The possibility of interpreting history as the product of social conflict, and
explaining the latter as the consequence of ethnic/national enmity caused by
conquest, was already present in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s booklets praising
the Tiers état and inviting the supposedly Frankish, that is German, nobility to
return to the Franconian forests. The theory was systematized thirty years
later by Augustin Thierry in his Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1820), which
presented French history as the product of a struggle between an alien
Frankish nobility and a national Gaulish roture that culminated in the
French Revolution. Social conflict thus rested upon an original ethnic, or
national (in the continental European meaning of the term) clash, and could
be resolved only by the removal/integration of the alien element.
This vision, popularized by novels like Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, incorporated
an image of the European continent in which ethnic stratification
antedated and explained the social one. A cognate thesis, formalized by
Hegel, strengthened this image by surmising that peoples and nations (the
borders between the two concepts remained blurred) could be divided into
two groups: those which had been able to create a state, and thus had a
proper history (since state history was the only relevant one), and those
which did not have, or had very soon lost, their state, and were thus also
deprived of history (such peoples were known as “small” peoples, independently
of their size). This hierarchical vision admitted exceptions, like Poles
and Magyars who had lost their states but still had their ruling classes, and
middle-of-the-road cases, like Italians and Germans, that produced many
statelets but did not have a state capable of defending them.
European intellectuals, therefore, already possessed before 1848 a model of
historical explanation based on ethnic and social conflict, and a pyramid-like
image of Europe’s peoples, with but a few “historical” nations, some of which
were felt to be unjustly oppressed and thereby possessing a right to rebuild
their own state.
By showing that social conflicts could be independent of ethnic ones, and
could make France tremble, 1848 Paris seemed to disprove Thierry, who had
maintained that, having reunified the French people, 1789 had laid inner
conflicts to rest. It also pushed Marx and Engels to proclaim that all history
was a history of class struggle, and the proletariat had no national identity.
Contemporary Central and East European events, however, stressed
instead the power of ethnic conflicts as well as their intersection with social
ones, so much so that even Marx and Engels called in 1849 to annihilate
counterrevolutionary peoples, not classes. These peoples were Hegel’s peoples
“without history” that were betraying the revolution by affirming their
right to build their own state at the expense of “historical nations” like
Germans, Magyars and Italians. Revolutionaries were thus entitled to take
their revenge, and Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and other “barbaric Slavs”
(Engels’s words) – who refused to finish, as Czechs or Slovaks, in the
dustbin of history – were to be destroyed, thus paving the way for their
Germanization, Magyarization, etc.
The only Slavic nation whose rights Marx and Engels upheld was Poland.
Far from supporting national liberation movements in general, at first the
two founders of communism thus opposed those of the “small peoples,”
whose destiny they saw in terms of assimilation. In 1865 this position was
reaffirmed in the Proclamation on the Polish Question, endorsed by the First
International, which stressed the need “to annihilate the growing influence
of Russia ... by assuring Poland the right of self-determination which belongs
to every nation.” As Walker Connor has noted, however, the universality of
the call was limited by restricting the status of “nation” to Hegel’s “historical”
peoples.
Things started to change with Marx’s, and especially Engels’s, involvement
in the Irish question. Ireland, which could not be presented as an unjustly
oppressed historical nation, became the prototype of the oppressed peoples
in which national and social liberation coincided. Besides, its liberation was
seen as a precondition for revolution in Britain since, as Marx wrote, “any
nation that oppresses another forges its own chains.” In and through Ireland,
therefore, communism laid the foundations for its support for national and
social liberation movements the world over, a support that was, however, yet
to come.
In those same years, a Polish intellectual of Jewish origins and German
culture, Ludwig Gumplowicz, was rethinking the interpenetration of the
social and the national under the influence of both Thierry and Marx, whose
historical materialism he accepted, rejecting at the same time its teleological
content. For Gumplowicz, social and national struggles were everlasting, and
communism was but an illusion. In his scheme, those struggles started as
conflicts among different human groups. Through conquest, however, such
groups ceased to be ethnically homogeneous and, via the assimilation of the
defeated, grew in size and inner articulation, thus opening the door to social
conflicts. The theory, which won many followers and influenced – through
Gaetano Mosca – the beginnings of political science, openly raised the
question of “assimilation,” implicit in Marx’s and Engels’s analysis of the
“small” peoples’ destiny. If different groups could be amalgamated, new
entities could be born, and peoples and nations could be “built.” The term
“ethnographic material” then started to be used to refer to illiterate peasant
masses which could be manipulated using new, powerful tools – like the draft
or compulsory education – in order to either integrate them into existing high
cultures, or to make them adhere to new national projects.
Modernization, that is, the combination of industrialization and mass
urbanization, was meanwhile proving that the “small” peoples, whom
Marx had thought doomed to disappear, instead had a future. The Czechs’
revival, accompanied by their conquest of Prague, was particularly momentous:
On its basis Karl Kautsky, a native of the city and Marx’s and Engels’s
heir, questioned his teachers’ assumptions. Small, peasant peoples were
proving their right to life, and social democracy could not ignore their plight,
also because their struggles influenced the socialist parties, as proven by the
Austrian one’s split along national lines.
But if small peoples proved vital, and “historical” nations’ minorities could
not be assimilated into them, if both were (in Otto Bauer’s terms) active
nationalities, how could the conflicts among them be managed, so as to
prevent these conflicts from distorting social ones, thereby endangering the
socialist perspective?
The answer was provided by Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, who looked at
Jewish self-government in the Habsburg Empire and at the Ottoman millet
system. Their solution (nonterritorial national cultural autonomy) was to
institute in multinational states national communities provided with rights in
the fields of culture, education, etc., which citizens belonging to those
nationalities could join independently of their residence. Kautsky, instead,
proposed to reorganize the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federal state
composed of language-based units, with federally guaranteed minority
rights.
Both solutions required a definition of what a nation or a nationality was,
and which were the features that qualified them as such. When discussing
these problems, the Second International was confronted with the question
of whether non-European “primitive peoples” were indeed such, and as such
endowed with the right to become nations, a right few now denied to
“barbaric Slavs.” The answer was no: “Civilized” peoples alone were
endowed with the right. Only the most enlightened socialists (and liberals)
maintained that given time, and “development,” “primitive peoples” too
could gain that status, and therefore aspire to self-determination. Many
more supported the idea that civilized nations had the right to build empires,
also because imperial spaces alone could guarantee the survival of a socialist
system in case the revolution did not triumph everywhere at the same
moment, but only in a single, developed country. Georg von Vollmar’s
“socialism in one country” (which could thrive because of socialism’s higher
productivity vis-à-vis capitalism) thus became “socialism in one empire.” In
1899 even Eduard Bernstein, often criticized because of his liberal leanings,
admitted that “it may be desirable for [a socialist Germany] to procure at least
part” of the products it needed from colonies that, also in the eyes of many
socialists, were to guarantee the country that Platz an der Sonne that Britain
and France were denying it.
This rhetoric penetrated to Italy, where Enrico Corradini gave it a new
formulation, which was to influence nationalist and socialist movements the
world over. Corradini acknowledged that the new nationalism he proclaimed
descended from collectivism, and recognized socialism’s birthright and
achievements. Socialism’s mistake, he added, was the incapacity to see that
the division into haves and have-nots which fueled class struggle within each
state was duplicated without its borders by that between proletarian, like
Italy with her emigrants, and capitalist nations, like France and the British
Empire. Before fighting the class struggle within, each people had therefore
to unite to fight the international class struggle, that is, war. Obviously, the
real “proletarian nations,” that is the majority of the oppressed, nonEuropean
peoples, escaped Corradini’s attention, also because – in line
with the Second International – he did not even consider them as such.
The link to later, famous “Third World” theories – such as Frantz Fanon’s –
which read world history as a conflict between Western capitalistic nations
and colonial, oppressed peoples, is, however, evident.
In the Central and East European territories disputed by historical nations
and “small” peoples, new and different hybrids, appealing to a combination of
nationalism and socialism, emerged. They presented themselves as the organs
of self-defense of the respective communities, and belonged to the left or the
right of the political spectrum according to whether these communities were
the oppressed or the oppressing ones. In Bohemia, for instance, the Czechs
founded the progressive Czech National Socialist Party, and the Germans their
anti-Slav, anti-Semitic Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, later to be renamed German
National Socialist Workers’ Party. Yet, in spite of fundamental differences, the
conditions breeding these hybrids fueled in both cases the possibility of very
unpleasant developments, which the Ukrainian socialist Mykhaylo
Drahomanov perceptively analyzed, noting that in territories where national,
social and religious cleavages coincided, conflicts could escalate and lead all
sides to extermination policies.
Connolly, whom Lenin admired, adopted instead a positive view: The
countries in which national and social oppression dovetailed, such as Ireland,
were those in which the socialist revolution could more easily triumph. In
1896 he thus founded the Irish Republican Socialist Party, which aimed at
fusing the national and the class struggle in order to reach the socialist
revolution through the national one.
Such was the climate in which the young Stalin grew up, studying in a
seminary in which Russification was crudely enforced. His first political
experiences were tied to the Georgian national movement, to whose periodical,
Iveria, he contributed verses (“Blossom, lovely land, / Exult, country of
Georgians. / And you, Georgian, / Gladden your motherland with learning”)
proving his participation in continental Europe’s nineteenth-century nationalist
culture, a culture he later abandoned for socialism, but did not forget. As
Ronald Suny noted, in the Georgian literary works he read, national and
social liberation blurred into each other, and Stalin came into contact with
the model of the militant infusing from above consciousness into the people
in a nationalist milieu.
Lenin and Stalin as Innovators 1913–1929
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party declared in favor of
self-determination for the empire’s nationalities. While Mensheviks later
espoused Renner’s and Bauer’s policies, Bolsheviks stuck to that choice,
carrying it to its logical conclusion. In Marxism and the National Question
Stalin transcended the opposition between socialism and nationalism without
compromising the former’s supremacy. Defining the nation as “a historically
constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common
language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a
common culture,” a list that – through Bauer – harked back to Italian
nationalist theories, Stalin acknowledged the role of noneconomic factors.
He also fruitfully combined these ideas with Marxism’s evolutionism, tying
the forms taken by the national question to different historical stages:
National claims were legitimate at a certain stage of development, and
revolutionaries had therefore to support them, because, as Lenin wrote,
“the struggle [of the masses] against all national oppression, for the sovereignty
of the people, or the nation [is] progressive.” The door was opened to
the rights of all nonhistorical peoples.
In fact, a rare case among Russian revolutionaries, in 1914 Lenin supported
Ukraine’s national cause, applying to Russia Marx’s dictum about the
impossibility for a nation oppressing other nations to liberate itself; and in
1916 he mourned Connolly’s death in Dublin’s Easter Rising, criticizing the
Marxists who branded the Irish rebellion as bourgeois. Above all, following
Herder’s theory of the equality among peoples rather than Marx’s hierarchy
of nations, in his Imperialism (1916) Lenin stated that all the peoples of the
worlds, not just European ones, enjoyed the same rights, including that to
self-determination.
...
In 1919, the Third Communist International (Comintern) was founded. Its
second 1920 Congress adopted the theses “on the national and colonial
question” presented by Lenin and M. N. Roy, the former advocating support
for national bourgeoisies in their fight for independence, the latter insisting
on the revolutionaries’ own initiative. A former Bengali nationalist, and the
founder of both the Mexican and the Indian Communist Parties, Roy was
then placed in charge of the Asian bureau, directing communist policies
toward the Asian subjects of European empires. Once more the communists
thus proved adept at maneuvering the national question, something that
Western socialist parties were unable to do, as the incapacity of the Italian
socialists to think also in national terms, thus opening the road to fascism, was
indicating (a mistake that, also because of Stalin’s advice, Togliatti was not to
repeat in post-World War II Italy).
...
In spite of their strict collaboration, it was on the national question that
Lenin and Stalin conflicted: In 1922 the latter continued to defend the traditional
Bolshevik idea of a Russian Federation reuniting all the Soviet republics.
Lenin proposed instead to create a new union without national or
geographical connotation (the USSR) formed by language-based republics,
including the federal Russian one, enjoying equal rights, and constitutionally
preserving their rights to self-determination up to separation. Such a union,
Lenin thought (and Stalin later conceded that he had been right), would
guarantee a more stable solution to the national question in the former tsarist
empire, and could serve as a model for all the oppressed peoples. At the same
time, the party would remain a highly centralized institution, controlling the
federal state and providing it with a strong unitary skeleton.
Lenin’s USSR was thus organized as a set of Chinese boxes, the biggest one
devoid of any national connotations, and the smaller ones (from federal
republics down to autonomous regions, districts and even villages) defined
instead on the basis of language-ethnicity, and guaranteeing special rights to
their “titular nationalities.” The latitude of these rights greatly varied over the
course of Soviet history, but the principle was never questioned, even in the
bleakest periods of Stalin’s imperial despotism. In the 1920s the creation of
these boxes and of their borders, which Stalin personally supervised, generated
interesting debates among communist leaders, ethnographers, statisticians
and others, during which many of the “national” problems that were to
emerge during the Soviet period and after the Soviet collapse came to the
fore.
In 1926 these debates led to the identification – based on the 1913 criteria –
of approximately 200 peoples (narodnosti), reduced to 172 in 1927, and halved
in the following decade. At their height, in 1925, Stalin stated that “[it is]
beyond doubt that, after all, the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence,
of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry
constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful
national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be.” Without
understanding this, he added, it was impossible to understand “the profoundly
popular and profoundly revolutionary character of the national
movement.”
The peasant and the national questions thus defined the NEP. The republics’
national communists then launched impressive nation-building programs
under the banner of indigenization: alphabets, languages, education
systems and cultures went through rapid changes, so much so that national
socialist leaders opposed to the Bolshevik regime like Józef Piłsudski and the
Georgian Noe Zhordania noted that communists were making “the nations
without history progress, and revive.” Zhordania, in particular, stressed that
Ukraine was “being created under our own eyes.” Ukrainian communists
also enlisted the support of émigré leaders like the historian Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, who returned to Kyiv in 1924 to use the Soviet regime –
which he had fought during the civil war – and Lenin’s national policies to
build Ukraine.
The turn in favor of oppressed peoples also influenced the Soviet cultural
debate. Mikhail Pokrovskii read tsarist history as a story of conquest and
imperial oppression, while the Georgian linguist Nikolay Marr accused his
European colleagues of abetting the oppression of Oriental peoples, and
presented Indo-European philology as a pseudo-science conceived to perpetuate
the West’s dominance. He also applied the theory of class struggle to
linguistics, claiming that different linguistic strata corresponded to different
social classes, and that all the oppressed classes spoke language varieties that
were closer among themselves than they were to the language of their
respective ruling classes. Linguistic/ethnic and social stratification thus coincided,
in what can be seen as an extreme version of Thierry’s theories.
Russian-speakers reacted: By 1925–26 Russian party leaders, intellectuals
and urban strata in both non-Russian republics and Moscow were lamenting
their belittlement and the disparagement of things Russian. Actually, the
drawing of republican borders had favored the Russian republic, which
acquired Ukrainian territories that were granted special rights in the field of
language and education. Yet it is true that the Soviet solution, though
allowing for the continuing of Moscow’s predominance over the former
Russian imperial space, did so by denying Russians what the other nationalities
received. For instance, there was no Russian Communist Party, nor a
Russian Academy of Science because to have them would have meant to
undermine the importance of the central Soviet institutions, which would
have become but shadows of their Russian counterparts. On the other hand,
the formal Russification of the party or of the academy would have alarmed
the non-Russian nationalities whose support Lenin’s policies had won.
At the international level, the communist approach to national struggles
was marked by the coexistence of the lines that Lenin and Roy discussed in
1920, in their turn distorted by Soviet state interests. In Turkey as in China
Moscow supported at first the pro-national bourgeoisie line, granting financial
and military aid to Mustafa Kemal and the Kuomintang, and defending
their modernization projects, including linguistic ones. However, in spite of
the failure of the 1923 revolution in Germany, where Karl Radek in his
“Schlageter speech” claimed that “the great majority of the nationalistminded
masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of
the workers,” an important section of the Comintern continued to stress the
importance of a pure communist and worker policy, and considered the
alliance with nationalists a betrayal potentially leading to massacres of communists
like those of 1927 China.
The Soviet solution to the national question, and Lenin’s extension of selfdetermination
to all the peoples of the world, proved in the 1920s extremely
appealing to colonial elites, also because of Willi Münzenberg’s ability in
presenting them, for instance, with his League against Imperialism. Like
Zhordania, nationalist and socialist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru expressed
their admiration for the Soviet model, which also attracted minority (Jewish,
Armenian, Greek, etc.) intellectuals from the Middle East and Africa.
The Comintern also proposed solutions for a number of national problems
that were to play a significant role in subsequent years, for instance envisaging
a “greater Ukraine” built at the expense of Poland, which Stalin was able
to create with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and to sanction with the 1945
victory, and a Balkan Federation that constituted the kernel of Tito’s plans in
1945–48. Questions such as that of black Americans were also considered: In
1928 the Comintern advanced the slogan of the “right of self-determination
for negroes” in those “regions of the South in which compact negro masses
are living,” and later on called for their “national self-determination.”
...
Stalinism and the National Question 1929–1953
Stalin’s 1929 revolution from above caused a sharp turnabout also in national
policies. Forced collectivization and industrialization required a stronger
center, and this trend was reinforced by Stalin’s perception of the unpopularity
of his moves, which was especially strong in Ukraine, whose borders
Stalin judged particularly dangerous, whose grain Moscow needed, whose
peasants deeply resented collectivization and where national communism
was deeply rooted. In 1930 repression struck the republics’ intelligentsia. The
Russian intelligentsia was not spared, but Ukrainian intellectuals were
charged with nationalism, a clear signal that stricter limits were being
imposed upon indigenization.
This turn disappointed Republican leaderships, especially in Ukraine, since
at the beginning they had supported Stalin because they hoped that rapid
industrialization and urbanization would allow them to conquer their “alien”
cities. Their disappointment was compounded by Stalin’s 1931 appropriation
of Russian nationalist rhetoric to stem the crisis his policies had provoked,
and by the fierceness of the confrontation in the countryside involving state
peasants and nomads.
Tragedy struck first in Kazakhstan, where in 1931 Moscow’s decision to use
local herds to feed Slavic cities ruined an indigenous society already weakened
by repeated assaults, precipitating a famine that was to wipe out onethird
of the local population and to uproot the traditional Kazakh way of life.
In Ukraine, the confrontation between state and villages grew, and in the
spring of 1932 local famines appeared. Ukrainian leaders questioned
Moscow’s policies and asked for help, but were reminded that state needs
came first. In the fall, after Stalin convinced himself that there was a risk of
“losing Ukraine,” whose party he deemed penetrated by nationalism, a
decision was taken to use hunger to force peasants to swallow collectivization,
and to simultaneously reverse indigenization policies, arresting thousands
of its cadres and intellectuals, and making the alphabet and the lexicon
closer to the Russian one.
...
The confrontation with national communism, and Stalin’s growing perception
of national origins as a security concern (in 1934–36 border areas were
cleansed accordingly), is the background of the rehabilitation of Great
Russian nationalism and of the tsarist past. In 1935 Russians were declared
to be the elder brother in the Soviet fraternity of peoples, while the tsars’
state-building activities started to be praised. Yet, especially in the north and
in the east, nation-building policies were still enforced, even though it was
made clear that local cultures had to be relegated to folklore, and that
modernity, and the world, could be reached only through Russia and
Moscow.
...
Communism, Nations and Nationalism
Andrea Graziosi
The Cambridge History of Communism, vol 1
Home
by Ferenc Puskás Mon Dec 10, 2018 10:04 pm
Da se razumemo - nemam ništa protiv, ovo nije kritika. I ja danas mislim da je to bila najbolja opcija, samo bez meltingpotisanja.
