The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 7)

56 – The Russian National Question

Concerning Lenin’s contribution to the April Conference (April 24-29, 1917; 7-12 May European calendar), there is still the national question to be considered. We have the text of the resolution that Lenin proposed, and a partial view of the ideas within it in a pamphlet dated 10 April (immediately after the April 4 theses which we discussed earlier). Using another incomplete publication as our source we can reconstruct an outline of the discussion.

According to that source the principal merit for setting out the national question goes to Stalin, who made the official speech.

It is therefore possible that Stalin had understood enough to retract the policy he had pursued earlier towards the bourgeois provisional government and the opportunist parties in the Soviets. Be that as it may, the decisive intervention that shaped the conference’s conclusions was made by Lenin.

It is undoubtedly correct to say that the nationalities oppressed by tsarism (as the old saying went, a hundred races and a hundred languages under one State and one tsar) played a massive part in the struggle taken up in 1917 to lay the basis of a new power, its passing to a new class. The outcome of the revolution depended, in large part, on knowing whether the proletariat would manage to draw the oppressed nationalities behind the laboring masses. That is a fact: one need only think of Poland, where vicious Tsarist pogroms had massacred Polish and Jewish nationals; and hatred there was directed not only against the Tsar but against Petrograd, against the Russian race, which was historically dominant within the empire. Another matter of decisive historical importance is that the bourgeois provisional government was prepared to continue the old policy of throttling and oppressing the different nationalities: it was repressing national movements, and dissolving organizations of the Diet of Finland type. For the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, confronted with a war situation in which vast zones of the ex-empire were in the hands of the German foreigner, the fact of the matter is that the main slogan was still “Russia one and indivisible”, just as under the tsar when the country was even deemed Holy.

No less historic is the fact that it was the Bolsheviks alone who took a stand against this feudal slogan, openly declaring that the peoples of the oppressed nations had the right to decide their destiny. The popular text, which here and there we have paraphrased, displays little rigor when it attributes this right to the “workers”, when actually the formula refers specifically to the peoples.

It is said, then, that it was Stalin who elaborated with Lenin the principles of the Bolshevik national policy, and that in his report he unmasked the government’s policy of thievery and pitilessly denounced the petty-bourgeois conciliators clinging on to the bourgeoisie’s coat tails. Well, as is well known, the question of whether or not a directive’s paternity is ascribed to the names of illustrious men is not something we find particularly pressing; and as to the point he made, we will talk about Stalin’s contributions to the national question in general (see our Race and Nation in the Marxist Theory). What is certain is that the sudden shift in April, to opposing the provisional Government and the opportunists in the Soviets, affected the national question just as it did the issues of war and peace; the attitude to the provisional government and the dualism of powers; and the economic and agrarian measures and so on. Anyone who had seen it as correct about the bourgeoisie’s and petty-bourgeoisie’s reactionary policy towards the nationalities as correct would necessarily have viewed all of it as correct, and not steered the conference we are discussing towards an attitude of “benevolent expectation” towards the government until the constituent assembly had taken place, and towards a merger with the Mensheviks!

57 – Two Conflicting Positions

They can be assumed to be the points attributed to Stalin, but we find them in the resolution written up by Lenin as follows: a) recognition of the right of the peoples to secede (what does it mean to apply this to workers? nothing); b) for the peoples gathered under a given State, regional autonomy; c) for the national minorities, special laws that guarantee their free development; d) for the proletarians of all of the nationalities under a given State, one indivisible proletarian organization, and one party.

Now at this point, without dialectics to assist, one doesn’t get very far, just as the Bolshevik left back then didn’t get very far. Is this the solution of the national question for a communist society? Certainly not. It is the dialectical solution that follows from a bourgeois democratic revolution. But back in 1917, during a phase of conquering, plundering, imperialist capitalism, overseas and in Europe, the bourgeoisie of every country and especially in Russia was totally incapable of remaining faithful to all the literary incense (rather than historically concrete actions) burnt in ’89 and ’48 to the autonomy of small nations and for their liberation (which, when it did happen, was due to insurrections and wars of independence, not rubber stamping from on high).

Such a program, like many of those of an agrarian and urban social nature which are sub-socialist and still democratic-bourgeois, can be adopted and put into effect only by a proletarian power which takes control of the anti-feudal revolutionary process: the key to the entire problem always lies there, in the previous theorizations of the party, in the lessons of history duly interpreted from 1900 to the present day, and linked to what was established as regards theory and policy by Marx back in 1848, for example in relation to the classic question of Poland, which we have covered in great depth.

But Piatakov (a Marxist not to be written off), supported by others who attended the conference, gave another report on the national question. They eventually did away with Piatakov, and we are making use of the reference we have. He would state that in an era in which the world economy had established indissoluble links between many countries, the national State constitutes a historical stage which has ended: “The call for independence belongs to a historical epoch that has already passed”, he said, “it is reactionary because it wishes to make history go backwards. Setting out from an analysis of the new age, the age of imperialism, we say right now that we cannot conceive of a struggle for socialism that diverges from that conducted under the slogan “Down with frontiers”, a struggle that aims to suppress all frontiers between nations and States”.

58 – Lenin’s Confutation of the “Lefts”

We will report what was attributed to Lenin because it contains a high value concept, not because we want to put Piatakov down, as those who write in a “marketing” vein might want to do. We know plenty of comrades who reason as we have Piatakov talking here, good ones as well, both now and in the past. We also sang the lines which made old Turati blush: “I confini scellerati cancelliam dagli emisferi” – let us wipe unholy frontiers from the hemispheres – nor do we regret having sung them or… having hit a wrong note. But singing is one thing, deducing in a Marxist way is another. We certainly predict that the erasure will come to pass, along with an international culture and language, and the global fusion of the human races, but in following the historical course we carefully avoid serving it up as poetic and lyrical confections.

Lenin as polemicist didn’t use quack cures, and he would have probably spoken as it appears here: “The method of socialist revolution under the slogan “Down with frontiers” is all muddled up. (…) What does the “method” of socialist revolution under the slogan “Down with frontiers” mean? We MAINTAIN THAT THE STATE IS NECESSARY, AND A STATE PRESUPPOSES FRONTIERS (…) One must be mad to continue Tsar Nicholas’s policy [which was, we suppose Vladimir would have added, down with any frontier which dares to cut across the territory of my Holy Crown] … The slogan “Down with frontiers” will be the suitable only when the socialist revolution has become a reality, instead of a method…”

Let us pause over the words we put in capital letters. They are great. Why did the giant Lenin say them at this felicitous moment? Perhaps it was the giant Engels, who theorized in a crystalline phrase: two elements define the State: a definite territory, and armed class power. Or perhaps the giant Marx said them when he was on theoretical terrain and taking on the mantle of authoritarian and accepting the term, he used them to pour scorn on the libertarian anarchists of 1870, who were enlightening the cosmos and history with their: down with God, Bosses and the State. Or maybe it was some normal person like one of us lot, from the moment when, through no merit of our own, at a certain juncture in our lives, the idea enters our head (“gli entro’ nelle chiocche”), never to abandon it. Le chiocche [in Neapolitan dialect] are the cerebral hemispheres, the brains, the cortex; or whatever you like of the natural nut.

59 – The Central Question: the State

Bourgeois culture still poses the question as follows: Capitalism means private economy, socialism means State. For a while nine out of ten socialists following this trend sought to exalt the State, and if in pursuit of the usual didactic purpose we just take Italy for a moment, it was well-known there that the anarchists “were against the State”, and that the Marxist socialists (ouch!) were for conquering the State, under the unfortunate formulation of the “public powers”.

Did we, who were children at the time of the Genoa Congress in 1892, need to read State and Revolution in 1919 in order to tackle the question? It was actually quite sufficient to read a couple of Marx and Engels’ well-known and oft quoted paragraphs, acquirable even fourth hand, and with no need to clothe ourselves in erudition.

Marxism is against the State in general and against the bourgeois State in particular. The society that is in its historical program, since it is without classes, is without a State. But Marxism foresees that the State will serve as a transitory revolutionary instrument precisely in order to destroy the present ruling class, after the revolution has destroyed the present State.

Marxism conducts the struggle against the bourgeois State, which can only be overthrown by violent means. But in previous historical stages Marxism foresees the utilization of this same State to destroy the feudal State, and in given sectors to hit the private owners of capital with its detoxicated nationalizations. In given periods it foresees entering the organs of the bourgeois State firstly to ‘stimulate’ it, then to ‘sabotage’ it, and at a certain point it has to prepare to abandon this terrain for that of insurrection and the taking of power.

Anecdotal evidence can sometimes make explaining things easier. In 1908 the Marxists in Italy began to break the monopoly on revolutionary action held by the anarchists and syndicalists of the then a la mode Sorelian type, who were extremist in words but in substance petty bourgeois; meanwhile it stigmatized the reformist wing of socialism. Attaining a certain notoriety there was the “teachers’ left”, with solid party militants, namely comrades Dini, Capodivacca and others, who pioneered trade union agitation among the teachers. For the deputy and lawyer Turati: the Dini, the Ciarlatini and other similar “omini” [little men]. For the deputy and lawyer Turati (certainly no idiot even as regards Marxism, and along with him Treves and others) a Marxist without a degree was inconceivable.

In fact the school master Ciarlantini, at the 1912 Reggio Emilia congress dominated by Mussolini as standard bearer of the left, would make a speech – maybe not understood by all but commendable none the less – on the subject of socialism against the State for Marxist reasons rather than anarcho-Sorelian ones.

The entire question back then revolved around running for election as intransigents, rather than as part of the dreadful popular blocs, which was a way of getting proletarians and bourgeois to collaborate. Still very young when we fought for this at the time, we were nevertheless very clear that the proletarian class needed to remain separate not in order to penetrate the parliamentary State, but to destroy it by revolutionary means.

In any case, returning to Lenin, he along with Marx and Engels, and us in the stalls, established that we need the State, and in certain cases the post-feudal State of whatever type, including for over a century the bourgeois ones as well. Every time that this historical machine that is the State is of service to us, of service to us is its political and military weapons, even police ones, along with a precisely circumscribed territory as well: we will also need the frontiers.

When feudalism is no more, when the bourgeoisie is no more and when classes are no more or rather no more class forms of economy and production, that is, when there are no more proletarians, then, as Engels said, we will get rid of the State and send it to the scrapyard and after the last States are got rid of, only then will the last frontiers fall.

Certainly not as soon as we have taken power in a big, modern capitalist country; much less after taking power in feudal Russia in 1917. And so, said Lenin to Piatakov, you tell me nothing with the phrase ‘no more frontiers!’ You must tell me: are they the frontiers of the Romanov territory, or somewhere else? And which ones are they?

The question of April 1917 is still a burning one. At the moment the French bourgeoisie is screaming that black African Algeria is within the frontiers of its “République une et indivisible”. Something to throw in the face of the even more centralist Soviet republic is that it is subjugating peoples behind a curtain that is even longer than Nicholas’s Holy one.

For Marxism the resolution of such burning issues cannot be based on Piatakov’s passionate but naïve appeal. Much more is required, when one considers the torrents of historical energy needed to shift frontiers, and how little the workers’ International seems to possess, which is supposed to wipe them, like chalk from a blackboard, from the spherical surface of the planet.

60 – The Usual Historical Kitchen

The balance sheet of this dispute on the national question is made by the cominformists in the usual way. “What united L. Kamenev and I. Piatakov [with not a hint that Kamenev and Stalin, a bit before and a bit after April, supported the same line!] was their lack of understanding of the tasks of the revolution and it drew the party into the Menshevik swamp [and Stalin who had drawn up, and then withdrawn, the motion on unification with them, what was he doing?]; Piatakov, without openly declaring himself [all those who are not in the inner sanctum today have always been, by the same yardstick, Mephistophelian imitators!] against Lenin’s theses, was, in practice, condemning the revolution to isolation and defeat. The party was fighting on two fronts: against the opportunist opposition on the right and against the left opposition”. And it goes on to repeat that the main questions of the conference were covered in the reports given by Stalin and Lenin, in order to suppress, not frontiers like the unfortunate Piatakov, but the memory, any memory of the fact that back then the right opposition was Stalin; as the incontrovertible data and evidence we have brought forward bears out.

Anyhow, the left opposition would have said this: If we take total revolutionary power in Moscow and Petrograd, we would be mad to let go of Warsaw, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Baku, Batum and so on: it would be a gift to the counter-revolution made in the name of our school’s respect for the theory of the “right to separate”. Which race or nationality did Stalin ever give up, orthodox then against left errors, to conform with the policy on the national question? It was the ups and downs of war that caused free bourgeois Finland to rise, still respected to this day, and free Poland also, which, with Hitler’s help, was resolutely gobbled up in 1940.

It is therefore necessary return to Lenin’s original text, resolute on this point more than ever.

First though we should highlight that not all the cooks in that kitchen were always in unison. The famous Official History of the Party says that the speaker on the national question, Stalin, had together with Lenin elaborated, etc, etc; then it reports the resolution, leading one to believe that it was written by the speaker Stalin, as you would. But in Lenin’s Selected Works edited in Moscow, there appears the same resolution, published in Soldatskaia Pravda of 3 May 1917, as indicated, and included in the volume: Writings of 1917 by Lenin, Vol.1, pp.352-353, ed.1937. Which of the two is the truth?

61 – Lenin and the Question of Nationalities

A first brief formulation, and a very good one, appears in the pamphlet which was written immediately after the 4 April Theses. The chapter on the agrarian and national questions is excellent also on the first question as well: it insists on the division between the rural Soviet of wage-earning agricultural laborers and semi-proletarians (those who, let it be said for the hundredth time, have a parcel of land, but who cannot earn their living from it and have to work for a daily wage here and there for other larger enterprises) and the generic Soviet of peasant farmers, as opposed to “the honeyed petty-bourgeois talk of the populists regarding the peasants in general, which will serve as a shield for the deception of the propertyless mass by the wealthy peasants, who are merely a variety of capitalists”. In what respect, therefore, does populism, slapped down back then, differ from today’s agrarian policy of the cominformists, where, in Italy for instance, they even flirt with the big tenant farmers?!

Lenin asked, then, that every estate confiscated from the landowners (a confiscation the opportunists wanted postponed until … the constituent assembly had been held) be transformed into a large model farm controlled by the Soviets. And he added: “In order to counteract the petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and the policy prevailing among the Socialist-Revolutionaries, particularly the idle talk about “subsistence” standards or “labor” standards, “socialization of the land”, etc., the party of the proletariat must make it clear that small-scale farming under commodity production cannot [Lenin’s italics] save mankind from poverty and oppression”.

Repeating yet again that neither Christian Democrats nor “communists” in Italy appear to be in the least interested in pursuing such an objective, preferring instead to hatch clutches of sterile, poverty-stricken family farms, spelling the death knell as much for squalid Basilicata as for magnificent Sicily, we’ll now get back to the national question: in fact we’ll quote Lenin on the subject in full (Point 14 in the pamphlet):

“As regards the national question, the proletarian party first of all must advocate the proclamation and immediate realization of complete freedom of secession from Russia for all of the nations and peoples who were oppressed by tsarism, or who were forcibly joined to, or forcibly kept within the boundaries of, the State, i.e., annexed.

“All statements, declarations and manifestos concerning the renunciation of annexations that are not accompanied by the realization of the right of secession in practice, are nothing but bourgeois deceptions of the people, or else pious, petty bourgeois wishes.

“The proletarian party strives to create a State [you hear!] which is as large as possible, because this is to the advantage of the workers; it strives to draw nations closer together and bring about their further fusion, but it desires to achieve this aim not by violence, but exclusively through a free fraternal union of the workers and the working people of all nations.

“The more democratic the Russian republic, and the more successfully it organizes itself into a Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the more powerful will be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of all nations.

“Complete freedom of secession, the broadest local (and national) autonomy, and elaborate guarantees of the rights of national minorities – this is the program of the revolutionary proletariat”.

62 – The Conference Resolution

The great historical questions that are presented here, the perspective of which causes discomfort to no few comrades, can be followed better on the basis of the developed resolution. Naturally how the problem is framed changes.

We are (a) under a regime in the feudal period or worse under one that is still Asiatic-depotic? We give a completely free hand to the movements for national liberty, which in the famous theses of 1920 at the 2^nd Congress of the Communist International (accepted by the Italian left, which fiercely disagreed with the application of those tactics in the countries of advanced capitalism) there is discussion about as to whether they should be defined as democratic-bourgeois or national revolutionary. Communist and Marxist gullets were invited to swallow both terms, dished up with the following thankless presentation: in given places, times and social modes, if you can get your hands on guns, it is okay to unite not only with the non-proletarian masses, but with the bourgeoisie themselves. That’s it.

Or are we instead (b) on the morrow of the fall of feudalism and in a republic led by the bourgeoisie which has decided not to deal with the war and land questions? It is necessary to force it to free the nations trapped within the ex-feudal State, and which want to separate. In practical terms this means that the question will not be posed in a “pan-Russian” consultation, but rather in peripheral national consultations.

We are (c) for moving forward, not to a socialist society, but to a socialist republic which bases its power on the Councils of Workers and Peasants? Well, we would be consistent, in the expectation of higher social forms and above all the international revolution, if we proclaimed that the Soviets of the nationalities were free to decide whether or not to separate from the one State.

We mention in advance that the question is not the same as republics united in a federation, and hence not the same as the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, in its day, either, insofar as almost all of the nations and races in play are represented as a minority, and the fact that the various federated and autonomous republics do not correspond, and nor could they, to uniform languages and races.

After the conquest of power, we will maintain the principle of separation, but civil and military wars will have a bearing on its implementation, or rather the wars with States who have sent in counter-revolutionary forces, variously operating in all of the regions of the immense territory.

At a certain point the great battle of 1920 at the gates of Warsaw would determine a major turning point, more than a Polish workers’ uprising would do, and the decision that a Polish National Soviet on the “frontiers” would be proclaimed.

63 – Despotism and Imperialism

The passing of the resolution is a historic moment. “The policy of national oppression, inherited from the autocracy and monarchy, is maintained by the landowners, capitalists, and petty bourgeoisie in order to protect their class privileges and to cause disunity among the workers of the various nationalities. Modern imperialism, which increases the tendency to subjugate weaker nations, is a new factor intensifying national oppression”.

The resolution refers back to the historic Marxist thesis which states that in order for the capitalist form of economy to fully develop, and for European society as a whole to be released from the bonds of feudalism, a necessary requirement, to be brought about by means of internal insurrections and national wars, was for States to organize on the basis of a nationality; it was necessary (and couldn’t be otherwise) to liquidate all the old transcontinental empires, and if Vienna’s, Berlin‘s and Constantinople’s were reluctant to die, Petrograd’s was even more so.

If therefore the rise of the capitalist mode of production within the European zone is linked to the free organization of the nationalities, something in which proletarians have a direct interest, in a later phase, according to Lenin, it becomes increasingly oppressive. The struggle for overseas and extra continental markets leads to powerful deployments of the military forces of the State and to continuous wars driven by competition, with the aim of exerting political domination over the countries of other continents. When in the great wars the imperialist powers fight to rob each other of their colonies and possessions, also those with a fully developed and democratic capitalism are keen to make conquests that are detrimental to the interests of other European countries and, depending on the outcomes of the wars, the small countries and peoples pass from one hand to the other.

The ideology of European national liberation and liberation in general comes to be replaced by the idea of spreading modern civilization: this, in an early stage, is employed to justify the subjection, enslavement and even the destruction of peoples and races of color, and then takes the form of demands, in the metropolis, for contested frontier provinces that lie in crucial nerve centers, i.e., Alsace Lorraine, Venezia Giulia, the Danzig region, the Sudetenland, the Balkans. From these struggles there arises the solidarity of socialist opportunism with imperialist capitalism, and the epidemic of defencism is triggered, with each side concealing their thirst for conquest under phrases about saving their own developed civilization from the threat of aggression.

That same socialism which professed to be against all annexations became the supporter of all wars. If one allows for a moment the sophism that peoples with advanced modes of production have “the right” to govern the less advanced ones, a sophism every European country has been guilty of invoking, the bourgeois idea of freedom of peoples and equality of nations, historically devoid of meaning, becomes one of oppression and conquest.

Having broken at the same time with Tsarism allied in Europe with national and class oppression of all kinds, and with the opportunism of 1914 which consecrated the proletariat paying homage to all bourgeois wars, the Russian revolution could not but adopt the policy of ending wars of expansion and conquest and offering freedom to those countries which had been included in the Russian State as a result of violent conquests.

64 – Separation of States

In his preliminary remarks Lenin points out that a bourgeois republic, with a fully developed democracy, can consent to different peoples and languages coexisting, without one predominating over the other; clearly he is referring to Switzerland, where there is not one but three official languages. And he adds: “The right of all the nations forming part of Russia freely to secede and form independent States must be recognised”. He says that any other policy would foment national hatred and sabotage internationalist proletarian solidarity. He cites the case of Finland and its conflict with the bourgeois Government in Petrograd, and asserts that Finland, having thrown off the yoke of Tsarism, must be allowed to secede.

If separation from the State is not achieved, the party must support broad regional autonomy and the abolition of a compulsory official language, calling for the new constitution to bring an end to national privileges or any violation of the rights of national minorities.,

Readers will recall in the report at Trieste on the Factors of Race and Nation the part dedicated to Stalin’s writings on linguistics: the theories according to which a class revolution does not interrupt the historical function of the national language referred to the Russian language, which had become de facto language of the Soviet republic and of the entire union. Our critique of this notion was useful in proving that this historical requirement of one national language was further proof of the bourgeois character the revolution had assumed, and that it was pointless to get tied up in theoretical knots to justify this requirement on a Marxist level. So, what happened to the opposing claim that the State, first of all, should propose to the national minorities that they secede, and if not, that they be granted a polylingual administration along Swiss lines? Later on we will return to this issue and consider if the massive State structure in present day Russia does have one national language, legally and actually, as this is one of the obscure features that define an imperialist structure.

65 – Against “Cultural” Autonomy

It is here that we come on to the famous point on which Stalin, back in 1913, had had to collaborate with Lenin on the national question, at cross purposes with the position taken by Austrian social democracy in the pre-war period; a point which Lenin reaffirms in 1917. It was the proposal of the socialists of the “mosaic State” of the Habsburgs. They conceded that the administration of the State, politically and bureaucratically, should be unitary as regards finance, the army and so on, (apart from the relation of parity between Austria and Hungary, united under the crown) and proposed that to all of the subordinate peoples: Slavs, Ottomans, Latins, there should be conceded “the removal of affairs concerning public instruction and similar matters from the competence of the central State, in order for to be placed in the hands of sui generis national Diets” without other powers. This creates artificial division, Lenin now adds, between the workers living in the same locality, or even in the same industrial enterprise, by reinforcing their link with the bourgeois cultures of individual nations, whereas the aim of the Socialists is to “reinforce the international culture of the world proletariat”.

In the study undertaken by the young Stalin, which impressed Lenin and his wife, was precisely developed the idea that the thesis of autonomy in schools, university and in cultural matters was right-wing and opportunist, whereas the revolutionary thesis was the separation of the Austro-Hungarian State from the Italian, Slovenian, Croatian, Ottoman, Serbian, Rumanian, Czech and Slovakian provinces, the fracturing of that State, even if that was not necessarily the task of a socialist revolution – which on the contrary would have been able to bring those people together on a very different plane – but of a bourgeois revolution and of a war settlement, as the first European war was for Austria, as the earlier Balkan one had been for the Ottoman empire.

This thesis is consistent with the Marxist view on the national questions, which with ample elaborations we showed cannot be reduced to the negation of nationalities as a present-day historical fact, and at the time it was strongly defended. But whereas back in 1917 Lenin committed the Russian Revolution to it, which wasn’t a national rebellion, but the historical overthrowing of a State which held many nationalities trapped in its web, we might well ask how that thesis developed in subsequent years, and what type of State, as regards freedom of movement of nations and regions, the one in the U.S.S.R., constructed in Stalin’s name and appearing as a formidable monolithic block, actually is, whereas meanwhile Stalin claims responsibility for the tradition and the merit of being a national super-autonomist. To remain consistent with Lenin’s thinking the next step for Russia, to be able to overcome serfdom and national fragmentation, could only be taken in association with the European proletarian revolution. Given that this didn’t happen, Russia arranged itself into a super-State, concentrated and unitary in its armed forces, both at home and abroad; the classic form of modern capitalism.

66 – Nations and Proletarian Organisations

Radical Marxists had always fought the formation of national parties within the same State, which professed to be socialist (Poland, Bohemia, etc.). In Russia the question, as to movements within the workers unions and Party organisation, which was already social democratic, was a burning one. Lenin had always supported one sole party throughout the Russian State. The question was particularly relevant to the Jewish Bund, a party which was Marxist in doctrine and known for its energetic revolutionary action. Accepted in Russian and international congresses, the Bund was however unwilling to merge with the socialist, then communist, party, which comprised indifferently militants of all nationalities in its ranks. Lenin clinched this point with the words: “The interests of the working class demand that the workers of all nationalities in Russia should have common proletarian organisations: political, trade union, co-operative educational institutions, and so forth. Only the merging of the workers of the various nationalities into such common organisations will make it possible for the proletariat to wage a successful struggle against international Capital and bourgeois nationalism”.

These final formulae place in their correct relationship the constant pursuit of internationalism, both in the proletarian movement and in the socialist organization of society in the future, and the struggle against the “immanent” nationalism of the bourgeoisie, with the historical solutions which in the great stages and great areas we are obliged to find and give to the questions of race and nation. What we have said at great length as regards the fundamental conference of April 1917, which maps out the entire trajectory of Russia’s revolution by strictly linking together the movement’s past and future, which for ease of exposition, too, is personified in Lenin, integrates historically what we developed regarding doctrine in the oft cited Trieste report, which comrades will recall unravelled the question of race and nation, in its historical application, up to the first great world war and within the confines of the central-western European zone, and it was left to the present work to apply the question to Russia, and to another one, presented orally in Florence in December 1953, to apply it to the East and to Asia.

Any justifiable elasticity, on the historical scale or related to global geography, is possible, that much is quite clear as far as Marxist doctrine is concerned, on condition that Lenin’s condition of one pluri-national organisation within each State is respected, and their union at an international level: in that Communist International which in the wake of the – monolingual – Stalinian declination, was liquidated in a way as rowdy as it was servile, and which will one day shall rise again, as One Communist Party, with sections in each State territory.

67 – Nationality and the West

Proof of the meagre internationalism of Graziadei, Serrati, Cachin and co. lay precisely in their lack of understanding the national question in the world that lay beyond the Urals and the Mediterranean, because that data was not that of the politics of the country they came from.

With the sole aim of rendering Lenin’s construct for Russia and the extra-European world more intelligible, a construct which was truly prophetic, and above all strictly orthodox in its Marxism, we will, yet again, fall back on the example of Italy, and ask ourselves if, and from when, it was right to say: where we are the racial and national question doesn’t exist; and therefore our party (but this would be correct if it was national!) is only concerned with class issues. Fine, but petty.

The Italian national bourgeois State was formed late, in 1861, on the back of the wars and insurrections of a young bourgeoisie, in which the proletariat fully participated. Although there arose a State of mixed races in the ethnographic sense, everything came together (and, along with the democratic tradition alla francese, that of Catholicism, of ecclesiastical internationalism) to settle the racial questions: Russians and even Germans were amazed when they heard us say we didn’t know if a citizen was Jewish or of a non-Catholic religion: the equality of the conditions of life was total not only legally but in fact and in custom.

Against a lay background such as this, for despite its lateness the capitalist economy appeared among us in its recent forms (it had very different traditions in the North and South, in Palermo and Milan) the class struggle of the proletariat rapidly took shape.

In 1911 the proletarian party rid itself of its last national prejudices: it loudly denounced the celebrations of the 50^th anniversary of unity, and at the same time broke off its alliance with the petty bourgeoisie against alleged reactionary strata, there being no more reactionary stratum than the petty bourgeoisie itself.

But stuck in the gullet of the bourgeoisie there still remained a negative, irredentist, national question. An honest radical bourgeois at the end of the century felt there would be a fourth war and he called it “la prova del fuoco”, the crucial test; and bourgeois Italy came out of the imperialist war well, but without the support of the proletariat, which was able to remain indifferent.

The socialist proletariat had provided good evidence (facilitated by history, rather than due to any inherent merit) for its anti-imperialist and anti-annexionist positions during the harsh African ventures at the end of the nineteenth century and in 1911-12; it had learnt to tarnish the thesis that corrupts many Marxists: that a war is just if it brings to a barbarous people modernizing and civilizing systems.

In a certain sense the Italian proletariat in 1918 found itself unencumbered by the national questions whether negative (irredentism) or positive (empire), as the bourgeoisie alone had been involved, and it felt ready, as regards its internal organisation, to proceed and give battle on the class front.

68 – Revolution with Europe

If that battle, which doesn’t require every glorious and inglorious episode to be gone into, was lost, it is due also to the struggles not having been correctly placed within an international framework, to an underestimation of the much better equipped imperialisms of England, France and Germany, which had pulled the carpet from under the feet of the European Revolution.

If a Russian revolution is unable to attain the peak of its cycle without a revolution in Europe, mainly because of its inadequate economic forms, an Italian revolution cannot, not because of all the usual rubbish about regions being depressed or backward, but because geographically events occurring in Italy become international matters; indeed, the bourgeois revolution itself only got underway because of the wars of systemization in Europe, in the West and East, which cleared the road of conservative obstacles. Whichever of the two imperial blocks into which Europe can be divided wins it can take charge in Italy, and in the past, and in the future, this country with its too many frontiers will share borders with both of the adversaries. The Italian militants, therefore, shouldn’t be too proud in being the first to overcome the evils of chauvinist opportunism. They should not say that due to their experience of politics on the domestic front they can declare the national question overcome, or that they can go on to delete those too many frontiers of theirs.

That won’t happen before the question of the ones in Europe has been settled, including the huge problem of the two Germanies: revolution alone can unite them, but the European revolution needs German unity, and a German workers’ dictatorship, whereas the prospect of that happening in England and France is more fragile, for various reasons.

It would be a really, stupid kind of national pride to refuse to acknowledge this point, and fail to see that we have to learn from the past revolution in Russia, and also from ones yet to happen in Asia, in order to break the cycle of the hundred and one conditions which, in endless succession, lie between us and socialism.

It wouldn’t be bad thing, having got back onto the subject, to mention a couple of other things about the national question in Russia in 1917.

The historical thesis that the provisional government composed of members of the bourgeoisie and social-opportunists, as well as keeping the war going, continued the tsarist directive of ruling over the whole of indivisible “Panrussia” and – typically – fought against the movements in the peripheral areas of a national-bourgeois type with repressive measures (whereas the Bolsheviks on the contrary adopted the position of disannexation with a view to achieving internationalist revolutionary understanding among the working classes), is a thesis that has been confirmed in a series of facts.

Ukraine (a third of the population of European Russia, a ninth of its territory). Petlyura and other bourgeois nationalists followed by the social-opportunists formed the Rada, which, when it called for self-determination, but not separation, came into conflict with the Petrograd government. Lenin considered such requests modest and affirmed that one shouldn’t “deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. Only unqualified recognition of this right makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one State”. In July an agreement was made between Petrograd and Kiev; but on August 4 it was revoked drastically and unilaterally by Petrograd.

Finland (population 3 per cent, territory 4 per cent). Having consented to the Diet on the basis of a previous tsarist constitution, after a conflict with it the provisional government dissolved it in July 1917. Lenin had written: “The tsars pursued a crude policy of annexation, bartering one nation for another by agreement with other monarchs (the partition of Poland, the deal with Napoleon over Finland, and so on), just like the landowners, who used to exchange peasant serfs. The bourgeoisie, on turning republican, is carrying on the same policy of annexation, only more subtly, less openly […] Workers, do not be influenced by the annexationist policy of the Provisional Government towards Finland, Kurland, and the Ukraine”.

Turkestan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan (territories partly in central Asia, population a seventh of European Russia). The Provisional Government governed them from the centre with the Tsar’s old bureaucratic apparatus, granted amnesties to the executioners of the national insurrections, and imposed the Russian language and schooling on these Muslim and Mongol peoples.

Poland. Here the provisional government made the grand gesture in February 1917 of publicizing the declaration of independence by Russian Poland. But the fact is the Germans had occupied it, and a year before it had proclaimed the same independence! Where Russian troops were in occupation of the territory, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists prevented any “disannexation”. Poland is the classic ‘test’ of the national vexata quaestio: and its function in that respect doesn’t start nor end here.

A note on language. On 29 March 1917 the Russian provisional government “ authorizes the use of all languages and all dialects in the documents of private societies, for teaching in private schools and in commercial literature”.

The 1918 constitution (which consecrates the independence of Finland, the Persian provinces, Armenia, and the right of national secession) includes education among the central people’s commissariats, sanctions the general right to free instruction, but doesn’t say anything about the use of the various languages.

The 1936 constitution (on which we will need to dwell later) states in article 121 that the right of the citizen to instruction is “in the mother tongue”.

The matter is left to the ministers of education of the federated republics (which are nonetheless not monolingual).

Therefore, there is no explicit reference either to one State language or to languages being considered equal under the law.

In practice that same Stalinian pamphlet on linguistics, which places the language factor (see the Trieste report on “Race and Nation”) outside of socio-economic determination and “politics”, erects a monumental pedestal to the classic literary historical Russian language, which is no longer considered the language of a nationality, but as a language of the State, because it is pluri-national.

A concept that is indissolubly linked to the historical phase in which the capitalist-bourgeois from of production dominates, if Marx is Marx.

Regarding this cycle, and in relation to our quotations from Marx on the Crimean War and the siege of Sebastopol, which appeared in that report: Voroshilov, over recent days in that very city, has glorified the heroic and patriotic resistance on the centenary of its defence. Holy Russia!