THE NATIONS OF RUSSIABy KLAUS MEHNERT

Irrespective of where we may standin the present war, we all hope thatin post-war Europe peace will be morestable than in the past. But, in orderto gain stability, any future organiza­tion of Europe will have to take twofactors into consideration: on the onehand, the necessity for a large-scaleeconomic co-operation which will haveto reach beyond national frontiers; onthe other, the powerful urge of theawakened peoples to live with theirfellow nationals as free men in nationsof their own. To find a solution thatwould do justice to both these objec­tives will be a task that no one willexpect to be easily accomplished.Nationalism in particular is deeplyingrained in the nature of man.

Most of the outstanding politicalissues of today are fairly well-knownthroughout tte world. But of thenational minority problems, which wereparticularly responsible for the out­break of the Great War in 1914 andagain of the present war (Sarajevo,Danzig), most people have only a veryhazy notion. Not many, for example,realize that almost half the populationof the Soviet Union (47.20/0 accordingto the census of 1926) consists of peo­ple who are not or do not considerthemselves Russians in the proper senseof the word, and that 88 differentnationalities of at least 10,000 mem­bers each are living within the USSR,:not counting many smaller groupswhich bring the total number to about150. (Of these the Ukrainians and theTurks are by far the largest.) As aresult many more nationalities areliving and many more languagesare spoken in Russia alone than in thewhole of Europe. Russia is the world'snationality problem number one. eventhough few people outside know this on

account of the silence which the SovietGovernment imposes upon its nationalminorities.

VOYAGE TO BASHKIRIA

After studying during a number ofyears the theoretical angle of the Bol­shevist nationalities policy I decided afew years ago to spend a monthamongst one national minority of Russia.I tried to find one that would beneither too big nor too small, neithertoo backward nor too advanced,neither too far from Moscow nor tooclose - in other words one that couldbe considered as typical of the rest. Ichose Bashkiria.

I even attempted to learn the lan­guage before I went on my expeditionand found a young Bashkir journalist inMoscow who was willing to teach it tome. I did not tell him right awaythat I was a foreign correspondent.The inhabitants of the USSR havelearned to avoid contacts with foreign­ers as much as possible, since thesehave often led to accusations of espio­nage, and I did not want to seare hima way. After the first three lessons,however, I casually mentioned that Iwas not a Soviet citizen. I must sayfor him that he managed to sit throughthat hour, but after that I never sawhim again.

The "Bashrespublika," as the Bolshe­viks call the Bashkirian Republic intheir fancy for abbreviations, is in­habited uy a branch of the Turkpeoples of which there are some twentyto thirty millions in the USSR. Theylive in the mountains and foothills ofthe Urals. On comfortable and leisurelysteamers I went down the Volga andup the Kama and Belaya rivers to the

82 THE XXth CENTURY

heart of Bashkiria. To travel on Rus­sian boats is always restful. They moveslowly through the endless countryside.Although there was nothing excitingto be seen, my eyes enjoyed the forestsred with autumn and the golden wheatfields on both banks. There were onlya few villages and stops on the way.While the sailors loaded or unloaded alittle cargo, we passengers ran ashoreto buy a boiled chicken, a pound ofbutter (with fingerprints), or a basketof apples from the Bashkir womenwho were sitting in dignified silencebehind their wares. Here and there Istayed for a day or two, visiting acollectivized village (kolklwz), chattingwi th the peasants, and sleeping in theirhuts.

In Ufa, the capital, the Bashkir Gov­ernment invited me to participate inthe maiden run of a train over thenewly completed ninety mile railroad toIshembayevo, where new oil fields werebeing developed. I went along. Partof the way I preferred to walk. Inorder to complete the constructionprogram OIl time the train had to crossgulleys, not on bridges-which were notyet buut-but on rails supported bypiles of wooden ties. The roadbed wasso hastily built that in places the railslooked like snakes. But we reached ourdestination - slowly and with muchspeech-making at every station. Thetrain returned to Ufa with ten tank­cars filled with tho first oil from thenew fields; and I returned with theexperience of having seen Bashkirianpeasants in the process of transforma­tion into railroad and oil field laborers.

"DE-NOMADIZING" THE KAZAKSFeeling that one month in one of the

national republics had not been enough,in the following year I spent anot.herfew weeks with another branch of theTurkic nation in the Kazak Republic ofSoviet Central Asia. While Bashkiriawas until recently a country of peasantswho are now being changed into col­lective farmers and industrial laborers,the Kazaks (not to be confused with theCossacks) since time immemorial have

been herdsmen and nomads and are nowbeing forced into settled life andfactory work through the process of"de-nomadization." In Kazakstan I hadto adapt my mode of traveling to theenormous size of the country, whichequals the combined territories ofGermany, England, France, Spain, Italy,and Turkey. I flew the whole way, withstops in nomadic, industrial, and agri­cultural regions.

The Bolsheviks feel very proud andprogressive when they claim in theirpublications that practically all the tenmillion nomads living in Russia at thetime of the Revolution have been tornaway from their former habits and arenow settled. To the Marxists a nomadis an unfortunate being who must besaved, even against his will. from hiseconomic backwardness. However, Ihave often wondered whether it isreally progress to transform into forcedsettlers the free and wandering Kazaknomads whose mode of life is the resultof thousands of years of adjustment totheir natural environment.

The Bolsheviks were honest enoughto admit at leaBt part of the pricewhich the Kazaks and the whole of theSoviet Union hall to pay fur thisde-nomadization. According to theofficial Soviet figures the total livestockof Kazakstan, formerly tlle livestockcountry of the USSR. sank from 24million head in 1930 to 2.4 million in1933. (From Kazakstan k IX SyezduSovietov, Alma Ata, 1935, p. 87.)OlJviously the Kazaks after losing 90%of their livestock had no other way outthan either to starve to death or tofollow the Soviet demand to becomesettlers and industrial workers. Butwhile the Soviet Government admittedthat its policy of de-nomadization inKazakstan alone has cost 211/ 2 millionhead of livestock, the loss in humanlives was never announced. Judgingfrom conversations I had on the way,and from the many abandoned habita­tions I saw from the plane, my guesswould be that 20 to 305'0 of the Kazakspaid with death for this tremendousupheaval in their lives.

THE NATIONS OF RUSSIA 83

The following pages are a result ofmy expeditions into Bashkiria andKazakstan, of observations in a numberof other national minorities such asKarelia, the Ukraine. Georgia, Azerbaid­jan, and Armenia, and of a study ofthe theoretical foundations of theBolshevist nationalities policy.

STALIN'S THEORY

Twenty-nine years ago, in the wintermonths of 1912, a man was writing hisfirst large theoretical study. Known tothe small group of his political friendsas well as to the police under manydifferent names, and to history asStalin, he composed the standard workMarxism and the National Question.and thus became among the Bolsheviksa specialist in this field. Five yearslater, in November, 1917, Stalin wasthe first People's Commissar for Na­tionality Questions and hence a memberof the Soviet Government. At a timewhen his name was still unknownabroad and only rarely heard in Russia,he played a considerable role in therelations between the Soviet Govern­ment and its national minorities.

The most concise formulation of hisnationality theory was given by Stalinat the Sixteenth Communist Party Con­gress in the summer of 1930. Stalindeclared the melting of national culturesinto a single culture, with a singlelanguage, to be the final aim of theBolsheviks. This aim, he explnined,could only be reached after the victoryof the world revolution. As long asthe dictatorship of the proletariat wasconfined to one country, the SovietUnion, the individual nationalities wereto be allowed to possess and to developtheir national cultures.

The calculation which led to thisdecision was simple: in order to winthe much needed support of theminorities in the struggle against theTsarist regime, the Bolsheviks had hadto give them something that wouldbind them to the cause of the Revolu­tion. Nothing could accomplish thisbetter than the granting of those

rights which the various nationalitieshad always craved and rarely obtainedunder the Tsars: free speech, press,and education in their own languages.The granting of these rights by theBolsheviks actually had much to dowith the eventual victory of theBolsheviks in the whole of Russia.The national minorities felt that theBolshevist victory would be to theiradvantage.

Soon, however, the minorities foundthat things were not quite as simpleas they had appeared. In his theoryStalin divided culture into form andcontent, and he created the famousformula that in the Soviet Union thecultures of all nationalities should benational in form, socialistic in content.That in itself did not sound bad; butwhat did it mean? It meant thatthe form of cultural life -language,alphabet, etc.-could be Bashkir, Kazak,or Ukrainian, but the content had tobe - Moscow. In other words, thenationalities were permitted-for thetime being in their own languages, withtheir own alphabets, in their own news­papers, movies, or radios-to praise theideas of Bolshevism and nothing else.

NATIONAL FORM

Up to the middle thirties Stalin'sformula was on the whole adhered to.The nationalities actually were grantedthe national form of their cultures.Schools, newspapers, printing housesgrew like mushrooms, all or thembecoming so many channels throughwhich Bolshevist ideas were pumpedinto the minds of the people. TheBolsheviks even went further than thenationalities themselves intended themto go. They created new writtenlanguages where they had not beforeexisted, in order to split up the non­Russian population into small andharmless groups.

In particular was this done in thecase of the Turks, the largest non­Slavic nation within the USSR. TheBashkirs had never had a writtenlanguage of their own, their spokenlanguage being only a Tartar dialect.

THE XXth CENTURY

To prevent too much co-operationbetween these racially closely relatedgroups, the Bolsheviks insisted on givingthe Bashkirs a written language andgrammar of their own. Thus we havethe curious phenomenon that withregard to the other Slavic peoples(Ukrainians and White Russians) theBolsheviks always minimize the dif­ferences in language and historicaltradition, claiming them to be Russianslike themselves, while in the case ofnon-Slavic nationalities they emphasizeto the utmost the already existingdifferences between them.

SOCIALISTIC CONTENT

There is no question in my mindthat the granting of the national formhas won the Bolsheviks many friendsamong their numerous national minor­ities. These were now allowed freelyto enjoy what the former Governmenthad either prohibited or limited. Formany of them this was all they wereinterested in. Those, however, whotried to look at the root of thingssoon found that there had been muchmore lost through the "socialisticcontent" than had been won throughthe national form, and that thetremendous power of the socialisticcontent gradually made that nationalform meaningless.

The socialistic content expresseditself primarily in three ways.

COLLECTIVIZATION A.1'VDDE-NOMADIZATION

The first concerned the mode of lifeof the agrarian population; cullect,iviza­tion of the peasants and de-nomadizationof the nomads. The collectivization,which turned individual peasants intolaborers on large collective or statefarms, was enforced in the whole ofRussia in the years 1929-32 in almostexactly the same way. The influenceof this entirely new economic develop­ment was so tremendous that, incomparison with it, the formerly existingdifferences between, say, Russian andBashkirian peasants paled into insignif­icance.

In Bashkiria 4,000 collectives, orkolkhozes, took the place of 400,000individual peasant farms. Daily life ona collective farm is radically differentfrom that in an individual peasanthome. Where formerly a hundred peas­ants had performed more or lesssimilar tasks, there was now a widedifferentiation. In a kolkhoz one need­ed bookkeepers, mechanics, managers,chauffeurs, and many other specialistswhom neither the Russian nor theBashkirian villages had known before.The collectivization also brought count­less Russian, Bolshevist, or internationalwords such as kolkhoz, trakto?', CO1/!­

bine, Ma?'xistic, etc. into the languageof peasants throughout the USSR.Sometimes, while listening to Bashkiriankolkhozn'iks, I was able to follow theirconversation. Not, I hasten to add,because of my three lessons in Bashkir,but because their conversation waspermeated with the same words I hadso often heard in Russian kolkhozes orread in Russian newspapers.

INDUSTRIALIZATION

The second way in which the Bolshe­vist content overwhelmed the minoritieswas through industrialization by theFive Year Plans. In Bashkiria, forinstance, the figures of Basllkir ill­dustrial laborers increased by 6000/0in the first Five Year Plan alone. Ifone observes Bashkir pea~ants or Kazaknomads suddenly transformed into in­du~tdal workerB one can eU.:lily imaginethe tremendous revolution which thismeana in their lives. The mOl·C simple­minded and backward a person is, themore will he be overcome by thischange in his work and way of life.

Compared with conservative agricul­ture, modern industry is a verypowerful melting-pot. The ex-nomadsand ex-peasants must, in order tosucceed, speak Russian well to conversewith their Russian superiors - the fore­men and engineers in their plant - andit will not be long before you hearBashkir laborers speaking Russian evenamong themselves, at least when theirconversation concerns their work.

THE NATIONS OF RUSSIA 85

BOLSHEVIZATION

The third great influence of thesocialistic content is the Bolshevizationof all cultural life. Take Bashkiria,for example: I have met practicallyall Bashkir writers of note, have readall their works as far as they havebeen translated into Russian, and havehad lengthy talks with them abouttheir writing. What I found was nota Bashkir literature, but a Bolshevist­Russian literature accidentally clothedin Bashkir language, The subjectstreated were with rare exceptions thesame as those in the I'est of the SovietUnion: class struggle, glorification ofthe Revolution and of communist ideo­logy, collectivization, industrialization.(Only in one literary field was there anational note to be found, in that ofhistorical novels and plays. I shall re­turn to this later). The same is alsotrue of the schools. The only thing Ifound .to be Bashkirian was thelanguage: everything else- subjectsmethods of study, type of textbooks:presentation of the subject matter­was dictated from Moscow.

The extraordinary power of Bolshe­vization becomes particularly evidentwhen one observes that even Islam,once a powerful factor in the life ofthe Turk people and a strong bonduniting them. is recp.rling in importance.I gained the impression that with fewexceptions Islam has lost contact, atleast for the time being, with therealities surrounding its erstwhile fol­~o:,enl. Accustomed tu dealing withIlhterate peasants and nomads it wasswept off its feet by the rapid trans­formation of its people and now haslitt~e influence on the younger generation.It IS, of course, quite possible that theyou~g Turks of ~us8ia will eventuallyrealIze the emptiness of life withoutsome religious content; but they willI believe, return to Islam only if itsucceeds in readjusting itself.

DANGEROUS HISTORY

It is not enough to mention theseobvious consequences of the applicationof Stalin's nationality theory on the

peoples of Russia. There are also somemore subtle results. The permission touse and develop the forms of theirculture gave the consciously nationalisticelements among the minorities awelcome weapon in their struggle forthe preservation of their nationalindividuality. They had to proceedwith utmost caution and one should notoverestimate their success. Neverthe­less they were to some extent able touse the national form for the propaga­tion of a national content. This wasparticularly the case in their emphasison national history. The Bashkil's, forexample, rapidly changing from a nationof illiterates to one where the majoritycould read and write, were now able,for the first time, to read for themselvesof the heroic deeds of their ancestorsin the many books about Bashkirhistory which began to appear.

As far as the nationalists wereconcerned, it was all to the good thatalmost the entire history of the Bash­kirs is one long fight with Russianimperialism. Thus in the guise ofhistory they could awaken and strength­en the pride of their countrymen intheir age-old heroic struggle againstRussian domination. Listen, for instance,to the song of Salavat Yulayev, thegreatest hero in Bashkir history, whoselife-at the time of Catherine the Great-was an endless struggle against theRussians. I found the song in a bio­graphical novel of the hero, publishedin 1933. In it Salavat Yulayev singsof his love for the Bashkirian land andfor Yurusen, his native river.

THE SONG OF' SALAVATYULAYEV

o Yurusen, river of my home,Your banks are covered with reeds,Those of other rivers have only

stones.a lovely river, swift as an arrow.Came the Russian with his shovel,Many Russians with their guns.They built factories,Factories on your beautiful banks,Spreading filth and feeding pigs.Let them tear apart my nostrils,

THE NATIONS OF RUSSIA 87

middle thirties they began to suspectthat the neat division of culture intoform and content was too simple tosucceed with such complicated creaturesas human beings. Form and content,they discovered, are very closely relat­ed. Just as the body and soul of aman cannot be separated at will, sothe content and form of a nation'slife are one. In theory and for pur­poses of discussion their separateexistence is, of course; possible, but inreal life they are only two sides ofthe same thing. It is not irrelevantwhich language we speak, what melodieswe sing, which historical heroes weworship. Every language, music, orhistory has its own spirit which helpsto mould the mind of its people.

During the last few years littlemore was said in Russia about Stalin'sfamous division. Instead, the tendencyturned noticeably against national form.Emphasis on the Russian languagewas greatly increased, and the use ofnational tongues discouraged with theassertion that they were backwardand tended to retard the growthof socialism. "Why should we," wrotefor example the Soviet writer Gladkov,"renew the past and galvanize the dustyUkrainian language? That would onlyhinder the development of socialistprogress." National alphabets wereabolished and replaced by the com­pulsory introduction of Russian letters;words and phrases that had long beentaboo, such as "Little Mother Russia"and "Russian Fatherland," reappeared.Everything tha.t could be interpreted a5

furthering the national spirit of minor­ities was sought out and "liquidated."Even the literature of post-Revolutionyears was denounced and the nationalminorities lost a number of prominentwriters in the purges of the latethirties.

THE CASE OF VASSA'SPRETTY LEGS

A curious example of the exaggeratedbut perhaps not unjustified Bolshe­vist suspicion against everythingnational was the case of the book

First Spring by the Ukrainian authorGregory Epik. In one scene of thenovel, the writer describes the thoughtsof Comrade Golubenko, a UkrainianBolshevist Party Secretary, as he thinksof Vassa, a lovely Ukrainian girl, orrather of her pretty legs. These arehis thoughts: "Vassa's legs to himappeared neither thin nor thick. Theirelastic rotundity softly fell near thesculptured knees, evenly continuinglower and enlarging again, well­proportioned, to beautiful calves, andended thinly as if in a chiseled bone.Because of legs like these the Ukrainemore than once suffered attacks fromTartars and Turks and because of sucheyes and such a soft de"ep voice asthat of Vassa the Ukraine was justlyproud of her daughters."

To S. Shtchupak, a Bolshevist literarycritic, this sounded like counter-revolu­tion. In his work The Struggle forMethodology (p.142-143) he wrote:"The nationalistic enthusiasm for the'Wonderful Ukrainian Woman,' thistheory of national biology, is in realitya racial theory. a clear case of national­ism." Eventually the author Epik wasexiled to the Far North and then shot.

We may smile at the zealous Bol­shevist critic, yet, in away, he wasright: form and content cannot beseparated. The affectionate enthusiasmfor Ukrainian leg5 which a UkTainianauthor puts in Ukrainian words intothe minds of a Ukraininn Bolshevik is,all other means being closed, one pos­sibility of making Ukrainian readersthink along Ukrainian lines.

The present war emergency isstrengthening the emphasis on every­thing Russian; it is heightening suspiciontowards the national minorities andincreasing their oppression. The orig­inal promise to leave the forms oftheir culture to the various nationali­ties, until they can be replaced by arising international culture after thevictory of the world revolution, seemsto have been forgotten. Perhaps theBolsheviks have found that there canbe no international culture, that theremust be a national culture or none at

88 THE XXth CENTURY

aU. At any rate the new tendencyto enforce Russian culture rather thanan international culture on the minori­ties is unmistakable. If the presentdevelopment is to continue, Stalin'sslogan will soon have to read: theculture of the national minorities isto be Russian in form and Bolshevistin content.

THE ISSUE

The replacement of national cultureby a uniform world culture, as it isfrankly advocated by the Bolsheviks,seems to many a desirable and logicalevolution. These are frequently thesame people who, when speaking ofworld culture, naively assume that thismeans the adoption of their owncivilization and way of life by the restof the world. Their internationalismis often at bottom nothing but a super­nationalism, based on the belief thatthey of course, are on the right trackand that the salvation of the worldrests with everybody's becoming likethemselves.

There is also anotber way of lookingat nations. It is less simple but alsoless superficial, and aeema more convinc­ing to the student of history and

political realities: to regard nations asthe organic outgrowth of thousands ofyears of history and their variety as asource of great enrichment for theworld. This attitude comes naturallyto persons like myself who have enjoyedliving in many different parts of theworld, because they have found, grow­ing on the common soil of humannature, a miraculous wealth of nations,cultures, ideas, forms of art, literatures,religions. Hawaii is perhaps the finestexample of the values created by thepreservation of the national culture ofmany different peoples living together.

Those who share this attitude knowthat for countless ages a narrow,misunderstood, and misinterpreted na­tionalism has been breeding hatred,suspicion, and wars. They see no wayout in either the imperialistic enforce­ment of one way of life on the rest ofthe world or in the fratricidal antag­onism between various nationalisms.They look toward a solution in whicheach nation accepts and respects thepeculiaritie:s of the other (without de­nomadizing the nomads or proletizingthe peasants), and where all by commonagreement and under the intelligentguidance of leading nation:s work forthe same purpose-a better future.