Die Neue Zeit
22nd December 2011, 15:02
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=895
Bad treaty
My, last week's issue of the Weekly Worker (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/edition.php?issue_id=894) was quite an issue on left nationalism all around, - from across the European Union to Libya, to the Middle East, to the former Soviet space. One of Jack Conrad's own podcasts was on that last one, and it is also the subject of my final letter for 2011.
It is only about a week before the twentieth anniversary of what Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite other aspects of his politics, aptly called "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century," whose negative impacts are still felt by workers the world over even today. It is also about a week or two before the eighty-ninth anniversary of what could be considered one of the unsung geopolitical tragedies of the 20th century. The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was a historical mistake.
In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his People's Commissar of Nationalities mostly in the right. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/nationalities-soviet-union-t61251/index.html) The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and "positive discrimination" in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the "affirmative action empire" may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet Air and Air Defense Forces. However, too ethnic minority concessions were made. Today's Quebecois intercultural policies demonstrate in hindsight that the cultural diversity positives could have been achieved with neither linguistic korenizatsiya (Quebec's Bill 101 makes French the only official language in Quebec) nor fragmented geopolitical identities past reasonable autonomy; the entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
Bad treaty
My, last week's issue of the Weekly Worker (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/edition.php?issue_id=894) was quite an issue on left nationalism all around, - from across the European Union to Libya, to the Middle East, to the former Soviet space. One of Jack Conrad's own podcasts was on that last one, and it is also the subject of my final letter for 2011.
It is only about a week before the twentieth anniversary of what Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite other aspects of his politics, aptly called "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century," whose negative impacts are still felt by workers the world over even today. It is also about a week or two before the eighty-ninth anniversary of what could be considered one of the unsung geopolitical tragedies of the 20th century. The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was a historical mistake.
In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his People's Commissar of Nationalities mostly in the right. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/nationalities-soviet-union-t61251/index.html) The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and "positive discrimination" in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the "affirmative action empire" may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet Air and Air Defense Forces. However, too ethnic minority concessions were made. Today's Quebecois intercultural policies demonstrate in hindsight that the cultural diversity positives could have been achieved with neither linguistic korenizatsiya (Quebec's Bill 101 makes French the only official language in Quebec) nor fragmented geopolitical identities past reasonable autonomy; the entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.