NATIONAL CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT UNDER COMMUNISM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 22, 1998
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 1, 1957
• Content Type: REPORT

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NATIONAL CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT UNDER COMMUNISM
June 1957
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NATIONAL CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT UNDER COMMUNISM
Muslims of Russia, Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea,
Kirghiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and
Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain Peoples
of the Caucasus, and all you whose mosques and prayer
houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled upon by the Tsars and the oppressors
of Russia. Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your
national and cultural institutions are forever free and
inviolate. Organize your national life in complete
freedom. This is your right.
Thus read in part a proclamation issued on 7 December 1917
by the Bolsheviks over the signatures of Lenin and Stalin,
addressed to "All Muslim toilers of Russia and the East." The
Bolsheviks had realized that if their revolution was to be a
complete sucess and if they were to be able to consolidate their
newly-won power, the support of Russia's minority peoples, in-
cluding the Muslims, was essential. Hence this proclamation.
Other pronouncements designed for the same purpose were also
issued. For example, a previous declaration, also signed by
Lenin and Stalin, issued on 15 November 1917, had stated:
The Council of People's Commissars had decided to base
its activities with regard to the nationalities of
Russia on the following principles:
1. Equality and sovereignty of the nations of Russia.
2. The right of nations to free self-determination,
including the right to secede and form inde-
pendent states.
3. Abolition of all national and national-religious
privileges and restrictions whatsoever.
4+. Freedom of development for the national minorities
and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory
of Russia.
The Muslim peoples of Russia had, at the time, no way of
knowing how little a Bolshevik, i.e., Communist, promise meant.
The two declarations, therefore, at first kindled great hopes
among them. Colonial subjects of the Tsar, whose lands had been
forcibly incorporated into and held as part of the Russian
Empire, they fervently desired national independence; and these
proclamations seemed an open invitation to them to declare their
freedom from Russian rule and to create their own national states.
The Tsarist regime therefore appeared as the, chief enemy of the
Muslims as of the Bolsheviks, so the former were easily persuaded
to cooperate with the latter.
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Disillusionment was rapid. Muslim leaders were at first
feasted and feted by the Bolsheviks; but as the power of the latter
grew, they soon showed that their promises had been only a tac-
tical maneuver. The newly-established independent Muslim govern-
ments were ruthlessly suppressed by the Red Army andyRussian rule
re-imposed as the Bolsheviks forgot their promises to recognize
the right of self-determination.
The history of the Communists during the 4+0 years they have
been in power in the Soviet Union shows that self-determination
has not been the only subject on which they have betrayed both
their promises and their alleged doctrine. Throughout their
years of power, and especially since World War II in their propa-
ganda to the peoples of Asia and Africa, the Communists have
boasted of their success in solving the "nationalities problem"
by building a multi-national state in which every nationality is
equal and has full opportunity for a free national cultural
development. A brief examination of the record, however, shows
that the permitted opportunity for national cultural development
is severely limited where it exists at all and is, in any case,
without exception, so controlled and warped as to serve not the
needs and aspirations of the various peoples but only the interests
of the Communist Party and Great Russian chauvinism.
Let us, for example, consider the position of Islam. In the
Muslim regions of Russia, as in Muslim lands everywhere at that
time, Islam was the hearthstone around which the life of its
devotees revolved, or rather did revolve until the Communists
violated their promises and made it impossible for Muslims to
perform their religious duties. As we have seen, the November
1917 proclamation promised: Muslims that they would be free to
continue in the practice of their faith. Even some years before
the Revolution, in an article entitled "To the Rural Poor,"
Lenin had written:
Everyone must be perfectly free not only to belong to
whatever religion he pleases, but he must be free to
disseminate his religion and to change his religion.
No official should be entitled to ask anyone about his
religion; it is a matter for that person's conscience
and no one has any business to interfere.
A decree on the separation of church from state, issued 5 February
1918, declared in Article 3 that "Every citizen may profess any
religion or none;" in Article 5 that "Free practice of religious
rites is guaranteed;" and in Article 9 that "Citizens may teach
and study religion privately."
Once the Communists had consolidated their power, however, they
began to reveal their true nature, to violate their earlier promises, and
to take repressive acts. Lands belonging to mosques were confiscated
by a decree in 1918; Muslim religious brotherhoods were outlawed
during the period 1921-22; and a campaign was launched to ridicule
Islam and to undermine the influence of the spiritual leaders of
the pprove"06r Ue1ea969 06)' 44
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by Lenin before the Revolution and guaranteed by law immediately
after the Revolution, but soon Article 122 of a new criminal
code made it a crime, carrying punishment of one year's cor-
rectional labor, to teach religion to children and minors, either
in public or in private.
In 1929, a direct attack on Islam was begun which included
measures that made active religious life virtually impossible.
Islamic leadership was eliminated by the arrest and deportation,
if not liquidation, of almost all persons enjoying any religious
status; nearly all village and most city mosques were closed
(see below); religious literature was suppressed through the
changing of alphabets, the confiscation of existing religious
texts, including the Qur'an, and the suppression of all publica-
tions of a.reiigious nature; and anyone in a responsible position
was dismissed if known to be a pious and practicing Muslim.
Muslims were to be free to practice their beliefs and
customs--that was the Bolshevik promise. But is not Islam part
of those beliefs? Is it not the most vital and most deeply .
cherished part of Muslim life? Yet the Communists, in spite of,
their commitment, have suppressed Islam ruthlessly. Take the
matter of mosques, for example. When the Communists came to
power in 1917, there were 7,000 mosques in European Russia.
alone in addition to the unnumbered thousands in Muslim Central
Asia, the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, and the Crimea. But in
1942 the Communists themselves admitted that there were then
only 1,312 mosques in the whole of the Soviet Union, The others
had been confiscated and converted into warehouses or stores or
otherwise desecrated or allowed to fall into ruins. Yet in the
November 1917 proclamation, the Bolsheviks had condemned the
Tsars for destroying mosques and prayer houses and called for
Muslim support so that such actions could be brought to an end'
Although a few mosques have been built in the post-war
period and ,a few others repaired, the situation is little better
than it was in 1942. In Tashkent, for example, where once 300
mosques graced the city before the Communists came to power,. there
are today only 20. Samarkand, which formerly had over 100, today
has only 17, of which only one is permitted to be used. Bokhara,
which once boasted of 360, has also only one today. Alma-Ata, a
Muslim town for centuries and the capital of the Muslim republic
of Kazakhstan, has not a single mosque, 'nor are any to be found
in such large Muslim centers as Krasnovodsk, Ashkabad, or
Stalinabad.
The same story holds true for the madrasahs, or.religious
schools. Before the Communist regime there were at least 8,000.
The 103 madrasahs which were once the pride of Bokhara's Muslims
and which used to train 16',000 mullahs annually are no more.
Today there is only one--the only one., in fact, in the entire
Soviet Union--which has a mere 105 students who follow a nine-
year course.
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Such is the manner in which the Communists honor their promise
to respect Muslim beliefs and customs, Muslim national and cultural
institutions!
The same fate that befell the mosques and madrasahs has also
been the fate of the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam. This too the
Communists promised to respect--but we know what a Communist prom-
ise means. Speaking to the Daghestani people at T'emir-Khan-Shura
(now Buinaksk) on 13 November 1920, Stalin declared.
We are informed that the Shariah has great importance
for the peoples of Daghestan. We are also informed that
the enemies of Soviet power are spreading rumors that the
Soviet regime would ban the Shariah. I am authorized to
declare here-on behalf of the Government of the RSFSR.
that these rumors are lies. The Government of Russia
leaves to every people the full right to administer itself
on the basis of its own laws and customs. The Soviet
Government considers the Shariah as customary law of the
same standing as that in force among the other peoples
living in Russia. If it is the desire of the people of
Daghestan their laws and customs shall be preserved. 5
This is a fine assuring statement, for could there be a clearer
and more binding commitment on the part of the Communists to
respect the Shariah? Unfortunately it did not mean anything, for
it was only another example of the fact that the Communists
constantly say one thing and then do another. The truth is that
Stalin knew he was speaking a lie, knew that the Communists had
no intention of respecting the Shariah, for only a month earlier,
in an article published in the 10 October 1920 issue of Pravda
(which, of course, the Daghestanis had not seen nor had any way
of knowing about), he had declared:
... if, for instance, the Daghestani masses, who are
profoundly imbued with religious prejudice's, follow the
Communists "on the basis of the Shariah," it is obvious
that the direct methods of combatting religious pre-
judices in this country must be. replaced by indirect and
more cautious methods.
In other words, political expediency required the Communists
to make promises now and break them later. This is exactly what
the Communists did. The Soviet Government for a time allowed
the Shariah to continue in force. In 1922 it even established
Shariah courts in Turkestan and then later, in 1924-25, in the
course of the agrarian reform, had recourse to these courts to
obtain favorable declarations from the Muslim divines. But once
they had served their purpose, all Shariah courts were abolished,
especially after the initiation of the vigorous anti-Islam campaign
in 1929. As the January 1950 issue of the Soviet periodical
Sovetskoye Gosudarstvo i Pravo put it.
Stalinist precepts, when carried out, quickly led to
the elimination of the old-fashioned beliefs in the
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Shariah, eliminated itself and was liquidated.
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Stalin, in 1920, had praised the Shariah as ? Muslim cust;omar~r law;
but the Soviet Political Dictionary (1940) describes it as 'a.
means for keeping. the workers in economic and political subordina-
tion by the rich. It legalizes domination, exploitation and
slavery of the workers, the enslavement of women." and states
flatly that "in the USSR, now, the Shariah is eradicated." Stalin,
in 1920 praised the Shariah as Muslim customary law; but Kizil
Uzbekistan, on 29 May 1949, described it as "a collection of Taws
which are among the most ignoble and unjust in the world."
Such is the manner in which Communists honor their promises,
the way in which they respect Muslim beliefs and customs, Muslim
national and cultural institutions!
The Communists have not been content t;o close mosques and
madrasahs, suppress the Shariah, and liquidate Muslim religious
leaders; they even insult the Islamic faith itself and its Holy
Prophet (God bless and keep him;) One Communist writer,. In
setting forth the.official party line, described Islam as'a
"primitive and fanatical religion" which is "a chaotic mixture
of Christian, Jewish, and pagan doctrines." ,/ And Bagirov,
the apostate First Secretary of the Azerbaidzhan Communist
Party, in a speech printed in the l4 July 1950 issue of Bobinski
Rabotchi (Baku),'' called the Prophet Muhammad (May God bless s and
keep him!) "a representative of the feudal-mercantile aristocracy
of Mecca who utiliz.ed..Islam for the unification of the Arab
tribes and for the maintenance of their own power." Yet, despite
these blasphemies against Islam and Muhammad (May God bless and
keep himj, the Communists are today trying to persuade the
Muslim peoples of Africa, Asia, and the'Middle East that they have
no better friends than the Communists!
The Holy Qurfan makes incumbent upon every true believer
the faithful observance of the five Pillars of Islam: profession
of the faith, prayer, alms. giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Those
all formed an integral part of the beliefs and customs of the
Muslim peoples of Russia--which the Communists promised to respect.
But today the Pillars are proscribed in the Soviet Union. Only
the profession of the faith can be made without hindrance; but-
even this must be done in secret unless the pious Muslim wishes
to run the risk of being subjected to presaure,.economic or
otherwise; on the part of the authorities. Prayer, too, is im-
possible for the same reason. In any case, the Muslim worker is
not permitted to leave his work to recite his prayers at the
appointed times, and the communal Friday prayer is precluded by
the 'absence of mosques and by the fact that the Kremlin has
decreed that Muslims must observe Sunday rather that the tradi-
tional Muslim Friday as the weekly day of rest. The younger
generation; having been deprived of religious instruction, is
further handicapped by its ignorance of the prayers.
Fasting during the holy month of Ramadan is almost impos-
sible. A. Muslim worker, if he should decide to defy the Communist
ban on fasting, is nevertheless forced to do a full dayts work;
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norm is severe. Consequently, fasting has been made virtually
physically impossible. Moreover, as a means of enforcing the
ban, Muslims are frequently subjected to tests during Ramadan.
For example, they may be called in for conference by their
superior's and there offered a drink.or a cigarette. Refusal
and may well
more admission
to accept is to
punishmengt,
lead to dismissal if not
Alms giving, or zakat~, is rigorously prohibited by law.
The Criminal Codes of the Uzbek, Tadzhik,, and Turkmen Republics,
as well as that of the RSFSR which is also enforced in the
Kirghiz and Kazakh Republics, provide criminal penalties for
the collection of such religious tithes. The fifth Pillar,,
j or pilgrimage, was banned by the Communists from the
the ha
11.1
early days of their regime. As a result of wartime concessions.,
the ban was lifted in 1944, only to be re-imposed in 1947.
the ban was again lifted after Stalin's death, this was more in'
theory than in practice, for the only Soviet Muslims to have
made the trip to Mecca have been faithful Communists whose
purpose in making the hajj is not primarily to fulfill any
religious duty but to propagandize. The ordinary Soviet Muslim,.
is still prevented from making the pilgrimage.
Such is the manner in which the Communists have respected
Muslim beliefs and customs, Muslim national and cultural insti-
tutions;
Let as turn now to a consideration of some other aspects
of Muslim life and culture in the Soviet Union. The Vllth
All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social-Democrat Labor
Party (the former name of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union) in April 1917 adopted a resolution which read, in part:
"The Party demands wide regional autonomy the abolition of a
compulsory state language ..." 9 This was part of the Bolshevik
campaign to win the support of Russia's minority peoples. A
people's language is without doubt the most treasured part of its
culture, and a people will fight as hard, if not harder, to
preserve that heritage as to win political independence. The
Bolsheviks knew this. Stalin, in fact, in his Marxism and the
National onal Question, had written:
A minority is discontented not because there is no
national union but because it does not enjoy the
right to use its native language. Permit it to use
its native language and the discontent will pass of
itself.
Once the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power, however,
this liberal view of the language question began to change and
Great Russian chauvinism once again began to emerge. Lenin saw
the danger; and in'a letter written on 31 December 1922, not
meant for general publication, he warned that:
it is necessary to set the strictest rules concerning
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which enter the union and to abide by those rules with
especial carefulness. There is no doubt that, under the
pretext of unity of the railroad service, under the
pretext of fiscal unity, and so forth, with our present
apparatus a mass of abuses of genuinely Russian character
will take place. 10
After Lenin's death, the trend he had foreseen gathered more and
more strength as the Soviet leaders forgot their early promise not
to accord special rights to any single language. The climax came
on 13 March 1938 when the Kremlin issued a decree which made the
teaching of Russian henceforth obligatory in all national minority
schools.
Today, Russian is not only taught in all schools but has also,
through the force of political, economic and legal pressures,
become the language of all business and social life in every part
of the Soviet Union. Every Soviet citizen, regardless of his
national origin, is compelled to make use of it if he is to
achieve any success in his career; whatever that may be. Course
work at universities and other higher educational institutions
in the USSR, even those located in Muslim areas, is carried on
in Russian, This not only strengthens the privileged position of
Russian but it keeps many minority youths from obtaining advanced
education since their training in the Russian language has been
so poor that they do not qualify.. As a result, only a small
percentage of the graduates of educational institutions in Muslim
areas are actually Muslim. For example, in March 1947, the rector
of the Kazakh State University admitted that since the university's
founding in 1934, only 17 percent of all graduates were Kazakh.
Similarly of the 1,100 students graduated by the Uzbek State
University in Samarkand from 1927 to 1947, only slightly more
than half were Asiatics, the rest having been Russians and others
of European descent Parallel examples could also be adduced
for all other Muslim areas and their higher educational institu-
tions.
Not only have the Communists violated their promise not to
institute a compulsory state language, but they have also been
making a determined effort to Russianize the various minority
languages. Communist writers and grammarians are trying slowly
to change the structure of the minority languages to make them
conform as much as possible with the Russian model; and when new
words are needed in a language, the Communists do not permit
them to be formed from native roots but require that they be
adapted from the Russian equivalents. Illustrative of this is
the statement of the Russian press, speaking of a linguistics
conference which met atBaku in January 1951:
The duty of linguists is to write really scientific works
on the origin and history of the language, in doing which
they must fully show the favorable influence of the
Russian language on it, and must establish the identical
elements in the two languages. The language must be en-
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The above quotation was in reference specifically to the.
Azerbaidzhani language, but the same principles are being
applied to all minority languages, including those spoken by
the various Muslim peoples.
Violence has also been done to the minority languages in
another manner. The Muslim peoples. of Central Asia and the
Caucasus, at the time of the 1917 Revolution, had long used the
Arabic script for their languages. As part of their campaign
against Islam and in order to weaken the ties between Russia's
Muslims and the Muslims of other lands, the Kremlin, in the
1.920's, decreed that henceforth all minority languages should
be written in Latin alphabets. Then, a decade later, a new
change was ordered and Cyrillic scripts replaced the recently
adopted Latin ones. In neither case. were the wishes of the
minority peoples taken into consideration. The Communists in
Moscow simply decided that these far-reaching changes should be
made and then forced them upon the people. Such is the Communist
idea of "free national cultural development."
One aspect of the linguistic heritage of any people is its
literature, for it is in its literature that a people's language
is preserved and perpetuated. But consider what this Communist-
dictated change of alphabets meant. The new generations, since
they would be taught only the new script, were cut off from
free access to their nation's literature, for the Soviet Govern-
ment, being in complete control of all printing establishments,
could, and did, authorize republication in the new scripts only
of such works as it decided would serve the interests of the
Communist Party. The fact is that since the imposition of
Cyrillic scripts, almost all of the books published in the
various minority languages have been translations of Russian
works, especially the writings of Lenin, Stalin, and other
Communist Party theoreticians. The traditional native literary
works remain unpublished and hence are not available to the
present and future generations. This situation is especially
grievous for Muslim youth since the Soviet Government does not
permit the publication of almost all Islamic works.
The Communists have, at the same time, begun a systematic
campaign to ridicule and denounce the native folk literature
as a means of justifying their suppression of it. The great
Kirghiz epic Manas, portraying the struggle between the
Kirghiz people and the Chinese, once viewed with favor by the
Soviets, is now condemned as "antipopular," "reactionary" and
"an idealization of Khans and feudal lords." The Azerbaid-
zhani epic Dede Korkut (which is also the Turkmen epic under
the name Korkut Ata , once considered as an example of the
highest type of popular poetry and of "people's expression,"
has somehow, in Communist eyes, become a reactionary bourgeois
poem. Kublandibatir, the Kazakh epic, is no longer a paean
of national virtue and valor but "low patter,. extolling
violence and brigandage, steeped in the poison of hatred of
other peoples in reactionar Muslim ideology and ideas of
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as have a multitude of works .of lesser stature. The fact is
that the Communists condemn-=and therefore prevent the publi-
cation of--all Muslim literary.works except those few which
extol the virtues of Russia and the Russians.
Such is the manner in which the Communists respect Muslim
beliefs and customs, Muslim national and cultural institutions;
Cr let as take the matter of history, which, along with
religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a
people's cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have
interfered in a shameless manner.. For example, on 9 August
1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting
in Moscow, issued a directive ordering the party's Tartar
Provincial Committee "to proceed to a scientific revision
of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings
and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by indi-
vidual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history." 12
In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten--let us be
frank, was to be falsified--in order to eliminate references to
Great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real
course of Tartar-Russian relations. And this was no isolated
case. In every Muslim area within the USSR, historians, on
orders of the Communist Party, have rewritten history to distort
the facts so that the Russians appear always in a good light.
Needless to say, histories which present the facts truthfully
have been withdrawn and destroyed, so that the present and future
generations of Muslims are forever denied the chance of learning
the true facts of their nations' past.
Such is the manner in which Communists respect Muslim
beliefs and customs, Muslim national and cultural institutions.
The resurgence of Great Russian chauvinism, especially since
World War II, has also resulted in a campaign to vilify the
historic heroes of the various Muslim peoples. For example, as
late as 1947, Kenesary Kasymov, the leader of the 1837-1846
Kazakh resistance to Russian aggression--and the national hero
of the Kirghiz as well--was accepted by the Communists as a
fighter for national liberation. But in June 1949 Voprosy
Istorii, in an article on Kazakh history, declared that
Ke~nesary's policy directed at the creation of a centralized
state was an expression of his usurpational efforts to subordinate
all other holders of power to. himself." On 26 December 1950,
Pravda published a virulent attack on the mistakes of historians
of Kazakhstan and made Kenesary and his brother out as black
villains. Communist, Great Russian, interests required that his
name be besmirched, so Kazakh history was rewritten. And the
Communists call this "free cultural development!"
Or take the case of Shamyl, the great hero of Caucasian
resistance to Russian aggression, who has received the same
treatment as Kenesary. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in an
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movement of the Caucasian mountain peoples, which was directed
against the colonial policy of Tsarist Russia." His denigration
began in 1947 at a conference of the Historical Institute of the
USSR Academy of Sciences, when one speaker denounced Shamyl's
movement as not having been one for national liberation but a
struggle "for freedom for wolves, for freedom for backwardness,
oppression, darkness, Asiaticism." Other conference members
did not receive the speech well and some even reproached Shamyl's
detractor; and nothing further was heard on the subject for three
years. In March 1950, one Geidar Guseimov was given a Stalin
Prize for his book History of Nineteenth Century Social and Philo-
sophical Thought in Azerbaidzhan, in which Shamyl was portrayed
sympathetic--ally. But only two months later, in May, the Prize was
rescinded and the Prize Committee administered a sharp rebuke,
declaring that Guseimov's appraisal of Shamyl "basically distorts
the meaning of the movement, which was reactionary and national-
istic, and was in the service of British capitalism and the
Turkish sultan." After that, the history of another minority
people was rewritten to meet the needs of Great Russian chau-
vinism. And the Communists call this "free cultural develop-
ment!"
Perhaps the best example of the Communist contempt for the
rights of the minority peoples of the Soviet Union and of the
emptiness of their boast of "free cultural development" is the
wartime liquidation of several entire Muslim peoples: Crimean
Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, as well as the
BuddhistKalmyk people. It is hard to conceive of a clearer
'violation of the promise to permit "free cultural development,"
for how can there be a culture or cultural development if a
people is liquidated or dispersed in small units amidst other
peoples? How can this be reconciled with the Communist pledge,
as contained in the 1917 Proclamation, to respect Muslim beliefs
and customs, Muslim national and cultural institutions?
Stalin and his cohorts attempted at the time to justify
this genocide on the grounds of military necessity, but the
following statement shows the falsity of this claim:
All the more monstrous are the acts whose initiator
was Stalin and which are rude violations of the basic
Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the
Soviet state. We refer to the mass deportations from
their native places of whole nations ...; this deporta-
tion action was not dictated by any military necessity.
Thus, already at the end of 1943 ... a decision was
taken and executed concerning the deportation of all
the Karachai from the lands on which they lived. In
the same period, at the end of December 1943, the same
lot befell the whole population of the Autonomous Kalmyk
Republic. In March 1944 all the Chechen and Ingush
peoples were deported and the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous
Republic was liquidated. In April 1944 all Balkars
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many of them a.nd there was no place to which to deport
them.
This statement makes clear the callous violation of national
minority rights by the Kremlin, And it is not merely a propa-
ganda.statement written by some Western anti-Communist but it
came from the mouth of Nikita Krushchev, present head of the
Communist Party, during his speech to the party's XXth Congress
on 25 February 1956. He claimed that it was all due to Stalin;
but the fact remains that if the Kremlin masters had the power
to violate minority rights once in so brutal a fashion, they
can do so again whenever they might so choose. It is simply
another illustration of the meaninglessness of the Communist
boast about "free cultural development."
In his well-known essay Marxism and the National Question,
written in 1913 before the Communists came to power, Stalin
wrote:
only the nation itself has the right to determine
its destiny. ... no one has the right forcibl to
interfere in the life of the nation,- to destroy its
schools and other institutions, to violate its habits
and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its
rights 14
And in "Counter-Revolution and the Peoples of Russia," an
article published on 13 August 1917, Stalin wrote:
But no one has the right to interfere in the internal
life of a nation and by force "correct" its mistakes.
Nations are sovereign in matters of internal life, and
they have the right to manage themselves according to
their own desires. 15/
The record of 40 years of 'Communist rule, however, shows that
every one of these principles professed by the Communists before
they won power has been systematically and constantly violated.
The Kremlin has interfered forcibly in the life of the various
minority nations in every conceivable manner; the latter's
schools and other institutions, for example, mosques and
madrasahs have been destroyed; their languages have been
repressed~or at least changed and corrupted; their rights
have been curtailed; and their right to rule themselves
according to their own desires has been infringed.
These statements are especially true of the Muslim
peoples of the Soviet Union. Once they were subject colonial
peoples of Tsarist Russia, today they are subject colonial
peoples of Soviet Russia. The only difference is that under
Tsarist rule they enjoyed cultural autonomy; whereas today,
despite the Communist boast of "free cultural development"
permitted every nation within the borders of the USSR, the
Ap t deFoo l TIM : 'fAT V tfP0 9r'D ture
and are more and and more e ng orce~ to
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by the needs of Great Russian chauvinism, i.e., are being
Russianized. The other Muslim peoples of the world would do
well to reflect on the fate of their unfortunate co-religionists
before they accept the Communist propaganda now being directed
at them. For there can be little doubt but that if ever the
Communists were to gain control of their lands, they would, suffer
the same fate.
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SOURCES
1. I..V. Kluchnikov and A. Sabanin (eds.), Mezhdunarodnaya
politika noveishege vremeni v do?ovorakh, notakh i
ed klaratsiakh (Moscow., 1925-'8), "I, p. 94--977-
2. Sir Olaf Caroe, Soviet Empire. The Turks of Central
Asia and Stalinism London, 1953 p. 105.-
3. V. Lenin, Selected Works (New York, 1943), II, p. 284,
4. Gazeta Raboche o i Krestyanskogo Pravitelstva, 23-January
1913 1d S ty e .
5. I.V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow, 1947), IV, p. 395-6.
6. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question
(New York, 1942), p. 84-85.
7. See,Mustafa Chokaev,."Souvenirs de Turkestan," Promethee
(Paris), (1938-39).
8. S.P. Tolstov On the Traces of the Ancient Civilization
.of Khwarezm Moscow, 1 949),, T.-=-22.
9. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question,. p. 269.
10. See Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union:
Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1973.(Cambridge, Mass., 1954),
p.,273-77. Full text also in Leon Trotsky, Stalin,- (London,
1947), p. 361-63.
11. Quoted in Caroe, op. cit., p. 156.
12. Walter Kolarz, Russia and her Colonies (New York, 1952),
P. 39, quoting -.rropa agandist, No. 13/1 , 1944, p. 22.
13. Columbia University Russian Institute, The Anti-Stalin
Campaign and International ?Communism (New %Zork, _9 5 ,,
p. 57.
14. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, p. 18.
15. Stalin, Sochineniya, III, p. 209.
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