Paradigms of the Nations Classification in European and Soviet Marxism

• Author: Sergii Rudenko and Vyacheslav Vilkov
• Position: Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology (Maoming, China); Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine)/Ph.D. (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine)
• Pages: 85-103

Ukrainian Policymaker, Volume 6, 2020 85

Paradigms of the Nations Classication

in European and Soviet Marxism

Sergii Rudenko1

Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor, Guangdong University of Petrochemical

Technology (Maoming, China); Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

(Kyiv, Ukraine)

E-mail: rudenkosrg@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9069-0989

Vyacheslav Vilkov2

Ph.D. (Philosophy), Associate Professor, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

(Kyiv, Ukraine)

E-mail: tvvvilkof59@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3542-0756

Rudenko, Sergii, and Vyacheslav Vilkov (2020). Paradigms of the Nations Classication

in European and Soviet Marxism. Ukrainian Policymaker, Volume 6, 2020: 85-103. https://

doi.org/10.29202/up/6/9

For the rst time in the post-Soviet period, in a separate publication, prerequisites, key ideas,

theoretical, methodological, ideological and political paradigms of nationalities by world and

European “classics of Marxism” (Friedrich Engels, Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, Joseph Stalin and

Vladimir Lenin, etc.) are analyzed and revealed in reliance on the principle of historicism and methods

of systematic, comparative, discursive and content analysis in political, philosophical and ideological

aspects. Comparative research of the interpretations of the main types of nations by the ancestors of

Marxism and their theoretical models, and also ideologemes, which were created in Soviet Marxism in

the second half of the twentieth century, was carried out.

The material of the article is particularly important for a relevant understanding of the specics

and direction of the development of philosophical and socio-political studies in the USSR and Ukraine

in the second half of the 1960s, the second half of the 1980s, and for the scientic understanding

of the paradigmatic, analytical and ideological prescriptions of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the

nation and the communist meta narration in their confrontation with Western concepts. In the present

circumstances, the results of such an analysis are essential for the creation of a correct assessment

of the theoretical platform and ideological attitudes of that period Soviet authority in the sphere of

national and cultural, national-state and socialist building, as well as its struggle with “bourgeois

nationalism.”

© Rudenko, Sergii, 2020

© Vilkov, Vyacheslav, 2020

Paradigms of the Nations Classication in European and Soviet Marxism

by Sergii Rudenko and Vyacheslav Vilkov

Ukrainian Policymaker, Volume 6, 2020

86

Keywords: socio-political studies, USSR and Ukraine, dierentiation of nations, Friedrich Engels,

Austro-Marxism of Otto Bauer, Stalin’s classication of nations, Marxist-Leninist historical and

economic theory of the nation, scientic communism

Received: March 6, 2020; accepted: April 21, 2020

Introduction

It should be noted that the social sciences, especially in the socialist countries and

specically in the Soviet Union, actively carried out ideological functions in the geopolitical

situation of the second half of the twentieth century. Using the cliché of that era, they were

at the forefront of the ideological struggle between the two political systems and ideological

doctrines — Socialist, Soviet, Marxist-Leninist, communist, internationalist, on the one hand,

and capitalist (imperialist), anti-communist, anti-Soviet and bourgeois-nationalist, on the other.

Because of this geopolitical and ideological confrontation, one of the key challenges of

the theory of the nation for Soviet experts in the eld of the theory of the nation (especially

in the situation of obvious ethnocultural commonality of the population of some alternative

socio-political systems and states, rst of all, the GDR and the GFR, the DPRK and the

Republic of Korea (South Korea); the activation of national liberation movements in

dierent regions of the world; international recognition of such a politically extraordinary

phenomenon as “countries of socialist orientation,” with their national or nationalist-oriented

leadership and ruling parties, etc.), was the problem of interpreting the relationship of the

national liberation struggle of peoples and the struggle for social liberation of the exploited

classes, i.e., socialism.

Initially, the only way to solve the problems of the interconnection between national

and social liberation was the democratic, proletarian and social revolution, the abolition

of capitalist economic and political relations. So, the following model was used: “to the

national through social liberation.” Nevertheless, Marxists of dierent countries and of

dierent historical periods were not unanimous about the specic way of implementing the

general scheme. Dierent social democratic and communist leaders preferred (including the

theoretical justication, ideological, propagandist, and organizational support, etc.) one of the

two versions.

The rst version, on which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels insisted (in work, called The

Principles of Communism of 1846, he directly stated that the proletarian/socialist revolution

must occur in all capitalist countries simultaneously), later the Trotskyists with their idea of

a “permanent revolution” (even in the mid-twentieth century).1 Relied on a postulate which

read as follows, “Since the position of the workers of all countries is the same, since their

interests are the same, and their enemies are the same, they must ght together, and they must

oppose the fraternal union of all nations to the bourgeoisie union of all nations” (Engels,

1955: 373). Thus, the solution of the issue of national freedom, independence or statehood

of each individual nation, and even the very legitimacy of its struggle for liberation, was

made entirely dependent by the founders of Marxism (an exception was made only for Poland

1 For example, Pierre Frank (1905-1984), who was one of the leaders and theorists of the Trotskyist

movement of the second half of the twentieth century, a member of the secretariat of the Fourth

International (to 1979), a member of the leadership of the international Revolutionary Communist

League organization (from 1968 to 1984), explicitly stated that the question of national independence

does not constitute any significant part of the theory of the permanent revolution (cited by 984, pp. 56).