Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia

by Walter Laqueur

Vladimir Zhirinovsky's "second Bolshevik revolution" in October 1993 shocked the world with the strength of the Russian Red-Brown alliance and the danger it poses to Russian democracy and world peace. In this book, Walter Laqueur, an expert on Russian and European history, provides a portrait of the leaders and tenets of the Russian extreme right and their attempts to win over public opinion at a time of grave domestic trouble. It is clear that Russia's long-term fate is far from settled, and this book introduces readers to a movement that may have a fateful impact on Russia in the years to come.

Genres: Russia, History, Politics

317 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1993

About the author

Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was an American historian, journalist and political commentator. Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Prussia (modern Wrocław, Poland), into a Jewish family. In 1938, he left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust.

Laqueur lived in Israel from 1938 to 1953. After one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined a Kibbutz and worked as an agricultural laborer from 1939 to 1944. In 1944, he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a journalist until 1953, covering Palestine and other countries in the Middle East.

Since 1955 Laqueur has lived in London. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey from 1956 to 1964. He was also founding editor of The Washington Papers. He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and University Professor at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. He has also been a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.

Laqueur's main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Russian history and German history, as well as the history of the Middle East. The topics he has written about include the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism, and the diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Muruacus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russia is one of the more unique places in the world to study nationalism, especially when it comes to European nations. This is primarily due to its long and profound history of communism and the reign of the Soviet Union. Both Russians and foreigners see Russia as the pinnacle of communist history and manifestation, perhaps only rivaled by China. Communism at its core is anti-Nationalistic, as Marx had stated, “the proletariat has no fatherland.” Yet with the advent of Stalinism and National Bolshevism, many Russians mended these paradoxical viewpoints. Others, however, sought to abandon any association with communism and instead favored the fascism of Italy or the national socialism of Germany.

Laqueur walks the reader through a timeline of nationalism in Russia and the various parties and groups that it created, as well as the key ideological sentiments that nationalists have shared. Regarding the former, it should be noted that it may be inappropriate to title the book Black Hundred. Black Hundred was a catch-all term for nationalist movements in the early twentieth century. The most prominent groups that spawned from this movement were the Russian Association, the Union of Russian People, and Soyuz Russkovo Naroda (SRN). While some groups believed political power could only be gained outside the political realm, and others believing it could only be gained within, SRN sought to operate on both sides of the spectrum and did quite well at this, even gaining the blessing of the Tsar.

By the time the 1930s came around, official groups that were associated with the Black Hundred movement had essentially dissipated. Many Russians at this time, especially among the youth, became entranced with fascism and national socialism. This led to the creation of the Russian Fascist Organization and the Russian Fascist Party. Since many Russians still held to the anti-German racism of their elders, they found fascism to be more palatable than national socialism, though that is not to say that there were not movements that were more sympathetic to the latter and saw Hitler as the pinnacle of political leadership.

With all the development and establishment of different movements throughout Russian history, there were several common themes throughout. The first is the idea of ethnic loyalty. Russians had first seen the import of Germans in their land and their eventual rise through the ranks of politics and academia. They were not fond of being subjected to foreigners in this manner. When Jews began migrating to Russia, this had made things drastically worse, as they saw Jews responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution and took note that after this, their entire political structure had been composed of more Jews than ethnic Russians. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion had become almost a holy book to Russian nationalists. Other political minorities, such as the Tatars, were also seen as an issue even if they did not wield political power.

Another point of interest for these movements was that of religion. They saw the secularization of Russia both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution to be a sign of cultural degradation. By far the most popular religion among the nationalists was Eastern Orthodoxy. As Dostoevsky put it, “To be Russian is to be Orthodox.” There was also a noticeable move towards paganism, however the issues that these groups had was that Slavic paganism was not as well documented as other European religions, and so many of the beliefs were concocted by their members, most notably in The Book of Vlas. There were also many nationalists that did not care for religion at all, whether it be Christianity or paganism.

Advocacy for the working class was also a top priority for these groups, as is the case for most if not all nationalist movements around the world. Agrarian reform was at the top of the priority list, as was the availability of cheap credits for the peasantry. The SRN in particular worked hard to reduce the amount of working hours per week and overall fought for various measures to increase the living standard for the working class without the negative effects of Marxism. In addition, many of these groups fought for social reform regarding alcoholism and degeneracy in pop culture. Nationalism in this context meant not only fighting for change within the political realm but change in the social realm as well.

My main criticism for this book is Laqueur’s personal commentary. This is most obvious when it comes to the sections regarding Jewish power and influence in Russian politics. There are certain passages where he will, for example, concede that the majority of leaders within the Bolshevik Revolution were Jewish, and then spend the next few paragraphs explaining why it is erroneous for the Russians to have blamed Jews for leading the revolution that killed their Tsar. The same can be said regarding the fact that the Black Hundred, who had the Tsar’s blessing, were banned and investigated by the government after the revolution. He uses the term “conspiracy theorist” several times throughout the book to refer to those who made these connections. It may be the case that he had a personal issue with this topic considering he is ethnically Jewish, which would explain why he did not make the same qualifications or provide the same lengthy explanations when it came to anti-German racism within Russia, or other minority groups for that matter.

Despite my criticisms, the book serves well as a reference for a topic which is not well documented even until this day. Lacquer documents groups within the Black Hundred that had as little as thirty members, exhibiting both the niche and well-researched material that even many history buffs may be ignorant of. Anyone who is interested in political theory of the twentieth century, especially on the Eastern front, would benefit greatly from giving this a read.

[Richard Laznik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb review of the history of right wing extremist groups in Russia in the latter part of the 20th century. (Published in 1993). It charts the movement through the 70s, 80s and early 90s in particular, while discussing the antecedents of the movement back to the later Tsarist period.

This is the third book by Laqueur that I’ve read and I really like the matter-of-fact language he uses generally and the occasional cutting barb he sinks into both the left and the right in this book. I am constantly amazed by the fact that he was clearly fluent in English, German, Russian, Hebrew and French.

First rate historian (IMO) and having discovered him only in recent years, very sad to hear he passed away late in 2018.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastically thorough, extensively foot noted, well written, and perspicacious. I love a book that constantly has me looking up words I didn’t know before. Laqueur was brilliant and I want to read more of his works.

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rather unusual wealth and diversity of political movements and parties in ex-USSR that are generally regarded as belonging to the far right have recently received sustained academic attention, and even popular, as exemplified by Emmanuel Carrere's Goncourt winning biography of Eduard Limonov. Yet when this book came out following closely the collapse of the union, little if any attention, for understandable reasons, had been given to the subject of the Russian far-right tradition.
The time of the writing of this book allow for a closer look at a variety of movements that are nowadays often eclipsed by more contemporary or at least more relevant elements. Zhironovsky only gets a passing mention, as does Dugin (Eurasianism is dismissed as an intellectual parlour game) and Limonov is nowhere to be seen. Those absences make place for first a good look at pre-revolutionarry nationalism and especially anti-semitism, followed by a number of interesting analyses, later make space for what seems to me, more than the Black Hundred, to be the actual core of the book: an observation (but no analysis, surprisingly) of the rise of nationalism inside and in the periphery of the party itself, and the complex and unique relationship that nationalism entertained for several decades with both the soviet establishment and the dissidence.
Lacqueur's pre-consensus approach circumvent carefully the terminology questions that were being raised elsewhere at the time of his writing and he displays a distance in his judgement of the phenomenon that is all but disagreeable, but one is bound to blame his inefficiently articulated defense of patriotism, and most of the considerations in the conclusion of the book, on his involvement in foreign policy. His generous literary culture, general erudition and a flawless style still fail ushering some generally essentialists judgements, one the "russian people" and "the nationalist mind" that the rabid (post)-modernization of Russia since the publication of his volume has at any rate disproved. Wheras his interpretations of pre-soviet anti-semitism for example, are clearly very perceptive, it seems ultimately that he failed at identifying the authentic leftist drive his homonym Sternhell had already clearly identified.
This by no means makes his book less of a landmark in the field, and a unique work of reference for the post-WWII russian nationalism.

[Kriegslok · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting attempt to document the emergence of the extreme new right in post Soviet Russia. A good historical overview of the influences on new right thinking and ideology and its strange and not so strange bedfellows.