For once, the date on the spine is close to honest. V. S. Semyonov's Nations and Internationalism was issued in English by Progress Publishers in 1979, translated by Lenina Ilyitskaya, and the internal evidence puts the Russian original barely a year or two earlier. The 1977 Constitution is discussed as new. The Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976 is the most recent Party gathering. The freshest Brezhnev citation is an article in World Marxist Review for December 1977; the bibliography runs to 1978 and 1979. And the book says in its own voice: "It is less than 35 years since the end of the war." Nothing here is a warmed-over text of the 1960s dressed for export. Readers of this series will know that is not the usual finding.
What the book is, is a theoretical treatise. Semyonov states the ambition in his first paragraphs: "In this book the author sets out to give a theoretical exposition of these issues, discussing them in the context of world history and of the diverse forms of the human community." The six chapters move from the emergence of ethnic groups in pre-class society, through the formation of nations in late feudalism, to imperialism, October, the war, "developed socialism", and the world revolutionary process. The biographical note is badly damaged in this scan, but it records a doctoral thesis called 'Nations and Internationalism: a Historical Essay' and earlier books including By-passing Capitalism (1966), Looking into the Future (1966), a study of Soviet foreign policy (1970) and Internationalism and Progress (1978). This is an academic, not a functionary, and it matters — because a theoretical account of nations is held to a higher standard than a constitutional handbook or an anniversary volume. A treatise on the national question that cannot mention the largest forced movements of nations in Soviet history is not merely omitting an awkward fact. It is failing at its own subject.
Begin with what is true, because a great deal here is.
The Bolshevik position on the national question in 1917–23 was the most advanced of any state of its era, and this book reports much of it accurately and at length. It quotes the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia of 2 November 1917, correctly listing "the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination, even to the point of secession and the formation of an independent state". It notes that the RSDLP Programme of 1903 already contained the clause on self-determination "up to and including secession". It reproduces, in full and without softening, Lenin's passage from the 'Revision of the Party Programme' of October 1917:
"The Party which uses the Great-Russian language, is obliged to recognise the right to secede. When we win power, we shall immediately and unconditionally recognise this right for Finland, the Ukraine, Armenia, and any other nationality oppressed by tsarism (and the Great-Russian bourgeoisie). ... We want free unification; that is why we must recognise the right to secede (without freedom to secede, unification cannot be called free). The more so must we recognise the right of secession, because tsarism and the Great-Russian bourgeoisie have by their oppression left great bitterness and distrust of the Great Russians generally in the hearts of the neighbouring nations, and these must be eradicated by deeds and not by words."
It quotes the 1919 Party Programme on the special obligations of "the proletariat of the former oppressor nations". It says plainly that Great-Power chauvinism was "the chief menace" the policy had to defeat. It reports Lenin's insistence, against the plan to fold the independent republics into the RSFSR as autonomies, that the task was "not to destroy their independence, but to create another new storey, a federation of equal republics". It records the material achievement without exaggeration where the figures are checkable: literacy among the nine-to-forty-nines in 1926 at 3.7 per cent in Tajikistan, 10.6 in Uzbekistan, 15.1 in Kirghizia; the decision of 1927 to give the Turkic peoples a Romanised alphabet; the state subsidies that met roughly 92 per cent of Tajikistan's budget in 1927 and 80 per cent of Kazakhstan's from 1931 to 1934. The industrialisation of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Soviet North was not a fiction, and korenizatsiya did create written languages, schools and national institutions where none had existed.
The comparative chapters are better than they need to be. Chapter One's survey of national consolidation in Western Europe, among the Slavs, and in Asia, Africa and the Americas is real scholarship — the account of Vietnam's fifteenth-century "golden age" and the displacement of Old Chinese as the written language, or of the formation of the Turkish nationality in Anatolia from the eleventh century, are the work of someone who has read the literature. The Lenin apparatus is scrupulous, giving volume and page throughout so that a reader can check. And there is one footnote in which the author briefly stops performing: describing his travels in Asia and Africa, he writes that he "often had the impression that he was travelling in a time machine", seeing modern mines beside peasants in the natural economy and pre-capitalist usury. That is a man looking at something.
So the doctrine set out in this book is not false, and the record it reports for the early 1920s is largely real. The problem is the sixty years the book has to cross to reach 1979.
This series has learned how to read a Soviet list. The 1968 Progress volume Soviet Socialist Democracy enumerated twenty Autonomous Republics and, with no explanation whatever, silently reinstated the Kalmyk, Kabardinian-Balkar and Checheno-Ingush autonomies — abolished in 1943–44 when the peoples who named them were deported wholesale, restored in 1957 — while silently omitting the Crimean and Volga German autonomies, which were never restored. The State and Nations in the USSR (1982) failed the same test, and worse, being a book about nations. History of the USSR Part 3 (1982) reproduced the construction in logic. Semyonov's is a book about the theory of nations, published between the other two.
Here is the result, term by term. Volga German: the phrase does not occur. Meskhetian: does not occur. Crimea occurs once, in a description of the pre-revolutionary economy — the Crimean Tatars are not in this book, and neither is the Crimean Autonomous Republic. Deportation occurs once, in this sentence about the Great Patriotic War: the Soviet people suffered losses "as the result of the deportation of many Soviet citizens to forced labour camps in Germany". Resettlement occurs twice in the relevant sense: Russian colonists resettled to Central Russia in the 1920s, and the Generalplan Ost, under which "Tens of millions of people from Poland and the western part of the Soviet Union were to be resettled in Siberia and replaced by Germans". The vocabulary is available to the author. It is reserved for tsarism and for Nazism.
Rehabilitation occurs nine times, and every one of them is economic — the rehabilitation of the Ukrainian economy, of the Zaporozhstal works, of factories in Kharkov and Minsk and Riga. In the political language of the USSR after 1956 that word meant the clearing of the falsely convicted. Not once in this book does it refer to a person.
1944 occurs six times: Tuva's entry into the Union, the Paris insurrection, the Hungarian Front, a Pravda citation, wartime funds for Ukrainian reconstruction. Not the deportations.
The peoples themselves are present, but only as figures. The Chechens and Ingush appear first as tsarism's victims, in a passage quoting Lenin on how colonisation drove the natives "out into the wilds". They appear again in a population table comparing the 1926 census with the 1970. The Kalmyks, Karachays and Balkars appear in that table too, and the table is worth reading closely. Between 1926 and 1970 the Soviet population rose from 147.0 to 241.7 million. Over the same forty-four years the Kalmyks went from 132,000 to 137,000 — a rise of four per cent — while the Karachays doubled and the Balkars nearly doubled from their much lower bases. The book prints the figure and passes on.
Then comes the passage that makes this volume's silence something more than an omission. Discussing changes in the ethnic composition of the autonomous republics, Semyonov writes:
"A comparison of 1939 and 1959 census data shows that during and after the war the proportion of the indigenous population in some Autonomous republics fell slightly. For example, Buryats accounted for 20.2 per cent of the total population of the Buryat ASSR in 1959, as against 21.3 per cent in 1939. Similarly, the proportion of indigenous population dropped from 49.6 to 35.1 per cent in the Kalmyk ASSR, from 23.2 to 13.1 per cent in the Karelian ASSR, from 72 to 30.4 per cent in the Komi ASSR..."
And here is the explanation offered: "In all these republics there was a considerable increase in the absolute size of the indigenous population which was, however, coincident with an influx of people of other nationalities, mainly Russians."
The entire Kalmyk people was deported to Siberia and Central Asia in December 1943, its republic abolished, its territory divided among neighbouring provinces and settled by others. Kalmyks were not permitted to return until 1957, two years before the census Semyonov is citing. That is why the indigenous share of the Kalmyk ASSR fell by fourteen and a half percentage points; the influx of other nationalities is the consequence, not the cause, and it happened because the republic had been emptied. The book supplies the demographic trace of the deportation, in its own table, and reads it as migration. The words it uses for a fourteen-point collapse are "fell slightly".
One more. Arguing that the spread of Russian is voluntary and that Western talk of Russification is falsification, the book lists the proportions of each people with a command of Russian: "62.5 per cent of the Tatars, 58.4 per cent of the Chuvashi, 41.8 per cent of the Kazakhs, 65.7 per cent of the Mordvinians, 53.3 per cent of the Bashkirs, 66.7 per cent of the Chechens..." The Chechens return the highest figure on that list. They spent thirteen years, from February 1944 to 1957, in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, in schools and workplaces that functioned in Russian. Shevtsov's volume three years later would reach for the Chechen-Ingush ASSR for exactly the same purpose. Of all the evidence available, both books chose the case most contaminated by a history neither could name, and presented it as proof of free choice.
This book postdates the Constitution of 7 October 1977 and discusses it. It says the new Constitution "not only preserves the former sovereign rights of the Union republics but adds some new ones, with new guarantees", and enumerates: the right of republics to share in all-Union decision-making, and the right to initiate legislation in the Supreme Soviet. It compares Article 70 of 1977 with Article 13 of 1936 and finds the newer text superior, quoting its description of the USSR as an "integral, federal, multinational state formed on the principle of socialist federalism". It cites Article 36 on the equal rights of nationalities.
Article 72 — "Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR" — is not cited anywhere in this book. The word "secession" appears six times and the word "secede" three, and every occurrence belongs to 1903, 1917 or the Civil War. Shevtsov, writing three years later, affirmed the right a dozen times and could describe no procedure for exercising it; there was none to describe, and none existed until April 1990. Semyonov, writing a theoretical treatise fourteen months after the Constitution was promulgated, does not raise the question at all. He notices instead that the new Article 70 has added the word "integral" and reads the addition as a strengthening of Leninism.
Trotsky had already written the answer, in April 1939, about the equivalent article of the 1936 Constitution:
"After all, even the constitution of the USSR acknowledges the right of its component federated peoples to self-determination, that is, to separation. Thus, not even the incumbent Kremlin oligarchy dares to deny this principle. To be sure it remains only on paper. The slightest attempt to raise the question of an independent Ukraine openly would mean immediate execution on the charge of treason."
("Problem of the Ukraine", written 22 April 1939, published in the Socialist Appeal of 9 May 1939 and reprinted in Fourth International, vol. X, no. 10, November 1949.)
The Ukraine is named more than thirty times in this volume — as the second republic of the Union, as the site of wartime devastation and postwar reconstruction, as a bearer of literacy statistics. The word famine occurs once, and refers to 1920–21 in the Volga region, attributed to "Bad crop failure in 1920 and 1921". There is no reference of any kind to 1932–33. The historiography of that catastrophe remains genuinely contested — the death tolls in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the question of intent are argued over by serious historians and the ranges are wide — but no serious account puts the losses below the millions. Semyonov's word for the policy that produced them is this: "This achievement of the Soviet people can rightly be put on a par with such attainments as industrialisation, collectivisation and the cultural revolution." The achievement being praised in that sentence is the claim that "The national question, a legacy of the past, has been solved completely, finally and irrevocably in the Soviet Union."
Georgia occurs twenty-two times. (A companion volume in this series, a full-length biography of Lenin, managed the word once in 202,000 words; Semyonov is not doing that.) But the autonomisation crisis of 1922, Lenin's last political fight, is not here. The book reports that "It was suggested that the Soviet Republics should be unified on an autonomous basis, and join the RSFSR as autonomous republics. Lenin and the Communist Party rejected the idea" — a suggestion with no author, rejected by a unanimity that did not exist. There is no Ordzhonikidze striking a Georgian communist, no dictation of 30–31 December 1922, no "mere scrap of paper", no Mdivani, no Makharadze, no Rakovsky. Ordzhonikidze does appear: in a footnote, quoted as the authority for the proposition that the Transcaucasian Federation gave political form to a coexistence "that will breed peace and affection among these peoples".
And then there is the honour roll. Arguing that the Soviet people is a community of equals, Semyonov writes that "Lenin's name and cause united prominent representatives of different nations and nationalities in the common struggle for socialism", and lists as "prominent leaders of the Leninist core of the Party" the non-Russians "Dzhaparidze, Dzerzhinsky, Kosior, Manuilsky, Mikoyan, Narimanov, Postyshev, Rudzutak, Stalin, Sverdlov, Snieckus and Uborevich".
That is the only place in this book where Stalin appears as a person; the sole other occurrence of the name is Stalingrad. Four of the eleven men he is listed among were shot on his orders: Ieronim Uborevich in June 1937, Yan Rudzutak in July 1938, Stanislav Kosior and Pavel Postyshev in February 1939. Kosior had been general secretary of the Ukrainian party through 1932–33 and Postyshev was sent to Kiev in 1933 as Moscow's plenipotentiary; they are named here as exemplars of internationalism in a book that does not mention the famine they administered, and they were killed by the man whose name sits between theirs.
Semyonov's book went to press while the Fourth International's press was reporting the subject weekly. Intercontinental Press carried, in its issue of 28 March 1977, Marilyn Vogt's summary of the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events: "After Stalin's death, eleven of the fourteen nationalities that had been summarily deported from their homes during World War II were eventually allowed to return to their lands. However, the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and Meskhetians were forced to remain in exile." Its issue of 9 January 1978 noted that Stalin "deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from Crimea in May 1944 and in 1946 abolished their republic that had been established by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1921". Its review of the year on 25 December 1978 recorded that "The campaign of vilification against the entire Crimean Tatar people was revived" — and, in the same paragraph, that mass demonstrations had forced the Kremlin to abandon its attempt to remove the language guarantees of Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis from their republican constitutions, "a new development in the Soviet Union". On 7 May 1979, the year of this book's imprint, the same paper reported that Mustafa Dzhemilev had been sentenced to four years' internal exile — his fifth term — for championing the right of the Crimean Tatars to live in Crimea.
The analysis behind those reports was older. Trotsky, in the April 1939 article quoted above, identified the mechanism: "In his capacity as People's Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin invariably represented the most centralist and bureaucratic tendency. This evinced itself especially on the question of Georgia and on the question of the Ukraine... In order to guarantee 'administrative needs,' i.e., the interests of the bureaucracy, the most legitimate claims of the oppressed nationalities were declared a manifestation of petty-bourgeois nationalism. All these symptoms could be observed as early as 1922-23." The result, he wrote, was the "outright strangulation of any kind of independent national development of the peoples of the USSR", and Soviet Ukraine had become to the bureaucracy "an administrative division of an economic unit and a military base of the USSR". The unsigned editorial note prefacing the article's reprint in Fourth International in November 1949 added what the intervening decade had supplied: "During the war and since, Stalin has uprooted entire peoples from their ancestral homes and shipped them in cattle cars to the barren wastelands of Siberia."
George Clarke set the whole sequence down in three sentences in Fourth International in 1952: "Stalin's record on the national question leaves no doubt on this score. Lenin on his deathbed broke off all personal relations with Stalin for his brutal treatment of the Georgian people. Subsequently there have been constant purges in the Ukraine; Volga Germans, peoples of the Baltic and the Caucasus have been bodily uprooted from their homes and lands." (Vol. XIII, no. 6, November–December 1952.)
Semyonov's central theoretical construct — "the Soviet people, a social and international community", a society in which classes and nations converge because there is no stratum with an interest in keeping them apart — has its answer in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), and specifically in chapter 9, "Social Relations in the Soviet Union". There Trotsky names what the convergence thesis has to leave out: "The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy," which is "in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." A theory of nations under socialism that begins by assuming no such stratum exists will explain the emptying of the Kalmyk ASSR as an influx of Russians, because it has no other category available.
Chapters One and Two are a serious, well-sourced comparative history of national formation, and they are worth reading on their own terms; the treatment of oppressed and oppressor nations quotes Lenin accurately and at length and is the best short statement of that doctrine in the Progress list. Chapter Three's narrative of 1917–22 is documented and largely reliable up to the point where it stops. The census, literacy and budgetary series are real data, drawn from named Soviet sources, and they record real transfers of resource to the peripheries. Chapter Four's account of the anti-fascist Resistance — the French, Greek, Italian, Belgian and Hungarian movements, the Soviet prisoners who joined the maquis — is a genuine contribution, and the figure of more than twenty million Soviet dead is stated without inflation or evasion. And the polemic against theories of the nation founded on blood and soul is a good argument, whatever it is being used to cover.
The point of the criticism is not that the doctrine here is wrong. It is that the doctrine is right and the book is describing a country in which it had ceased to operate. Self-determination including secession was real Bolshevik policy, and the book quotes the proof of it. Lenin's last fight was over precisely this question, against the man this book lists among the Leninist core. What Semyonov cannot say is that Lenin lost; that the federation became a formality administered from Moscow; that between 1941 and 1944 entire nations were loaded onto trains and their republics struck from the map; that three of them had still not been allowed home when he was writing; and that the right of secession, by 1979 fifty-six years old and inscribed in three successive constitutions, had never acquired a procedure and never would until the year before the Union dissolved.