A people's tragedy

Only the socialist parties in Russia embraced the ideas of national autonomy and independence, although even they tended to subordinate the national question to the broader democratic struggle within Russia. It is hardly surprising, then, that the national movements for liberation should have formed such a central part of the revolutionary movement as a whole. Indeed this was the pretext for their persecution by the Right: simply to be a Pole or, even worse, a Jew was to be a revolutionary in their eyes. This socialistic aspect of the nationalist movements is worth underlining. For the late twentieth-century reader might be tempted to assume, on the basis of the collapse of Communism and the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe, that they must have been opposed to socialist goals. What is striking about the nationalist movements within the Russian Empire is that their most successful political variants were nearly always socialist in form: Joseph Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Party led the national movement in Poland; the Socialist Party became the national party of the Finns; the Baltic movements were led by socialists; the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries were the leading Ukrainian national party; the Mensheviks led the Georgian national movement; and the Dashnak socialists the Armenian one. This was in part because the main ethnic conflict also tended to run along social lines: Estonian and Latvian peasants against German landlords and merchants; Ukrainian peasants against Polish or Russian landlords and officials; Azeri workers, or Georgian peasants, against the Armenian bourgeoisie; Kazakh and Kirghiz pastoralists against Russian farmers; and so on. Parties which appealed exclusively to nationalism effectively deprived themselves of mass support; whereas those which successfully combined the national with the social struggle had an almost unstoppable democratic force. In this sense it is worth repeating, given the understandably bad press which nationalism has received in the twentieth century, that for the subject peoples of the Tsarist Empire, as indeed of the Soviet Empire, nationalism was a means of human liberation from oppression and foreign domination. Lenin himself acknowledged this when, paraphrasing the Marquis de Custine, he called Imperial Russia a ‘prison of peoples’.46

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Most of the national movements in the Tsarist Empire began with the growth of a literary cultural nationalism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Romantic writers, students and artists, alienated by the life of the cities, travelled to the countryside for refreshment and inspiration. They idealized the simple rustic lifestyle of their peasant countrymen and added folk themes to their works in an effort to create a ‘national style’. This appropriation of the native culture — of folksongs and folklore, local customs and dialects, peasant crafts and costumes — was more than a passing fashion for the pastoral. It was part of a broader project by a newly conscious urban middle class: the creation of a set of ethnic symbols as the basis of their own national ethos and identity. This was their ‘imagined community’. The urban intelligentsia did not so much observe peasant life as reinvent and mythologize it in their own image. The folk culture of the countryside, which they believed was the ancient origin of their nation, was in fact often little more than the product of their own fertile imagination. It was increasingly the urban middle classes, rather than the peasants, who dressed up in folk costumes when they went to church, and who filled their homes with furniture and tableware in the ‘peasant style’. It was they who flocked to the ethnographic and folk museums which were opened in cities throughout Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.fn7 But if instead of these museums they had gone into the villages themselves, to observe this folk culture, so to speak, in its native habitat, they would have found it was disappearing fast. The old handicrafts were dying out under competition from cheaper industry. The peasants were increasingly wearing the same manufactured clothes as the urban workers, buying the same food in tins and jars, the same factory furniture, household utensils and linen. It was only the urban middle classes who could afford to buy the old handicrafts.47