The unfathomable sympathy in the West of many for the most despicable regimes among various “Third-World” states, and most notably in the more than three dozen states with a Muslim majority, rests on the inertia of the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-sophisticated notion of a Marxist theory and analysis of human and international relations. As Theodore Dalrymple has reminded us not too long ago (“There is no God but Politics” in New English Review, May, 2007).
“The Soviet Union loomed very large in all our imaginations. It was the ruffian on the stair of western civilization, or a looming presence to the east. And that meant that, for anyone who wanted to understand the world, it appeared necessary to immerse himself in Marxism."
No matter how venal, corrupt, despotic and inhuman the Soviet leadership and the detestable nature of Soviet society, many “intellectuals” found solace and refuge in anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism as part of their former indoctrination and or fascination with Marxist theory, a form of secular fundamentalism, as destructive and uncaring of individual rights as any totalitarianism or religious fanaticism. The Marxist exploitation of the plight of homeless "oppressed peoples" was part of what they considered to be both a “natural sympathy” for the poor as well as their offer of aid to help liberate those who lacked a territorial homeland free from foreign rule from which to begin their national construction of "socialism".
Stalin’s Contribution to the National Question
How did Marxism begin to shape a policy of “liberation” with regard to “oppressed peoples“? In 1913, Stalin wrote what has been termed his most important contribution to Marxist theory entitled “The National Question and Social Democracy” This essay won Lenin’s approval and made Stalin known internationally. Stalin attacked Socialist leader Otto Bauer who had proposed a model of “cultural autonomy” on the “personal principle” for individuals wherever they lived to choose and maintain their own sense of national identity. Although nationalism like religion was often termed a deviation from the true “class interests of the workers,” Stalin asserted that:
“A nation has the right freely to determine its own destiny. It has the right to arrange its life as it sees fit, without, of course, trampling on the rights of other nations. That is beyond dispute.”
He immediately qualified this assertion of the nation as a social reality by asking….
“But how exactly should it arrange its own life, what forms should its future constitution take, if the interests of the majority of the nation and, above all, of the proletariat are to be borne in mind? A nation has the right to arrange its life on autonomous lines. It even has the right to secede. But this does not mean that it should do so under all circumstances, or that autonomy, or separation, will everywhere and always be advantageous for a nation.”
Stalin rejected the Social-Democratic solution of “cultural autonomy” based on individual rights and insisted that…
“The only correct solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crystallized units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, etc . The advantage of regional autonomy consists, first of all, in the fact that it does not deal with a fiction bereft of territory, but with a definite population inhabiting a definite territory.“
This was the format of territorial-ethnic division instituted in the USSR. The so called Marxist principle in the Soviet Union of “National in form, Socialist in content” meant however nothing more than a superficial tolerance of folk festivals featuring colorful costumes and songs and dances but not the cultivation of any serious literature or emotional identification with the cherished past of any of the 15 constituent Soviet Republics.
The intensified violent conflicts over territory and the demands to impose strict immigration quotas as well as sporadic campaigns in dozens of countries for regional autonomy or special language rights read like a list of defeats for class solidarity. Marxism’s answer to the ‘national question’ has been a colossal failure. The expected solidarity of the working class across national and linguistic boundaries was a mirage. The calls of the socialist international to prevent the First World War went unheeded except for a tiny minority (most of whom were organized in the "International Workers of the World").
“Authentic internationalism” was not achieved within the international workers’ movements or within the multi-national states such as the USSR and the so called “People’s Democracies.” The Marxist dictum that each kilometer of railroad track and advance in technology would serve as a nail in the coffin of national differences and eventually eliminate all ethnic distinctiveness to forge a true working class solidarity was utterly wrong. A rebirth of intense ethnicity and territorial loyalty has occurred among all those groups that even in Marx’s time were considered to be on the road to assimilation in larger nationwide frameworks. The Armenians, Basques, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenians, Irish, Scots, Welsh, Catalans, Galicians, Maltese, Moldavians, Ukrainians, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians Georgians, French speaking Quebecois and the Jews who served as a model for Marx’s theory on assimilation were all supposed to lose their identity.
Defender of “Oppressed Peoples” and Support for a Separate Black Nation in the United States
Before the withering away of the state and the national consciousness of workers who would eventually come to realize their common class interests over and above the separating issues of race, nationality and language, the Communist Party embraced a role as the Defender of Oppressed Peoples. Although initially suspicious of racial separatists and Black “nationalists” inspired by the anti-colonial movements in Africa, the Party was critical of the Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey. It accepted the fostering of race and class consciousness but strongly opposed any separate Black Nation on the continent of North America.
However, in 1928, the Cominetern declared that Negroes in the United States constituted a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an "incipient revolutionary force." The Communist Party in the United States followed the lead of the Comintern utilizing Stalin's theories and pressed a demand for a separate nation for Blacks within the "Black Belt," a meandering swath of counties with majority black populations extending from Eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Alabama, the Delta regions of Mississippi, Louisiana and the coastal areas of Texas.
The influence of Stalin’s 1912 essay on the National Question was easily mobilized to justify the program of national self-determination for Afro-Americans in those areas where they constituted majorities even though the party drew considerable ridicule from other civil rights and leftwing organizations both in the urban North and the South. Most practical Party work however ignored this theoretical position until it was abandoned.
The Quaint Peoples and “Rootless Cosmopolitanism”
These “backward" or “quaint” peoples of remote provinces would, according to Marxism, soon be brought into closer economic relationships with their national capitals in the states where they lived and through their participation in the national economy they would adopt the national standards of speech, dress, literacy and realize their common interests as workers.
Nevertheless, the need to win the loyalty of the masses often meant that the Communist Parties had to outdo the old prejudices and chauvinism of conservative nationalists. The structure of the Soviet Union with its 15 (later 16, then 15 again after the abolition by decree of the Karelo-Finnish S.S.R.) Soviet Socialist Republics and the support the Communist Parties gave to “national liberation struggles” were intended to win the Party the support of “oppressed nationalities,” yet the Soviet Union under Stalin soon attacked the Jews whose assimilation was according to Marxist theory guaranteed, since they lacked the two basic requirements for nationhood – a common language and territory. The Jews were later labeled as “rootless cosmopolitans” for their tendency to want to assimilate. Stalin even reversed the initial favorable attitude of Lenin towards Esperanto, the international language because its inventor, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, had at one time been a Zionist, and believed that his devised international language should be cultivated to increase world-wide harmony and unity among the classes as well as the nations.
The Armenian Homeland and Soviet “Zion-states” for The Finns and the Jews “Building Socialism”
The Soviets, for their own purposes, seized on the idea of fostering territorial concentration through the creation of two new “Zion states” to build socialism among Jews and Finnish emigres “throughout the world.” These projects had their origin in part from Stalin’s theory of national identity and the simple fact that Armenians in a far flung Diaspora all over the world including those even unsympathetic to communism looked upon the Soviet Armenian Republic with fond hopes. After all, even under the Czarist regime, Armenian emigres fleeing persecution at the hands of the Ottoman Turks had struggled to reach Russian territory in 1896 and 1917-1920.
The Soviet regime promoted Armenian culture and education. It invited artists and intellectuals from abroad to return to Armenia, and succeeded in creating an environment of greater security for Armenians than they had known in the aftermath of World War I and the great tribulations of massacres and forced exile they had suffered in Ottoman Turkey and the Middle East. For several decades, it could be said that of all the Soviet republics outside the Slavic core, Armenia probably was the most content.
Marxist theory’s doctrines of class warfare and aid to “oppressed nationalities” in the Czarist Empire initially gave what appeared to be an adequate, even “convincing” explanation for the strong support the Communist Party of the U.S.A. received among two immigrant ethnic groups - the Finns and the Jews as well as the sympathy of Armenian emigrants and exiles all over the world who looked upon even the limited framework of the Soviet Armenian Republic as a basis to further develop their national identity and culture and as the only part of their ancestral homeland not under foreign rule.
North American Finnish “Reds”
Throughout the 1920s and well into the mid 1930s, the Finnish language section, representing recent immigrants, in the Great Lakes and adjacent Canadian Prairie Provinces, with a strong proletarian identity and limited knowledge of English, represented the largest group of Communist Party members and supporters organized into a specific ethnic organization.(1)
The prospects of only limited autonomy and the hope for greater economic opportunity in North America had led to a wave of emigration to the United States and Canada which grew as Russian rule became entrenched. By 1912, Russian was granted full official status and more and more Russians had begun to settle in the Duchy, posing a threat that many Finns felt could only be avoided by achieving independence. From the mid 1880s until 1914, more than 200,000 Finns emigrated to the United States and Canada settling in the Great Lakes area and Prairie provinces. They continued to retain a strong sense of both Finnish and working class identity and followed both the international socialist movement and the nationalist struggle for independence in Finland.
In Finland, a very strong workers’ movement had also developed and many Finns were encouraged by the Russian revolution and the success of the Communists in the Civil War (1917-1922) to attempt to create a Soviet style Finland after winning independence from the new government of the USSR. A bitter Civil War took place simultaneously in the new Finland and Russia. Whereas the Reds triumphed in Russia, the “Whites“ aided by German troops were victorious in Finland and provoked a new exodus of all those Leftwing Finns who believed that a better life would be possible in the neighboring Soviet controlled Karelia region around the shores of Lake Ladoga which they regarded as part of the historic Finnish homeland.
The émigré “Red Finns” with a strong working class consciousness believed that Karelia could be developed with the help of like-minded overseas Finns in America and pose a constant political alternative to the working class in Finland under “White” capitalist control and exploitation. Communist Party leader Edvard Gylling, who had fled from Finland to Soviet Karelia, imagined the possibility of elevating the autonomous region to a full standing equal Soviet Republic similar in its administrative authority to the other 15 Soviet Republics.
Encouraged by the relative success of the young American Communist Party to attract Finnish-Americans, links were established in the 1920s to send aid to help in the development of Soviet Karelia. It is indeed quite telling that the greatest support for the Party could be found among two distinctly marginal groups in North American society - intellectual urban Jews most of whom were not working class according to Marxist theory and among the Mid-western Finnish-Americans and Canadians, engaged in agriculture, construction, logging and fishing, true proletarians, but hopeful at preserving a sense of their nationality even in North America and angered at the “White“ victory in the Finnish Civil War.
The USSR and the Manipulation of Marxist Theory - Consequences for The Jews
The Jews, because of their “fossil-like existence” – a non-territorial remnant of a pre-Christian and pre-modern era, particularly vexed and angered both Marx and Lenin. In fact, their theories about the disappearance of the small provincial ethnic nationalisms of 19th century Europe could be put to a “litmus test” – the Jews, who should have been more ready, willing and able to participate in the new economy and lose their old tribal identity, becoming either workers or capitalists. The fact that they did not, antagonized Marx, himself of Jewish descent, and he wrote a vicious pamphlet in 1843, "On The Jewish Question”, re-titled “World Without Jews” in English translation that has even been used by anti-Semites to back their views.
Marx’s attitude influenced Lenin and misled many Jews who were attracted to communism not so much because of their class interests as workers but in return for the promise of a world without nations. The great tragedy of Jewish self-delusions about the Bolshevik Party in Czarist Russia and the Soviet regime stemmed from the naive will to believe that such a world was possible in spite of the evidence everywhere the communists seized power, this ideology of a world without nations was shelved in order to win the support of the “masses” with their ingrained national (and religious) prejudices. Early measures in the 1920s designed to further Yiddish culture were brutally suppressed and thousands of Jewish idealists purged from the Party during and after the show trials in the late 1930s.
The Depression and Lure of the “Zion-states”
The impact of the Depression had already begun to be felt and thousands of Finnish-Americans who had grown up espousing Left-wing causes and had felt betrayed by the White Victory in the Civil War seriously considered emigration to the Soviet controlled region of Karelia. Much of the enthusiasm was generated by sheer idealism rather than desperation. The movement was aided by the election of President Roosevelt and the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of families were motivated by “Karelian fever” (1) to migrate and bring with them such luxuries and essential goods as cars, typewriters, industrial machinery and vital materials necessary in the construction of several factories. The new migrants were also given special privileges that included being allowed to buy “luxury” goods with the American dollars they brought with them. Approximately 6,000 American and Canadian migrants reached Karelia, a quarter of whom returned almost immediately.
Karelia and Birobidjan
By 1930, plans were declared to establish a Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidjan along the Amur River on the Soviet-Chinese border in Manchuria. Birobidjan thus offered a competitive alternative to Zionism and Palestine in an area with absolutely no connection to any Jewish religious or historical memory. Similarly, in the summer of 1930, Gylling was given permission by Soviet authorities to encourage the settlement of American and Canadian-Finns by the 16th Party Congress Resolution calling upon the Karelian Autonomous Region “to expand the practice of drawing workers and specialists from abroad and inviting foreign engineers, masters and qualified workers to the U.S.S.R“. Priority was given to fishermen, loggers and construction workers.
An Immigration Department was opened in Petrozavodsk - the largest town in the region and a Society to aid the scheme was established in New York in May Day 1931 as well as another branch in Toronto. Approval of the scheme was given by the Finnish language Communist newspaper in Superior Wisconsin TuUmies (Working Man). Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 disgruntled Finnish citizens who could not reconcile themselves to life in the Finnish Republic also crossed the border to the new Finnish “Proletarian Zion“ in Karelia.
The inevitable result was immediate resentment and astonishment by the local population who were flabbergasted by the arrival of well to do Americans who had come voluntarily out of idealism to share in the already abysmal life of a depressed backward, marginal region of the Soviet Union. The Birobidjan experiment of the Jewish Autonomous Region was basically similar but perhaps more pathetic and comical for the migrant Jews coming from the United States, Argentina and Western Europe as well as the European parts of the Soviet Union who had absolutely nothing in common with the local Mongol population. The selection of this territory without any Jewish connection in a remote corner of the USSR in the Far East bordering China and Mongolia was due to Soviet hopes that settlement there might serve their security needs.
Until 1935, migrants to Karelia or Birobidjan wishing to return to Canada and the United States encountered no obstacle as the Soviets had no wish to antagonize the Americans and Canadian governments. Those who had opted for Soviet citizenship were doomed to remain. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party boss in December 1934, Stalinist paranoia took over and thousands perished in the purges of the late 1930s.
The 1939-40 Winter War of naked Soviet aggression against Finland strained the remaining sentiments of the hardest Communist loyalists. The ethnic Finnish population of Karelia was thrown a bone following the Soviet victory in March 1940 in the form of the creation of the 16th Soviet Socialist Republic - the Karelian S.S.R. with its own flag (both Republic and flag abolished by decree in 1956) but the change in official status offered little in the way of additional benefits. Soviet territorial gains on the Karelian isthmus including the city of Vipurii were added to the new Soviet Republic scant reward for those communist idealists who had given up life in the United States, Canada and Finland for their own “Soviet Zion”.
Origin of the Jewish Autonomous Region
In 1934, the “Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan” was declared in a region of mostly swamp and forest on the Manchurian frontier in what appeared to be an about-face of original Marxist theory about the “rootless cosmopolitan Jews.” Tens of thousands of Jews from the Ukraine and Belarus were persuaded to move there and start a new “productive life” as farmers. Appeals were sent via the Communist Parties abroad to attract Jewish sympathizers that the Soviet Union was not only opposed to anti-Semitism but had actually proposed to establish a Jewish territorial region on socialist principles and Yiddish culture as a counterweight to the “illusion” of Zionism with its roots in religion and the “artificial” recreation of the Hebrew language, supported by what was described as “British imperialism in the Middle East.” President Kalinin even promised the eventual establishment of a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic should the region manage to attract a dense Jewish farming and proletarian population of 100,000.
Approximately one thousand foreign Jews, many of them active Communists from the U.S.A, Canada, Argentina and Europe followed their dream of a “Soviet Zion”. Immediately after World War II, Birobidjan enjoyed a brief renaissance as fresh immigrants arrived. The Jewish population rose to 45,000 at its peak about 1941 comprising 28% of the total population (the figure today is around 5%). Unwilling to let Jewish refugees from Poland and other areas of Nazi conquered Eastern Europe who found refuge in the USSR reach and settle Birobidjan, the region languished and was thrown into confusion by two developments in 1948-49.
1. The brief Soviet foreign policy initiative supporting the partition of Palestine and active military aid allowing the new Jewish state of Israel enabling it to survive. It thus raised hopes that the Soviet leaders had finally acknowledged the existence of a Jewish nationality.
2. A suppression of all Jewish cultural expression including the murder of leading Yiddish writers in the USSR. This was followed by the infamous “Doctors Plot” trials in 1952-53, in which a clear anti-Semitic trend was evident.
Double About-Face on Zionism and Palestine
The “achievements” of the Jewish Autonomous Region were meager by any measure and ignored by Soviet foreign policy considerations. The classic Stalinist explanation of Marxist theory regarding the Jews was that they had lost the national characteristics of a people speaking their own language and residing in their own territory. Birobidjan had been created as a counterweight to the appeal of Zionism and the hope that Jewish national aspirations within the Soviet Union could find a safety valve for those Jews who were either unsuccessful in their attempts to assimilate or were spurned by the other nationalities within the USSR who regarded them as "foreign" and too influential.
Jewish Marxist theoreticians including several high ranking Party activists, all dedicated anti-religious and anti-Zionist communists had followed the Party Line and even praised a vicious pogrom by Muslim fanatics carried out against ultra-Orthodox Jews in the town of Hebron in Palestine in 1929. The Party Line then was that the Arabs masses were demonstrating their anti-imperialist sentiment against British rule and its sponsorship of Zionism. A few years later, they had to feign enthusiasm first for Birobidjan and then perform an even greater about-face following Soviet recognition and aid to Israel in 1948-49 and both the Daily Worker and the Yiddish language communist daily in the U.S. Freiheit (Freedom) outdid one another to explain the new party line in 1947-49 that…. “Palestine had become an important settlement of 600,000 souls, having developed a common national economy, a growing national culture and the first elements of Palestinian Jewish statehood and self-government.” (2)
A 1947 CP-USA resolution entitled “Work Among the Jewish Masses” berated the Party’s previous stand and proclaimed that “Jewish Marxists have not always displayed a positive attitude to the rights and interests of the Jewish People, to the special needs and problems of our own American Jewish national group and to the interests and rights of the Jewish Community in Palestine” (3). Stalin’s essay on the National Question from 1913 was even dug up again to explain that even though Jewish immigration to Palestine had been fostered by “romantics” or “religious circles” or “bourgeois nationalists“, all under the reactionary banner of Zionism, the new reality that had been created in Palestine was a “Hebrew nation” that deserved the right to self-determination. Curiously, the Soviet propaganda machine even praised the far Right underground groups of the Irgun and “Stern Gang” for their campaign of violence against the British authorities.
Instead of the class struggle taking precedence over the national question as prescribed in the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Moscow at times found it expedient to even advocate its own remedy of territorial concentration for Jews and Finns in their own “Zion-states” of Karelia and Birobidjan because those communists choosing this path, were “building socialism” in a territorial homeland.
In what might be termed “poetic justice,” the Winter War of 1940 caused a dramatic loss of support for the Communist Party among ethnic Finns in the United States and Canada. On the other hand, Soviet support for the partition of Palestine and the military aid (through the agency of the Communist Czech government) rendered to the beleaguered Israeli state fighting for its life in 1947-49 helped in furthering a pro-Soviet position among many American Jews who gave considerable support to the Far-Left candidate, former Vice President Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party in the 1948 election.
The abrupt end of the Soviet honeymoon with Israel in 1949 did not signal any renewed support for Birobidjan. On the contrary, new purges decimated the veteran Jewish population especially among educators, writers, and even authentic “proletarians”. Much of the leadership was purged and a new campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.” In 1958, Khruschev admitted failure of the region and blamed it on “Jewish individualism,” Today, the region has begun to recover and has even attracted some former residents who had migrated to Israel but couldn’t find satisfactory jobs and make the transition to Hebrew and a totally different climate.
Opportunism as the Guiding Light
Whenever the supposed international ideology of Marxism collided with the power interests of the USSR, in Palestine, or as aid to the Spanish Republicans manipulated by the Spanish Communist Party to exclude and even combat the Trotskyite and anarchist parties, the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the Soviet invasion of Poland two weeks after the initial German assault unleashing World War II, the Soviet attack on Finland in December 1939, the imposition of brutal dictatorships across Eastern Europe following the end of the war in 1945, Marxist ideology was used as a screen to further the great power interests of the Soviet state utilizing Great-Russian chauvinism as an important motive to further the standing of the Communist Party at home, even if it meant, as in the case of the loyal Finnish-American Communist activists, betrayal by Soviet aggression against their original homeland.
With regard to the “National Question,” no real consistent line was followed. It was always subject to the geopolitical and military needs of the Soviet state. Insistence on a territorial definition of nationality or nationhood, led to brief support for Black separatism in America, and a temporary “Zionist solution” to the problems of the world-wide Diaspora of Armenians, Finns, and even Jews “building socialism."
Current Russian, and much of the world-wide support for the Palestinians in another “homeland” (in addition to the Kingdom of Jordan, where they represent well over two-thirds of the population), whose claim to a distinct nationhood (NO renowned historical figures, distinctive history, or flag, language, religion, sense of past nationhood, or common historical memory before the Balfour declaration), is suspect at best and is likely to be as doomed as the Soviet line on the need for a distinct territory for Afro-Americans, Yiddish speaking Jews in Manchuria and the red Puppet State of the Karelian SSR.
The class interests of the “oppressed peoples” repeatedly played second fiddle to the “salvation” of their ethnic, religious and cultural identity offered by pro-Soviet or anti-American forces everywhere. “There is No God but Politics” applies equally as well today for the Islamists and their use of the Koran as it did when the faithful waited for the Word to come forth from the Politburo or from Tien-amin Square. The only authentic Zion state besides Israel is still Armenia, homeland of a people who are among the most ancient with their distinctive language, alphabet, religious center, and historic memories. The failed pseudo-Zion states and the disfunctional mini-states of the PLO on the "West Bank" and Hamas in Gaza are all a testimony to what doesn't work because there was no immense and long lasting reservoir of love and devotion to develop an historic homeland as in the case of modern Israel and the Zionist movement.
NOTES
(1) Karelian Exodus; Finnish Communities in North America and Soviet Karelia During the Depression Era. edited by Ronald Harpelle, Varpu Lindstrom, and Alex Pogorelskin. Special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies. Arpasia Books, Inc. Beavorton, Ontario, Canada, 2004.
(2) Alexander Bittelman in “Political Affairs” . October, 1945. cited in Nathan Glazer. The Social Basis of American Communism. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York. 1961. p.155.
(3) Alexander Bittelman in “Program for Survival; The Communist Position on the Jewish Question”. New Century. 1947. pp. 16, 52-53; cited in Nathan Glazer. The Social Basis of American Communism.
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