London, 7 February 1882 
Dear Mr Kautsky, 

I have at last got round to answering your letter of 8 Novem- 
ber. 224 

One of the real tasks of the revolution of 48 (and the real as distinct 
from illusory tasks of a revolution are always carried out on the 
strength of that revolution) was the restoration of the oppressed and 
disunited nationalities of Central Europe in so far as these were at all 
viable and, in particular, ripe for independence. In the case of Italy, 
Hungary and Germany, this task was carried out by the executors of 
the revolution, Bonaparte, Cavour and Bismarck, in accordance with 
the circumstances obtaining at the time. There remained Ireland and 
Poland. Ireland need not be considered here; it is only very indirectly 
concerned with conditions on the Continent. But Poland lies in the 
middle of the Continent and keeping it partitioned is precisely the 
bond that continually re-cements the Holy Alliance ? and hence 
Poland is of great interest to us. 

Now it is historically impossible for a great people to discuss this or 
that internal question in any way seriously so long as national in- 
dependence is lacking. Prior to 1859 there was no question of social- 
ism in Italy; even the republicans were few in number, although they 
constituted the most vigorous element. Not until 1861 did the repub- 
licans begin to expand, 7°’ subsequently yielding their best elements 
to the socialists. Similarly in Germany. Lassalle was on the point of 
giving up the cause for lost when he was lucky enough to be shot. It 
was not until 1866, the year that actually decided Little Germany’s 
Greater Prussian unity, 7°* that both the Lassallean and the so-called 
Eisenach parties ? acquired any significance, and it was not until 
1870, when the Bonapartist urge to interfere had been eliminated for 
good, that the cause gathered momentum. If we still had the old Fe- 
deral Diet *7°, where would our party be now? Similarly in Hungary. 
It wasn’t until 1860 that it was drawn into the modern movement — 
sharp practice above, socialism below. ?7! 

Generally speaking an international movement of the proletariat is 

possible only as between independent nations. What little republican 
internationalism there was in the years 1830-48 was grouped round 
the France that was to liberate Europe, and French chauvinism was thus 
raised to such a pitch that we are still hampered at every turn by 
France’s mission as universal liberator and hence by its natural right 
to take the lead (seen as a caricature in the case of the Blanquists but 
also much in evidence in that of e.g. Malon & Co.). In the Interna- 
tional, too, the French not unnaturally took this view. They, and 
many others, had first to learn from events, and must still do so daily, 
that international co-operation is possible only among equals, and 
even a primus inter pares* at most for immediate action. So long as Po- 
land remains partitioned and subjugated, therefore, there can be no 
development either of a powerful socialist party within the country it- 
self or of genuine international intercourse between Poles other than 
émigrés and the rest of the proletarian parties in Germany, etc. Every 
Polish peasant and workman who rouses himself out of his stupor to 
participate in the common interest is confronted first of all with the 
fact of national subjugation; that is the first obstacle he encounters 
everywhere. Its removal is the prime requirement for any free and 
healthy development. Polish socialists who fail to put the liberation of 
the country at the forefront of their programme remind me of those 
German socialists who were reluctant to demand the immediate re- 
peal of the Anti-Socialist Law and freedom of association, assembly 
and the press. To be able to fight, you must first have a terrain, light, 
air and elbow-room. Otherwise you never get further than chit-chat. 

Whether, in this connection, a restoration of Poland is possible de- 
fore the next revolution is of no significance. It is in no way our busi- 
ness to restrain the efforts of the Poles to attain living conditions es- 
sential to their further development, or to persuade them that, from 
the international standpoint, national independence is a very secon- 
dary matter when it is in fact the basis of all international co- 
operation. Besides, in 1873, Germany and Russia were on the brink of 
war 7’? and the restoration of some kind of Poland, the embryo of a la- 
ter, real Poland, was therefore a strong possibility. And if these Rus- 
sian gents don’t soon put a stop to their pan-Slav intrigues and rab- 
ble-rousing in Herzegovina, 773 they may well find themselves with 
a war on their hands, a war neither they, nor Austria nor Bismarck 
will be able to control. The only people who are concerned that the 

* first among equals 

Herzegovina affair should take a serious turn are the Russian Pan- 
Slav Party and the Tsar; no one can really concern himself with the 
rapacious Bosnian riff-raff any more than with the idiotic Austrian 
ministers and officials who are presently pursuing their activities 
there. So even without an uprising, as a result, rather, of purely Euro- 
pean conflicts, the establishment of an independent Little Poland 
would be by no means impossible, just as the Prussian Little Ger- 
many invented by the bourgeois owed its establishment not to the re- 
volutionary or parliamentary methods they had dreamed of, but to 
war. 

Hence I am of the opinion that ¢wo nations in Europe are not only 
entitled but duty-bound to be national before they are inter- 
national-— Ireland and Poland. For the best way they can be inter- 
national is by being well and truly national. That’s what the Poles 
have understood in every crisis and proved on every revolutionary 
battleground. Deprive them of the prospect of restoring Poland, or 
persuade them that before long a new Poland will automatically fall 
into their laps, and their interest in the European revolution will be at 
an end. 

We, in particular, have absolutely no reason to impede the Poles in 
their necessary efforts to attain independence. In the first place they 
invented and put into practice in 1863 the methods of struggle which 
the Russians are now so successfully imitating (cf. Berlin und [St] 
Petersburg, Appendix 2) ?’* and, in the second, they were the only 
reliable and capable military leaders in the Paris Commune. ?7° 

Come to that, who are the people who oppose the Poles’ national 
aspirations? First, the European bourgeoisie in whose eyes the Poles 
have been utterly discredited since the 1846 insurrection with its so- 
cialist tendencies ?’° and, secondly, the Russian pan-Slavs and those 
they have influenced, such as Proudhon, who saw this through Her- 
zen’s spectacles. But up till today few Russians, even the best of them, 
are free of pan-Slav tendencies and recollections; they take Russia’s 
pan-Slav vocation for granted, just as the French do France’s natural 
revolutionary initiative. In reality, however, pan-Slavism is an im- 
posture, a bid for world hegemony under the cloak of a non-existent 
Slav nationality, and it is our and the Russians’ worst enemy. That 
imposture will in due course disintegrate into the void, but in the 
meantime it could make things very awkward for us. A pan-Slav war, 
as the last sheet-anchor for Russian Tsardom and Russian reaction, is 
presently in preparation; whether it will actually materialise is a moot 

point, but ifit does there is one thing of which we may be certain, name- 
ly that the splendid progress in the direction of revolution now be- 
ing made in Germany, Austria and Russia itself will be totally disrupt- 
ed and forced into different and quite unpredictable channels. At 
best, this would set us back by 3-10 years; in all likelihood it would 
mean one last respite for a constitutional ‘new era’ *’?’ in Germany 
and also, perhaps, Russia; a Little Poland under German hegemony, 
a war of retribution with France, renewed racial incitement and, fi- 
nally, another Holy Alliance. Hence pan-Slavism is now more than 
ever our mortal enemy, despite—or perhaps just because of— its 
having one foot in the grave. For the Katkovs, Aksakovs, Ignatievs 
and Co. know that their empire will be gone for ever the moment 
Tsardom is overthrown and the stage taken by the Russian people. 
And hence this ardent desire for war at a moment when the treasury 
contains less than nothing and not a banker is willing to advance the 
Russian government so much as a penny. 

That is precisely why the pan-Slavs have a mortal hatred of the 
Poles. Being the only anti-pan-Slav Slavs, they are consequently 
traitors to the sacred cause of Slavdom and must be forcibly incorpo- 
rated into the Great Slav Tsardom of which the future capital is 
Tsarigrad, i.e. Constantinople. 

Now you may perhaps ask me whether I have no feeling of sympa- 
thy for the small Slav peoples and fragments thereof which have been 
split apart by those three wedges — the German, the Magyar and the 
Turkish — driven into the Slav domain? To tell the truth, damned 
little. The Czecho-Slovak cry of distress: 

Boze! ... Ach mkdo neni na zemi 

Kdoby Slaviim (sic) spravedlivost Cinil?* 
has been answered by Petersburg, and the entire Czech national 
movement cherishes the aspiration that the Tsar should spravedlivost 
ciniti them. The same applies to the others—— Serbs, Bulgarians, Slo- 
venes, Galician Ruthenians (at least some of them). But these are aims 
of a kind we cannot support. Only when the collapse of Tsardom frees 
the national aspirations of these diminutive peoples from their entangle- 
ment in pan-Slav hegemonic tendencies, only then can we let them 
do as they please and, in the case of most of the Austro-Hungarian 

* ‘O God ... there’s no one on earth who would see that justice be done to the Slavs’. 
From Jan Kollar’s Sldwy deera, Part III, ‘Dunag’, p.287.- see that justice was 
done 

Slavs, I am sure that six months of independence will suffice to bring 
them begging for re-admittance. But in no circumstances will these 
little nationalities be granted the right they are presently arrogating 
to themselves in Serbia, Bulgaria and East Rumelia-— of preventing, 
that is, the extension of the European railway network to Constanti- 
nople. 

Now as for the differences that have arisen between the Poles in 
Switzerland, these are émigré squabbles ??* such as are seldom of any 
consequence, least of all in the case of an emigration which will be cel- 
ebrating its centenary in 3 years’ time and which, owing to the urge 
felt by all émigrés to do, or at any rate plan, something, has given 
birth to plan after plan, one new so-called theory after another. But, 
as you will see from the foregoing, we are not of the same opinion as 
the Réwnos¢é people and, indeed, we told them as much in a message 
sent on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of 29 November 1830, 
which was read out at the meeting in Geneva. * You will find a Polish 
version of it in the report (Sprawozdanie, etc.— Biblioteka Réwnoset: 
No. 1, Geneva, 1881), pp. 30 ff The Réwnos¢ people have apparently 
allowed themselves to be impressed by the radical-sounding slogans 
of the Genevan Russians and are now anxious to prove that they are 
not open to the reproach of national chauvinism. This aberration, of 
which the causes are purely local and transitory, will blow over with- 
out having any appreciable effect on Poland as such, and refuting it 
in detail would be more trouble than it was worth. 

How the Poles, by the way, will sort things out with the White and 
Little Russians and Lithuanians of the old Poland, or with the Ger- 
mans as regards the frontier is, for the time being, no concern of ours. 

Proof, by the way, of how little the workers, even in allegedly ‘op- 
pressed’ countries, are tainted by the pan-Slav yearnings of the aca- 
demics and bourgeois is provided by the splendid accord between 
German and Czech workers in Bohemia. 

But enough for now. Kindest regards from 

Yours, 

F.E.