Democratic Panslavism

Cologne, 14 February. We have often enough pointed out how the
No. 222, 15 February 1849
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
gentle dreams that emerged after the February and March revolutions, how the fantasies of universal fraternisation of peoples, of a European federal republic and of eternal world peace, were basically nothing more than disguises for the boundless helplessness and inactivity of the spokesmen of the 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, push through any really revolutionary measures; the narrow-mindedness of the one, the counter-revolutionary intrigue of the other, coincided in the fact that the people received only sentimental phrases instead of revolutionary deeds. The loudly protesting scoundrel Lamartine was the classic hero of this epoch of popular betrayal concealed beneath poetic blooms and rhetorical tinsel.

The revolutionised peoples know how dearly they have had to pay for believing, in their good nature, the big words and haughty assurances of that time. Instead of the securing of the revolution, everywhere reactionary chambers that undermined 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 renewal 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 applauded the high-sounding phrases of the epoch now recall only with blushes how they let themselves be duped by blockheads and scoundrels.

People have learned through painful experience that the “European fraternisation of peoples” does not come about through mere phrases and pious wishes, but only through thorough revolutions and bloody struggles; that it is not a question of a fraternisation of all European peoples under one republican banner, but of the alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary ones, an alliance that comes about not on paper, but only on the battlefield.

In the whole of 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, allegedly democratic, revolutionary factions, who never tire of acting as an echo to these phrases and sentimentalities and preaching the gospel of the European fraternisation of peoples.

These factions – we abstract from a few ignorant enthusiasts of the German tongue, such as Mr. A. Ruge, etc. – are the democratic Panslavists of the various Slav tribes.

The programme of democratic Panslavism 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.

Hear how Bakunin, right at the beginning of his Appeal, links on to 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 mankind, and recognised that the welfare of the nations is never secured so long as a single people anywhere in Europe still lives under oppression … Away with the oppressors, it rang out as from one mouth; hail to the oppressed, to the Poles, the Italians and to all! No more wars of conquest, but let one last war be fought to the dregs, the good fight of revolution for the final liberation of all peoples! Down with the artificial barriers which have been forcibly erected by despot congresses according to so-called historical, geographical, commercial and strategic necessities! Henceforth there are to be no other dividing lines except those corresponding to nature, drawn by justice and in the spirit of democracy, which the sovereign will of the peoples themselves prescribes on the basis of their national peculiarities. Such was the cry that went out through all peoples.” p. 6, 7.

We already find in this passage the whole dreamy enthusiasm of the first months after the revolution. Of the actually existing obstacles to such a universal liberation, of the thoroughly different levels of civilisation and the consequently equally different political needs of the individual peoples, there is no word. The word “freedom” replaces all that. There is no talk of reality at all, or insofar as it is perhaps considered, it is depicted as something absolutely reprehensible, willfully manufactured by “despot congresses” and “diplomats”. Over against this bad reality there steps the alleged popular will with its categorical imperative, with the absolute demand for “freedom” pure and simple.

We have seen who was the stronger. The alleged popular will, precisely because it embarked upon such a fantastic abstraction from the actually existing conditions, was so disgracefully duped.

“With its own plenary power, the revolution declared dissolved the despot states, dissolved the Prussian Reich … Austria … the Turkish Empire … dissolved finally the last refuge of the despots, the Russian Empire … and as the ultimate goal of all – the universal federation of the European republics.” p. 8.

Indeed, here in the West it must seem peculiar to us that, after all these fine plans have foundered in their first attempt at execution, they can still be enumerated as something meritorious and grand. That was, after all, precisely the trouble, that the revolution indeed “by its own plenary power declared dissolved”, but at the same time “by its own plenary power” did not lift a finger to execute its decree.

At that time the Slav Congress was convened. The Slav Congress placed itself entirely on the standpoint of these illusions. Hear:

“Vividly feeling the common bonds of history (?) and of blood, we swore never again to allow our destinies to be separated from one another. Cursing the politics of which we had so long been the victims, we reinstated ourselves in our right to complete independence, and vowed that henceforth it should be common to all Slav peoples. We recognised the autonomy of Bohemia and Moravia … we extended our fraternal hand to the German people, to democratic Germany. In the name of those of us who dwell in Hungary, we offered the Magyars, the furious enemies of our race … a fraternal alliance. Nor did we forget in our league of liberation those of our brothers who sigh under the yoke of the Turks. We solemnly condemned that criminal policy which thrice rent Poland asunder … All this we proclaimed, and demanded, with all democrats of all peoples (?): the liberty, the equality, the fraternity of all nations.” pag. 10.

These demands democratic Panslavism still puts forward today: “We then felt certain of our cause … justice and humanity were wholly on our side, and on the side of our enemies nothing but illegality and barbarism. These were no empty dream-figments to which we abandoned ourselves; 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 Panslavist manifesto but these more or less moral categories, which sound very fine indeed, but in historical and political questions prove absolutely nothing. “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, etc., may demand this or that a thousand times; but if the thing is impossible, it does not happen and remains, despite all that, an “empty dream-figment”. The Panslavists could have enlightened themselves about their illusions from the role that the mass of the Slavs have played since the Prague Congress; they could have realised that against iron reality all pious wishes and fine dreams avail nothing, that their policy was just as little as that of the French republic ever the “policy of the revolution”. And nevertheless they still come to us today, in January 1849, with the same old phrases, over whose content Western Europe was disabused by the bloodiest counter-revolution!

Just one word about the “universal fraternisation of peoples” and the drawing of “boundaries which the sovereign will of the peoples themselves prescribes on the basis of their national peculiarities”. The United States and Mexico are two republics; in both the people are sovereign.

How is it that between these two republics, which according to the moral theory ought to be “fraternised” and “federated”, a war broke out over Texas, that the “sovereign will” of the American people, supported by the bravery of the American volunteers, moved the boundaries drawn by nature several hundred miles further south out of “geographical, commercial and strategic necessities”? And will Bakunin reproach the Americans with a “war of conquest”, which, though it deals a severe blow to his theory based on “justice and humanity”, was nevertheless waged solely and entirely in the interest of civilisation? Or is it perhaps a misfortune that magnificent California has been wrested from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it? that the energetic Yankees, by swiftly exploiting the gold mines there,

...to increase the means of circulation, to concentrate a dense population and extensive trade in a few years on the most favourable coast of the Pacific Ocean, to create large cities, to open up steamship connections, to lay a railway from New York to San Francisco, to really open up the Pacific Ocean to civilisation, and to give world trade a new direction for the third time in history? The “independence” of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer as a result, “justice” and other moral principles may be violated here and there; but what is that compared with such world-historical facts?

We note, incidentally, that this theory of universal brotherhood of peoples, which, without regard to the historical position and the social stage of development of the individual peoples, wants nothing but to fraternise into the blue yonder, was already combated by the editors of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* long before the revolution, and at that time against their best friends, the English and French democrats. The English, French and Belgian democratic newspapers of that period contain the proofs of this.

As regards Pan-Slavism in particular, we developed in No. 194 of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* how, apart from the well-meaning self-deceptions of the democratic Pan-Slavists, it has in reality no other purpose than to give the scattered Austrian Slavs – historically, literarily, politically, commercially and industrially dependent on Germans and Magyars – a rallying point, on the one hand in Russia, and on the other in a united Austrian monarchy ruled by the Slav majority and dependent on Russia. We have shown how such little nations, dragged along by history against their own will for centuries, must necessarily be counter-revolutionary, and how their whole position in the revolution of 1848 was in fact counter-revolutionary. In view of the democratic Pan-Slavist manifesto which demands the independence of all Slavs without distinction, we must return to this point.

Let us note first that the political romanticism and sentimentality on the part of the democrats of the Slav Congress are very excusable. With the exception of the Poles – the Poles are not Pan-Slavist, for very palpable reasons – they all belong to tribes of people who either, like the Southern Slavs, are necessarily counter-revolutionary by virtue of their entire historical position, or who, like the Russians, are still far removed from a revolution and therefore, at least for the present, are likewise counter-revolutionary. These factions, democratic through the education they acquired abroad, seek to bring their democratic outlook into harmony with their national feeling, which among the Slavs is notoriously very pronounced; and since the positive world, the actual conditions of their country, offered no points of contact for this reconciliation, or only fictitious ones, nothing remains for them but the other-worldly “airy realm of dreams”, the realm of pious wishes, the politics of imagination. How fine it would be if Croats, Pandours and Cossacks formed the vanguard of European democracy, if the ambassador of the Republic of Siberia presented his credentials in Paris! Certainly very gratifying prospects; but that European democracy should wait for their realisation even the most enthusiastic Pan-Slavist will surely not demand – and for the present it is precisely the nations whose special independence the manifesto demands that are the special 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 that have never had a history of their own, that from the moment when they reach the first, crudest stage of civilisation already come under foreign domination, or that are forced into the first stage of civilisation only through a foreign yoke, have no viability and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence.

And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. The Czechs, among whom we may also include the Moravians and Slovaks, although they are linguistically and historically different, have never had a history. Since Charlemagne, Bohemia has been chained to Germany. For a moment the Czech nation emancipates itself and forms the Great Moravian Empire, only to be subjugated again forthwith and tossed to and fro for five hundred years as a plaything between Germany, Hungary and Poland. Then Bohemia and Moravia definitively fall to Germany, and the Slovak regions remain with Hungary. And this “nation”, which has absolutely no historical existence, lays claim to independence?

Likewise the so-called Southern Slavs proper. Where is the history of the Illyrian Slovenes, the Dalmatians, the Croats and the Šokci? Since the 11th century they have lost the last semblance of political independence and have stood partly under German, partly under Venetian, partly under Magyar rule. And out of these torn shreds one wants to cobble together a strong, independent, viable nation?

Even more. If the Austrian Slavs formed a compact mass, like the Poles, the Magyars, the Italians, if they were capable of putting together among themselves a state of 12 to 20 million, then their claims would at least have a serious character. But the exact opposite is the case. The Germans and Magyars have thrust themselves between them like a broad wedge right to the farthest ends of the Carpathians, almost to the Black Sea; they have separated the Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks from the Southern Slavs by a belt 60 to 80 miles wide. In the north of this belt 5 1/2 million, in the south 5 1/2 million Slavs, separated by a compact mass of 10 to 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 one realm, and the 5 1/2 million Southern Slavs together with the Turkish Slavs not be able to form another?

Just look at the distribution of the Czechs and their linguistically related neighbours on the first language map to hand. They are pushed into Germany like a wedge, but eaten away and thrust back on both sides by the German element. One third of Bohemia speaks German; for every 24 Czechs in Bohemia 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, completely demoralised in a national respect. And what a Slav empire it would be, in which in the end the German bourgeoisie of the towns would rule!

Similarly the Southern 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, owing to “geographical and commercial necessities” which, though they are no obstacle to Bakunin’s imagination, nevertheless exist and are matters of life for Germany and Hungary just as, for example, the Baltic coast from Danzig to Riga is for Poland. And where the existence and the free development of all the resources of great nations are at stake, such sentimentality as consideration for a few scattered Germans or Slavs will decide nothing! Apart from the fact that these Southern Slavs are likewise everywhere interspersed with German, Magyar and Italian elements, that here too a glance at the language map shatters the projected South Slav empire into disconnected shreds, and that in the best of cases the whole 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 Southern Slavs not attach themselves to the Serbs, Bosnians, Morlachs and Bulgarians? Certainly, if only, in addition to the difficulties already cited, the age-old hatred of the Austrian frontiersman for the Turkish Slavs beyond the Sava and the Una did not exist; but these people, who for centuries have known each other as rogues and bandits, hate each other, despite all tribal affinity, infinitely more than Slavs and Magyars.

In fact, the position of the Germans and Magyars would be extremely pleasant if the Austrian Slavs were helped to their so‑called “rights”! Between Silesia and Austria an independent Bohemian-Moravian state wedged in; Austria and Styria cut off by the “South Slav republic” from their natural débouché, the Adriatic and Mediterranean; the east of Germany torn to pieces like a loaf of bread gnawed by rats! And all this as thanks for the Germans having taken the trouble to civilise the stubborn Czechs and Slovenes, to introduce trade, industry, tolerable agriculture and education among them!

But it is precisely this yoke forced upon the Slavs under the pretext of civilisation that constitutes one of the greatest crimes of the Germans as well as the Magyars! Just listen:

“Rightly do you rage, rightly do you pant for revenge against that accursed German policy which thought of nothing but your ruin, which for centuries has kept you in bondage ...” p. 5.

“... The Magyars, the furious enemies of our race, who, scarcely four million in number, presumed to wish to impose their yoke on eight million Slavs ...” p. 9.

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

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

The Germans have reconquered from the Slavs, in the north, the formerly German, later Slav territory from the Elbe to the Warthe; a conquest that was conditioned by “geographical and strategic necessities” arising from the division of the Carolingian Empire. These stretches of Slav territory are completely Germanised; the matter is settled and cannot be redressed, unless the Pan-Slavists found again the lost Sorbian, Wendish and Obotrite languages and the Leipzigers, Berliners and

impose upon the Stettiners. That this conquest, however, lay in the interest of civilisation has never yet been disputed.

In the South they found the Slav tribes already scattered. The non-Slav Avars, who later occupied the territory taken by the Magyars, had seen to that. The Germans made these Slavs tributary and waged many struggles with them. They waged the same struggles with the Avars and Magyars, from whom they took the whole land from the Enns to the Leitha. While here they Germanised by force, the Germanisation of the Slav countries proceeded far more peaceably, through immigration, through the influence of the more developed nation upon the undeveloped. German industry, German trade, German culture brought the German language of their own accord into the country. As for “oppression”, the Slavs were no more oppressed by the Germans than the mass of the Germans themselves.

As for the Magyars, there are also a good many Germans in Hungary, and the Magyars have never had to complain of “accursed German policy”, although they were “hardly four million”! And if the “eight million Slavs” had to put up with the four million Magyars imposing the yoke upon them for eight centuries, this in itself proves sufficiently who was more viable and energetic, the many Slavs or the few Magyars!

But the greatest “crime” of the Germans and Magyars, however, is that they prevented these 12 million Slavs from becoming Turkish! What would have become of these fragmented little nations that 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 Soliman, if their so-called “oppressors” had not decided the battles that were fought to defend these weak peoples! The lot of the “twelve million Slavs, Walachians and Greeks”, who are “trodden underfoot by seven hundred thousand Ottomans” (p. 8) down to the present day, does not that speak loudly enough?

And finally, what “crime”, what “accursed policy”, that at a time when in Europe generally the great monarchies became a “historical necessity”, the Germans and Magyars threw together all these small, crippled, impotent little nations into a single great empire and thereby enabled them to take part in a historical development from which, left to themselves, they would have remained entirely alienated! To be sure, such a thing cannot be carried through without violently crushing many a tender little national flower. But without violence and without iron ruthlessness nothing is carried through in history, and had Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon possessed the same capacity for sentiment to which Pan-Slavism now appeals on behalf of its decayed clients, what would have become of history! And are the Persians, Celts and Christian Germans not worth the Czechs, Ogulins and Seressaners?

But now, as a result of the enormous advances in industry, trade and communications, political centralisation has become a far more urgent need than it was in the 15th and 16th centuries. What still has to be centralised, is being centralised. And now the Pan-Slavists come and demand that we should “set free” these half-Germanised Slavs, that we should rescind a centralisation that 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 among the best and most creditable deeds of which our people and the Magyar people can boast in history.

As for the Magyars in particular, it should be noted here that, especially since the revolution, they have acted far too indulgently and weakly towards the bloated Croats. It is notorious that Kossuth conceded everything possible to them, except only that their deputies might speak Croat in the Diet. And this indulgence towards a nation that is by nature counter-revolutionary is the only thing for which the Magyars can be blamed.

(Conclusion follows.)

* Cologne, 15 February. ( The Democratic Pan-Slavism. – Conclusion.) We

No. 223, 16 February 1849
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

concluded 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 constituted independent states, it would not be 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 non-viable small intermediate states.

All this, however, would still decide nothing. Had the Slavs, at any period of their oppression, begun a new revolutionary history, they would by that very fact have proved their viability. From that moment the revolution would have had an interest in their liberation, and the particular interest of the Germans and Magyars would have disappeared in the face of the greater interest of the European revolution.

But that has just never been the case. The Slavs – we recall once more that we always exclude the Poles here – have always been precisely the chief instruments of counter-revolution. Oppressed at home, abroad they were the oppressors of all revolutionary nations, as far as Slav influence extended.

Let nobody counter that we are putting forward German national prejudices here. The proofs are available in German, French, Belgian and English journals that the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, long before the revolution, opposed all German national narrow-mindedness most resolutely. To be sure, they have not, like many others, railed at the Germans off the top of their heads and on mere hearsay; on the contrary, they have historically demonstrated and ruthlessly exposed the shabby role that Germany, thanks to its nobility and its burghers, thanks to its stunted industrial development, has indeed played in history; they have always recognised, vis-à-vis the backward Germans, the just claims of the great historical nations of the West, the English and the French. But precisely for this reason, let us be permitted not to share the rapturous illusions of the Slavs, and to judge other peoples just as severely as we have judged our own nation.

Hitherto it has always been said that the Germans were the mercenaries of despotism throughout Europe. We are far from denying the disgraceful part taken by the Germans 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 his mercenaries or his vanguard? England and Russia. The Russians to this very day boast that they decided the fall of Napoleon by their innumerable armies, which to a large extent is indeed true. At least this much is certain, that of the armies which drove Napoleon back from the Oder to Paris by their superior numbers, three-quarters consisted of Slavs, Russians or Austrian Slavs.

And then the oppression of the Italians and Poles by the Germans! In the partition of Poland, one wholly and one half-Slav power competed; the armies that crushed Kosciuszko were Slavs for the most part; the armies of Diebitsch and Paskevich were exclusively Slav armies. And in Italy, the Tedeschi for long years bore the shame alone as oppressors; but once again, what were the armies made up of that were best used for oppression, and whose brutalities were laid at the door of the Germans? Once more, Slavs. Go to Italy and ask who crushed the Milan revolution, you will no longer be told: 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 entire Austrian army, i.e., everything that is most deeply hated by them: i Croati!

And yet these reproaches would be superfluous and unjustified if the Slavs had anywhere seriously taken part in the movement of 1848, if they had hastened to enter the ranks of the revolutionary peoples. A single courageous democratic revolutionary attempt, even if it is stifled, extinguishes whole centuries of infamy and cowardice in the memory of the peoples, rehabilitates on the spot a nation no matter how deeply despised. The Germans experienced that last year. But while French, Germans, Italians, Poles, Magyars hoisted the flag of revolution, the Slavs, as one man, lined up under the flag of counter-revolution. Foremost were the South Slavs, who had for many years already defended their counter-revolutionary separatist desires against the Magyars; then the Czechs, and behind them, equipped for battle and ready to appear on the field of decision at the crucial moment – the Russians.

It is well known how in Italy the Magyar hussars went over to the Italians in droves, how in Hungary whole Italian battalions placed themselves at the disposal of the Magyar revolutionary government and are still fighting under the Magyar flag; 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 one ever heard that Czech or South Slav troops revolted against the black-and-yellow flag? On the contrary, to date one knows only that Austria, shaken to its foundations, was kept alive and momentarily secured again by the black-and-yellow enthusiasm of the Slavs; that it was precisely the Croats, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Czechs, Moravians and Ruthenes who provided a Windischgrätz and Jellachich with their contingents...

agents for the suppression of the Revolution in Vienna, Cracow, Lemberg, Hungary, and what we now learn from Bakunin is that the Prague Slav Congress was broken up not by Germans, but by Galician, Czech, Slovakian Slavs and “by nothing but Slavs” (p. 33)!

The Revolution of 1848 forced all the peoples of Europe to declare themselves for or against it. In a month all the peoples ripe for revolution had made their revolution, all the unripe peoples allied themselves against the revolution. At that time it was a matter of unravelling the ethnic confusion of Eastern Europe. The question was which nation here would seize the revolutionary initiative, which would develop the greatest revolutionary energy and thereby secure its future. The Slavs remained mute; the Germans and Magyars, true to their previous historical position, placed themselves at the head. And thereby the Slavs were thrown completely into the arms of the counter-revolution.

But the Slav Congress in Prague?

We repeat: the so-called democrats among the Austrian Slavs are either scoundrels or dreamers, and the dreamers, who find no soil in their people for the ideas imported from abroad, have been continually led by the nose by the scoundrels. At the Prague Slav Congress the dreamers had the upper hand. When the aristocratic Panslavists, Messrs. Count Thun, Palacky and their associates, found this visionary fantasising threatening, they betrayed the dreamers to Windischgrätz and the black-and-yellow counter-revolution. What bitter, striking irony there is in the fact that this congress of enthusiasts, defended by the enthusiastic youth of Prague, was dispersed by soldiers of their own nation, that the fantasising Slav Congress was, so to speak, confronted by a military Slav Congress! The Austrian army, which captured Prague, Vienna, Lemberg, Cracow, Milan and Budapest, that is the real, the active Slav Congress!

How untenable and confused the fantasising of the Slav Congress was is proved by its fruits. The bombardment of a city like Prague would have filled any other nation with the most inextinguishable hatred for its oppressors. What did the Czechs do? They kissed the rod that had chastised them till they bled, they enthusiastically swore allegiance to the flag under which their brothers had been butchered, their women violated. The Prague street-fighting was the turning-point for the Austrian democratic Panslavists. For the prospect of their miserable “national independence” they sold democracy, the revolution, to the Austrian total monarchy, to “the centre,” “the systematic realisation 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 been cheated by the counter-revolution nonetheless, that there can be no thought either of a “Slavic Austria” or of a “federative state with equal rights for nations,” let alone of democratic institutions for the Austrian Slavs, has at last become clear to these traitors. Jellachich, who is no greater scoundrel than most of the other democrats of the Austrian Slavs, bitterly regrets how he has been exploited; and Stratimirovich, in order not to be exploited any longer, has proclaimed open insurrection against Austria. The Slovanská Lípa associations are everywhere once again confronting the government and daily having new painful experiences of the trap into which they allowed themselves to be lured. But it is now too late; in their own homeland, powerless against the Austrian soldiery which they themselves helped to reorganise, repelled by the Germans and Magyars whom they betrayed, repelled by revolutionary Europe, they will have to endure the same military despotism which they helped to impose on the Viennese and the Magyars.

“Be submissive to the Emperor, so that the imperial troops do not treat you as if you were rebellious Magyars” – in these words of the Patriarch Rajačić it is expressed what they must expect in the immediate future.

How completely differently the Poles acted! For eighty years oppressed, enslaved, bled white, they have always sided with the revolution, they have declared the revolutionising of Poland to be inseparable from the independence of Poland. In Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Italy, in Hungary the Poles have fought alongside in all revolutions and revolutionary wars, regardless of whether they fought against Germans, against Slavs, against Magyars, even whether they fought against Poles. The Poles are the only Slav nation that is free of all Panslavist aspirations. But they also have very good reasons for this: they have been subjugated mainly by their own so-called Slav brothers, and with the Pole, hatred of the Russians takes precedence over hatred of the Germans, and with full right. It is therefore because the liberation of Poland is inseparable from the revolution, because Pole and revolutionary have become identical words, that the Poles enjoy the sympathy of all Europe, 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 against the Czechs, Croats, and Russians is certain.

The Austrian Panslavists ought to realise that all their wishes, in so far as they are at all realisable, are realised in the establishment of the “Austrian total monarchy” under Russian protection. If Austria disintegrates, the revolutionary terrorism of the Germans and Magyars awaits them, but by no means, as they imagine, the liberation of all the nations enslaved under Austria’s sceptre. They must therefore wish that Austria remain united, indeed, that Galicia remain with Austria, so that the Slavs retain the majority in the state. Here, then, the Panslavist interests are already directly opposed to the restoration of Poland; for a Poland without Galicia, a Poland that does not extend from the Baltic to the Carpathians, is no Poland. For that very reason, however, a “Slavic Austria” is still also a mere dream; for without the supremacy of the Germans and Magyars, without the two centres of Vienna and Budapest, Austria again falls apart, as its entire history up to the last months proves. The realisation of Panslavism would accordingly have to be restricted to the Russian patronage over Austria. The openly reactionary Panslavists were therefore quite right to cling to the preservation of the total monarchy; that was the only means of salvaging anything. The so-called democratic Panslavists, however, were in a terrible dilemma: either give up the revolution and at least partially save their nationality through the total monarchy, or give up their nationality and save the revolution through the disintegration of the total monarchy. At that time the fate of the East European revolution hung on the attitude of the Czechs and South Slavs; we shall not forget that at the decisive moment they betrayed the revolution to Petersburg and Olmütz for the sake of their petty national hopes!

What would one say if the democratic party in Germany were to open its programme with the demand for Alsace, Lorraine, and for Belgium, which in every respect belongs to France, on the pretext that in these regions the majority of the population is Germanic? How ridiculous the German democrats would make themselves if they attempted to create a pan-German German-Danish-Swedish-English-Dutch alliance for the “liberation” of all German-speaking lands! Fortunately, German democracy has got beyond such fantastic nonsense. The German students of 1817 and 1830 indulged in such reactionary enthusiasms and are today appreciated throughout Germany as they deserve. The German revolution only came about, the German nation only began to become something, when it had completely freed itself from these futilities.

Just as childish and reactionary as Pan-Germanism is Panslavism. If one reads up on the history of the Panslavist movement of last spring in Prague, one thinks oneself transported back thirty years: tricolour ribbons, old-fashioned costumes, Old Slavonic masses, complete restoration of the age and the customs of the primeval forests; the Swornost a perfect Burschenschaft, the Slav Congress a new edition of the Wartburg festival; the same phrases, the same enthusiasm, the same lament afterwards: “We had builded a stately house,” etc. Anyone who wants to read this famous song translated into Slav prose should read Bakunin’s pamphlet.

Just as with the German Burschenschaftler, in the long run the most determined counter-revolutionary sentiments, the most furious hatred of the French and the most narrow-minded national feeling came to the fore, just as later they all became traitors to the cause for which they claimed to be enthusiastic – just so, only more rapidly, because the year 1848 was a revolutionary year, the democratic veneer among the democratic Panslavists dissolved very quickly into fanatical hatred of Germans and Magyars, into indirect opposition to the restoration of Poland (Lubomirski), and into direct attachment to the counter-revolution.

And when individual sincere Slav democrats now call upon the Austrian Slavs to join the revolution, to regard the Austrian total monarchy as their principal enemy, even in the interest of the revolution to hold with the Magyars, they recall the hen that runs about on the edge of the pond in despair over the young ducks that she herself has hatched and that suddenly swim away to a quite foreign element where she cannot follow them.

But let us have no illusions. With all Panslavists, nationality, i.e. the fantastic, universal Slav nationality, takes precedence over the revolution. The Panslavists want to join the revolution on condition that they are permitted to constitute all Slavs without exception, without any regard for the most material necessities, into independent Slav states. If we Germans had wanted to set the same fantastic conditions, we would have got a long way in March! But the revolution does not allow any conditions to be imposed on it. Either one is a revolutionary and accepts the consequences of the revolution, whatever they may be, or one is thrown into the arms of the counter-revolution and finds oneself, perhaps quite without knowing or willing it, one morning arm in arm with Nicholas and Windischgrätz.

We and the Magyars are supposed to guarantee the Austrian Slavs their independence – that is what Bakunin demands, and people of the calibre of a Ruge are capable of making him such promises in private

to have made a reality. We and the other revolutionary nations of Europe are being asked to guarantee the herds of the counter-revolution, right at our door, an unhindered existence, the right freely to conspire and bear arms against the revolution; we are asked to constitute a counter-revolutionary Czech realm in the very heart of Germany, to break the power of the German, Polish, and Magyar revolutions by means of Russian outposts thrust between them on the Elbe, the Carpathians, and the Danube!

We have not the slightest intention of doing so. To the sentimental phrases of fraternity offered us here 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 only in common with the Poles and Magyars, only by means of the most resolute terrorism against these Slav peoples, can we secure the revolution. We now know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and the Austrian Slav lands; and no phrases, no prospect of some indeterminate democratic future for these lands, will deter us from treating our enemies as enemies.

And when Bakunin finally exclaims: “Truly, the Slav shall lose nothing, but rather shall he gain! Truly, he shall live! And we shall live. As long as the smallest part of our rights is contested, as long as a single limb is severed from our collective body or held torn away, so long shall we fight to the death, shall we struggle relentlessly, unto life and death, until Slavdom finally stands before the world great and free and independent”—if revolutionary Pan-Slavism means this passage in earnest, and, where it is a question of a fantastic Slav nationality, leaves the revolution entirely out of the game, then we, too, know what we have to do.

Then war, “relentless war unto life and death,” with Slavdom, which is treacherous to the revolution; war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism—not in the interest of Germany, but in the interest of the revolution!