02.12.1999
Permanent and national revolution
Gerry Downing examines differences among the Bolsheviks on the national question
Then Lenin began his battle against Great Russian chauvinism in the Bolsheviks, as manifested in the handling of the Georgian and Ukraine questions by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky in 1922 and 1923, he entrusted Trotsky with the brief and gave him strict instructions not to compromise with Stalin at the 12th Congress. But Trotsky agreed to a few face-saving amendments to Stalin’s theses and abandoned Christian Rakovsky to fight alone.
His reasons were many. He did not want to carry out Lenin’s instructions and split the party by attempting to remove Stalin just after Lenin had suffered his second major stroke and was at death’s door. Stalin’s power over the apparatus was fully clear to him. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky together could have defeated him, Stalin not only had the apparatus now, but also the backing of Zinoviev and Kamenev. This triumvirate controlled the party from the beginning of Lenin’s illness in 1922.
Also it is incorrect to read backwards into history the evil intentions of Stalin. He was not yet the Stalin of the purges. In fact all were reticent to accept Lenin’s mantle because they were all aware that the Seventh of Thermidor was upon them and they did not wish to become the new Bonaparte. Trotsky in particular was the obvious candidate for this position and he was very careful to avoid any suggestion of accepting the role. But it may also be true that he did not appreciate as yet the extremely reactionary nature of Stalin’s attitude to Georgia, as Lenin and Rakovsky did, and what this indicated about the bureaucratisation and degeneration of the party itself.
Nonetheless he did begin the battle in earnest on October 8 1922, when Dzerzhinsky proposed that party members should spy for the GPU. A week later the Platform of the 46, a document mainly by old Bolsheviks attacking the degeneration of the party, appeared. Stalin made a tactical retreat and the central committee opened up a debate on bureaucracy in the party. On December 11 Trotsky published his New course against bureaucracy. He also outlined in detail the need for the central planning of the economy. The inevitable result was a defeat for Trotsky and the oppositionists against the combined forces of the troika now joined by the rightist Bukharin. Stalin already controlled all congresses because he now appointed the delegates.
Bukharin had swung from the ultra-left to the right over the issue of the monopoly of foreign trade in capitulation to the peasantry. It took the combined efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to defeat that Bukharin-Stalin alliance. The 13th Congress on January 16-18 1924 condemned ‘Trotskyism’, days before Lenin’s death and effectively marginalised Trotsky until the break-up of the troika in 1925.
Rakovsky had changed his position on the national question following his analysis of his experiences as president of commissars of the Ukrainian Socialist Republics and his conclusions marked the first serious theoretical fight against the rising bureaucracy. Previously he had held the dominant position, inherited from the German social democracy - which ignored Lenin’s far better, if pragmatic, position - that the revolution would solve all and that the national question was merely a backward and reactionary separatism. His new approach of respect for and defence of the progressive aspect of the culture of the oppressed is summed up in the introduction to his writings by Gus Fagan, which consists of quotes from Rakovsky’s speech interspersed with continuity commentary by Fagan: “Tell me, comrades, how many of you can explain in what way the October revolution solved the nationalities question?”
It did not resolve it, nor could it have. National culture does not cease to exist because a state is a workers’ state or because the economy is no longer privately owned. National culture is the only way through which the working and peasant masses will gain access to political and cultural life.
“And hand in hand with national consciousness comes that feeling of equality which Lenin speaks of in his memorandum. Because of centuries of tsarist domination, the nationalities are now experiencing that feeling of equality in a much deeper and stronger way than we think. It [the party] faces the question of how to find the bond between proletarian internationalism and the national development of wide layers of the peasant masses with their aspiration for a national life, for their own national culture, for their own national state” (C Rakovsky Selected writings on opposition in the USSR 1923-30 London, p33).
And Rakovsky went on to link the rise of bureaucratism to the lack of any serious attempt to tackle national oppression, as Lenin had done. This fight was the real origins of the Left Opposition and then what is known as ‘Trotskyism’.
Rakovsky had to educate the Left Opposition on the national question, on its essential international character and on the transitional method contained in respect for the national consciousness of the oppressed. Trotsky’s 1939 position on the Ukraine was obviously informed by this struggle of Rakovsky.
Both of them, and Lenin, would have been far better informed on this vital matter for the survival of the revolution had they studied the debate that raged on this very question within the Jewish Marxists. They might have learned from the Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem, whose long study, The national question and the social democracy, published in Yiddish in 1904, contained the following remarkable forerunner of Rakovsky’s remarks:
“A national culture as an independent entity, as a closed circle with its own content, has never existed. The nation is the particular form in which the human form expresses itself. The essence of cultural life, which generally is the same everywhere, takes different colourings and national forms to the extent that the different groups, around which specific social relations are established, adapt themselves to them. These social relations - the context in which class conflicts are born and intellectual and spiritual currents develop - confer on the culture a national character”(E Traverso The Marxists and the Jewish question pp101-102).
According to Traverso, Medem saw the Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Pale of Settlement as a nation, but his view of a nation was not territorial: it was cultural and linguistic solely. He developed the theory of national neutralism, which allowed history to decide the eventual outcome of the question: “We are neutral. We are not against assimilation; we are not against anti-assimilation.”
The Bolsheviks should have reciprocated this correct anti-Zionist approach. However, it seems that the relationship with the Bund, which ebbed and flowed following the split of 1903, was never developed sufficiently again to encompass this vital understanding of the national question. After Lenin’s death Stalin’s dogmatic, schematic understanding and Trotsky’s tardiness in tackling the problem at all led to wholesale confusion. Rakovsky’s understanding came too late.
This remarkably concise understanding of the national question by Medem contains and develops the idea expressed by Marx in a letter to Engels on April 20 1866. Lenin had quoted this, as had Rakovsky in his last speech to the Bolsheviks where he was listened to with any respect, the 12th Congress in April 1923 already referred to:
“Yesterday there was a session of the council of the International on the current war ... As was expected, the session eventually came to the question ‘of nationalities’ and our attitude to them ... The representatives of ‘Young France’ (non-workers) came out with the announcement that all nationalities and even nations were “antiquated prejudices” ... The English laughed very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue and others, who had done away with nationalities, had spoken to us in French - that is, in a language which was incomprehensible to nine-tenths of the meeting. I also suggested that by the negation of nationalities he appeared, quite unconsciously, to understand their adoption by the model French nation.”
There does not appear to be much of the ‘historic nations’ versus ‘non-historic’ counterrevolutionary nationalities in this approach of Marx. What else do the quotes from Rakovsky, Medem and Marx represent in modern terms but a legitimisation of the rights of every oppressed nation and nationality to struggle against their national, cultural and military oppressor, particularly as it comes today in the guise of the Coca-Cola culture and neo-liberal reaction?
The mass movement that was the Jewish Bund had developed the most progressive and dialectical understanding of the national question, but the Bolsheviks were too little engaged with them to learn it. The new revolutionary government’s understanding of the Jewish question never really had a chance to develop. The pogromistic anti-semitism of the whites drove the Jews into the arms of the revolution, so the Bolsheviks did not really have to fight for their allegiance. The Jews were engaged in light, consumer industries that did not have the revolutionary potential of large factories and were too remote from Moscow and Petersburg to influence to outcome of the revolution itself.
The Bolsheviks were successful champions of the oppressed Jews and all oppressed nationalities and nations for the few short years (1917 to 1923) of the revolution’s forward drive. The Jewish intellectuals (but of the ‘non-Jewish Jews’ - ie, assimilationist variety) were strongly represented on the Bolshevik leadership. The mass of Jews remained committed to the Soviet Union for most of its history, despite the increasing anti-semitism of the Stalinist regime.
A final word is necessary on Lenin’s last struggle, the Georgian affair. Firstly the suppression of the Georgian Menshevik government correctly had the support of all sections of the Bolshevik leadership. Trotsky details the conduct of the Mensheviks against the revolution:
“The Special Detachments, if you please, are the Menshevik Cheka. The Special Detachments seized and imprisoned and shot all who were active against the Menshevik democracy. The Special Detachments in their method of terror in no way differed from the Extraordinary Commission of Soviet Russia. Where they did differ was in aim. The Extraordinary Commission protected the socialist dictatorship against the agents of capital; the Special Detachments protected the bourgeois regime against the Bolshevik ‘anarchy’. But it was for this very reason that the respectable people who cursed the Cheka did not notice the Special Detachment” (L Trotsky Social democracy and the wars of intervention 1918-1921 London, p44). He is referring to social democrats like Kautsky, Mrs Snowden, Henderson, etc.
When Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky rode roughshod over the Georgian Bolshevik government and sought to hide this from Lenin and the politburo Lenin fought him in his famous last struggle so well described by Moshe Lewin. Lenin or Trotsky never made any apologies for crushing the counterrevolutionary Menshevik regime in Georgia. The conflict was about the denial of the national rights of Georgia as represented by the Georgian Bolshevik government. On January 30-31 1922 he produced his final addendum to his testament, recommending the removal of Stalin as general secretary and setting out his own memorandum on the national question referred to by Rakovsky above.
Note in particular that this memorandum tacitly acknowledges that the initial statement of the Bolshevik government on the right to separate, etc was naive in subordinating the revolution to counterrevolutionary forces like the Georgian Mensheviks. He rejected the bureaucratic suppression of national rights by Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky so forcefully: “That really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.”
He gave as his reason, not the needs of the internal situation in the USSR, but the need to relate to the developing revolutionary consciousness of the oppressed masses:
“The morrow of world history will be a day when the awaking peoples, oppressed by imperialism, are fully aroused and the decisive long and hard struggle for their liberation begins” (both quotes from M Lewin Lenin’s last struggle pp86-87).
Marxist understanding of the need to relate to the consciousness of the most oppressed had indeed developed in line with how that consciousness had developed since 1848 when Engels promised “blood revenge” against the south Slavs for opposing the revolution of that year.