Defending the Nation | CU Experts

Abstract; Chapter 8 discusses how village writers became involved in national movements during the Gorbachev era. Starting in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged environmental activism by Russian writers like Valentin Rasputin as part of his new policy of glasnost. Emboldened by the example of the Russian writers and galvanized by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, writers like Oles’ Honchar and Ion Druță began to push for environmental protections as well. Village writers began to protest the diminished status of national languages in the non-Russian republics. The geography of cultural politics was transformed as the Baltic republics replaced Moscow as the primary organizational hub for national activists. Encouraged by their newfound freedom, writers and other activists organized grassroots “informal” organizations to protect their native languages and the environment. These organizations became the basis of the Popular Front movements, which built on the rural nationalist ideology forged by village writers in prior decades. Writers like Honchar and Druță became leaders in the national movments, which ultimately sought independence from the Soviet state. Many Russian Village Prose writers, meanwhile, joined the opposition to Gorbachev and sought to preserve the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s efforts to keep the national republics within the Soviet state precipitated a crisis that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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