"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" – Democratic Pan-Slavism

Democratic Pan-Slavism

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 222, February 15, 1849]

Cologne, February 14. We have often enough pointed out how the gentle dreams that emerged after the revolutions of February and March, the raptures about the universal fraternisation of peoples, a European federal republic and eternal world peace, were in essence nothing but a covering for the boundless perplexity and inactivity of the spokesmen of that time. People did not see, or did not want to see, what had to be done to secure the revolution; they could not, or would not, carry through any really revolutionary measures; the narrow-mindedness of the one side and the counter-revolutionary intrigue of the other concurred in ensuring that the people was given only sentimental phrases in place of revolutionary deeds. The high-protesting scoundrel Lamartine was the classic hero of this epoch of the betrayal of the people, concealed beneath poetic flowers and rhetorical tinsel.

The peoples who made the revolution know how dearly they have had to pay for having, in their good-nature, believed in the big words and haughty assurances of that time. Instead of the revolution being secured—reactionary chambers everywhere, undermining the revolution; instead of the fulfilment of the promises made on the barricades—the counter-revolutions of Naples, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, the fall of Milan, the war against Hungary; instead of the fraternisation of peoples—the revival of the Holy Alliance on the broadest basis under the patronage of England and Russia. And the same men who in April and May still cheered the high-sounding phrases of the epoch now think only with blushes of how they let themselves be duped by fools and scoundrels.

Bitter experience has taught us that the “European fraternisation of peoples” does not come about through mere phrases and pious wishes, but only through thorough-going revolutions and bloody struggles; that it is not a question of the fraternisation of all European peoples under one republican flag, but of the alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which is concluded not on paper, but only on the battlefield.

Throughout Western Europe these bitter but necessary experiences have robbed Lamartine’s phrases of all credit. In the East, on the other hand, there are still factions, supposedly democratic, revolutionary factions, who never tire of echoing these phrases and sentimentalities and of preaching the gospel of the European fraternisation of peoples.

These factions—we disregard a few ignorant enthusiasts of German tongue such as Herr A. Ruge, etc.—are the democratic Pan-Slavists of the various Slav tribes.

The programme of democratic Pan-Slavism lies before us in a pamphlet: “Appeal to the Slavs. By a Russian Patriot, Michael Bakunin, Member of the Slav Congress in Prague.” Köthen, 1848.

Bakunin is our friend. That will not prevent us from subjecting his pamphlet to criticism.

Let us hear how Bakunin, right at the beginning of his Appeal, links up with the illusions of last March and April:

“The very first sign of life of the revolution was a cry of hatred against the old oppression, a cry of sympathy and love for all oppressed nationalities. The peoples … at last felt the disgrace with which the old diplomacy had burdened humanity, and recognised that the welfare of the nations is never secure as long as anywhere in Europe a single people lives under oppression. … ‘Away with the oppressors!’ it resounded as from one mouth; ‘Hail to the oppressed, the Poles, the Italians and all! No more wars of conquest, but let the one final war be fought to the very end, the good fight of the revolution for the ultimate liberation of all peoples! Down with the artificial barriers erected by force by despots’ congresses according to so-called historical, geographical, commercial and strategic necessities! There shall be no other dividing lines than those that correspond to nature, drawn by justice and in the spirit of democracy, which the sovereign will of the peoples themselves traces out on the basis of their national characteristics.’ Thus the call went out through all peoples.” (pp. 6, 7.)

Here we already find the whole rapturous enthusiasm of the first months after the revolution. Not a word is said about the actually existing obstacles to such a universal liberation, about the so thoroughly different levels of civilisation and the political needs, just as different, of the individual peoples conditioned by them. The word “freedom” replaces all this. No word at all is said about reality, or to the extent that it is at all taken into account, it is depicted as something absolutely damnable, arbitrarily fabricated by “despots’ congresses” and “diplomats”. Opposite this bad reality stands the alleged popular will with its categorical imperative, with the absolute demand for “freedom” as such.

We have seen who was the stronger. The alleged popular will was shamefully duped precisely because it indulged in such a fantastic abstraction from the actually existing conditions.

“With full power the revolution declared dissolved the despotic states, dissolved the Prussian Empire … Austria … the Turkish Empire … dissolved finally the last refuge of despotism, the Russian Empire … and as the final goal of all—the universal federation of European republics.” (p. 8.)

In fact, to us here in the West it must seem peculiar that, after all these fine plans failed at their first attempt at realisation, they can still be cited as something meritorious and great. The very trouble was that the revolution, indeed, “declared dissolved with full power”, but at the same time “with full power” did not lift a finger to execute its decree.

At that time the Slav Congress was convened. The Slav Congress adopted completely the standpoint of these illusions. Let us hear:

“Vividly feeling the common bonds of history (?) and of blood, we swore never again to let our destinies be separated from one another. Cursing the policy of which we had so long been the victims, we claimed for ourselves our right to complete independence and pledged ourselves that henceforth it should be common to all Slav peoples. We acknowledged the independence of Bohemia and Moravia … we extended our fraternal hand to the German people, to democratic Germany. In the name of those of us who live in Hungary, we offered a fraternal alliance to the Magyars, the furious enemies of our race. … Neither did we forget those of our brothers who sigh under the yoke of the Turks in our league of liberation. We solemnly condemned the criminal policy which three times tore Poland apart. … All this we proclaimed and demanded together with all democrats of all peoples (?): freedom, equality, fraternity of all nations.” (p. 10.)

These demands are still being made today by democratic Pan-Slavism:

“We felt then certain of our cause … justice and humanity were entirely on our side, and on the side of our enemies nothing but illegality and barbarism. These were no empty figments of the imagination we gave ourselves up to; they were the ideas of the only true and necessary policy, the policy of the revolution.”

“Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “independence”—so far we have found nothing in the Pan-Slavist manifesto but these more or less moral categories, which sound very fine, but prove absolutely nothing in historical and political questions. “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, etc. may demand this or that a thousand times; but if the thing is impossible, it does not take place and remains, despite everything, an “empty figment of the imagination”. The Pan-Slavists could have enlightened themselves about their illusions from the role that the mass of the Slavs has played since the Prague Congress; they could have seen that nothing can be achieved against iron reality with all pious wishes and fine dreams, that their policy was no more the “policy of the revolution” than was that of the French Republic. And yet they still come to us today, in January 1849, with the same old phrases whose content has been exposed as illusory for Western Europe through the bloodiest counter-revolution!

Just a word about the “universal fraternisation of peoples” and the drawing of “borders which the sovereign will of the peoples themselves traces out on the basis of their national characteristics”. The United States and Mexico are two republics; in both the people is sovereign.

How does it happen that war broke out between these two republics, which according to the moral theory ought to be “fraternising” and “federated”, over Texas, that the “sovereign will” of the American people, supported by the bravery of the American volunteers, shifted the borders drawn by nature a few hundred miles further south out of “geographical, commercial and strategic necessities”? And will Bakunin reproach the Americans with a “war of conquest”, which certainly gives a severe blow to his theory based on “justice and humanity”, but which was, after all, waged solely and exclusively in the interests of civilisation? Or is it perhaps a misfortune that splendid California has been wrested from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?—that the energetic Yankees, by rapidly exploiting the gold mines there, are increasing the means of circulation, are concentrating a dense population and an extensive trade on the most favourable coast of the Pacific Ocean in a few years, creating great cities, opening up steamship connections, constructing a railway from New York to San Francisco, opening up the Pacific Ocean for the first time properly to civilisation, and giving world trade a new direction for the third time in history? The “independence” of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer, “justice” and other moral principles may be violated here and there; but what does that count against such world-historical facts?

We remark, incidentally, that this theory of the universal fraternisation of peoples, which, without regard to the historical position, to the level of social development of the individual peoples, wants nothing but to fraternise into the blue, was combated by the editors of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” long before the revolution, and in fact at that time against their best friends, the English and French democrats. The English, French and Belgian democratic papers of that period contain the proof of this.

As regards Panslavism in particular, we have expounded in No. 194 of the _N.Rh.Z._ <See “Der magyarische Kampf”> how, apart from the well-meant self-deceptions of the democratic Panslavists, in reality it has no other purpose than to give the fragmented Austrian Slavs—who are historically, literarily, politically, commercially and industrially dependent on Germans and Magyars—a point of support, on the one hand in Russia, on the other in the Austrian composite monarchy, which is dominated by the Slav majority and dependent on Russia. We have expounded how such petty nations, dragged along by history for centuries against their own will, must necessarily be counter-revolutionary, and how their whole position in the revolution of 1848 was in fact counter-revolutionary. In the face of the democratic-Panslavist manifesto that demands the independence of all Slavs without distinction, we must return to this point.

Let us note first of all that the political romanticism and sentimentality among the democrats of the Slav Congress is very excusable. With the exception of the Poles—the Poles are not Panslavist, for very obvious reasons—they all belong to ethnic groups which, like the South Slavs, are necessarily counter-revolutionary by virtue of their entire historical position, or which, like the Russians, are still far removed from a revolution and therefore, for the time being at least, still counter-revolutionary. These factions, democratic by virtue of the education they acquired abroad, seek to bring their democratic convictions into harmony with their national feeling, which among the Slavs is notoriously very pronounced; and since the positive world, the real conditions of their countries, offered no—or only fictitious—points of contact for this reconciliation, nothing remains for them but the other-worldly “airy realm of dreams”, the realm of pious wishes, the politics of fantasy. How beautiful it would be if Croats, Pandours and Cossacks formed the vanguard of European democracy, if the envoy of the Republic of Siberia presented his credentials in Paris! Certainly very pleasing prospects; but even the most enthusiastic Panslavist will not demand that European democracy should wait for their realisation—and for the time being precisely those nations whose particular independence the manifesto demands are the particular enemies of democracy.

We repeat: Apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Slavs of Turkey, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions of independence and viability.

Peoples who have never had a history of their own, who from the moment they ascend the first, crudest stage of civilisation already come under foreign domination, or who are only forced into the first stage of civilisation by a foreign yoke, have no viability, and will never be able to achieve any independence.

And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. The Czechs, among whom we would include the Moravians and the Slovaks, although they are distinct linguistically and historically, have never had a history. Since Charlemagne, Bohemia has been chained to Germany. For a moment the Czech nation emancipated itself and formed the Great Moravian Empire, only to be subjugated again forthwith and tossed back and forth for five hundred years as a plaything between Germany, Hungary and Poland. Then Bohemia and Moravia came definitively to Germany, and the Slovak regions remained with Hungary. And this “nation”, which historically does not exist at all, lays claim to independence?

Likewise the so-called South Slavs proper. Where is the history of the Illyrian Slovenes, the Dalmatians, Croats and Šokci? Since the eleventh century they have lost the last semblance of political independence and have been partly under German, partly under Venetian, partly under Magyar rule. And out of this tattered rag one wants to patch together a vigorous, independent, viable nation?

What is more. If the Austrian Slavs formed a compact mass like the Poles, the Magyars, the Italians, if they were in a position to bring together a state of 12–20 million among themselves, their claims would still have a serious character. But the very opposite is the case. The Germans and Magyars have driven themselves like a broad wedge between them, to the furthest ends of the Carpathians, almost to the Black Sea, and have separated the Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks from the South Slavs by a belt 60–80 miles wide. To the north of the belt live 5 1/2 million Slavs, to the south 5 1/2 million Slavs, separated by a compact mass of 10–11 million Germans and Magyars, who are allies by history and necessity.

But why should the 5 1/2 million Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks not be able to form an empire, and the 5 1/2 million South Slavs, together with the Turkish Slavs, not be able to form an empire?

Take a look at the first available language map at the distribution of the Czechs and their linguistically related neighbours. They are thrust into Germany like a wedge, but gnawed at and pushed back on both sides by the German element. A third of Bohemia speaks German; in Bohemia, for every 24 Czechs there are 17 Germans. And it is precisely the Czechs who are supposed to form the core of the intended Slav empire; for the Moravians are likewise strongly interspersed with Germans, the Slovaks with Germans and Magyars, and moreover they are completely demoralised in national terms. And what a Slav empire that would be, in which in the end the German bourgeoisie of the towns would rule!

Likewise the South Slavs. The Slovenes and Croats cut off Germany and Hungary from the Adriatic Sea; and Germany and Hungary cannot allow themselves to be cut off from the Adriatic Sea, for “geographical and commercial necessities” which, though no obstacle to Bakunin’s fantasy, nevertheless exist and are just as much vital questions for Germany and Hungary as, for example, the Baltic coast from Danzig to Riga is for Poland. And where it is a question of the existence, of the free development of all the resources of great nations, such sentimentality as consideration for a few scattered Germans or Slavs will certainly not decide anything! Quite apart from the fact that these South Slavs are likewise everywhere interspersed with German, Magyar and Italian elements, that here too a single glance at the language map shatters the projected South Slav empire into disconnected shreds, and that at best the entire empire would be delivered into the hands of the Italian bourgeois of Trieste, Fiume and Zara, and the German bourgeois of Agram, Laibach, Karlstadt, Semlin, Pancsova and Weißkirchen!

But could the Austrian South Slavs not join the Serbs, Bosniaks, Morlachs and Bulgarians? Certainly, if, in addition to the difficulties mentioned, the age-old hatred of the Austrian frontiersman for the Turkish Slavs beyond the Sava and Una did not exist; but these people, who have known each other for centuries as rogues and bandits, hate each other, despite all tribal kinship, infinitely more than Slavs and Magyars.

In fact, the position of the Germans and Magyars would be exceedingly agreeable if the Austrian Slavs were helped to their so-called “rights”! An independent Bohemian-Moravian state wedged in between Silesia and Austria, Austria and Styria cut off by the “South Slav republic” from their natural débouché <trade route>, the Adriatic and Mediterranean, the east of Germany torn to shreds like a loaf gnawed by rats! And all this in gratitude for the fact that the Germans took the trouble to civilise the obstinate Czechs and Slovenes, to introduce trade, industry, tolerable agriculture and education among them!

But precisely this yoke, imposed on the Slavs under the pretext of civilisation, constitutes one of the greatest crimes of the Germans as well as of the Magyars! Just listen:

“With justice you rage, with justice you pant for revenge against that accursed German policy, which thought of nothing but your ruin, which enslaved you for centuries…” p. 5.

The Magyars, the furious enemies of our race, who, barely four million strong, presumed to impose their yoke upon eight million Slavs…” p. 9.

“What the Magyars have done against our Slav brothers, what they have committed against our nationality, how they have trampled our language and independence underfoot—all this I know.” p. 30.

Now what are the great, terrible crimes of the Germans and Magyars against the Slav nationality? We are not speaking here of the partition of Poland, which does not belong here; we are speaking of the “centuries-long injustice” that is supposed to have been perpetrated against the Slavs.

In the north, the Germans reconquered from the Slavs the formerly German, later Slav territory from the Elbe to the Warthe; a conquest that was conditioned by “geographical and strategic necessities” which arose from the partition of the Carolingian Empire. These Slav tracts of land have been completely Germanised; the matter is settled and cannot be redressed, unless the Panslavists rediscover the lost Sorbian, Wendish and Obotrite languages and impose them on the people of Leipzig, Berlin and Stettin. But that this conquest lay in the interest of civilisation has never yet been contested.

In the south they found the Slav tribes already dispersed. This was the work of the non-Slav Avars, who occupied the territory later taken by the Magyars. The Germans made these Slavs tributary and fought many a struggle with them. The same struggles they fought with the Avars and Magyars, from whom they took the whole land from the Ems to the Leitha. While they Germanised here by force, the Germanisation of the Slav lands proceeded far more on a peaceful footing, through immigration, through the influence of the more developed nation on the undeveloped one. German industry, German trade, German education brought the German language into the country of their own accord. As for “oppression”, the Slavs were no more oppressed by the Germans than the mass of the Germans themselves.

As regards the Magyars, there are also plenty of Germans in Hungary, and the Magyars have never had occasion to complain of “accursed German policy”, although they were “barely four million”! And if the “eight million Slavs” had to endure for eight centuries the fact that the four million Magyars imposed their yoke on them, that alone proves sufficiently who was more viable and more energetic—the numerous Slavs or the few Magyars!

But the greatest “crime” of the Germans and Magyars is certainly that they prevented these 12 million Slavs from becoming Turkish! What would have become of these fragmented petty little nations, which have played such a pitiful role in history, what would have become of them if they had not been held together by Magyars and Germans and led against the armies of Mohammed and Suleiman, if their so-called “oppressors” had not decided the battles that were fought to defend these weak little peoples! The fate of the “twelve million Slavs, Wallachians and Greeks” who are “trampled underfoot by seven hundred thousand Ottomans” (p. 8) down to the present day—does not that speak loudly enough?

And finally, what a “crime”, what an “accursed policy”, that the Germans and Magyars, at a time when in Europe as a whole the great monarchies became a “historical necessity”, welded together all these little, crippled, impotent nationlets into a great empire, thereby making them capable of taking part in a historical development which, left to themselves, they would for the most part have remained completely alien to! Of course, such a thing cannot be accomplished without forcibly crushing many a tender nationlet-flower.

But without force and without iron ruthlessness nothing is achieved in history; and if Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon had possessed the same capacity for emotion to which Panslavism now appeals on behalf of its decayed clients, what then would have become of history! And are the Persians, Celts and Christian Germans worth the Czechs, Oguliners and Seressaners?

Now, however, political centralisation has become a far more pressing need than it was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, owing to the tremendous progress of industry, trade and communications. What still has to be centralised, is being centralised. And now the Panslavists come forward and demand that we should “set free” these semi-Germanised Slavs, that we should abolish a centralisation which is forced upon these Slavs by all their material interests!

In short, it turns out that these “crimes” of the Germans and Magyars against the Slavs in question belong to the best and most meritorious deeds of which our people and the Magyar people can boast in history.

As regards the Magyars in particular, it must be specially noted here that, since the revolution especially, they have acted far too yielding and weakly towards the inflated Croats. It is notorious that Kossuth conceded everything possible to them, except that their deputies were not to be allowed to speak Croatian in the Diet. And this indulgence towards a nation by nature counter-revolutionary is the only thing that can be held against the Magyars.

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung” No. 223, February 16, 1849]

*
Cologne, February 15. We closed yesterday by demonstrating that the Austrian Slavs have never had a history of their own, that historically, in literature, politics, commerce and industry they depend on Germans and Magyars, that they have already been partly Germanised, Magyarised, Italianised, that if they were to constitute independent states, it would be not they but the German and Italian bourgeoisie of their towns who would rule these states, and that finally neither Hungary nor Germany can tolerate the secession and independent constitution of such unviable little buffer states.

All this, however, would still settle nothing. Had the Slavs within any period of their oppression begun a new revolutionary history, they would thereby already have proved their viability. From that moment on, the revolution would have had an interest in their liberation, and the particular interest of the Germans and Magyars would have faded before the greater interest of the European revolution.

But that was precisely never the case. The Slavs — we recall once more that we always exclude the Poles here — were always precisely the chief instruments of the counter-revolutionaries. Oppressed at home, they were abroad the oppressors of all revolutionary nations, as far as the Slavic influence extended.

Let nobody retort that we are here speaking in the interests of German national prejudices. The proof is available in German, French, Belgian and English periodicals that it was precisely the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung who, long before the revolution, had come out most decisively against all German national narrow-mindednesses. They did not, of course, like many others, abuse the Germans at random and from mere hearsay; instead, they set out the historical proof, and relentlessly exposed, the shabby role which Germany, thanks to its nobility and its bourgeoisie, thanks to its stunted industrial development, has admittedly played in history; at all times they recognised the justification, as against the backward Germans, of the great historical nations of the West, the English and the French. But just for that reason we should be permitted not to share the ecstatic illusions of the Slavs and to judge other nations just as severely as we have judged our own.

So far it has always been said that the Germans were the lansquenets of despotism throughout Europe. We are far from denying the disgraceful part the Germans took in the disgraceful wars against the French Revolution from 1792 to 1815, in the oppression of Italy since 1815 and of Poland since 1772; but who stood behind the Germans, who used them as their mercenaries or their vanguard? England and Russia. To this very day the Russians boast that they decided the overthrow of Napoleon with their innumerable armies, which is largely correct, to be sure. At least it is certain that of the armies which drove Napoleon back from the Oder to Paris by their superior strength, three-quarters consisted of Slavs, Russians or Austrian Slavs.

And then the oppression of the Italians and the Poles by the Germans! In the partition of Poland, a wholly and a half Slavic power competed; the armies which crushed Kosciuszko consisted mainly of Slavs; the armies of Diebitsch and Paskevich were exclusively Slavic armies. And in Italy, for long years the Tedeschi [Germans] alone bore the disgrace of being regarded as oppressors; but again, what were the armies composed of that were best used for oppression and whose brutalities were laid to the charge of the Germans? Again, of Slavs. Go to Italy and ask who put down the Milan revolution; they will no longer tell you: the Tedeschi — since the Tedeschi made a revolution in Vienna, they are no longer hated — but: the Croati. That is the word in which the Italians now sum up the whole Austrian army, i.e., everything they hate most deeply: i Croati!

And yet these reproaches would be superfluous and unwarranted if the Slavs had seriously taken part anywhere in the movement of 1848, if they had hastened to enter the ranks of the revolutionary peoples. A single bold, democratic revolutionary attempt, even if it is stifled, wipes out in the memory of whole nations whole centuries of infamy and cowardice, rehabilitates at once even a nation deeply despised until then. The Germans experienced that last year. But while the French, Germans, Italians, Poles and Magyars raised the banner of revolution, the Slavs to a man went under the banner of counter-revolution. In the van, the South Slavs, who had already for many years defended their counter-revolutionary separatist aspirations against the Magyars; then the Czechs, and behind them, armed for battle and ready to appear on the scene at the decisive moment — the Russians.

It is known how in Italy the Magyar hussars went over in masses to the Italians, how in Hungary whole Italian battalions placed themselves at the disposal of the Magyar revolutionary government and are still fighting under the Magyar banner; it is known how in Vienna the German regiments held with the people and were by no means reliable even in Galicia; it is known that Austrian and non-Austrian Poles fought in masses in Italy, in Vienna, in Hungary against the Austrian armies and are still fighting in the Carpathians; but where has it ever been heard that Czech or South Slav troops revolted against the black-and-yellow banner?

On the contrary, all that we know so far is that Austria, shaken to its foundations, was kept alive and once again secured for a moment by the black-and-yellow enthusiasm of the Slavs; that it was precisely the Croats, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Czechs, Moravians and Ruthenians who placed their contingents at the disposal of a Windischgrätz and a Jellachich to suppress the revolution in Vienna, Cracow, Lemberg and Hungary, and what we now learn from Bakunin is that it was not Germans, but Galician, Czech and Slovak Slavs and “nothing but Slavs” (p. 33) who dispersed the Prague Slav Congress!

The revolution of 1848 forced all European peoples to declare for or against it. Within one month all peoples ripe for revolution had made their revolution, all unripe peoples had allied themselves against the revolution. At that time the confusion of peoples in Eastern Europe had to be disentangled. The issue was what nation here would take the revolutionary initiative, what nation would develop the greatest revolutionary energy and thereby secure its future. The Slavs remained silent, the Germans and Magyars, true to their previous historical position, took the lead. And thus the Slavs were thrown completely into the arms of the counter-revolution.

But the Slav Congress in Prague?

We repeat: The so-called democrats amongst the Austrian Slavs are either knaves or visionaries, and the visionaries, who in their own people find no ground for the ideas imported from abroad, are constantly led by the nose by the knaves. At the Prague Slav Congress it was the visionaries who predominated. When the visionary ideas seemed threatening to the aristocratic Panslavists, Messieurs Count Thun, Palacký and Co., they betrayed the visionaries to Windischgrätz and the black-and-yellow counter-revolution. What bitter, shattering irony there is not in the fact that this congress of enthusiasts, defended by the enthusiastic youth of Prague, was chased away by soldiers of their own nation, that a military Slav congress was set, as it were, in opposition to the fantasising Slav congress! The Austrian army which captured Prague, Vienna, Lemberg, Cracow, Milan and Budapest, that is the real, active Slav congress!

The results of the Slav congress show how baseless and confused its visionary ideas were. The bombardment of a city like Prague would have filled any other nation with inextinguishable hatred of the oppressors. What did the Czechs do? They kissed the rod that flogged them until they bled, they enthusiastically swore allegiance to the banner under which their brothers were massacred and their wives outraged. The Prague street battle was the turning-point for the Austrian democratic Panslavists. For the prospect of their miserable “national independence” they sold democracy and the revolution to the Austrian unitary monarchy, to that “centre”, “the systematic implementation of despotism in the heart of Europe”, as Bakunin himself says (p. 29). And for this cowardly, base betrayal of the revolution we shall one day take bloody revenge on the Slavs.

That they have nonetheless been duped by the counter-revolution, that there can be no question either of a “Slav Austria” or of a “federative state with nations enjoying equal rights”, and least of all of democratic institutions for the Austrian Slavs—this has at last become clear to these traitors. Jellachich, who is no greater a scoundrel than most of the other democrats among the Austrian Slavs, bitterly regrets how he has been exploited; and Stratimirovich, to avoid being exploited any longer, has proclaimed open insurrection against Austria. The Slovanská Lípa societies are everywhere once again confronting the government and are daily making new painful discoveries about the trap into which they allowed themselves to be lured. But it is now too late; powerless in their own homeland against the Austrian soldiery which they themselves reorganised, repulsed by the Germans and Magyars whom they have betrayed, repulsed by revolutionary Europe, they will have to endure the same military despotism which they helped to heap upon the Viennese and the Magyars. “Be submissive to the Emperor, so that the imperial troops do not treat you as though you were rebellious Magyars”—in these words of Patriarch Rajachich is expressed what they may expect in the immediate future.

How completely differently the
*Poles*
have acted! Oppressed, in bondage, exploited for eighty years, they have invariably sided with the revolution, have declared the revolutionising of Poland to be inseparable from the independence of Poland. In Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Italy, in Hungary, in every revolution and every revolutionary war the Poles have fought alongside us, regardless of whether they were fighting against Germans, against Slavs, against Magyars, even whether they were fighting against
*Poles*.
The Poles are the only Slav nation that is free of all Pan-Slavist appetites. But they have very good reasons for this: They have been subjugated mainly by
*their own Slav*
so-called
*brothers*,
and, for the Pole, hatred of the Russians comes even before hatred of the Germans, and with full right. Precisely for this reason, however—because the liberation of Poland is inseparable from the revolution, because Pole and revolutionary have become identical words—the sympathies of all Europe are assured to the Poles, and the restoration of their nationality is just as certain as the hatred of all Europe and the bloodiest revolutionary war of the entire West are certain for the Czechs, Croats and Russians.

The Austrian Pan-Slavists ought to see that all their wishes, insofar as they are capable of fulfilment at all, are fulfilled in the restoration of the “Austrian total monarchy” under Russian protection. If Austria falls apart, what confronts them is the revolutionary terrorism of the Germans and Magyars, but by no means the liberation of all the nations in bondage under Austria’s sceptre, as they imagine. They must therefore wish that Austria remain together, that Galicia remain with Austria, so that the Slavs may retain the majority within the state. Here, then, the
*Pan-Slavist*
interests already stand
*directly opposed*
to the restoration of Poland; for a Poland without Galicia, a Poland that does not stretch from the Baltic to the Carpathians, is no Poland. For that very reason, a “Slav Austria” is still likewise a mere dream; for without the supremacy of the Germans and Magyars, without the two centres of Vienna and Budapest, Austria falls apart once again, as its entire history up to the last months demonstrates. The realisation of Pan-Slavism would therefore have to be confined to a Russian protectorate over Austria. The openly reactionary Pan-Slavists were therefore entirely right when they clung to the preservation of the total monarchy; it was the only means of salvaging anything at all. The so-called democratic Pan-Slavists, however, found themselves in a dire dilemma: either abandoning the revolution and at least partially salvaging their nationality through the total monarchy, or abandoning their nationality and salvaging the revolution through the dissolution of the total monarchy. At that moment the fate of the revolution in Eastern Europe hung upon the stance of the Czechs and South Slavs; we shall not forget that, at the decisive instant, they betrayed the revolution to Petersburg and Olmütz for the sake of their petty national hopes!

What would be said if the democratic party in Germany were to open its programme with the demand for the return of Alsace, Lorraine and Belgium, which in every respect belongs to France, under the pretext that the majority of the population there is Germanic? How ridiculous the German democrats would make themselves if they sought to establish a pan-Germanist German-Danish-Swedish-English-Dutch alliance for the “liberation” of all German-speaking lands! German democracy is fortunately past such fantastic nonsense. The German students of 1817 and 1830 carried on with this sort of reactionary sentimentalism and are today given their due throughout Germany. The German revolution only came into being; the German nation only began to become something, once it had wholly freed itself of these futilities.

But Pan-Slavism is just as childish and reactionary as Pan-Germanism. When one reads through the history of the Pan-Slav movement in Prague last spring, one thinks oneself transported thirty years back: tricolour ribbons, old-frankish costumes, Old Slav liturgies, a complete restoration of the age and the customs of the primeval forests; the *Svornost*—a perfect student fraternity; the Slav Congress—a new edition of the Wartburg Festival; the same phrases, the same effusive sentimentality, the same lament afterwards: “We had built a stately house” etc. Whoever wants to read this famous song translated into Slav prose should read Bakunin’s pamphlet.

Just as, in the long run, the most decided counter-revolutionary disposition, the most furious hatred of the French and the most narrow-minded national feeling emerged among the German *Burschenschaftler*, just as later on they all became traitors to the cause about which they had pretended to be so enthusiastic—just so, only more rapidly, because the year 1848 was a revolutionary year, the democratic veneer of the democratic Pan-Slavists very soon dissolved into fanatical hatred of Germans and Magyars, into indirect opposition to the restoration of Poland (Lubomirski), and into direct adhesion to the counter-revolution.

And when a few honest Slav democrats now call upon the Austrian Slavs to join the revolution, to regard the Austrian total monarchy as their principal enemy, even to side with the Magyars in the interest of the revolution, they call to mind the hen that runs about at the edge of the pond in despair over the young ducklings she has hatched out herself and which now suddenly escape her onto a wildly unfamiliar element whither she cannot follow.

Let us, for the rest, be under no illusions. With all Pan-Slavists, nationality, i.e., the fantastic general Slav nationality, takes
*precedence over the revolution*.
The Pan-Slavists want to join the revolution on the condition that they be permitted to constitute all Slavs, without exception and without regard to the most material necessities, into independent Slav states. Had we Germans wanted to set the same fantastic conditions, we would have come a long way in March! But the revolution allows no conditions to be set for it. One is either revolutionary and accepts the consequences of the revolution, let them be what they will, or one is thrown into the arms of the counter-revolution and one morning finds oneself, perhaps quite against one’s knowledge and will, arm in arm with Nicholas and Windischgrätz.

We and the Magyars are supposed to guarantee the independence of the Austrian Slavs—thus demands Bakunin, and people of the calibre of a
Ruge
are capable of actually having made him such promises in private. We and the other revolutionary nations of Europe are expected to guarantee the herds of the counter-revolution right on our doorstep an unhindered existence, a free right of conspiracy and arms against the revolution; we are expected to constitute, in the very heart of Germany, a counter-revolutionary Czech realm, to break the power of the German, Polish and Magyar revolutions by means of Russian outposts thrust between them on the Elbe, in the Carpathians and on the Danube!

We have no intention of doing so. To the sentimental fraternising phrases here tendered us in the name of the most counter-revolutionary nations of Europe, we reply that hatred of the Russians was and still is the
*primary revolutionary passion*
among the Germans; that since the revolution, hatred of the Czechs and Croats has been added to it, and that we, in common with the Poles and Magyars, can secure the revolution only by the most determined terrorism against these Slav peoples. We now know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and the Slav countries of Austria; and no phrases, no references to an indefinite democratic future of these lands will deter us from treating our enemies as enemies.

And when Bakunin finally exclaims:

“Verily, nothing
*lose*
shall the Slav, but gain shall he! Verily, live shall he! And we shall live.
*As long as*
the
*smallest part*
of our rights is disputed, as long as
*a single member of our entire body is kept severed or torn away from us*,
so long shall we fight
*to the blood,*
shall we fight implacably
*to the death*,
until at last Slavdom stands great and free and independent in the world”—

if revolutionary Pan-Slavism seriously means this passage and, where the fantastic Slav nationality is concerned, leaves the revolution entirely out of the game, then we also know what we have to do.

Then war, “implacable war to the death” against Slavdom, the betrayer of the revolution; a war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism—not in the interest of Germany, but in the interest of the revolution!