ABSTRACT
The Russian nationalist movement came into being and received official sanction in 1965, soon after the removal of Nikita Khrushchev. Initially, views expressed by members of the group encountered sharp opposition in Soviet journals, but by the beginning of the nineteen-eighties the Russian nationalists had managed to silence their critics. The conflict between the theater and "Otechestvo" was covered by the Soviet media, and the materials available provided an insight both into the emergence and activities of such societies and into the role played by Russian nationalists in Soviet cultural developments in general. "Somebody needs our culture and art to acquire alien national roots." In June 1988, the state commission which had been set up under the chairmanship of Soviet head of state Andrei Gromyko in July 1987 to look into the grievances of the Crimean Tatars, rejected their demands for national autonomy.
