V. I.

Lenin

Critical Remarks on the National Question

3. THE NATIONALIST BOGEY OF “ASSIMILATION”

The question of assimilation, i. e., of the shedding of national
features, and absorption by another nation, strikingly illustrates the
consequences of the nationalist vacillations of the Bundists and their
fellow-thinkers.

Mr. Liebman, who faithfully conveys and repeats the stock arguments, or
rather, tricks, of the Bundists, has qualified as “the old assimilation story ” the demand for the unity and amalgamation of the
workers of all nationalities in a given country in united workers’
organisations (see the concluding part of the article in Severnaya Pravda ).

“ Consequently,” says Mr. F. Liebman, commenting on the concluding
part of the article in Severnaya Pravda , “if asked what
nationality he belongs to, the worker must answer: I am a
Social-Democrat.”

Our Bundist considers this the acme of wit. As a matter of fact, lie
gives himself away completely by such witticisms and outcries
about “assimilation”, levelled against a consistently democratic
and Marxist slogan.

Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the national
question. The first is the awakening of national life and national
movements, the struggle against all national oppression, and the creation
of national states. The second is the development and growing frequency of
international intercourse in every form, the break-down of national
barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, of economic
life in general, of politics, science, etc.

Both tendencies are a universal law of capitalism. The former
predominates in the beginning of its development, the latter characterises
a mature capitalism that is moving towards its transformation into
socialist society. The Marxists’ national programme takes both tendencies
into account, and advocates, firstly, the equality of nations and languages
and the impermissibility of all privileges in this respect (and
also the right of nations to self-determination with which we shall deal
separately later); secondly, the principle of internationalism and
uncompromising struggle against contamination of the proletariat with
bourgeois nationalism, even of the most refined kind.

The question arises: what does our Bundist mean when he cries out to
heaven against “assimilation”? He could not have meant the
oppression of nations, or the privileges enjoyed by a particular
nation, because the word “assimilation” here does not fit at all, because
all Marxists, individually, and as an official, united whole, have quite
definitely and unambiguously condemned the slightest violence against and
oppression and inequality of nations, and finally because this general
Marxist idea, which the Bundist has attacked, is expressed in the
Severnaya Pravda article in the most emphatic manner.

No, evasion is impossible here. In condemning “assimilation”
Mr. Liebman had in mind, not violence, not inequality, and not privileges. Is there anything real left in the concept of
assimilation, after all violence and all inequality have been eliminated?

Yes, there undoubtedly is. What is left is capitalism’s
world-historical tendency, to break down national barriers, obliterate
national distinctions, and to assimilate nations—a tendency
which manifests itself more and more powerfully with every passing decade,
and is one of the greatest driving forces transforming capitalism into
socialism.

Whoever does not recognise and champion the equality of nations and
languages, and does not fight against all national oppression or
inequality, is not a Marxist; he is not even a democrat. That is beyond
doubt. But it is also beyond doubt that the pseudo-Marxist who heaps abuse
upon a Marxist of another nation for being an “assimilator” is simply a
nationalist philistine . In this unhandsome category of people are
all the Bundists and (as we shall shortly see) Ukrainian
nationalist-socialists such as L. Yurkevich, Dontsov and Co.

To show concretely how reactionary the views held by these nationalist
philistines are, we shall cite facts of three kinds.

It is the Jewish nationalists in Russia in general, and the Bundists
in particular, who vociferate most about Russian orthodox Marxists being
“assimilators”. And yet, as the afore-mentioned figures show, out of the
ten and a half million Jews all over the world, about half that
number live in the civilised world, where conditions favouring “assimilation” are strongest , whereas the unhappy, down trodden,
disfranchised Jews in Russia and Galicia, who are crushed under the heel of
the Purishkeviches (Russian and Polish), live where conditions for
“assimilation” least prevail, where there is most segregation,
and even a “Pale of Settlement”, [1] a numerus clausus [2] and other charming features of the Purishkevich regime.

The Jews in the civilised world are not a nation, they have in the main
become assimilated, say Karl Kautsky and Otto Bauer. The Jews in Galicia
and in Russia are not a nation; unfortunately (through no fault of
their own but through that of the Purishkeviches), they are still a
caste here. Such is the incontrovertible judgement of people who
are undoubtedly familiar with the history of Jewry and take the above-cited
facts into consideration.

What do these facts prove? It is that only Jewish reactionary
philistines, who want to turn hack the wheel of history, and make it
proceed, not from the conditions prevailing in Russia and Galicia to those
prevailing in Paris and New York, but in the reverse direction—only they
can clamour against “assimilation”.

The best Jews, those who are celebrated in world history, and have
given the world foremost leaders of democracy and socialism, have never
clamoured against assimilation. It is only those who contemplate the “rear
aspect” of Jewry with reverential awe that clamour against assimilation.

A rough idea of the scale which the general process of assimilation of
nations is assuming under the present conditions of advanced capitalism may
be obtained, for example, from the immigration statistics of the United
States of America. During the decade between 1891-1900, Europe sent
3,700,000 people there, and during the nine years between 1901 and 1909,
7,200,000. The 1900 census in the United States recorded over 10,000,000
foreigners. New York State, in which, according to the same census, there
were over 78,000 Austrians, 136,000 Englishmen, 20,000 Frenchmen, 480,000
Germans, 37,000 Hungarians, 425,000 Irish, 182,000 Italians, 70,000 Poles,
166,000 people from Russia (mostly Jews), 43,000 Swedes, etc., grinds down
national distinctions. And what is taking place on a grand, international scale in New York is also to be seen in every big
city and industrial township.

No one unobsessed by nationalist prejudices can fail to perceive that
this process of assimilation of nations by capitalism means the greatest
historical progress, the break down of hidebound national conservatism in
the various backwoods, especially in backward countries like Russia.

Take Russia and the attitude of Great Russians towards the
Ukrainians. Naturally, every democrat, not to mention Marxists, will
strongly oppose the incredible humiliation of Ukrainians, and demand
complete equality for them. But it would be a downright betrayal of
socialism and a silly policy even from the standpoint of the
bourgeois “national aims” of the Ukrainians to weaken the ties
and the alliance between the Ukrainian and Great-Russian proletariat that
now exist within the confines of a single state.

Mr. Lev Yurkevich, who calls himself a “Marxist” (poor Marx!), is an
example of that silly policy. In 1906, Sokolovsky (Basok) and Lukashevich
(Tuchapsky) asserted, Mr. Yurkevich writes, that the Ukrainian proletariat
had be come completely Russified and needed no separate
organisation. Without quoting a single fact bearing on the direct issue , Mr. Yurkevich falls upon both for saying this and cries out
hysterically—quite in the spirit of the basest, most stupid and most
reactionary nationalism—that this is “national passivity”, “national
renunciation”, that these men have “split [!!] the Ukrainian Marxists”,
and so forth. Today, despite the “growth of Ukrainian national
consciousness among the workers”, the minority of the workers are
“nationally conscious”, while the majority, Mr. Yurkevich assures us,
“are still under the influence of Russian culture”. And it is our duty,
this nationalist philistine exclaims, “not to follow the masses, but to
lead them, to explain to them their national aims ( natsionalna sprava )” ( Dzvin , p. 89).

This argument of Mr. Yurkevich’s is wholly bourgeois-nationalistic. But
even from the point of view of the bourgeois nationalists, some of whom
stand for complete equality and autonomy for the Ukraine, while others
stand for an independent Ukrainian state, this argument will not wash. The
Ukrainians’ striving for liberation is opposed by the

Great-Russian and Polish landlord class and by the bourgeoisie of these two
nations. What social force is capable of standing up to these classes? The
first decade of the twentieth century provided an actual reply to this
question: that force is none other than the working class, which rallies
the democratic peasantry behind it. By striving to divide, and thereby
weaken, the genuinely democratic force, whose victory would make national
oppression impossible, Mr. Yurkevich is betraying, riot only the interests
of democracy in general, but also the interests of his own country, the
Ukraine. Given united action by the Great-Russian and Ukrainian
proletarians, a free Ukraine is possible ; without such unity, it
is out of the question.

But Marxists do not confine themselves to the bourgeois-national
standpoint. For several decades a well-defined process of accelerated
economic development has been going on in the South, i. e., the Ukraine,
attracting hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers from Great Russia
to the capitalist farms, mines, and cities. The “assimilation”—within
these limits—of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is an
indisputable fact. And this fact is undoubtedly progressive. Capitalism is replacing the ignorant, conservative, settled
muzhik of the Great-Russian or Ukrainian backwoods with a mobile
proletarian whose conditions of life break down specifically national
narrow-mindedness, both Great-Russian and Ukrainian. Even if we assume
that, in time, there will be a state frontier between Great Russia and the
Ukraine, the historically progressive nature of the “assimilation” of the
Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers will be as undoubted as the progressive
nature of the grinding down of nations in America. The freer the Ukraine
and Great Russia become, the more extensive and more rapid will be
the development of capitalism, which will still more powerfully attract the
workers, the working masses of all nations from all regions of the
state and from all the neighbouring states (should Russia become a
neighbouring state in relation to the Ukraine) to the cities, the mines,
and the factories.

Mr. Lev Yurkevich acts like a real bourgeois, and a short-sighted,
narrow-minded, obtuse bourgeois at that, i. e., like a philistine, when he
dismisses the benefits to be gained from the intercourse, amalgamation and assimilation of the
proletariat of the two nations, for the sake of the momentary
success of the Ukrainian national cause ( sprava ). The national
cause comes first and the proletarian cause second, the bourgeois
nationalists say, with the Yurkeviches, Dontsovs and similar would-be
Marxists repeating it after them. The proletarian cause must come first, we
say, because it not only protects the lasting and fundamental interests of
labour and of humanity, but also those of democracy; and without democracy
neither an autonomous nor an independent Ukraine is conceivable.

Another point to be noted in Mr. Yurkevich’s argument, which is so
extraordinarily rich in nationalist gems, is this: the minority of
Ukrainian workers are nationally conscious, he says; “the majority are
still under the influence of Russian culture” ( bilshist perebuvaye shche pid vplyvom rosiiskoi kultury ).

Contraposing Ukrainian culture as a whole to Great-Russian culture as a
whole, when speaking of the proletariat, is a gross betrayal of the
proletariat’s interests for the benefit of bourgeois nationalism.

There are two nations in every modern nation—we say to all
nationalist-socialists. There are two national cultures in every national
culture. There is the Great-Russian culture of the Purishkeviches, Guchkovs
and Struves—but there is also the Great-Russian culture typified in the
names of Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov. There are the same two
cultures in the Ukraine as there are in Germany, in France, in England,
among the Jews, and so forth. If the majority of the Ukrainian workers are
under the influence of Great-Russian culture, we also know definitely that
the ideas of Great-Russian democracy and Social-Democracy operate parallel
with the Great-Russian clerical and bourgeois culture. In fighting the
latter kind of “culture”, the Ukrainian Marxist will always
bring the former into focus, and say to his workers: “We must snatch at,
make use of, and develop to the utmost every opportunity for intercourse
with the Great-Russian class-conscious workers, with their literature and
with their range of ideas; the fundamental interests of both the
Ukrainian and the Great-Russian working-class movements demand it.”

If a Ukrainian Marxist allows himself to he swayed by his quite legitimate and natural hatred of the Great-Russian oppressors to
such a degree that he transfers even a particle of this hatred,
even if it be only estrangement, to the proletarian culture and proletarian cause of the Great-Russian workers, then such a
Marxist will get bogged down in bourgeois nationalism. Similarly, the
Great-Russian Marxist will be bogged down, not only in bourgeois, but also
in Black-Hundred nationalism, if he loses sight, even for a moment, of the
demand for complete equality for the Ukrainians, or of their right
to form an independent state.

The Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers must work together, and, as
long as they live in a single state, act in the closest organisational
unity and concert, towards a common or international culture of the
proletarian movement, displaying absolute tolerance in the question of the
language in which propaganda is conducted, and in the purely local or
purely national details of that propaganda. This is the imperative
demand of Marxism. All advocacy of the segregation of the workers of one
nation from those of another, all attacks upon Marxist “assimilation”, or
attempts, where the proletariat is concerned, to contrapose one national
culture as a whole to another allegedly integral national culture, and so
forth, is bourgeois nationalism, against which it is essential to
wage a ruthless struggle.

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Notes:
[1]
Pale of Settlement —districts in tsarist Russia where Jews
were permitted permanent residence.

[2]
Numerus clausus —the numerical restriction imposed in tsarist
Russia on admission of Jews to the state secondary and higher educational
establishments, to employment at factories and offices, and the
professions.