Marx and Engels on guard

“The Russian Menace to Europe” is a somewhat piquant collection of articles by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in 1953. The collection is edited by two American scholars, Paul W Blackstock, a “retired” Army intelligence operative, and Bert F Hoselitz, an economist. The point of this curious book, published at the height of the Cold War, is to point out that Marx and Engels were anti-Russian, and then use this knowledge as a battering-ram against Stalin's Soviet Union, which – of course – claimed to be Marxist. Both editors also emphasize Marx' and Engels' support for Poland. How well this political provocation worked, I don't really know. However, the collection is interesting in its own right, and seems to include all important texts by Marx and Engels on Russia, Poland, Czarist diplomacy, the Crimean War and Pan-Slavism.

Marx and Engels regarded capitalism and liberal democracy as historically progressive steps, compared to feudalism and royal absolutism. Only capitalism could create centralized nation-states with modern, industrial economies and hence lay the material basis for socialism, the next step in human history. For this reason, Marx and Engels supported “bourgeois” and democratic movements (such as the revolutions of 1848), while calling on the workers (if at all possible) to organize themselves as an independent force through workers' parties and labour unions. It's not surprising, therefore, that the two founders of modern socialism regarded Czarist Russia as the main bastion and pillar of reaction in Europe. Russia had defeated Napoleon, set up the so-called Holy Alliance, and frequently intervened to crush revolutions, most notably in Austria-Hungary in 1848-49. Indeed, Marx and Engels viewed Russian expansionism as a very concrete enemy to be stopped at almost any cost. They believed that a democratic, united Germany should launch a “revolutionary war” against Russia. Marx and Engels supported the Ottoman Empire against Russia, despite the fact that the Ottomans, too, were reactionary according to Marxist theory. During the Crimean War, Marx and Engels backed the Ottoman-British-French coalition, argued against the strong pro-Russian sentiment in the United States (the Americans were still suspicious of Britain), castigated the British for inaction and hoped that Austria-Hungary (another reactionary state) would join the war on the anti-Russian side. In Britain, Marx collaborated with the well-known pro-Turkish lobbyist David Urquhart. An interesting example of early Marxist Realpolitik! In general, the founders of “scientific socialism” took positions on Islam most of the contemporary left would reject as Orientalist and Islamophobic. They retrospectively supported Charles Martel against the Arabs, and the defenders of Vienna against the Turks in 1529 and 1683. These Muslim empires threatened “European development” and it was therefore necessary to save “European civilization”. In this context, Marx and Engels also express support for the medieval knights who fought the (non-Muslim) Mongols at Wahlstatt in 1241.

It seems that Marx and Engels originally didn't believe in a domestic Russian revolution. Instead, they viewed the liberation of Russian-occupied Poland as the key to the downfall of Czarism. By “Poland”, Marx and Engels apparently meant a much larger area than “Congress Poland” (the 19th century Russian-controlled Poland) or indeed modern Poland. They wanted Poland to regain its lost territories in the east, inhabited by Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians. Ironically, the founders of Marxism had the same expansive view of Poland as the later anti-Marxist Polish leader Pilsudski, who fought Lenin's Red Army! Marx and Engels even said that Poles (and the Irish) are the two European peoples who have the absolute duty of being nationalists before they can become internationalist. (In a later text, Marx and Engels took the more sensible position that Polish, Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian democrats should freely negotiate the future relations of their respective nations.) Poland was the advanced Western guard of Czarism, and wresting it out of Russian hands therefore an absolute necessity in order to drive back the Czarist empire. Marx and Engels further demanded that Germany grants national self-determination to the smaller, German-occupied part of Poland. They argued that this was good *for Germany*, as it would create a German-Polish alliance against the Russians. In this context, it's interesting to note that the two socialist leaders opposed German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, with the (prescient) argument that this would make Germany and France permanent enemies, with the French becoming allies of Russia in order to regain its lost provinces. By letting the French keep Alsace-Lorraine, France and Germany could instead have united against the Czar.

The Marxist founders were absolutely opposed to Pan-Slavism, viewing it as an instrument of reactionary Russian foreign policy and expansionism in Europe. Even “democratic” Pan-Slavism is rejected, including the “revolutionary” version represented by Mikhail Bakunin, the future anarchist. These groups are simply the useful fools and tools of the Czar. The Cold War editors of this volume are quick to point out the bizarrely accurate predictions of Marx and Engels concerning Russian expansion: the natural borders of a Pan-Slavist empire goes from Danzig, or perhaps Stettin, to Trieste! That is indeed were the Iron Curtain was raised after World War II. Marx and Engels mentioned attempts by Russia to expand in India through Afghanistan, and claimed that the autocratic rulers of Moscow occasionally called for “class struggle” by serfs against landlords, in order to mobilize popular support for the Russian armies in newly conquered lands... Above all, Marx and his collaborator feared that the Russians might conquer the Balkans and Constantinople (known in Russian as Czarigrad), thereby turning the Black Sea into a purely Russian possession, threatening the Mediterranean in the process.

Marx and Engels were certainly right about Russia's role in 19th century European politics. However, their early writings on the Pan-Slavist issue also contain very disturbing ideas. Marx and Engels argued that the Slavs (except the Poles) were “peoples without history” and “barbarians” doomed to perish as world civilization advanced, that they were “reactionary peoples” since they had opposed the 1848 revolution in Austria-Hungary, and that the only solution was anti-Slav terror and genocide! These passages are worth quoting in full:

”Among all the nations and petty ethnic groups of Austria there are only three which have been carriers of progress, which have played an active role in history, and which still retain their vitality – the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. For this reason they are now revolutionary. The chief mission of all the other races and peoples – large and small – is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust. Therefore they are counterrevolutionary”.

“But with the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat, which Louis Napoleon is trying with all his power to conjure up, the Germans and Magyars in Austria will become free and will take bloody revenge on the Slavic barbarians. The general war which will then break out will explode this Slavic league and these petty, bull-headed nations will be destroyed so that nothing is left of them but their names. The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also entire reactionary peoples to disappear from the earth. And that too would be progress.”

“…we, along with the Poles and the Magyars, will only be able to secure the Revolution through the most determined terror against these Slavic peoples. We now know where the enemies of the Revolution are concentrated: in Russia and the Austrian Slavic countries; and no slogans, no promises of an uncertain democratic future of these countries will prevent us from treating our enemies as enemies.”

“Then it is war. `A ceaseless fight to the death' with Slavdom, which betrays the Revolution, a battle of annihilation and ruthless terrorism – not in the interests of Germany, but of the Revolution!”.

It's difficult not to see this as Slavophobic racism and chauvinism, or something even worse. Marx and Engels had some pretty unkind things to say about other “barbarians”, too. The Turks are a “thoroughly degenerate nation”, Mexicans are “lazy” and didn't know what to do with California (Marx and Engels supported the United States in the 1848 war), the Sami people in Lapland are “nomadic savages” speaking a “barbaric, half-Esquimaux idiom”. Albanians (called Arnauts in this collection) are also given short shrift, being “as yet very unprepared for civilization. Their predatory habits will force any neighbouring Government to hold them in close military subjection, until industrial progress in the surrounding districts shall find them employment as hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

In all fairness to Karl Marx and his close collaborator, they *did* develop more flexible views on these subjects in their later writings, although they never explicitly – as far as I know – repudiated their early statements. As early as 1853, Marx and Engels admitted that independent Slav nations (plus Romania and Greece) carved out of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire might gradually become modernized, with one faction turning to the West for inspiration, rather than simply becoming tools of Russia. There is even a formulation in their writings on the Crimean War that *could* be interpreted as support for a South Slav federation, something akin to the later Yugoslavia. In 1882, Marx and Engels wrote that national self-determination for the Austrian Slavs might become possible, too, when Pan-Slavism eventually collapses.

This, I think, might be the kernel of the poodle: Marx and Engels had come to believe that a domestic revolution in Russia was possible, after all. If victorious, such a revolution would upset the geopolitical applecarts, remove the main bastion of reaction in Europe, and create an entirely new political situation. “The Russian Menace to Europe” contains some of Marx' and Engels' later writings on the Russian question, in which they seriously discuss the prospects for a Russian revolution, holding out the prospect that it might base itself on the collective property of the “mir” (the peasant commune) and hence take a path somewhat different from that of Western Europe. Indeed, it seems as if Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were no longer absolutely sure whether capitalism was obviously progressive outside Western Europe and North America…

Despite its somewhat colourful origins, “The Russian Menace to Europe” is one of the more interesting collections of Marx' and Engels' writings I've seen, and it raises a lot of questions (some of them awkward), including a number not mentioned here. I therefore give it five stars.