Translation and Introduction by Medway Baker.

Safarov (upper right) with Ural Regional Soviet, circa 1918.

Georgy Safarov was born in St. Petersburg in 1891. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and from 1910 spent many years exiled in Switzerland, returning to Russia alongside Lenin in 1917. Despite spending most of his political career up until the revolution in Western Europe, he took a keen interest in the national question, especially the plight of the Muslim population of Russian Central Asia. He was sent to Soviet Turkestan in 1919 to aid in the establishment of soviet power and the fight against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi movement. The complexity of carrying out these tasks—establishing soviet power, winning over the oppressed masses, building socialism, and combatting both counterrevolutionary nationalism and Russian chauvinism—led Safarov to engage in a comprehensive study of Central Asian economic and social conditions. The two pieces we present below were written around the time that Safarov was engaged in a struggle with Mikhail Tomsky, who also had come to hold a leadership position in Soviet Turkestan. Tomsky, as Matthieu Renault elaborates in his essay Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin, wished to transplant the methods used with regard to the peasantry in the Russian core—the tax-in-kind, etc.—directly to Turkestan, without consideration for the national chauvinism and economic dominance of Russian peasants, workers, and administrators, and the resentment of the native population towards these colonisers. To this proposal, Safarov counterposed the establishment of committees of the poor peasants and distribution of the lands of the large landowners to these peasants, in order to encourage class conflict within the Muslim population, against both their own elites and the Russian colonisers. As Renault demonstrates, Lenin—eternally concerned with Great Russian chauvinism and bureaucratism—attempted to mediate between the two, but clearly sided with Safarov. This was a struggle that he and Safarov were to lose.

The first essay, The Evolution of the National Question, published in the French publication Bulletin communiste in early 1921, is a brief sketch of the development of the national question throughout the revolutionary period, and concludes with a list of problems and a set of prescriptions for the Soviet government to act upon. The style, structure, and content suggest that it was rather hastily written as a call to action, a feature that we have attempted to preserve in this translation. The second, The East and Revolution, published in Bulletin communiste a few months after (and having been published in German in late 1920), greatly elaborates on the content of the first article, with references to anthropological, economic, and historical studies, especially of the Central Asian peoples of the Russian Empire. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Safarov examines the nature of imperialism, its effect on the economies and societies of colonised nations, the changes in the global and Russian situations since the beginning of the First World War, and the experiences of the national-democratic and proletarian revolutions occurring worldwide in the wake of the war. He then discusses solutions to the national question, in an earnest attempt to resolve the tensions inherent to the national-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia, and by extension the world.

A key part of his solution is the soviets, which he identifies as “a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries.”

But the importance of the soviets, for Safarov, is not the particularities of the soviet form as manifested in Russia in 1917 (he in fact refers also to the anjoman, a type of revolutionary council that emerged during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09). Rather, it is their status as popular organs of the revolutionary masses, created in the actual process of the class struggle, and as anti-agreementist organs from which the exploiting strata are excluded. For Safarov, the significance of the soviet form is not in their size, nor in their organisational norms; it is in their class composition. Only the class-independence of the labouring masses (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty producers alike) from their exploiters can fully carry out the project of national liberation from imperialism. The native exploiters, Safarov demonstrates, will inevitably betray the interests of the majority of the nation in favor of their own class interests, and in so doing will side with imperialist dictatorship.

It is crucial to note that Safarov does not at any point confuse national liberation with the transition to communism, nor does he advocate liquidation of the proletarian struggle against exploitation into the pure struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, he stresses that “this entire programme [for national liberation] has not a single communist element,” and insists on the necessity of “conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form.” For Safarov, the struggle for national liberation is a necessary component of the progression towards communism, of the development of the exploited masses’ revolutionary consciousness — but national-democratic revolutionaries are not to be confused with communists, and it is the duty of communists to struggle against these elements in order to win over the exploited masses.

It is notable that for Safarov, the national policy he proposes “coincides with another [task]: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule.” In effect, the alliance of the Russian workers and peasants with the toiling masses of the oppressed nations is mirrored by the alliance between the proletariat and the peasanty (the smychka). Just as the Russian proletariat was incapable of exercising power without the support and active participation of the peasantry (unless they wanted to wage a brutal war against the countryside), it was also unable to exercise power without the participation of the exploited strata of the oppressed nations. Safarov, clearly referencing the Basmachi movement, insists that attempting to exercise proletarian power over the oppressed nations, without taking into consideration their particular conditions and tasks, “can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development” — that is, a struggle against the Soviet Republic. This applies not only to the Soviet Republic internally, but also to the international revolution. Even Soviet economic policy is mirrored in Safarov’s vision for the global socialist economy: the peasant soviet republics of the once-oppressed nations, he says, will trade raw materials to the proletarian soviet socialist republics in exchange for manufactured goods and technical expertise, just as the New Economic Policy was founded upon equal exchange between the workers and the peasants. Safarov claims that this will allow the peasant soviet republics to develop at their own pace, so that they can “prepare for communism.”

The tendencies that Safarov identifies constitute an early version of a thesis later elaborated upon by postcolonial revolutionaries and scholars, such as Frantz Fanon. The thesis rejects both stageism—the idea that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are and must be entirely distinct events—and the notion that proletarian revolution must be directly transplanted to the colonies by the advanced proletariat of the imperial core, to the exclusion of a native, national-democratic revolution. These two stages of revolution—national and socialist—are not identical, but neither can they be isolated from each other.

We thus present these works as not only a part of the Bolsheviks’ debate on the national question, but also as a study on the dynamics of national oppression and revolution. We contend that these articles are not only a historical curiosity, but can provide insight into questions of imperialism, uneven economic development, and national oppression even today, along with the larger body of scientific study on the national question.

Bolshevik poster in Russian and Uzbek text, 1920, reads: “life of the eastern masses of the Soviet Union”

The Evolution of the National Question

Translated from “L’Évolution de la question nationale,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1921).

I

The experience of the revolution has not been sufficiently instructive with regard to the national question. At the beginning of the October Revolution this question had not been posed as concretely, nor with such tangible importance and keenness as today. In the first year of soviet power, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination manifested itself above all as the liquidation of the colonial heritage of the old Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia oppressed and enslaved the “allogenous peoples” (inorodtsy). Soviet power gave them national equality, up to and including the right to create an independent state. The needs of the struggle against internal counterrevolution made this question a problem of prime urgency. Thanks to the concentration of the proletariat in the big cities and the industrial regions of Central Russia, to the favourable strategic position inhabited by this proletariat over the course of Russian history, the seizure of power could not have been easier. But these same circumstances determined in advance the historic path of the Russian counterrevolution, bourgeois and aristocratic, a path travelling from the outer provinces towards the centre. All the preceding history of Russia had been the history of Russian colonisation, and this fact distinguished itself from the moment of the proletariat’s seizure of power: it brought us face to face with the necessity of overcoming the existing antagonism between the Russian proletarian centre and the outer provinces, which are neither Russian nor proletarian; between the Russian city and the non-Russian country. The key to victory was in the resolution of the national question. But obtaining this resolution has not been easy. It has been necessary, firstly, to educate the Russian proletarian masses, infected—at least among their backwards sections—by an unconscious nationalism that makes them see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie; this leads them to apply the same methods of attack against these villages as are employed against capital. It has been necessary on the other hand to overcome the age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation. The Bashkir knows this all too well, as the factories in the south Urals took away all their wealth and land; the nomadic Kirghiz knows it all too well, and looks askance at the Orenburg, Kazalinsk, Petrovsk, and Tashkent railways, which have always been nests of the scorpions called “police”; the poor Ukrainian peasant, too, knows it all too well. The assault against capital, advancing beyond the outskirts of the city, encounters an environment where the classes were not distinguished. It comes up against an impassable wall of national distrust. The primary attitude of the oppressed, non-Russian countryside was above all the desire for the Russian cities to finally cease commanding them, and to let the oppressed nations freely pursue their proper path towards national development. The poor sections of the oppressed nations considered soviet power to be a force hostile to their national character. The well-off sections and the nationalists of the intellectual stratum, having become the direct object of requisitions and confiscations, as well as of the struggle against counterrevolution, speculation, and sabotage, saw soviet power as a direct menace to their class domination or to their privileges as intellectual workers. This state of mind naturally facilitated, in a large way, the projects of the Russian counterrevolution. Crushed in the first declared encounter, they naturally seized upon the principles of separation, decentralisation, and independence. Kolchak, “Supreme Leader of the Russian Forces,” and Denikin, leader of “Russia One and Indivisible,” are figures of the second period of the Russian counterrevolution. Before selling their beloved “Fatherland” on the global market, where the demand was not yet enough, the counterrevolution first engaged in business among themselves, in the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire.

The experience of the civil war taught the labouring masses of the oppressed nations that the Ukrainian Rada led to Hetman Skoropadskyi and the German general Eichhorn, which wasn’t far from Kolchak’s Alash Orda or the Musavatist government of the English oil barons. The masses of Russian proletarians inhabiting the frontiers understood, too, that without the middle peasant it was impossible to hold firm against the aristocrats and the generals, that without the allogenous peoples it was impossible to create global proletarian power. The immediate collision of Soviet Russia with international imperialism compelled the oppressed nations to stand with the Russian proletariat against imperialist dictatorship, since the latter excluded all possibility of democracy and national liberty. The civil war was terrible, but it made the peoples of Russia pass through entire eras of history. Over the course of the civil war the possessing classes of the oppressed nations demonstrated to even the most backwards their internal, profound impotence in maintaining their positions of national independence in the struggle between capital and the soviets.

The conclusion of this experience has been clear and indubitable: all the bourgeois-national movements, led by the ruling class, have a natural tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the great powers, the buffer states, and the colonies. The natural tendency, unconscious from the first, of all national-revolutionary movements, is, by contrast, to draw on the revolutionary governing organisation of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, in order to obtain, by this course, their freedom to develop their nation in the global socialist economic system presently being constructed. The structure of the Federation of Soviets of Russia, the decisions of the Congress of the Peoples of the East, the existing alliance with the eastern revolutionary movements with the European revolutionary proletariat, are proof of this.

Three years of soviet power have presented the national question on a global scale, as a question of class struggle.

II

We can thus say that soviet power is the algebraic formula of revolution. The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised this, in concluding that the backwards peoples, with the aid of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, and by means of the formation of soviets, can jump over the capitalist stage to immediately prepare for communism. This is not a rationale understood by the “socialist colonisers,” who proclaim all national features to be counterrevolutionary prejudices, and who recognise nothing other than the national prejudices of the dominant nations. Our Russian colonisers in no way differentiate themselves from the bourgeois socialists of the Yellow International. To combat them is to combat bourgeois—however radical it appears—influence on the proletariat. If we transplant the communist revolution, unaltered, to the backwards countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s minuscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls. But the soviets are the class organisational form which permits the smooth advancement to communism, starting from the lowest stages of historical development. The semi-proletarian Kirghiz, the poor Bashkir, the Armenian peasant, each has wealthy classes in their country. These wealthy strata take away the former’s right to freely dispose of their labour, they enslave them as agrarian serfs, they divest them of the products of their labour, which they appropriate as a usurer’s profit; they keep them in ignorance; they maintain for themselves a sort of monopoly on the national culture, supported by the Mullahs, the Ishans, and the Ulamas. For the labourers of the backwards countries, bourgeois democracy can represent nothing other than a reinforcement of traditional domination, half-feudal, half-bourgeois. The brief experience of the “Kokand Autonomy”—which had more partisans among the Russian police than among the poor Muslims—, the experience of Alash Orda, the experience of Musavatist rule in Azerbaijan and Dashnak rule in Armenia, the recent experience of the pseudo-nationalist government of the Tehran merchants, taught in the imperialist countries of Europe, can all testify to this in perfect clarity. Six years of turmoil, 1914 to 1920, have brought hardship to the labourers of the backwards countries. The Kirghiz who were mobilised in 1916 to dig trenches have even now not been able to recover their lands, once given by the tsar to the rich peasants of Russia. The name “Kolchak” is well-known to the old allogenous peoples. The economic crisis, the absence of flour and cloth, has significantly exacerbated the subjugation of the poor class among the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan, etc.… The lack of land, far from being resolved, has done nothing but grow, as the shortage grows, and as the nomads are forced to become sedentary. In the countries of the East, placed between life and death by the yoke of English imperialism, the crisis clears the market of European products, but at the same time it augments the appetites of the Western generals, the adventurers and the national usurers. The only remedy to all these afflictions is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards peoples. Here, as everywhere, we must terminate that which has not terminated — which has been incapable of terminating — capitalism. The communist revolution, throughout its entire course, must struggle against the exploiters of all historic periods and all types. The soviets are the revolution’s primary weapon, the universal form of this struggle.

III

Soviet power has become the form by which the right of the oppressed peoples to self-determination manifests. The soviet organisation of the oppressed peoples, from the national point of view as from the political point of view, sets itself against a slew of practical barriers, arising from class inequality and from traditional injustices.

There are enormous spaces, populated by the nations formerly oppressed by tsarism, a great distance away from the railroads. A characteristic example: the Semirechye line, impossible to construct, although the remoteness of this region with respect to Turkestan proper permits the large Russian peasants to maintain an autonomous existence. The nomads fear the city, because they see it as an erstwhile nest of police.

There are no Muslim printed letters, because printing was the privilege of the dominant nation.

There is no one literate in the native language; in Turkestan the cantons are forced to lend secretaries between each other for their executive committees.

There are no specialists for intellectual labour, and intellectuals count only in the dozens. There is no one who can teach others to read and write. This summer in Turkestan we trained a thousand Muslim schoolmasters, but even in just the already-existing schools, we are still missing about 1500.

As regards Russian specialists, we can employ them in the colonial provinces only with the utmost precaution, as they were all more or less agents of the colonial yoke—the colonial plunder. Their distinctly Russian sabotage, which they decorate with bureaucratic scruples and references to decrees, carries a criminally systematic character.

Finally, white-Russian “internationalism” has not yet been completely uprooted in the Communist Party.

The application of all these measures comes up against obstacles: the absence of primers, of scholars, of native specialists, etc.

The Communist Party must clearly understand these facts. It must declare that the soviet autonomy of the oppressed nations is an urgent task for the Communist Party and for soviet power. We must concentrate the attention of the labouring masses, of the proletarian vanguard, and of the entire soviet and communist apparatus on this problem, as we have done in the past in regard to the middle peasant. The liberation of the East, where there is more national and class slavery than anywhere else, is today the centrepiece of our international policy — the international policy of the socialist proletariat. It is there that we will practically address the problem of organising the International Republic of Soviets and the global socialist economy. In three years of soviet power, the national question has undergone many changes. Declarative formulas have passed into the practical organisation of nations. From the military struggle with the national counterrevolution, we have passed to soviet autonomy. From the struggle with the internal counterrevolution we have passed to global policy. The conclusions that present themselves must be taken up by the Commissariats of Agriculture and of Procurement, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and all the other relevant organs, so that an excessive zeal to execute our labour mobilisations, our taxes-in-kind, etc., will not generate a so-called “counterrevolution.” Our entire party must be mobilised morally to the service of the national liberation of the oppressed.

Soviet poster from Baku, 1920, text in Azeri, reads: “Through their strong union, workers and peasants destroy oppressors.”

The East and Revolution

Translated from “L’Orient et la Révolution,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 17 (April 28, 1921). Originally appeared in German in Die kommunistische Internationale, no. 15 (December 1920).

The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised that “the masses of the backwards countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the different stages of capitalist development.” We came to recognise this principle through the experience of the national soviet republics in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and through the revolutionary awakening of the colonial peoples and the oppressed nationalities of the East: India, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.… These peoples were cut off from the course of their historical development by European imperialism. They found themselves excluded from the technical revolution, from the rupture with the old social forms, and from the progress of civilisation. European capitalism did not at all revolutionise the mode of production in these countries. It did nothing but erect its own superstructure—in the form of an imperialist bureaucracy, of a commercial agency of European capital and a European “importation” industry—upon the feudal-patriarchal regime which had constituted itself over the course of centuries. It reinforced the exploitation of the agrarian population, by seizing the best lands, the sources of materials and fuel, but did not eliminate the old, reactionary feudal forms of exploitation. Where it could, for example in the Indies, it destroyed the local industry of petty artisans, by saturating the native markets with items manufactured in Europe, outcompeting the locally-manufactured items. Labour, rendered unoccupied by the elimination of petty production, became employed in agriculture. The establishment of industrial hegemony, and the military and political dictatorship of European capital in the colonies, led the great majority of the native population to become “attached to the land” so to speak, and inevitably also to emigration of the surplus population to the industrial centres (such as the exodus of Persians, reduced to finding work in Baku), and the horrific mortalities that periodically desolate certain countries in times of scarcity (India).

The Role of European Capitalism

Therefore, European capitalism has retarded the economic development of the colonies, just as much as it has the development of culture; it has artificially maintained the old social forms and the old reactionary ideology. Certainly, it could not have manifested otherwise in this part of the world and, all things considered, it has fulfilled its role as unconscious revolutionary agent. Friedrich Engels himself recognised this “civilising mission,” even as it concerns former tsarist Russia. In a letter to Karl Marx on May 23, 1851, he wrote, “Russian rule, despite its wickedness, despite its Slavic dirtiness, has a civilising influence on the Black and Caspian Seas and on Central Asia, on the Bashkirs and Tatars.” But here he misses the point. Capitalism of “importation” has the particularity that, in the colonies, it does not in practice follow the same method as in Europe and America. It does not develop the land for capitalist production. The colonialists burn the land to clear it for agriculture, they grow all sorts of grains until the ground is rendered completely barren, and then they abandon it for new lands. It is intensive cropping in all its rapacious brutality. The ruined artisan is not transformed into the industrial proletarian, but is rather transported by force to the countryside, where he has to work as a half-serf day labourer, and becomes literally the rich landlord’s or director’s workhorse, a slave to European exploitation. The nomad who lost his herd meets the same fate. The autonomous petty producer, who does not go to sell his labour on a capitalist farm, is reduced to misery, and becomes the insolvent debtor to the local usurer and to the European commissioner. At the same time that it destroys the native small industry and ruins the agrarian economy, European capitalism reserves all the offices, all the honours and all the important posts to the bearers of “high culture”, to Europeans.

The European is engineer, overseer, commissioner, administrator; the native, labourer and farmer. Just as in capitalist society, the development of the productive forces is accomplished through the intensification of the dominion of capital over labour, in the colonies this development has augmented the class antagonisms between the dominating nation and the oppressed nation. European capitalism barely disturbed the native elites, nor the exploiters of the peoples it oppresses. The big landlords, the merchants, the native usurers, the clergy, and even the police are left at their posts, legitimised by habit, by religion and by history. Only, above them, new figures appeared; the representatives of the imperialist bureaucracy and European capital, the Christian missionaries and the commercial agents. To the feudal exploitation of the peasant by the big landlord, the usurer, and the despotic state was added the oppression of the whole nation by foreign capital. In addition, the European yoke, far from destroying the backwards civil and familial customs, the traditional ancestral ideology, did nothing but consolidate them, by making them dear to the oppressed masses, who see in them a form of conserving their national culture, as well as a weapon in their struggle for political autonomy and their own culture, against the violent assimilation by European capital. This is what explains the strength of pan-Slavism, pan-Mongolism, pan-Asianism (“Asia for Asians!”), and other analogous movements that tend to consolidate the position of the possessing classes in the oppressed nationalities.

“The desire to safeguard the old, backwards forms of production from the invasion of capitalism: this is the economic base that has realised, without difficulty, the unification of the immense masses dispersed across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”¹ Pan-Islamism as well as other, analogous movements are prominent examples.

European capitalism has not yet had the time to dissolve in the industrial furnace the population of the colonies and the half-enslaved peoples of the East, which the communist revolution and the European proletariat will break open. This is the fatal consequence of this imbalance in the development of different parts of the global economy, an imbalance that constitutes the very essence of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has dug an abyss between developed industry and the backwards rural economy. Capitalism has created a contradiction between the production of articles of consumption and the production of the means of production themselves. It has created a collision between the industrial progress of Europe and the backwards economic state of the colonies. It is exactly the transformation of industrial capitalism into imperialism that has caused the world war.

During the imperialist war, many colonial peoples were forced to provide military contingents and working-class armies for the war in Europe. The imperialist war brought the national question to the forefront, on a world-historic and world economic scale. Relying on Turkey, German imperialism attempted to draw into its camp the peoples of the East. The Entente’s imperialism, by virtue of its international situation, naturally had to speculate instead on its relationship with the Latin and Slavic peoples of Europe.

The Military and Political Dictatorship of Conquest

The imperialist war stripped away from the colonies all the “advantages” of their connection with European capital—commodities, the technical and capital means of the Europeans—and at the same time added cannon-fodder and a multitude of raw materials to the usual colonial tribute. The political yoke was equally strengthened. The result of the war was, on the one hand, the spoils of Versailles, and on the other hand the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary crisis in Europe. Thus, the march of the revolution in the East was predetermined. The war inhibited the base, the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only for the national economy of each country in particular, but for the entire global economy. In Europe, the industrious and enterprising capitalist of peacetime—who, hiring labour everywhere and constantly searching for new available capital, would constantly flood the market with streams of commodities—has been replaced with the speculator, declared enemy of large consumption, conscious protagonist of the continual reduction of social production; likewise, in the East, the European travelling salesman, the “peaceful conqueror” has been replaced with the true conqueror, the peacemaker with gold epaulettes, clad in menacing armour made in the European military style, and equipped with a “mandate” for an indeterminate number of colonial slaves and for limitless territory. In Europe, civil war has created an economic necessity for military dictatorship. The awakening of the oppressed peoples of Asia to the struggle for their national existence has equally created an economic necessity of the strengthening of capital’s doctrine of conquest in the East. The military dictatorship in Europe, and the doctrine of conquest in Asia, have been the only means for capitalism to enlarge its base of production, amidst the global disorganisation and the general revolutionary crisis. Looting one to make gifts for the other, making gifts to this one to loot a third, and so on, without end: this is the real essence of the politics of international imperialism, obligated to zig-zag before the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in Asia.

From this peril emerges the community of interests and solidarity in the struggle. The alliance with the European communist proletariat has emerged as an urgent historical necessity for the peoples of the East. The grand course of world history has seen the collision of capitalism with its direct successors—the revolutionary proletarians—and with its bastards—the oppressed peoples. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominant and oppressed nations. The revolution has brought about the union of the workers of the dominant nations with the majority of labourers in the oppressed nations.

It is through the proletarian revolution in Russia that the global revolutionary crisis has begun. The victory of the proletariat in the empire of the tsars, this “prison house of nations,” has given this alliance a concrete manifestation. The Russian revolutionary A. I. Herzen wrote, “The Europeans consider Russia to be Asia; the Asians, for their part, consider Russia to be Europe.” This was the situation of tsarist Russia. In Europe, it fulfilled the role of the international gendarme; in Asia, it conducted the power politics of European bandits. As strange as it may seem, this ancient formula, if turned on its head, characterises the present situation. To the eyes of Europe, the bankers and the big proprietors, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appears as the propagator of a terrible infection called “Asiatic bolshevism.” In the East, Russia finds itself as the bearer of the ideas of European communist revolution. It is in this phenomenon that we find the revolutionary importance of our geographic position between the East and the West. The Russian proletariat, the vanguard, had to practically resolve the accession of the masses of petty producers to the communist revolution; it had to resolve the question of the transformation of national movements from national-democratic into socialist-revolutionary…. The past march of historical development will sweep them to victory. Concentrated in the great halls of large industry, able to animate immense spaces, the proletariat, from the first, finds itself in a strategic position more advantageous than that of its enemies; the counterrevolution had to take the offensive from the outer reaches of the country, where it has attempted to draw upon the possessing and exploiting strata, upon the nations once oppressed by tsarism. In effect, all the prior history of Russia has been the “history of colonisation”!²

One of the first acts of the proletarian government was to enact “the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia” (2 November 1917), in which it recognised the right of self-determination, up to and including the right of separation from Russia—the right to form a distinct national state—for all the peoples of the old tsarist empire. Be that as it may, to manifest the right to national autonomy in the soviet form, it is necessary above all to overcome the historical contradiction between the Russian city and the non-Russian village, deprived of all national rights. It is necessary to win the confidence of the toiling masses of the oppressed nations, by eliminating the unconscious nationalism with which the backward elements of the Russian working masses are imbued; and by clearly demonstrating to the oppressed masses the true nature of soviet power, the power of the toilers. In truth, this task coincides with another: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule; and it is this that will enable the solution. The counterrevolution will help to unmask bourgeois democracy before the eyes of the middle peasant, who sees, hiding behind the grand rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, a new landlord. The counterrevolution will contribute to eliminating the illusions of the labourers of tsarist-oppressed nations in national-bourgeois democracy. In effect, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionary nationalists have swerved to march openly behind the bellicose nationalist intellectuals, who present themselves as the old Russian police, as flag-waving Russian patriots, as European imperialists. Kolchak, Denikin, Mannerheim, Skoropadskyi, and the Allied and German generals have thus unmasked the Kirghiz “Alash Orda,” Petliura’s Ukrainian partisans, and many others.

The Separation of Classes

We can say without exaggeration that the separation between the classes of the oppressed nations has occurred only over the course of the civil war. It is through direct struggle, as class interests collide, that the masses have acquired revolutionary experience; and because of this revolutionary experience, they have moved on to new forms of social organisation. The Kirghiz steppes gave birth to “Alash Orda,” declared partisan of the Constituent Assembly in Samara which brought about the rise of Kolchak; and it was under Kolchak’s boot that the labouring Kirghiz masses consciously rallied to soviet power. Bashkiria underwent the same experience. Ukraine had to pass through an even longer series of successive stages: in the first place, the struggle between the Rada and soviet power put pressure on the new workers; next, the German general Eichhorn, in league with the ataman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; after them, Petliura and the French generals took their turn; then, the brief establishment of soviet power, overthrown by the unrest of the rural magnates and Petliura’s partisans; after that, the representative of a Russia “one and indivisible,” Denikin; and lastly, through the inevitable logic of the events, Ukrainian soviet power. Vynnychenko’s metamorphosis from leader of the bourgeois Rada to the vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic is the most telling of all these displays.

It is over the course of the civil war between the dictatorship of the proletariat and imperialism that soviet power has become the form of national autonomy and of class differentiation among the toiling masses of the oppressed nations. On the territory of the old Russian Empire, the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the revolutionary proletariat has taken shape in the form of the socialist federation of national soviet republics. The soviet revolution among the peoples of the East, who once formed an integral part of the Russian Empire, has bridged the gulf between the communist West and the revolutionary East.

The Russian proletariat knew to take advantage of their special situation, to simultaneously challenge the imperialism of millions of communists—of the European proletariat—and the threatening wall that is the revolting toilers in the East. Comrade Lenin well noted the international significance of various essential traits of our revolution, when he spoke of “the inevitable historical repetition, on the international scale, of what has occurred here.”³ Soviet power, that is the state form of the labouring masses, has been victoriously tested in practice in the revolutionary industrial city of Petrograd, as well as in the Russian hamlet of the Vyatka Gubernia; among the Tatar peasants dwelling on the Volga, as in the Ukrainian villages; in the East so strongly attached to its national customs, in the East where patriarchy reigns and where blood ties are still so important to everyday life, in the lands of the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan and Azerbaijan. Everywhere, soviet power has demonstrated its strength. Karl Marx already noted this peculiarity of proletarian government in his critique of Paris Commune. “The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”⁴

The revolution accelerates the progress of events to the highest point. It accentuates class contradictions to the extreme, even in the most backwards areas. The long, historic learning process makes way for a learning process governed by the revolutionary method. Peoples and social classes develop, over the course of a few months, more than over dozens of years of normal development.

Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 targeting Muslim women, reads “Now I too am free.”

Oppressors and Oppressed

The world revolution against imperialism places the oppressors and the oppressed on the same level.

The transformation of bourgeois-national movements into social-revolutionary movements has its origins in the conflict of class interests—conflict that manifests with a particular acuity among nations engaged in the struggle for independence, and which can equally be provoked by an external influence: that of the international situation. The elimination of bourgeois domination in the advanced nations necessarily pulls the more backwards nations along the road of the soviet revolution. The counterrevolution then involves itself as an aggressor.

The dictatorship of imperialism unmasks bourgeois nationalism in the West as well as in the East. The dominant strata of the oppressed nations endeavour immediately to seize control of the state machinery and their class victims. For them, the national revolution is the expansion of the national foundation of exploitation. This expansion consists in the manufacturer, the merchant, and the large landlord expelling the foreign interlopers and creating their own state apparatus of class oppression. On the other hand, at the same time, “a class of intellectuals develops and their own written language transforms into a necessity of the national culture, even if in substance this culture had to be very international. And if a nation feels the need for a national intelligentsia, this class, in turn, feels the need for a great, intellectually developed nation.”⁵

The national bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectual class want to have their market, their stock exchange, their bureaucracy, their officer corps, their writers and journalists, their ministers, their representatives, their teachers and their musicians. At the start, their national need finds its expression in bourgeois development. But this need, in the global economic disorganisation and revolutionary crisis, inevitably falls into class contradictions in a nation that has won its national independence. Democracy, in the name of the national interest, transforms into a national bourgeois dictatorship. Finland, a country with ancient democratic traditions, is a poignant example. “It seemed to us,” writes Comrade Kuusinen, on the beginning of the revolution in Finland, “that parliamentary democracy opened a wide and straight path for our workers’ movement, leading right to our aim. Our bourgeoisie had neither army nor police; what’s more, it didn’t even have the possibility of organising them legally, as to do so they would need the assent of the socialist majority in parliament.”⁶ And nevertheless, the bourgeoisie organised its white guard and defeated the Finnish working class with the aid of the German imperialists.

Bourgeois democracy is now unable to ensure national peace in the countries that have become independent and which contain national minorities. This is the practical experience of Ukraine: “Petit-bourgeois democracy cannot maintain its power in Ukraine, as the internecine struggle fractures it into hostile parties.”⁷ The intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, in a nation that frees itself, profess an aggressive bourgeois nationalism, and this leads them to betray the cause of national liberation, to pass into the camp of the imperialists, from which they buy their bourgeois domination at the price of national freedom. The examples are legion: Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, the Musavat government in Azerbaijan, Greece, “the Israelite state of Palestine,” the pseudo-national state of Persia which, in fear of its soviet revolution, has thrown itself into the arms of the British, etc. The aggressive nationalism of the oppressed nations’ bourgeoisie and large landlords makes their countries into buffer states of the imperialist powers against the revolution. As a result, social conflict—class antagonism—manifests first of all in the domain of the national interest: the labouring masses reclaim their national independence from the yoke of the imperialists; the exploiting strata cling to their class privileges and, because the foreign yoke was, up until that moment, a powerful means of conserving the most reactionary forms of exploitation—in the east, feudal and patriarchal customs—, the revolutionary awakening of the labouring masses transports the revolution from the national terrain to that of social relations. The national question is raised as one of class inequality. The reason is perfectly clear: if industrial capital and the intelligentsia are, in the early stages, the protagonists of national liberation, the big landlords and the native bureaucracy are the declared partisans of European assimilation. The national revolution, waged against the foreign invaders and the native big landlords, therefore pushes the merchant class into the camp of imperialist puppets. Thus we reach this general conclusion: all the bourgeois-national movements led by the possessing strata—by the exploiting strata—have an objective tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the “great powers,” to transform into “buffer states” and colonies. At the outset, the strictly historic, unconscious tendency of all national-revolutionary movements of the labouring masses, in the colonies and in the half-enslaved countries, is to draw on a revolutionary state organisation, a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries, to ensure the freedom of national development in the forming global socialist economy.

The advent of organs of autonomous revolutionary management—the anjoman of the first Persian Revolution, the experience of the eastern national soviet republics, the beginning of the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, the birth of communist movements in Persia, in Turkey, in China, and in the Indies—all this proves that the labouring masses of the East are marching towards the international federation of national soviet republics.

For the Grouping of Communist Elements

It was in understanding the above that the 2nd Congress of the Communist International decided to support national revolutionary movements in the colonies and in the backwards countries, but under the express condition that the truly communist elements of the future workers’ parties in these countries are grouped together and instructed in their special tasks, in the necessity that they combat the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nations; the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and the backwards countries, nevertheless without ever fusing with it; and in conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form. In the East, as in the West, the way to soviet power has been paved by the process of capitalist development itself. In the West, it was paved by the transformation of “peaceful” industrial capitalism, of imperialism and bourgeois democracy into military dictatorship; in the East, by the implantation of capitalism as a foreign organisation of class domination, as a superstructure over the native society. In India, as the Indian communist Comrade Roy noted, “we are seeing, for the first time in history, an entire people being economically exploited by a true state power.”⁸ But it is not thus only in India. Russian Turkestan, up until the revolution, was in the same situation. Still today, we see the same state of affairs in Persia, in China, in all the colonies. As for the governmental organisation of the native exploiters, this is relatively weak in the East, where it adopts a purely feudal character.

On the subject of Persia, Victor Bérard had this to say: “Persia is neither a state nor a nation. It is the strange combination of a feudal anarchy and a centralised taxation system, the unstable mix of nomadic tribes and barely settled farmers, Moluk-us-Sawaif, as the natives say, monarchical federation or, more precisely, royal flock of nations.”⁹

The oppressive and exploitative character of state power is evident here. The base of all social life is the small farmer, ferociously exploited by the feudal state, by the large landowner, and by commercial capital, the true usurer.

The fact that, in the East, state power—as much the native feudal power as the power of the “invaders,” the European imperialists—manifests above all as the immediate exploiter of the population in the economic domain, has an immense political importance: no political revolution is possible in this situation without an economic revolution. Experience confirms this. “Just like their Western counterparts, the exploiting plutocracies of the Near-Eastern countries make every effort to give their rule the appearance of popular rule. The introduction of parliamentarism in Turkey and in Persia, as well as the transformation of Georgia (under the leadership of the Mensheviks), Armenia (under the leadership of the Dashnaks), and Azerbaijan (under the leadership of the Musavatists) into democratic republics, took place under the slogan of ‘Liberty and Equality.’ Nevertheless, every one of these politicians was incapable of providing even the illusion of democracy. The masses of people drown in unbelievable misery, while the agents of foreign imperialism swim in opulence. The land remains in the hands of its old owners, the old fiscal system remains in place, bringing immeasurable harm to the labourers, and the state not only tolerates, but encourages usury.”¹⁰

The Form of the Revolution in the East

The “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in the East, inevitably takes the form of a dynastic revolution: it expands the privileges of the exploiters, but does not alleviate the burden of exploitation for the oppressed one bit. Native feudalism does nothing but assume the cast-offs of “European democracy.”

The East is living history. In some places, we still find remnants of the primitive communitarian society (clan, patriarchy), where patriarchal and feudal customs are conserved in full force. The religion of the East is simultaneously social and political. It consecrates the existing civil and familial order. It is the direct support for social inequality. It plays about the same role as Catholicism in the Middle Ages. “From the point of view of the orthodox Muslim, the theocratic Muslim state is the community of believers, of which the earthly representative is the ‘sultan’ (sovereign, leader); he is no more than the representative of God on Earth, a representative with a mission to take care—in conformity with the exigencies of ‘sharia’ (religious law)—of the civil and religious affairs of the community entrusted to him by God. To accomplish this, he, the ‘amiliami’ (the collectors of the ‘zakat,’ a ritual tax), and other civil servants receive a modest compensation of forty kopeks per day. The ‘zakat,’ which is meant to be used to help the poor, orphans, and invalids; to wage war against the infidels; in short, to serve the needs of society and the state, has become, in the hands of the latest Muslim sovereigns, a personal revenue that they use as they please, without any control and in an absolutely illegal fashion; the troops and even the popular militia, created to war against the infidels, to propagate Islam by force of arms, and to protect the community from outside enemies, are transformed bit by bit into the sovereign’s bodyguards, used to oppress the people and serving exclusively the personal or dynastic interests of these sovereigns. The Muslim community has been transformed into rayat, into herds of docile, mute slaves.”¹¹

The centuries-long domination of the total surplus-value of labour was necessarily an obstacle to the expansion of social production, and it hindered all technical and economic progress. The primitive hoe (ketmen) and plough (omach) are still practically the only agricultural tools of the Central Asian farmer. There, capital is naturally stalled in its development; it has not gone further than usury and the sale of produce at the bazaar.

Religious law (sharia) defines property rights thus: “Property (mulk) is all that man possesses, whether it be the thing itself or its fruits.” This definition is the loyal reflection of primitive forms of production: religion recognises the proprietor’s right to sell the things that belong to him, as well as its “fruits”; it recognises his right to dispose of the surplus product of his natural goods.

A multitude of peoples in the East have not completely reached agricultural life in their evolution (the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Arabs, the tribal peoples of northern India, the Kurds, etc.). Nevertheless, among these peoples the survival of the primitive communal society has, over time, become a source of exploitation of the poor majority by the rich clan leaders. For example, we will look at the Kirghiz of the steppes. “Possessors of an extensive economy, the rich Kirghiz has already completely renounced physical labour; he is no more than the manager, the administrator; those who do the work are the day-labourers. The number of these labourers varies on average from seven to nine by economy, but there are economies where twenty labourers are exploited, or even more. A curious phenomenon to observe in the economy of the rich Kirghiz is the union of traits characteristic of modern capitalism with those of primitive nomadic society… The clan, despite its evident decomposition, still remains the legitimate proprietor of a given territory in the Kirghiz consciousness. The rich Kirghiz, abiding by this boundlessness of the right to use the land, covets considerable advantages: he puts to pasture his numerous herds without obstacle on all the territory of his relatives. Even up to the present, he has nothing pushing him to close off his land from that of the mass of the Kirghiz people.”¹²

The Task at Hand

From the above, we can easily understand why the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920) recognised that “the soviet system is the only one which truly gives the labouring masses the possibility of taking power from their natural enemies, the upper classes (large landowners, speculators, high functionaries, officers), and to determine their own fate. Only soviet power empowers the poor labourers to take and keep the land from the landowners. The amalgamation of the soviets in large federations, and their autonomy within the framework of these federations: this is the only means for the toilers of different countries, who once warred among each other in the East, to pursue a peaceful existence, to destroy the foreign and native oppressors’ power, and to defeat all attempts by these oppressors to restore the old state of things.” To the forceful organisation of petty production and exploitation from above, the revolution substitutes the autonomous revolutionary organisation of the petty producers—the half-workers—in the form of the workers’ soviets. “Eliminate the prime cause of all oppression and exploitation—the power of the invading foreign capitalists and native tyrants (sultans, shahs, khans, beys, with all their bureaucrats and parasites)—seize power and exercise it in all domains (administrative, economic, and financial); refuse to fulfil any obligations to the feudal landlords and overthrow their authority; eliminate all personal and economic dependence on the landlords; abolish the large estates, under whatever legal form they may take; take the land from the large landlords without compensation or indemnities, and share it among the peasants, the farmers and the day-labourers who cultivate it”¹³: this is the task at hand. The alliance between the peasant soviet republics of the East with the soviet socialist republics of the West: this is the path that communism must pursue, to take hold of the entire global economy.

The proletariat of the West will help the toilers of the East with their knowledge, their technical expertise, and their organisational forces. The peasant soviet republics will provide the socialist industry of the West with the raw materials and fuel that it needs. Such an international division of labour between the city and the village, on the basis of amicable collaboration, is necessitated by the logic of the struggle against global economic disorganisation—the evident manifestation of capitalism’s decomposition. It is solely by this division of labour that we can eliminate the dependence of the Eastern people’s economy on the guardianship of the European and American banks, trusts, and syndicates.

The path to salvation of European industry, which suffers from a lack of raw materials and fuel necessary for its development, is the socialist industrial colonisation of the East. The soviets are not a repressive regime against the national customs and traditions of the peoples of the East; they will not drag these peoples by force into the kingdom of liberty. On the contrary, they will make them find their own path towards communism, by the cooperation of petty producers, by the organisation of public works (irrigation systems), and the formation of state enterprises.

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Efendiev. Political Currents among Muslims, Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei [Life of the Nationalities] (N° 33, p. 41, 1919).
An expression from [Vasily] Klyuchevsky.
Lenin. “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder.
Marx. The Civil War in France.
Kautsky, The National Problems, L1, T. 2, p. 42, 1918.
Kuusinen, The Revolution in Finland (1919).
M. Rafes, Two Years of Revolution in Ukraine (1920), p. 107.
Roy, The Communist Movement in India, Communist International no. 12.
V. Bérard, Revolutions of Persia: the provinces, the peoples and the government of the King of Kings (1910), p. 21.
Theses on Soviet Power in the East, by Comrade Béla Kun, adopted by the Congress of the Peoples of the East (September 1920).
V. Nalivkin, The natives, then and now (1913, p. 15-17).
Questions of Colonisation (no. 5, 1909): “Social structure of the Kirghiz people,” P. Rumyantsev.
Theses on the agrarian question, adopted by the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East, in Baku (September 1920).