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Rosa Luxemburg
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Gubernia | Poles | Jews | Germans | Russians |
Kalisz | 83.9% | 7.6 | 7.3 | 1.1 |
Kielce | 87.6 | 10.9 | — | 1.2 |
Lublin | 61.3 | 12.7 | 0.2 | 21.0 |
Lomza | 77.4 | 15.8 | 0.8 | 5.5 |
Piotrokow | 71.9 | 15.2 | 10.6 | 1.6 |
Plock | 80.4 | 9.6 | 6.7 | 3.3 |
Radom | 83.8 | 13.8 | 1.1 | 1.4 |
Siedlce | 66.1 | 15.5 | 1.4 | 16.5 |
Warsaw | 73.6 | 16.4 | 4.0 | 5.4 |
Thus, in all the gubernias except two, and in the country as a whole, the Polish element constitutes more than 70 percent of the population; it is, moreover, the decisive element in the socio–cultural development of the country.
However, the situation looks different when we turn to the Jewish nationality.
Jewish national autonomy, not in the sense of freedom of school, religion, place of residence, and equal civic rights, but in the sense of the political self–government of the Jewish population with its own legislation and administration, as it were parallel to the autonomy of the Congress Kingdom, is an entirely utopian idea. Strangely, this conviction prevails also in the camp of extreme Polish nationalists, e.g., in the so–called “Revolutionary Faction” of the PPS, where it is based on the simple circumstance that the Jewish nationality does not possess a “territory of its own” within the Russian empire. But national autonomy conceived in accordance with that group’s own standpoint, i.e., as the sum of freedoms and rights to self–determination of a certain group of people linked by language, tradition, and psychology, is in itself a construction lying beyond historical conditions, fluttering in mid–air, and therefore one that can be easily conceived, as it were, “in the air,” i.e., without any definite territory. On the other hand, an autonomy that grows historically together with local self–government, on the basis of modern bourgeois–democratic development, is actually as inseparable from a certain territory as the bourgeois state itself, and cannot be imagined without it to the same extent as “non–territorial” communal or urban self–government. It is true that the Jewish population was completely under the influence of modern capitalistic development in the Russian empire and shares the economic, political, and spiritual interests of particular groups in that society. But on the one hand, these interests were never territorially separated so as to become specifically Jewish capitalist interests; rather, they are common interests of the Jewish and other people in the country at large. On the other hand, this capitalist development does not lead to a separation of bourgeois Jewish culture, but acts in an exactly opposite direction, leading to the assimilation of the Jewish bourgeois, urban intelligentsia, to their absorption by the Polish or Russian people. If the national distinctness of the Lithuanians or Byelorussians is based on the backward peasant people, the Jewish national distinctness in Russia and Poland is based on the socially backward petite bourgeoisie, on small production, small trade, small–town life, and – let us add parenthetically – on the close relation of the nationality in question to religion. In view of the above, the national distinctness of the Jews, which is supposed to be the basis of non–territorial Jewish autonomy, is manifested not in the form of metropolitan bourgeois culture, but in the form of small–town lack of culture. Obviously any efforts toward “developing Jewish culture” at the initiative of a handful of Yiddish publicists and translators cannot be taken seriously.
The only manifestation of genuine modern culture in the Russian framework is the Social Democratic movement of the Russian proletariat which, because of its nature, can best replace the historical lack of bourgeois national culture of the Jews, since it is itself a phase of genuinely international and proletarian culture.
Different, though no less complicated, is the question of autonomy in Lithuania. For nationalist utopians, obviously the existence of a certain territory inhabited by a population of distinct nationality is a sufficient reason to demand for the nationality in question, in the name of the right of all nationalities to self–determination, either an independent republic, or one federated with Russia, or the “broadest autonomy.” Each of these programs was advanced in turn by the former “Lithuanian Social Democracy,” then by the PPS in its federative phase, and finally by the recently organized “Byelorussian Socialist Commune” which, at its Second Congress in 1906, adopted a somewhat vague program of a “federal republic in Russia with a territorial–autonomous diet in Vilna for the territory of the Western country.”[5] Whether the “Byelorussian Commune” demands the proclamation of the “Western country” as one of the republics into which the Russian Empire is to be split, or a “territorial autonomy” for that “Western country” is difficult to figure out; since an “autonomous” diet is demanded for Vilna, it would seem that the latter version is intended, or else, what is in complete harmony with the whole utopian–abstract treatment of the question, no basic distinctions are made between an independent republic, a federal system, and autonomy, but only qualitative distinctions. Let us examine the matter from the standpoint of territorial autonomy. The “Western country,” according to the terminology in the Russian administrative division, is a preponderantly agrarian and small–industry district comprising areas with considerable variations in conditions. Apart from the local interests of the rural, municipal, and provincial self–governments, this territory is much less of as distinct production and trading district, with a less distinctive character and a less distinct grouping of interests, than the Kingdom of Poland or the industrial Moscow district. On the other hand it is a distinct nationality district. But it is precisely with regard to this question of nationality that the greatest difficulties arise from the standpoint of potential autonomy. The “Western country,” i.e., the territory of former Lithuania, is an area occupied by several different nationalities, and the first question that arises is: which nationality is to be served by the territorial–national autonomy that is at stake, which language, which nationality is to be decisive in the schools, cultural institutions, the judiciary, legislation, and in filling local offices? The Lithuanian nationalists obviously demand autonomy for the Lithuanian nationality. Let us look at the actual conditions of that nationality.
According to the census of 1897 – the last one that has taken place and whose results in the area of nationality relations have been available to the public since 1905 – the genuine Lithuanian nationality in the Russian empire numbers 1,210,510 people. This population inhabits mainly the Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, and Suwalki gubernias. Besides, there live almost exclusively in the Kovno gubernia, 448,000 persons of Samogitian nationality, who by no means identify with the Lithuanians. If we were to outline the territory that might serve as a basis for an autonomous Lithuania, we would have to eliminate part of the present “Western country,” and on the other hand go beyond its borders and include the Suwalki gubernia which today belongs to the Congress Kingdom. We would obtain a territory approximately corresponding to the voyvodship of Vilna and Troki which, in pre–partition Poland, constituted “Lithuania proper.” The Lithuanian population is distributed in that territory as follows: out of the sum total of 1,200,000 Lithuanians almost half, i.e., 574,853, are concentrated in the Kovno gubernia. The second place with regard to the concentration of Lithuanians is occupied by the Suwalki gubernia, where 305,548 live; somewhat fewer are to be found in the Vilna gubernia, viz., 297,720 persons; finally, an insignificant number of Lithuanians, about 3,500, inhabit the northern portion of the Grodno gubernia. Actually, the Lithuanian population is doubtless more numerous, because in the census the language used by the respective populations was the main point taken into consideration, while a sizable proportion of Lithuanians use the Polish language in everyday life. However, in the present case, from the standpoint of nationality as a basis of national autonomy, obviously only the population wherein national distinctness is expressed in a distinct native language can be taken into account.
The distribution of the Lithuanian population becomes apparent only when we ascertain its numerical ratio to the remaining population in the same territory. The over–all population figure in the gubernias mentioned (always according to the 1897 census) is as follows:
Percent Lithuanians |
||||
In the Kovno gubernia | 1,544,569 | 37.0 | ||
In the Vilna gubernia | 1,591,207 | 17.0 | ||
In the Grodno gubernia | 1,603,409 | 0.2 | ||
In the Suwalki gubernia | 582,913 | 52.0 |
Out of a total population of 5,322,093 in that territory, the Lithuanians constitute less than 23 percent. Even if we were to include, as do the Lithuanian nationalists, the entire Samogitian population with the Lithuanians, we would obtain the ratio of 31 percent, i.e., less than a third of the total population. Obviously, setting up the former “Lithuania proper” as the area of the Lithuanian nationality is, in present–day conditions, an entirely arbitrary and artificial construction.
The total population of the four “north–western” gubernias included because of the Byelorussian nationality is as follows:
Minsk gubernia | 2,147,621 | |
Mogilev gubernia | 1,686,764 | |
Witebsk gubernia | 1,489,246 | |
Smolensk gubernia | 1,525,279 |
Together with the population of the four gubernias inhabited by Lithuanians, this adds up to the considerable figure of 12,171,007. However, among this population, the Byelorussians constitute less than half, i.e., about 5.85 million (5,855,547). Even considering only the figures, the idea of fitting Lithuania’s autonomy to the Byelorussian nationality seems questionable. However, this difficulty becomes much greater if we take into consideration the socio–economic conditions of the respective nationalities.
In the territory inhabited by them the Byelorussians constitute an exclusively rural, agrarian element. Their cultural level is extremely low. Illiteracy is so widespread that the “Byelorussian Commune” was forced to establish an “Education Department” to spread elementary education among the Byelorussian peasants. The complete lack of a Byelorussian bourgeoisie, an urban intelligentsia, and an independent scholarly and literary life in the Byelorussian language, renders the idea of a national Byelorussian autonomy simply impractical.
The social conditions among the Lithuanian nationals are similar. To a preponderant degree farming is the occupation of the Lithuanians. In the cultural heart of Lithuania, the Vilna gubernia, the Lithuanians constitute 19.8 percent of the total population, and 3.1 percent of the urban population. In the Suwalki gubernia, the next with regard to Lithuanian concentration, the Lithuanians constitute as much as 52.2 percent of the gubernia population, but only 9.2 per–cent of the urban population. It is true that the cultural conditions among the Lithuanians are quite different from those in Byelorussia. The education of the Lithuanian population is on a relatively high level, and the percentage of illiterates is almost the lowest in the Russian Empire. But the education of Lithuanians is preponderantly a Polish education, and the Polish language, not the Lithuanian, is here the instrument of culture, which fact is closely connected with the fact that the possessing classes, the rural landed gentry, and the urban intelligentsia are genuinely Polish or Polonized to a high degree. The same situation prevails to a considerable degree in Ruthenia. Indeed, in Lithuania and Ruthenia the only nationality culturally fit to manage national autonomy is the Polish, with its urban population and its intelligentsia. Therefore, if the national autonomy of the “Western country” were to be considered, it would have to be neither a Lithuanian nor a Byelorussian autonomy, but a Polish one: the Polish language, the Polish school, Poles in public offices would be the natural expression of the autonomous institutions of the country.
Given this situation, culturally and nationally, Lithuania and Ruthenia would constitute only an extension of the Kingdom, not a separate autonomous region; they would form, with the Kingdom, a natural and historical region, with Polish autonomy over the Kingdom plus Lithuania.
Such a solution of the question is opposed by several decisive considerations. First of all, from the purely national point of view, this would be the rule of a small Polish minority over a majority of Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Jews, and others. In Lithuania and Ruthenia, the Jews and the Poles make up most of the urban population; together they occupy what would be the natural social centers of autonomous institutions. But the Jewish population decisively outnumbers the Polish, whereas in the Congress Kingdom there are 6,880,000 Poles (according to the 1897 census) and only 1,300,000 Jews. The percentage of each in the four gubernias of Lithuania proper in terms of the over–all population is as follows:
Gubernia | Poles | Jews | ||
Suwalki | 22.99 | 10.14 | ||
Kovno | 9.04 | 13.73 | ||
Vilna | 8.17 | 12.72 | ||
Grodno | 10.08 | 17.37 |
Only in the Suwalki gubernia is the Jewish population smaller than the Polish, but even here this ratio is quite different when we take the towns into consideration: then the Poles constitute 27 percent, the Jews 40 percent of the urban population. It should also be taken into consideration that Jews in the Kingdom, if assimilated – more so in the urban areas – reinforce the Polish nationality; whereas in Lithuania the assimilation process, which is anyway much slower, occurs – when it does at all – among Jews who belong to the Russian culture; in both cases confusion among nationalities grows and the question of autonomy becomes more and more entangled. Suffice it to say that in the heart of Lithuania and the seat of the planned autonomous diet, Vilna, out of the 227 schools counted in 1900, 182 are Jewish!
Another consideration no less important is the circumstance that the Polish nationality is in Lithuania and Ruthenia precisely the nationality of the ruling strata: the gentry landowners and the bourgeoisie; while the Lithuanian and particularly the Byelorussian nationality is represented mostly by landless peasantry. Therefore, the nationality relationship is here – generally speaking – a relationship of social classes. Handing over the country’s autonomous institutions to the Polish nationality would here mean the creation of a new powerful instrument of class domination without a corresponding strengthening of the position of the exploited classes, and would cause conditions of the kind that would be brought about by the proposed autonomy of Galicia for the Ruthenians.
Consequently, both for nationality and for social reasons the joining
of Lithuania to the autonomous territory of the Kingdom or the
separation of Lithuania and Ruthenia into an autonomous region with an
unavoidable preponderance of the Polish element is a project which
Social Democracy must combat in principle. In this form, the project of
Lithuania’s national autonomy altogether falls through as utopian, in
view of the numerical and social relations of the nationalities
involved.
Another outstanding example of the difficulties encountered by the problem of nationality autonomy in practice is to be found in the Caucasus. No corner of the earth presents such a picture of nationality intermixture in one territory as the Caucasus, the ancient historical trail of the great migrations of peoples between Asia and Europe, strewn with fragments and splinters of those peoples. That territory’s population of over nine million is composed (according to the 1897 census) of the following racial and nationality groups:
In Thousands | ||||
Russians | 2,192.3 | |||
Germans | 21.5 | |||
Greeks | 57.3 | |||
Armenians | 975.0 | |||
Ossetians | 157.1 | |||
Kurds | 100.0 | |||
Chechens | 243.4 | |||
Circassians | 111.5 | |||
Abkhaz | 72.4 | |||
Lezgins | 613.8 | |||
Georgians, Imeretins, Mingrels, etc. |
Kartvelian | 1,201.2 | ||
Jews | 43.4 | |||
Tatars | 1,139.6 | |||
Kumyks | 100.8 | |||
Turks | Turco–Tatars | 70.2 | ||
Nogays | 55.4 | |||
Karaches | 22.0 | |||
Kalmuks | 11.8 | |||
Estonians Mordvinians |
1.4 |
The territorial distribution of the largest nationalities involved is as follows: The Russians, who constitute the most numerous group in the whole Caucasus, are concentrated in the north, in the Kuban and Black Sea districts and in the northwest part of Tersk. Moving southward, in the western part of the Caucasus the Kartvelians are located; they occupy the Kutai and the south–eastern part of the Tiflis gubernias. Still further south, the central territory is occupied by the Armenians in the southern portion of the Tiflis, the eastern portion of the Kars and the northern portion of the Erivan gubernias, squeezed between the Georgians in the north, the Turks in the west and the Tatars in the east and south, in the Baku, Elizabetpol and Erivan gubernias. In the east and in the mountains are located mountain tribes, while other minor groups such as Jews and Germans live, intermingled with the autochthonous population, mainly in the cities. The complexity of the nationality problem appears particularly in the linguistic conditions because in the Caucasus there exist, besides Russian, Ossetian, and Armenian, about a half–dozen languages, four Lezgin dialects, several Chechen, several Circassian, Mingrel, Georgian, Sudanese, and a number of others. And these are by no means dialects, but mostly independent languages incomprehensible to the rest of the population.
From the standpoint of the problem of autonomy, obviously only three nationalities enter into consideration: Georgians, Armenians, and Tatars, because the Russians inhabiting the northern part of the Caucasus constitute, with regard to nationality, a continuation of the state territory of the purely Russian population.
The relatively most numerous nationality group besides the Russians are the Georgians, if we include among them all varieties of Kartvelians. The historical territory of the Georgians is represented by the gubernias of Tiflis and Kutai and the districts of Sukhum and Sakatali, with a population of 2,110,490. However, the Georgian nationality constitutes only slightly more than half of that number, i.e., 1,200,000; the remainder is composed of Armenians to the number of about 220,000, concentrated mainly in the Akhalkalats county of the Tiflis gubernia, where they constitute over 70 percent of the population; Tatars to the number of 100,000; Ossetians, over 70,000; Lezgins represent half of the population in the Sakatali district; and Abkhazes are preponderant in the Sukham district; while in the Borchalin county of the Tiflis gubernia a mixture of various nationalities holds a majority over the Georgian population.
In view of these figures the project of Georgian nationality autonomy presents manifold difficulties. Georgia’s historical territory, taken as a whole, represents such a numerically insignificant population – scarcely 1,200,000 – that it seems insufficient as a basis of independent autonomous life in the modern sense, with its cultural needs and socio–economic functions. In an autonomous Georgia, with its historical boundaries, a nationality that comprises only slightly more than half of the entire population would be called on to dominate in public institutions, schools, and political life. The impossibility of this situation is felt so well by the Georgian nationalists of revolutionary hue that they, a priori, relinquish the historical boundaries and plan to curtail the autonomous territory to an area corresponding to the actual preponderance of the Georgian nationality.
According to that plan, only sixteen of Georgia’s counties would be the basis of the Georgian autonomy, while the fate of the four remaining ones with a preponderance of other nationalities would be decided by a “plebiscite” of those nationalities. This plan looks highly democratic and revolutionary; but like most anarchist–inspired plans which seek to solve all historic difficulties by means of the “will of nations” it has a defect, which is that in practice the plebiscite plan is even more difficult to implement than the autonomy of historical Georgia. The area specified in the Georgian plan would include scarcely 1,400,000 people, i.e., a figure corresponding to the population of a big modern city. This area, cut out quite arbitrarily from Georgia’s traditional framework and present socio–economic status, is not only an extremely small basis for autonomous life but moreover does not represent any organic entity, any sphere of material life and economic and cultural interests, besides the abstract interests of the Georgian nationality.
However, even in this area, the Georgians’ nationality claims cannot be interpreted as an active expression of autonomous life, in view of the circumstance that their numerical preponderance is linked with their pre–eminently agrarian character.
In the very heart of Georgia, the former capital, Tiflis, and a number of smaller cities have an eminently international character, with the Armenians, who represent the bourgeois stratum, as the preponderant element. Out of Tiflis’s population of 160,000 the Armenians constitute 55,000, the Georgians and Russians 20,000 each; the balance is composed of Tatars, Persians, Jews, Greeks, etc. The natural centers of political and administrative life as well as of education and spiritual culture are here, as in Lithuania, seats of foreign nationalities. This circumstance, which makes Georgia’s nationality autonomy an insoluble problem, impinges simultaneously on another Caucasian problem: the question of the autonomy of the Armenians.
The exclusion of Tiflis and other cities from the autonomous Georgian territory is as impossible from the standpoint of Georgia’s socio–economic conditions as is their inclusion into that territory from the standpoint of the Armenian nationality. If we took as a basis the numerical preponderance of Armenians in the population, we would obtain a territory artificially patched together from a few fragments: two southern counties of Tiflis gubernia, the northern part of Erivan gubernia, and the north–eastern part of Kars gubernia, i.e., a territory cut off from the main cities inhabited by the Armenians, which is senseless both from the historical standpoint and from the standpoint of the present economic conditions, while the size of the putative autonomous area would be limited to some 800,000. If we went beyond the counties having a numerical preponderance of Armenians we would find the Armenians inextricably mixed in the north with the Georgians; in the south – in the Baku and Elizabetpol gubernias – with the Tatars; and in the west, in the Kars gubernia, with the Turks. The Armenians play, in relation to the mostly agrarian Tatar population which lives in rather backward conditions, partly the role of a bourgeois element.
Thus, the drawing of a boundary between the main nationalities of the Caucasus is an insoluble task. But even more difficult is the problem of autonomy in relation to the remaining multiple nationalities of the Caucasian mountaineers. Both their territorial intermingling and the small numerical size of the respective nationalities, and finally the socio–economic conditions which remain mostly on the level of largely nomadic pastoralism, or primitive farming, without an urban life of their own and with no intellectual creativity in their native language, make the functioning of modern autonomy entirely inapplicable.
Just as in Lithuania, the only method of settling the nationality question in the Caucasus, in the democratic spirit, securing to all nationalities freedom of cultural existence without any among them dominating the remaining ones, and at the same time meeting the recognized need for modern development, is to disregard ethnographic boundaries, and to introduce broad local self–government – communal, urban, district, and provincial – without a definite nationality character, that is, giving no privileges to any nationality. Only such a self–government will make it possible to unite various nationalities to jointly take care of the local economic and social interests, and on the other hand, to take into consideration in a natural way the different proportions of the nationalities in each county and each commune.
Communal, district, provincial self–government will make it possible
for each nationality, by means of a majority decision in the organs of
local administration, to establish its schools and cultural institutions
in those districts or communes where it possesses numerical
preponderance. At the same time a separate, empire–wide, linguistic law
guarding the interests of the minority can establish a norm in virtue of
which national minorities, beginning with a certain numerical minimum,
can constitute a basis for the compulsory founding of schools in their
national languages in the commune, district, or province; and their
language can be established in local public and administrative
institutions, courts, etc., at the side of the language of the
preponderant nationality (the official language). Such a solution would
be workable, if indeed any solution is possible within the framework of
capitalism, and given the historical conditions. This solution would
combine the general principle of local self–government with special
legislative measures to guarantee cultural development and equality of
rights of the nationalities through their close co–operation, and not
their mutual separation by barriers of national autonomy.
An interesting example of a purely formalistic settlement of the nationality question for the entire Russian empire is provided by the project of a certain K. Fortunatov published by the group “Trud i Borba” [Work and Struggle], an attempt at a practical solution of the problem in accordance with the principles of the Russian revolutionary socialists.[6] On the basis of the census, the author first arranges a map of the empire according to nationalities, taking as a basis the numerical preponderance of each nationality in the respective gubernias and counties. The numerically strongest nationality is the Great Russians who are preponderant in thirty gubernias of European Russia. They are followed by the Little Russians who have a majority in the Ukraine in the gubernias of Poltawa, Podolia, Kharkov, Kiev, and Volhynia, and are represented also in the gubernias of Ekaterinoslav, Chernigov, Kherson, Kuban, and Taurida, while in Bessarabia the Moldavians and in the Crimea the Tatars are preponderant. Apart from the Poles, the third nationality is the Byelorussians, who have a majority in five gubernias: Mogilev, Minsk, Vilna, Witebsk, and Grodno, with the exception of eight counties (Bialystok, inhabited mainly by Poles; Bielsk, Brzesc, and Kobryn, in which the Little Russians are preponderant; the Dzwinsk, Rezyca, and Lucin counties, where the Latvians are in the majority; and finally Troki, in which the Lithuanians prevail). On the other hand, the Krasne county of Smolensk gubernia has to be included in Byelorussia because of the preponderance of that nationality. The Lithuanians and Samogitians prevail in the Kovno and Suwalki gubernias, with the exception of the Suwalki and Augustow counties in which the Poles are in the majority. The Latvians in Courland and the Estonians in Estonia have a decisive majority, and between them they divide Livonia into practically two equal parts, southern and northern. Including the Congress Kingdom, with the exception of the Suwalki gubernia, we obtain, in sixty–two gubernias of European Russia, the following picture of nationality relations:
Great Russians preponderant in | 30 gubernias |
Little Russians | 10 gubernias |
Byelorussians | 5 gubernias |
Poles | 9 gubernias |
Lithuanians | 2 gubernias |
Latvians | 2 gubernias |
Estonians | 1 gubernia |
Moldavians | 1 gubernia |
Tatars | 2 gubernias |
Having examined the territorial distribution of nationalities in the Caucasus according to gubernias and counties, the author in turn moves to Asiatic Russia. In Siberia, the Russian element is in a decisive majority, forming 80.9 percent of the population besides the Buriats, 5 percent; Yakuts, 4 per–cent; Tatars, 3.6 percent; other nationalities, 6.5 percent. Only in the Yakut gubernia do the Russians constitute a minority of 11.5 percent while the Yakuts form 82.2 percent of the whole. In Central Asia, the most numerous nationalities are the Kirgis, who are in a majority in all gubernias with the exception of the three southern ones: Trans–Caspia, in which the Turkomans number 65 percent, Samarkana, inhabited by the Uzbekhs (58.8 percent) and Tadzikhs (26.9 percent), and the Fergan Valley, in which the Sarts form half, the Uzbekhs 9.7 percent, the Kirgis 12.8 percent of the population.
Thus, taking as a basis the gubernias and counties with a preponderance of one nationality or another, Mr. Fortunatov ranges the following scheme of nationality districts in the whole empire, as shown in the appendix below.
In this scheme we are struck by great numerical differences, e.g., between the tremendous Great Russian and Little Russian districts and such tiny ones as the Lithuanian, Estonian, or individual Caucasian, let alone the Yakut. This circumstance apparently offends the sense of symmetry of the admirers of the principle of “Federation.” It also evokes in them some doubts as to whether nationalities so unequal in strength and size could enter into idyllic coexistence as autonomous districts possessing equal rights. Therefore, our statistician, without much thought, obviates the evil with scissors and glue by combining several small districts into one and simultaneously dismembering two big ones into smaller ones. Apparently taking a population of six to nine million as a normal measure of a nationality district – although it is unknown on what basis – he considers that it is “easy” to split the Little Russian district into three and the Great Russian into seven, separating for instance the Don, Astrakhazan, Kuban, Stavropol, and Black Sea gubernias and two counties of Tersk with a population of 6.7 million as a “Cossack” district, and the Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, Samar gubernias and two counties of Symbir gubernia with nine million population as a Tatar Bashkir district, finally simply dividing the remaining territory of twenty–five gubernias with forty–two million people into five more or less symmetrical parts with eight million people, with no regard to the nationality principle.
In this way we obtain the plan of the division of the whole of Russia into the following sixteen “states” or autonomous districts on the basis of nationalities:
1 Poland with a population of | 8,696,000 |
1 Byelorussia with a population of | 7,328,000 |
1 Baltic with a population of | 5,046,000 |
3 Little Russia with a population of | 27,228,000 |
a. South–western (Podolia, Volhynia and Kiev, and 3 counties of Grodno) with a population of | 10,133,000 |
b. Little Russia Proper (Poltawa, Kharkov, Chernigov without the northern counties as well as the Little Russian counties of Kursk and Voronezh gubernia) with a population of | 8,451,000 |
c. New Russia (Bessarabia, Kherson, Taurida, Ekaternoslav and Taganrog county) with a population of | 8,644,000 |
l Caucasus (without the Russian counties) | 6,157,000 |
1 Kirgis in Central Asia (without 2 counties of Akmolin province) with a population of | 7,490,000 |
1 Siberia (with 2 counties of Akmolin province) with a population of | 6,015,000 |
7 Great Russia with a population of | 57,680,000 |
In setting up the above scheme the author was obviously not restrained by any historical or economic considerations, or by the divisions of production or commercial communication created by modern development and natural conditions. It is well known that such pedestrian considerations can only hamper the political concoctions of people professing the “Marxist” doctrine and a materialistic world view. They do not exist for the theorists and politicians of “truly revolutionary socialism,” who have in mind only the “rights” of nations, freedom, equality, and other such lofty matters. The separation of two Lithuanian gubernias – Kovno and Suwalki – with the exclusion of the Polish counties – from the historico–cultural heart of Lithuania, the Vilna gubernia and other neighboring regions with which economic relations were of long standing, and on the other hand the joining of these two curtailed gubernias with Livonia, Courland, and Estonia, with which the historical links, as well as present–day economic ones, are quite loose, clearly demonstrates this point. Although the cutting up of the Ukraine for the sake of symmetry into various divisions, despite the continuity of its natural and economic character, and on the other hand, combining into one autonomous region of Siberia a country comprising 12.5 million square kilometers, i.e., by one–third bigger than the whole of Europe, a country representing the greatest natural economic and cultural contrasts, is a demonstration that that method is free of any “dogmas.” At the same time, the nationality autonomy in this scheme is treated free of any connection with the economic and social structure of the given nationality. From this standpoint other peoples are equally prepared for regional autonomy – that is, they evince a certain permanent territory and administration, legislation, and cultural life centralized in that territory. There are, on the one hand, the Poles, and on the other the Kirgis, the Yakuts, and the Buriats, who are still partly nomadic and are still living according to the traditions of tribal organization, thwarting to this very day the efforts of the territorial administration of Russian absolutism. The autonomous regional construction, in accordance with the “socialist–revolutionary” views, is thus entirely “free,” unconnected with any real bases in time and space, and all the existing historical, economic, and cultural conditions play only the role of material out of which, by means of “revolutionary” scissors, artful nationality plots are to be cut out.
What is the result of this solely and exclusively ethnographic method of the political dismemberment of Russia? Mr. Fortunatov’s scheme reduces the principle of nationality to an absurdity. Although the Lithuanians are cut off from the Polish nationality with which they coalesce culturally, still they are linked on the basis of ethnographic affinity into one “Baltic” nationality with the Latvians and the Estonians with whom they identify as little as with the Poles: thus they gravitate toward the completely Germanized cultural centers of Livonia and Estonia. Combining the Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, and a few dozen other tribes of the Caucasus into one “Caucasian” nationality smacks of a malicious satire against national autonomous aspirations. No greater regard for these aspirations is evidenced by the inclusion of the Moldavians, situated in Bessarabia, in the Little Russian nationality, of the Crimean Tatars in the very same nationality, and finally by the combining of Samoyeds, Ostiaks, Tunguz, Buriats, Yakuts, Chuckchees, Kamchadals, and many other tribes, each living an entirely separate life, differing among themselves in the level of cultural development, language, religion, even partly race, with the Russian population of Siberia into one mysterious “Siberian” nationality with common legislative, administrative, and cultural institutions. Fortunatov’s scheme is basically a simple negation of the nationality principle. It is also interesting as an example of the anarchistic approach to nationalism, unrestricted as it is by any considerations of objective social development. Having thrown its weight around in that valley of tears, it eventually returns to the results, very much resembling the same ugly history of reality which it had undertaken “to correct,” i.e., the systematic violations of the “nationality rights” and their equality. The whole difference consists in the fact that the trampling of the “rights” of nationalities imagined by the ideology of liberalism and anarchism is, in reality, the result of the process of historical development which has its inner sense and what is more important – its revolutionary dialectic, while revolutionary–nationalistic bungling tends, in its zealous cutting up of what had grown together socially, and in its gluing of what socially cannot be glued together, to trample eventually the nationality “rights” celebrated by it, merely for the sake of schematic pedantry deprived of any sense and blown up with political buffoonery.
[1] Incidentally, this is the only reason why histories of philosophy such as those of Zeller or Kuno Fischer are possible, in which the development of “ideas” takes place in a void, with no relation to the prosaic history of society. Original note by R.L.
[2] Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna 1907), pp.49–50, 136. Original note by R.L.
[3] Another Austrian Social Democratic publicist who, under the pseudonym Springer, wrote a number of works on the nationality question in Austria: Der Kampf der österreichischen Nationen um den Staat (1902); Grundlagen und Entwicklungsziele der österreichisch–ungarischen Monarchie (1906). Original note by R.L.
[4] Kautsky, Nationalität and Internationalität, pp.3, 4. Original note by R.L.
[5] Proceedings of the Russian National Socialist Parties (St. Petersburg: 1908), p.92. Original note by R.L.
[6] K. Fortunatov, Natsonalniia Oblasti Rossii (St. Petersburg: Knigoizdatelstvo Trud i Borba, 1906). The author is not the well–known statistician, Professor A. Fortunatov, as was erroneously surmised by the reviewer in Humanity, nos.76 and 77, 1907. Original note by R.L.
Districts | Population of gubernia forming part of district with preponderance of given nationality |
Population of all counties with a majority of a given nationality |
Overall figure of persons in a given nationality in the empire |
|||
In Thousands | ||||||
1. | Great Russian | 57,617 | 57,250 | 55,673 | ||
2. | Little Russian | 25,347 | 26,587 | 22,415 | ||
3. | Byelorussian | 8,517 | 7,328 | 5,886 | ||
4. | Polish | 8,819 | 8,696 | 7,931 | ||
5. | Lithuanian–Latvian | 4,101 | 4,088 | 3,094 | ||
6. | Estonian | 413 | 958 | 1,003 | ||
7. | Moldavian | 1,935 | 1,352 | 1,122 | ||
8. | Kartvelian | 1,503 | 1,352 | |||
9. | Armenian | 946 | 1,173 | |||
10. | Caucasian Mountaineers | 6,497 | 1,109 | 1,092 | ||
11. | Caucasian Tatars | 1,982 | 1,533 | |||
12. | Other Caucasians | 527 | ||||
13. | Chuvashes, Bashkirs, Tatars, Mordvinians |
4,367 | 3,673 | |||
14. | Kiris–Turkoman | 5,515 | 5,642 | 4,365 | ||
15. | Sarts, Uzbekhs, and Tatchiks (Tadzikhs) |
2,232 | 2,232 | 2,046 | ||
16. | Yakuts | 270 | 234 | 227 | ||
17. | Others | 1,173 | ||||
Total: | 125,640 | 125,640 |
Last updated on: 11.12.2008