I. Panslavism and the Crimean War

Originally published in Neue Oder-Zeitung, 21 April 1855. From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp 84-86. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

We have been assured by the best sources that the present Russian Tsar has sent a telegram to certain Courts wherein, among other things, it is stated that:

The moment Austria shall irrevocably ally herself to the West, or commit any overt act of hostility against Russia, Alexander II will place himself at the head of the Panslavist movement, and change his title of Emperor of all the Russians into that of Emperor of all the Slavs.

This declaration of Alexander’s if authentic is the first plain-spoken word since the war began; it is the first step towards giving the war, frankly and openly, that European character which has hitherto been lurking behind all sorts of pretexts and pretences, protocols and treaties, Vatel phrases and Puffendorf quotations. Turkey’s independence and existence is thrown into the background. Who is to rule in Constantinople is no longer the question, but who is to command all Europe. The Slavic race long divided by internal contests, repelled towards the East by Germans, subjugated, in part, by Turks, Germans, Hungarians, quietly reuniting its branches, after 1815, by the gradual rise of Panslavism, for the first time asserts its unity, and, in doing so, declares war to the knife against the Romano-Celtic and Germanic races which have hitherto ruled Europe. Panslavism is not a movement which merely strives after national independence; it is a movement which aims to undo what a thousand years of history have created; which cannot realise itself without sweeping from the map of Europe Hungary, Turkey and a large part of Germany. Moreover, it must subjugate Europe in order to secure the stability of these results, if they are ever obtained. Panslavism is now, from a creed, turned into a political programme, with 800,000 bayonets to support it.

It leaves Europe only one alternative: submission to the Slavic yoke or destruction forever of the centre of its offensive strength – Russia. The next question to be answered is: ‘How will Austria be affected by Russian-equipped Panslavism?’

Of the seventy million Slavs living east of the Bohemian forest and the Carinthian Alps, about fifteen million are subject to the Austrian Emperor, comprising representatives of almost every variety of Slavic speech. The Bohemian or Czech branch (six million) falls exclusively within the Austrian dominions; the Polish branch is represented by about three million Galicians; the Russian by three million Malo-Russians (Red Russians, Ruthenes) in Galicia and North-eastern Hungary – the only Russian tribe outside the pale of the Russian Empire; the South Slavic branch by about three million Slovenes (Carinthians and Croats) and Serbians, including some scattered Bulgarians. These Austrian Slavs are of two different kinds. One part of them consists of the remnants of tribes whose history belongs to the past, and whose present historical development is attached to that of nations of different race and speech; and to complete their unfortunate position, these hapless relics of former greatness have not even a national organisation within Austria, but, on the contrary, are divided among different provinces. Thus the Slovenes, although scarcely 1,500,000 in number, are scattered over the different provinces of Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, Croatia and South-western Hungary. The Bohemians, though the most numerous group of Austrian Slavs, are settled partly in Bohemia, partly in Moravia, and partly (the Slovak branch) in North-western Hungary. These peoples, therefore, though living exclusively on Austrian soil, are far from being recognised as constituting separate nations. They are considered as appendages, either to the German or the Hungarian nations, and in reality they are nothing else.

The second portion of Austrian Slavs is composed of fragments of different tribes, which in the course of history have become separated from the great body of their nation, and which, therefore, have their centre of gravity outside of Austria. Thus, the Austrian Poles have their natural centre of gravity in Russian Poland; the Ruthenes in the other Malo-Russian provinces united with Russia; the Serbs in the Serbian Principality under Turkish rule. That these fragments, torn from their respective nationalities, will continue to gravitate, each towards its natural centre, is a matter of course, and becomes more and more evident as civilisation, and with it the want of historical, national, activity is spread among them. In either case, the Austrian Slavs are only disjecta membra, seeking their reunion either among each other, or with the main body of their separate nationalities.

This is the reason why Panslavism is not a Russian but an Austrian discovery. In order to secure the restoration of each Slavic nationality, the different Slavic tribes in Austria are beginning to work for a union of all the Slavic tribes in Europe.

Russia was strong in itself; Poland proved itself in the sense of the indestructible toughness of its national life and at the same time in its open enmity towards Slavic Russia. Both these nations were obviously not called upon to invent Panslavism. The Serbs and Bulgarians in Turkey were, however, too barbaric to conceive such an idea. The Bulgarians quietly subordinated themselves to the Turks; the Serbs had enough to do with the fight for their own independence.

II. Panslavism and the Crimean War

Originally published in Neue Oder-Zeitung, 24 April 1855. From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp 86-90. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

The first form of Austrian Panslavism was literary. Dobrovsky, a Bohemian, the founder of the scientific philology of the Slavic dialects, and Kolar, a Slovak poet from the Hungarian Carpathians, were its originators. With Dobrovsky it was the enthusiasm of a scientific discoverer; with Kolar, political ideas soon became predominant. But, as yet, Panslavism was satisfied to wallow only in elegiac moods; the greatness of the past, the disgrace, the misfortune and foreign oppression of the present, were the themes of this poetry. ‘Is there, oh God, no man on earth, who will render the Slavs their due?’ The dream of a Panslavic empire dictating laws to Europe was at that time hardly hinted at.

But the lamenting period soon passed away, and with it the cry merely for ‘Justice for the Slavs!’. Historical research on the political, literary and linguistic development of the Slavonic race made great progress in Austria. Schafarik, Kopitar and Miklosich as linguists, Palacky as an historian, took the lead, followed by a host of men with little or no scientific talent like Hanka and Gaj and others. The glorious epochs of Bohemian and Serbian history were depicted in glowing colours in contrast to the present degraded and broken state of those nations. Just as in Germany ‘philosophy’ formed the pretext under the protection of which politics or theology were subjected to critical analysis, in Austria, and under the very nose of Metternich, philological science was used by the Panslavists as a cloak to preach the doctrine of Slavic unity, and to create a political party with the unmistakable aim of upsetting the relations of all nationalities in Austria, and instituting a vast Slavic empire in its place.

The linguistic confusion which reigns east of Bohemia and Carinthia to the Black Sea is truly astonishing. The process of denationalisation among the Slavs bordering on Germany, the slow but uninterrupted advance of the Germans, the invasion of the Magyars, which separated the North Slavs from the South Slavs by a compact mass of seven million people of Finnish race, the intermixing of Turks, Tatars, Wallachians among the Slavic tribes, produced a linguistic Babel. The language varies from village to village, almost from estate to estate. Out of five million inhabitants, Bohemia alone numbers two million Germans alongside three million Slavs, surrounded, moreover, on three sides by Germans. The same is the case with all Austrian-Slavic tribes. To restore all originally Slavic soil and territory to the Slavs, to convert Austria, with the exception of the Tirol and Lombardy, into a Slavic Empire – the goal of the Panslavists – is to declare null and void the historical development of the last thousand years, is to cut off a third of Germany and all of Hungary, and to change Vienna and Budapest into Slavic cities – a process with which the Germans and Hungarians who own these districts cannot exactly sympathise. Moreover, the difference between the Slavic dialects is so great that, with few exceptions, they are mutually unintelligible. This was demonstrated in a comical fashion at the Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848, where, after various vain attempts to find a language intelligible to all members, they were finally obliged to use the tongue most hated by all of them – the German.

Thus we see that Austrian Panslavism was lacking the most essential elements of success: mass support and unity. It wanted mass support because the Panslavic party consisted only of a portion of the educated classes, and had no hold upon the masses, and hence no strength capable of resisting both the Austrian government and the German and Hungarian nationalities against which it entered the lists. It lacked unity, because its uniting principle was a mere ideal one, which, at the very first attempt at realisation, was broken up by the fact of diversity of language.

In fact, so long as Panslavism was a movement limited to Austria it offered no great danger, but that very centre of unity and mass support which it wanted was very soon found for it. The national uprising of the Turkish Serbs, in the beginning of this century, had called the attention of the Russian government to the fact that there were some seven million Slavs in Turkey, whose speech, of all other Slavic dialects, most resembled the Russian. Their religion too, and their sacred language – old Slavonic or Church Slavonic – were exactly the same as in Russia. It was among these Serbs and Bulgarians that the Tsar for the first time began a Panslavist agitation supported by appeals to his position as the head and protector of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was, therefore, only natural that as soon as this Panslavist movement in Austria had gained consistency, Russia should extend thither on the soil of its ally the ramifications of its agencies. Where Roman Catholic Slavs were met with, the religious side of the question was dropped; Russia was merely held up as the centre of gravity of the Slavic race, as the core around which the regenerated Slavic tribes would range themselves, as the strong and united people which was to realise the great Slavic empire from the Elbe to China, and from the Adriatic to the Polar sea. Precisely here the lacking power and unity were found. Panslavism fell into the trap immediately. It thus pronounced its own judgement on itself. In order newly to restore imaginary nationalities, the Panslavists declared themselves ready to sacrifice 800 years of actual participation in civilisation to Russian-Mongolian barbarism. Was not this the natural result of a movement which began as a decided reaction against the main stream of European civilisation and continued by seeking to reverse the course of world history?

Metternich, in the years of his greatest power, very well recognised the danger and saw through the Russian intrigues. He opposed the movement with all the means in his power. But all the means known to him can be summarised in one word: suppression. But the only proper means – general freedom, of expansion of the German and Hungarian spirit, more than sufficient to scare away the Slavic spectre – did not fit in to his system of petty policy. Accordingly, on Metternich’s downfall in 1848, the Slavic movement broke out stronger than ever, and embraced a larger proportion of the population than ever before. But here its thoroughly reactionary character at once came to light. While the German and Hungarian movements in Austria were decidedly progressive, the Slavs saved the old system from destruction, enabled Radetzky to advance on the Mincio, and Windischgraetz to conquer Vienna. And to complete the drama, and the dependence of Austria on the Slavic race, the Russian army, that great Slavic reserve, had to descend into Hungary in 1849 and settle the war for Austria there by a dictated peace.

But if the adherence of the Panslavic movement to Russia was its own self-condemnation, Austria acknowledged its lack of vitality no less through the acceptance, even the provocation, of this Slavic assistance against the only three nations within its dominions which do possess and show historic vitality – the Germans, Italians and Hungarians. Since 1848 this debt to Panslavism has always held Austria down, and the awareness of it has been the mainspring of Austrian policy. Austria’s first move was to react against the Slavs in its own territory but this required the adoption of an at least partially progressive policy. The special privileges of all provinces were abolished; a centralised administration took the place of a federal one; and, instead of all the different nationalities, an artificial Austrian nationality was alone to be acknowledged. Though these changes were directed in some degree also against the German, Italian and Hungarian nationalities, they yet fell with far greater weight on the less compact Slavic tribes, and gave the German element a considerable preponderance.

The dependence on the Slavs within the realm having been removed, there remained the dependence on Russia; and with it the necessity, at least for a moment and to a certain degree, to break this direct and humiliating dependence. That was the real reason for the wavering, but at least openly professed anti-Russian policy of Austria with respect to the Eastern Question. On the other hand, Panslavism has not disappeared; it has been deeply wounded, it grumbles, pauses, and since the intervention in Hungary looks to the Russian Tsar as its predestined Messiah. It is not our province to determine whether Austria can reply with concessions in Hungary and Poland without endangering its existence if Russia should openly step forward as the head of Panslavism. This much is certain; it is no longer Russia alone, but the Panslavist conspiracy which threatens to build its realm on the ruins of Europe. Through the undeniable strength it possesses and can maintain, the union of all Slavs will soon compel the side which opposes it to appear in a totally different form than theretofore. On this occasion we have spoken neither of Poland (to her honour usually an enemy of Panslavism) nor of the so-called democratic or socialist form of Panslavism, which differs basically only in its phraseology and hypocrisy from the ordinary genuine openly Russian variety. We have said equally little of abstract German speculation, which in sublime ignorance has sunk to becoming an organ of the Russian conspiracy. We shall return in detail to these and other questions relating to Panslavism.