Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (10 page)

After the war the German Right looked back to the Brest-Litovsk interlude as the great might-have-been, the Reich’s first grand venture into an east European empire. Few Germans saw that they had been too harsh for their own good and too indifferent to others’ national aspirations. For one extreme nationalist, Alfred Rosenberg, writing in 1921, Berlin had in fact been
too
considerate of the rights of the Poles and other national groups. Twenty years later, as Hitler’s Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in a new war of imperial expansion, he would be well placed to avoid his predecessors’ mistake. Right to the end, the authoritarian strand in German nationalism clung instinctively to direct military rule over the Slav “barbarians” and ignored the advantages which a more cooperative approach might have offered. The Russians, whose own approach to the nationalities problems of eastern Europe was far more sophisticated, reaped the benefits.
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One must ask why it was that the Habsburg Empire expired while the Tsarist empire came back to life as the Soviet Union. In part, no doubt, it was because of their differences, most obviously the fact that
while Germans and Hungarians never even amounted to one half of the population of the former, Russians alone never comprised less than half the population of the Soviet Union, and together with Ukrainians and Belorussians amounted to around two thirds. An imperial nation predominated there in a way that was not true of the Dual Monarchy, enhancing the tradition of state centralism developed under the Tsars and brought to fruition under Stalin.
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But this is only half the answer. It is also true that Russian Marxists learned much from the Habsburg debate about nationality and empire. In some ways, the Soviet Union was the Habsburg Empire’s real heir, just as Hitler’s New Order was its ultimate rejection. Thanks to the Bund—the Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers’ movement—the pre-war Austro-Marxist debate about nationalism had reached Russia and the Bolsheviks. The Bundists had wanted to turn the Russian empire into a federation of peoples, with national-cultural autonomy independent of territory—in line with the Austrian Social Democrat programme for the Habsburg Empire—and attacked the Russian demand for assimilation as a “nationalism of appropriation.” One leading Bundist presciently attacked Lenin and other Russian Social Democrats in 1902 for their intolerance of Jewish national autonomy, warning that an apparently internationalist workers’ movement might become “nationalistic” if it were “blinded by the ‘general-Russian,’ ‘general-Polish’ or ‘general-German’ cause which holds the rights of subject nationalities in contempt.”
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A decade later Lenin, who had initially been extremely hostile to the Bundist line, became convinced that nationalism could not be wished away. Before the war he had opposed the Bund’s federalism as weakening the Russian workers’ movement; and he had opposed its nationalism on conventional Marxist grounds, insisting that to oppose assimilation meant “to turn back the wheel of history,” since “this process of assimilation of nations by capitalism means the greatest historical progress … especially in backward countries like Russia.” But during the war, his views began to change. Opposing his comrades’ call for “the liquidation of the national states in Europe,” Lenin moved gradually towards a commitment to national self-determination. This commitment, however, was always conditional upon the interests of the proletariat. For Lenin it was necessary to
enter into a temporary alliance with nationalist groups for the sake of the revolution. But at what point might this alliance cease to be useful? The difficulty of answering this question helps explain the uncertainty of Bolshevik nationalities policy between 1917 and 1920.
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By the end of 1917, as Richard Pipes has put it, Russia “as a political concept had ceased to exist.” Taking Lenin at his word—or rather, simply reflecting Moscow’s lack of power and German dominance—national movements had swept to power in the Baltic states and Finland. Along the southern and eastern rim of the Tsarist dominions, new republics sprang up. Was the doctrine of national self-determination not now simply endangering the revolution? Stalin reached this conclusion well before Lenin, as early as December 1917: the Ukrainian crisis, he argued, showed an independence movement simply masking counter-revolution. With the outbreak of civil war, and Allied intervention from the periphery, such an analysis gained in plausibility.
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Thus Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s faced at the outset what the Habsburgs only confronted at their end—“the management of politically conscious, ambitious nationalities.” To this problem, the Bolsheviks found a solution which was subtle, pioneering and remarkably durable. They created a federal system which was, in effect, a combination of an Austro-Marxist state and a centralized Communist Party. Founded in the 1920s, this system, with all its contradictions, proved more effective in its capacity to manage nationalist politics than anything the Habsburgs or the Germans devised. It was called the Soviet Union.
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On the one hand, the Bolsheviks won over the new non-Russian nationalities, offering them real political power through participation in government and administration; economic power by enjoying the benefits of social revolution, in which previously dominant ethnic groups among the urban bourgeoisie and the landowning classes found themselves dispossessed, and peasants took over the cities; and cultural power through new educational rights with the spread of mass literacy and compulsory schooling. In the Ukraine, for instance, 97 per cent of Ukrainian children received instruction in their native language by 1929, something they could only have dreamed of before the revolution; Poland at the same time was busy shutting down its
Ukrainian-language schools, whose numbers fell from 3,662 to 144 in the inter-war period.
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It is not surprising that Bolshevik nationalities policy, so far from being regarded as oppressive and tyrannical, exerted a powerful attraction over the minorities of central-eastern Europe between the wars. In the 1920s, communist support was high among these groups—Macedonians, Belorussians, Jews and others—who were the chief victims of Versailles’s love affair with the nation-state. The Ukrainians themselves could contrast the violent police repression they faced against their culture in Poland with the situation in the Soviet republic, at least until the famine of the early 1930s, and perhaps even after. Only on the basis of this contrast can we understand why so many Ukrainians and Jews celebrated the downfall of the Polish republic and the arrival of the Red Army into the Western Ukraine in the autumn of 1939.
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On the other hand, the ostensibly federal structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as it emerged in the early 1920s, hid an increasingly centralized reality. Republics may have had greater powers than the so-called autonomous regions, but they were still subject to Moscow, and their constitutional right to secession—designed to prove the egalitarian nature of the Union—existed only on paper.

In fact the Bolshevik leadership’s willingness to consider federalism depended upon real power remaining in the hands of an organization that was not even mentioned in the 1923 USSR constitution—the Communist Party. Lenin may have rebuked Stalin in 1922 for “Great Russian chauvinism,” and stressed the need to avoid “imperialistic relations towards our oppressed minorities.” But there was no essential disagreement between them over the party’s fundamental role in cementing the new empire together. This it carried out successfully enough to make Russia Europe’s last imperial power. Communism turned out to be the last, and perhaps the highest, stage of imperialism.
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THE LIBERAL VARIANT: TOWARDS MINORITY RIGHTS

Much like the Bolsheviks, the victors at Versailles also had to grope their way towards a policy which could reconcile their pledges of
national self-determination with the need for regional stability in Europe. Through the first months of 1918, in fact, many policymakers in Washington and London still believed the best solution for eastern Europe remained confederation: nation-states would be too small to be viable and too unstable to keep the peace. The Americans planning their version of Europe’s future hesitated between recommending independence for Poland and turning it into a federal state in a brand-new Russian democracy; the British Foreign Office only reluctantly abandoned the idea of re-forming the Habsburg Empire.
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But the sudden collapse of the old empires made such thinking redundant and as a result brought the minorities issue into the open for the first time, primarily and initially in relation to Poland. Given that, as the Polish nationalist Roman Dmowski put it, “the aim of this war was to reduce German power to limits which would allow the reestablishment of European equilibrium,” Poland played a crucial role in any post-war settlement. But defining Poland was not a straightforward matter in terms of either territory or ethnicity, since the country had not existed as an independent state for over a century, and was home to large communities of Germans, Lithuanians, White Russians, Ukrainians and Jews as well as Poles. Polish nationalists themselves were torn between two visions of past glory: an exclusively Polish nation-state of pristine ethnic purity, or a multi-ethnic Commonwealth under Polish leadership.
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Roman Dmowski stood for the first. There was, in his view, “no place for a small and weak state” if Poland was to serve as a bulwark against Germany. Other ethnic groups would have to be assimilated in a tightly centralized nation-state; federation was a recipe for disintegration. “I have never been a herald of liberal-humanitarian ideas, and did not belong to any international organisation founded to bring happiness to humanity,” he wrote later, writing off the whole idea of minority protection.
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Opposing him, however, was his rival Józef Pilsudski, as well as Ukrainians and Jewish lobby groups in London and Washington. Jewish groups, in particular, played an important role in these early stages of the development of a doctrine of minority rights by alerting British and American policy-makers to the schemes of “half-crazed nationalists.” The Balkan Wars of 1912–13—when Ottoman Europe
was carved up between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria—had already revealed to them the dangers nation-states posed to minority groups. Now they pressed for some form of autonomy to be granted minorities in any eventual Polish state. The pogroms carried out by Polish troops in the winter of 1918 only helped their case.
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At the Paris Peace Conference, the struggle between these different conceptions of an independent Polish state was eventually to coalesce into a new international policy towards minority rights. The French—pro-Polish, fervently anti-German
and
anti-Bolshevik—were the minorities’ stiffest opponents. Their view was that “the business of the Conference is to create a sovereign state for Poland, not for the Jews.” But the British were less dismissive. Balfour worried that the existence of an independent Poland, “so far from promoting the cause of European peace, would be a perpetual occasion of European strife.” Lloyd George feared an “imperialist Poland.” Poland’s land-grab in Eastern Galicia and Western Ukraine increased these concerns. By mid-1919, Poland was only two thirds Polish from the ethnic point of view—its population now included four million Ukrainians, three million Jews and one million Germans—and looked very much like the “reactionary Imperialist, military State,” the “ramshackle Empire,” foreseen by the British journalist H. N. Brailsford.
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It was already clear to the peacemakers in Paris that the minorities question would not be solved by maps alone: the ethnographic distribution of the population in eastern Europe was so complex that it defied the most expertly drawn of borders. In the British Foreign Office, E. H. Carr suggested offering minorities inducements to migrate to their own nation-state. But what of those who preferred to remain? And what of those, like the Jews, or gypsies, who lacked a national homeland? This was precisely the difficulty raised by the minorities problem in Poland.
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Prompted by President Wilson’s concern, the newly created New States Committee in Paris decided to tackle the issue. They dismissed Jewish demands for national autonomy for the Jewish minority in Poland; it was undesirable, in their view, to create the danger of a state within a state, or indeed to forestall the process of assimilation which was still believed to be the desirable long-term outcome. On the other hand, the committee insisted that some form of minority rights had to
be found if Poland was not, through the Poles’ own intolerant nationalism, to create the conditions for an ethnic civil war and consequent instability throughout eastern Europe.
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The result—in the teeth of bitter Polish protests—was that the government, as a condition of recognition, signed a treaty guaranteeing certain rights to its minorities. These rights covered citizenship, equality of treatment under the law and religious freedoms as well as minorities protection proper, in other words, rights to certain forms of collective organization such as schooling. The treaty was guaranteed by the League of Nations, which meant that complaints could be brought before the League (though not directly by the minority concerned). In certain circumstances, the League’s Council could take action against the Polish government.

During the previous century, the Great Powers had often made recognition of new states dependent upon a commitment to religious freedom and toleration: such had been the case, for example, in Belgium in 1830 and Romania in 1878. But the Polish Minority Rights Treaty took international law into uncharted waters. What was new in 1919 was the concern for “national” rather than exclusively religious rights, and for collective rights rather than individual liberties, as well as the provision for international deliberation by a supranational body rather than a conclave of Great Powers.