The national question
is simultaneously a
social and a universal
historic question
IT IS WRONG to oppose social problems to national problems on the pretext that the former are more important and immediate. National problems are always social problems as well, problems of political class strategy. This has always applied to the Ukrainian question. Furthermore, there is the sphere of foreign policy, about which the Fifth Congress of the Comintern declared:
The Ukrainian question is one of the most important national questions in Central Europe, and its solution is dictated by the interests of the proletarian revolution in Poland, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, as well as in all neighbouring countries.
Naturally, the international importance of the Ukrainian question has grown even more, not only in connection with socialist construction in the neighbouring countries of Europe, but also in connection with the revolutionary movement and national construction in Asia and Latin America.
But at present we ought also to consider the internal social aspect of the Ukrainian national question.
Lenin and the Party always stressed how important it was for the proletariat and for socialist construction to resolve the conflict that exists in the Ukraine between the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry and the predominantly Russianspeaking proletariat, between the Ukrainian village and the Russified city. this in particular is the meaning of the policy of Ukrainianization. The prole-
74 International Marxist Review tariat, the industrialized city, were to become the active bearers of Ukrainian culture and on this basis to strengthen their alliance with, and their leadership of, the peasantry. Thus the Ukrainian nation should have become a fully-fledged socialist nation in its own right and not some sort of underdeveloped embryo, some ethnographic raw material that carries unforeseen complications for the future. The Ukrainian nation should have unfolded its strength in the proud creation of a socialist statehood....
Unfortunately, today we can only observe a gap, which is, if anything, wider, between the Ukrainian-speaking village and the Russian-speaking city. Only a total lack of political responsibility can allow us to contemplate this calmly and not notice those complex social clashes which, sadly enough for socialism, are produced by this linguistic and national conflict between the village and the city in the Ukraine.?
I am sure that in the foreseeable future a Marxist economist and sociologist, analysing the reasons for our present difficulties in agriculture, is bound to find amongst them the morbid abnormalities in the relations between the village and the city, the social-cultural inferiority complex of the village, the manifold contempt for the village and for village people (not formally, in the official press, but actually, in real life) complicated and intensified in the Ukraine by the national factor: the painful national difference between the Ukrainian village and the Russified city. A thoughtful and subtle analysis would probably establish that a sense of doom hanging over the nation, the lack of national prospects and of national growth beyond the village boundaries, the denationalizing pressure "from above", from the city, do not rank least among the factors making for that drop in vitality, that demoralization, indifference to life and drunkenness, which you can often observe among the rural population and which in themselves are a serious social problem.
Likewise, the future sociologist will also note the demoralizing influence of the linguistic-national conflict between the city and the village upon the city itself. Thus the city develops, noticed or unnoticed, certain phenomena and attitudes linked with its objectively colonizing, assimilating and "consumer" position among the indigenous ethnographic "raw material" ". It loses the sense of kinship with its country and with the surrounding people. the consciousness of its responsibility and duties towards them gets extinguished, and there develops instead a feeling of "freedom" from these responsibilities, of "liberation" from all traces of descent, in short, of national denudation. as a result it is ready to grab at any "stylish" costume: there is a gaudy semiculture with claims to raciness — "the abomination of emptiness". There develop reflexes of irresponsibility and indifference and a hidden or obvious
Simultaneously a social and a universal historic question 75 boorishness (including the notorious: "Hey, you, kolkhoznik!", "What's the matter, are you a kolkhoznik?" "Forgive him, he is from the village", "First learn to speak like a human being", etc., etc., as we know only too well).
Can there be any talk of developing attitudes of collectivism and fraternity, of being conscious that we are each one of us a man among humanity? Let in particular our honourable humanists finally give this some though, our
"members of humanity" from the "all-Russian intelligentsia" in the Ukraine, who like to talk about the universally human principle but actually themselves contribute to the creation of an atmosphere in which a person's dignity and his whole being can be so crudely trampled down, thereby giving rise to innumerable human dramas... "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his broth-
Whenever a nation is split into two linguistically, with the "lower" stratum speaking its original language, while the "higher" stratum speaks another, acquired tongue, this always threatens to create a great social problem and danger. Once when Herzen was in Brussels, he pointed out that the "educated" section of the Belgians spoke French, while the common people, whom the former despised, spoke Flemish. Herzen saw in this an enormous injustice and danger to democracy: "This cleavage of peoples into two strata — the one bathed in light and floating like oil over the depth of the second stratum, deep and dark and enveloped in mist - has caused all revolutions to fail."
and with great penetration Herzen passes to the Ukrainian question, with a warning against the seemingly successful linguistic expansion, Russification.
"Rather than conquering the South Russian? people linguistically, let us begin, gentlemen, with the restitution of their land, and then we will see what
Take a close look today at who speaks Ukrainian and who speaks Russian in the Ukraine. If you are an honest person, if you can see and interpret what you have seen, if truth is more valuable to you that your blindness and your that the linguistic division in the Ukraine coincides with social and socialcultural divisions. And will your heart not bleed and your soul ache for "the
And do not the figures quoted earlier — about the actual dropping behind and disadvantageous position of the Ukrainian nation in a number of decisive spheres of social activity - point to grave social problems that require spe-
Finally, national problems have a bearing upon the problems of socialist democracy and interact with them. The rights and liberty of the individual are er, he is a liar...".
prejudices, than "mighty rank and miserable greed"
insulted and the injured"?
cial investigation?
language they will choose for speaking and learning."4.
" you cannot fail to admit
closely linked with national rights and liberty, just as the dignity and selfconsciousness of the individual are linked with national dignity and selfconsciousness, since rights, liberty, dignity and self-consciousness are indivisible concepts. National problems bear directly upon the problems of self- government and sovereignty of the people. National development and national diversity are the same as the spontaneity and variety of life, its eternal unfolding and enrichment, while, conversely, a purposeful state-controlled levelling, amalgamation and swallowing-up of nations — all the more, if this happens according to despotic design — is a triumph of obtuse bureaucratic uniformity, regimentation and deadliness. For this reason alone the processes of denationalization and Russification are an immense drag upon the cause of socialist democratism and have an objectively reactionary significance.
Besides, such processes impoverish communist society tremendously and make for irretrievable losses. We say that the national question is subordinated to the class struggle, that it is part of the general question of the struggle for communism. Communism leads to the maximum material and spiritual wealth of humanity, to the development of all its powers and potential, to the preservation and proliferation of all its attainments. Thus we must value the amazing riches left to us in the national multiformity of humanity and the diversity of its national activity, which make the great miracle of human universality. We must value this and develop it. The contrary policy — a policy of squandering, debasing, "writing off" these riches as scrap, a policy of bureaucratic standardization and "reduction to a common denominator" — is a crime before communism, and future generations will not forgive us such a
Ye. Girchak [Hirchak], Na dva fronta v bor' be s natsionalizmom, 2nd edition, Moscow-
Then there is the aspect of everyday life and its culture which also has its importance: is here anyone who does not know how much humiliation and mockery from the petty ourgeois public has to be endured, let us say, by a village woman who has come to the city on business. A man from the village, a Ukrainian from the village, why, any Ukrainian who is conscious of being a Ukrainian feels in the cities of the Ukraine as in a foreign country, "in our land, yet not our own", to use Shevchenko's words (his Povne zibrannya ivoriv u shesty tomakh, II, Kiev, 1963, p. 9; an English translation in his
I-r [Herzen], "Po povodu pis'ma iz Volyni", Kolokol, No. 116, December 15, 1861, p.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
bankrupted heritage.
Ukrainian.
76 International Marxist Review
Leningrad, 1931, pp. 213-14
Selecied Works, Moscow (1964), p. 187).
OLIVER MACDONALD