Boris Ziherl
Communism and Fatherland
VII.
During the consultations which the Central
Committee of the CPSU (b) held on questions
of Soviet music, Zhdanov said in part:
"He cannot be an internationalist who does not
love and respect his own people."
A bitter struggle is now being pursued in
the Soviet Union under this slogan against bourgeois cosmopolitanism in art, philosophy and in
science. In the editorial already quoted in No. 2
of the "Voprossy Filosofii", cosmopolitanism is
defined as follows: "Cosmopolitanism is a reactionary ideology which preaches renunciation
of national traditions, disparagement of national
individuality in the development of different
peoples, rejection of feelings of national honour
and national pride."1
Of course, we can agree completely with
this definition of cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitanism today is a weapon in the
hands of American imperialism, a mean's of spiritual disarmament of a people who are, or are
to come, under its domination. Cosmopolitanism
proceeds hand in hand with the most unbridled
nationalism which belittles, humiliates and rejects all that is foreign, and proclaims everything
of its own as "racially pure" and original; nationalistic cosmopolites or cosmopolitan nationalists
are seeking "proofs" in all corners of the globe
and in all fields of human activity of the decisive
spiritual influence of their nation upon which
to base their exceptional rights to definite territories. Cosmopolitanism as spiritual quislingism
is expressed in the slave-like imitation of all
that is foreign, in the fettering of the development of national
culture, in the servile discrediting
of oneself, in reducing the cultural achievements of one's nation to the passive copying
of foreign examples.
The general laws of social development appear only through the specific forms of development in every individual country. Each nation
with its share, with its achievements of material
and spiritual culture, participates in the building
of universal world culture. Living connections
with one's fatherland and nation are, therefore,
the pre-requisite for every progressive movement
of science, philosophy and art. It is possible to
penetrate into the essence of a phenomenon only
by making a thorough study of the different
specific forms of its manifestation. The generalisation of revolutionary theory becomes fuller
and more profound in content, they deepen upon
taking concrete form in the specific conditions
of time and place, through application in the
revolutionary activity of the national parties of
the proletariat.
Classics of Marxism-Leninism teach that national nihilism is alien to the working class, that
the working class cannot and must not be indifferent to its fatherland and to its nation, to
the positive traditions of its nation, to the national culture of its country. On the contrary,
the working class of every country is the lawful
heir to all the great and the significant that has
been created in that country for the development
of the nation and all of mankind.
Engels, in the preface to the first edition
of his work "The Development of Socialism from
A Utopia to A Science", stresses:
"We German socialists are proud of having
our source not only in Saint Simon, Fourier and
Owen, but also in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel."2
In his article "Bellicose Militarism and Anti-
Militaristic Tactics of the Social-Democrats",
written in 1908, Lenin said:
"The proletariat cannot bear itself with indifference and with equanimity towards the political, social and cultural conditions of its struggle, and, hence, it cannot be indifferent to the
fate of its country."3
By its profundity, sincerity, and warmth,
Lenin's article "On the National Pride of the
Great Russians" is a unique example of deep love for one's fatherland and for one's people
for their cultural heritage arid for their great
progressive traditions. Comrade Stalin, in his
works, and especially in his addresses delivered
during the Second World War, fired the national
consciousness of the Soviet peoples by pointing
to their magnificent traditions of struggle for the
freedom and independence of their homeland, by
calling upon them to be worthy of their great
ancestors, thinkers, poets, patriot-generals.
The history of our Party, especially during
the past ten or twelve years of its development,
is replete with struggle against national nihilism,
for a correct attitude towards national traditions
and towards national culture. Armed with Lenin's
thought, our Party overpowered the remnants of
social-democratic national nihilism in its ranks,
imbued the Yugoslav proletariat with a clear
knowledge of its blood kinship with all that is
great in the past of the Yugoslav peoples, a
knowledge that it has fatherlands: a "fatherland" of exploiters, and a fatherland of the working people, the realisation of which is the
historic feat of the working class. Without combatting national nihilism which turned the old
social-democracy into a "dry branch on the tree
of the nation" (Cankar), it would not have been
possible to turn the full attention of our Party
to solving tasks which confronted the Communists in the concrete Yugoslav reality, it would
not have been possible to solve these tasks as
they were solved during the war and revolution
of 1941-1945.
The struggle against national nihilism and
cosmopolitanism is a struggle against the attempt
to prove, by means of disparagement or even
denial of the national maturity of another nation,
the superiority of one nation over another, and
its right to rule over and to prescribe its own
laws for it. The struggle against cosmopolitanism
serves to awaken national consciousness, to rally
the creative forces of one's own people so that
it might successfully resist the plans of conquest
of foreign imperialists. It is the defence of the
Marxist-Leninist view that — in principle —
every nation, by developing its national culture,
is capable of contributing fruitfully to the development of universal culture.
But the "struggle against cosmopolitanism"
inevitably degenerates into nationalism if certain
basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism are not taken
into account.
Firstly, national cultures do not develop separately, there is mutual influence, mutual fertilisation among them! The culture of an advanced
people has always influenced the culture of the
more backward.
Byelinsky stated in his renowned survey of
Russian literature of 1846 that it is not so much
a matter of whether a certain people has borrowed something from another people but whether
it independently modified what it borrowed
according to its own national being, whether
what it borrowed underwent an organic blending
with the national, whether it went through the
process of assimilation. "German philosophy started with the Frenchman Descartes, but for that
reason it by no means became French."4
Engels in his letter to Konrad Schmidt of
October 20, 1890, replied to the question why
backward countries can also attain great success
in philosophy and science:
"As a definite field of division of labour.
the philosophy of every epoch has at its disposal
definite philosophic materials which have been
left it as a heritage by its predecessors and from
which it proceeds. Hence the phenomenon that
economically backward countries can play the
first violin in philosophy: France in the XVIII
century in relation to England upon whose philosophy the French based theirs, later Germany in relation to the former two."
Today we might add: and still latter Russia
in relation to the first and second and third.
Lenin, for example, termed Chernishevsky
"a great Russian Hegelian and materialist",5 and
generally underlined that the Russian enlighteners of the sixties of the XIX century in no way
considered themselves "individual" in the sense
of isolation from general European thought, in
the sence of virgin originality.6 Stalin, in his
talk with an American workers' delegation in
1927, pointed out that Lenin "was and remains
the most loyal and most consistent pupil of Marx
and Engels", and that he "developed these teachings still further".7 It is stressed in the notes on
the digest to the textbook of "The History of
the USSR" which was written in 1934 by Stalin,
Kirov and Zhdanov, that one of the main shortcomings of the digest is that "it does not reflect
the role and influence of the Western European
bourgeois-revolutionary and socialist movements
on the formation of the bourgeois-revolutionary
movement and the proletarian-socialist movement
in Russia. The writers of the digest obviously
forgot that the Russian revolutionaries considered themselves disciples and followers of the
well-known leaders of bourgeois-revolutionary
and Marxist thought in the West."8
Russian classical philosophy of the XIX century without doubt followed upon the philosophical heritage of the West, but on its part
it acted as a decisive influence on the inception
of realism in Russian literature which in the
second half of the XIX century indisputably
reached the level of development of world literature of that time. It is generally known that
Lenin termed Marxism itself as "the legitimate
successor to the best that was created by humanity in the XIX century in the shape of
German philosophy, of English political economy
and French socialism."9
The matter in question, therefore, is not
whether the social thought of a backward people
goes through the school of a more progressive
one, but whether its representatives are hollow
imitators or independent creators who know how
to further the cultural heritage of other peoples
by taking the concrete problems of their own
country, in its connection with international
events, and discovering new truths about nature
and society.
To deny the continuance of social thought
on a universal scale, and thus also the very
existence of universal culture; to deny the existence of interfertilisation of national cultures
wherein the lower culture always first becomes
impregnated by the higher, only then to act in
its turn upon the higher, to think that only
one's own national culture can and must influence other people while not being affected
by such influence is, of course — sheer nationalism.
Secondly, the development of society does not
proceed evenly but by leaps and bounds. Some
nations which at one time or other headed social progress gave way to other nations which
were until recently the personification of backwardness.
Speaking of the historical roots of Leninism,
Comrade Stalin, looking to Marx, points out that
the centre of revolutionary movement in the
past two or three centuries moved from England
to France, from France to Germany which became "the homeland of scientific socialism", from Germany to Russia, "the homeland of theory
and tactics of the proletarian revolution."10
It is only natural, and historical experience
proves it, that a country which becomes the
centre of a revolutionary movement also becomes
the cradle of the most progressive scientific and
philosophical ideas of its times.
Chernishevsky, for example, in his dissertation "On the Causes of the Disintegration of
Rome", declared that Western Europe had nothing to learn from backward, semi-feudal Russia.11
Certainly, today the assertion that Western Europe has nothing to learn from the Socialist East with Russia at its head would be reactionary.
What is more, one should and must say today
that that the Socialist East has nothing to lean
from the ruling bourgeois culture of Wester
Europe which has lost its national features am
is sinking into decadency, into pathology. This
of course, does not mean that western culture
will not live to see its regeneration as the result
of the victorious struggle of the progressive social forces which have never ceased to be the
legitimate heir to everything progressive that
was created during the glorious past of their
countries. This regeneration will come about together with the final liquidation of all the
causes of division of culture into "western"
and "eastern" in the sense of domination of
what is reactionary or progressive now in the
one, now in the other.
What struggle against cosmopolitanism means
first of all, is struggle against contemporary
bourgeois ideological decay, against the detrimental and destructive influence which it exercises on different national cultures, on the social
consciousness of the working masses. It need
must, therefore, have quite a definite class character.
It would be wrong and un-Marxist to term
as cosmopolitanism the recognition of the superiority of foreign culture in the past, or
the present for that matter (if the culture of
a more progressive nation is in question), of its
beneficial effect on the development of other
national cultures,. Internationalism on the cultural
front is the recognition of the real merits of
different nations in the development of universal
culture and in acquainting their nations with
those merits and with the achievements of other
peoples.
Chernishevsky and Dobrolyubov ridiculed
what is called the "patriotic esthetics" of their
time which already then saw in Russian literature the height of world literature.12 Byelinsky
proclaimed the following as genuine patriotism
in the cultural field for his time: "To see at the
same time the advantages of foreign culture over
one's own and yet be able to embrace one's own
even more closely — is not false patriotism, or
narrow-minded bias: it is but a noble and
inevitable endeavour to know oneself."13 These
are the words of a real patriot and internationalist.
To consider as absolute the leading role
which a definite national culture has at a given
time, to project that leading role arbitrarily from
the past into the future, has nothing in common
with real love for one's national culture, or with
internationalism on the cultural front. On the
contrary, every other nation with great cultural
traditions must consider such absolutism an insult to its national sentiments, and every Marxist-
Leninist must consider it — nationalism.
It should he stated that the tendency towards
such absolutism of Soviet, or rather Russian
culture at times pervades modern Soviet works,
different articles, film scripts, critiques, etc., arid
meets with no criticism.
When we hear that at the time of Nicholas I.,
in the fifties of the past century, Russia had
"already surpassed the West" (in the otherwise
good film "Pirogov"), or that during the time
of Chernishevsky, Hertzen and Shevchenko Slav
culture, in their person was the most progressive
in the world (editorial by A. Korneichuk in "Literaturnaya Cazctta" of March 9, 1949), etc., etc.,
— then, if nothing else, we must ask: Can it be
that Marx and Engels who have hitherto been
considered the founders of the most progressive
teaching in history, as teachers of Plekhanov
and Lenin were not living and fighting at the
same time? However deep our respect for the
brilliant pioneers of science and progressive social thought in backward and feudal Russia, we
still cannot but feel that to thus overlook the
two greatest geniuses of the XIX century is
incomprehensible and incorrect, un-Marxist.
Such or a rather similar attitude towards the
cultures of other peoples which in their time
doubtlessly constituted the height of world culture and upon which all progressive people in
these countries pride themselves is often met
with in the pages of the Soviet press, in different
speeches and reports. It, of course, cannot stand
up under Marxist-Leninist criticism.
Such absolutism of Russian culture, which
today undoubtedly heads world culture, is quite
unnecessary, neither is it in harmony with the
spirit and letter of the teachings of its greatest
representatives, from Byelinsky and Chernishevsky to Lenin.
Notes
1. "Voprossy Filosolil", 1948, No. 2, p. 14.
2. Engels, "The Development of Socialism from A Utopia to A Science". Belgrade. 1947, p. 9.
3. Lenin. Works, IV Edition, Vol. XV, p. 172.
4. Byelinsky, Selected Works (in one volume) Moscow, 1947, p. 555.
5. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Belgrade, 1948, p. 376.
6. Lenin, Works, IV Edition. Vol. II, p. 485.
7. Lenin, Selected Works, Belgrade, 1948, Vol. I, Book I, p. 37.
8. "Instructions of the CPSU (b) and the Decisions
of the Soviet Government on Popular Education from
1917-1947", Moscow-Leningrad, 1947, p. 185 (in Russian).
9. Lenin, Selected Works. Belgrade. 1948, Vol. 1
Book . pp. 59-60.
10. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, Belgrade, 1946, p.17.
11. Chernishevsky, Collected Works, St. Petersburg, 1906, Vol. VIII, pp. 172-3.
12. Compare Chernishevsky, Esthetic Relations of
Art Towards Reality, Moscow, 1945, p. 91, with Dobrolyubov, Good Intentions and Deeds, in Selected Works
of Philosophy, Moscow, 1946, Vol. II, p. 240.
13. Byelinsky, Selected Works (in one volume,) Moscow, 1947, p. 547.