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The Impact of the October Revolution on International and Inter-Ethnonational Relations

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War and Compromise Between Nations and States

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Abstract

Research into the reasons why during the twentieth century, the rule of the Communist Party, which was guilty of mass murder, was greeted with enthusiasm and led to the mobilisation of countless millions of people for three generations, is far from having been completed and has still not provided satisfactory results. The October Revolution is generally interpreted as a socially motivated event led from below by the suffering lower social orders and by a number of middle-class, property-owning intellectuals and the aristocracy. This view takes insufficient account of the fact that all communist regimes, with the exception of the Cuban regime, were created as a result of military defeats in the two world wars and in several colonial wars. In order for the communist parties to win, the concept of capitalism as the root cause not only of social exploitation, but above all also for war, militarism and nationalism, played a decisive role. The promise of an entirely new way of organising relations between the ethnic nations and the states in the name of internationalism, and not of cosmopolitanism that was without nation or state, was a key factor in the success of the communists.

Lenin was a proponent of a global republic with a centrally administered global economy, a single global corporation and a global office led by a global party. However, for tactical reasons, he propagated the right to self-determination of the people, the dissolution of the large continental and colonial empires and the formation of national republics, to be brought together under one umbrella as federations. In the long term, he anticipated not only a rapprochement between the nations, but their “amalgamation”. The multi-national USSR was not intended to act as a successor state to Tsarist Russia, but as an alternative to the capitalist League of Nations, and as the core of the global Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

After the failure of the global revolution, Stalin developed the concept of socialism in one country, and later of Soviet patriotism. He assumed that in the future communist global society, humanity would speak just one language, Russian. Accordingly, the non-Russian nations among the Soviet peoples were to “voluntarily” adopt Russian as their second native language. The Communist International as an organisation of the global party, which was separated according to the different nations, was now to act as a tool of Soviet foreign policy. After 1945, the new states that fell under communist rule were not integrated into the USSR, but were rather to form a closed “socialist community of states” with a common foreign policy. In the longer term, the emancipation of the communist nations of Yugoslavia and China was the first step on the road towards the end of communism.

Lecture given on 6.11.2017.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Heinemann-Grüder (2017).

  2. 2.

    On history schematism see Jahn (1986).

  3. 3.

    Meissner (1962, p. 244).

  4. 4.

    On the dilemma of the state leadership of not negatively judging Soviet history on the one hand, while on the other avoiding celebrating revolution, see Ibragimova (2017).

  5. 5.

    See the contributions by Kalinin (2017), Katzer (2017). The attitudes among the population to the October Revolution compared to the February Revolution are discussed by Gudkov and Zorkaja (2017).

  6. 6.

    Habermas (1990).

  7. 7.

    Other types of communism, such as anarchistic, religious or monastery communism, which were already conceived and practised here and there in ancient times, are not the subject of discussion here.

  8. 8.

    Thus, for example, “In October 1917, the proletariat of Russia, together with the poor farmers, and under the leadership of the Party of the Bolsheviks, overthrew the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and established the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of Soviet power.” Berchin (1971), p. 17.

  9. 9.

    This was the title of the famous depiction of the October events from 1919 by an American journalist, John Reed (1990).

  10. 10.

    Geyer (1985, p. 93). See also Bonwetsch (1991), Hildermeier (1989), Carr (1971), Pipes (1990), Haumann (2007), Furet (1999), Altrichter (2017), Koenen (2017).

  11. 11.

    For the consensus in principle among all elements of the Socialist Internationale in Basel in 1912, cf. the lectures and literary references in: Jahn (2015, pp. 55–89).

  12. 12.

    In the elections to the Constituent Assembly in Russia in November 1917, the Bolsheviks obtained just 22.5% of the votes, Bonwetsch (1991, p. 199).

  13. 13.

    On the history of the soviets, see Anweiler (1958), Gerlach (1974).

  14. 14.

    Tannu Tuva was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944.

  15. 15.

    Lenin (1974a, p. 342, 1974b, p. 410), Sinowjew (1919, p. IX).

  16. 16.

    In the two publications “Foundations of Leninism” (1924) and “Concerning Questions of Leninism” (1926), Stalin (1971, pp. 37–38, 169–180). On the political context, see Deutscher (1962, p. 173, S. 303–304).

  17. 17.

    Stalin (1950, p. 45).

  18. 18.

    Goodman (1960, pp. 86–87, 107–110), Beyrau (2001, p. 227).

  19. 19.

    Simon (1986, p. 106, 156–157, 174).

  20. 20.

    This amounted to 6.7 million out of 10.4 million square km in total. 363 million people lived in eastern Europe, with 362 million living in the west in 1988, according to statistical calculations in: Der Fischer Weltalmanach (1989).

  21. 21.

    These countries included Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Benin, the Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen, the People’s Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, the ruling parties of which were more or less influenced by the Marxist-Leninist worldview and manifesto.

  22. 22.

    Staar (1989).

  23. 23.

    Renner (1918), Bauer (2016).

  24. 24.

    “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto... In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” (Marx and Engels 1969, pp. 98–137). See Szporluk (1988).

  25. 25.

    See the lecture in Chap. 4, pp. 61–78.

  26. 26.

    Marx (1973).

  27. 27.

    The appeal by the Executive Committee of the Communist Internationale on 1 May 1919 stated that: “Im Jahr 1919 wurde die große Kommunistische Internationale geboren. Im Jahr 1920 wird die große Internationale Sowjetrepublik geboren werden.” Bibliothek der Kommunistischen Internationale I (Library of the Communist Internationale I.) (1920, p. 91). Other expressions used were the “proletarian” or “socialist world republic”. For a fundamental discussion of the topic, still see Goodman (1960, pp. 50–79, 264–284).

  28. 28.

    Thus Lenin, referring to Friedrich Engels (1974d, p. 396).

  29. 29.

    Lenin (1974a, p. 342).

  30. 30.

    “We demand freedom of self-determination … for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations …”, Lenin (1974b, pp. 408–409). The CPSU manifesto of 1961 limited the scope of the formula somewhat. Now, the talk was of full unity (pol’naya edinost’) instead of amalgamation, but also of the fact that the non-Russians will voluntarily adopt the Russian language as the lingua franca of all peoples living in the USSR, Meissner (1962, pp. 223, 225).

  31. 31.

    Stalin (1972, p. 272).

  32. 32.

    At the same time, the communists agreed to describe the organisation of the sovereign state peoples as the Organizatsia Ob’edinionnych Natsii (not: Narodov) in accordance with the American linguistic usage.

  33. 33.

    On the historical origin of the different concepts of the nation, see the three lectures on the topic of nationalism, Jahn (2015, pp. 27–29).

  34. 34.

    Stalin (1972).

  35. 35.

    Thus, for example, D. Zaslavsky in an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of 1 January 1949, according to Goodman (1960, p. 278).

  36. 36.

    Lenin (1974b, pp. 412–413, 1974c).

  37. 37.

    In the CPR (B) manifesto of March 1919, the “federative unification of the states organised according to the Soviet type” was openly declared as “one of the transitional forms on the path to full unity”, Meissner (1962, p. 128). Lenin already wrote in 1914: “We do not advocate preserving small nations at all costs; other conditions being equal, we are decidedly for centralisation and are opposed to the petty-bourgois ideal of federal relationships.”, Lenin (1974c, p. 102).

  38. 38.

    See in detail the list of the peoples and population figures in Jahn (2008, pp. 67–68).

  39. 39.

    Mark (1989).

  40. 40.

    Weber et al. (2014), Bayerlein (2004), Rees and Thorpe (1998).

  41. 41.

    Leonhard (1975).

  42. 42.

    Soon after Stalin’s death, it was dissolved again in 1956, after it had been decisively weakened by the Cominform conflict with Yugoslavia. After that, only three further world conferences were held, in 1957, 1960 and 1963, in which the contradictions between the national communist parties became increasingly clear.

  43. 43.

    Schlaga (1991, pp. 82–86).

  44. 44.

    Kriza (2017), Wimberg (1992).

  45. 45.

    Gerhard Simon mentions such attempts, although without giving or mentioning the sources of such suggestions, Simon (1986, p. 16, 366).

  46. 46.

    Zaslavsky (1991, pp. 13–14, 19–21).

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    Egbert Jahn

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Jahn, E. (2020). The Impact of the October Revolution on International and Inter-Ethnonational Relations. In: War and Compromise Between Nations and States. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34131-2_8

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