private property and nationalism (see Hoffmann; van Ree). The myth of Stalin's “turn to the right” is nearly as pervasive as another legend repeatedly cited in Umland's sources, which alleges that the general secretary was planning to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia in 1953. See, for example, Liuks (“Evreiskii vopros v politike Stalina”, “Zum Stalinschen Antisemitismus” etc.).

This classic definition of nationalism stems from Ernest Gellner.