Saturday, January 10, 2015

Moscow Analyst Invokes Distinction Between 'Historical' and 'History-Less' Nations

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 10 – The notion that Ukraine is not a nation put about by Moscow propagandists has roots in German philosophy and Marxism, and now one Russian commentator has explicitly invoked the distinction between “historical nations” and peoples “without a history” to argue Russia has “returned to history,” implying this is something Ukraine cannot do.

 

            “At one time,” the deputy head of the Moscow Center for Scientific Political Thought and Ideology says, “Hegel particularly distinguished out of the numerous states which have existed at various times historical states” and argued that “through these states was realized the semantics of world history” (rusrand.ru/actuals/rossija-vernulas-v-istoriju).

 

            For Hegel, as Bagdasyaran notes, “historical states are not equivalent to successful states” because “the historically great” can be “a victory or a tragedy.”  But as he does not note, Friedrich Engels used the term in a way that suggested that those nations which had been able to articulate a state were “historical” while those who were not were “peoples without a history.”

 

            Engels’ simplification of the idea of “geschichtslosen Nationen” or “history-less nations” informed much of Marxist thought from the middle of the 19th century until now. It certainly helps to explain part of Lenin’s argument that big states even if they are multi-national empires are more progressive than smaller nation states with smaller markets.

 

            And more broadly, it informs directly or indirectly those, often found in Russia but not absent in other countries as well, who dismiss nations which for one reason or another have not been able to articulate a state  and who then conflate nation and state in the cases of those who have erected one.

 

            But it has particular relevance to Ukraine, which makes Bagdasyaran’s insistence that Russia has resumed its “historical” status after two decades of following in the trail of the West as a “transition” state following in the path of Western economic and political development. Indeed, he says, “the return of Russia to big history is the chief result of 2014.”

 

            That is because of the withering criticism of Engels idea offered by Roman Rosdolsky, an émigré Ukrainian scholar (1898-1967) who argued that the co-founder of Marxism simply wanted to keep all large states together even if that required the sacrifice of the freedoms of the peoples who made them up. 

 

            In “Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples” (Glasgow, 1987), Rosdolsky cited Engels’ argument that “peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilization … have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence.”

 

            Engels was being consistent with Hegel, Rosdolsky said, because his predecessor had argued only those peoples who were capable of setting up a state could promote historical progress. “A nation with no state formation … has, strictly speaking, no history, like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.”

 

            But as a Ukrainian, Rosdolsky rejected the notion of Russians as having the standing of an historical people and the Ukrainians lacking such standing simply because of the longstanding existence of a state in the one case and the frequent absence of one in the other. And in his most famous work, he argued that the Ukrainian “question cannot be solved” -- until Ukrainians have “achieved full and not merely formal – independence” from Russia.

 

 

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