The war severely affected the oppressed nationalities in Russia.
Lenin called tsarist Russia “a prison of nations,” and this phrase aptly describes the plight of the numerous national minorities in Imperial Russia.
Under the tsarist autocracy the whole toiling population suffered lives of hardship, but the lot of the working people of the non-Russian nationalities, the inorodtsi, or “aliens,” as they were contemptuously called, was particularly intolerable. Economic exploitation in their case was aggravated by brutal national oppression. Even the few wretched rights enjoyed by the Russian working population were curtailed to a minimum in the case of the oppressed nationalities. Political inequality, arbitrary rule and cultural oppression were the blessings conferred by the autocracy on the enslaved peoples.
The policy of the Russian tsars was definitely a policy of conquest.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the tsarist government undertook extensive military campaigns in the East in the interests of the ruling classes. It laid its greedy paw on the lands of the Middle and Lower Volga, subjugated Siberia as far as the Pacific coast and invaded the steppe regions of the Ukraine east of the Dnieper. The interests of the nobility, the merchant capitalists, and the growing class of industrial capitalists were reflected even more definitely in the military plans of Peter I, who endeavoured to gain a firm foothold on the shores of the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian. It was under Peter I that the region now known as Esthonia, a part of Latvia and Finland, and the Caucasian coast of the Caspian Sea were seized. Catherine II annexed the northern coast of the Black Sea, the Crimea, the Ukraine west of the Dnieper, White Russia, Lithuania and Courland. Alexander I seized Finland from the Swedes and Bessarabia from the Turks and after the war with Napoleon, secured part of Poland, including Warsaw. Under Alexander I, too, Russia entrenched herself in Georgia and began a prolonged war for the enslavement of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. This war continued throughout the reign of Nicholas I. Alexander II completed the subjugation of the Caucasus, deprived China of the Amur and the Ussur regions and annexed vast territories in Central Asia. Nicholas II, the last of the Russian tsars, continued the policy of his fathers and at first attempted to annex Manchuria and Korea. He then entered the World War, aiming at the seizure of Constantinople, Turkish Armenia, Northern Persia and Galicia. . . .
The double-headed eagle cast its sinister shadow over the vast territories of the Russian Empire, stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the mountains of the Caucasus, and from the sunlit steppe of the Ukraine to the sands of Central Asia and the hills of the Far East.
Every step of the Russian tsars, like every step of the bourgeois governments of Europe, was marked by fire, bloodshed and violence. The triumphant advance of capitalism into the auls of the Caucasus, the kishlaks of Turkestan and the Finno-Turkic villages of the Volga region brought poverty and hopeless misery in its train.
When resistance was offered, the tsarist government did not hesitate to exterminate or deport the whole population of the conquered districts. Scores of flourishing villages of mountain peoples were reduced to ashes. Mountain gorges were filled with the smoke of burning dwellings. Forests were cut down, auls razed to the ground, crops trampled underfoot, and the property of the mountain tribes, even their household effects, pillaged.
The land seized from the native population was distributed among Russian officers, landlords and kulaks. Thousands of wealthy manors were created on lands plundered from the Bashkirs of the Volga; huge, luxurious estates, belonging to tsar and princes, were founded in the Caucasus, the Crimea and Central Asia. The introduction of this “agrarian reform” in the conquered territories was accompanied by the institution of serfdom. Peter I introduced serfdom in the Baltic provinces. Catherine II in the Ukraine and Nicholas I did his best to consolidate it in the Caucasus.
Following the tsarist generals, Russian landlords, manufacturers and merchants flocked to the conquered regions. The territories of the various nationalities were inundated by Russian soldiers, gendarmes and officials. With them came the priests of the Orthodox Church, who sanctified the right of bayonet and gold by the grace of the holy cross.
Military violence and brigandage were followed by even more frightful economic oppression. The annexed regions were transformed into capitalist colonies and became the chief sources of supply of raw materials and fuel for the growing industries of Russia. The Ukraine supplied coal from the Donbas and iron ore from Krivoi Rog, the Caucasus supplied oil and Central Asia cotton.
The antique fortifications, with their bastions and cannon, were replaced by manors, kulak farms and capitalist factories. And side by side with these sprang up thousands and tens of thousands of holy churches and tsar-owned drink shops. The tsar’s vodka shops debauched the local population, while the churches burnt incense and offered prayers for the success of the colonial policy of the “White Tsar.” A vast army of priests worked zealously to inculcate in the “savages” the principles of Orthodox religion and autocratic government.
The newly-built churches served as instruments for the further plunder of the small nationalities. Converted “aliens” were initiated into the mysteries of Orthodox religion with the aid of fines inflicted for failing to attend confession, for ignorance of prayers, for non-observance of ritual and so on.
Christianity was propagated among the oppressed nationalities in the most unbridled and cynical fashion. The methods the missionaries adopted to spread religious enlightenment among the semi-savage peoples of Siberia were often of a deliberately provocative character.
On arriving at a village, a missionary would begin by ingratiating himself into the good graces of the inhabitants. He would distribute small gifts, such as crosses, icons and tobacco. If this did not achieve its purpose, he would make a prolonged stay in the refractory village and adopt more “vigorous” measures. In the end, the missionary would work the population up to such a pitch that they would begin to threaten him, whereupon the culprits would be arrested and imprisoned and their property confiscated.
The first to bring Christian enlightenment to the Siberian tribes were fugitive and vagabond monks who together with prayer and holy water brought vodka and syphilis to the Siberian tundra.
This same system of debauching the native trappers with the aid of vodka was practised later, when the Orthodox Missionary Society—a huge enterprise with a capital of 200,000 roubles—was active. The result of this “Christian” solitude was that at the time the World War broke out the Siberian tribes were dying out with appalling rapidity.
The yoke of the Orthodox Church had weighed heavily on the Mohammedan peoples of Russia for three and a half centuries. Religious persecution and the closing of mosques (between 1738 and 1755, Luke, Bishop of Kazan, alone destroyed 418 of the 536 mosques in Tatary) were accompanied by measures to compel Mohammedan children to attend the parish schools of the Orthodox Church.
The spread of Russian enlightenment among the Finno-Turkic tribes of the Volga began with the founding of a theological academy in Kazan. Missionaries of the Orthodox Church were also trained at the Oriental Faculty of the Kazan University.
One of the most striking acts of Russification in recent times was the “Regulations of March 31, 1906,” issued by Count I. I. Tolstoy, Minister of Education. Speaking of the necessity of enlisting the aid of “science” to instil “love of the common fatherland” in the oppressed peoples, these regulations made the teaching of the Russian language compulsory in all schools for “aliens.”(1) But the Russian State schools had been scrupulously performing this duty even before Tolstoy issued his regulations. In Poland, after the insurrection of 1836, all the national universities and high schools were closed and replaced by Russian schools, and it was forbidden to speak Polish aloud in public places, such as government offices and shops and in the streets.
The Ukraine was similarly persecuted. The very word “Ukraine” was declared to be subversive and was replaced by “Little Russia.” Books and newspapers were forbidden to be printed in the Ukrainian language, the native tongues could not be taught even in private schools and its use in public statements was prohibited. The effects of oppression on the culture of the Ukrainian people were devastating. The level of culture in the Ukraine before it was annexed to Russia was higher than in Great Russia, but by the end of the nineteenth century the percentage of illiteracy in the Ukrainian provinces was astonishingly high even for tsarist Russia.
With the aid of the army and the state machine—the Russian state schools and the Orthodox Church—the tsarist government ruthlessly pursued its policy of universal Russification. This was facilitated by the fact that the cultural level of the majority of the oppressed nations was a low one. But even when Russian imperialism encountered nationalities which in their economic and cultural development were not lower, and sometimes even higher, than the Great Russians, e.g., the Poles, Finns, Esthonians, Latvians, and, in part the Georgians, Armenians and Ukrainians, this did not prevent it from pursuing its policy of Russification with undiminished ruthlessness and relentlessness. When Alexander I seized Finland he promised to preserve the form of autonomy she had enjoyed under the Swedes. But the Russian government gradually encroached on Finland’s autonomy and decided to reduce her to the unfranchised condition of the rest of the country. Poland had long lain prostrate under the jackboot of the tsarist gendarmes. Even the spurious reform which introduced what were known as local government bodies (the Zemstvos and City Dumas) was not extended to Poland. Nor was the system of trial by jury introduced in Poland. Poles employed in the government service or serving in the Army suffered from numerous civil disabilities.
But the most disfranchised people of all in tsarist Russia were the Jews. Their freedom of domicile and movement were extremely restricted. Exceptions were made only in the case of rich Jews—the wealthy merchants—and Jews with university education. The class policy of the tsarist government was reflected even in the national question, certain relative ameliorations being granted to the wealthy strata of the population. Nevertheless, as compared with a bourgeois or landlord of the dominant Russian nation, the Jewish or Armenian merchant did not feel that he had any rights at all. A quota was established for Jews in the schools, and they were not accepted at all in the government service, on the railways and so forth. Jews were obliged to live within the Pale. Cooped within the congested towns and hamlets of Poland, Lithuania, White Russia and certain parts of the Ukraine, the mass of the Jews were condemned to hopeless poverty.
The non-Russian population was shamelessly robbed by the tsarist authorities. Bribery, which was widely prevalent in tsarist Russia generally, assumed incredible proportions in the remote border regions. Swarms of gluttonous officials devoured like locusts the last crumbs of the toiling members of the oppressed nationalities. With the coming of the Russian colonisers, taxation on the population of Central Asia increased three-fold and four-fold, and in some cases as much as fifteen-fold. The population was steadily dying out. Travellers who visited the regions inhabited by the Uzbeks at the end of the nineteenth century relate that where there were formerly forty-five villages with 956 houses, after twenty years of Russian colonisation there remained only thirty-six villages with 817 houses, 225 of which were uninhabited. The picture painted by the travellers of the horrors perpetrated in the tsarist colonies is obviously far from complete; the censorship would not have passed a more faithful account. But they too speak of the ruthless and bloody vengeance which was wreaked on the native population for the least attempt at protest. Whole villages were burnt to the ground because the dead body of a Russian had been found in the vicinity.
An order issued by the Russian officer who suppressed an uprising in Katta-Kurgan in 1910 arrogantly declared that “the sole of a Russian soldier’s boot is worth more than the heads of a thousand wretched Sarts [Uzbeks].”(2)
And orders like this were not empty phrases, as is shown by the brutal vengeance wreaked on the inhabitants of Andizhan.
In 1898 an insurrection broke out among the Uzbeks of the region then known as Ferghana. It was led by a local religious leader, Dukchi Ishan, who enjoyed great popularity. On the night of May 17 a band of local inhabitants, armed with knives, crowbars and sticks, attacked the barracks of Andizhan. Nineteen soldiers were killed, but the tsarist troops soon succeeded in suppressing the revolt. Hundreds of Uzbeks, even persons who had taken no part in the outbreak, were massacred. All the villages where the leaders of the revolt had lived were razed to the ground and Russian settlements built in their place. In compensation for the losses incurred, estimated at 130,000 roubles, the property not only of those sentenced but also of their relatives was sold by auction. Eighteen persons were hanged and 362 condemned to penal servitude for terms of from four to twenty years.
It is therefore not surprising that the nations of Central Asia, as of the other tsarist colonies, trembled with fear at the mere name “Russian.” Every tsarist official, however insignificant, even a policeman, regarded himself as the master of the bodies and souls of the “savages” under his charge. The whole system of government was designed to maintain the conditions of national oppression. Both government and church enjoined the Russian population that the “unchristened aliens” were not to be regarded as human beings.
In its efforts to avert an agrarian revolution, the tsarist government tried to satisfy the land hunger of a part of the Russian peasants at the expense of the oppressed nations. The colonies were turned over to kulaks and Cossacks for exploitation and spoliation. At the same time the autocracy used the peasants and Cossacks settled in the border territories as a weapon in its war on the native population.
The landed aristocracy, represented by the Union of the Russian People, the Nationalist Party and other parties, together with the military, the bureaucracy and the monarchist press, carried on a savage nationalist campaign against the “aliens,” skilfully fostered anti-semitism and organised Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine and mutual massacres of Armenians and Tyurks in Transcaucasia. The government for its part fostered national enmity among the various peoples. Tsarism consolidated its rule over the oppressed nationalities by inciting one nation against another, thus preventing them from uniting and forming a common front of the oppressed nations against the Russian autocracy.
The policy of the tsarist government towards the oppressed nationalities can be expressed in the ancient Roman maxim: “Divide and rule.”
The population of the Russian Empire was divided into two distinct camps: on the one hand, there were the Great Russians, who were encouraged in every way to regard themselves as a privileged, ruling nation; and, on the other, the dependent, non-sovereign peoples.
One of the leaders of the party known as the All-Russian National Alliance wrote in the Novoye Vremya—a paper published by Suvorin and distinguished even among the Black Hundred press by its fanatical incitement to national enmity and its advocacy of the supremacy of the Great Russians—as follows:
“We, by the grace of God, the Russian nation, possessors of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia, accept this possession as an exclusive expression of the Divine Mercy which we must treasure and which it is our mission to preserve at all costs. It is not for nothing that this rule has been conferred on us, the Russians. . . . Pray, what is the sense without rhyme or reason of sharing with the subjugated breeds the right to rule what we have won? On the contrary, it would be the height of political folly and a piece of historical prodigality, like that of a merchant’s ‘darling son’ who, having inherited a million, begins to lavish it on lackeys and fallen women. Nature itself has distinguished the Russian race from many others as the strongest and most gifted. History itself has proved that the small tribes are not our equals.”(3)
The Great Russian nationalist policy was reflected most clearly in the programme of the arch-reactionary Union of the Russian People, which stated:
“The Russian nation, which assembled the Russian land and created the great and mighty State, must hold prime place in the life and development of the State. . . . All the institutions of the Russian State unite in a determined effort unswervingly to preserve the greatness of Russia and the privileges of the Russian nation, although on the firm basis of law, so that the numerous aliens inhabiting our fatherland should count it an honour and privilege to belong to the Russian Empire and should not resent their dependence. . . .”(4)
The national policy of the Black Hundreds met with the full approval of the Octobrists and “Nationalists.” The first item in the programme of the “Nationalists” spoke of “consolidating the Russian state on the basis of the autocratic government.”(5)
The more moderate of the bourgeois parties, such as the Cadets, who called themselves the Party of National Freedom, and other parties which reflected the interests of the capitalist landlords and industrial capital, especially the light industries, i.e., the groups which more than others needed the home market, strove to achieve their nationalist aims by making certain superficial concessions to the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nationalities. But even these parties, of course, would tolerate no vacillation where the unity of the Russian State and the conquest of foreign territory were concerned. The slogan “Russia united and indivisible,” met with the support of the entire bourgeoisie.
Lenin asked in what way the position of the Cadets on the national question differed from the nationalism and chauvinism of papers like the Novoye Vremya, and replied:
“Only by white gloves and by more diplomatically cautious language. But chauvinism, even in white gloves and using the most refined language, is disgusting.”(6)
The so-called Socialist parties, although they paid lip-service to the right of the oppressed nationalities to self-determination, also in practice defended the integrity of the Russian State. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party advocated a state built on federal principles, but at the same time would not concede the right of the nations to secede, and confined its solution of the national question to the sphere of culture and language.
The nationalist parties in the Russian Empire—the Polish Socialist Party among the Poles, the Dashnaktsutyun among the Armenians, the Bund among the Jews, etc.—in the main treated the national question from the bourgeois standpoint and advocated the division of the organisations of the workers according to nationality. They confined the national question to the narrow circle of problems that affected their own particular nationality, expressed the views of the petty-bourgeoisie and distorted the international proletarian line. One “solution” proposed for the national question was “national cultural autonomy.” Advanced by the Austrian Social-Democrats, supported by the Jewish Bund, and meeting with approval among the Mensheviks, including the Caucasian Mensheviks, it substituted for the Bolshevik demand for the right of nations to self-determination, including the right to secession, the petty-bourgeois nationalist demand for the creation of national alliance within the State for the control of education, culture and other affairs of the various nationalities.
Stalin has pointed out that the result of “national cultural autonomy” is that “a united class movement is broken up into separate national rivulets” and that it spreads “noxious ideas of mutual distrust and aloofness among the workers of different nationalities.”(7)
At the same time, advocating “national cultural autonomy” was equivalent to advocating inter-class unity. Thus the Mensheviks departed from the international position of the proletariat on the national question as well.
In drawing up their national policy under the guidance of Lenin and Stalin, the Bolsheviks realised the tremendous importance of the national question for the proletarian revolution, especially in Russia, where the non-Russian nationalities constituted the majority of the population (56.7 per cent) and the Great Russians the minority (43.3 per cent). The Bolshevik Party bent every effort to prevent a split between the Russian proletariat and the workers of other nationalities.
Lenin and Stalin subjected the programmes of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties on the national question to exhaustive criticism. A Bolshevik Party conference held in September 1913—known as the “August, or Summer, Conference of the Central Committee”—confirmed the basic line of the Party on the national question, viz., the international unity of the toilers, and stated that:
“The interests of the working class demand that the workers of all the nationalities of a given State shall be joined in united proletarian organisations—political, trade union, co-operative, educational, etc.
“As regards the right of the nations oppressed by the tsarist monarchy to self-determination, i.e., to secede and form independent States, the Social-Democratic Party must unquestionably defend this right. . . . This is demanded . . . by the cause of freedom of the Great Russian population itself, which cannot create a democratic State if reactionary Great Russian nationalism is not eradicated, a nationalism which is backed by the traditions of a number of blood-thirsty acts of vengeance against the national movements and which is systematically fostered not only by the tsarist monarchy and by the reactionary parties, but also, in their servility to the monarchy, by the Great Russian bourgeois liberals, especially in the period of counter-revolution.”(8)
Such was the policy of Lenin and Stalin on the national question.
Before the imperialist war, the bourgeois movements for national liberation did not make the separation of their nations from Russia their direct aim.
When the prospective defeat of Russia in the war became unmistakable, strong separatist tendencies arose within the bourgeois nationalist groups. Centrifugal forces began to predominate. On the one hand, the cup of patience of the oppressed nationalities was filled to overflowing; on the other hand, it was felt that the locks on the “prison of the nations” were becoming insecure and that with sufficient pressure they could be smashed once and for all.
A spirit of revolt against Russian tsarism began to spread in the regions of the national minorities. In Central Asia, in 1916, it took the form of a widespread revolt, embracing not only the Kazakhs, who before the revolution were called Kirghiz, but nearly all the peoples inhabiting the steppe region (present-day Kazakhstan) and Turkestan.
The bourgeois separatists grew more active among the Poles, Finns and Ukrainians and drew up a nationalist programme of action. The movement for national liberation also became more active among the Lithuanians and the nationalities of Transcaucasia and other parts of the Russian Empire. General national demands also assumed an extreme form, especially since the bourgeoisie had declared the imperialist war to be a war in defence of small nationalities.
The tendency to secession from Russia was reflected in the congresses of nationalist-separatists held abroad. A League of the Nations of Russia was formed, which in May 1916 addressed a joint complaint to United States President Wilson describing the hard lot of the national minorities in Russia.
The spread of separatist tendencies among the national minorities in Russia was not overlooked by the belligerents on either side. Both sides strove to use this movement for their own ends. This is what Pierre Chantrel, a prominent Frenchman, wrote to Premier Clemenceau during the war:
“Berlin is encouraging the separatist movements all it can in order to create for itself new political and economic clients in the East. The Entente has every reason to act parallel with Germany in order to deprive her of the fruits of her labours. Russia, united and indivisible, is a thing of the past. France must intervene so as to reshape her into a federation based on the voluntary agreement of the contracting parts. The Entente statesmen should realise that Germany would find it more difficult to deal with three or four capitals than with the one St. Petersburg.”(9)
The oppressed nationalities served as an important source of man-power for the army on active service. They were down-trodden slaves of the war whom the bourgeois themselves, with cynical frankness, referred to as “cannon fodder.”
The bourgeoisie of the belligerent countries were obliged hypocritically to proclaim the imperialist shambles a sacred war for the liberation of weak nations in order to secure the support of the oppressed nationalities and the colonial populations, and in order to undermine the prestige of the enemy among these peoples. Germany, for example, endeavoured to stir up revolt in Ireland and in the colonies of the Entente Powers. The Entente, on the other hand, incited the Czechs, Poles, and other peoples against the Germans.
Against the background of growing imperialist antagonisms, all this served as a powerful stimulus to the movement for national liberation. The latter became a very important political and, in places, revolutionary factor.
One of the principal ideological foundations of the monarchy—“Russia, united and indivisible”—had by this time become severely shaken by the events of the war, which were preparing the ground for revolution.
[1] Statutes, Circular and Information on Public Education in the Interim Period, Moscow, 1908, p. 155.
[2] S. Dimanstein, Past and Present. Life of the Nations of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, 1924, pp. 20-21.
[3] “The National Alliance,” Novoye Vremya (New Times), No. 11576, June 5, 1908.
[4] V. I. Charnolussky, Russian Parties, Alliances and Leagues. Collection of Programmes, St. Petersburg, 1906, p. 119.
[5] “Rules of the All-Russian National Alliance,” Novoye Vremya, No. 11577, June 6, 1908.
[6] Lenin, “Cadets and Nationalists,” Collected Works, Vol. XVI.
[7] J. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Eng. ed., 1935, p. 34.
[8] V. I. Lenin, “Resolution of the Summer (1913) Conference of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. with Party Workers,” Collected Works, Vol. XVII.
[9] Revolution and the National Question. Documents and Materials on the History of the National Question in Russia and the U.S.S.R. in the 20th Century, Vol. III (1917), Moscow, 1930, p. 22.
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