STALIN AND THE MODERN NATIONAL QUESTION

G.A. Petrov, Doctor of Military Science
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin – the great political activist of the XX century and a great scientist, politologist, philosopher, sociologist and remarkable designer of political strategies and tactics. A one time superb leader (apparatchik), Stalin solved problems in a concrete and practical way, formulated by him in the sphere of history, politics and sociology. What is characteristic of modern researchers specializing in social disciplines, is the complete abstraction of formulating problems – if they do not directly examine separate countries, regions, events etc, and if they are in the captivity of empirical material, then they are not in a fit state to formulate common regularities, patterns and rules. Even when these researchers call themselves “continuers of Marxist methodology” the only thing that appears “Marxist” about them is their surface knowledge of Marxist tenets (quotations), for explaining these or those facts being observed. What set J.V. Stalin apart from others was that even when dealing with directly practical questions, he never broke away from the theoretical precepts “gone through by him” because of an extensive and deep analysis of all the history of the detailed process of revolutionary practice. This was the true Marxist attitude towards the objectiveness of truth and reality, because the “objectiveness of reality is not a question of theory, but question of revolutionary practice”. The main distinguishing feature of J.V. Stalin as a theorist and practician in areas of his activity was his revolutionary-mindedness. Without an understanding of this, it is impossible to define the greatness of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Ignoring the works of Stalin in the sphere of social thinking will inevitably lead to regression in social theory, and in the sphere of political activity lead to bloody outcomes. This becomes especially apparent when examining Stalin’s work on the national question. As a practician of revolutionary struggle, he clearly understood the significance of national policy, and as a theorist, he made a most complete fundamental investigation into the national question from the position of a materialist understanding of history using the dialectical method when analyzing social phenomena. This special quality of Stalin made him a master of proofs – if one proceeds on the basis of practice (the sole criterion of truth and reality); the proofs of Stalin may only be rejected from the position of selfish class interests and not from the viewpoint of truth and reality.1
After Stalin, enemies of Soviet power and communism could only ignore his investigations, but could not analysis and discover substantial definitions for an optimal and progressive continuation of research into the theory of national relations and attitudes.2
The theory of nations put forth by Stalin back in 1913 became a classic, but in the sphere of social thought, the classically flawless tenets are rejected on socio-political and selfish grounds. In the sphere of practice on the national question under J.V. Stalin, every 10-15 years corrections and updates were entered into the ethnos of each separate nation and people, for it was well known that with each moment in history, a community on the basis of language, culture, unity of economic systems and territories inevitably alters historically in all the directions of its special characteristics.
All outstanding politicians, according to the demands of reality, were masters – pragmatists, and without an evaluation of the real interrelations between social groups, it is impossible to achieve the desired result. Stalin was just that kind of pragmatist that distinguished him from other revolutionaries-romantics: as V.I. Lenin had still noted, the revolutionary Narodniks and early Mensheviks had suffered with this isolation from reality “with revolutionary romantism”. Political programmes can be implemented only within a framework of considering the interactions of all opposing forces – participators in historical events including openly reactionary ones. Such are the dialectics of history, and “we know only one science, and that is the science of history”. In the development of national relations, Stalin always warned of the impermissibility of running too far ahead: from the tribal-ethnical communality having still not been defined as a people, having found itself at the stage of only just forming historical self awareness, and with this, unable to separate historical prejudices from national character (portrayed in the unity of culture), up to the forming of a nation, a socialist nation, according to his instructions there exists a lengthy epoch – an epoch of three – four generations. This particularly related to the Crimean Tatars, the Tatars of the Lower Volga Regions, and the townspeople of the Caucasus, the Kazakhs, Kirgiz people and others.
As an “infantile disorder” of the process of forming peoples, which can turn out fatal in national relations, there first appears uncontrolled nationalism, naïve in form, that is – “ours” and “not ours”, anti-proletarian according to Stalin and reactionary in content. Support for the national liberation movement assumes, first of all, the suppression of the reactionary sides of national self awareness (“any nationalism in the epoch of imperialism is reactionary”); secondly, it is necessary in any way possible, to support international forces, educate them in the spirit of proletarian revolutionary patriotism and internationalism. It was namely on these questions that J.V. Stalin had always been in dispute with pseudotheorists of the national question: Pyatakov, Bukharin, Trotsky. Unfortunately, in the mass study of the history of the CPSU, it is namely this dispute that as a rule, was hushed up (especially in the past 45-50 years), allegedly to “prevent the spreading of the views of these pseudotheorists”, but in actual fact, to make Stalin’s theses and deductions that were relevant to concrete national policy in the sphere of national culture – “national in form, socialist in content”- abstractly empty.
May the reader be reminded that J.V. Stalin was guided in the theory of nations by the thesis on the “historical community” according to language, territory and national character being reflected in a community of culture, and in the community of economic life (unity of social-economic systems in the sharing of the “national market”). V.I. Lenin adopted the Stalinist formula of nations and the national question, and when answering the Black Hundreds, indicated the dual nature of national culture: “reactionary culture” and “democratic culture”, but V.I. Lenin believed to be possible, the creation of a new international community within the framework of a new kind of federalism. This point of view triumphed in 1922 in connection with concrete historical conditions: the activity of the III International; the necessity of unity of Soviet power and the national aspirations of the peoples of the East; the revolutionary situation (unrealized by the European proletariat) in the majority of Western European countries.3 The Soviet type of federalism demonstrated its vitality only in unity with the Stalin national policy. The rejection of the Stalin national policy by the opportunist leadership of the CPSU led, together with a whole list of treacherous acts on the part of “national” leaders of the CPSU in all the republics of the Soviet Union, towards national betrayal first of all, of the Soviet people as the highest social and legal subject of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, to the betrayal of the communist ideals and rights of Man, recognized by the whole cultural world of the XX century.4 It is completely natural that in almost every Union republic, by the process of betraying socialism and acts of state treachery, former leaders of the republican communist parties were nominated for this purpose.
J.V. Stalin was constantly aware that in the absence of territorial unity, we possess no “national character” or tribal relations. Stalin’s pupil and comrade-in-arms A.A. Zhdanov in 1939 made a sufficiently comprehensive criticism of the “practical solution to the national question”, when national belonging was defined according to the principle of “descent”, “blood-tribal criterion”. Although the criticism was clear-cut and well defined, the practical question on national belonging continued to be decided at the class-four education level of heads of passport offices in the departments of the militia, or of inspectors of register offices (ZAGS). Ethno cultural and ethno confessional attitudes affecting every Soviet citizen at an everyday level, could have been solved without an especially bloody approach, had the complexity of the “Soviet way of life” been preserved in its valued- moral content, but we were witnesses to the destruction of this set of social arrangements, starting from the “results of the XX Congress of the CPSU”. The generation of people in the 1960-s on the question of solving national relations went off in two directions: bourgeois cosmopolitan (a set of abstract “values common to all Mankind”, very often associated and close to religious obscurantism, right up to middle-age mysticism) and, openly nationalist, restorative under the guise of national bourgeois-feudal traditions and prejudices. Every Soviet citizen has experienced the destructiveness of these two trends, although they have been contrived to develop within wide “communist propaganda”. The standard formula that inside the USSR the “national question, as defined by the classics of Marxism, had been solved,” together with its own categoricalness suffered out of stupidity, as the final solution to the national question is possible only then, when the culture of all the peoples of the world integrates into a single, unified culture common to all Mankind. J.V. Stalin spoke about this back in 1928. The question concerning who is the “classic of Marxism” is not a question of theory, but a practical question. The classic research into the national question, the Stalin legacy is an achievement of all Mankind. We shall not dwell especially on the problems of “national socialism”, “national communism” and other “true socialisms”, the theoretical criticism of which was given by K. Marx and F. Engels, and the practical criticism, which was given by the people of the world in their struggle against fascism, Nazism and other ideologies and practices of the most reactionary defenders of capitalism of the XX century. We shall only point out that attempts to avoid the formulation of the national question in the USSR appeared especially in 1987-1989 in the USSR (this, on the eve of the “national dismantling” of the communo-criminal structures in almost all the republics of the Union), when educational subjects devoted to the national question were dropped from the list of compulsory subjects in party education. The case of a future investigation and judicial examination is to determine who was personally interested in bringing about that situation.
Who then defines the national question at this point in history? The national question has four main directions of definition:
1. It remains the main component in the common solution to the development in the direction of social equality. The true realization of absolute rights of Mankind (human rights) over the whole territory of the country (the right to life, the right to education for the future generation, the right to creative labour, the right to knowledge accumulated by Mankind, the right to an information guarantee for existence and coexistence of each person within a unified language environment), is the criterion for a solution to this problem. These rights are absolute since they are valid in any social environment, but are not being realized anywhere.
2. Solving the problem of social equality between people and the process for guaranteeing implementation after its solution, may be realized only on the basis of unified and indivisible public, social ownership over the system of social saving funds for all the means of providing absolute human rights for every citizen.
3. The formulation of the defence and realization of common ownership is possible only by way of a revolutionary (that is, a constantly historically changing, depending on the stage of development of objective conditions for providing social equality in the framework of guarantees of absolute human rights) government structure, permanently accountable to all members of society.
4. The providing of a complete an all-embracing integration of cultural achievements of all the peoples of the world, with the providing of conditions for each citizen to use this information-subject fund of social existence in accessible language form. It is obvious and clear that programmes of “cultural-national” autonomies under this, which J.V. Stalin struggled against all the time, are rejected for what they are – for there is no place for national isolationism.
Conclusion: from the Stalin formula – “national in form, socialist in content” – Mankind’s culture should be transformed into the formula – “national language in form, unified communistically and international in content culture of all Mankind”. All material, social and material-production conditions for all humanity will become unified, national-language forms of life, and cultures are preserved while people of separate national-ethnic belonging exist.
The correctness of the national question regarding separate ethnic communities is decided starting from common directions of determining national problems.
As an example, it is possible to examine the “problem of the Caucasus” or the “Chechen problem”. Events in the Caucasus have shown that in historical development, a section of mountain people have not departed from the boundary of tribal attitudes, their definition and self-determination go against the rights of other peoples and representatives of people of other nationalities. On the territory of Chechnya up to “perestroika”, and actually up to the counter-revolutionary process and expansionism of international capital with the assistance of the compradors on the territory of the USSR, there lived about two million inhabitants. 450 thousand of them were Chechens. The crime of “genocide” was carried out against the non-Chechen population. And here primordially, is how the “national problem” stood, not even talking about the deportations in the 1940-50-s of the XX century, which concerned all peoples (ethnic groups) who brought about genocide in relation to the majority of representatives of other communities: the “Sudetan Germans”, Gdansk Germans”, Pomeranian Germans, Baltic Germans, Japanese in the USA etc. The experience of the Second World War made it obligatory for each ethnos to answer as a community for their own leading representatives. The provision of absolute human rights for every person is the criterion of responsibility. According to the expression of one of the Chechens in 1994: “Stalin deported us, but did not kill us”. The “defenders”, “lawyers” of the “repressed peoples of the USSR” make it the aim to destroy these peoples (so that there would be no “questions raised about them”). The responsibility of a nation for their own representatives is determined by the peoples of the world as a right to separate statehood. Humanity has sacrificed more than 100 million lives in the XX century for the sake of this principle; J.V. Stalin stood for this principle in 1946 at a meeting with a Finnish state delegation. Such is the practical aspect of the modern-day national question.

Notes
1. Stalin’s formulas entered into the mass conscience of the Soviet people and were made into aphorisms, proverbs, and sayings – mass stereotypes of social awareness.

2. The “unmaskers” of J.V. Stalin love referring to the “incompletion” of his education. If one approaches this objectively then: firstly, Stalin actually finished studying the whole coarse at the only institute of higher learning in Georgia (except the sitting of the final exam, which was not due to “poor progress”), secondly, objectively by 1903, he was one of the popular and erudite propagandists of Marxism in Georgia, and by 1914, his works were at the level demanded by modern candidate-dissertations. By 1918, J.V. Stalin had become one of the leading specialists-Marxists in the world on the national question. By 1924, Stalin’s political professionalism and quality as a scientist are reflected in his theoretical works.

3. V.I. Lenin believed that with the triumph of socialism in the countries of Western Europe, leadership in the world revolutionary process towards socialism would cross over to them.

4. The first legal relations of guarantees of human rights were portrayed in right – in the Constitution of the USSR of 1936 (The Stalin Constitution, by definition of the Soviet people). The USSR was the only power that recognized in 1975, the norms of the World Declaration of Human Rights