In Marxist theory, bourgeois nationalism is the ideology of the ruling capitalist class which aims to overcome class antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie by appealing to national unity. It is seen as a distraction from engaging in class struggle and an attempt to impose interests of capitalists on the proletariat by constructing capitalist interests as "national interests". Internationally, it aims to create antagonism between workers of different nations and serves as a divide-and-conquer strategy. The bourgeois nationalism is contrasted with left-wing nationalism and proletarian internationalism.
After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik government based its nationalities policy (korenization) on the principles of Marxism. According to these principles, all nations should disappear with time, and nationalism was considered a bourgeois ideology. [1] By the mid-1930s these policies were replaced with more extreme assimilationist and Russification policies. [2] [3] [4] The term was used indiscriminately to smear national groups opposed to Russian centralism. [5]
In his Report on the 50th anniversary of the formation of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev emphasized: "That is why Communists and all fighters for socialism believe that the main aspect of the national question is unification of the working people, regardless of their national origin, in the common battle against every type of oppression, and for a new social system which rules out exploitation of the working people." [6]
In the Soviet Union throughout its existence, the term generally referred to Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Armenian, Kazakh and other types of nationalism that were propagated by the Soviet Union's non-Russian minorities. The Soviet leadership saw their struggle for independence as a threat to the entire existence of the USSR's communist regime. [7] [8] [9]
Bourgeois nationalism as a concept was discussed by China's president, Liu Shaoqi as follows:
The exploitation of wage labour, competition, the squeezing out, suppressing and swallowing of rivals among the capitalists themselves, the resorting to war and even world war, the utilisation of all means to secure a monopoly position in its own country and throughout the world - such is the inherent character of the profit-seeking bourgeoisie. This is the class basis of bourgeois nationalism and of all bourgeois ideologies. [...] The most vicious manifestations of the development of bourgeois nationalism include the enslavement of the colonial and semi-colonial countries by the imperialist powers, the First World War, the aggression of Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese warlords during the Second World War, and the schemes for the enslavement of the whole world undertaken by the international imperialist camp, headed by American imperialism. [10]
In 1949, the Communist Party USA declared the Zionist movement to be a form of "Jewish bourgeois nationalism". [11]
Writing for People's World, the leftist activist John Gilman referred to Jewish bourgeoisie nationalism as having multiple varieties, including Jewish assimilationism and Zionism. [12]
The State and the Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution is a book written by Vladimir Lenin and published in 1917 which describes his views on the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Soviet anti-Zionism is an anti-Zionist and pro-Arab doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the Soviet Union initially pursued a pro-Zionist policy after World War II due to its perception that the Jewish state would be socialist and pro-Soviet, its outlook on the Arab–Israeli conflict changed as Israel began to develop a close relationship with the United States and aligned itself with the Western Bloc.
Korenizatsiia was an early policy of the Soviet Union for the integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet republics. In the 1920s, the policy promoted representatives of the titular nation, and their national minorities, into the lower administrative levels of the local government, bureaucracy, and nomenklatura of their Soviet republics. The main idea of the korenizatsiia was to grow communist cadres for every nationality. In Russian, the term korenizatsiya (коренизация) derives from korennoye naseleniye. The policy practically ended in the mid-1930s with the deportations of various nationalities.
Friendship of peoples is a concept advanced by Marxist social class theory. According to Marxism, nationalism is only a tool of the ruling class, used to keep the working class divided and thus easier to control and exploit. With the success of class struggle, the natural brotherhood of all workers would make the idea of separate nations obsolete.
The intensification of the class struggle along with the development of socialism is a component of the theory of Stalinism.
Sovietization is the adoption of a political system based on the model of soviets or the adoption of a way of life, mentality, and culture modeled after the Soviet Union. This often included adopting the Cyrillic script and sometimes also the Russian language.
The Directorate, or Directory was a provisional collegiate revolutionary state committee of the Ukrainian People's Republic, initially formed on 13–14 November 1918 during a session of the Ukrainian National Union in rebellion against the Ukrainian State. During the Anti-Hetman Uprising it was named as the Executive Council of the State Affairs. Its authority was extended by the Labor Congress of Ukraine on 23–28 January 1919.
Volodymyr Vasyliovych Shcherbytsky was a Ukrainian Soviet politician who served as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1972 to 1989. A close ally of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Shcherbytsky replaced reformist leader Petro Shelest in 1972 as part of a crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Shcherbytsky ruled as a neo-Stalinist, overseeing Russification of Ukrainian society as well as a rapid shift to nuclear power, ultimately resulting in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Shcherbytsky was removed in 1989 amidst widespread protests against his rule, and died months later.
Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil was a Ukrainian politician and Soviet dissident. As a prominent Ukrainian dissident in the Soviet Union, he was arrested multiple times in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s for his political views. From 1992 onwards, Chornovil was one of the leaders of Rukh, the People's Movement of Ukraine, which was the first opposition party in democratic Ukraine, and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Chas-Time (Chas) from 1995. One of the most prominent political figures of the 1980s and 1990s, Chornovil paved the way for contemporary Ukraine to regain its independence.
National communism is a term describing various forms in which Marxism–Leninism and socialism has been adopted and/or implemented by leaders in different countries using aspects of nationalism or national identity to form a policy independent from communist internationalism. National communism has been used to describe movements and governments that have sought to form a distinctly unique variant of communism based upon distinct national characteristics and circumstances, rather than following policies set by other socialist states, such as the Soviet Union.
Before the perestroika Soviet era reforms of Gorbachev that promoted a more liberal form of socialism, the formal ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, a form of socialism consisting of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state that aimed to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union's ideological commitment to achieving communism included the national communist development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat the predominant prevailing global system of capitalism and promote the goals of Russian Communism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union—and thus Marxism–Leninism—derived and developed from the theories, policies, and political praxis of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
Bilhorod Kyivskyi or Belgorod Kiyevsky was a legendary city-castle in Kievan Rus', on the right bank of the Irpin River. The remains of the city is currently located in Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine.
The Ukrainian national government was a brief self-proclaimed Ukrainian government during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The government was declared by the proclamation of the Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941, which also pledged to work with Nazi Germany. It was led by Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.
Ivan Mykhailovych Dziuba was a Ukrainian literary critic, social activist, dissident, Hero of Ukraine, academic of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the second Minister of Culture of Ukraine (1992—1994), and head of the committee for Shevchenko National Prize (1999–2001).
Internationalism is a political principle that advocates greater political or economic cooperation among states and nations. It is associated with other political movements and ideologies, but can also reflect a doctrine, belief system, or movement in itself.
People's democracy is a theoretical concept within Marxism–Leninism that advocates the establishment of a multi-class and multi-party democracy during the transition from capitalism to socialism. People's democracy was developed after World War II and implemented in a number of European and Asian countries as a result of the people's democratic revolutions of the 1940s.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
The Russification of Belarus denotes a historical process where the integration of Russian language and culture increasingly influenced Belarusian society, especially during the 20th century.
The History of Ukrainian literature includes laws of the historical and literary process, literary genres, trends, works of individual writers, features of their style, and the importance of artistic heritage in the development of Ukrainian literature.
The Ukrainian orthography of 1933 is the Ukrainian orthography, adopted in 1933 in Kharkiv, the capital Soviet Ukraine. It began the process of artificial convergence of Ukrainian and Russian language traditions of orthography. Some norms that were rejected due to their absence in the Russian orthography were returned to the Ukrainian orthography of 2019.
Elsewhere in the USSR, the late 1930s and the outbreak of World War II also saw some significant changes: elements of korenizatsiya were phased out... the Russians were officially anointed as the 'elder brothers' of the Soviet family of nations, whilst among historians Tsarist imperialism was rehabilitated as having had a 'progressive significance'
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