Recently, the Russian public learned from the latest update of the shameful, inquisitorial federal list of extremist materials that on September 24, 2015, the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow added to this list a book called «The Empire of the Kremlin: Soviet Type of Colonialism,» written by a well-known Sovietologist of Chechen nationality, Abdurakhman Avtorhanov.
Before going into the real meaning and reasons for this ban, it should be noted that after it became known, conspiracy theories about what happened immediately emerged. In particular, some speculated that someone from the security forces did this to discredit the current head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, who «personally renamed Clara Zetkin Street in Grozny and Krasnoarmeyskaya Street in his ancestral village after the Hitlerite Avtorhanov. Kadyrov gave the extremist’s daughter a three-room VIP apartment as a gift from the propaganda departments of the German Wehrmacht.»
However, in today’s political realities, such subtle hardware trolling looks like an implausible manifestation of developed intellect. Moreover, it turns out that Avtorhanov’s book was banned in 2015, that is, three years have already passed, during which time this fact has not been used in any way against Ramzan Kadyrov, and there have been no particular attacks on him by the security forces (so far).
Therefore, the most convincing explanation for what happened is that the law enforcement machine in its fight against dissident thought simply targeted another ideologically unacceptable book. And that is really interesting. It is interesting because Avtorhanov’s book, written in 1988, exposes the national policy of the communist regime represented by Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev.
«But what has the present government of Russia, represented by completely different people who do not position themselves as communists (and in some cases, the opposite), to do with it? — is a question that will inevitably come to the mind of any reasonable person. The answer to it becomes very clear after reading this brilliant book, which many of our readers will surely want to do now. Fortunately, finding the book on the Internet will not be difficult…
Because then it will become extremely clear that the national policy of the current regime is a continuation and culmination of the very policy that Avtorhanov describes in detail in his now banned book in Russia. He shows in detail how the communist regime, combining sovietization and russification, with only slight changes in approach from one leader to another, consistently sought to achieve one goal — the fusion of the conquered imperial nations into a denationalized «Russophone» human mass. Such a mass, called the «Russian nation» or the «Russian world,» is the ideal of the current regime, which is non-Soviet in this sense, as Avtorhanov’s book clearly shows when translated into current realities.
Thus, the ban on Avtorhanov’s work, unlike that on many other books that are really harmless to the regime, seems perfectly logical to it, since it strikes at the very heart of the policy of building the «Russian world» and the «Russian nation,» revealing to the reader its origins and methods. Moreover, not only the main idea of the book seems relevant, but also the specific historical events Avtorhanov describes, whether it is the Kremlin’s struggle against Islam in the Red Empire, or the Ukrainians’ struggle for their national identity and freedom. Only slightly deviating from this path during the period of weakening central power, the non-Soviet imperial Kremlin returned to all the tasks of the policy described by Avtorhanov a few years after the writing of this book.
Moreover, if the previous communists, as Avtorhanov shows, found it necessary to combine rhetoric about the right of nations to self-determination with neo-imperial chauvinist policies, the current Chekist capitalists declare this rhetoric itself to be false and to generate separatism. Therefore, a person who reads this book cannot fail to see that the national policy of the current regime is the culmination of what Avtorhanov described and the tearing off of the chauvinists’ masks of decency. Of course, it would be absurd not to ban such a book in today’s Russia.