Stalin: A Biography

What about the Mingrelians, Abkhazians, Adzharians, Svans, Lez-gins and others speaking different languages but not having their own literature? How to relate to such nations? Is it possible to organise them into national unions? But around which ‘cultural matters’ can they be ‘organised’?

What about the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are assimilating (but as yet are far from having assimilated entirely) as Georgians while the Ossetians of the North Caucasus are partly assimilating as Russians and partly developing further by creating their own literature? How can they be ‘organised’ into a single national union?

To which national union should the Adzharians be ascribed who speak Georgian but live by Turkish culture and profess Islam? Shouldn’t they be ‘organised’ separately from the Georgians on the basis of religious matters and together with the Georgians on the basis of other cultural matters? And what about the Kobuletsy? The Ingush? The Ingiloitsy?

Zhordania had no answer to such questions.

Stalin’s counter-proposal was for regional self-rule, as Lenin had counselled since 1903. This would be undertaken in such a fashion as to give each ethnic group, however small, the right to use its own language, have its own schools, read its own press and practise its own faith.²³ The response to Stalin and Lenin was acerbic, and it was led by Stalin’s Georgian antagonist Zhordania. For Zhordania the important point was that capitalist economic development had scattered nations over vast areas. It was therefore impractical to protect national and ethnic rights on a purely territorial basis. Leninism was therefore a doctrine from ‘the old world’.²⁴ Another claim by Zhordania was that ‘the Russian part of the party’, by which he meant the Bolsheviks, was insensitive to the acuteness of national oppression in the Russian Empire.²⁵ In truth Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were better at criticising each other than at providing a solution which would not lead somehow to oppressive results. If the Ukrainians were offered Bolshevik-style regional self-rule, Jews and Poles in Ukraine would have reason for concern. If Ukrainians acquired the right to Menshevik-style cross-territorial self-organisation, the prospects for central supranational government would become chaotic. Stalin and Zhordania were wrestling with a question with no definitive theoretical solution.

By and large, though, the dispute was conducted with intellectual rigour even though the language on both sides was intemperate. Stalin’s commentary on the Caucasus was taken seriously even by those who disagreed with him. He had said nothing offensive except to the ears of the most extreme nationalists. Indeed little attention was later drawn to his booklet when his enemies were searching for dirt on him.

The exception was the passages in Marxism and the National Question on the Jews. According to his categories, the Jews could not be considered as a nation because they did not live in a discrete territory. They had a language — Yiddish — and a religion of their own; and they were conscious of their Jewishness. But the matter of territory was crucial for Stalin and he took Bolshevik ideas on nationhood to their logical conclusion. his attack on the Jewish Bund was direct:²⁶