Translated material
Anna Nezhinskaya. "Nerus": the name of the enemies of the people has been found!
In the lexicon of Russian national-patriots, the word "not Russia " is a political concept that allows arbitrariness in defining "enemies of the Russian people" and allows grouping all those peoples, ethnic, social classes and groups, professional, confessional and other communities, which together represent "enemies" and "haters" of Russia. According to Russian national patriots, the amorphous and all-powerful non-Russian seeks to subjugate, suppress or destroy the Russian statehood, threatens the existence of the Russian people from various, but invariably hostile or objectively harmful motives.
The word nerus is an old one. In Dahl's Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, it means non-Russian people and has a negative meaning. In the explanatory and derivational dictionary of Efremova, "non-Russian" is interpreted as colloquial with the meaning "Russophobe".
In the 19th century, non-Russians were called foreigners and residents of the newly annexed regions of Russia, who did not understand Russian orders and customs and did not know the Russian language well. Actually, the official term "foreigners" by the end of the 19th century acquired a negative connotation in Russia. "Nerus" had a negative connotation, similar to the current Japanese "gaijin" (not Japanese, barbarian) or the Jewish "goy", but did not serve as evidence of such religious antagonism, which is visible in the expression "non-Christ".
During Soviet times, "nerus" almost disappeared from use. The official ideology emphasized the solidarity of workers of all nationalities. Ethnic strife was officially condemned and eradicated (for example, the campaign against anti-Semitism and Russian great-power chauvinism of the late 1920s, as well as the permanent struggle against all kinds of nationalism).
The media avoided mentioning interethnic conflicts. During the period of the revolution and the Great Terror of 1920-1930, the term "enemy of the people", which arose during the Great French Revolution, entered the political lexicon of the USSR. "Enemies of the people" by definition were subject to merciless destruction. The phrase of Maxim Gorky "The enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed" along with the proverb "The forest is cut, the chips fly" became the quintessence of the ideology of the Great Terror.
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia became a nation-state for the first time in its history. The growth of Russian ethnic nationalism has given rise to various, often extremist, movements, groups and parties that have been called "national-patriotic". They needed a new original definition of the enemy, coinciding with the broad semantic field "enemy of the people" and at the same time not historically connected with the lexicon of Russian revolutions. Thus, "non-Russian" became one of the proposed terms for defining the universal enemy of the Russian people.
Russian national patriot Konstantin Krylov in his article "Rus and Non-Rus" defined this concept as "a set of peoples, classes, social groups, as well as professional, confessional and other communities seeking to subdue, suppress or even destroy Russians as a people and Russia as an independent state" . Krylov emphasizes that the reasons for such a desire may vary: "Starting from completely rational, economic considerations (for example, the desire to" plunder ") and ending with an irrational, absolutely unreasonable, "animal" hatred of everything Russian " . According to Krylov, an important mistake of traditional nationalism lies in a certain one-sidedness of ideas: by singling out the nation as a subject of historical action, nationalism does not see other subjects acting in the same arena. And, according to these ideas, a nation can only be opposed by another nation. Krylov points out the limitations of such a view, which is not capable of explaining all the facts of history. This limitation caused the existence of other theories designed to "fill the gap": these are conspiracy theories (anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic and others), and Lev Gumilyov's theory of anti-systems (as part of his passionate theory of ethnogenesis). Within the framework of Krylov's reasoning, there is another assumption, according to which a nation and its interests can be opposed by any community, arranged on any principles, united only by "negative interest" in relation to this nation.
Russian nationalist, publicist and author of pseudo-historical writings Oleg Platonov in the book "Holy Russia and Cursed Non-Russians" (2005) also uses the word "nerus" (with a lowercase letter) to refer to "the totality of active enemies of the Russian people and Russia " . This book is part of the essay "The History of the Russian People in the 20th Century" and, according to the author's intention, reveals the role played in Russian upheavals and disorganizations at the beginning of the 20th century by various social, national, class, religious and other communities. Platonov refers to the active enemies of "Holy Russia": Freemasons, Zionists, intelligentsia, nobility, cosmopolitans, socialists, bureaucrats, Westerners, left-wing political terrorists, nihilists, atheists, God-seekers, ecumenists, sectarians, nationalists from non-Russian regions of the empire, Jews, capitalists, foreign politicians, liberals, martinists, philalites, rosicrucians, communists, marxists, bolsheviks, socialist-revolutionaries, provocateurs, "tramps" and so on.
"Nerus" in the vocabulary of national-patriots fills in the terminological gap and allows you to get rid of "theoretical" and "scientific" justifications for opponents, allows complete arbitrariness in defining "enemies of Russia" - depending on the tastes and predilections of "theorists". "Nerus" completely covers the semantic field of the old broad and arbitrary definition of "enemy of the people", but does not carry historical associations with the revolution and the Bolsheviks. Probably, this word can be useful precisely to those who dream of a repetition of the Great Terror of Stalin's times.
The psychomorphological analysis of the word "nerus" is interesting. In contrast to a number of singular words with the prefix non- (like "ignorant", "non-Christ"), the plural word "nerus" means an innumerable multitude. It is built like the words "undead" and "evil spirits", which are usually called evil spirits in Russian. Therefore, it can be assumed that (the word was chosen initially or by modern authors) in order to liken people called "non-Russians" to demons, evil spirits. Nerus is among other insulting names used by Russian nationalists and national patriots, covering the semantic field associated with demons, devilry, evil spirits - like the "small people" in Shafarevich's Russophobia, which also means evil spirits in European mythology. Partially, "non-Russian" covers the semantic field of the Nazi term "subhuman", but does not claim to be "scientific" that the "subhuman" had in the framework of Nazi racial theory.
So the word known to have been in the beginning is already there. Here, the affairs of the Russian national patriots are not a lot. Relying only on negative propaganda, the national patriots have not yet been able to convince Russian society that they are able to offer a positive path. Moreover, weakness, fragmentation and mutual enmity among the national patriots compromise the very idea of Russian ethnic nationalism, repel potential allies from among the nationalist-statesmen. National patriots, especially pro-fascist ones, have become an easy target for the authorities, who portray the anti-fascist struggle for democracy. Most often, "non-Russian" is used in internal squabbles and showdown among a motley, amorphous mass of national patriots incapable of concrete big deeds.
Literature:
Krylov K.A. Nerus (abridged and corrected version of the article).
Krylov K.A. On the criteria for belonging to the Nerus. Conversation with Mikhail Yakubov.
Platonov O.A. History of the Russian people in the XX century. T. 1.
Platonov. O.A. Holy Rus' and damned non-Russians. Russian civilization against world evil. Moscow: Algorithm, 2005. 704 p.
Efremova T.F. New dictionary of the Russian language. Explanatory derivational. 2nd ed., stereotype. M.: Russian language, 2001. T. 1.
Shafarevich I. R. Russophobia. M., 1989.
Anna Nezhinskaya , USA, doctoral student in Oriental languages and theology, activist in self-help groups for youth affected by violence and ethnic strife.
The author thanks Michael Dorfman for help in writing the article.
Other articles by the author:
You will never rise
Jerusalem does not believe in tears
Discussion failed
Orthodoxy and anti-Semitism
The church is silent