Smenovekhovtsy

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Cover of the magazine Smena Vekh. July 1921

The Smenovekhovtsy (Russian: Сменовеховцы, IPA: [smʲɪnəˈvʲexəftsɨ]), a political movement in the Russian émigré community, formed shortly after the publication of the magazine Smena Vekh ("Change of Signposts") in Prague in 1921.[1] This publication had taken its name from the Russian philosophical publication Vekhi ("Signposts") published in 1909. The Smena Vekh periodical told its White émigré readers:

"The Civil War is lost definitely. For a long time Russia has been travelling on its own path, not our path ... Either recognize this Russia, hated by you all, or stay without Russia, because a 'third Russia' by your recipes does not and will not exist ... The Soviet regime saved Russia - the Soviet regime is justified, regardless of how weighty the arguments against it are ... The mere fact of its enduring existence proves its popular character, and the historical belonging of its dictatorship and harshness."

Ideology

The ideas in the publication soon evolved into the Smenovekhovstvo movement, which promoted the concept of accepting the

Soviet Russia, predicting that the Soviet Union would not last and would give way to a revival of Russian nationalism.[2]

Smenovekhovtsy supported co-operation with the Soviet government in the hope that the Soviet state would evolve back into a "bourgeois state". Such cooperation was important for the

Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921.[5][need quotation to verify
]

Opposition

Conservative émigrés such as those in the

OGPU, which had in fact been active in promoting such ideas in the émigré community. On the Smenovekhovstvo movement in October 1921, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin commented: "The Smenovekhovtsy express the moods of thousands of various bourgeois or Soviet collaborators, who are the participants of our New Economic Policy
."

History

Representatives of the Smenovekhovtsy who settled in the Soviet Union did not survive the end of the 1930s; almost all the former leaders of the movement were arrested by the NKVD and executed at a later date.[6][7]

There were other émigré organizations which, like the Smenoveknovtsy, argued that Russian émigrés should accept the fact of the Russian revolution. These included the Young Russians (

Mykhailo Hrushevskyi (1866–1934) and Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951). The Soviet Ukrainian government funded a Ukrainian emigre journal called Nova Hromada (first published in July 1923) to encourage this trend. The Soviets referred to this movement as a Ukrainian Smena Vekh, as did its opponents among the Ukrainian emigres, who saw it as a defeatist expression of Little Russian Russophilia. For this reason, the actual proponents of the trend rejected the label of Smenovekhovtsy.[8]

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ "Lenin: Draft Decision for the Politbureau of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.) in Connection with the Genoa Conference". Marxists Internet Archive.
  2. ISBN 0-19-510282-7
    .
  3. S2CID 155437029
    .
  4. S2CID 155437029
    .
  5. S2CID 155437029
    .
  6. ^ "СМЕНОВЕХОВСТВО • Большая российская энциклопедия - электронная версия". bigenc.ru. Retrieved 2022-05-27.
  7. OCLC 1162187814
    .
  8. ISBN 978-3-89821-965-5 – via Google Books
    .

Further reading
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