The National and Colonial Question at the First Congress of Eastern Peoples

Bakù, September 1920

The Marxist Analysis of the National and Colonial Question

Marxist methodology in the 19^th century had acknowledged the participation of the workers’ parties of western Europe in alliances with revolutionary nationalist parties over a period which came to a close with the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871: “Class rule is now no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are as one against the proletariat!” wrote Marx in the 1871 Address of the General Council of the International Workers’ Association. “The support given to the democratic and independence movements was logical in the first half of the 19^th century, on the terrain of insurrection. In the article “Pressione ‘razziale’ del contadiname, pressione classista dei popoli colorati” (“‘Racial’ Pressure of the Peasantry, Classist pressure of the Coloured Peoples”) published in Il Programma Comunista, no.14, 1953, we wrote: “This fundamental Marxist position still holds good in the East today, as it did in Russia before 1917”.

The revolutionary period of 1905‑17 would open the national and anti‑colonial cycle in the East and pose the question of what assistance should be given to these bourgeois movements by the communist proletariat.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 had had profound repercussions throughout the East, from Turkey to Persia, from China to India, since it had become possible afterwards for the peoples violently oppressed by the Western imperialist bourgeoisies to rebel and cast off the yoke of brutal exploitation they had been subjected to. After it had engulfed Germany, Hungary, Finland and Italy, the powerful revolutionary wave that began in 1917, following the massacres of the First World War, needed to spread beyond the Muslim regions of the ex‑Russian empire and the Middle East to the peoples of Eastern Asia. The question was, would the latter, composed for the most part of peasants crushed under the weight of mainly English imperialism, also make moves to link up with the Third International and the World Revolution?

In his Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International, delivered at the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in revolutionary Moscow in the month of July 1920, Lenin declared, “The imperialist war has helped the revolution: the bourgeoisie has levied soldiers from the colonies, from the backward countries, from the most distant regions and made them participate in this imperialist war. The British bourgeoisie impressed on the soldiers from India that it was the duty of the Indian peasants to defend Great Britain against Germany; the French bourgeoisie impressed on soldiers from its African colonies that it was their duty to defend France (…) The imperialist war has drawn the dependent peoples into world history. And one of the most important tasks now confronting us is to consider how the foundation‑stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement can be laid in the non‑capitalist countries”.

The question was still on the agenda after the Second World War. In the Filo del Tempo article from 1953 cited above, it was stated that the time had come – with war in Indochina since 1946 and the ending of the Korean War – to focus our attention on two questions which were intimately connected, namely the agrarian, and the national and colonial questions, basing ourselves on the results established by Marx and Engels and revived by Lenin, and on the fundamental texts written in the years 1920‑1926 by the left opposition in the International and by the Communist Party of Italy.

That article pointed out that “What must be understood is this: in given geographical areas and historical phases, precisely identified in the general theory of historical development (…) it often happens that an attack by a mass of poor peasant farmers against the landed proprietors accelerates the bourgeois revolution and frees modern productive forces from historical chains, the sole precondition for subsequent workers’ struggle and demands”. The main thing is to define these movements as having a democratic, capitalist aim and therefore bourgeois and not proletarian in form. It is a matter of grasping the historical significance of events: “Although it is difficult, looking to give a hand to the bourgeoisie, without seeing things through their eyes”.

The International Situation

In January 1918, with the First World War still underway, the white armies supported by the Germans ferociously suppressed the revolution in Finland, leaving thousands dead. The Entente organized an embargo against the new Russian state and some British detachments of the Army of the East started to march on the oilfields of Bakù, which had been proving so profitable for Shell, the Anglo‑Dutch oil company. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed a separate peace with Germany, the Treaty of Brest‑Litovsk, which restored to the Ottoman Empire territories that Russia had occupied in 1878, namely the Russian part of Armenia, and abandoned the Ukraine to German troops, who starved the peasantry and deprived Russia of its grain supplies. From April 1918 the British and French intervened in the North and South of the country to counter the German occupation. Austrian troops occupied Odessa and the Black Sea, and the Japanese disembarked at Vladivostok. Ottoman troops penetrated the Caucasus to attack Armenian forces, which had been joined by those of Georgia and Azerbaijan, using the pretext of defending the Azeri (ethnic Turks) against the Armenians. Armenia, Azerbajan and Georgia, which had called for German protection, proclaimed their independence in May 1918. The Russian Civil War would continue until 1922, at the cost of millions of deaths.

Polish troops would also harass the new Soviet State

The part of the Caucasus that had been within tsarist Russia became the new zone of conflict. This mountainous region, whose highest peaks reach over 5,000 metres, is roughly 1,200 km long and around 600 km wide. It separates the Black Sea from the Caspian Sea, and Europe from Asia and the Middle East. Over the course of history it had always been a busy intersection and also a place of refuge for many peoples put to flight by invasions. In prehistory the peoples moving out of Africa into Europe and into the rest of the world crossed through it. The territory is composed of a mosaic of peoples grouped into three main families (the Caucasian, which is the oldest; the indo‑European; the Turco‑Tartar, originally from the Asiatic Steppes). A great variety of languages (43) and religions are to be found there. Given its strategic position to the south of Russia, along with its substantial gas and oil resources, the region is unable to escape the disputes between the imperialist states. The Allies therefore tried to get their hands on it.

The Middle East, as it is currently structured, came into being after the First World War and the arbitrary carving up of the Ottoman Empire by the two main imperialist powers in the area, Great Britain and France. Immediately after the new states were founded rebellions broke out. By July 1919 the Syrian National Congress was already demanding a unitary state. Strikes by railwaymen took place and hotbeds of nationalist discontent flared up in various countries in the region between 1919 and 1924: Egypt, Syria and Libya. Arab revolts against the British, often led by Shiite clerics, were repeated in 1922 and 1924 in Syria and Palestine, and there were anti‑Zionist revolts, such as in Jaffa in 1921 in response to the artificial divisions imposed by the so‑called Mandates. All these movements were influenced by the Russian Revolution and the nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey.

Indeed, Turkey only avoided the dismemberment foreseen by the infamous Treaty of Sèvres thanks to the energy and resolve of the Turkish nationalists, backed by the predominantly peasant population, which rallied behind the hero of Gallipoli in prosecuting a ferocious civil war to secure the country’s independence. To begin with Mustafa Kemal ruthlessly pushed the Armenians back over the border. The Bolshevik troops helped him because the Armenian Republic, founded by the Entente, was serving as a base for dangerous counter-revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik forces. The Kemalist formations then turned on the Kurds, inflicting heavy losses. Then they liberated Cilicia in the south from French troops and central Anatolia from the Italians. Finally, they attacked the troops occupying Constantinople, by now reduced to a few thousand men.

In 1920 the situation began to deteriorate for the new communist state. In a speech at the 9th Conference of the RCP on 22 September 1920, as the Red Army approached Warsaw, Lenin declared: “ Poland, the last anti-Bolshevik stronghold fully controlled by the Entente, is such an important element in this system that when the Red Army threatened that stronghold the entire structure was shaken. The Soviet Republic has become a major factor in world politics. The new situation which has arisen has, in the first place, revealed the tremendously significant fact that the bourgeoisie of the Entente-oppressed countries is in the main for us, and these countries contain seventy per cent of the world’s population. During 1919‑20 the entire English and French news services and colonial press evoked the “Communist Peril”.

1920, Apogee of the Bolshevik Revolutionary Movement

In March 1920 Lenin took stock of the Revolutionary movement in the West. In the Speech at a Meeting of the Moscow Soviet in Celebration of the First Anniversary of the Third International (March 6, 1920) we read:

“A year has passed since the founding of the Communist International. During that year the International has been successful beyond all expectations (…) In the early days of the revolution many hoped the socialist revolution would break out in Western Europe immediately after the imperialist war; at the time when the masses were armed there could have been a successful revolution in some of the Western countries as well. It could have taken place, had it not been for the split within the proletariat of Western Europe being deeper and the treachery of the former socialist leaders greater than had been imagined (…) Had the [Second] International not been in the hands of traitors who worked to save the bourgeoisie at the critical moment, there would have been many chances of a speedy revolution in many belligerent countries as soon as the war ended and also in some neutral countries, where the people were armed; then the outcome would have been different.

“Things did not turn out that way, revolution did not succeed so quickly, and it now has to follow the whole path of development that we began even before the first revolution, before 1905; for it was only due to more than ten years having passed before 1917 that we were capable of leading the proletariat.

“What happened in 1905 was, so to speak, a rehearsal for the revolution, and it was partly because of this that we in Russia succeeded in using the moment of the collapse of the imperialist war for the proletariat to seize power. Owing to historical developments, owing to the utter rottenness of the autocracy, we were able to begin the revolution with ease; but the easier it was to begin it the harder it has been for this solitary country to continue it, and with the experience of this year behind us we can say to ourselves that in other countries, where the workers are more developed, where there is more industry, where the workers are far more numerous, the revolution has developed more slowly. It has taken our path, but at a much slower pace. The workers are continuing this slow development, paving the way for the proletarian victory which is advancing with undoubtedly greater speed than was the case with us”.

1920‑21 were the years in which the communist parties adhering to the 3^rd International were formed, and one of the fundamental duties of the C.I. was to define clearly the conditions of admission, in such a way as to eliminate the parties, groups and fractions that wanted to join the International for reasons of social-opportunism, or for electoral ends (as in the case of the French and German right). And the Asian world, where tensions were running high, certainly wasn’t being left behind.

The Theses of the Second Congress

“This was revolutionary Russia’s broad outlook from the very beginning: alliance, with the Soviet State, on the one hand of the working class in the western countries, on the other of the oppressed peoples of colour, to overthrow capitalist imperialism (…) In September 1920, therefore between the Second and Third Congresses of the 3^rd International, firmly anchored in the directives of revolutionary Marxism, a congress of the peoples of the East took place at Bakù. Almost two thousand delegates attended, ranging from China to Egypt, from Persia to Libya” (Oriente, “Prometeo”, no.2, 1951).

It was abundantly clear to the Bolsheviks that the western bourgeoisie’s capacity to resist was based on the blatant exploitation of the colonial peoples, allowing them to extort the enormous riches which they could use to buy off the European workers’ aristocracy. From the military point of view the movements in the colonies could engage the imperial powers and contribute to loosening their vice‑like grip on the revolutionary citadel. A question which presented itself to revolutionaries was, therefore, what tactical stance should the proletariat in the colonies adopt towards its nationalist bourgeoisie?

(To Be Continued)