Stalin: A Biography

If campaigns of repression [by the government] touch ‘land’ interests, as has happened in Ireland, the broad peasant masses will soon gather under the banner of the national movement.

If, on the other hand, there is no truly serious anti-Russian nationalism in Georgia, this is above all because no Russian landlords or Russian big bourgeoisie exist there who might feed such nationalism among the [Georgian] masses. What exists in Georgia is anti-Armenian nationalism but this is because there is an Armenian big bourgeoisie which, by crushing the small and as yet weak Georgian bourgeoisie, thrusts the latter towards anti-Armenian nationalism.

Stalin’s analysis pointed to the complexity of the national question in the Russian Empire. It anticipated the bringing together of Russians and Georgians in harmony within the same multinational state.

Evidently he assumed that the Russian Empire, when revolution at last overthrew the Romanovs, should not be broken up into separate states. Even Russian Poland, which Marx and Engels had wanted to gain independence along with other Polish-inhabited lands, should in Stalin’s opinion stay with Russia.²⁰ His rule of thumb was that ‘the right of secession’ should be offered but that no nation should be encouraged to realise it.

What motivated Stalin was the aim to move ‘the backward nations and nationalities into the general channel of a higher culture’. He italicised this phrase in his booklet. The Menshevik proposal for ‘national-cultural autonomy’ would permit the most reactionary religious and social forces to increase their influence and the socialist project would be set back by years:²¹

Where does [‘national-cultural autonomy’] lead and what are its results? Let’s take as an example the Transcaucasian Tatars with their minimal percentage of literacy, their schools headed by omnipotent mullahs and with their culture pervaded by the religious spirit… It is not difficult to understand that organising them into a cultural-national union means to put their mullahs in charge of them, to proffer them up to be devoured by reactionary mullahs and to create a new bastion for the reactionary stultification [zakabalenie] of the Tatar masses by their very worst enemy.

Stalin’s point was not without plausibility.

He then posed some pertinent questions:²²