THE RUSSIAN SPECTATOR: The Return of White Russia
Robinson, Paul
THE RUSSIAN SPECTATOR PAUL ROBINSON The Return of White Russia NBELIEVABLE," THE PROFESSOR TOLD ME. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-Communist Russian...
...Prosperity is gradually returning (insofar as Russia has ever experienced it since the revolution of 1917...
...The most prevalent narrative of Russian affairs in the Western press talks of a return to dictatorshipunder a former KGB colonel...
...Yet more uniformed men are Russian civil war re-enactors, decked out as soldiers of the White Volunteer Army...
...Ilyin its most prominent theoretician...
...After the burial I wandered through Red Square...
...Both died in exile...
...others carry wreaths...
...In fact, my friend suggests, there may even be more freedom of expression in Russia than in the West, because there are fewer social and legal constraints on "politically incorrect" and extremist points of view...
...A Russian army band strikes up the Soviet, now Russian, national anthem...
...When Denikin's daughter, Marina Grey, refused to give permission to exhume her father, the president won her over by granting her Russian citizenship...
...We assemble in the grounds of the Donskoi monastery, in the front of the A cathedral...
...We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-Communist Russian philosopher Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin...
...The honor guard fires three salutes...
...Putin, I'm told, played a major role in repatriating the bodies of Denikin and Ilyin...
...1/4 Article reproduced by permission of The Spectator magazine in London...
...Again, the tone of the speeches is not of -White triumph but of unity and reconciliation...
...The next day I meet my friend again...
...When the Russian army refused to provide a military honor guard for Ilyin because he had never served in the military, Putin overruled the generals...
...she asks...
...The reburials are a fraud, he claims...
...Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Ilyin's books would have brought six years in prison...
...DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...Denikin fled Russia after his defeat in 1920 and Ilyin was expelled from the young Soviet Union in 1922...
...and while there are still occasional packs of wild dogs sunbathing beside apartment buildings, there are not nearly so many...
...A handful of men are walking around in military uniforms and badges identifying them as members of the Cossack forces...
...He announces that henceforth October 3—the day of the reburial—will be a Day of National Unity, which will replace Revolution Day (November 7) as a national holiday...
...This fall their bodies were exhumed from graves in America and Switzerland, and returned to their native soil...
...A host of impressions: the golden Imperial double-headed eagles on the enormous chandeliers...
...An honor guard leads the way to the new graves...
...I know what people think of the Vlasovtsy, she tells the diners, but I know that many of them were good men...
...hundreds of mourners crossing themselves to the chant of gospodi pomilui, Lord have mercy...
...He should know...
...Vladimir Zhirinovsky, I'm told later, stormed off in a huff because he was not allowed to speak...
...1 LEVEN O'CLOCK...
...The nomenklatura are usurping the memory of the Whites to legitimize their own rule...
...Lenin's tomb looked deserted and forlorn...
...After the Patriarch, others speak—the president's representative, the minister of culture, Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and the film director Nikita Mikhalkov...
...Together, they were the pen and the sword of anti-Communism...
...Soldiers pick up the coffins and slowly march out...
...The talk of unity and reconciliation is a means by which they suggest an equivalence between Red and White, both equally guilty and equally right...
...others hold his medals...
...AT A PARTY HELD IN THE PRESIDENT HOTEL later that evening, a lady of a certain age sitting next to me reveals herself to have been an interpreter for Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet general who defected to the Germans in the Second World War and raised an anti-Soviet Russian army...
...His honor guard has abandoned him for others...
...Over tea and a bowl of gurevskaia kasha, we discussed the state of modern Russia...
...For a start, even five years ago it wouldn't have been possible to find such a nice cafe, serving such good quality fare in such comfort at such a reasonable price...
...A sudden breeze wafts a flurry of leaves down on the graves...
...Undoubtedly, there is a political purpose to ceremonies such as these...
...Life was getting better, we agreed...
...His slogan, after all, was "Russia, one and indivisible...
...On October 3 the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Ilyin but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern Russia during the Russian civil war...
...He lays the foundation stone of a new bell tower dedicated to national unity, and mounts the steps to deliver a speech on reconciliation...
...the tinkle of bells as the Patriarch shakes incense aroundthe church...
...he has twice been sacked from newspapers for writing pro-Putin articles...
...the deep booming of the monks, rising to a final crescendo of the words of eternal memoryvechnaia painiar, vechnaia pamiat', vechnaia pamiat...
...Fireworks celebrate his arrival...
...Incense floats through the thinning brown autumn trees...
...Little boys dressed in the black, blue, and white uniforms of 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 PAUL ROBINSON the Moscow cadet corps line the road from the monastery gates to the cathedral...
...Later she apologizes...
...the crackle of thousands of lighted candles...
...It helps to suppress political competition, and to create a sort of corporatist, nationalist unity which favors those in authority...
...The Russian president is repeatedly portrayed as a closet Communist, eager to suppress freedom of speech and jail any political opponents...
...Has she spoken out of turn...
...Most of the government were against it, but Putin insisted...
...Though a Putin fan, he regards most of those who now rule Russia as unreconstructed Soviet apparatchiks...
...Spetsnaz commandos in combat fatigues provide security...
...If you want to be racist, sexist, or anything else-ist, you'll find it easier to get a publisher in Moscow than in London or New York...
...Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster...
...The honoring of the Whites, and the implied repudiation of the Reds, came from the top...
...Then silence...
...Not everybody is quite so jubilant...
...Still, by celebrating Denikin and Ilyin, their anti-Communism, nationalism, and Orthodoxy, the Russian state is making a statement about the country's future which, for those of us who remember the Soviet years, is a statement we can only welcome...
...After the speeches, we pack into the cathedral...
...One officer carries Denikin's sword...
...Orthodox monks wander around in black robes, jabbering into mobile phones, and snapping photos with their digital cameras...
...The honoring of the Whites washes away the sins of the Reds...
...We wind through the decrepit tombs of the monastery's cemetery, past the graves of long-forgotten imperial aristocrats, to an area newly carpeted in fresh pine branches...
...Denikin might well have approved...
...The problem, he tells me, is that Westerners listen too much to the likes of the former oligarch Boris Berezovsky...
...The focus on unity suggests that all Russians should abandon party divisions...
...There is some truth to this...
...Denikin was the White movement's military leader...
...How times have changed...
...My journalist friend laughs at the suggestion that Putin has suppressed all independent political thought...
...The Patriarch rolls up to the cathedral steps in a big black limousine...
...Incidentally, he adds, Berezovsky still owns a newspaper in Russia—so much for there being no anti-Putin voices...
...Before the ceremony, I met a journalist from a Moscow newspaper...
...Not at all...
...the flash of cameras...
...There are fewer beggars and fewer old ladies at street corners selling their last possessions to supplement their meager pensions...
...No, everybody replies...
Vol. 38 • December 2005 • No. 10
