(Militant International Review, No. 42, Winter 1990)
Gorbachev’s reforms have unleashed the outrage of the national minorities within the USSR, suppressed for decades by Stalinism. But as Peter Taaffe explains, Gorbachev’s solutions to the ‘national problem’ are a million miles removed from Lenin’s.
„There has not been a single quiet day in the last one and a half months“ complained Gorbachev at the reconvened September Supreme Soviet – the USSR’s so-called parliament. He was not just referring to the summer strikes which convulsed the country. The Kremlin is also besieged by a seemingly ever rising tide of nationalist unrest.
Bloody clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis have uprooted 250,000 people and in the last few months this conflict has widened. In the predominantly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh both groups are armed to the teeth. Guerrilla camps have been observed by Soviet pilots and Kremlin spokesmen talk of the threat of ‚civil war‘ or ‚Ulsterisation‘. In October, Gorbachev despatched troops to break the stranglehold exercised by Azerbaijan through its economic blockade of Armenia.
April saw the massacre of nationalist demonstrators, mostly women, by shovel-wielding troops in Georgia. This was followed in July by armed clashes between Georgians and Abkhazians in Sukhumi, the capital of the Abkhazian Autonomous Republic, an enclave within Georgia.
Add to this the clashes in Uzbekistan between the Uzbeks and Meshkhetian Turks, the huge protests in Moldavia at the denial of elementary language rights and the massive nationalist opposition in the Baltic states, and it is easy to see why Gorbachev has been compelled to rush out an ‚acceptable‘ nationality and ‚ethnic‘ programme for the USSR.
Yet, only two years ago, Gorbachev wrote in his book Perestroika: „If the nationality question had not been solved in principle, the Soviet Union would never have had the social, cultural, economic and defence potential as it has now. Our state would not have survived if the republics had not formed a community based on brotherhood and co-operation, respect and mutual assistance.“
There is not much ‚brotherhood and co-operation‘ in the Caucasus, the Baltic states, Moldavia and Georgia. These problems and the legitimate aspirations of the growing nationalist movements in the Ukraine and Byelorussia cannot be satisfied on a bureaucratic basis.
The ‚liberal‘ Gorbachev is a million miles removed from Lenin in his approach to the national question. Trotsky described Lenin’s teachings on the national question as ‚one of the eternal treasures of mankind‘. Tsarism was the ‚prison of nations‘ where 47% of the population, the Great Russians (in reality the landlords and capitalists), ruled over 53%. The Bolsheviks championed the right of self-determination of these oppressed nationalities. But they were not ‚evangelists of separation‘. They did not advocate that each nation should separate, they merely defended the right of self determination, including the right to secede. In 1918 they accepted the secession of Finland.
The new society, argued Lenin, could not be built on even the slightest compulsion of one nation by another. At the same time, the Bolsheviks implacably opposed bourgeois nationalism. They were for the unification of all workers, irrespective of nationality, race or religion, within one organisation – be it the workers‘ party or the unions.
While advocating the right of self-determination, the Bolsheviks stood for voluntary union of the Russian people on a socialist basis. Lenin argued that this would remove the fear of national oppression. „If we have a voluntary socialist federation, the nationalities will not cut away.“ This brilliant dialectical approach was vindicated with the formation of the USSR in 1924.
Prior to this, those states which adhered to the Soviet regime were linked together in a confederation, i.e. separate states co-operating with one another. Lenin, as one bourgeois commentator correctly points out, „sought to weld this vast area into a federation of equal, common, sovereign republics which would have the right to self-determination and even, theoretically, the right to secede. The federation, he said, is invincible and will grow freely without the help of lies or bayonets“. (William Millinship, Observer 3 September, 1989) He goes on, „It was a noble concept. Stalinism preferred lies and bayonets“.
At one level, the Russian bureaucracy played a relatively progressive role in the national sphere. Peoples kept in the dirt by tsarism began to acquire the basic elements of culture. Nations were formed out of races and tribes. Alphabets had to be invented for the more backward peoples where none existed before.
But at the same time Stalin, personifying the ruthless Moscow centralised bureaucracy, suppressed the slightest ’nationalist‘ deviation, real or imagined. In the aftermath of the Second World War, whole peoples were uprooted and dumped thousands of miles from their homelands. This happened to the Crimean Tartars, the Meshkhetian Turks, the Volga Germans (transported to Siberia and Kazakhstan) – who are now emigrating in their thousands to West Germany – and also the Kalmyks, the Karachav, the Balkharians, the Chechens, the Ingush as well as Koreans, Greeks and Kurds. These insane crimes of Stalin have rebounded on his Kremlin heirs.
In many ways the national question in the USSR is more complicated than it was for the Bolsheviks under Tsarism. On the one side are the unresolved national questions inherited from Tsarism. At the same time and superimposed on them are new oppressed nationalities and minorities, which are a product of Stalinism. Moreover, through huge internal migrations, particularly of the Slavs, some nationalities, like in Latvia have actually become minorities in their own homeland.
The stored up nationalist rage, released by Gorbachev’s ‚reforms‘, has been fuelled by the catastrophic economic situation. Of the 1,200 items in the Standard Soviet Consumer Goods Basket, no fewer than 1,000 are in short supply. The 20% unemployment in Uzbekistan was a trigger for attacks on Meshkhetian Turks.
Sometimes these racial conflicts have been encouraged by the local bureaucracy to embarrass Gorbachev and shipwreck perestroika, as in Georgia and Uzbekistan. Conversely, in the Baltic states and Moldavia, the Russian minority, fearful of discriminatory legislation from the ‚little‘ regional or incipient nationalist bureaucracy, have taken strike action.
The local ‚Communist‘ Party bosses, facing regional elections next year and increasingly discredited in the eyes of the oppressed minorities, seek to clothe their nakedness by putting themselves at the head of ’nationalist‘ movements. Such is the case in the Baltic states, in Armenia and in Azerbaijan.
Faced with this witches brew, Gorbachev convinced the Supreme Soviet to accept his document on the nationality question. But can Gorbachev succeed or will the USSR break apart at the seams?
The USSR is composed of 15 republics, with 100 distinct nationalities and 400 ‚ethnic groups‘. Sixty million people live in republics other than those of their ethnic origin. Even a healthy workers‘ state would have to exercise the greatest sensitivity on the national question. This would involve reconquering in action the confidence of all the nationalities of the USSR.
On a bureaucratic basis this is impossible. The right of self-determination is formally conceded in the USSR’s Constitution. However the Congress of People’s Deputies, largely dominated by the Russian bureaucracy, can ‚ratify the Soviet Union’s borders‘.
In today’s changed situation, where the proletariat and nationalities are losing their fear of mass terror, the methods of state police terror of the past cannot work. Stalin could uproot whole peoples. Khruschev could arbitrarily dislodge the Ukrainian Crimea from the Russian Federation in 1954. Kazakhstan handed over regions to Uzbekistan in 1969. White Russia conceded land to Latvia; Kirghizia surrendered territory to Tajikistan
But now Gorbachev is even incapable of resolving the murderous conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani and Armenian bureaucracies are concerned for their own power, prestige and privileges, not the peoples of both areas. The Azerbaijani bureaucracy denied cultural and linguistic rights to the Armenian majority when they controlled the enclave. As eyewitness reports in MIR No. 38, Autumn 1988 showed, they encouraged pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait and Baku, causing hundreds of deaths.
It was ordinary Azerbaijani workers who attempted to protect their Armenian neighbours from mobs whipped up by the bureaucracy. Even in the massive demonstrations and strikes in September some of the Azerbaijanian workers were at pains to distance themselves from the extreme nationalists. One declared to The Independent: „this is not an anti-Armenian protest.“ The organising of the general strike and demonstrations in Azerbaijan were in the hands of committees, i.e. Soviets.
Azerbaijanian nationalism is reinforced by the region’s economic situation. Six million Azerbaijanis feel discriminated against by Moscow. This fuelled demands for greater control over Azerbaijanian resources. For the Baku bureaucracy not the least motivating factor is that many have villas and farms in Nagorno Karabakh – ‚the Switzerland of the Caucasus‘.
The Armenian bureaucracy are a mirror image of their Azerbaijani counterparts. Corruption and mismanagement mean that thousands of Armenians still live in tents in the areas devastated by last year’s earthquake.
A real Communist Party in Azerbaijan would have educated the masses in the spirit of internationalism and in defence of the right of the population in Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination, including the right to secede from Azerbaijan and join with Armenia if necessary, with full democratic guarantees for the 20% Azerbaijanian population.
Such an approach is impossible for the bureaucracies of both areas whose interests are uppermost over the needs of the masses. Nor can Moscow produce any lasting solution. Despite direct rule, over 100 Russian soldiers have been killed in a year with only two people brought to trial. This underlines the impotence of the Kremlin in Nagorno Karabakh.
Gorbachev has declared that the answer is „the transformation of the Soviet Federation, devolution of economic authority and budgetary power, to all republics and regional Soviets.“ On the relationship between the centre and the republics, his document is full of laudable sentiments.
He states that: „one condition for stability and successful development of our federation is to establish an optimum relationship between the rights of union republics and the USSR as a whole … In this connection, we should clearly define the terms of reference and mutual obligations of the Union and the republics. The Union must be vested with legislative powers necessary to determine the foundations of the political and economic system; to ensure the country’s defence and security; to pursue foreign policy; to coordinate and fulfil common tasks in the sphere of the economy, science and culture … to ensure the … development of the country’s national economic complex.“
The republics „must be entitled to decide all state and social matters, except those they voluntarily delegate to the Union.“ The operative word here is ‚voluntarily‘. The relationship between the republics and ‚the Union‘ is precisely not ‚voluntary‘.
But who decides on the ‚Union law‘ or on ‚rights of the republics‘? It is the ‚Congress of Deputies‘ and the ‚Supreme Soviet‘ elected by it. This body has a built-in ‚Communist‘ Party majority – the party of a privileged bureaucratic stratum which dominates the state, the unions, the government etc. A voluntary union as envisaged by Lenin is only possible on the basis of a completely free election to Soviets open to all parties – and a democratic workers‘ state.
Gorbachev has no intention of dismantling the bureaucracy despite his championing of ‚democracy‘. As the MIR has commented before, Gorbachev stands for greater differentials between the bureaucracy and the mass of the working-class and farmers. His attacks on ‚bureaucracy‘ are aimed primarily at the middle layers. Their colossal swindling, mismanagement and waste is swallowing a huge portion of the surplus.
The bureaucracy will not vacate the scene voluntarily. Gorbachev is attempting to breath new life into the system. His incapacity to go outside the limits of the system means that his ’nationalities policy‘ will be stillborn.
The document itself declares: „A precise definition of the rights and responsibilities concerning the ownership and management of property requires the establishment of the social property status of industrial, transport, agriculture, trade, service and other enterprises. This should determine which are the property of the republics (union or autonomous)…“
But who is to determine which are the properties of the whole union, and which are the properties of the republics?
There is widespread support in the Baltic states for the resources in their ‚republics‘ to be controlled by themselves. Such a mood is fuelled by the bureaucratic centralism of Moscow in its relationships with these areas.
At the same time the bureaucracies of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania display all the features of the full-blown ‚liberal‘ national Stalinism of the other states of Eastern Europe. The Latvian Popular Front has the tacit support of the ‚Communist‘ Party – one-third of its members are CP members – for its ‚ultimate goal‘ of outright political and economic independence.
Gorbachev, no more than the ‚conservative‘ wing of the Russian bureaucracy, would not tolerate any of these states separating from the USSR. The nationalities document states: „it is utterly wrong to allege that peoples of the USSR have no right to self-determination and to reduce self-determination merely to secession, thereby impoverishing this universal principle of the solution of the nationality problem.“ This is all that it says about the right of self-determination!
This has nothing in common with Lenin’s approach to the question. Nor are the Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian ‚Communist‘ Parties any better. They have reinforced divisions within the proletariat in order to maintain their faltering grip on power.
The Estonian Supreme Soviet recently proposed discriminatory measures on the language question and in voting rights against the Russian-speaking population: 40% of Estonia’s population is ’non-Estonian‘, 30% of whom have lived in Estonia for 40 years! The Estonian bureaucracy proposed that residency in the country of at least two years and in some cases five years was necessary for Russian speakers to vote. This provoked the organisation of Inter-Front, of Russian and other immigrants in the country. Its organisers include the pre-dominantly Russian managers of the industrial plants throughout Estonia.
The Russian speakers tend to be proletarian, with the native Estonians concentrated in the professions and white-collar jobs. Thus the national divisions also tend to run along class lines. The Estonian bureaucracy and the local Russian bureaucracy lean on their respective populations against one another as a means of shoring up their position. And this is from parties that claim to be ‚proletarian internationalist‘. Moscow vetoed the discriminatory election law, but not before widespread strike action closed most factories in Estonia. The Estonian government sought to ban strikes, in anticipation of their big brother Gorbachev in Moscow who has now introduced similar measures in ‚essential‘ industries
Despite the nationalist poison injected by both the Estonian ‚Communists‘ and the leaders of the ‚internationalists‘, the basic instincts of the proletariat were shown in the demand for ‚Soviets‘. Trotsky once remarked that it was necessary to differentiate between the nationalism of the landlords and capitalists and of the masses. The awakening to political life of formerly backward peasants and workers sometimes manifests itself in the growth of powerful nationalist movements. This should be distinguished from bourgeois nationalism, for it was the merely the ‚outer shell of an immature Bolshevism‘. Such tendencies have been revealed in the recent national movements in the USSR.
In the Baltic states, and in the vicious pogromist atmosphere in Azerbaijan, ‚Soviets‘ and strike committees were set up. A similar process has unfolded in Moldavia where a mass movement has developed against Stalin’s forced ‚Russification‘ of the region. Moldavians are mainly ethnic Romanians, who like their Romanian cousins over the border, had a Latin language and alphabet before Russian occupation in 1945.
Crushed by the Ottoman empire, brought under the heel of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Moldavians were then dominated by the Russian central bureaucracy which brutally imposed the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian language. Quite naturally a movement has developed against compulsory teaching of Russian and for the Romanian language to be a state language. This movement took on a mass character, with the improvisation of a ‚mini-police force‘. The slogans of the August demonstrations were ‚Down with the mafia!‘, ‚Down with the bureaucracy!‘.
However, the Moldavian bureaucracy sought to atone for one crime, Stalin’s policy of forcible Russification with another: discrimination against the Russian speaking population. Romanian was proclaimed as the state language.
Lenin, arguing against the Russian liberals 76 years ago, castigated their not so ‚liberal‘ attitude to the language question. He wrote: „Why should huge Russia, a much more backward country, inhibit her development by the retention of any kind of privilege for any one language“. He pointed out that „tiny Switzerland has not lost anything but has gained from having not one official language but three – German, French and Italian. In Switzerland, 70% of the population are Germans (in Russia 43% are Great Russians), 22% French (17% in Russia are Ukrainians) and 7% Italian (6% in Russia are Poles and 4.5% Byelorussian).
„Italians in Switzerland often speak French in the common parliament. They do so not because they are menaced by some savage police law (there are none such in Switzerland), but because the civilised citizens of a democratic state themselves prefer a language that is understood by a majority. The French language does not instil hatred in Italians because it is the language of a free civilised nation, a language which is not imposed by disgusting police measures“.
The huge hostility to the imposition of the Russian language in Moldavia does not justify discrimination against Russian speakers. A democratic, let alone a socialist position, would involve the acceptance of not one ’single official language‘ but two: Moldavian-Romanian and Russian. Lenin argued: „if all privileges disappear, if the imposition of any one language ceases… (the) horrible… thought that speeches in different languages would be heard in the common parliament“ would be laughable.
In a multi-national society there would obviously need to be a common means of communication. This would, as experience has shown in the USSR, be Russian. However, this would be impossible with the slightest compulsion, of forcing one language down the throats of another nation or minority. Lenin again points out „the requirements of economic exchange will themselves decide which language in a given country is to the advantage of the majority to know in the interests of commercial relations“.
He goes on: „This decision will be all the firmer because it is adopted voluntarily by a population of various nationalities“. The position of the Bolsheviks on the defence of national rights of oppressed minorities stands out clearly compared to the shameful position of all wings of the ‚Communist‘ bureaucracy.
In his unfinished work on Stalin, Trotsky quotes a resolution of the Bolshevik Org-Party conference in December 1919. „In the view of the fact that the Ukrainian culture … has for centuries been suppressed by tsarism and the exploiting classes of Russia, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party makes it obligatory for all members of the party to help in every way to get rid of all obstacles to the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture.
„Owing to the centuries of oppression, nationalist tendencies are to be found among the backward sections of the Ukrainian masses, and in view of this fact, it is the duty of the members of the parry to treat them with utmost forbearance and discretion, putting before them a comradely explanation of the identity of interests of the toiling masses of the Ukraine and of Russia. Members of the party … must actually enforce the desire of the toiling masses to study in the Ukrainian language and to use it in all Soviet institutions … striving … to render the Ukrainian language a weapon for the Communist education of the toiling masses. Steps must immediately be taken to ensure a sufficient number of employees in all Soviet institutions who know the Ukrainian language and to see that in the future all employees should be able to speak Ukrainian“. (Stalin p. 43)
Last year in the Ukraine, riot police attacked football crowds for flying the Ukrainian flag. The national question has re-emerged, shown by the recent huge demonstrations in Kiev and elsewhere. Gorbachev must be reaching for the panic button. Ukraine is the bread basket and the industrial locomotive of the USSR. With a population of 51 million, it occupies a vital position, far more important for the Kremlin than the Baltic states or the Caucasus.
Despite desperate efforts by the Moscow bureaucracy, it is impossible to solve the national question on a bureaucratic basis. Trotsky, writing 53 years ago in The Revolution Betrayed, gave the key to the solution of the present national problems facing the USSR when he wrote: „The tendencies of cultural autonomy and economic centralism come naturally from time to time into conflict. The contradiction between them is, however, far from irreconcilable. Although there can be no once and for all prepared formula to resolve the problem, still there is the resilient will of the interested masses themselves.
„Only their actual participation in the administration of their own destinies can at each new stage draw the necessary lines between the legitimate demands of economic centralism and the living gravitations of national culture. The trouble is, however, that the will of the population of the Soviet Union in all its national divisions is now wholly replaced by the will of a bureaucracy which approaches both economy and culture from the point of view of convenience of administration and the specific interests of the ruling stratum“, (p. 71)
These lines retain all their validity in characterising the present bureaucratic leadership of the USSR. Only a democratic workers state will begin to provide a solution. With the limitless economic, social and cultural possibilities which will then be unleashed, it would be possible to begin to solve accumulated problems in the national sphere.
In the Russian press there are attempts to grapple with these problems that even now give a glimpse of what is possible in the future. Thus in Soviet Weekly, 23 September 1989, Professor Edward Bagramov, in relation to the Crimean Tartars wrote: „I have suggested an ethnic area for the Crimea Tartars in the Crimea steppe. We could restore similar settling areas for Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians who lived there before the war and were exiled to other parts of the country.“
But with economic stagnation and even regression in some fields in the USSR, together with their concomitant shortages, such a proposal is a formula for racial or ethnic conflict. The Crimea Tartars were transported from the bountiful Crimea to the arid wastes of central Asia. Some would like to return, others, particularly the younger generation, would prefer to remain in their new ‚homeland‘. On the basis of a democratic USSR, it will be entirely possible to begin to satisfy the legitimate national aspirations of the Crimea Tartars.
After all, Trotsky and Lenin once considered giving land to the anarchists for them to put into practice their Utopian schemes. They believed such an experience would convince the anarchists of the superiority of the ideas of Marxism. This experiment was cut across by the civil war.
Lenin considered that the maximum ‚autonomy‘ would be possible and even necessary on the basis of a socialist federation. But the key to solving the national problem remains a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy. To even carry through this task it will be necessary for a force to be created in the USSR which is as bold and sensitive on the national question as were Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. This would involve a policy of recognising the rights of self-determination, up to and including the right to secede.
Gorbachev cannot possibly support such a measure without risking immediate overthrow. The present Politburo is the most ‚Russified‘ ever with only one non-Slav member. To counter the independence movements in the Baltic, Gorbachev is compelled to falsify history. Conceding that the Baltic states were ‚illegally annexed‘ by Stalin he then argues that the ‚peoples of the area‘ expressed support for such a step later on. Yet all historical evidence proves that the region was forcibly annexed by Stalin through the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.
While supporting the right of self-determination, at the same time the forces of Marxism, the subjective factor necessary to guarantee a victory over the bureaucracy, would advocate the closest union of the workers throughout the USSR. Without a clear position on the national question, the forthcoming political revolution against the bureaucracy is no more possible than was the Russian revolution 72 years ago.
Further upheavals, racial conflict, pogroms and a living nightmare for the peoples of the USSR are inevitable on the basis of the bureaucratic system. The ultimate break-up of the USSR cannot be ruled out if the bureaucracy continues to exercise its grip on power for any length of time. Only Marxism and Trotskyism can provide the theoretical and practical weapons for the peoples of the USSR to establish harmonious relations on the basis of a democratic workers state.
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