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previous: Chapter 5 (Part 2) This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Nationality Problem of the Soviet Union by Roman Smal-Stocki published by The Bruce Publishing Company Milwaukee, 1952 The text is in the public domain. This page has not been proofread. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 7

 p158  Chapter VI

The Fight Against Russian Communist Imperialism
Outside the Soviet Union

The Promethean Movement

The successive occupation of all democratic national Republics of the non‑Russian nationalities (with the exception of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) about 1920‑1922 by Communist Russia, carried out by the Russian Red Army, forced all the legal governments into exile. In the first years after this defeat the embassies, legations, and consulates of the exiled legal governments continued to function in various States of Europe which had recognized their independence. The governments continued their political tasks and were everywhere the directing center of the political and cultural activities of the émigrés. In a short time these nationalities developed a flourishing cultural life in Paris, Warsaw, Prague, Rome, and Berlin, and in spite of the Iron Curtain this had its influence on the mother countries, occupied by the Red Army, and stimulated the non‑Russian nationalities there to new importation against the Soviet dictator­ship, to constant uprising and unrest. This gave the legal governments the basis for repeated diplomatic appeals to the various governments, parliaments, and the League of Nations, and these were supported by the public opinion of Europe which was becoming more and more conscious of the true nature of the Soviets.

Quite naturally in all these centers of political life in Europe the leaders of the exiled governments began to form a close family, bound together by their common fate and the common struggle. Quite naturally also there began in all political circles of the emigrations discussions and debates about the reasons for the common defeat. These resulted in the clear knowledge and conviction that not only the ignorance of the foreign powers about the national problems of old imperial Russia had caused the common catastrophe in the defensive war against Russian Communist aggression — but that there has also been a fundamental mistake in the political and military outlook of all nationalities. The political and military analysis of the lost war showed convincingly that the chief reason for the defeat of every nation was the lack of a common front of all non‑Russian nationalities against Soviet Moscow.

Moscow had the strategical advantage of the interior lines and with an unthreatened rear it could always concentrate its military forces on one single nation, while it induced all the others to maintain neutrality by solemn promises of respect for their independence. Thus during the Communist aggression against Ukraine-Caucasia, the Baltic States and Finland were neutral: they had no idea that the defense of Ukraine could also decide their fate. When the moment for decision came after the  p159 alliance of Ukraine with Poland in 1920 and the dramatic common war against Communist aggression — the Baltic States with Finland, Roumania, Caucasia, and Turkestan waited! Then came Caucasia's turn, especially Georgia's, and again all other nationalities maintained neutrality, waiting for some action by the League of Nations. In this way one democratic republic after another was eliminated by aggrieve Russian Communism which systematically broadened and consolidated its base for the future world revolution and the proletarian world dictator­ship.

This analysis not only clarified for the leading statesmen of the exiled governments and national committees the basic reason for the common defeat but also led them to the very important conclusion that the future victory of any nation against Russian Communism depended upon one fundamental condition, namely, the establishment of this common front of all subjugated nations against Soviet Moscow.

This was the birth of the Promethean Movement.

The conviction as to the urgent need for an immediate relaxation of this idea was especially deeply felt among the Ukrainian leaders, for it followed the lines of the Congress of the Nationalities of former Russia in Kiev (1917, at which Prof. T. G. Masaryk, later President of Czecho­slovakia, participated as guest). It also recalled the previous common front of all these nationalities in the Duma, formed by the Parliamentarian Club of the Autonomists, and initiated by the distinguish Polish leader, A. Lednicki, and by the common front of the revolutionaries in 1905‑1908. In fact, this idea goes back to the policy of Hetman I. Mazepa in his alliance with Charles XII of Sweden. More than that, all the other nationalities began to look to the Ukrainians because of their number (they are the second largest Slavic nation) as the natural leader of all the non‑Russian peoples. Therefore as the next step the author of this study was charged by general consent with the negotiations for the realization of this common front.

Every government in exile and national committees delegated a few personalities of long political experience and high authority to represent the public opinion of his own nation in an organization which was to be a symbol of the common front of the said nationalities and which could publicly speak on behalf of the free public opinions of these peoples. Thus was formed a common front of the subjugated peoples which was unofficially supported by all the legal governments in exile and by the national committees. This organization chose the name "Promethean League of the Nations Subjugated by Moscow," and this was abbreviated to "Promethean League." In 1925 it began to function under­ground after long negotiations in Paris, Bucharest, Istanbul, Helsinki, and Prague.

The aims of the Promethean League were:

a) To represent the common front of all nations subjugated by Moscow in their struggle for liberty and independence and in the defense of their rights to self-determination.

b) To continue this common struggle by a systematically planned common action before the League of Nations the governments of the individual States, international congresses, through speeches and  p160 writing, declarations and publications, and through special Promethean Congresses.

c) To educate the political parties, especially the youth of all subjugated nationalities in the history of all these peoples and their special problems in order to develop solidarity and the conviction of the necessity of a common front in war and peace among all these nations and emigrations;

d) To introduce this idea of a necessary defensive alliance among the occupied mother countries within the Soviet Union;

e) To prepare a common front for the future of the national revolutions for the common liberation of all peoples concerned, this to be under the leader­ship of national armies, prepared by the legal governments and national committees after securing adequate support from the great Powers;

f) To uphold the ideals of Democracy, the real basis of the modern national idea in Europe, and of the League of Nations;

g) To settle all questions in dispute, especially all conflicts as to boundaries, by accepting voluntarily the principles of arbitration;

h) To fight everywhere Communistic propaganda, to expose the true aims of the Soviet dictator­ship and to warn the world against World War II which was being prepared by Soviet Moscow in order to hasten the world revolution;

i) And always and everywhere to act on the principle: one subdued nationality for all and all subdued nationalities for everyone, even the smallest!

The following subjugated nations formed the Promethean League (beginning with the North): Karelians, Komi which represented also the interests of the Udmurt (called by the Russian "Votiaks"), Mordva and Mari, Ingrians, Ukrainians, Don Cossacks, Kuban Cossacks, Georgians, North Caucasians (Mountaineers), Azerbaijanians, Idel-Ural Tatars, Crimean Tatars, Turkestanians including the Turkmens, Tadjiks, Kasakhs, Uzbeks, and Kirghiz, Buriats. This was the last nation which joined the Promethean League and was represented by delegates who escaped to Finland from the Solovki Island's concentration camp. (Any handbook of the Soviet Union will furnish data about the area and population of each nationality. The total number of the population included in the Promethean League was about 80 million.)

There were two nations which did not formally join the Promethean Movement: the Byelo-Ruthenian (Byelo-Russians) and the Armenians. Intimate contact was established with both. The Byelo-Ruthenians even sent their delegate to the Promethean Congress, but they were not fully represented because of their complicated inner situation. Nevertheless, the Prometheans always considered the Byelo-Ruthenians full members of the common front and defended everywhere their right of self-determination. More complicated was the question of the Armenians, an ancient, highly cultural, but unhappy nation for which so much sympathy had been expressed in the whole world. Their national aspirations were primary directed against Turkey, and this anti-Turkish tendency could not be accepted as a basis for a constructive policy by the other Promethean members.

 p161  The idea of the defensive common front against Soviet aggression and of united political action quickly took root in all centers of the political refugees. The aims of the Promethean League began to be realized by the activities of the Council and its sections (ideological, educational, women, youth, and press sections). The constant protests, declarations, and explanations of every Russian Communist step forced the Soviet press to react violently and thus by its slanders made the principles of the Promethean League well known in the whole Soviet Union. Thus from 1925 on the Promethean League protected and represented the rights of the subjugated nationalities to self-determination before world public opinion and constantly informed the League of Nations about the horror of the totalitarian Soviet regime, about the tortures in the Soviet concentration camps, etc.

The political action culminated in the motions in the American Senate to recognize the exile governments of Ukraine and Georgia and to appoint diplomatic representatives to the Ukrainian and Georgian democratic republics, to voice its disapproval of the occupation of these countries by the Russian Government and its sympathy with the peoples of these republics. We present the motion of Senator Copeland, October 30, 1929, regarding the Ukraine, in a photostat (in the Appendix). These facts found a tremendous response in the whole resistance movement within the Soviet Union, and the Russian Communists soon mobilized outside the Soviet Union all their "direct and indirect" forces for a smear campaign of all the national resistance movements in the U. S. S. R.

2. The Promethean Linguistic Congress, 1935

Of course all the Promethean centers very attentively followed developments in their occupied mother countries inside the Soviet Union, not revocation of the N. E. P. alarmed them all. It was clear that the collectivization of the farm land had not only an economic purpose, but was above all aimed at the annihilation of the very basis of the anti-Russian national oppositions of the subdued nationalities and at the liquidation of the non‑Russian peasant classes themselves. The simultaneous introduction of Marr's linguistic theory started the Russian cultural aggression against all non‑Russian cultures and languages. In all centers of the Promethean exiles, especially in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Istanbul, Bucharest, and Sofia, these matters were a constant topic at all meetings.

In reality nothing happened that had not been anticipated from the very beginning of the establishment of the Russian Communist dictator­ship. The democratic leaders of the non‑Russian peoples had already after 1920 immediately identified Russian Communism as the newest form of the old Russian imperialism. But the question before the democratic leaders about 1929‑1930 was how to mobilize the free scientific public opinion against Marr's linguistic theory and the public opinion of the world for a defense of the subdued non‑Russian nationalities against the new Russification — in the very era of the League of Nations in Geneva. . . .

 p162  Thus in 1933 the Promethean League decided to awaken the conscience of scholars of linguistics outside the Soviet Union and to mobilize the public opinion of the free world by a special Promethean Linguistic Congress. This Congress had the special task of raising the free voice of the subjugated nationalities against the systematic Russification of their languages by Soviet Moscow. In discussing the place of the Congress there the wish was expressed that the Congress might take place in a country immediately contiguous to the Soviet Union, in order that the voice of freedom might the more easily penetrate the Soviet frontiers. After the negotiations Poland unofficially permitted the meeting of the Congress in Warsaw May 31-June, 1935, at the Y. M. C. A. building, presented by the Americans to the Polish branch of this society.

Leon Wasilewski was elected as honorary protector. He was the leader of the Peru Socialist Party, who for many decades during the Tsarist regime was an energetic champion of the cause of self-determination of all nationalities enslaved in Russia. Wasilewski, for a time himself an exile in England during the Tsarist period, later the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of Free Poland, but then in opposition to the Polish Government, opened the Congress with a historic speech which linked the struggle of the oppressed non‑Russian nations against Soviet Moscow with the former struggle against Russian Tsarism for liberty and democracy. Over 200 delegates of all the non‑Russian peoples participated in the congress, many of them well-known philologists, historians, specialists in nationality questions, and ethnologists. The delegates of every nationality gave a survey of the application of Marr's linguistic theory to their mother tongue. All the papers read at the Congress furnished indisputable proof that a gigantic campaign of gradual denationalization was already well under way in the whole U. S. S. R. Mass deportations to distant parts of the Union were the supplementary means of changing the linguistic and national structure of the territories forcibly held within the Union under the very thin mask of "independence" or "autonomy" and "voluntary union."

The Congress passed a resolution addressed to the whole dizzied world, in particular to the League of Nations and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at Geneva, stating the actual conditions in which these non‑Russian languages and cultures then existed, and appealing to the League to summon the Soviet government to restore full rights and freedom of language to the non‑Russian nationalities within the Soviet Union.

To mobilize Asia's public opinion against the new Russification the Promethean League sent on a special mission to the Mongol and Tatar exiles in China and Manchuria its special envoy, Mr. Ayaz Ishaki, a leading writer of the Idel-Ural Tatars.

The Linguistic Congress represented the supreme protest action against the application of Marr's linguistic theory to the non‑Russian languages, giving the new Russification a pseudo-Marxist "scientific" motivation. This protest action was conducted after 1930 in all centers of the Promethean Movement under the leader­ship of R. Smal-Stocki,º who delivered a series of lectures about Marr's linguistic theory and  p163 its consequences. A special work was published for the Congress, presenting its application to the Ukrainian language and all other non‑Russian languages (R. Smal-Stocki, The Ukrainian Language in Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian Scientific Institute, Vol. XXXIV, Warsaw, 1936). This protest action was closely followed by Soviet Moscow and its secret service, which had established in Warsaw a special resident agent for spying on the Promethean activity, in the person of W. Nedaykasha, who shortly afterward was discovered and then escaped to France, where he received a farm from the NKVD to continue his shady business. But soon we were greatly astonished to hear in the free world outside the Soviet Union two voices raised in defense of Stalin's linguistic and nationality policy. For the historical record these two voices deserve to be immortalized; they attempted by their hallelujahs outside the Soviet Union to silence the protests of the enslaved nationalities, who were tortured in the Soviet Union. These voices even now have their influence. . . .

3. Roman Jacobson, Now at Harvard, the Glorifier of Stalin's Linguistic Policy

At the very time the Prometheans began their protest action against Stalin's linguistic policy, a Russian scholar in Czecho­slovakia began a defense and glorification of Stalin's linguistic wisdom. In the Czech country, with the old puristic traditions of Hus, with the humanistic world outlook of T. G. Masaryk, academic freedom was abused by a teacher of Russian for the "scientific" justification of the "language reforms" of the Russian Communist regime, which had long ago killed all academic freedom in the Soviet Union.

This teacher was Roman Jacobson, formerly of Columbia, now of Harvard. Soon after the twenties, when it was clear that Prague developed into the leading intellectual Slavic center of all the anti-Communist exiles, from the Soviet Union, there appeared in this city this Soviet scholar. He arrived in that center of free Slavic thought not as an anti-Communist refugee, but as a member of a Russian Soviet mission, with a legal Soviet passport, and began at once to establish personal contacts among Czechs and émigré scholars. Did real anti-Communist and nonparty members get passports in the time of the Red terror? Since his brother, Sergey, later initiated similar actions in Berlin, the other large center of the anti-Communist refugees, there were many interpretations about this activity among the émigré scholars.

 p164  R. Jacobson first joined the Eurasiatic movement of the Russian émigrés, which was viewed at that time very sympathetically by the Russian Communist Party. This "patriotic" section of Russian émigrés, united in the Eurasiatic movement, recognized with a deep bow to Soviet Moscow that Bolshevism signified the "national liberation of Russia from the domination of foreign Imperialism." D. S. Mirsky⁠1 characterizes the Eurasians thus: "This movement was outspokenly xenophobe and anti-West. It was a nationalism of the type that forms in subject races, for it was clear that a non‑Bolshevist Russia could only be a colony of western imperialism, and that the Communists have saved Russian from colonial Slavery." One of the best students of Soviet affairs in Europe, R. Wraga,⁠2 recently gave a characterization of the Eurasian "pseudo-scientific trend with Prince Trubetzkoy, Prof. Alexeyev, Prof. Savitsky as its leaders":

Of course, the Russian Communists highly appreciated these Eurasianian "witnesses of holy, indivisible Russia" as allies against all tendencies of the non‑Russian nationalities to continue their fight for liberty. The Eurasian movement is partly an offshoot of the German Geopolitik of that time. The old Russian Empire was proclaimed according to "natural laws of Geopolitik" a natural unity, and the Russian chauvinistic émigré scholars utilized this doctrine for defending the "unity and indivisibility of the Soviet Union" which was for them tantamount to old "Russia." As Haushofer and his school got busy to rewrite German history and to give a new interpretation of the past and present and to prepare a plan for future action, so the Russian émigré scholars zealously labored to propaganda their "Eurasian thesis of Russia as a separate historical and geographical world." In Paris a special publication was founded for this anti-West propaganda in Western Europe and it is a sorry achievement of linguistics that in 1931 R. Jacobson⁠3 attempted to establish also a "Eurasiatic Union of Languages," which embraces the Slavic, Ugro-Finnic, Turk, and Mongolian languages. There is no  p165 need now to criticize this "conception," which was propagated by the Eurasians "as a confirmation of the Eurasian thesis by modern linguistics." But the fight of R. Jacobson against the Latin script in Byelo-Ruthenian and his advocacy of the Russian scope for the whole "Eurasian Union" is characteristic.

R. Jacobson's studies for the creation of "Eurasiatic Linguistics" were soon interrupted by the "linguistic war in the Soviet Union between the Russian Communist Party and the non‑Russian nationalities." R. Jacobson immediately started action by lectures and articles in Czecho­slovakia, introdu­cing the "dialectical method" of thinking into philology, publicly defending the Communist "reforms" and sympathizing with them. I published in my book (p250) the report of the "Ukrainian Weekly," No. 51, 1934, then appearing in Prague, about Jacobson's lectures in Bratislava, November 29, 1934, on "The Language Problems in the Soviet Union." R. Jacobson publicly sympathized with the reforms of the bolsheviks, aimed at the destruction of the lingual "separatism" and at the "approach" of the separate national cultures. He expressed his joy that the Communists managed to defeat the tendency of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenians to establish "artificial dams" between them and the Russians by establishing for all nationalities of the Soviet Union an obligatory common scientific and technical terminology. Of course, R. Jacobson did not waste a single word on the whole background of the struggle. . . .

I called R. Jacobson in my book a former bolshevik collaborator. This man of Jewish extraction is so Russified and assimilated that he disregarded what was happening simultaneously to the Yiddish and the Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. I then advised him to proclaim also a "war against the linguistic wreckers" in Czecho­slovakia, against Czech purism and to "convince" also the Czecho­slovak philology of the need to "unify" the Czech and Slovak terminology with the Communist Russian terminology.

Soon Jacobson began to defend the Russian Communist linguistic policy also in print. In 1934 he published in the Slavische Rundschau (edited in German by subsidies of the then foreign minister, E. Benesh) an article entitled "Slavische Sprachfragen in der Sovjet-Union" (pp324‑343). I do not wish to be accused by Jacobson of quoting him only in part disregarding the whole line of thought in the article. Therefore we offer this article in full, photostated, in the Appendix and offer here the following remarks concerning it;

a) The whole article is written in a Russian Communist lingo, translated into German, in which he also excels in applying the "dialectical" method.⁠4

 p166  All words in the photostats underlined by me with a wave form are examples of the Russian Communist jargon; those underlined with a simple line are connected with my current remarks.⁠a

b) In this article Jacobson shows himself a master in omitting essential facts, and his style fits his purpose. Ignoring the whole background of the linguistic problems in the Soviet Union, the final subordination of linguistics to the dictator­ship of the Russian Communist Party, the transformation by Marr of linguistics into a weapon of the "world revolution," the fight of the non‑Russian nationalities for democracy and liberty, the abolition of academic freedom of the universities and academies of sciences, the persecution of linguists, writers, and poets, their section and imprisonment in slave labor camps — R. Jacobson begins his article with philological objectivity: Russian Slavistics until 1933 produced only one remarkable work, Kravtsov's Serbian Epos, but "the actual and basic tasks of research of the Eastern Slavic languages remain unaccomplished" (p324). Why? Perhaps it is due to the abolition of academic and human rights? Jacobson is silent, but he comfortingly instructs the reader that to Slavistic studies belong "not only the past and present of Slavic languages, but also the questions of the immediate future" (p324). Yes — "linguistics is not only the reconstruction of the existing material, but also language-construction (p325) proudly asserts Jacobson, fully conscious that this "language-construction" is based on the new Marxist-Leninist linguistic theory of Marr and is effected by the dictator­ship of the Russian Communist Party. But for Jacobson, the worshiper of this totalitarian Communist State, it is quite "natural" that "as the social construction takes a more and more planned and purpose­ful shape, as in the range of the planned economy are included gradually a larger number of social value systems, it is natural that also in the life of the language-system the production anarchy is forced [in the original: 'sentenced'] step by step to retreat before the plan and the regulation." Of course, Jacobson knows it — before the plan and regulations of the Russian Communists under the leader­ship of the universal genius Stalin. (What about the application of this principle now at Harvard, to English and American for abolishing the "production anarchy" in these languages of the "capitalists"?) Thus for Jacobson the liberty of language and the creative work of language, which flourish outside the Soviet Union is "production anarchy" which "naturally" will "retreat" everywhere with the spread of the Communist world revolution and its "planned language construction."

c) The remaining pages of Jacobson's Communist propaganda article are his full and enthusiastic support of all the "reforms" in the language field forced by the Russian Communist dictator­ship on the non‑Russian nationalities. He uses the usual Communist "double-accounting method, ""what is good for Russian is bad for any non‑Russian language in the Soviet Union"; he uses an uncritical parrotlike repetition  p167 and approval of all Communist propaganda tricks, of half-truths and falsifications, which mask the Russification process under the guise of "international co‑operation"; often he flouts logic, but inflexibly keeps to the "party line."

It is not true (p325) that "the ruling strata of the [Russian] Empire had a monopoly of the Russian Hochkultur": "The chief instrument of this culture, the Russian literary language was their exclusive property." Was not this chief instrument also, for instance, the property of M. Gorky and A. Tolstoy? Or of V. Lenin and comrades? And what about the Narodniki (mentioned by Jacobson in a quotation of Gorky on pages 326 and 330)? Did they not share in the "social control" over the life of their mother language by their literary production together with the ruling strata? Lenin's articles about the Russian language prove Jacobson's statement to be a falsehood. The leaders of the Russian proletariat were coproprietors, cocreators, cocontrollers of this chief instrument. But we are grateful to Jacobson for establishing the fact (p326) that the "liberalism" practiced in the Russian language during the time of the Tsarist regime did not endanger the "stability of the orms of the [Russian] literary language."

Why, asks the reader, has the old "liberalism in the Russian language" to be abolished during the present Russian Communist regime? And this question is important not only for the Russian language but also for all non‑Russian languages under the Russian Communists' dictator­ship. This question is also important even today for many American linguists,⁠5 especially for Robert A. Hall, Jr., Cornell University, the author of the excellent "key to linguistic freedom": Leave Your Language Alone! who do not yet know that in the event of the establishment of the "Soviet United States," the Communist Party has prepared for them all the necessary honorary ropes.

Therefore we repeat the question: Why did the era of liberalism in the Russian language under Russian Communism have to pass away? Jacobson anticipated this question (of the reader) and instructs the reader that the Communist Party has a "language-construction" plan, which will end "production anarchy"; of course, the "language-construction" plan is conceived not in the interest of Russian cultural imperialism — God forbid! — but only to serve "international co‑operation" and the  p168 progress of humanity, of which the Russians, modestly, are the "avant-garde." But our readers will remember the real reasons for the Lian of liberalism in language by the Russian Communist Party: liberalism would disintegrate the Russian literary language on the one hand; on the other hand liberalism in the non‑Russian languages would immediately disintegrate the Soviet Union linguistically, culturally, and politically. Liberalism, even when granted only in the language sphere, would bring the immediate end of the dominant role of Russian in the Soviet Union, where it is hated as the chief instrument of Communist dictator­ship (the non‑Russian nationalities in real liberty surely would prefer the English as an intermediary language among themselves. This would link them also in Europe and Asia with the language intellectual freedom and of the free world). Consequently Russian Communist propaganda and Russian imperialistic chauvinism both demanded the abolition of liberalism in language and the establishment of the dictator­ship of the Russian language as the chief instrument of Communism over the whole Soviet Union. And anyone who opposes this and demands liberalism is in the Communist jargon a "chauvinist," "fascist, ""reactionary," etc.

d) Jacobson, without any critical remarks but with his own full approval, presents in his article the "linguistic discussion" initiated by the Communist Party member M. Gorky. This was the beginning of the "marriage" of Russian Communism and Russian cultural chauvinism. In the course of the discussion there developed the theory that "the Russian proletariat is the heir of the Russian classic language and literature" (p329). The Russian literary language is regarded as "classless" — all‑national (p329). The "cultural inheritance" includes also the pre‑Peter literature, the biography of Avakum, and the old Russian legends about the saints (p330). In the cultural inheritance Russian folklore occupies a "place of honor" (p330), and there is established an indivisible connection" between Russian literature and the folklore from the "Tale of Ihor's Host" (annexed from the old Ukrainian literature!), including the Soviet "lyrics." This "heritage of the Russian proletariat" is its "own property" now, which "has to be recognized, cultivated and enriched" (p320).

What "endangers" this heritage? Gorky complained: "The Russian language is being disfigured, vulgarized . . . by using words from the vocabularies of the [non‑Russian] — national minorities" (p327); Serafimovich and Panferov propaganda "the clumsy, healthy, rustic force" of the peasants (p328). Gorky, shocked, proclaimed this rustic force of the language of the majority of the Russians) as a "socially unhealthy force," with full agreement of Jacobson (despite the fact that the peasant writers in all other Slavic literatures using this "unhealthy force" contributed to valuable and original works), and Jacobson endorses this opinion with a "quotation" from a letter of a worker of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory demanding "purity of the Russian language" on behalf of the Russian workers. Jacobson over­estimated the naïveté of the Western linguists, supposing that they did not know how such letters in the Soviet Union are manufactured by the Communist bosses themselves  p169 according to party lines (p328). But the problem is how to harmonize the thesis of the "place of honor of the folklore" created by the same peasantry with the thesis that the peculiarity of its language is an "unhealthy," even "anarchical" force (p328). Jacobson compliments Gorky for his solution of the contradiction by declaring folklore as an "interdialectical, collective and interclass production"; thus the "reactionary" peasantry as "vulgus" was deprived is whole contribution as a class to the Russian folklore (p332). This explanation, that Slavic folklore is "an interdialectical and interclass creation" is simple nonsense; "wandering themes" exist the Slavic world over, but according to dialect and social surroundings any piece of folklore is connected with special regions and social strata. But thus was eliminated the "unhealthy, and anarchistic force" of the Russian peasant dialects, which threatened the "preservation of the heritage."

But why must the Russian literary language, so to say, be "mummified"? Why is the Russian proletariat interested only in the preservation of the "consistent, strident uniformity of the literary language" (p327)? Why is "any renewal of it by dialectical words detrimental: Kraehwinkelwoertchen — reactionary" (p327)? Why is the Russian proletariat interested only in such "uniform language and not in the split peasant dialectics" (p327) Jacobson informs us by showing that his "Sprachfragen" are in reality purely political questions of militant Communism: (a) this "strident uniformity of the literary language" is "the security for its broadest and deepest expansion enough its propaganda possibilities" (p327) and (b) "the Russian language must become a world language, and the time is not far off when it will be taught under all the degrees of latitude," according to the modest vision of the Communist writer A. Tolstoy (p329).

Thus, as we see both interests, the Communist and the Russian, were merged and Jacobson knows well how to formulate the decision of the Communist Party in the "language of dialectics" (p327), as is absolutely necessary for a "progressive" language. The old norms of the Russian literary language were replaced by their negation, and now followed, "the negation of the negation"! How right Schopenhauer is in the appraisal of this method. . . . The whole language discussion is enlivened by Jacobson not only by uncritical use of Communist propaganda slogans (struggle for quality, selections in the language), but with lyrical descriptions as a general background of the progress in the sphere of language:

We shall devote a special chapter to the program of A. Tolstoy; here we offer only some critical remarks on Jacobson's enthusiasm for the  p170 way in which the Russian proletariat is "struggling with elementary force" to possess themselves of the old Russian literary language. The best example of this is seen in the general situation at that time of the Soviet Russian school system. Let us compare Jacobson's fiction with the following facts: the leading journal Za Komunistischeskoie Prosvishchenie, February 16, 1935, reports on the intensification of the fight against the illiteracy of the teachers. In on school of Leningrad a quiz was held on Russian orthography; the majority "failed, many made 80 mistakes in the dictation." A commission established the fact that in one single district of Leningrad 400 teachers are illiterate in orthography. In the same journal, November 22, 1935, Supervisor of Schools Volin said at the meeting of the school directors of Moscow, "the teachers have no adequate education, they themselves are illiterate. The students of the higher classes in the high schools and the students of the colleges cannot write the simplest dictation without mistakes." All the material about the condition (about 1935) of the teaching of Russian in the Soviet Union may be found in my book, The Ukrainian Language in the Soviet Ukraine (pp89‑91). The "possession of the heritage" had a rather queer influence on the youth of the proletariat, even in the capital Moscow: Komunisticheskaia Pravda, No. 49, 1935, informs us that for the fight against banditry in grammar schools the following means were introduce: expulsion of bandits from schools, trial of their parents by the courts, the division of Moscow into special districts for the fight against student-bandits, the formation of special squads of the militia for this purpose. . . ." Brawls, murders, sexual demoralization, alcoholism became so common in the Soviet schools, the government had no way out except to issue on April 5, 1935, a decree, signed by Kalinin, Molotov, and Akulov, which was unique in the history of education, by demanding the death penalty for children under 12 years old:

That was the situation about 1935, after nearly two decades of Soviet education and Communist cultivation and protection of the "glorious heritage" (p330) and of the "great and mighty language" (p333). No article was written without such chauvinistic ornamental epithets for the Russian language in Soviet Moscow at that time, just as at the same time in Nazi Germany the German language was similarly glorified.

e) Jacobson next instructs the reader that "the importance of this language discussion goes beyond the limits of the Russian language. It has also found an echo in the literary circles of the farthest Soviet republics. Its methodological importance extends to the cultural life of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian languages. . . ." In this part of the article Jacobson's fiction, "double-accounting," falsification and  p171 "omission" tricks reach a climax. Completely passing over the fact that Ukraine and Byelo-Ruthenia had before separated themselves from Russia and established democratic republics and were later, after prolonged struggle, occupied by the Red Russian Army, Jacobson opposed only the "dark Russian Tsaristic regime" to the Russian Communist — of course, "progressive." "The Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian literary languages managed to live within the borders of Tsaristic Russia under miserable and difficult conditions, almost illegally. The Revolution has with one stroke removed all artificial barriers and enforced measures, which checked the development of the two southwestern branches of the Eastern Slavic world. More than that, it has failed a short time ago, or at least it has subjected them to a fierce censor­ship . . . put them in a special favorable, privileged position." Thus writes Jacobson about the blessings of the Russian Communist revolution for the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian languages. Confronted with the facts presented in the previous chapters, only a propagandist, not an unbiased scholar, could write such distortions of truth and downright falsifications. It is a lie that the Russian Communist Revolution, having annexed the Ukraine and Byelo-Ruthenia, has "with one night stroke abolished all artificial barriers and enforced measures which checked the development of the languages in these countries" and "put these languages in a special favorable, privileged position." The truth is that Russian Tsaristic censor­ship was exchanged for Russian Communist censor­ship. Jacobson's opinion concerning the Russian Communist censor­ship over these languages as "the abolishment of all artificial barriers and enforced measures," which once hindered the development of these languages, is only a proof of his fidelity to the party line, as is his arrogant and cynical statement that this Russian Communist censor­ship over Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian put these languages in a "special favorable, privileged position." Jacobson's statement that the books published by the Byelo-Ruthenian State publishing office are more than ten times the number published before the revolution conceals the fact that the increase is created by the publication of Communist propaganda literature . . . for obvious reasons.

Page 334 again expresses Jacobson's full support of the party line conceptions. There do not exist separate Russian and separate Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian cultures (that could weaken the "cultural uniformity" of the Russian arsenal of the world revolution) "but there exists for them all one culture, the Russian culture," one and indivisible. Three nationalities of course "equal" — but one Russian culture. (What progress in self-determination! Russian Tsarism insisted on one single nationality, one single language, one single culture, but Russian Communism only insists on one single culture; and wishes to make the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians the "junior partners" and henchmen in forcing this "culture" on all the non‑Slavic nationalities of the Soviet Union.) Anyone of the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians who opposes this "conception of the Russian cultural unity," anyone from these nationalities who regards the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian cultures as Western European, democratic and liberal in world outlook, and as an  p172 antithesis to the Russian culture, is branded by Jacobson as a "chauvinist and separatist." Jacobson does not even bother to mention that after the year 1917 both nationalities separated themselves from Russia; he does not even, for sake of objectivity, demand a democratic plebiscite in both countries for that purpose; he simply declares:

Consequently for the master of dialectics, Jacobson, the situation presents itself thus: "The mighty Russian chauvinism found its dialectal antithesis in the local chauvinism, especially in the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian cultural separatism."

Let us analyze this thesis of the "unbiased observer," Jacobson. The Russian chauvinism, which negated the very existence of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian nations, cultures, and languages and erased their names from the map of Europe, is put on one level with the demand of the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians of their legitimate national rights! The very demand of legitimate national self-government by the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians is "cultural separatism and local chauvinism," created as an "antithesis" by Russian chauvinism! The dialectical logic of Jacobson is unrivaled. He reasons: Russian Tsarist chauvinism created the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian "cultural separatism"; before, they simply did not exist. Consequently, as the result of Russian chauvinism the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian "cultural separatism" has to be liquidated because the thesis of the Russian Tsarist chauvinism that there existed and exists only "one Russian culture also for the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians " is now also the Russian Communist thesis. This thesis apparently is also a part of the "precious heritage" of the Russian proletariat from "old Tsarist times." Thus, finally, in order to use the dialectical method of Jacobson, old Russian chauvinism becomes dialectically legitimate Russian nationalism in Russian Communist times, but Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian legitimate nationalism are branded as "chauvinism and separatism," even as "results" old Russian chauvinism. By such dialectical hocus-pocus Jacobson informs us that to deny the separate cultural entity of the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians (who from the earliest times until the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772‑1795 belonged to the Western European cultural sphere), is not Russian chauvinism but Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian separatism and chauvinism!

With true Russian Communist pathos the "unbiased" Jacobson falsifies the whole "language discussion," then in process in the Ukraine and Byelo-Ruthenia, calling the Communist Russification: the "bringing closer together" of the "Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian languages with Russian," instead "to speed up their cultural growth," and pathetically preaches:

What a marvelous example of the Communist Aesopian language and upside-down semantics: the Russian Communist stooges in the Ukraine and Byelo-Ruthenia are represented by Jacobson as "the broadest society circles" (Breiteste Gesellschaftskreise!), the fight for the preservation of the peculiarities of these languages from Russian by the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian linguists and Communists is "the wish to establish artificial barriers ('Chinese walls) between these nationalities and the Russians in Sovietland," the Russification of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian language by the Russians is described as a "vehement" fight against the damaging work of the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians themselves, who also took "the initiative in a series of newly planned measures in the sphere of language-culture," and finally they themselves "condemned determinedly their separation from the Russian culture"! The Russian Communist Party is not once mentioned; only the "Ukrainians" and "Byelo-Ruthenians " themselves are "acting" — "demanding" — "fighting." . . . How delicately and diplomatically Jacobson manages finally to draw up the formula that: "For the mutual approach of the national cultures of these three closely related peoples it was decided . . ." etc., etc. By whom decided? we ask the unbiased pundit Jacobson. By the Ukrainian or Byelo-Ruthenian "broadest circles of society"? Why not state at simple truth; the Russian Communist Party ordered it and enforced it by terror? And a final remark on these semantic acrobatics. Only one of two possibilities can be true: either there does exist one Russian culture, common to Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelo-Ruthenians — in that case why is "bringing them closer together" and their "mutual approach" necessary? Or: there do exist three different cultures; a Russian, Byelo-Ruthenian, Ukrainian, with no artificial but historical barriers, which make it necessary for the Russians to "bring  p174 them closer together" and bring about their "mutual approach" instead by artificial means to Russify the different cultures of the Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians. This second possibility must surely be accepted by Jacobson himself, who forgets what he plane reached about the common Russian culture at the beginning of his article, and suddenly writes "for the mutual approach of the national cultures. . . ." Consequently, the different Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian cultures do exist, when Jacobson for a moment loses the party line and regains his objectivity. Jacobson compliments the Russian Communist Party, in whose objective position and logic he firmly believes, for having "logically unmasked the demonstration of all the (Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian) theoreticians, who endeavored to build around the separate Slavic languages in the Soviet Union "Chinese walls." But after we have taken the mask off Jacobson's face anyone can see that they demanded simply the same rights that all languages enjoy as in Switzerland or in the British Commonwealth: to be cultivated in liberty, in a free society by free linguists and writers, without "planned language construction" of a Communist dictator­ship. And may I assure Jacobson that his lip service against Russian chauvinism is well understood by anyone as the rather than worn out "double-accounting" trick to justify the Russian Communist persecutions of the liberty of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian languages and of their legitimate rights to independent and free development. His statement that Soviet Moscow is acting instead "to speed their cultural growth" is the height of falsification and A. Tolstoy's quotation about the plan to make Russian a "world language" is a good background for understanding these actions of the old Russian chauvinism and cultural imperialism, as well as their missionaries in professional togas.

This upside-down language of Jacobson contains in every case a Communist lie and falsification, for which this "unbiased observer" is responsible in the free world of scholars.

With the same methods Jacobson continues to describe the Communist "reforms" in Byelo-Ruthenian and Ukrainian. "The unification of the writing of foreign words in the orthography of all three languages" is his way of describing the subordination in this matter of Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian to Russian, contrary to Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian phonetic peculiarities and traditions, and, of course, it is praised by Jacobson as "essential success." For whom? All this Russification Jacobson justifies by the "healthy precedence of the functional point of view before the genetic one" and with this principle he justifies also the Russification of the Ukrainians of the North Caucasus, whose demand for the introduction of Ukrainian schools is condemned by Jacobson, according to the party line, as "chauvinistic deviation" (pp334‑335).

Jacobson in the usual party-lingo terms as "extraordinarily instructive . . . the unmasking of the motives of their predecessors" by the Byelo-Ruthenian, A. Aleksandrovich, and Ukrainian, A. Khvylya (p325), introdu­cing them as "Byelo-Ruthenian " and "Ukrainian" scholars and withholding the fact that they are leading members of the Russian  p175 Communist Party. That the "predecessors" consisted of the elite of the Bruhn and Ukrainian linguists and philologists who attempted, according to scientific truth, to express orthographically the peculiarities of both languages, Jacobson does not even mention, but accuses them, following the party line, of attempting "to bring about the greatest dissimilarity with the Russian writing."

f) Jacobson is carried away into a real linguistic frenzy by the project of the introduction of Latin characters into Byelo-Ruthenian and Ukrainian. The unbiased Jacobson writes:

Thus we see, how Jacobson, continue linguist, and Aleksandrovich, the Russian Communist, are joining in the accusation that the Latinization of the Byelo-Ruthenian writing is the "highest level of counter-revolutionary activity." May I ask, is that statement of Jacobson linguistics ? Why is the linguist Jacobson so eager to defend Russian Communism against Byelo-Ruthenian counterrevolution? How could the linguist Jacobson agree with both reasons given by the Russian Communist Aleksandrovich? The first is nonsense, and the second unmasks the very reason: Russian Communist Party interests. What have Russian Communist Party interests to do with linguistic questions?

To this "Latinization" problem Jacobson devoted his next pages; and again he follows the party line, uncritically giving quotations from Communist official papers as the last achievements of linguistic wisdom and internationalism: the Com‑Party always knows best! He welcomes the statement that "Generally, we notice in the question of the Latinization a remarkable change of sentiment in the Soviet public." "Soviet public" is euphemistically substituted for "Russian Communist Party." A Pravda article has proven also to Jacobson that the demand for Russian letters in non‑Russian las is not Russian nationalism and chauvinism but internationalism; but it is an expression of materialism and chauvinism, of anti-internationalism to demand the introduction of Latin letters in these languages. The article says: "the blabbing about the missionary character [for Russification] of the Russian alphabet under the conditions of the proletarian dictator­ship is non‑sensical, idle gossip. . . . Who regards it necessary that the Latin writing become an international writing and for what purpose? What advantages has the Latin alphabet in comparison with the Russian, in which are created the great cultural values of the Sovietland?" (p336) And the linguist Jacobson agrees also with this "linguistic" argument of the power­ful cultural values of Russian Communism, and he supports this Communist Party line with yet another quotation: "As a matter of fact, is the Latin alphabet principally more international than the Russian, which is used by a large part of the workers of the Soviet Union, of the  p176 avantgarde of the International Socialist Revolution?" For the unbiased linguist, Jacobson, the Russian Communists are the avant-garde of the international socialist Revolution, and consequently their alphabet is "international" — but for all socialist and democrat they were and are the avant-garde of the blackest reaction the world has ever known; but (leaving policy out of the discussion), can such quotations be used in a linguistic discussion for the combating of the arguments for Latinization of the non‑Communist scholars in the Soviet Union? Is that fair play? Summing up, Jacobson writes:

The politician Jacobson is here absolutely right: the question is clearly presented. But may I ask how a linguist enjoying liberty outside the Soviet Union can lower himself to such a degree as to denounce the linguists inside the Soviet Union who at the very time are persecuted by the Communists? Their fight for Latinization "did not lack an objective counterrevolutionary basis"? Is the "orientation to the West" — "chauvinistic reaction" or fight for democracy and liberty? But Jacobson presents the problem correctly, and every reader has to decide: Is an objective linguist speaking here, or a partisan of Russian Communism, of its "power­ful achievements" and of the avant-garde of the International Communist world revolution.

g) I do not wish to waste space by analyzing Jacobson's misrepresentations of the Byelo-Ruthenian orthographical reforms forced by Russian Communists, especially since the leading Byelo-Ruthenian linguist, I. Stankiewich, is now in the U. S. A. and he shall have a word to say in defense of the Byelo-Ruthenian language. We limit ourselves here to the statement that Jacobson's opinion (p339), "the reforms . . . do not harm the phonological peculiarity of the Byelo-Ruthenian language, not even to the smallest degree," is Communist propaganda.

Completely misrepresented according to party-line, in the article is the problem of loan-words and of purism, which we have explained in a previous chapter. Uncritically Jacobson repeats all the Russian Communist accusations against the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian linguists, and he gives them with special malice full support "as a linguist" (hausbackene Woerter, Machwerk, duftige woertchen, schwerfaellige, nichtsnutzige, wenig verstaendliche Neologismen) and he says: "Thus for example in Byelo-Ruthenian the designations of the village-implements were used likewise as terms in the factories." This was denounced as a crime. What is wrong if the Byelo-Ruthenian workers understood them; why must such terms be obligatory Russian in spite of the fact that they were misunderstood by them? Thus, strictly according to the party line, "the decision regarding the unification of the  p177 scientific and technical terminology of all nationalities of the Soviet Union," is presented as "a way out of a blind alley." Whose decision? of the Byelo-Ruthenians ?

Again, the fact is always passed over that the driven was enforced by the Russian Communist Party against the oppressed nationality of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian linguists and even of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian Communists; but Jacobson, the politician, knows very well what is going on in the Soviet Union and what is the whole background of the language discussion: "The fierce duel between two Weltanschauungen did not limit itself to the sphere of terminology, it embraced the whole vocabulary." May I ask a clear, pointed question: With which one of the two Weltanschauungen fighting the fierce duel does R. Jacobson stand in this article; with Russian Communism under Stalin's leader­ship or with anti-Communism under the leader­ship of the West?

There can be no doubt, since Jacobson condemns and attempts to ridicule the thesis of the Ukrainian Western school that "the Ukrainian culture are European, consequently they can and must orientate themselves in their development towards Europe" (p339). Concealed, of course, are the true reasons for it, namely that the Ukrainians consider the Russian Communist despotism as an Asiatic phenomenon.

Jacobson unreservedly welcomes any Russian Communist reform in Byelo-Ruthenian and Ukrainian, repeating the Communist accusation against the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian linguists and their terminology that they conducted a "fatal estrangement work" between their languages and Russian (p339), completely ignoring the fact that the Ukrainian terminology was used for many decades in Western Ukraine (Galicia and Bukovina during Austrian times) and that all Ukrainian terminology was created only on the principle of easy and full intelligibility for the Ukrainian masses.

Now follows the application of the double-accounting method to the Ukrainian literary language. Any principle Jacobson applied to the Russian literary language and considered good, he applied to the Ukrainian language, and called it bad and counterrevolutionary. If Gorky fights the infiltration of Ukrainian words into Russian it's good, if Ukrainians antagonize the infiltration of Russian words into Ukrainian it's bad. If Russian writers defend the norms of classical Russian it is good, it Ukrainian writers defend the norms of classical Ukrainian, it is bad; Russian folklore has a "place of honor" and is glorified, while the Ukrainian does not exist for Jacobson. The vocabulary of the Russian "Narodniki" is good (p326), the vocabulary of the Ukrainian "Narodniki" does not exist at all; respect for Russian traditions in literature is good, for Ukrainian traditions bad; planned selection in the Russian vocabulary by Russians is good, in Ukrainian by Ukrainians it is bad; the theory of the general importance and validity of the classic literature is good in Russian — bad in Ukrainian; Jacobson terms the application of these principles to Ukrainian according to Russian Communist terminology as "archaization attempts on the language front" (340), which of course, "are condemned to failure" ("condemned to failure" = the linguists and writers are condemned to slave labor camps). And  p178 gloriously defeating Ukrainian counterrevolutionaries on the "language front," Jacobson proudly asks: "With what can they oppose the mighty pressure of the present?" omitting of course to mention that his "mighty pressure" is Russian imperialistic Communism and ironically and disdain­fully asks: "With the archaic supplies of the old Ukrainian, or by the old Byelo-Ruthenian, literature? Prince with the lit up beginnings of the last century, which may have been even extraordinarily splendid, for example, the poetry of Shevchenko — but which in spite of all never got beyond incidents beginnings?" (p340). The teacher of Russian, Jacobson exhibits here his complete ignorance of Ukrainian literature; he maliciously reduces the compass or, more exactly, denies the very existence of Ukrainian literature, with the mental reservation, therefore, of considering, for the "Ukrainian proletariat," the "season of the Russian classic heritage" as obligatory. The truth is that in spite of all Russian persecution, the Ukrainian literature surpassed in volume before World War I the Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Slovakian literatures, equalling the Polish and Czech literatures. Here are some names of Ukrainian writers and poets of the modern period until World War I: Kotlyarewsky, Hrebinka, Kwitka, Shashkevych, Kulish, Marko Vovchok, Konysky, Rudansky, Fedkovych, Nechuy-Liwycky, Panas Myrny, Samiylenko, Starycky, Kropywnycky, Karpenko-Kary, Krymsky, Franko, Kobylanska, Wynnychenko, Kotsiubynsky, Makowey, Stefanyk, Martowych, Lesya Ukrainka, Lepky, Pachovsky, Oles, Fylansky, Chuprynka, Rylsky. On page 341 Jacobson accuses the Ukrainian writers and linguists in the true manner of Communist hooligans: "Some of the archaists have directly neglected by sleeping the cultural development of present times, the other part purposely attempted to turn the development backwards. They were ready to prefer the extinct cultural inflects of the nobility of the past centuries to the present democratic influences. . . ." Jacobson's statement unequivocally proves what this unbiased linguist conceives as "democracy," which for this objective seeker of truth is "the dictator­ship of Russian Communism." His statements concerning the tendencies of the "sleeping" or "reactionary" Ukrainian writers and linguists are Communist calumnies. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian writers represented a deep democratic, often socialistic, deeply Christian ideology, expressed in the literary language, closely connected with the pure vernacular of the Ukrainian peasants, who created a uniquely beauti­ful folklore, folk art, and folk music.

With "Ukrainian humour sketches," from Communist news­papers, edited under Russian Communist censor­ship, Jacobson attempts to ridicule this language as a volapuek; "the language, which is thought out by archaists, is a patch work of Museum rarities, new word-formations according to old patterns, dialectical rarities and constant Polonisms," the Bohemisms Jacobson has now artfully forgotten, although he previously mentioned them (on p339), as a teacher of Russian in a Czecho­slovak university.

But life itself created a more "humour sketch." The same unbiased observer Jacobson is now at Harvard, "professor of Slavic,"  p179 and he himself has regarded it necessary to introduce Ukrainian into the curriculum and a course of lectures on "Ukrainian Literature," delivered, of course, in Russian! What kind of literature is taught at Harvard, if in 1934 there exhibited only the beginnings of Ukrainian literature? Either Jacobson lied in 1934 in saying that there does not exist a Ukrainian literature but only the beginnings, or he has introduced now a course of a nonexisting literature. Yes, the line has changed a little, the suspecter is a member of the UN — and these changes demand an acrobatic linguistic and philological leap, especially if the Communists themselves, by way of appeasement, published in 1949‑1950 an anthology of old Ukrainian literature of the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, edited by O. J. Bilecky and numbering 555 pages, and are now preparing an anthology of opened Ukrainian literature.

For students of linguistics to whom "humour sketches" from news­papers edited under Russian Communist censor­ship do not represent arguments in a linguistic discussion, Jacobson introduced two "Ukrainian" authorities, instead finally to convince the reader. The first is A. Khvylya (p335), but Jacobson conceals the fact that he was a leading Communist in Ukraine following the Russian party line, and the chief of the propaganda division of Central Committee of the Communist party in Ukraine. The other witness is Postyshev⁠6 himself, a name also well known to our readers from the previous chapters; Jacobson writes:

I disagree with Jacobson also regarding the term "leader" for Postyshev. To introduce Stalin's hangman into the Ukraine as a leader of "present Ukrainian life" in a linguistic discussion is a unique achievement of Jacobson. Also Postyshev's slogans, which Jacobson fully endorses, provokes my antagonism (as a "chauvinist, reactionary and archaist"). For me the Soviet Union is an improved copy of the old Tsarist prison of nationalities. I modestly doubt that Moscow is "the center of attraction of progressive humanity," and I am sure Moscow  p180 is "a symbol" for the reintroduction of slavery. But did not Jacobson, the unbiased observer, here leave the sphere of pure linguistics and enter the field of pure Communist propaganda, misusing for it a Slavic philological journal? Jacobson supports this propaganda with the "Kulturpolitischen Standpunkt" (cultural viewpoint) of the poet, Mayakowsky, again concealing the fact that it is the "cultural-political" program of the Russian Communist Party; and summing up, Jacobson formulates his support of this as follows: "Instead of the language policy of the archaists, the policy of discord between brother nations, there is proclaimed [in the Soviet Union] a close linguistic approach and reciprocity which by no means infringes on the peculiarity of the national form." As we read at the beginning of Jacobson's article, Gorky and the Russian Communists are strong purists respecting the norms of the classical Russian language. Consequently Jacobson's picture is a falsification of facts. There was no mutual "linguistic approach" between the brother nations, but only a one‑sided approach of Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian to Russian, forced by the "reforms" of the Russian Communist Party, which "approach" means virtually a Russification. Whether the national form was or was not touched, only Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian non‑Communist linguists can judge, not Russian Communists or their stooges in the Ukraine.

The Russification of the Ukrainian vocabulary Jacobson again defends with the same slogans of the Communists as an "elimination of provincial words which the Ukrainian literary language separated artificially from Russian." In one word the principle for Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian is Gleichschaltung with Russian.

The final evaluation and appreciation of Stalin's linguistic policy toward the non‑Russian languages Jacobson gives, as a linguist, at the end of his article (pp342‑343):

Jacobson stresses an "analogical dialectical" process also in the French Revolution in the French language, forgetting that France was, generally speaking, a national homogeneous State, and that the Russian Communist Party enforces by terror this "process of the most close unification," with Russian on the multilingual Soviet Union against the will of the non‑Russian nationalities concerned.

 p181  Jacobson, as we see, ends his article by declaring the Soviet methods to be "requirements of modern linguistics," and of "the national cultural rise" and "genuine international cooperation. . . ." Could an enemy of Russian Communism write a similar statement, could an unprejudiced scholar write it who believes in academic freedom and in the dignity of free scholar­ship? Jacobson's article is a pure Communist propaganda article, an uncritical glorification of Stalin's linguistic policy. Jacobson was well aware of the "fierce duel between ideologies," between democracy and Communist dictator­ship, between the principles which were embodied in the American Declaration of Independence and the tenets of Leninism-Stalinism.

Jacobson was well aware of the fundamental ideological problems behind the whole "linguistic fight" of the non‑Russian nationalities against the Russian Communist dictator­ship. Either the State is subordinated to the free will of citizens, and the free citizens and nationalities then have also inalienable rights regarding their mother languages and their cultivation according to their own will expressed in a democratic way (Western style), or the citizens and nationalities are singe to the Russian Communist State, deprived of all human and national rights by the totalitarian dictator­ship. In this case, all the spheres of human activities, literature, music, liberal arts, painting, science, press, theater, film, radio, religion — everything is included in the "planned economy" of the totalitarian State, especially the languages.

Jacobson has known that the Russian Communist dictator­ship developed its own "Soviet linguistic theory" of Marr as a "weapon of arsenal of the world revolution" for the "fusion, merger, unification of all languages and cultures into one Soviet nation," that all the "reforms" enforced by the Russian Communist Party were an application of this theory of Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian.

And he made a clear choice between these two camps, of which one demands human liberty with self-government, and the other proclaims Russian totalitarian dictator­ship over body and mind of individuals and nationalities — their languages included.

I will most vigorously defend Jacobson's right to express his own political and linguistic convictions, but he must concede the free linguists of the non‑Russian nationalities the right to defend themselves and their languages against Russian militant Communism and its distortions, lies, and falsifications about these nationalities, their literatures, and traditions. Communist imperialism has also made falsehood in linguistics a dangerous weapon, but Jacobson has underestimated the power of the will to liberty of the non‑Russian nationalities, their enthusiasm for free democratic life, for free institutions, and for the respect of the individual. . . . Even today they have refused to capitulate and have created at this very moment the greatest political mass emigration, known in history, from Stalin's linguistic and cultural paradise.

But there is a grave moral question involved in Prof. Jacobson's attitude. All scholars are united in the common search for truth. And I doubt that he has really looked for truth in that article. Among  p182 scholars there is also feeling of solidarity; as members of a teaching profession, they are defending everywhere the very basis of scholar­ship: academic freedom. How could Prof. Jacobson write this "scientific" defense of Stalin's linguistic policy, knowing that thousands of Ukrainian, Byelo-Ruthenian colleagues, philologists, and teachers have been "liquidated" and sent by Stalin into slave labor camps? How could a university professor, enjoying in free Western Europe, in Masaryk's state, full academic freedom of teaching and research, in such a way glorify Stalin's complete liquidation of all freedom of teaching and research of his colleagues within the Soviet Union, even in the sphere of languages? How could he support from the outside the establishment of the final install blackout also in linguistics inside the Soviet Union, in which scholars dare not think but may only quote Marx, Lenin, and Stalin? The Russian Communist thought control is presented by Jacobson as progress toward humanity.

Against the background of the pogrom of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian languages, literatures, linguists, and writers, then in full swing, with its terror, and the exile to slave labor camps of all opponents, the article of Jacobson is the basest piece of linguistics ever written. Jacobson's proslavery propaganda in linguistics opened a new branch of Soviet linguistics.

But life ironically writes the most tragic "humour sketches." Jacobson's and Postyshev's "center of attraction of the progressive humanity," "the symbol of the struggle for the final extirpation of slavery," "the avant-garde of the International Socialist Revolution" — the Soviet Union — is, for a year now, killing American soldiers in Asia. But Jacobson himself reached, on his missionary expedition to the West with its Latin script, Harvard; he teaches American youth not only Rome but "Slavic" and by a grant of $50,000 from the Rockefeller foundation he will surely now establish the right foundation for Slavic research in the U. S. A. . . . Life is stranger than fiction.

Hans Kohn, Nationalism in the Soviet Union, London, 1933, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. (First published in Germany in 1932 under the title Der Nationalismus in der Sovjet­union.)

Some books do not become antiquated, they remain monuments of a period.

At the very time when the struggle for independence on the part of the non‑Russian nationalities and the non‑Russian Communist Parties against Russian imperialistic Communism reached its highest tension, there appeared in London this pamphlet, which was the hardest blow for all the non‑Russian nationalities fighting for liberty. The report of the Frankfurter Zeitung⁠7 in Moscow, Hans Kohn, first in this "liberal" German news­paper itself, later in the above-mentioned special pamphlet  p183 for the English-speaking world, engaged in a smear attack against the non‑Russian peoples who then through their democratic and socialist parties appealed to the liberal and socialist opinion in Western Europe for moral defense against Russian Communism-Stalinism. Everywhere in "intellectual" and liberal spheres, especially in England, the aspirations of the non‑Russian nations were fought by misled journalists, politicians, even scholars, by means of quotations from Kohn's book. Not only I, but all my friends, suspected that the real origin of this "ideological attack" on the non‑Russian nationalities from Western Europe, the establishment of this "second front" against the non‑Russian peoples, could be only in Soviet Moscow. It was the artillery barrages of Jacobson's linguistic frontal attack.

This pamphlet was the kind of "liberal" defense Stalin badly needed. The "progress" in the solution of the national problem was evident: from the pogroms of the Jews in old Russia, the Soviet Union; from the "Proto­cols of the Elders of Zion," to Leninism-Stalinism, that ideological foundation for the "new approach" to the non‑Russian groups. At the very time when millions were sent to slave labor camps of the non‑Russian intelligentsia (which camps played the same role as Hitler's crematories), the mouth of H. Kohn, as a "liberal witness from Soviet Moscow," was full of liberal phrases, international vistas, even Messianism. With glittering sophistry, so effective for all the left-wing babbits and snobs, Kohn attempted to present the unenlightened despotism of Stalin over body and mind of individuals and nationalities in the Soviet Union as "progress" in comparison with the program of the non‑Russian peoples who struggled for liberty and member­ship in the League of Nations. The program of tallness Communist dictator­ship, with its suppression of all free institutions of society, was here supported by a representative of the "free German press" — a program which would sound reactionary and barbarian even for African tribes. The pamphlet is characterized by a complete absence of any emotional and moral condemnation of Communist inhumanities; on the contrary, Kohn always justifies them by splendid comparisons or pictures. It is a monument of the absence of any moral and political responsibility toward the victims of Stalin — individuals and nations. Stalin's policy is dressed up in the German "liberal" phraseology of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which once so warmly welcomed Rapallo, not anticipating that it was helping Hitler to power in Germany for second Rapallo of 1939. . . .

Kohn's pamphlet is still today a popular book amongst all fellow travelers in American universities, and continues its work for the glorification of Russian Communism. Consequently this belated book review is necessary, the more so that H. Kohn is at present a reviewer for the New York Times "Book Section," a teacher of American Youth, and a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

Kohn was fully aware of what is going on in Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the dilemma with which anyone in the free world is faced. "Communism and Western civilization stand face to face as irreconcilable  p184 conceptions of the meaning of life and human values." He assumes that since the dissolution of the medieval religious order, nationalism became the main pillar of the faith of men of the new age, creating the nationalities as units of history. Whereas in the old religious order there existed a universal order or the elements of the œcumene in the conceptions of God, the creator of all things and father of all men, in the new age nationalism represents the dissolution of the œcumene. The fact that the leading non‑Russian peoples were fighting for the ideals of the League of Nations in Eastern Europe and that all the national movements regarded Wilson's League as the new world order, Kohn silently disregards. What is good and constructive for the free nationalities in Western Europe is, of course, ad for the non‑Russian nationalities in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

Consequently Kohn condemns nationalism as a "negative" movement of present times. As in the present technological century of advanced traffic development and world trade, the economic existence of the individual and its needs can be satisfied only by the new œcumene, H. Kohn preaches (at the very moment when five million died of hunger in the Ukraine and cannibalism was a deep stain on this Stalinist era): "Communism, which seeks to anchor the spiritual existence of man in a new faith, to liberate him from fear and insecurity in a new shelteredness, is turning back to œcumene" (p21); not mentioning with a single word the slave labor camps and the abolition of all rights of the working class, Kohn teaches: "In the world of [the] proletariat labor is elevated to the creative principle" (p14); "In Communism the dignity of labor comes once more into its own, and the social estimation of the individual is made entirely independent of his income" contrary to the American attitude (p15); H. Kohn assures us enthusiastically: "E the worker as the highest in the land, labor gains a new ennoblement. Over Moscow there floats the flaming device: 'We shall point a new way for the world; labor shall become lord of the world" (p15). The human brain is a useful instrument if it can discern what is behind the slogan. . . . H. Kohn, completely dragging the historical background of the Ukrainians, Byelo-Ruthenians, the Baltic nations, and Finland, of the Caucasian and Asiatic peoples, dragging the problems involved: Europe-Russia, Russia-Asia, assumes that their present nationalism is a consequence of

H. Kohn repeats the comparison between the Catholic Church and the Russian Communist Party, first given by Coudenhove-Kalergi, as both aim in their systems at a single all‑embracing society and both  p185 claim a monopoly of validity of their roads to salvation, and he actually writes, "œcumenical religion and Communism point the way through their fulfilment to an age of universalism and peace" (p23)! Young Americans are even today shocked after reading this book, at what crimes were done in New York by the American Courts by having stopped the "peace actions" of the American Communist Party and Hiss & Co., but older readers will confront the words of Kohn with the facts of the last decades and understand that the Russian Communist meaning of "universalism and peace" must, for an honest interpretation, be translated into English by "Russian Communist Neanderthalism." Consequently the statement is untrue that the Church and Russian Communism move toward a common goal.

Kohn is right in saying that "the Communist intellectual system is by the conviction that the world is controlled and ordered through the growth of the rationalist spirit, a growth imminent in the world. . . . Anyone who has assimilated and accepts this system possesses the key to the explanation of all things and the assured knowledge of the path to be pursued in the future" . . . and the claim to absoluteness of this system. On page 26, H. Kohn presents very clearly the European outlook against this Communist "absoluteness," which does permit liberty in thought and opinion (practi­cing tolerance) — of course, with the criticism that "what Europe has won thus by breadth and freedom, it has lost in certainty. . . ." But Kohn has lost nothing in "certainty" that the fight of the non‑Russian nationalities for the practice of these European values "of liberty of thought and opinion, and tolerance," and against the Russian claim to absoluteness of their Communist system — is a "negative" movement. Consequently H. Kohn belittles their accusations and gives to Communist despotism a "pious" explanation, even justification: "the lack of freedom, the 'intolerance' and 'inhumanity' of Communism similarly find their explanation in its medieval type of faith" — putting the words "intolerance" and "inhumanity" in quotation marks (p29). Thus for everything in Communism H. Kohn has a high-brow interpretation:

What a marvelous 'justification" of Communist intellectual slavery and thought control! But what cynical chatter if we confront this explanation with facts. H. Kohn well understands that "the Communists' certainty of victory is not based on ethical superiority but on a confidence  p186 free from all moral context," because of their idea "of progress," with a definite, planned goal and the course to it. . . . "Thus in the idea of progress, Communism outbids the XIX century" (p33), according to H. Kohn:

Kohn does not bother to confront this Communist propaganda of "progress," "spirit of equal partner­ship of all peoples," "new order," "approaching realm of peace" with the facts from the life of the non‑Russian nationalities, he uncritically repeats the Messianism of Russian Communism under the aspect of "the unity of the history of society, declaring all the non‑Russian peoples "enemies" of this progress, of this new order and peace, which Leninism-Stalinism is realizing. Kohn is convinced that:

 p187  Such are the interpretations of H. Kohn of Russian Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism, and of the democratic nationalism of the non‑Russian peoples in the Soviet Union who refused to be butchered "horizontally" by the Russians for the "progress," "new order," and "peace." That these nationalities were fighting for the European ideals of liberty and put their national individualities under the protection of the League of Nations — all these values belong to the "old stage of history"; they are, of course, "obsolete and reactionary" as compared with the Russian Communist "progress." Lenin and Stalin are then elevated by Kohn in the chapter: "Bolshevism and Nationalism," as the Apostles of the rights of the non‑Russian nationalities, which were shortly before "horizontally" prepared by the collectivization. First, of course, according to the double-accounting method, comes the condemnation of the Russian nationality policy before 1917 and of all the persecutions; then is presented Lenin, with his "supernational outlook," proclaiming for all non‑Russian peoples complete self-determination, even to secession from the empire. But Kohn forgets that the non‑Russian nationalities via facti recognized this right, as a Wilsonian principle, themselves, before Lenin could "practice" it and the Russian removal virtually had ceased to exist. But Kohn is silent about the methods with which the Soviet Union was built up by the Russian Communists, about the conflict between the conceptions of Moscow and Geneva, and he presents us with a glamorous picture of Lenin and Stalin as nationality specialists. Of course, the Austrian Socialists were bunglers proposing only "cultural autonomy"; "Lenin went far beyond the Austrian Marxists. . . ." Stalin at the Tenth and Twelfth Congresses is credited with having relaxed, in the "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia," "equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia, their right to full self-determination, including secession from Russia and setting up as independent states; the abrogation of all privileges and disabilities of nationalities and national religions, freedom of development of national minorities and ethnical groups in Russian territory." Of course, what is the French Revolution according to Kohn in comparison with the Russian Communist one? "The French Revolution, which has been the herald of national awakening and individualization in Europe, had contented itself with the individual's right to freedom. The Russian Revolution, setting the seal on the historic progress of the hundred and twenty years passed since then, had added to the rights of the individual citizen the right of peoples . . ." ([50) Heil Lenin! Heil Stalin! Gloria, Hallelujah! The ignorant Americans are under a delusion when they assume that the American Declaration of Independence has contributed something to it; poor ignorant bard Taras Shevchenko, the Robert Burns of Ukraine, who hailed George Washington with the "new and just law." Also, Wilson's principles had apparently no influence on the world development. — H. Kohn is silent about how the Soviet Union emerged under the Russian Communist dictator­ship, and only says, "The dynamic energy of the oppressed nations, especially of colonial peoples, had now been harnessed to the service of the Revolution. The slogan: Proletarians of all countries and oppressed regions  p188 of all the world, unite!" Of course, about the slogan of the Promethean League — "Oppressed peoples by Soviet Moscow unite!" — H. Kohn did nothing here in the 30's. And he seriously declares: "The example furnished by the solution of the problem of nationality in the Soviet Union is also to have effect upon the peoples beyond its borders." "Solution" — that is a good term . . . ! Upon which "peoples beyond the border" could this "solution" have effect? And Kohn seriously writes that "the freedom and equality of rights accorded to the Ukrainians and White Russians in the Soviet Union are contrasted with persecution and deprivation of rights to which they are exposed in Poland." I do not wish to defend the Polish oppressions, but to publish in 1933 such a statement about "the freedom and equality of rights" accorded to Ukrainians and Byelo-Ruthenians in the Soviet Union in the year 1933 is a downright falsification of facts. The organization of springboards for aggression and imperialism against free democratic States by Russian Communism Kohn calls "the desire [of the Soviet Union] to apply the Leninist nationality policy in foreign affairs," and so he explains the organization of the Karelian Republic opposite Finland, of the Moldavian Republic opposite Roumania, of the Mongolian and Tannu-Tuva Republics opposite China!

It is unbelievable how the chapter "Language and Culture," with all its misinformation could be written by H. Kohn, who at that time (1932‑1933) certainly knew what was going on in the non‑Russian republics in the Soviet Union. All the Communist pga slogans are there piously repeated, one Big Lie after nu: "The Soviet State rests on the class of the proletariat; the State serves the will of the proletariat to persist and progress; it is becoming the expression and the protector of the creative efforts of the proletariat." (Yes, but Kohn forgets to say "only of the Russian proletariat. . . .") "Hence the Soviet Union is free from every attempt at cultural or lingual oppression or subordination of the smaller peoples or minorities in its territory. A definite common body of culture is being bestowed on the masses, but not through the Russian language but through the languages of the various peoples, and the culture is not a national, a Russian culture but a supra-national, proletarian, Communist one" — H. Kohn preaches his Communist propaganda wisdom at a time when just the opposite of all his statements is true. Nor is Kohn troubled by the fact that the Tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter I were already included in the "supra-national, proletarian, Communist culture." And how ardently "the father of all peoples" protects the non‑Russian nationalities according to Kohn (here he mentions all the organizations formed before 1928 by the national oppositions as the achievements of the Soviet government, of the same Russian Soviet government which about 1930‑1932 had liquidated them):

"Above all in language," says H. Kohn, and he does not mention with a single word Marr's existence and his theory. And constantly revels in a pious glorification of magnanimous Russian Communism and its "work" for all "humanity":

Thus Russian Communism, according to Kohn, virtually continues the work of Christianity and capitalism; how stupid of the Western democracies not to open the gates for this "progress" and its "still more effective ways"!

Kohn's description of the plight of the non‑Russian nations in the Soviet Union includes pictures which surpass the vision of paradise in the Koran:

According to Kohn and Czecho­slovakia and Poland by their laws

as by "free consent" it also now happens in Poland, Czecho­slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Roumania. . . . At the very time when all self-government also as to the languages of all non‑Russian nationalities was liquidated, Kohn wrote:

 p190  Thus Kohn sees only "development," "education," "encouragement"; therefore only fascists and chauvinists can sabotage this humanitarian progress under the leader­ship of Stalin. . . . H. Kohn informs us:

This H. Kohn published in 1933! The Russian Soviet government which from 1928 had been liquidating all these cultural agencies of the democratic national and national Communists' opposition against Russian Communism is here credited as fostering and encouraging them. Kohn informs the reader about the attitude of Russian Communism as to "national culture" in the following way:

Kohn's report is misleading and false. The readers are made to believe by Kohn that Russian Communism practices this attitude toward all "national culture," thus also toward the Russian national culture. Accordingly, the "internationalist" Kohn, blinded by the Communist œcumene, does not shed a single tear over the fact that the Jewish nation is being "horizontalized" also from their culture heritage of Judaism; he believes that "death to the national cultures" includes also the Russian national heritage. This statement of Kohn the reader can put face to face with R. Jacobson's informational remarks in the previous article about the "Russian cultural heritage." Kohn conceived that "death to national cultures" means in the Russian Communist lingo only "death to all non‑Russian cultures"; the Russian cultural heritage of the classic literature and language, from the feudal and theocratic until the bourgeois capitalistic epochs became the "proletarian Russian heritage," which is to be cultivated and enriched by "inspirations" from Ivan the Terrible and Peter I. All the bonds of the non‑Russian nations which unite the life of the peoples with the past are to be dissolved — but not the bonds of the Russian nationality. Consequently Kohn's statement that "all [languages] are equal" is not true. Kohn does not bother to analyze critically the Communist propaganda formula "national in form but proletarian in content." How can there be a Jewish culture, "national in form, proletarian in content," when the millenniums of Judaism are replaced by the cult of Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, the orthodox Protopop Avakum, etc.? This Stalinist formula, repeated parrotlike by the high priests of the Communist œcumene, is the greatest propaganda hoax of Soviet semantics. The adjective expresses the quality of the noun from which it is derived; thus from "wood" comes "wooden"; the adjective "national" is derived from "nation" and in that case has a meaning only if the existence of a "nationality" in the Western European sense is recognized as a cultural national individuality and entity. But Kohn himself sees clearly that Russian Communism does not recognize that Western meaning of the word "nationality" as applying to the non‑Russian nationalities; hence the adjective "national" in the Communist lingo has a new meaning, entirely different from the Western European; it virtually means "the local native language, purified of all national content." Language means here simply a "vocal instrument of communication purged of all national elements." How can a national form exist without a national content? The cassock is the "form of Christian priesthood." If the devil puts on a cassock, does this form remain "Christian"? The Russian Communists have changed the meaning of  p192 the adjective "national" into its very opposite, "antinational," and use the word "national" only to deceive the national opposition and the gullible Western democracy. The Russian Communist term "national" has just as much in common with the Western European term, as the Russian Communist terms "democracy," "freedom of the press," "aggression," "imperialism," with the meanings of the Western European terms. Thus the term "national in form, Socialist in content" must be honestly translated, "antinational in form, antinational in content," because only the Western European national content makes the "national form." To use the Ukrainian language for the glorification of the hangman of Ukraine, Peter I, is to give a "Socialist" content to the "national" form in the present‑day Soviet Ukraine. The national form can only be the expression of the national content, as the Russian national form only of the Russian national cultural heritage. What would remain of the "American national form" if one would cut it off from the American cultural heritage and the ideas of the American Declaration of Independence? We repeat once again: the "national" form (of language) is "national" only insofar as it is the expression of the very complex phenomenon of a nationality. When this spirit is killed, the form ceases to exist. Soviet Moscow is executing before this slogan the most contemptible kind of denationalization of the non‑Russian peoples, killing their very spirit and cutting their culture roots, which unite them with European culture.

Instead of saying honestly that the non‑Russian nations are in the Soviet Union enslaved and oppressed, deprived of all human and national rights, H. Kohn performs a masterpiece of Communist propaganda about "the direct and democratic participation of the masses," the "training of the masses and the Russian Communist Party" as a "supra-national organization":

In plain English: in the Soviet Constitution, with all independence and autonomous republics, democratic participation of the masses is a hoax and a fraud. There is no freedom and no participation of the non‑Russian nations in the Soviet Union, but everything is under Russian Communist dictator­ship, the "supra-national" organization of which is also mockery. Kohn's opinion follows the party line and he faithfully sums up: "Thus nationalism is to be brought down from its supremacy and absoluteness to be the servant of a supra-national idea." Russian Communism is for Kohn a "supra-national idea" and the non‑Russian  p193 peoples must be its "servants" — a fine classless terminology of the pious adorer of the Communist œcumene. Kohn is so fascinated by the Communist program that he does not stop to analyze obviously the roots of "local nationalisms" and what they are really fighting for: "Local nationalism is preached and promoted by all the elements which for economic or social reasons oppose the dictator­ship of the proletariat and aspire to secede from the Union and form 'bourgeois' national States of their own." That is partly falsification. The Georgian Republic was Socialist, the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian governments conducting the fight against the Soviet Moscow had also Socialist governments and the struggle was going on not for "bourgeois" national States, but for social democratic national States, which would co‑operate with the League of Nations as the supra-national organization. H. Kohn also sees clearly that "among the Ukrainians and the White Russians there are westernizing tendencies that object to a cultural dependence on Moscow and on the semi-Asiatic Soviet Union, and desire to follow the cultural models of the West, the latest currents of bourgeois literature and art." Had not the West also a Socialist literature and a "non‑bourgeois" art, Mr. Kohn? Has Soviet Moscow a monopoly on them?

Kohn sees also among the Turco-Tatar peoples Pan‑Turk and Pan‑Islamic movements; he even knows that "right down to recent times the Soviet authorities have been kept busy by a series of armed risings in central Asia." . . . Are these movements not also "super-national ideas"? Is it not therefore an oversimplification and falsification to present the fight of the non‑Russian nationalities of the USSR in Europe and Asia against Russian Communism as a fight of "local nationalisms" against the "supra-national idea of Soviet Moscow"?

Thus, in Kohn's opinion there is not going in the Soviet Union a struggle for democracy and liberty against a Russian Communist tyranny, but, to use his own words, "So the struggle continues between the forward looking nationalism of Communism and the ebullitions of nationalism under the influences of the past." And he is quite on the side of Semitic in this struggle:

Thus for Kohn, Russian Communism "is preparing the way for a classless society, a warless age of peace" — and we are grateful to Kohn finally at least for having discovered the real mission of Russian Communism: "Through the dissolution of other nations" to force "their  p194 merging into one all‑embracing nation in the course of the historic process"; in plain English: "Through the dissolution of the non‑Russian nations to force their merging into one Russian all‑embracing Soviet nation." And that, of course, is for Kohn the universal human aim of "Socialism," represented by the Russian Communist dictator­ship. But Mr. Kohn, if a person is "dissolved" against his own will, it is called in the West "murder"; is not a "dissolution" of a nation against its will nation-killing? Whence has a gangster or a gangster party the authority for the "dissolution" of individuals or nations? Might is right? Kohn had ample opportunity, since 1933, to compare his Communist lyrics about "the warless age of peace" and "the classless society" with facts of recent history. (What a crime that the "ill‑defined thinking of a liberal epoch" has delayed for free Ireland and Israel the realization of Kohn's "progressive" ideology! — What a victory for "humanity" that Poland, Czecho­slovakia, Roumania, Bulgaria, Don Juan de Austria, Tibet finally "joined" the Russian Communist œcumene! What a shame that Titoist Yugoslavia broke away and that the U. S. A. "hindered" Greece and Turkey from "joining" the "new world order of peace"! — American students inferred this from Kohn's book. . . .)

At the very time when all the political refugees of the non‑Russian nationalities appealed to the conscience of the Western free nations to raise their voices in defense of liberty — H. Kohn is preaching:

The "Red Dean of Canterbury" is a piker: Marx, prophets, Christians, Stoa, Young Europe, Slavophile Messianism — and suddenly appears "Russia — the protagonist and Spoleto, the suffering demonstrator and interpreter of the meaning of human history" — modestly aspiring to the "World Soviet Republic," this "urge toward a united and peaceful humanity"! Let us briefly remark" Marx would surely have been executed by Lenin and Stalin in 1920 for his anti-Russian writings. Young Europe reached and fertilized with its ideas Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and penetrated into the Caucasus as an anti-Russian, democratic, and revolutionary ideology, which later embraced, together with Socialism, all the oppressed non‑Russian nations. chain does not even see these oppressed and suffering nationalities, but their Pan‑Slavic, or rather Pan‑Muscovite, oppressor is decked out in the role of the "suffering demonstrator and interpreter of the meaning of human history," because of the Russian Slavophile Messianism of the same Katkov who got the money for his publication from the hangman, Muravyov. . . .

And with reverent and deep bows before Lenin and Stalin, the Frankfurter Zeitung democrat states:

O holy German Geopolitik! But the non‑Russian nationalities are deeply indebted to H. Kohn as a witness to the fact that the Soviet government did not "allow" the independent national States to organize. Thus the question is elucidated whether the Russian Communists infringed on their rights of self-determination or not, whether they joined the "Soviet Union" voluntarily or not, and whether they are at present oppressed odor not. Perhaps now the free world understands that the destruction of the free democratic republics of the non‑Russians by Russian Communists "was fatal in more than merely economic respects"? Besides being a political crime still awaiting its Nuernberg for its perpetrators and their abettors.

And Kohn ends his propaganda with a real orgy of Communist soap‑box oratory systematically repeating all the "Big Lies" about the plight of the non‑Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union:

What Stakhanovite, nearly Stalinist, pathos! But H. Kohn is right. There can be no compromise between Russian Communist imperialism, which he calls "universalism," and the free world of nationalities, which aspire to the ideal to organize a free humanity.

We accepted this challenge in 1918; we fought then, we fight now, and therefore we are presenting Jacobson and Kohn fully against the background of the tragedy of the non‑Russian nations and their fight for liberty in the Soviet Union.

By the way: This "beast of prey," the American eagle, is rather a "liberal" beast, yet from the "liberal century" it takes under its wings all the enemies of the very ideas of the American Declaration of Independence, fronts them "inalienable rights" for the poisoning of the American youth with such ideologies and pays for it in American dollars. It's a nice birdy! This eagle represents for the non‑Russian peoples the ideology for which they are fighting for more than a quarter century, and therefore the Russian "hammer and sickle" attempts to chop off this eagle's head in order to achieve the "dissolution" of the American nation. . . .

"Dissolution of nationality!" Has genocide ever had a better apologist than this, H. Kohn? His book is to this day the vade mecum in the U. S. A. for the nationality problem in the Soviet Union. And nobody suspects that, in the 1949 catalogue (distributed — 1951) of the well-known center of Communist literature, Universal Distributors Company, 38 Union Square, New York, it was still listed among all the Communist propaganda literature about the Communist Doctrine and the Soviet Union. The same book furnished material for information of the American Congress (House Document 754) about the plight of the non‑Russian peoples in the Soviet Union after World War II.

The Author's Notes:

1 "Histoire d'une Emancipation," in the Nouvelle Revue Française, September 1, 1931.

2 "Russian Emigration After Thirty Years Exile," The Eastern Quarterly, Vol. IV, No. 1, London, 1951.

3 K Kharakteristike Evraziisogo Yazykovogo Soiuza, Izdanie Evrasiicev, 1931; on the last page is given: "Imp. de Navarre, 5, Rue deº Gobelins, Paris." On the first page my copy has a red stamp "Printed in the Soviet Union." R. Jacobson's ideas have to be separated from Koppelmann, H., Die Eurasische Sprachfamilie, Indogermanisch, Koreanisch und Verwandtes, 1933.

4 Unfortunately, he has disregarded Arthur Schopenhauer's denunciation of Hegel's method and also uses it for "saving the classical Russian language from vulgarisation." Here are the words of Schopenhauer: "Hegel's philosophy is a crystallized syllogism: it is an abracadabra, a puff of bombast and wish-wash of phrases, which in its monstrous construction compels the mind to form impossible contradictions and in itself is enough to cause an entire atrophy of the intellect. It is made up of three-fourths of nonsense and one fourth error; it contains words not thoughts 'such stuff as madmen speak without brain.' "

5 They still think that linguistics are outside the present great war between the ideas of intellectual liberty and intellectual slavery, that they can, regardless of the basic aims of Marxism-Leninism, apply the methods of free modern linguistics to the American language, which they view as a social phenomenon whose nature and development cannot be governed by the Communist Party. Yet these American liberals dare to address the American society with "messages of liberty and tolerance of linguistic liberalism," encouraging their readers to think for themselves, to reach their own conclusions, not to rely on self-constituted "party" authorities and they, I fear, even yet doubt "that Stalin and his party know best," in linguistics and also in the American language.

6 Some publications of Jacobson's "leader of present Ukrainian public life":

Stalin, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism, Moscow, 1932.

Postyshev P., & Kossior, S., Soviet Ukraine Today, 116 pp., New York, 1933.

Postyshev P., Marxistisch-Leninistische Erziehung, 112 pp., Moscow-Leningrad, 1933.

7 The Frankfurter Zeitung had about the thirties a noteworthy staff of reporters; according to G. E. Sokolsky (Milwaukee Sentinel, Sept. 1, 1951). The German paper was represented in Shanghai by Mrs. Agnes Smedley, connected with the Sorge spy ring.

Thayer's Note:

a In the spirit of the author's intentions I've put the Jakobson article appendix onsite as scanned images. But in order to allow the text to be searched and picked up by search engines, I've accompanied those page images by a complete rekeying; in which I've rendered the wavy-underscored passages like this, and the plain-underscored passages like this.

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