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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2023-276
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Palestine:
Ukraine:
China
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Other issues:
The Beezle:
Empire:
Syrakistan:
Russia
Use as open (neither Ukraine nor Palestine related) thread …
Cont’d from #62
So was Lenin’s policy on nationalities his own unique idea? Of course not. Such ideas were widely discussed in Russian opposition circles.
In 1905–1906, Anton Budilovich (1846–1908), Russian philologist, Slavist, publicist, Slavophile, Dean of Warsaw and Dorpat (Yuryev, now Tartu) universities and a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, wrote a series of articles that, among other issues, discussed the approaches of opposition political parties to the question of nationalities. This article provides a summary:
Political forecasts by A.S. Budilovich (Nauka Vera Kultura, Aleksandr Kiselyov, November 7, 2023 — in Russian)
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A.S. Budilovich paid much more attention to the national aspects of the political situation in the Russian Empire, focusing on sharp criticism of contemporary liberal and socialist recipes for treating the national issue. Budilovich foresaw the type of policy on the national question that since the 1920s was purposefully carried out by the Soviet government and is known in historiography as the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization). It’s interesting that A.S. Budilovich polemicized not so much with the Social Democrats, but with ideas popular among the opposition liberal intelligentsia. In this regard, it can be assumed that the concept of resolving the national question subsequently implemented by the Bolsheviks was not their exclusive invention. It rather reflected popular ideas widespread in Russian public opinion. For example, thinking about the consequences of the programs and ideas put forward as an alternative to government policy, the professor argued that to implement them in the field of education, it would be necessary to transfer “our Malorussian south to the scientific leadership of another academy, a Ukrainian one, into which the Shevchenko Society would be transformed, moved to Kiev from Lvov, as it won’t be needed there due to the Polonization of Galicia: subsequently, more separate academies would gradually arise: Belarussian, Latvian, Estonian, etc.” [1, p. 105]. If we remember that in 1924 one of the ideological fathers of Ukrainian Nationalism M.S. Grushevskiy was made an academician of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) in the Ukrainian SSR, heading the archaeographic commission of the VUAN, and was appointed professor of history at Kiev State University, one cannot help but be surprised at the accuracy of the forecast. Not to mention the fact that this period marked the beginning of the policy of forced Ukrainization. In the field of primary and secondary education, Budilovich predicted that “the state language will be preserved only in Velikorussian schools, since in Belarussian and Malorussian schools the jargons of the Russian-Polish type, similar to the one now dominant in Chervonorussian* schools, will gradually take hold; in all schools on the outskirts, all teaching from top to bottom will be conducted in local languages: German, Polish, Armenian, etc.” [1, p. 104]. It should be noted here that A.S. Budilovich had a negative attitude towards the version of the Ukrainian literary language that was used in the Ukrainophile press of Austro-Hungarian Galicia.
The prominent scientist strongly opposed the idea of the right of “national self-determination” [3, p. 273], the implementation of which was aimed at radically changing the form of government of the Empire. A.S. Budilovich pointed out that the very concept of “self-determination” was poorly defined: from the question of which ethnic groups this right should be granted to the impossibility of agreeing on what exactly this self-determination amounts to. All that remained unclear, not to mention the fact that most ethnic communities “did not have a specific territory, but were scattered throughout the Empire” [3, p. 274]. Partially understanding this problem, inspired by the ideals of either cosmopolitanism or proletarian internationalism, the party ideologists put forward the “principle of autonomy of the outskirts” [3, p. 275], which was closely connected with the idea of federalization of Russia. As a result, many figures saw as optimal the vision of Russia as a federation of “regions based on historical and ethnographic principles” [3, p. 277]. For some socialists, such a federation seemed still too connected with the Russian state tradition, so “the United States of Eastern Europe appear in place of Russia.” However, for some intellectuals, even this option seemed insufficiently progressive and suitable for all participants in the revolutionary movement. That is why “another political faction is emerging among us: the transformation of Russia from a union of regions into a union of states or, as the Germans put it, from the Bundesstaat to the Staatenbund” [3, p. 278].
Experience of the political crisis of 1905–1907 showed that the implementation of the right of nations to self-determination was fraught with “streams of blood” caused both by terror and violence against Russians “without distinguishing between Velikorussians, Malorussians and Belarussians” [3, p. 279] and by a wave of interethnic conflicts, such as “the discord between the Mingrelians and the Abkhazians and the Svanetians on the Black Sea coast; massacres of the Tatars [Azerbaijanis — S] and the Armenians in Baku, Shusha, Tiflis [Tbilisi — S], etc.” Budilovich hoped that this negative experience had sobered up many fantasists, but admitted that the unsuccessful “outcome of the first attempt of the federalists to transform Russia according to their theories should not, however, lull us in terms of the future. Such attempts, no doubt, will be repeated many more times, even if in a different form” [3, p. 280]. In the immediate future, A.S. Budilovich’s biggest fear was that because of the political goals of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the State Duma would try to pass a bill on “the dismemberment of Russia into autonomies” [3, p. 280], which will push the Empire along the path of development of Austria-Hungary “with the only difference that there, only the Budapest and Vienna parliaments [the Diet and the Reichsrat — S] have the rights as broad as all our local parliaments and governments, perhaps two dozen of them, would have if we followed the decision of Messrs. Kadets [members of the Constitutional Democratic Party — S]”. It is interesting that he saw the finale of this evolution as the transformation of Russia “into a union of several independent states, connected among themselves only by a thin thread of a dynastic union” [3, p. 285], and “the Russian people would lose the most; having lost the possibility of development and even existence in the autonomous outskirts, it would have lost the rights of national self-determination within the empire” [3, p. 286]. It should be noted that A.S. Budilovich, as a loyal monarchist, wouldn’t allow even the shadow of a thought about the disappearance of the dynasty and its complete loss of political power. His understanding was greatly influenced by the ongoing experiences of Austria-Hungary. However, the predictive power of the scientist’s judgments is noteworthy. Budilovich almost guessed the number of union republics within the USSR: from 1940 to 1956 there were 16 of them. To reach two dozen, another 8 national republics would be necessary, but if we remember that, for example, in 1969 there were another 20 autonomous republics in the USSR [apart from the Soviet republics — S], then, at least in his writings, Budilovich was not mistaken in the order of the number of constructed republics. Their relative unity, however, was ensured not by a personal dynastic union, but by the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whose structure included the Communist Party of the Ukraine, the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan, etc., but, characteristically, there was no separate Communist Party of Russia.
Thus, in general, A.S. Budilovich turned out to be right in determining many of the political consequences of the implementation of the political ideas regarding national and religious issues that were popular among the opposition intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century. This seems to be a rather important observation, since, for example, the Bolshevik version of the solution to the national problem did not appear out of nowhere and was not the only option for a radical reorganization of the country. Whether it was Lenin’s planned Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia or the Kadets’ program of “regional representative assemblies,” for A.S. Budilovich such a decision was unacceptable, and the scientist was fighting against such ideas with his writings. To some extent, he foresaw the features of the state structure of the post-imperial space after the 1917 [October — S] Revolution and the Soviet policy on nationalities.
1. Budilovich, A.S. (1905). Nauka i politika, Tri statyi po zlobodnevnym voprosam. St. Petersburg: Pushkinskaya Skoropechatnya. 110 pages.
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3. Budilovich, A.S. [1906]. “Vopros ob okrainakh Rossii v svyazi s teoriey samoopredeleniya narodnostey i trebovaniyami gosudarstvennogo yedinstva.” In Klimakov, Yu.V., Platonov, O.V. (ed.) (2014). Slavyanskoye edinstvo. Moscow: Institut russkoy tsivilizatsii. pp. 267–287.
* Chervonorussian (Red Russian) is another term for Rusyn. Geographically located in Eastern Hungary, Middle and Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovina. — S
Posted by: S | Nov 21 2023 2:04 utc | 107
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