The USSR: Language and Realities - Nations, Leaders, and Scholars 088033147X

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THE USSR: LANGUAGE AND REALITIES Nations, Leaders, and Scholars

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Michael Bruchis '-A

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EAST EUROPEAN MONOGRAPHS, BOULDER DISTRIBUTED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK 1988

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EAST EUROPEAN MONOGRAPHS, NO. CCL

The Columbia University Press is Responsible Only for the Marketing and Distribution of This Book

Copyright © 1988 by Michael Bruchis ISBN 0-88033-147-X Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 88-80385 Printed in the United States of America

Contents

PART I The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program: Statements and Implications 1. From the 1961 Program of the Communist Party to Its 1986 Version..3 2. Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications.85 3. The Party's National Policy and Its Reflection in the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR.107 PART II The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy 4. The National Question and Language Policy in the USSR.129 5. Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders.147 6. Between National Consciousness and Loyalty.175 7. The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party and its Defenders.215 PART III Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness 8. Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation.263 9. Outlines of the History of the Moldavian Communist Party: From Edition to Edition.319 10. The Concept of Homeland in Ion Druta's Writings.337 PART IV Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds 11. In Lieu of a Conclusion

371

1

PART I

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program: Statements and Implications

1 From the 1961 Program of the Communist Party to Its 1986 Version

The text of the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), adopted in 1961, may be considered as transitional in regard to the use of such synonymous terminological collocations as socialist camp—socialist community. The passage in the program stating that "in the socialist camp or, which is the same thing, in the world community of socialist countries, none have, nor can have, any special rights or privileges"1 bears witness that its authors saw these col¬ locations as being identical in content ("is the same thing"). However, the fact that, later on, the second term completely dislodged the first in all Soviet sociopolitical and historical Party literature proves that, from Soviet point of view, the two differ substantially. In this literature, the "world socialist community" is being opposed, as the "fraternal family of socialist states," to the imperialist camp that, as the program says, "is making preparations for the most terrible crime against mankind—a world thermonuclear war."2 Although, in the words of the program, "none have, nor can have, any special rights or privileges" in the world community of socialist states, the spirit of certain other statements in its text bears witness to the contrary. That is, that the top echelon in the Kremlin, which sanctioned the text, attempted to secure for the CPSU not only the role of a leading force in the "community of socialist states," but also the exclusive rights to determine whether the policy and practice of a socialist state's ruling party are in conformity with the theory of Marxism-Leninism. Thus, as well as stressing the need for the closest unity between socialist countries, of a "united effort in building socialism and the communism," the program declares that "the line of socialist con¬ struction in isolation, detached from the world community of socialist countries, is theoretically untenable, . . . because it . . . may ultimately 3

4

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

lead to the loss of socialist gains."3 This statement constitutes the basis of legitimizing an eventual interference by the socialist community (first of all and mainly the USSR) in the internal affairs of any member of that "community" that has decided, for whatever reasons, to adopt a "line of socialist construction in isolation." The program of the CPSU proclaims, as characteristic features of interrelations of the socialist countries, "complete equality [and] mutual respect for independence and sovereignty. . . ."4 However, its text also contains statements that render this assertion void, e.g., the one saying that "the strengthening of the unity of the world socialist system on the basis of proletarian internationalism is an imperative condition for the further progress of all its member countries."5 In conformity with the theories elaborated by the specialists of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU, when one speaks of international interests of socialist countries, on the one hand, and of the national state interests of each of these countries, on the other, "the international interests of world socialism come first."6 "The sovereignity of an individual socialist country," as the Soviet authors assert, "cannot be viewed as detached from the sovereignity of the socialist community as a whole."7 Moscow's actions in connection with the events in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were the embodiment, on the one hand, of the interference by the USSR in the internal affairs of other socialist countries on the basis of the legitimation provided by the program of CPSU and, on the other hand, of theses and propositions arising from it. Representing the Soviet armed interventions triggered by these events as "support of the revolutionary forces of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by the USSR and other socialist countries," servile Soviet authors allude to the leaders of Hungary, headed by Imre Nagy, and those of Czechoslovakia, headed by Dubceck, as "opposed the national feelings by all classes to the proletariat's internationalism."8 In Soviet sociopolitical and historical party literature, the notion of the proletarian internationalism hints not so much at mutual support of the proletariat and of communist parties of all countries, as, primarily and mainly, at the solidarity of the world proletariat and all communist parties with the basic theoretical positions of the CPSU and with corresponding practical actions by the government of the USSR. The above refers equally to the concept of socialist internationalism (often used as a synonym for the term "proletarian internationalism"), denoting formally in Soviet terminology mutual support of the ruling parties of communist countries and the governments subordinate to

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

5

them, and, factually, unconditional solidarity by all concerned parties with the policy and practice of Moscow's rulers. One of the sources of the contradictions that has arisen and widened between the CPSU and certain ruling communist parties, e.g., the Chinese, lay in the fact that Moscow, on the one hand, demanded from those parties unconditional solidarity with its internal and external policies, but, on the other hand, did not share with them the accu¬ mulated knowledge in the field of new armaments, mainly nuclear arms. Another source of such contradictions was the adoption by several of those parties, e.g., the Yugoslav, of a way of building socialism that did not conform with the principles preached by the CPSU and its ideologues. These sources of contradiction generated and stimulated, in turn, the emergence of deep national traumas suffered in the distant and the near past by the peoples of the now communist countries as a result of the expansionist policies of tsarist and Soviet Russia. At the end of World War II, as the decisive factor in establishing communist regimes in Eastern European countries, Moscow achieved the reduction of the majority of those countries' governments and of their ruling parties to obedient executors of its will. In the meantime, there were the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, the Polish and Hungarian troubles in 1956, and the Czechoslavak ones in 1968, on the one hand, and the growing resistance in Eastern European countries to Moscow's predatory exploitation (by means of imposed bilateral agreements, of their natural resources, e.g., Polish coal, Romanian oil, etc.). Also, there were the attempts to reduce the less-developed of those countries to the role of an agrarian appendage to the more developed among them. All this demonstrated that the term "socialist community of states" does not correspond to the reality represented by the world system of socialism. In this respect, the term "camp of socialist states" better suited the definition of the bloc of socialist countries headed by Moscow, from which the attempts at disengagement sometimes succeeded but more often were brutally subdued. As far back as early 1948, Moscow sharply opposed Dimitrov's public utterances in favor of creating a federation of Balkan countries in Southeastern Europe, seeing in such union a potential threat to its dominant position within the socialist bloc. By forbidding Dimitrov s and Tito's attempts to create such a federation, Moscow appropriated the right of supreme final decision on the conformity or nonconformity to the principles of Marxism-Leninism of any initiative or action by the leadership of a country of the "socialist community." Considering

6

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

the accompanying glorification of the CPSU and its leadership as the faithful guide and keeper of these principles, the principles were in fact identified with the interests of USSR. Always minding and in all circumstances strengthening, first of all, the military might of the Soviet state, all Kremlin rulers over a span of seventy years gave their unrelenting attention to the problems of propaganda. To propaganda has always been allotted a very important role for the Party as interpreter of Moscow's policy and practice, disseminator of the myth of the infallibility of the CPSU, and, especially, its current leader as a faithful successor to Marxism's founding fathers, who enriches the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin by new conclusions and theses, in conformity with contemporary circum¬ stances. All these serve the Kremlin rulers as a legitimation for their claims for the dominant position of the USSR among the countries of the world system of socialism, and of the CPSU among the communist and workers parties. The military and economic might of the Soviet Union and its leading position in this respect among the countries of the world system of socialism have, in fact, never been contested by any of the ruling parties of those countries. What began, in the course of time, to arouse ever-growing dissatisfaction and resistance in socialist coun¬ tries were as follows. On the one hand, there were Moscow's efforts aimed not only at strengthening its military and economic supremacy, but also at the immortalization of its status as the only leader of the socialist world. On the other, the Kremlin rulers attempted to achieve a "division of labor" in the world system of socialism, so that certain countries would play the role of an agrarian appendage to other more industrially advanced countries. These attempts by Moscow affected the vital national interests of less industrially developed socialist countries and provoked an open negative reaction on the part of the leadership of the Romanian Communist party. Khrushchev's attempts at relaxing the growing tensions in the USSR's relations with other socialist countries could not be successful. Although he exposed the merciless exploitation of the Eastern bloc countries national wealth practiced by USSR in Stalin's time, he nevertheless not only strove to further strengthen the USSR's dominant position at the expense of other members of the "socialist community of states, but also continued to advocate the USSR's exclusive status of supreme pontiff of this community, judging the conformity or nonconformity of its other members' policies and practice by the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

7

All this has found expression in the program of the CPSU, which says that "the strengthening of the unity of the world socialist system . . . is an imperative condition."9 The spirit of the program evinces that, despite the statement in its text that, in the world community of socialist countries, none have any special privileges, Moscow has appropriated not only the pre¬ rogative of the most authoritative interpreter of the theory of MarxismLeninism, but also the monopolistic function of exclusive determination of other communist and workers parties' digressions from the basic principles of that theory. This is confirmed by the propositions of the program that state: "Revisionism, Right opportunism ... is the chief danger within the communist movement today [in the early 1960s— M. B.]," and that "another danger is dogmatism and sectarianism," which "unless steadfastly combated can also become the chief danger at particular stages in the development of individual parties."10 The Chinese Communist party, as the bearer (according to the label stuck on it by Kremlin leaders) of dogmatism and sectarianism, is not named directly in the program of the CPSU, but the Communist League of Yugoslavia is openly accused in it of revisionism ("The ideology of revisionism is most fully embodied in the program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia").11 On appropriating its function as denouncer of the apostates of Marxism-Leninism and its role of "vigorous defender" of "the world communist movement in line with the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism" Moscow elaborated the theoretical basis of its not only political, but also possibly military, intervention in other socialist countries.12 In resolutions subsequently adopted by international conferences of communist and workers parties, under Moscow's pressure, it is stated that "divergences connected with national peculiarities of socialist countries" and deriving from "dif¬ ferences in the level of their economic development, social structure, international position . . . must ... be solved ... on the basis of proletarian internationalism."13 Whereas in the early 1960s, the Yu¬ goslav ruling party was subject to open attacks by CPSU and servile Soviet scholars for apostasy from the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, the leadership of the Chinese Com¬ munist party subsequently became the target of permanent criticism in this respect. Thus, in a monograph published in the mid-1970s under the auspices of the CPSU CC Institute of Marxism-Leninism, it is stressed that "the controversies between Maoist leadership . . . and the majority of socialist countries became acute," and that "an implacable struggle against the anti-Leninist, anti-Soviet, dissen-

8

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

tient, social-chauvinistic course of the Maoists . . . became un¬ avoidable."14 In this instance, the admission by Soviet scholars—that the necessity of "implacable struggle" is provoked by the acute controversies between the leadership of the Chinese republic and the majority of socialist countries (not all these countries)—is noteworthy. This admission evinces Peking's stubborn resistance to the hegemony of Moscow that has led to an open split in the socialist world. It also supplies additional evidence that the terminological shift in Soviet vocabulary after the 1961 CPSU program, with full substitution of the term "community" of socialist states for "camp" of socialist states, right from the beginning, did not reflect the actual reality, i.e., the real relations between socialist states. One of the propositions elaborated in USSR says, that, in connection with the Red Army's advance to the West in 1944, "the Communist party and the Soviet government proclaimed as their aim ... to accord the liberated peoples full freedom in solving problems of their states' structures and social regimes."15 The USSR's interference in the internal affairs of East European countries (including military intervention), armed clashes on the Soviet-Chinese border, and other occurrences in the bilateral relations of the USSR and socialist states that came after World War II all show that the above-mentioned propositions by Soviet authors has nothing in common with the truth. The continuous evidence of basic divergencies and, often, irrec¬ oncilable controversies between the CPSU and other communist parties, as well as between some other non-Soviet communist parties them¬ selves, has necessitated the elaboration of corresponding theses and, respectively, the specification of terminology used in Soviet socio¬ political literature. Thus, along with the thesis that the unity of socialist countries is a dialectical category developing "jointly with the de¬ velopment of world sociopolitical processes,"16 Soviet authors began stressing that, in those cases when there is no adequate concord of national-state and international interests, it takes on a deformed character.17 In characterizing the policies of the Chinese communist leadership, B. Pugachev, one of the Soviet specialists in the theory and practice of mutual relations among socialist countries, states that "a departure from an internationalist position and a display of great power or nationalistic attitudes may, as happened several times in historical practice, substantially disturb or even temporarily break the unity of socialist states."18 Pugachev adds that, "in these cases, the reestab-

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

9

lishment of unity presupposes a resolute struggle against any digression from Marxist-Leninist domestic and foreign policy."19 In raising the problem of "deformations in the policies of individual socialist countries," another Soviet specialist on problems of the international relations of socialist states points out that, on the one hand, the establishment of socialist principles in the foreign policy of these states "does not go on uniformly" and, on the other hand, "in case of a serious deformation of inner social relations within a country and of preponderance in its foreign policy of aims and principles alien to socialism, such a policy may even lead to acute contradictions with the policies of other countries of the world socialist system."20 The elaboration by Soviet authors of such propositions and theses was evolving from the need for a theoretical explanation of the deep deteriorating contradictions, leading to open antagonism between the socialist countries and to mutual charges of apostasy from the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. In explaining the reasons for such contradictions, Soviet authors refer, as a rule, to "serious deformation of internal social relations" in other socialist countries, and to "the preponderance of aims and principles in foreign policy alien to socialism" of communist leaders of those countries, but not of Soviet leaders. In those rare instances that they cite as examples of such negative occurrences relating to the Soviet Union and its leaders, the facts cited do not relate to the Soviet leaders in power and their deeds. Thus, B. Pugachev refers in his work to mistakes engendered by Stalin's personality cult as an example of such negative occurrences. He also refers to the resolution of the CPSU saying that the cult of personality had led to grave mistakes "in the inner life of the Soviet land, as well as in its foreign policy," and attempts not only to belittle as far as possible the consequences of the Soviet government's domestic and foreign policy at that time, but also to justify it to a certain extent.21 As witness to it is Pugachev's statement that the main aim of socialist countries in those years was their rallying in a militarypolitical alliance "while purposely submitting in several instances specific national interests to the purpose of their common struggle," but that, "aside from the objective reason for not taking into con¬ sideration, in the first decade of formation and development of the world system of socialism, certain aspects of national interests of some countries within that system, there was also a subjective reason: the circumstances of the personality cult, which have been a serious

10

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

hindrance to the growth of reciprocal confidence of nations, the strengthening of international relations among the socialist states.”22 Pugachev's statements show clearly that he, like other contemporary Soviet theorists of interrelations of the socialist countries, tries by all means to allay (”certain aspects,” "the interests of some countries,” "in some instances") and even to justify ("an objective reason") the Soviet great power foreign and domestic policies in the Stalin period. This is notwithstanding the fact that, in the past, soon after Stalins death, these policies were unmasked by those who, in his lifetime, had been their obedient executors. Besides, Pugachev does not say a word in his work about the continuation, in actual fact, albeit in modified ways, of the great power foreign policy by Khrushchev, who unmasked Stalin's methods, and by all of the subsequent Kremlin rulers. At the same time, Pugachev, like all of the contemporary Soviet scholars who deal with great power and nationalist tendencies in socialist countries, sharply condemns "the breach," in the 1960s, in the friendly relations of "Chinese Peoples' Republic with the majority of socialist countries" as a result of "the destructive role of Chinese leadership within the framework of the world socialist system today (the italics are mine—M. B.).23 The fact that the controversies among socialist countries are everrecurring, and are not transitory, has led to a substantial shift in the use by Soviet authors of such synonymous terms as "community of socialist countries"—"world socialist system" and their terminological doublets: "socialist community"—"world system of socialism." These terms (and their doublets) are, to this day, often used as absolute synonyms in sociopolitical scholarly literature published in the USSR. This is not surprising if we consider that, up to recent times, they had been so used in works published under the auspices of the CPSU CC Institute of Marxism-Leninism. (See, for instance, "strengthening of the unity of the world socialist system," "collaboration of the socialist community countries," "international interests of world so¬ cialism," "class interests of the entire socialist community."24) Mean¬ while, in the very year of publication of the work from which come the examples of the absolute synonyms (i.e., as notions expressing identical reality), a Soviet author wrote that a "world community" and "world system" of socialist states are not identical, and that "the socialist community is a component of the world system of socialism and functions within its framework."25 Saying that certain Soviet authors treat the concepts of the world socialist system and the socialist community as "identical," Pugachev wrote (in 1982) that one cannot "view today all states of the world

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

11

socialist system as relating to the socialist community” and that the term "socialist community” being used lately "as a rule, ... in relation to the countries united in the COMECON and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, . . . allows a deeper understanding off the real processes going on today in the socialist world and of the effects of its laws.”26 While being a reflection of the realities of the socialist world and the controversies within it, the above-examined differentiation of the terms used by Soviet scholars has not resulted, however, either in an objective explanation of these realities or in a clear definition of the semantic field of the term "community of socialist countries" and its doublet, "socialist community." Thus, Soviet authors maintain that the collaboration of countries under conditions of socialism "is devoid of social and national antagonisms,"27 and that "the national and state interests of socialist countries coincide, in the main, with their inter¬ nationalist interests."28 At the same time, and in complete contradiction to such utterances, the same authors write that "a basic, irreconcilable struggle against the anti-Leninist, anti-Soviet, dissident, social-chau¬ vinist course of the Maoists became inevitable,”29 that, in the foreign policy of contemporary China, nationalistic, hegemonistic positions are dominant, and that "the restoration of the unity of socialist countries and of their cohesion presupposes a consistent struggle against any manifestations of hegemonism, chavinism, nationalism, in the relations among countries within the world socialist system [here and above italics are mine—M. B.].”30 At first sight, there are no contradictions in the utterances compared above. Soviet authors might maintain that the terms "community of socialist countries” and "world socialist system” have been differ¬ entiated just because instances of certain socialist countries deviating from the principles of Marxism-Leninism and of proletarian inter¬ nationalism in their domestic and foreign politicies are not only possible, but have actually happened. Moreover, the same authors can strengthen their position by alluding to the example of China and saying that no one in the USSR denies China's belonging to the world socialist system, although the Chinese leadership has broken away from the above principles by its assimilatory inner course,31 whereas, by its great power chauvinistic foreign policy, it has brought about undermining the "interconnection of the socialist community countries” and a breach in "friendly relations with the majority of the countries" of that community.32 Thus, in 1982, Pugachev wrote that "the character of the estranged, even hostile, relations among socialist countries (e.g., the character of the present relations of the

12

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

Chinese People's Republic [CPR] with several other socialist countries) does not annul the fact of the world socialist system being an entity encompassing all socialist countries."33 Under scrutiny, however, such a position and possible similar arguments prove to be devoid of any substance. The following facts bear witness to it: in a book published in 1982, the Soviet author V. Shevtsov condemns the contemporary Maoists who, as he says, "quite openly declare assimilation of the national minorities in China to be their national policy."34 But the language policy of the CPSU, extolled by subservient Soviet scholars and being a component of the party's national policy, is in no way different in its substance from the language policy of the Chinese leadership condemned by them, as shown in another chapter.35 In the light of the above, it is easy to understand that it is not the "assimilatory inner course," attributed by Soviet specialists to the Chinese leadership that has led to the deep chasm between the USSR and the CPR and has necessitated the differentiation, by the same specialists, of the terms community of socialist countries and world socialist system. Also the assertion that the Chinese leadership has brought about, by its great power chauvinistic foreign policy, the breach of the "friendly relations with the majority of socialist community's countries" is not based on the actual reasons for that breach. The very fact that Soviet sources invariably speak of a breach by China of friendly relations with the majority, and not with all, of the countries of the socialist community bears witness to it.36 In this connection, it must be considered that, on the one hand, according to Soviet sociologist closest to the CC of the CPSU, "a particularly great danger lies in the theory and practice of socialism being falsified by the Maoists," and unmasking them "is an important goal in the struggle against the enemies and distorters of scientific communism."37 And, on the other hand, that Soviet authors, after having differentiated the terms world socialist system and community of socialist countries, have begun to count as members of the socialist community only the states incorporated in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CO¬ MECON) and the Warsaw Pact Organization (WPO), i.e., only those states that, in their words, are bound together economically, as well as ideologically and politically.38 It follows that not all countries of the socialist community are rallied politically and, more so, ideologically, as only their majority—not all of them—are fighting the Chinese leadership.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

13

Thus, Romania is a member of both the COMECON and the WPO, but its ruling party not only maintains friendly relations with China's leadership, condemned by Moscow and its subservient scholars, but also allows the Romanian press to publish utterances contradicting the basic assumptions of the CPSU and its theorists in the field of interrelations of socialist states. The most important assumption of those theorists (as well as of Soviet specialists in the field of inter¬ relations of peoples and nationalities inhabiting the USSR) is "the unquestionable subordination of national to international interests."39 In the monograph prepared under the guidance of the academician P. Fedoseev, it is stated that "the working class of the socialist countries and their avant-garde face the task of finding ways for a harmonious combination of international and national state interests. Arising controversies will not influence negatively the development of col¬ laboration among sister countries, provided those controversies will be solved on the basis of common Marxist-Leninist positions, and if the common, international interests of world socialism will be given uppermost consideration."40 The assumption that "the idea of proletarian internationalism . . . has always been the leading principle of the communist movement" is being sustained, in one or another form, by the subservient scholars in most of the Comecon and WPO.41 Thus, for instance, the Hungarian scholar E. Borshy, mentioning the significance of national interests of the working class, stresses the decisive role of their common, i.e., international, interests.42 And H. Neubert, an East German scholar, says that "the historical experience of building socialism . . . confirms the priority of international interests over national ones."43 Such sayings are in unison with the statements in Soviet sources that the struggle "against any digression from Marxism-Leninism, from socialist internationalism" is a duty of every Communist "to the working people of socialist countries, to the world working class."44 It should be added in this connection that the Soviet specialists' glorification of the Soviet Union as "the standard-bearer of the ideas of communism, of proletarian internationalism"45 finds its echo in the address by a Polish scholar who says that "today, as before, the attitude toward the Soviet Union—the main power of the socialist community—is the touchstone of internationalism."46 It is significant, in the light of the above assertions, to note a review published in Romania in 1985 that says: Nicolae Ceausescu pointed out the theses of the perpetuation and even the increase of the nation's role in the world of today, rejecting both

14

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program imperialism's cosmopolitanism, interested in canceling the countries' borders and the peoples sovereignty, and the erroneous approach of proletarian internationalism from the positions of negating the national specific or outrunning a historical period, that of the nations' union.47

Not less relevant in this context is that the main thesis of a book published in Romania in the same year (1985) states that international relations should be based not only on the class concept, but on the national concept as well.48 At first sight, the sacrilegious assertion (from the viewpoint of the assumptions worked out in the USSR and preached by its leaders) that the proletarian internationalism is erroneous inasmuch as it "negates" national specifics," has nothing in common with the thesis on the need "to rely not only on the class concept, but on the national concept as well." In actual fact, however, this thesis has a direct connection with the "sacrilegious" assertion and is conditioned by it, as shown by the following facts. The assertion we find in Soviet sources that, "when realizing their sovereign rights, the countries of the socialist community are guided by the organic concord of national and international" factors is conditioned by the observing (by these states) "the principles of proletarian internationalism."49 In other words, the decisive factor in Soviet interpretation of the "organic concord of national and inter¬ national "factors is not, as already mentioned, the national-state interests of the given socialist country, but the "general, international interests of world socialism." By contrast, the main thesis of the above-mentioned book by the Romanian author Silviu Burcan is that the class and the national concepts are at least equivalent in international relations. Moreover, when the question lies in problems touching on the basic national interests of a people of the socialist community of states, the Romanian Communist party and Romanian scholars put forward as the determinant, decisive factor in the interaction of these concepts not the class concept (the principle of proletarian interna¬ tionalism), but the national one. This Romanian position manifested itself in Khrushchev's days in the resolute opposition to Moscow's attempts to achieve a "division of labor" in the socialist camp, which would have made Romania an agrarian appendage to the more industrially developed socialist coun¬ tries. This position led later on to the emergence, from the substratum of Romanian-Soviet relations, of the "Bessarabian question" that since the Romanian Communists came to power had been, as a rule, hushed up in Romanian historiography or touched on only casually and in

Program of the Communist Parti/, 1961-1986

15

complete accord with the theses and propositions of Soviet historians. A sharp shift in the presentation of the Bessarabian question in Romanian historiography followed Nicolae Ceau§escu's addresses at the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, in July 1965, and at the festive commemoration of the Party's forty-fifth anniversary in May 1966. The facts and propositions mentioned in those addresses (e.g., the fact that, at one time, the Comintern used to instruct the Romanian Communist party "to fight against the tearing-off from Romania of territories inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Romanians ; or the proposition of the incontestably exclusive right of the Communist party, the revolutionary and patriotic forces of each individual country to elaborate the policy, strategy, and revolutionary tactics of the working class; or the proposition of the "responsibility of each communist party to the working class to which it belongs and to its own people," etc. have served, and are still serving, the Romanian authors as a support of their presentation of the Bessarabian question in conformity with the national interests of the Romanian people.50 Thus, the noted Romanian historian Stefan Pascu, in raising the question of the shift in the presentation of the Romanian people's history after the addresses by Ceau§escu, stated in 1983 that there was in the field of Romanian historical research a period "when historical truth was being subordinated to peripheral interests, and glorious epochs of the Romanian people's history were ignored, or white pages were substituted for them, while public figures of Ro¬ manian history and culture were represented in a false light."51 On the other hand, he stresses that, after the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist party, "the stricken or falsified pages of the Romanian people's history have been restored," and that the Romanian "historians have understood that a change has occurred in the field of history, in the historical conception of the Romanian people," and that they too "must speak out with utmost sharpness and eliminate the mistakes."52 Romanian historians, repeatedly raising in their works in recent decades the question of Bessarabia and its autochthonous population, are guided in their utterances on this topic, in the first place and mainly, by national interests, and not In/ the principle of proletarian (socialist) internationalism as interpreted by Moscow. This trend is confirmed by the statement in an article published in 1982 in a Romanian historical magazine and entitled "Ancient Dacia—Blessed Romanian Land." The authors of the article, M. Musat and F. Tana§escu, mention not only that, as a result of the usurpation by Russia "of

16

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

eastern Moldavia, between the rivers of Prut and Dniester, which was named in 1812 'Bessarabia,' the objective, legitimate historical process of the establishment of a centralized and independent Ro¬ manian feudal state was delayed,” and not only that the Romanian population of Bessarabia was gradually and forcibly deprived of [its] land, ancient rights, and freedoms,” but also that the establishment, in 1918, of a united national Romanian state by unification of Bessarabia, Banat, Bucovina and Transylvania with Romania completed an ob¬ jective historical process.”53 The overt accusation of Russia, both tsarist and Soviet, that it had torn off an ancestral territory of the Romanian people—Bessarabia (in 1812 and in 1940)—has been accompanied in Romanian authors' works by a no less overt accusation of the nineteenth-century indig¬ enous Bessarabian nobility that it "had become russified, strengthening the ranks of Russian reaction” (nobilime a romaneasca s'a rusificat, intarind cadrele reacjionarismului rus), which contains a covert accusation of those strata of Romanian intelligentsia of the contemporary Moldavian SSR who prostituted themselves, strengthening Moscow's policy of russification.54 Such assertions by Romanian scholars, denying Russia's right to Bessarabia and condemning the policy of denationalization of the autochthonous population, contradict, from Moscow's point of view, the principles of socialist internationalism and provoke a corresponding reaction in Soviet Moldavia. They intensify there the propaganda saying that the joining of Bessarabia to tsarist Russia in 1812 and its subsequent "reunification with Soviet Russia in 1940 had crowned the wishes cherished by all nationalities of the province” and that, in contemporary circumstances in that republic, a free development of those nationalities has place, including that of the east Prutian Moldavians, as a sovereign Soviet nation with its own flourishing language, full-blooded national culture, and literature. Such theses and assumptions abound in the works of historians, economists, philosophers, specialists in literature, and linguists in the institutions of higher education and in the Academy of Science of the republic. For example, in the History of the Moldavian SSR and in the One-Volume MSSR Encyclopedia, both published in 1982, the authors of the first of these books write, as noted by reviewers, that, toward the beginning of 1918, the working people of Moldavia "established a Soviet regime in the province.”55 The question of the ways of preparing such propositions, necessary to justify Bessarabia's "reunification" with the USSR in mid-1940 but not conform with historical facts, has been examined by this author in another book

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

17

in which I have shown, on the authority of Soviet documentary sources, that Soviet rule was never established in Bessarabia—neither before nor after the beginning of 1918.56 One of the most vulnerable points in theory of the Moldavian nation concocted by subservient scholars in Soviet Moldavia is the question of its language. Being fully aware of the shakiness of their position on this question, the subservient linguists of the republic, who affirm that the east Prutians have their own language, distinct from the Romanian East Romance language, support their respective propositions and theses by references to assertions that, from their point of view, are most authoritative. Thus, N. Corlateanu, the author of the article "The Moldavian Language" in the One-Volume MSSR Encyclopedia, says that

F. Engels spoke of "the Latin and the Slavic etymology as the basis of the lexical system of the East Romance languages," and that "the Moldavian classical writer A. Russo in comparing the significance of Slavic lexical elements for the Moldavian language with the significance of Germanic and Arabic borrowings for the West Romance languages, has noted that . . . "for our language slavonisms have been a historical necessity, in the same way as germanisms and arabisms have been a historical necessity for other neo-Romance languages and have con¬ tributed to their shaping and formation" (the underscoring is mine— M. B.).57

However, Corlateanu's quotations from both Engels and Russo speak of the Romanian language, and not of East Romance languages, in one instance,58 or of the Moldavian language, in the other instance.59 Witness to it is the direct continuation of the quotation from Russo: "If to eliminate from the Romanian language its alien branches . . . where then will the language be . . . where will be its originality?"60 Although Russo, a native of Bessarabia, naturally uses in his writings the terms "Moldavian," "Moldavian language," these terms always appear, in full accord with the writers conception of his people and its language, as contextual synonyms for the terms "Romanian," "Romanian language."61 The theses, propositions, and theories of Soviet Moldavia's scholars, built up by sly juggling of facts, are often "supported" by direct attacks on Romanian scholars who present the problems of history, language, literature, and culture connected with Romania and its people, of the autochthonous population of Soviet Moldavia (Bes¬ sarabia) in the spirit of traditional Romanian historiography, While

18

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

not resorting to retaliatory attacks on and to overt refutation of Soviet Moldavian specialists' theses and propositions, Romanian scholars have continued, for over two decades, (notwithstanding the attempts to impose on them from the outside the Soviet position as to the "Bessarabian question") to speak of Bessarabia as an age-old territory of the Romanian people, cut off from the Romanian state, and of the east Prutian Moldavians as a forciby torn off part of that people. An open stand behind national and state interests of the Romanian people in the Bessarabian question would not be possible under the present regime in Romania without encouragement from the leadership of the ruling party of that country just as the attacks launched, from time to time, in Soviet Moldavia against Romanian scholars would not be possible without support not only from the republic's authorities, but, mainly, from the CPSU CC. We find a most blatant example of juggling with the principle of "proletarian [socialist] internationalism" in the relations among socialist countries in an article by the Soviet author O. Vladimirov.62 The press organ (Pravda) that published the article, the heading of the article ("The Leading Factor of the World Revolutionary Process"), the rubric under which it was published ("Problems of Theory"), the date of publication (21 June 1985), the space allotted to it (two whole "cellars")—all these taken together prove that Vladimirov presents in it not only his own point of view on the problems he dealt with, but also the position of the ruling party of the USSR. Naturally, Vladimirov refers in his article to the meeting held on the 26 April 1985 of the leaders of the Warsaw Pact member countries and to the extension of the pact for another twenty years. The conclusions of that meeting have been approved by the Politburo of the CC of the CPSU as having "the greatest import for further cohesion of the countries of the socialist community," Vladimirov says that the relations among the community members "are based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, socialist internationalism, class solidarity, friend¬ ship and cooperation, mutual confidence, mutual aid, equality of rights and sovereignty." However, his interpretation of the principle of proletarian (socialist) internationalism boils down, actually, to a demand for unconditional support of the Soviet Union by all, with no exception: countries not only of the socialist community, but of the whole world socialist system. Evidence of it is the whole spirit of the article, including the statement that, in involved modern circumstances, "the responsibility for the fate of socialism brings to the fore the question of stricter criteria of socialist solidarity and coordination of activity toward class

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

19

adversaries. There is also a reference to Lenin, who, according to Vladimirov, indefatigably stressed the necessity of the closest coop¬ eration among peoples who had taken the road of socialism” and saw any attempts to infringe on the unity of the forces struggling against imperialism "as absolutely inadmissible, as a treason to the interests of the struggle against international imperialism.” One should add that the repeated assertions appearing in Vladimirovs article of the need "to safeguard the gains of socialism," "the unity of socialist countries,” "fidelity to the principles of proletarian internationalism,” defending the interests of world socialism,” etc. are corroborated by a reference to the pronouncement of the plenary session of the CPSU CC, in March 1985, that the Soviet Union will never forego its interests and the interests of its allies. Notwithstanding these and other similar statements and pro¬ nouncements, like Vladimirov's assertion that the CPSU CC repeatedly stressed that the countries of the socialist community uphold "the Leninist principles of foreign policy," the essence of his article as a whole evinces something entirely different. That is, that the Soviet interpretation of Leninist principles of foreign and domestic policy does not coincide with, but even blatantly contradicts, the interpretation of those principles by the ruling parties of a number of countries of the socialist community. Moreover, Vladimirov (who is, as mentioned before, the mouthpiece of the USSR's ruling party in the problems he deals with) elucidates in his article that, among the countries of the socialist community, there are some that, in the Soviet conception, grossly infringe on the principles of proletarian (socialist) interna¬ tionalism, as well as on the theory of Marxism-Leninism in a number of cardinal matters. Thus, Vladimirov condemns those countries (in his article's context, members of COMECON—M. B.) in which "attempts are appearing to treat from revisionist positions problems of socialist property, of correlation between public and private production,” and in which "certain scholars support the introduction of market competition and expansion of the private sector,” these being, in his words, "fraught with grave economic, social and ideological consequences." Side by side with the harsh condemnation of grave deviations, from the Soviet point of view, on the part of a number of countries in the socialist community from the basic principles of building socialism, the article contains a no lesser condemnation of the hostility to the Soviet Union in those countries. This hostility, called "na¬ tionalism," takes, in the author's words, "the form of covert, and sometimes overt, russophobia, antisovietism." This and other ac-

20

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

knowledgements in Vladimirovs article confirm that the so-called community of socialist countries is, in reality, not a community, but a camp corroded by deep inner contradictions, and whose unity derives not from ties of friendship and a feeling of mutual respect, but from the military superiority of the country heading it, which does not relax its grip on the states that have fallen into its power. Anti-Soviet feelings and moods—not only in wide strata of the population of the so-called community of socialist countries, but often also of the leadership of their ruling parties (although these parties had come to power and hold it to this day thanks, in the ultimate account, to some kind of support from the USSR)—are being en¬ gendered by the great power policy of Moscow toward her partners in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON. We find a reflection of this policy in one of Vladimirov's theses, saying that "small” countries cannot act as mediators in bringing about compromises among great powers. "Of what mediation by some socialist countries in solving differences between the USSR and the USA can one speak, asks the author of the article, "when in key international problems the foreign policy of both the USSR and of the Marxist-Leninist core of the world socialism are identical?" Actually, putting thus the question bears witness to the intent of depriving the USSR's partners in the "community" of socialist countries of whatever latitude in initiating settlement of cardinal litigious problems of the contemporary world. The great power policy of the USSR also finds its expression in Vladimirov's branding as "pseudopatriotic, nationalistic moods" the tendencies evident in certain socialist countries, to restore the pages that had been deleted from their national history when the Communists came to power, pages throwing light on the aggressive, expansionist, policy of tsarist (and also Soviet) Russia. The blame for such moods are put on the propaganda services of the West, which—in Vladimirov's words—"attempt to speculate on problems inherited by socialist countries from the past, ... to exaggerate the 'injustices' and the 'white patches' in the history of the Soviet Union's relations with a series of sister countries." The question of actual (and not imaginary, as Vladimirov alludes to by using inverted commas) injustices and white patches in the history of the USSR's relations with the member countries of the Eastern bloc is naturally being debated in the Western press. However, Vladimirov's assertion that the propaganda services of the West are attempting to induce "pseudopatriotic" and "nationalistic moods" is downright ridiculous. Putting the blame on outside forces for negative (from Moscow's viewpoint) tendencies in socialist countries is a usual

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

21

stratagem of Moscow's when it holds that, for the time being, it is not expedient to directly condemn for such tendencies in the leaders of "fraternal" communist parties. There are, thus, all grounds to conclude that Moscow, by publishing Vladimirovs articles, calls to order its partners in the Eastern bloc and warns them against any deviations from the basic principles of scientific communism and proletarian internationalism, as interpreted by it. The fact of such an article appearing in the central press organ of the CPSU CC is, in itself, evidence of the fact that such deviations not only have place in member countries of the Eastern bloc, but also are a serious threat to the dominant position of the USSR within it. To similar occurrences, unacceptable to the USSR, belong the shifts, supported from higher up, toward regulation of economic development that has led to a certain growth of the private sector's specific weight in Hungary, or the pressure from below aiming at limiting the sphere of Communist party guidance in Polish society, and the efforts at filling in white spots in the history of USSR relations with Romania, encouraged from higher up and supported from below, and, finally, the anti-Soviet moods in these and other socialist countries. In distinction to the almost openly sharp condemnation of the partners of the Soviet Union in the community of socialist countries, that author's attitude toward the countries of the world socialist system who are not members of that "community," notably, China, appear to be more than conciliatory. Thus, referring to the April 1985 plenary session of CPSU CC, Vladimirov states that the USSR "consistently aspires to strengthen mutual links and develop cooperation with other socialist countries, including the Chinese Peoples' Republic." The sharply condemnatory stance of the article toward the USSR's partners in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, on the one hand, and its conciliatory tone toward China, on the other, are all the more significant because, as recently as the early 1980s, the Chinese communist leadership was subject to exacerbated attacks in Soviet press for tendencies toward hegemony and dissentient activity in the world's communist movement. The worsening of Soviet-Chinese relations after Stalin's death reached its apogee in Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's times. An endless stream of reciprocal accusations pervaded the official documents of both countries. The leader of the Chinese Communists, Mao Tsetung, attempted to impress on the Chinese people and the whole world that the development center of Marxist-Leninist science has moved from Moscow to Peking, and that he was the successor to the

22

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

founders of scientific communism. Mao's claims to spiritual and ideological primacy in the communist world presented a serious threat to Moscow, not only in its role of a theoretical center, but also, in perspective, as an industrial and strategic power leading in that world. Moscow could not put up with such a view. Here lies one of the causes of the campaign against Maoism in the Soviet press, which went on for more than twenty years. The acerbic Soviet attacks on Mao Tse-tung's theories did not cease after his death. Coming to the conviction that the overwhelming majority of the world's communist parties did not accept Maoism and continued to follow Moscow and that endless attacks on him were apt to finally lead to the perpetuation of the Soviet-Chinese rift (and, thus, to dangerous consequences in its struggle against the Western world, headed by the USA), Moscow decided to ignore, for the time being, the present Chinese leadership's basic deviation (from the Soviet point of view) from scientific communism, and to strive for a rec¬ onciliation with this leadership. All this shows that the determining criterion in the USSR's attitude toward its partners in the community of socialist countries, as well as, in general, toward countries of the world socialist system, is not their observance or nonobservance of the basic principles of MarxismLeninism and proletarian internationalism in the Soviet interpretation, but the Great Russian, great power interests of the USSR, as understood by the leadership of the CPSU. The great power, Russian interests pursued by Moscow inside the Soviet Union and the great power, Soviet interests—beyond its borders, within the world socialist system, and, especially, within the group of countries of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON—have been reflected in the Soviet interpretation of such notions as "homeland,'' "fatherland," "patriotism." National patriotism (be it Ukrainian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Mol¬ davian, etc.) is considered a grave negative phenomenon by subservient Soviet specialists in the theory of the nation and national relations. Thus, these specialists severely criticize and define as tendencies of "localism" any energetic promotion and advocacy of the interests of any individual Soviet republic, or opposition to the curtailing of its interests in the framework of all-Union economic policy implemented by the central government bodies of the USSR. On the other hand, subservient Soviet specialists brand as "bourgeois nationalism" any glorification of the heroic past of a non-Russian population of a Soviet republic, especially when that past attests to a stubborn resistance to tsarist or Soviet politics of conquest. Moscow's irreconcilable attitude toward its henchmen at the head of non-Russian Soviet republics

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

23

who allow the manifestation of localism or of some form of national pride finally led to the actual alienation of such terms as "homeland," "fatherland," or "patriotism" from the non-Russian Soviet republics and their peoples, and to the exclusive use of these terms for the USSR and the Soviet people as a whole. Naturally, Moscow's great power domestic policy applied to nonRussian Soviet peoples differs substantially from its great power foreign policy as applied to peoples of the so-called community of socialist countries and, especially, to peoples of the world socialist system. Still, one can detect in Moscow's policy toward the countries tamed by the bonds of the Warsaw Pact and in the COMECON trends that are identical with the trends in its domestic policy. The program of the CPSU, adopted a quarter of a century ago, proclaims that, "in fostering the Soviet people's love of their fatherland, the Party maintains that, with the emergence of the world socialist system, the patriotism of the members of socialist society is expressed in devotion and loyalty to their homeland, to the entire community of socialist countries. Socialist patriotism and socialist internationalism necessarily imply proletarian solidarity with the working class and all working people of all countries."63 The use of the terms fatherland (otechestvo), homeland (rodina), patriotism in the above passage of the program confirms what we said of their attachement, in the Soviet terminological system, to the USSR and to the Soviet people as a whole. Moreover, the term "patriotism" appears in the text quoted as an attribute not of an individual socialist country only, but also of all socialist countries taken together. Fully consonant with the above is the assertion by Soviet specialists in the theory of nation and national relations that "the subject of socialist patriotism not only outgrows the national framework in a multinational state, but also transcends the boundaries of independent socialist states," that "internationalism is of paramount importance in the unity of . . . patriotism and internationalism."64 With such interpretations of socialist patriotism are tightly bound the propositions of the same Soviet authors that "the sovereignty of an individual socialist country cannot be viewed as detached from the sovereignty of the entire socialist community," and that "the inviol¬ ability of the frontiers and the sovereignty of the socialist community as a whole is the surest guarantee of the sovereignty of each individual socialist country."65 According to the propositions conceived in conformity with the aims of CPSU in its domestic and foreign policy, "Soviet national pride has nothing in common with uncritical praise of a nation's historical past or with ascribing to one's people especially noteworthy

24

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

noble qualities,” and "the intensive process of rapprochement of socialist nations favored the growth of an all-national Soviet pride, which "became a component part of the all-socialist pride” of the peoples of the world socialist system.66 All these terms, in their Soviet interpretation, show that the CPSU and its subservient scholars have adapted the basic principles of communism to Moscow's Russian great power aims pursued inside the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. A most important place in the ideology of proletarian (socialist) internationalism has the examination of such dichotomies as the national and the class-social, the national and the international, the right to selfdetermination (of the Union republics) and the expediency of secession (from the USSR), Soviet national patriotism and Soviet all-national patriotism, Soviet national pride and Soviet all-national pride, flourishing and convergence of Soviet nations and nationalities. The documents of the CPSU and the works of Soviet authors stress that, in every one of these dichotomies, the second, and not the first, element is deter¬ minant and decisive. All these serve the Soviet ideologues in sub¬ stantiating their theses and propositions on the existence of "mis¬ understood principles of national sovereignty,"67 in arguing that "the principle of national sovereignty has been really and consistently realized in the USSR,"68 that "sovereignty is a class concept,"69 that "the completeness of sovereign rights of each Union republic is based on a number of factors . . . representing a political-legal mechanism that guaranties and guards its sovereignty,"70 and so on. These theses and propositions, and others like them, have been formulated for the purpose of "motivating" the fact of Soviet Union republics being deprived of any latitude to secede from the Soviet Union and to become independent, albeit such latitude has been formally proclaimed in the constitution of the USSR and in the constitution of each of these republics. Russian Soviet specialists, who, frequently and without disguising it, shed light on events in the USSR in the sphere of national relations, note that "processes of merging, or complete unity, of nations under the socialist regime are developing in most decisive spheres ... of society's life,"71 that the general trend of the Soviet people's devel¬ opment is "the unfolding in every way of those of its traits that turn it into a nation, and, respectively, the curtailing and eventual dis¬ appearance of the traits that differentiate it from the nation, i.e., an advance on the road to its gradual transformation into a united socialist nation."72 Reflecting what really happens in the USSR under Moscow's Great Russian and great power policy, such statements are in conflict

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

25

with the CPSU's attempts to disguise this policy. That is exactly why these statements are being contested by the majority of Soviet Russian and non-Russian scholars. In trying to keep in line with the requirements of the USSR's ruling party, these scholars defend propositions and theses more acceptable from the Party's point of view. They are mostly scholars of nonRussian origin. Some of them head research departments for problems related to the theory of nations and national relations in central scholarly institutions of the USSR and the CPSU. For example, there are M. Djunusov in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and M. Kulichenko in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU CC. Others are working on similar research in the Union republics, e.g., A. Dashdamirov in the Azerbaidjan SSR or N. Djandildin in the Kazakh SSR, etc. As a rule, non-Russian Soviet scholars reject the undisguisedly formulated proposition that, even now, a merging of Soviet nations intensively urged by the authorities is going on in the USSR.73 But they themselves put forward propositions indirectly revealing, in essence, the great power aims of the CPSU national policy. In considering the thesis of the “flourishing and convergence" of the USSR's peoples and nationalities as two trends under socialism, Soviet authors frequently divide them into "main and secondary," "leading and nonleading," "basic and nonbasic," "domineering and nondom¬ ineering," "dominant and nondominant" trends in the development of socialist nations."74 Thus, Kulichenko, who has given one his books the title The Flourishing and Convergence of Nations in the USSR,75 stressed in an article published in 1976 that "in its national policy, the Party always proceeded from the position that in the correlation of socialism's tendencies to the convergence of nations and to the flourishing of each of them the leading role belongs to the tendency toward convergence of nations," and that "developed socialism ensures the reinforcement and acceleration of the processes of convergence."76 Essentially the same proposition is reiterated in a book published by him in 1983: "Convergence of nations and nationalities founded on internationalism is the main direction of development of socialist national relations. It permeates literally every sphere of the Soviet people's life—the economic, social, political, spiritual, and moralpsychological."77 Also, other Soviet authors stress the preeminent significance of the convergence tendency in the development of socialist nations. It is evident, e.g., from M. Djunusov's statement that "within the multi¬ national Soviet people" such factors take effect as the "community

26

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

of sociioeconomic, political and ideological life," the "community of interest and aspirations of peoples building socialism, and the friend¬ ship and cooperation of peoples"; and that, "in the hierarchy of social pride, the leading place belongs to the pride of the Soviet fatherland and of its achievements."78 There is, in such utterances, a more or less disguised implication of a recognition that, in actual fact, processes that are aimed, in their essence, at a merging of nations are being stimulated by now in the USSR. It is borne out by such facts as that, in the categorizingconceptual apparatus of Soviet literature on the theory of nation and national relations, terms like homeland or fatherland are being used as synonyms for the USSR as a whole and not of individual Union or, more so, autonomous republics. "Characteristic signs defining that new international community [the Soviet people—M. B.] are . . . the community of the fatherland and homeland, the territory, socialist statehood, the growing social-class uniformity. . . ."79 "Frontiers have lost their past significance, they do not transform the republics into isolated fatherlands, do not transgress the integrity of the Soviet Fatherland. . . ."80 Seventy years ago, a year before the Bolsheviks seized power, Lenin wrote that

socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone. A foundation—socialist production—is essential for the abolition of national oppression, but this foundation must also carry a democratically organized state, a democratic army, etc. By transforming capitalism into socialism, the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality only—only!—with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the "sympathies" of the population, including complete freedom to secede. And this, in turn, will serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations that will be completed when the state withers away.81

Lenin said also that "socialism . . . gives full play to the 'sympathies' of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations."82 The Soviet author, G. Zimanas, referring to the first of the above quotations as a proof that "Lenin saw the elimination of even the slightest national friction as a premise for the drawing together and fusion of nations," says that, "in the actual period of the development

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

27

of national relations [in the USSR—M. B.], arises especially the task of a decisive attack on the survivals of bourgeois ideology, particularly on any survivals of bourgeois nationalism.''83 Another Soviet author, A. Agayev, uses a quotation from Lenin to substantiate his assertion that “a disinterested cultural assistance by the nations of the USSR to the nationalities does speed up the progressive processes of natural assimilation of nationalities not possessing the potential for national consolidation on their own ethnic foundations."84 However, Kulichenko denies that even now nations in the USSR are merging. He proclaims that it "does not reflect either the reality or the policy of the CPSU," and that "the merging of nations is ... a matter of a very distant future." According to him, "although Lenin spoke more than once of 'fusion' under socialism," he "in no way meant a fusing of nations, nationalities, but rather of social unity, of working people of different nationalities rallying on the basis of proletarian internationalism."85 Lenin points out, when speaking in his article, "A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economisin'' of authors "arbitrarily inserting precisely what is at issue, precisely what has to be proved, in defining a concept," and he states that "Marx described such methods as 'fraudulent.' "86 Of course, Lenin spoke often of "social unity and of working people of different nationalities rallying." But this does not mean in any way that when he speaks, also repeatedly, of the "fusion of nations under socialism" he always means not the fusion of nations, but the unity and the rallying of working people. Denying, by such an interpretation of the term "fusion of nations," so often used by Lenin, his Soviet colleagues' assumption that, even now, a powerful process of fusing of nations is going on in the USSR, Kulichenko resorted to the blameworthy methods that were condemned by the founder of scientific communism. However, Lenin's words quoted by the Soviet author G. Zimanas mean that such decisive factors as socialist production, on the one hand, and a democratic structure of the state, on the other hand, ensure processes like "the elimination of the least national mistrust" and "an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations." Lenin's words of the same period (1916) manifest that he explicitly meant a fusion of nations: "There is no 'contradiction,' nor can there be, between our propaganda of freedom of secession and our firm resolve to implement that freedom, when we are the government, and our propaganda of association and merging of nations."87 According to the ideologues of the CPSU, the democratic organi¬ zation of the Soviet state has long since been an objective reality, and "all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of nationality

28

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

. . . experience ... a great patriotic feeling of a common national pride of the Soviet man.''88 It would appear that Lenin's thesis of an "accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations" is being confirmed by Soviet reality. However, the admissions of Soviet sources attest that, in this respect, Lenin's prognosis is far from being realized. Thus, I. Tsameryan, a well-known Soviet specialist on nations and national relations, writing on such phenomena of Soviet reality as nationalism and chauvinism, points out that the concrete forms in which they manifest themselves are "national egoism [expressed particularly in tendencies of localism]; national swagger, conceit, glorifying and praising one's own nation and a supercilious attitude towards other nations; defending and justifying reactionary traditions and customs of one's own nation in the disguise of defending national specifics of the people; idealizing one's peoples historical past in a classless approach; preferring national [origin] when filling executive posts; exaggerating national specifics, overstressing the role of national feel¬ ings and consciousness, and diminishing the leading role and im¬ portance of the internationalist consciousness of the Soviet people; [and] ignoring national specifics, scorning national feelings, tending to speed up the process of wiping out national differences."89 In the light of Tsameryan's own words that he enumerated only the most typical "manifestations of vestiges of nationalism and chau¬ vinism" in the USSR, Kulichenko's assertion that "the merging of [Soviet] nations is a question of a distant future" appears, at first sight, very convincing. But only at first sight. For, although the CPSU proclaims in its official documents that the final goal of its national policy is the merging of nations and nationalities in the USSR, in actual fact, these policies pursue a totally different aim: namely, the final absorption of all nationalities in the USSR into one common Russian nation, and of all non-Russian languages in the country into one common Russian language. Factors stimulating the attainment of such goals are the glorification, encouraged by all imaginable means, of all that is Russian (the Russian people, the Russian proletariat, Russian history, literature, language, culture, etc., the disinterested help extended by the Russian people to all non-Russian peoples of the country, etc.). There is also the harsh condemnation of the least attempt to glorify any non-Russian people, large or small its con¬ temporary achievements and historical past—if the former are not shown to be directly dependent on the "disinterested help of the great Russian people"—and the disclosure in any way of Russia's (tsarist or Soviet) fatal role in its destinies; urging a massive broadening of the Russian language's social functions and the ousting of non-

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

29

Russian languages from most important functions; pushing forward the migration from one Soviet republic to another; encouraging na¬ tionally mixed marriages; etc., etc. Soviet authorities have always encouraged, in the words of the CPSU language policy promoter M. Isayev, such phenomena as “intensive processes of national consolidation" that “have taken place and continue to take place in the multinational country of the USSR."90 Another Soviet specialist, K. Khanazarov, says that the smaller peoples of the USSR "are going through a voluntary process of assimilating and merging."97 And the Soviet demographer V. Kozlov speaks of “processes of ethnic consolidation, linguistic and ethnic assimilation, going on in the USSR."92 It is just because the Soviet authorities encourage by all means the processes of dilution of small nations of the USSR in the large ones and their fusion that the promoters of the CPSU national policy are relying on Lenin's words that, under socialism "the working people will apply all efforts to drawing together and fusing with large and advanced socialist nations." However, in the USSR is a development, encouraged by the au¬ thorities and encompassing not only small nationalities. The following statements by the Soviet demographer V. Kozlov are of interest. He states that "the processes of interethnic integration are developing in the USSR both within the basic historical-geographical regions [among the Baltic peoples, the peoples of Central Asia, etc.], and, especially, within the country as a whole."93 On the other hand, it was he who noted that the above average increase in the number of Russians, in spite of the enormous losses they suffered during World War II, was due to the merging with them, as a result of ethnic assimilation, of Ukrainians and Belorussians who lived within the boundaries of the RSFSR. . . ,"94 It has been mentioned above that, according to certain Soviet authors, in the USSR "the processes of merging nations develop in the most crucial fields of public life," and that M. Kulichenko in opposing these views asserts that they “do not reflect either the reality or the policy of the CPSU," and “that the merging of nations is a matter of a very distant future." Meanwhile these views indeed "do not reflect the reality or [especially] the Party's policy." Soviet scholars define the ethnic-demographic processes in the USSR as a "consolidation" of nations and nationalities, as “voluntary assimilation" of small nationalities, as "interethnic integration," etc.— but they attack fiercely any mention that, in fact, a steadfast russification of the non-Russian population is taking place. But even in the works of the most subservient Soviet specialists we can find proof that all

30

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

over the country processes are going on leading, by their tendencies, to the absorption of small nationalities by the large ones, and, in the final analysis, of all peoples, small and large, by the Russian people. Thus, on the development of the Russian nation, a book published in Moscow in 1982, says: 'Tts current ethnic development is char¬ acterized not only by consolidation, but by enlargement, for dispersed ethnic groups close to the Russians in culture and language are being diffused among the latter." In the central areas of the Russian Federation (RSFSR), in the Urals, and in western and eastern Siberia, Ukrainians and Belorussians have merged with the predominantly Russian pop¬ ulation. This is undoubtedly facilitated by the close linguistic and cultural kinship of the three peoples. It should be noted that recent migrants from the Ukraine and Belorussia, and residents of the old Ukrainian and Belorussian com¬ munities in the Russian Federation are also merging with the Russians. Kulunda, a vast area in Siberia, was once settled primarily by Ukrainians; according to the 1926 census, they constituted about half of Kulunda's population; by 1959, the figure in some Kulunda districts had dropped to 20-25 percent. Between 1926 and 1959, the Ukrainian and Belorussian population of Siberia dropped by 50 and 80 percent respectively.95 Moreover, the authors of this research, fellows of the Ethnographic Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, acknowledge "that considerably more people have merged with Russians ethnically and culturally than the censuses indicate."96 It must be added first that, according to the 1979 census, beyond the boundaries of the Ukraine and Belorussia (i.e., in other Soviet republics) live 13.8 percent of all Ukrainians in the USSR (5,858,000 out of 42,347,000) and 20.0 percent of all Belorussians (1,895,000 out of 9,463,000).97 Second, that, according to the same census, 17.2 percent of all Ukrainians ceased to consider the Ukrainian language as their mother tongue, and 49.8 percent of them speak Russian fluently; respectively, 25.8 percent of all Belorussians ceased to consider Belorussian as their mother tongue, and 57.0 percent of them speak Russian fluently.98 These numerical data bear witness that the rus¬ sification of the two peoples goes on not only outside the boundaries of their republics, but also within those republics themselves. Starting from the 1926 census, when 6.6 percent of all Russians in USSR lived beyond the boundaries of the RSFSR, their "dispersion" in other Soviet republics steadily increased, reaching in 1959 14.2 percent, in 1970 16.5 percent, and in 1979 17.4 percent. According to the 1979 census, 21.1 percent of the inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and 11.9 percent of the Belorussian SSR were Russians.99

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

31

In the Uzbek SSR, Russians made up 10.8 percent, in the Kazakh SSR 40.8 percent, in the Georgian SSR 7.4 percent, in the Azerbaijan SSR 7.9 percent, in the Lithuanian SSR 8.9 percent, in the Moldavian SSR 12.8 percent, in the Latvian SSR 32.8 percent, in the Kirghiz SSR 25.9 percent, in the Tadjik SSR 10.4 percent, in the Armenian SSR 2.3 percent, in the Turkmen SSR 12.6 percent, and in the Estonian SSR 27.9 percent.100 Irrespective of the numbers of Russians living in a non-Russian Soviet republic, they (unlike Ukrainians, Belorussians, etc. constituting larger or smaller national groups outside their national republics) do not experience, as a rule, ethnic transformation or, the more so, ethnic assimilation. This is borne out by the fact that, among all peoples of the USSR, Russians rank first in adherence to their language (99.9 percent of them consider Russian their mother tongue).101 Taking into account that changing one's language leads, as a rule, to ethnic assimilation,102 that "groups of people who have changed their language change afterwards, usually, their ethnic affiliation,"103 we must conclude that the ethnic transformation experienced in USSR by the Ukrainians and Belorussians tends to their gradual assimilation and, in the final analysis, absorption by the Russian people. Thus, national clusters of Ukrainians and Belorussians (as well as other non-Russian peoples) dispersed outside their republics, and subjected to intensive ethnic transformation become, in the final account, assimilated. Concomitantly, the overwhelming majority of Russians living in non-Russian Soviet republics not only do not experience linguistic and ethnic assimilation, but constitute, in fact, a most important factor in the ethnic transformation of the peoples among whom they are "dispersed." Soviet author K. Khanazarov acknowledges that, in the USSR, purposeful work is being done to diffuse the Russian language among all nationalities, and the numbers of those whose national language and the language of schooling do not coincide grow from year to year.104 On the other hand, references by Khanazarov to the curricula issued by the Ministries of Education of Soviet republics, are significant: "If in the thirties the Russian language was allotted a total of 400550 hours in ten school years, now it [has become] the number one subject in national schools: an average of 1,600 to 1,850 hours is assigned to it during 10 years of schooling, meaning 14 to 17 percent of the overall curriculum in the secondary school."105 One may also note that most disciplines in national (non-Russian) schools of the Soviet republics are being translated from respective Russian textbooks, and that their translations are, as a rule, beneath criticism.106

32

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

The fact that, on the one hand, the Russian language is allotted in national schools more time than any other subject, and, on the other, that, in studying other subjects, pupils must apply—in addition to the normally required efforts—additional efforts to overcome the shortcomings of the translations, leads to the unavoidable result that their standard of knowledge at graduation is much lower than in Russian schools. In such circumstances, it is easy to understand why many non-Russian parents, especially in cities and towns, send their children to Russian-language schools. However, this does not justify Khanazarov's assertion that "growing numbers of parents persistently seek to place their children in Russian-language schools [the italics are mine—M. B.]."107 In the same work, Khanazarov claims that the CPSU has always supported freedom of choice in teaching language; in other words, it is not necessary to place children in Russianlanguage schools.108 Soviet scholars exert many efforts in deluding world public opinion by their recurring assertions that the ruling party in the USSR does everything for the people's good, for the sake and on behalf of the people, and in accordance with the freely expressed will of the country's working people. However, the achievements of national and, in particular, language policy, so glorified in the documents of the CPSU and in Soviet research, often have nothing in common with the true aims pursued by this policy's promoters, with the true consequences of this policy, or with the true aspirations and wishes of the overwhelming majority of the non-Russian population. All this is reflected in the often contradictory assertions in Soviet sources. Still, non-Russian children are often registered in Russian-language schools without their parents' consent. According to the author V. Avronin, local officials of the Ministry of Education, in questioning members of small nationalities on the desired teaching language for their children, ask them: "Do you want your children to know the Russian language?" "When answered in the affirmative," says Avronin, "the questioner concludes 'so, you want your children to go to a Russian school.' However, such a conclusion has no elementary logic in it and can stand up to no criticism."109 The incompatibility of current Soviet theses and assumptions in this held with Soviet reality is also shown by the following fact: the 1961 program of the CPSU states that, in the USSR, "the voluntary study of Russian in addition to the native language" is going on.110 In actual fact, however, this study is done not voluntarily, but com¬ pulsorily. Noting that "formerly in the Union republics pupils of national schools often studied Russian at the level of foreign languages

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

33

[English, German, etc.]," Soviet author V. Kozlov adds that "the situation has substantially changed after the 1938 special resolution, "On Obligatory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of National Republics and Regions [italics mine—M. B.]."111 Mingling truths with totally false statements is one of the char¬ acteristic traits of subservient Soviet authors. One finds an example of this in the statement that "the main goal of the language policy of the CPSU and the Soviet government is to further a comprehensive development of national languages, striving concomitantly to a full mastery by all citizens ... of the Russian language."112 While the second part of this statement reflects reality, its first part has nothing in common with the facts. Many other statements by M. Guboglo, the author of a paper published under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, are such combinations of truth and falsehoods. For example, he states that "measures taken for the realization of Leninist national language policy during the IX and X Five-Year Plans clearly indicate that the Communist party watches closely the functional advance of the USSR's peoples' national languages, as well as the creation of favorable conditions for a wider spreading of the Russian language."113 Guboglo's book abounds in evidence that the main aim of Soviet authorities in their national language policy is not a com¬ prehensive functional development of the native tongues of the USSR's peoples, but a steady widening of the functions of the Russian language at the expense of a concurrent systematic ousting of non-Russian languages from their most important social functions. Thus, Guboglo not only says that the influence of the interaction of ethnic-cultural and ethnic-linguistic processes shows itself in all cultural manifestations of the USSR's peoples: in processes developing in these peoples' languages, in processes occurring concomitantly (or alternately) in Russian and in non-Russian languages, and in processes in which national cultures function in Russian. Fie also repeats the thesis of the CPSU's promoters of language policy that the condition for the future development of non-Russian languages in the USSR lies in the "needs of their speakers."114 The thesis of development of languages in accordance with their speakers' needs reflects the objective Soviet reality, the essence of which is, in Guboglo's words, that the Russian language serves even today as a means "for international, as well as intranational, com¬ munication" for an ever-growing proportion of the USSR's population, and is being widely used in the domain of production, in the sociopolitical and spiritual life of the indigenous nationalities of all

34

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

Soviet republics.115 This thesis serves also as a basis for the greater narrowing of social functions for non-Russian languages. The book by Guboglo supplies many data on changes in schooling in the Soviet republics, denoting the trend to strengthen the role of the Russian language as a most important factor in russification, along with a displacement of national languages from their basic social functions. Stating that, during the years of the tenth Five-Year Plan, there appeared “a progressive tendency—to start teaching the Russian language in national schools from the first form," Guboglo gives instances of this trend: "As of the school year 1980/81 . . . the study of the Russian language was introduced in the first grade of primary schools in Kazakhstan; in the school year 1975/76, the Russian language was introduced in the preparatory classes in the Armenian SSR, and in 1980/81, in upper and preparatory forms of Armenian kindergarten; at present, experimental teaching of one of the disciplines, e.g., geography, in Russian has been started in Armenia."116 Moreover, a great number of parallel schools with classes in Russian and national languages had been created in the 1970s in all Union republics. In the school year 1978/79, there were 500 such schools in the Ukraine, 875 in Uzbekistan, 1,477 in Kazakhstan, 552 in Tadjikistan, 316 in Azerbaijan, 232 in Kirghizia, etc.; in these schools "a Russian-language milieu is taking shape."117 The impact of school russification in Soviet autonomous republics and regions is even greater. The authors of a monograph on contem¬ porary ethnic processes in the USSR state that "in the KabardinBalkar, Kalmyk, North Ossetian and Chechen-Ingush ASSRs, and the Adygei and Karachai-Circassian autonomous regions, all children of the indigenous nationalities are now taught in Russian."118 It is significant that the above-cited M. Guboglo states that "it is to be expected that in the near future a further deepening of the process . . . of enlarging the functions of the Russian language in the villages and towns of autonomous republics will take place."119 It was mentioned in another chapter that Guboglo tried, at the Brussels World Congress on Applied Linguistics, to call into question the subtitle of the symposium on the languages of non-Russian Soviet nationalities ("Languages of the Non-Russian Soviet Nationalities: A Gradual Reduction of Social Functions"). He assured the participants that, in the Union and in the autonomous republics, the languages of the autochthonous nationalities not only flourish, but their social functions are also broadening; that a narrowing of such functions takes place only in the languages of very small nationalities.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

35

In actual fact, a narrowing—not a broadening—of social functions of non-Russian languages is being observed in all republics of the USSR without exception. Only the rates of change are not the same for different Soviet nationalities. That is why Guboglo argues that the “ethnically identifying functions of the language" are being at¬ tenuated, that the “language's function of intraethnic integration" has been weakened, and asserts that “it is difficult to answer the question, which language is more 'native': the one that the interviewee considers to be his native tongue, or the one he masters better and uses more often."120 The direct consequence of such a weakening of the language's function of intraethnic integration is the ethnic transformation and, finally, ethnic assimilation of growing strata of the non-Russian population of the USSR. Significant in this respect is the acknowl¬ edgement by Soviet authors “that considerably more people have merged with Russians ethnically and culturally than the censuses indicate."121 *

*

*

To “prove conclusively" the scientific foundations of the Soviet ruling party's national policy and its achievements, Soviet ''unmaskers" of "slanderous fabrications of bourgeois falsifiers of the socialist way of life" quote favorable utterances by certain Western scholars, as well as enthusiastic comments by visitors from abroad (leaders and other representatives of ruling and nonruling communist parties; scientific, cultural and literary personalities; tourists from socialist and, especially. Western countries). Considering the favorable utterances by Western scientific, cultural, and literary personalities who have or have not visited the USSR (which are of some interest in this context), one can find out the incongruity of such utterances with Soviet reality from Soviet sources themselves, from the very sources that were used to confirm Soviet achievements. Thus, in a publication entitled "Achievements of Soviet Moldavia and Myths of Anticommunism," issued under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR, is cited the following statement of the "progressive U.S. writer" (in the words of the Soviet author), Miriam Morton, who acquainted herself with the "methods of teaching and education in Moldavian schools." "The Moldavian and Russian languages are being considered as the two most important subjects in the general schools. . . . Teachers attach much importance to the native language, it being closely connected with the pupil's everyday life, with his cultural habits."122 The Soviet Moldavian author, N. Mumji, needed the reference to the "progressive

36

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

U.S. writer" to confirm his assertion that "the Russian language is being studied in schools and institutions of higher learning not to the detriment of the national language."123 M. Mumji knew, no doubt, that a very considerable proportion even "of graduates of the philological faculties do not possess sufficient instruction in the domain of the Moldavian language."124 But he intentionally deceives his readers by stating that "the Russian language is being taught in schools and institutions of higher learning not to the detriment of the national language." We find one of the many proofs that the contrary is true in the titles of reviews written by the author of textbooks of the Moldavian language, M. Ignat, and the newspaperman L. Busuioc, on students enrolling in the philological faculty of the Pedagogical Institute in Kishinev and on its graduates: "one step from mediocrity," "basic coloring—grey."125 As to Ms. Mortons assertion about the "two most important subjects," it stems, at best, from ignorance of the teaching reality not only of the Moldavian language, but also of the overwhelming majority of subjects in the curricula of Moldavian (as well as those of other non-Russian republics) schools, which are being taught not from textbooks originally written in the students' native tongue, but from often low-grade translations from Russian.126 In the book, Solution to the National Languages Problem in the USSR, which was published in Moscow in 1977 and appeared in the same year in an English translation, Moscow linguist M. Isaev also refers to statements by an American author who had visited the USSR. In M. Isaev's words, that author's (W. S. Townsend's) views "are rep¬ resentative of the views of those Americans who do not have anti¬ communist prejudices and seek to understand the achievements of the Soviet Union as they are."127 The linguist states that "Townsend observed abundant evidence of the Soviet Union's success in solving the problem of nationalities and languages through the dissemination of bilingualism that, he feels, provides a realistic and positive alternative to the situation that exists in capitalist countries."128 Stating further that the American authors book. They Found a Common Language: Community Through Bilingual Education (New York, 1972), "is the outcome of two trips to the USSR," Isaev stresses that Townsend thereafter "visited many other countries on lecture tours and drew the attention of both government and public figures to the Soviet Unions experience in the development of relations among nationalities and of languages."129 Such eulogies of the Soviet Communist party's national and language policy coming from the outside are a godsend for its scholarly

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

37

promoters. In internal Soviet propaganda they serve as a means to convince the non-Russian populations of the USSR that their situations in all that ensure the development of national and ethnic values, including schooling in native tongues, is incomparably better than that of all (without exception) national minorities in nonsocialist countries, even in the richest countries of the Western world. In the ideological struggle of the Soviet Union against a Western world headed by the United States and against the leadership of socialist countries that have succeeded or are attempting to liberate themselves from Soviet dictates, they play into the hands of Soviet propaganda, whose aim is to undermine its adversaries' positions from the inside, to kindle the dissatisfaction of national minorities in Western countries and in refractory socialist countries. Moreover, the almost undisguised or even quite open approval of the national and language policy of the Soviet Union and the unrelenting condemnation of any criticism of these policies by its ideological adversaries bring to naught the Western world's efforts to unveil and restrain Moscow's great power domestic and foreign policy. Clear confirmation of the above can be seen in the evaluation and conclusions of Francis McKenna's address to the Multiculturalism, Nationalities, and Educational Policy section of the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies held in West Germany in 1980. For example, his conclusion that, "compared with the peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran, indicators of modernity clearly favour the Soviet Muslim peoples."130 Or his following sharply critical evaluation:

Western critics rarely, if ever, extend their analyses to domestic mul¬ ticultural settings. Allworth or Rywkin seem unwilling to peer from their windows towards Black or Spanish enclaves of New York; Fishback appears to ignore the ghettoes of Washington; and Wheeler's perspective on racialism has little application to British colonial policy or to the contemporary problems of Tottenham or White City-London. Typical of this clouded vision is the failure of critics of the USSR to note that at the culmination of 1978's Longest Walk by American Indian na¬ tionalities, President Carter's failure to accept personally the Indians' manifesto was because he was in attendance of a human rights conference in Europe at which he scored Soviet nationality policies.131

Censure of the president of the United States for his defending of human rights in other countries, while totally disregarding them in his oum country, cannot be viewed as irrelevant, albeit it has no direct

38

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

relation to McKenna's address. On the other hand, one can view not only as irrelevant, but as groundless, the censure of those Western scholars who, in examining certain aspects of nationality policies of the Soviet authorities and their reflection on the position and de¬ velopment prospects of national and ethnic values of non-Russian peoples in the USSR, do not compare simultaneously those peoples' situation with the situation of national minorities in Western countries: the absence of such comparative analysis is not a sufficient reason to deny their theses and conclusions on the subject matter of their research. The statement by another U.S. author, R B. Henze, that "Soviet Muslims have had greater opportunities to educate and modernize themselves than Muslims in most of the countries south of the USSR and have been less inhibited about taking advantage of their op¬ portunities,"132 albeit in accord with the essentially correct proposition of McKenna that, "compared with peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran, indicators of modernity clearly favour the Soviet Muslim peoples," does not mean that his basic conclusions are correct. For example, there is his conclusion "that increasing bilingualism among Soviet Muslims has very little to do with increasing russification," that the ever-growing spread of the Russian language among the Muslim population of the USSR "is very different from russification, however—almost the opposite of it,"133 or his assertion that, in the USSR, "each nationality has the right to its own language and the resources of the state are used to foster all languages."134 In actual fact, the USSR has long since been fostering the further development and strengthening of the Russian language only, not of all languages. Such conclusions and assertions by Henze do not reflect either the essence of Moscow's nationalities policies, the goals of those policies' realization, the language situation in non-Russian Soviet republics, or the language construction trends in those republics. Even subservient Soviet authors admit that today an ever-growing proportion of the non-Russian population of the USSR uses the Russian language in the domain of production and in the sociopolitical and spiritual life, so that this language "serves as a means not only for international, but also for intranational communication." The data quoted above confirm that russification is an all-Union phenomenon, relating in a greater or lesser degree to all non-Russian peoples of the USSR, and not only to small nationalities, as the above-named Soviet author M. Guboglo tries to assure us. The mass repressions of 1937 and 1938 were accompanied by a transition from the Latin alphabet, earlier adopted by many Soviet—

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

39

including an overwhelming majority of Muslim—peoples, to the Cyrillic alphabet; this transition marks a sharp change in Moscow's national-language policies. While, in the first years after the October Revolution, a widening of social functions of the non-Russian peoples' languages was encouraged in the USSR, a policy of systematic narrowing of these functions and concomitant broadening of the functions of the Russian language was started later on. As a result of this policy, pursued from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, Soviet scholars elaborated and widely propagated the proposition that the Russian language had become a second native tongue for non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR. Although this proposition did not reflect the linguistic reality in many Soviet republics, it represented correctly Moscow's language policy trends. For this purpose, that is, for making the Russian language a second native language for the entire non-Russian population of the USSR, a wide campaign was started in the late 1950s in all Soviet republics of national (non-Russian) Russian bilingualism as the most important factor in the increasing of the Russian language's social function, and the reduction of such functions of non-Russian languages. Such development of language process in the 1960s and 1970s was furthered by the recommendations of all-Union meetings and conferences on problems of terminology, bilingualism, etc.135 as well as by resolutions by the Union republics' communist parties on strengthening the position of the Russian language.136 A most significant result of this campaign was that the Russian language became not only the main subject in national (non-Russian) schools, but also the sole teaching language for all subjects in many autonomous republics, starting from the first grade. The change of trend in Moscow's national-language policies that occurred in those years manifested itself clearly in the second semester of the 1960/61 school year in transition to Russian as the teaching language in the schools of southern Soviet Moldavia, where only two years back, in the 1958/59 school year, instruction of Gagauz children in their native language was introduced in the preparatory, first, and second classes of primary schools.137 The same change occurred in those years in Soviet Moldavian schools for Ukrainian children. At present "the Gagauz, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Tatars, and Poles living in Moldavia may teach their children in Russian as well as in Moldavian," but not in their native languages.138 "May teach ... in Moldavian" does not mean that they really do so. In the same book by Guboglo, we read that the Gagauz and Bulgarian children "study in schools with Russian as the teaching language."139

40

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

All this shows that D. Tanasoglu, the author of the article on the Gagauz language in the Moldavian Soviet Encyclopaedia, misrepresents the facts when he writes in 1971 that, "in the Soviet period, optimal conditions have been created for the development of the Gagauz language."140 In actual fact, no books were printed, no newspapers appeared, and no teaching was conducted in the language of the Bessarabian Gagauz during almost fifteen years of Soviet rule (1940 to 1941 and 1944 to 1957). In the late 1950s, the authorities of Soviet Moldavia decided, under pressure by the Gagauz intelligentsia, to confirm officially the alphabet of the Gagauz language, based on the Cyrillic in its Russian form, and then, as already mentioned, to open classes with Gagauz as the teaching language. However, these measures of widening the functions of the Gagauz language were not consistent with Moscow's language policy at the time. This was the reason why Gagauz-language classes were closed so soon. Such an instantaneous, so to speak, return to Russian as the teaching language creates difficulties for Soviet authors dealing with this problem. Thus, M. Guboglo writes, in trying to explain it, that "the transition to the Gagauz as the teaching language in primary school caused a decreasing attention to . . . the study of the Russian language."141 To substantiate his argument, he brings "characteristic"—in his words—"statements by teachers in parents' councils in December 1960 on the necessity of abolishing Gagauz as the teaching language."142 Here are the statements referred to by Guboglo: "The Gagauz grammar," said a teacher at the Kangaz eight-year school, "is difficult: there are many incomprehensible and unknown words"; into the Gagauz language "many new words, borrowed from other languages, have been in¬ troduced, incomprehensible not only to students and parents, but even to teachers"; "I have three children in school: one is being taught in Gagauz, two in Russian. The latter are progressing better and are more fluent in Russian."143 Thus, "decreasing attention to the study of the Russian language" is represented by the author as one of the main reasons for the reinstatement of Russian as the teaching language for Gagauz children starting from the first form of primary school. At the same time, however, he attempts to create the impression that the initiative in tis respect came from below—from teachers and parents, whose reasons, as cited by him, for renouncing the native tongue as the language of teaching, are significant. The main reasons are not "grammatical difficulties" or "better progressing of children in studying Russian," but rather that "many new words . . . from other languages

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

41

. . . incomprehensible not only to pupils and parents, but also to teachers. . . The Soviet authorities' solution for the problem of the Gagauz nationality's language, as well as for that nationality generally speaking, which was denied the right of national statehood when the Moldavian SSR was created, is a clear example of disparity between the Moscow rulers' talk and their nationalities policy. In another one of my works, I dealt with the reasons for the Gagauz having been denied their own statehood.144 The late attention of Soviet authorities to the Gagauz language and the subsequent nar¬ rowing, after a would-be widening of its social functions has also been dealt with in that work.145 I would add that, when in the late 1950s (the first under the Soviets) Gagauz collections of verse and stories were published, it was accompanied by an ever intensifying disparity between that language's written and spoken forms. Lexical and other means of expression began to flow in a wide stream into the written language, while being absent in the spoken one. There is no doubt whatever that, if all these means of expression had been borrowed from Russian, no problem of penetration of "incompre¬ hensible and unknown words" into the Gagauz language would arise. The point is that, while the spoken idiom of Soviet Moldavia's autochthonous population is a Romanian dialect, the spoken Gagauz idiom is a Turkic dialect. And while the early 1950s saw the efforts of the autochthonous creative intelligentsia to identify their literary language with Romanian, the late 1950s saw a start of bringing the written Gagauz dialect close to the Turkish literary language. Reasons of domestic and foreign policy prevented Moscow from dislodging the language of the republic's autochthonous population from primary and secondary education. Moscow contented itself with the ever¬ growing discrepancy between the spoken and the literary forms of Moldavian as a result of Russian having either fully or considerably displaced it from the spheres of state administration, production, sociopolitical relations, higher education, etc. The Gagauz language is a different story. Soviet Gagauz numbered, in the early 1960s, 160,000 in the whole Soviet Union, and 125,000 in Soviet Moldavia.146 They do not belong to a people possessing its own national state outside the USSR. This probably explains why Soviet authorities, seeing in what direction the language of the few Gagauz books, published from time to time, was going, reverted to the previous situation in the teaching language for Gagauz children. The degree of impeding the development of the language of a nonRussian nationality in the USSR depends on such factors as its numbers, historical past, culture, existence or absence of literary

42

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

traditions, etc. However, a general trend toward displacement of nonRussian languages from the most important social functions, and of ever-widening functions of the dominant Russian language can be clearly discerned in Moscow's nationalities policies, in particular in regard to languages. This trend has been substantially intensified in the 1980s, as witnessed by the CPSU CC Politburo's special examination of the means for further improving the study of Russian in the schools of Union republics, and by the special decision in this respect jointly adopted in May 1983 by the CPSU CC and the Council of Ministers of the USSR.147 Referring repeatedly to this decision, Guboglo writes that it was adopted in order to create "facilities for learning Russian in the union republics."148 By the time the share of the Russian language in the curricula of national (non-Russian) schools had already reached 14 to 17 percent, and became the main subject, the CPSU CC Politburo considered further improvement of learning Russian in Union republics; Soviet authors keep silent about the wider and deeper aim of these steps: the massive campaign started by Moscow to make Russian the first native tongue of the USSR's non-Russian population. Most significant in this respect is the statement by a woman tractor operator, N. V. Gellert, at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU: "My family is big and multinational; my husband is a Kazakh; three languages—Russian, Kazakh, and German—are spoken in our house. And there are many such families."149 By the measures undertaken lately, Moscow strives to make Russian the first language not only in nationally mixed families, but also in nationally homogeneous families. The order of enumeration of the languages by Mrs. Gellert is not a question of manners: it reflects their relative prestige in her eyes. One cannot compare the russism-packed jargon of the almost 2 million Soviet Germans (1,936,000 according to the 1979 census) in the vast eastern territories of the USSR with full-blooded Russian—neither in its social functions nor the trends of its further development.150 Nor can it be compared with the less affected Kazakh language. The following fragment from a paper published in Moscow almost twenty years ago clearly shows the degradation of the Soviet Germans' idiom: In tekhniqum hot zi net postubila, aine dvojka hot zi polutsat, un der diregtor zakt mir: bun son mnogo

"She did not enter the technicum, she got a two-mark and the director told me: many (candidates)

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

nemt di dogumenty. Aene zadatsa konte zi net resaje un aen brimer, aen gants glaen primertsik, un di prepodavatelnitsa sakt uns: nitsego, dos is ne tak plokho, zi zol zig gotovit’ zi zol zraevaun tsitat' un dan kon zi postubaje, un ak glaip akh zi iz noukh molodaja, zi hot tsaet.

43

take back the documents. She couldn't solve a problem and an example, a quite small example, and the teacher told us: never mind it's not thus bad, she should prepare herself, she should write and read and then she can enter, and I also think she's still young, she has time."151

The languages of all non-Russian Soviet peoples are subject, in various degrees, to the destruction of their lexical, syntactical, and morphological systems, and, in fact, turn into jargons. An example is the ever-deepening gap between the literary and the spoken forms of even the old literary languages of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR with age-long literary traditions. It follows from all the above that the promoters of the nationallanguage policy of the CPSU are now striving not just to strengthen the prestige of the Russian language, but to its transformation into the first mother tongue of the non-Russian population of the USSR. This is born out by the statement of M. Kulichenko, in a work published in 1981, which says that "in the linguistic life of Soviet society goes on ... a redistribution of social functions of the international Russian language and of the national languages of the USSR."152 And although all this is also evident in the works by other Soviet authors, M. Yusupov, the first secretary of the Daghestan Regional Party Committee, stated on the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU that, in the Daghestan Autonomous Republic, in which "live about 70 nations, nationalities and ethnic groups, national languages are functioning on a high level."153 But the Daghestani author G. Gamzatov says in an article published in 1983 in the journal Izvestia Akademii Nauk SSSR that "the Russian language serves for Daghestani languages as the borrowing medium of terminology, including international terms, and that "the terms borrowed keep, as-a rule, the Russian transcription and orthography."154 In other words, those languages are subject, like the idiom of the Soviet Germans, to a transformation into Russiannational jargons. It should be added that the above-mentioned statement on the redistribution of the social functions of the languages of peoples in the USSR is fully consistent with Gamzatov's assertion that "reality compels the linguists of the republic [Daghestan M. B.] to accord

44

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

to the Russian language attention compatible with its real status, its actual role."155 At the Twenty-Seventh Congress of teh CPSU, Secretary Gorbachev tried to convince the audience that "the party of Communists is a party of unity of words and deeds."156 Not only Yusupov's assertion, but also numerous statements in Gorbachev's report at the congress in the words of participants, as well as admissions of ungainly facts of Soviet reality leaking through in all these bear witness to the contrary: too often, seemly statements, assumptions, theses, etc., of Soviet leaders and of their policies' subservient promoters have nothing in common with their most unseemly deeds in what relates not only to internal Soviet relations, but also to the USSR's relations with all other countries, including countries of the socialist community and those of the world socialist system as a whole. In the words of M. Djunusov, a noted Soviet specialist on problems of proletarian internationalism and national relations, "the pace and shape, the results of convergence of nations cannot be uniform within the multinational Soviet people and the world system of socialism."157 One cannot disagree with such a statement. The pace, the shape, and the results of the processes labeled by Soviet specialists as a "con¬ vergence of nations" are characterized by unequal intensity, unequal exterior manifestations, and unequal achievements within the Soviet Union itself. These indices of the "convergence of nations" are not identical for large Soviet nations, on the one hand, and for small Soviet nationalities on the other. Moreover, what is really meant in Soviet terminology by "convergence of nations and nationalities in the USSR" is not a bilateral, reciprocal, convergence, but a unilateral process of absorption of small peoples by larger ones and, finally, by the "great Russian people." The aspects of these processes of assimilation and, in the final account, of russification are extremely varied, and one of the most important and relevant of them is the linguistic one. In this respect the Belorussians and the Ukrainians are the most assimilated among non-Russian peoples whose names are borne by Union republics. Thus, as early as May 1966, the Soviet specialist in language construction, A. Agayev, stated at an all-Union conference convened by the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences that "there is no community of language for about half the Bashkirs, whose mother languages are either Tatar or Russian, for the Karels, for the Evenks. The notion of 'community of language' in its full purport is absent among Soviet Ukrainians: every eighth Ukrainian is Russian-speaking."158 It should be added that, according to the 1970 census, already every seventh Ukrainian (14.3

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

45

percent of their total number) was Russian-speaking, and in 1979 every sixth (17.2 percent).15Q According to the same censuses, in 1970 every fifth Belorussian (19.4 percent) was Russian-speaking, and in 1979 every fourth (25.8 percent).160 Such "linguistic convergence" is not so dynamic in the nations of the USSR less close with the Russian people. Nevertheless, it clearly manifests itself within them too. Significant in this respect is K. Khanazarov's admission that, in the USSR, "processes of voluntary transition of ever-growing parts of small nations and puny nationalities to languages of larger nations" are developing and that "a mass replacement of the teaching language ... by small nations and nationalities goes on."161 A. Agayev emphasized that nationalistic moods "among some representatives of the national intelligentsia . . . are in some way connected with the language problem," and that "these moods manifest themselves mostly in attempts to proclaim a language as a 'state language' in a republic, ... in a negative attitude to bilingualism, in threatening with the bugbear of assimilation."162 In the Soviet terminological system, such terms as "nationalism," "nationalistic moods," etc., being applied to relations among nations and nationalities in the frame of Soviet reality, bear a particularly pejorative tint. For this very reason, trying not to undermine by his statement the proposition elaborated by the promoters of the CPSU national policy that "the national problem, as a vestige of the past, has been successfully solved in the USSR," Agayev uses the vague pronoun "some." This word, along with another vague one ("certain") serves the Soviet authors to stress that phenomena, negative from the authorities' point of view, are of a very limited character in the USSR. In the case under consideration, they assert that the "nationalistic moods" in the USSR bearers is insignificant. Meanwhile, moods defined in 1966 as nationalistic arose after twelve years, in 1978, as "attempts on the part of representatives of national intelligentsias to declare their mother tongue as a state language." These moods have found expression in the text of the constitutions of a number of non-Russian Soviet republics, particularly the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijan Union republics, and the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic. The constitutional legalization of the indigenous population's lan¬ guage status in each of the above republics proves that Moscow's henchmen and Moscow itself have retreated from their former positions on this problem, which had been supported by references to Lenin. Obviously, Moscow would never make such a retreat if it were a concession to "some representatives of national intelligentsia. The reason in making these concessions is that strong tendencies in favor

46

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

of the native language were manifested in those republics, especially in the Georgian SSR, and that these tendencies were strongly supported by wide strata of the indigenous population. As for the abovementioned assertion by Khanazarov—that the assimilatory processes in the USSR bear an expressly voluntary character—this is a typical example of embellishing Soviet reality, purposely concealing the true goals of CPSU's national-language policy. Soviet scholars implicitly adapt their utterances to the CPSU's deviations from formulae and assumptions reflecting its final aims, whatever the reasons compelling it to such deviations. Thus, in a book published in 1977, a year before the promulgation of the republics' constitutions, M. Isayev categorically pleaded against the use of the term "state language." Referring to the statement in Lenin's article "Is a Compulsory Official Language Needed?" that "Russian Marxists say that there must be no compulsory official language," Isayev stressed that the use of this term "may result in a misinterpretation of methodological and theoretical positions."164 Meanwhile, K. Khana¬ zarov, accommodating himself in his book published in 1982—after the promulgation of the constitutions now valid in the Union re¬ publics—to the authorities' deviations from their former assumptions, wrote that "further building of communism will ensure the strength¬ ening in the USSR of the official status of the national languages as state languages."165 Such opportunistic adaptations of theses and assumptions, having been presented for years as Marxist-Leninist, to the recurrent changes in the Kremlin leaders' policies is being often accompanied by a dogmatic striving toward the same goals. Thus, the 1961 program of the CPSU states: The line of a socialist constitution in isolation, detached from the world community of socialist countries, is theoretically untenable because it conflicts with the objective laws governing the development of socialist society. It is harmful economically because it causes waste of social labor, retards the rates of production growth, and makes the country dependent upon the capitalist world. It is reactionary and dangerous politically because it does not unite but divides the peoples in the face of the united front of imperialist forces, because it nourishes bourgeois nationalist tendencies, and may ultimately lead to the loss of the socialist gains."166 At the same time, the program's compilers declare that "revisionism, Right opportunism, as a reflection of bourgeois influence, is the chief danger within the communist movement.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

47

Then, in 1961, dogmatism and sectarianism were also declared very dangerous to the communist world, but their carriers were not mentioned in the program, as the ideology of revisionism was being directly attributed in the program to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (p. 43). The 1986 revised edition of the CPSU program makes no mention of the concrete carriers of any kind of deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian (socialist) internationalism. More¬ over, in this edition are omitted such "combative” statements of the 1961 program as the following: "Nationalism is harmful to the common interests of the socialist community and, above all, the people of the country where it obtains, since isolation from the socialist camp holds up that country's development (p. 24)," or "Vigorous defence of the unity of the world communist movement in line with the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, and the pre¬ vention of any action likely to disrupt that unity are an essential condition for victory in the struggle for national independence, de¬ mocracy and peace, for the successful accomplishment of the task of the socialist revolution (p. 44)," and so on. The quoted and other similar statements of the 1961 program have constituted a theoretical background of such events as, for example, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. These statements of the 1961 program and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet armed forces have been sharply criticized and condemned by several com¬ munist parties in power and even by the ruling party of Romania, which is one of the member-countries of the Warsaw Treaty Orga¬ nization and of the so-called socialist community countries. The Romanian Communist party has repeatedly said that it cannot be allowed to any communist party to interfere in the policy pursued by another communist party, to label communist leadership of other countries as deviationists from Marxism-Leninism, from the principles of proletarian (socialist) internationalism, and so on. During the years following the adoption of the 1961 program, despite such an open attitude toward Moscow's attempts to appropriate the right to be the arbiter of the policy pursued by other communist parties, both in documents of CPSU and in works of Soviet scholars, the Chinese communist leadership was severely blamed. Thus, in 1975, the authors of a monograph published under the aegis of the CPSU CC Institute of Marxism-Leninism asserted that the Maoists' theory and practice constitutes a coarse retreat from Marxism-Leninism."167 In 1976, at the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU, it was stated that the Chinese leadership "strives to provoke a world war" and "it is far too mild

48

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

to say that Maoist ideology and policy are incompatible with MarxistLeninism teaching; they are directly hostile to it."168 In the same year of 1976, in a study of proletarian internationalism published under the aegis of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy it was repeated that "the Chinese leaders have advanced their own ideological and political platform . . . which is incompatible with Leninism."169 In 1981, at the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU, Brezhnev stated that "Peking's foreign policy ... is aimed at aggravating the international situation, and is aligned with the policy of imperialist powers."170 In the same year, in a book translated into English and published under by the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, Soviet scholars wrote about "the departure of the policy pursued by present Chiense leadership from the principles of socialist internationalism."171 It should be added that, in 1979, the Moscow Politizdat published under the general editorship of the Bulgarian scholar S. Anghelov a collection of contributions by scientists of the community of socialist countries, which "sums up the . . . theoretical and practical experience of the parties in socialist countries in the field of interstate relations."172 In the English translation of that book, which appeared in Moscow in 1982, it was emphasized that the main cause of the unrestrained nationalism in China today is the fact that the anti-Marxist ideas of Mao Zedong have been persistently forced on the Communist party of China and raised to the level of party and state policy, under conditions of military-bureaucratic dic¬ tatorship, the virtual liquidation of the party, and the carrying out of mass repressions, including the systematic persecution of communistsinternationalists.173

It is not surprising that, despite the participation of scientists from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the GDR, Mongolia, Poland, and the USSR in writing this book, and libeling in the leadership of a communist party, the scientists of Romania have not contributed to it. As stated above, the text of the 1961 program of the CPSU and the text of its 1986 revised edition do not resemble one another in all these respects. Indeed, they are quite different in respect of the letter of their text. Thus, in the first subdivision of part three of the revised edition, which is entitled "Cooperation with the Socialist Countries," there are such statements as "the solidarity of socialist countries is in harmony with their common interest," or the "CPSU

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

49

asks for the greatest attention to and benevolent examination of points of view, for an active solidarity, so as to exclude any possibility of such contradictions which may cause harm to common interests,” and so on.174 Here it should be mentioned that the report of the Central Committee to the same Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, which adopted the revised edition of the program took up a radically changed attitude toward the Chinese leadership. In this report, Gorbachev emphasized Moscow's readiness "to talk about a certain improvement in the relations between the Soviet Union and its great neighbor—socialist China," and asserted "the possibility of cooperating, interacting in many cases on an equal and principled basis," with its leaders.175 As shown above, according to one of the main theses of the theoretical material that Pravda published on 21 June 1985, small socialist countries cannot act as mediators in arriving at compromises among great powers, as "in key international problems the foreign policies of the USSR and the Marxist-Leninist core of world socialism are identical." Thus, Moscow does not allow other countries of the socialist community to mediate between the great powers. At the same time, however, the CPSU stated in the revised edition of its program that, "in the search for solutions to controversial issues, in putting an end to conflicting situations, in setting up limits to tension and to the armament race, all both great and small countries might and must take part irrespective of their potential, geographical position or incorporation in social systems." As usual, we are dealing with a two-faced attitude. On the one hand, small socialist countries are not allowed to mediate between the USSR and other great powers. On the other hand, in its efforts to undermine the position of the United States and its allies in conflict situations, Moscow calls for the support of all countries irrespective of their belonging to one or another social system. The revised edition does not put labels on any leadership of other communist countries. For example, we do not find in it, as in the 1961 program, such condemnatory formulae as: "the Yugoslav leaders by their revisionist policy contraposed Yugoslavia to the socialist camp and the international communist movement."177 However in the abovementioned aspects, the revised edition has not been changed at all in spirit in comparison with the 1961 program. Thus, in the 1986 edition, are retained the slogans concerning the need to consolidate the cooperation of the USSR with the socialist countries on the basis of the Marxist-Leninist teaching and the principles of socialist inter¬ nationalism, "to foster the security" of these countries, "to rebut

50

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

anticommunism and anti-Sovietism/' and "to struggle against dogmatic and revisionist conceptions."178 These slogans were retained and even strengthened in the formulae that the CPSU is "armed with the Marxist-Leninist theory," that "in all its activity the CPSU follows undeviatingly the tried and tested Marxist-Leninist principles of pro¬ letarian, socialist internationalism," and so on.179 Retaining in the revised edition such slogans and formulae proves that the CPSU has not renounced at all its claim to be the great priest of the MarxistLeninist doctrine and the supreme judge of the conformity or non¬ conformity of the policy and practice of any other communist party to the principles of proletarian, socialist internationalism. Moscow's attitude toward this question has found expression in the following, for example, official statement of the CPSU: "As our Party sees it, differences of opinion between Communists can be overcome, unless, of course, they are fundamental differences between revolutionaries and reformists, between creative Marxism and dogmatic sectarianism or ultra-Left adventurism. In that case, of course, there can be no compromises—today just as in Lenin's lifetime."180 In Stalin's lifetime, just as in Khrushchev's (until the October 1964 "Party putsch"), Brezhnev's, Andropov's, or Chernenko's, each of them was extolled in Soviet sources as a great revolutionary, and his policy and practice were qualified as models of creative Marxism. Nowadays, Gorbachev and his actions are extolled in the same way. In one word, as Stalin had written once, "Stalin is Lenin today," each of Moscow's rulers, in power, "is a Lenin today." In fact, assuming the reins of power, each new ruler of the CPSU is considered by Soviet propaganda as infallible, and in any eventuality of fundamental differences between the CPSU and rulers of an other communist parties, such rulers are qualified as carriers of "reformism," of "dogmatic sectarianism," "revisionism," or "ultra-Left adventurism," and so on. The political and socioeconomic slogan that closed the 1961 program, asserting that "the Party solemnly proclaims the present generation of Soviet people shall live under communism!" was omitted by the compilers of its 1986 revised edition. The omission of such a solemn proclamation proves, without doubt, that the promised accomplishment of communism not far distant in the future (even as communism is understood by Soviet leaders) ended in failure. And, in this sense, the 1986 program should be considered not as a revised edition of the 1961 one, but as quite a new program. Soviet society is very much removed from communism under which, according to both the 1961 program and its 1986 revised edition, "all sources of public wealth will gush forth abundantly."

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

51

This proves, for example, the following fact. The 1961 program included the task of solving the housing problem and proclaimed that, at the end of the decade of 1971-1980, “every family, including newlyweds, will have a comfortable flat (p. 94).“ But this “most acute problem" (ibid.) was not solved, and the 1986 revised edition provides once again for the task of solving it. Moreover, the revised edition puts off solving the housing problem until the year 2000. This problem, according to the revised edition, should be solved in such a way that “toward the year 2000, every Soviet family would have practically an individual dwelling."181 The use of the adverb "practically" shows that even at the beginning of the next century the housing problem will not be fully solved. Also, in many other spheres of primary importance, the 1961 program was not being fulfilled. That is why the revised edition avoided such formulae of the 1961 program as "in the decade 1971— 80 ... a communist society will on the whole be built in the USSR," and “the construction of communist society will be fully completed in the subsequent period (pp. 65-66)," or “the annual output of electricity must be brought up to 900,000-1,000,000 million kilowatt hours by the end of the decade 1961-70, and to 2,700,000-3,000,000 million kilowatt hours by the end of the decade 1971-80 (p. 69)." But now, at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, the tasks provided for in the revised edition of the program, are much more modest and vague, namely, to make “a step forward on the road to the highest phase of communism," or to accelerate “the socioeconomic development of the country," and so on.182 Although the 1961 program emphasized that “the maximum ac¬ celeration of scientific and engineering progress is the major national [obshchenarodnaia] task (p. 73)," the revised edition acknowledges that “in the 70s and in the beginning of the 80s the country's development was showing certain unfavorable tendencies, and difficulties."183 The real meaning of this acknowledgment was divulged in the report of the CPSU CC to the Twenty-Seventh Congress: “In the course of a series of years" in the Soviet society had begun to appear “phenomena of stagnation," such as “inertia, sluggishness of forms and methods of management, diminishing dynamism, rising bureaucracy."184 The most disgraceful failure of the 1961 program, however, should be considered its provisions in the field of development of communist consciousness. The CPSU proclaimed then that the moral code of the builder of communism should comprise such ethical principles as “intolerance of actions harmful to the public interest," “honesty and truth fulness, moral purity, modesty, and unpretentiousness in social

52

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

and private life," "an uncompromising attitude to injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism and greed, (p. 120)," and so on. The 1986 revised edition, as well as both the report of the CPSU CC to the Twenty-Seventh Congress, and the speeches delivered at the congress by some first secretaries of republican communist organizations prove without doubt that the moral code proclaimed in 1961 was a fiasco. In the report to the congress, Gorbachev said: "We should confess that, as a result of diminished control and other reasons, groups of people showing clear aspiration for ownership have appeared." And he added, "In a short time we will take additional measures against parasitism, misappropriation of socialist property, bribery."185 Gor¬ bachev's confession of the persistence of such and other vices in Soviet society, together with his raising the curtain of mist that was hiding the real state of affairs in this respect in some republican party organizations have revealed the truth about corruption in the CPSU as a whole.186 The speeches both of the first secretary of the Kirghiz Party organization, A. Masaliev, and of the first secretary of the Uzbek Party organization, I. Usmankhodzhaev, at the congress also show the degree of decay from top to bottom that has reached the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Thus, Usmankhodzhaev told the delegates that, in the Central Committee of the Uzbek Communist party, in the regional, city, and district Party committees of the republic had been implanted, under the leadership of his predecessor, "a vicious style: parade and selfpraise, neglect of criticism and self-criticism, loss of modesty, and, in a series of cases, loss of Party and human honesty have generated a spread of intrigues, trickery, formalism, indifference, abuse of power and embezzlements." Usmankhodzhaev said also that the primary Party organizations "were detached observers of the infringements committed under their very eyes," that "a great number of Party, executive-administrative bodies' officials, and leading officers in the militia, the judicial system, and procurator's office were brought to answer Party and criminal accusations," that "more than half of the personnel belonging to the nomenklatura of the CPSU CC and of the Uzbek CP CC had to be dismissed from service."187 At the same time, Masaliev spoke to the congress delegates about the fact that, under his predecessor's leadership, "the importance of CC plenums, bureau and secretariat were diminished, Leninist principles of selection of personnel, of joint leadership were being transgressed," "in the bureau of the Kirghiz CP CC criticism or self-criticism did not exist; secretaries [of the CC] and other members of the bureau often paid obeisance to the former first secretary of the CC."188

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

53

From the speeches both of Gorbachev and other delegates at the congress, it is clear that the CPSU CC knew for many years of the abuses and infringements in the Central Asian Soviet republics. And it is clear that such phenomena were usual. Thus, K. Makhkamov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Tadjikistan CC, told the delegates about manifestations of abuse and infringements in the Tadjik Republic. Makhkamov said that, as in other Central Asian republics, there were in the Tadjik SSR “grave infringements of Leninist principles in the selection and placing of personnel in recent years.''189 S. Niyazov, the first secretary of the Turkmen Party organization CC, said in his speech at the congress that also in the Turkmen SSR promotions of personnel were made on the basis of private con¬ nections, of fellow countrymen relations which led to the spreading of servility and self-seeking, generated mutual guarantees, abuses, and irresponsibility.'' He moreover emphasized that, “in the past fifteen years, there was a stagnation in the economics of Turkmen¬ istan."190 But, as Masaliev said, many signals sent to Moscow on the misuse of power by the communist leadership of Kirghizia “were not being verified directly by the CPSU CC, but forwarded to the CC of the Communist party of the republic."191 It is not surprising that in such circumstances Sh. Rashidov (in the Uzbek Republic), T. Usubaliev (in the Kirghiz Republic), Dzh. Rasulov (in the Tadjik Republic), and M. Gapurov (in the Turkmen Republic) were in power for a quarter of a century. And this is why, in the report of the CPSU CC, Gorbachev stated that, in the Communist party, "there are not, and there should not be organizations out of control, closed to criticism; there are not, and there should not be leaders safe from Party responsibility."192 Both the report presented by Gorbachev, and certain speeches of delegates at the Twenty-Seventh Congress show clearly that the abovementioned negative phenomena are not regional or republican ones, but all-Union ones, social scourges of socialism in its Soviet embod¬ iment. Subjecting to severe criticism the former Uzbek and Kirghiz leadership, Gorbachev emphasized, at the same time, that similar negative processes and phenomena had taken place to a certain extent also in Moscow, Alma-Ata, Chikment, “and in some other regions and republics."193 Indeed, for example, K. Demirchyan, the first sec¬ retary of the Armenian Communist party CC mentioned at the congress that, in Armenia, “the struggle against bureaucracy, abuse of official position, encroachment on national property, sponging, consumer psychology, money-grubbing, and parasitism should be strength¬ ened."194 And, for his part, S. Grossu, the first secretary of the

54

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

Moldavian Communist party CC said that, in Moldavia, it was necessary to seriously revise the personnel policy,” that "those leaders who have abused their positions, resorted to eyewash, [and] had soiled their name by unseemly behavior were being dismissed from service.”195 In the short time of Andropov's power, Soviet Moldavia's leadership had been subjected by Moscow to severe criticism. In the years following Andropov's tenure, however, and even in the five months after the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, the state of affairs in the republic did not change at all. On 2 August 1986, at a meeting of the Moldavian Party organization's most active members held in Kishinev, S. Grossu delivered a report on the tasks of the Party, governmental, administrative, and economic organizations of the re¬ public, which came from the decisions of the congress and the resolution of the CPSU CC "for the strengthening of the struggle against unearned incomes, drunkenness, alcoholism, for the strengthening of discipline and order.”196 The facts revealed by Grossu and by certain participants in the meeting bear testimony that the internal vices of the Soviet society are not only deep-seated, but indeed incurable. Even from the cut versions of the report and of the speeches Grossu and others made at the meeting, as well as from the latter's conclusive decision we can learn that in Soviet Moldavia: a. From mid-1983 to August 1986, 276 officials were punished for criminal acts, and among them the deputy chairman of the Moldavian SSR Council of Ministers Vasile Vyshku; b. From March 1984 to August 1986, more than 200 high officials from the nomenklatura of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist party were dismissed from the service for trans¬ gressing the administrative and Party rules; c. From 15,000 to 17,000 persons are arrested annually for petty embezzlement; d. Over a long period of time, in the Kishinev Medical Institute, as well as in other higher educational institutions and secondary specialized schools, bribery was widely practiced at entrance examinations; e. In the branches of the Agroindustrial Complex, in the enterprises and organizations of the Consumers' Cooperative Societies, in the Ministries of Trade, Public Health, Motor Transport, etc., various extortions, embezzlements, and abuses are practiced on a mass scale.197

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

55

In January 1986, G. Lavranchuk, the minister of internal affairs of the Moldavian SSR, spoke to the delegates at the Fourteenth Congress of the republics communist organization about a large group of offenders who, for many years, had stolen large quantities of alcohol at the distilleries in the southern districts of Soviet Moldavia. He said in this respect: "The group acted in an atmosphere of philistine indifference, complete unconcern and connivance. Everyone saw, every¬ one knew what these offenders were doing, but nobody raised a protest, nobody was filled with indignation, and nobody demanded the arrest of the perpetrators."198 In October 1985, a correspondent of the Moscow Literaturnaia gazeta described the kind of fraudulent machinations even the honest-minded, in his opinion, heads of collective farms in Soviet Moldavia were obliged to resort to in the 1970s and 1980s. He gave an example of "criminal offenses known to all the 2,000 inhabitants of the village of Fundurii-Vechi."199 The man charged in the case brought before the court, a young V. Kuruliuk, had headed the collective farm of that village only for two years, and was sentenced for the transgressions and committed to ten years confinement. Literaturnaia gazeta tells us that, in his first month of work, Kuruliuk received from the district authorities the so-called scheduled figures, according to which the collective farm he headed was obliged to produce 570 tons of meat. However, all the farm's cattle, together with its poultry, hardly weighed seventy tons. Kuruliuk made every effort to convince the district authorities that the scheduled figures were impossible to carry out, but all his attempts were in vain. And then Kuruliuk, in order to prevent his inevitable dismissal from his post, resorted to illegal manipulations involving thousands of people not only from FunduriiVechi, but also from other places in the Ukraine and Moldavia. Writing about P. Proka, another head of a collective farm in Soviet Moldavia who was charged with similar flagrant transgressions of the law, the author of the article emphasized the fact that the latter was in office not for two years, as was Kuruliuk, but for twenty-two years."200 Talking of the district authorities who were at least morally responsible for the illegal action of persons like Kuruliuk and many others, the correspondent of Literaturnaia gazeta mentions the name of D. Cebotar, one of the former leaders of the Glodeni District. Cebotar was not jailed but only demoted. When the correspondent met him, Cebotar was a scientific worker at a research institute in the city of Belts. Confirming that Kuruliuk tried to convince him of the impossibility of fulfilling the meat target envisaged in the scheduled figures, Cebotar confessed that he refused to intervene. He said: "If

56

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

I should have got Kishinev's permission to introduce amendments into the scheduled figures, they would not show any understanding of my interference.” The correspondent of Literaturnaia gazeta remarked that Cebotar could not take the risk of not being considered an assertive leader, who by order from above must always achieve anew. He had attained one new achievement after another, until the truth was out that the achievements were faked, that Cebotar juggled figures to make it seem that the district was prosperous. In such a way was created the myth of the Glodeni District as being an exemplary one, and guests from other parts of Soviet Moldavia and other republics came to adopt the "progressive methods” of its front-rank collective farmers." The correspondent noted an essential vice of the socialist system of management in its Soviet embodiment, qualifying the described phenomena as flourishing double-dealings that gave rise to a psy¬ chology of executors-adventurers who were ready to break the law "in order to obey the ruthless vainglory of their superiors.”201 In fact, as Kuruliuk and Proka obeyed Cebotar in the Glodeni District, Cebotar for his part blindly obeyed the republican leadership, and the latter implicitly obeyed Moscow. The implications of the article suggest that its author, in talking about the vainglorious leaders, meant first and foremost Ivan Bodiul, who was for almost twenty years first secretary of the Moldavian Communist party. Bodiul himself is a typical representative of the dishonesty, duplicity, obsequiousness, and toadyism that contaminate the Communist party of the Soviet Union—"the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations" of the USSR.202 In 1946, he came to work in Soviet Moldavia among the tens of thousands of newcomers who, after World War II, filled all the Party apparatus and any significant office in the administrative organs. From 1946 to 1951, Bodiul held low-rank positions in the government bodies of the Moldavian SSR. Making his way in life, he attained the post of first secretary of the Kishinev District Party Committee in 1951. Thus, he obtained another term of office and became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU nomenklatura. All this, with the direct support of Brezhnev, who was at that time first secretary of the Communist party of Moldavia.203 But Bodiul involved himself in dishonest affairs and was dismissed from his post. The Moldavian Soviet Encyclopedia notes that he was, "from 1951 to 1956, first secretary of the Kishinev District Committee of the Communist party of Moldavia (CPM),

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

57

manager of the Republic Agronomists Club, first secretary of the Volontirovka and Olonesht Districts Committees of the CPM."204 Whoever is familiar with Soviet realities, knows that a manager of an agronimists club (even of a republic one) has a very humble job in comparison to the post of first secretary of a district committee of the Communist party. Bodiul was saved then by his protector from much graver consequences of his bribery when he headed the Kishinev district. And he was much obligated to Brezhnev for his subsequent new rise to the head of district Party organizations, and finally to the top of the Moldavian Communist party. In the twenty years that Bodiul was secretary of the Central Committee of the CPM, he faithfully tried to implement Moscow's nationalities policy and became the most odious figure in the eyes of the patriotically minded national intelligentsia of the republic. At the same time, he set out to color favorably the economics of Soviet Moldavia. And his behavior in this respect led to lawless actions on a mass scale. In the end, Bodiul's failures in the fields of both of nationalities policy and economics caused his removal from office as head of the Party of Moldavia in December 1980. Nominally, he was promoted to the higher position of deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, but, in fact, it was an honorable demotion for which he had Brezhnev to thank. After Brezhnev's death, Andropov launched an attack on his rival, N. Shchelokov, the minister of internal affairs of the USSR. The latter was intimate with Brezhnev. They had worked together both in the Ukrainian SSR before World War II, and in Soviet Moldavia in the years 1951-1952. Shchelokov continued to work in Soviet Moldavia until his appointment as minister of internal affairs in 19 6 6.205 There can be no doubt that the investigation of the charges brought against Shchelokov also involved his activities in Soviet Moldavia, as well as the activities of Bodiul. So, the sharp criticism to which Moscow subjected the Central Committee of the Moldavian communist or¬ ganization on 6 December 1983 was spearheaded first and foremost against Shchelokov and Bodiul. Andropov had time to square accounts only with Shchelokov. Chernenko, however, being at one time elected deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet by one of the constituencies of the Moldavian SSR, was friendly with Bodiul and not at all in a hurry to punish him. But Gorbachev did it. Bodiul was first forced to retire on pension, and, after that, to leave the Supreme Soviet before expiration of his term of office.206 The dishonest acts and transgressions of the law had been committed by people born after the October Revolution, and who, from their

58

The Soviet Constitution arid CPSU Program

childhood, were brought up to respect the Soviet way of life. They disprove the thesis of Communist theorists about the survivals of capitalism in the mind and behavior of the Soviet people.207 They prove, on the contrary, that the infringements and dishonesty are natural manifestations of Soviet realities and Soviet morality. The liberalization adopted after Stalin's death has affected all Eastern European socialist countries. Thus, on 22 May 1956, at a meeting of the most active members of the Stalin district committee of the Bucharest Party organization, attended by Gheorghiu-Dej,208 the writer Alexander Jar had the courage to say “that he, like so many other writers, had lived for the past years a double life between his conscience and what he had been asked to do, between what he wanted to write and what he published, . . . that this was true not only of the writers but of all Party members/'209 The Party life of the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin period shows that, in this respect, the situation has not changed at all to this day. There are more than enough examples to illustrate the aforesaid. Among the eulogists of Brezhnev at the Twenty-Fifth and TwentySixth Congresses of the CPSU and of the achievements of the USSR in all fields of activity under his leadership who were dismissed after Brezhnev's death, were not only members or alternate members of the Politburo and first secretaries of republic and regional Party organizations, but also present-day Soviet leaders such as G. Aliev, V. Shcherbitski, E. Shevardnadze, B. Eltshin, and many others. In February 1981, B. Eltsin, for example, said in his speech at the Twenty-Sixth Congress that all achievements of the Soviet Union “arose from the collective wisdom, titanic efforts, unbending will, and unsurpassed talent of the Communist party, its Central Committee and Politburo headed by Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.''210 As first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional Party organization, Eltsin had done then his utmost to lick Brezhnev's boots, saying: “Everyone of us constantly felt how arduous and strenuous were the efforts of the Central Committee, of its Politburo, and, particularly, of the comrade Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.''211 In February 1986, the same Eltsin addressed the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU—at this time, in his capacity as the first secretary of the Moscow city Party organization and an alternate member of the Politburo. Now he said that “indisputable authority, leader's infallibility, 'twofold morality' in today's conditions are in¬ tolerable and inadmissible.''212 And he added: “The delegates can ask me why I have not said all this in my speech at the XXVIth Congress

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

59

of the party. Well, I can openly answer: apparently, then I had not enough courage and political experience/'213 Meanwhile, a two-faced morality was always the most essential hallmark of the whole Party life of socialism in its Soviet embodiment. This remains nowadays the Soviet reality under Gorbachev as it was before, under his predecessors. And Gorbachev even cannot plead lack of enough political experience in excuse of his previous conduct. It is many years since he reached the top of the Party hierarchy of the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1976 he was a member of the commission that compiled "The Resolution on the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXV Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Immediate Tasks of the Party in Home and Foreign Policy."214 That resolution called upon "all Party organizations to follow in their activity the propositions and tasks which were formulated by comrade L. I. Brezhnev."215 Gorbachev's career, from the very beginning to the death of Cher¬ nenko, presents an example of continuous obedience, toadyism, and dissimulation. His accession to power allowed him to rise inordinately above all other members of the Politburo. After getting rid of G. Romanov and securing in that way for himself the dependence of all members of the Politburo, Gorbachev began to act promptly. The subsequent development of home and foreign policy of the new general secretary of the CPSU shows that he makes every endeavor to consolidate his position as an unchallenged leader of the Soviet people and to shape an image of himself as a faithful disciple of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and who develops their teaching in the contemporary conditions. "Acceleration of socioeconomic development [as a panacea for all home problems]" and "a new political thought conformable to the realities of the 'atomic age' [as a method to solve world problems]" are widespread slogans today in the USSR. And they can be defined as hallmarks of Gorbachev's propaganda although they were used in Brezhnev's period too. Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that such slogans will be qualified by Soviet authors as valuable contributions by Gorbachev to Marxist-Leninist theory. Thus, in October 1986, heads of the humanities departments of Soviet higher educational institutions were summoned to a conference in the Kremlin. Gorbachev himself addressed the conference, saying that the reorganization that was taking place in the country made high demands on the social sciences, that "the qualitative, revolutionary changes which occur in Soviet society demand new thought and a strengthening of the connection

60

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

between theory and practice." The real reason, however, for their being summoned was the following circumstance.216 Gorbachev, as well as the main speakers at the conference—E. Ligachev, secretary of the CPSU CC, and G. Yagodin, minister of higher and secondary special education of the USSR—spoke about "the need for reforming the curricula in the educational institutions, for strengthening the truth both in life and in science, for elaborating new lectures and rewriting textbooks, and for a break in the dogmatic methods of teaching social sciences.217 Pointing out, on the one hand, "that in teaching of social sciences there isn't enough Leninist truth," and on the other, that "there are difficulties of curricula, of textbooks, of methods," Ligachev added that "the crux of the matter is nevertheless the deficiency of full truth." He underlined also the need for a reform in teaching methods "of social sciences in accordance with the spirit and letter of the 27th Congress of the CPSU," and said at the conclusion of his speech that "today propaganda, study, and imple¬ mentation of the congress's ideas should be the main ends for specialists in social sciences at the higher educational institutions."218 In the same spirit, G. Yagodin addressed the October 1986 conference of heads of social science departments. He stressed the point that, in the teaching methods of the social sciences, "such chronic illnesses as formalism, time-serving, ostentation should be overcome" and a "correlative unity of historical experience of the CPSU and its today's revolutionary practice should be secured." The minister informed the participants in the conference that, "in 1988, new textbooks on philosophy, political economy, and scientific communism should be published."219 Thus, the real goal of the new leadership of the USSR in summoning the heads of social science departments was, in fact, to instruct them on how to change the courses so as to shape the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU into an opener "of new approaches to a series of classic problems of Marxist-Leninist theory."220 In his speech at the conference, Ligachev observed critically that the "present state of the Party history studies causes great anxiety," and that "the periodic rewriting of Party history's pages has a negative influence on this science."221 Meanwhile, the October conference itself had been con¬ vened in order to urge Soviet specialists to rewrite once again the pages not only of CPSU history, but of all social sciences. This time, it was to eliminate all references to statements from Brezhnev's speeches, addresses, interviews, etc. as basic Marxist-Leninist tenets and to replace them with Gorbachev's statements. Such replacing answered the CPSU's efforts to make Gorbachev into an outstanding disciple

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

61

of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and into the greatest authority on MarxismLeninism and proletarian (socialist) internationalism in the communist world. It should be pointed out in this connection that, since the April 1985 plenary session of the CPSU CC, Party and government officials in the USSR (including all members and alternate members of the Politburo), as well as all Soviet specialists in the social sciences, never fail to mention the name of Gorbachev and to refer to his statements. At the congress, Gorbachev has raised slightly the curtain of untruths that covered in Brezhnev's period the venal and corrupt practices of state and Party officials and of Soviet economic bodies; he confessed that the Soviet economy had been stagnant for many years. On 10 November 1986, on the occasion of Soviet Militia Day, the minister for internal affairs of the USSR, General A. Vlasov, gave an interview to the Moscow television political commentator, L. Voznesenski. Vlasov said that recently groups of high-ranking Soviet officials were prosecuted for grave crimes in the RSFSR, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaidjan, and he added (by the way) that the last time a militia inspection was conducted at meat-packing plants all over the country it revealed flagrant offences against the law in all of them. But, at the same time, the minister tried to convince viewers that, since the April 1985 plenary session of the CPSU CC, all kinds of crimes and law breaking had decreased considerably in the USSR.222 Such different approaches to the pre-Gorbachev period, on the one hand, and to the current situation in the USSR, on the other, are a usual display of time-serving, which always characterized the Soviet mode of life. In this respect, all Soviet officials, as well as obedient men of science, culture, and literature have patterned themselves on the Gorbachev model, which exposed the wrongdoings of his pre¬ decessors and, in the same breath, began to extoll the highest at¬ tainments of Soviet people under the guidance of today's Soviet leadership. In September 1986, for example, in his tour of the Krasnodar and Stavropol territories, Gorbachev stated that, after the April 1985 plenum of the CPSU CC, it was necessary to have "a restructuring in the country's economics, to firmly change everything in the social field, ... to look truth in the face."223 In the same tour, however, he not only resorted to such stereotyped slogans of Soviet propaganda as "the unity of the Party and the people," or "the Soviet people stands through thick and thin by the Party's policy," but also praised the today's policy of the CPSU as a revolutionary one and the radical change that, owing to this policy, already was wrought in all areas of the socioeconomic life of the Soviet people.224

62

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

In connection with the continued exposures of large-scale corruption of sins against society, and all kinds of law breaking, the CPSU CC received many letters from alarmed activist members and veterans of the Communist party, who asked, “Is everything really so bad with us?"225 Confessing that some people, on the contrary, affirm that criticism of all kinds of offences against the law “should be continued but, at the same time, it is necessary to show more the positive effect of the restructuring," Gorbachev said that he supports “this [double] formula."226 Applying that formula, Gorbachev mentioned that, during the past years, “were committed grave infringements of social and moral norms" in the Krasnodar territory.227 But, on the other hand, he emphasized that “in the tenth Five-Year Plan, the yield of crops in the Kuban was thirty metric centners per hectare, in the eleventh one—also thirty," and that now, “in consequence of the introduction of intensive technologies in crop-farming, has made a leap to more than forty metric centners per hectare."228 Explaining the meaning of the term restructuring, V. Kadulin, a member of the Kommunist magazine editorial board, wrote that this word a. Has become part and parcel of the Soviet people's political vocabulary since the April 1985 plenary meeting of the CPSU Central Committee; b. Has come to rank with the word “revolution"; c. Means a reappraisal of values: it calls for an end to a doctrinaire and dogmatic view of socialism.229 Meanwhile, in the whole Brezhnev period, Soviet officials (including the current members and alternate members of the Politburo), as well as obedient specialists in the social sciences, have invariably extolled the leaderships "revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist" view of socialism. On the other hand, violations of moral and ethical norms, the gaining of unearned income and other similar phenomena were always officially condemned in the USSR. The 1961 program of the CPSU, for example, asserted that “the moral code of the builder of communism" should comprise such principles as “an uncompromising attitude to injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism and greed."230 There is no room for doubt that the exposures of different kinds of transgressions will continue in the USSR without a break. In this connection should be mentioned the dismissing of the Tashaus regions leaders at a plenary session of the Turkmen Communist party CC held in October 1986. The subject under discussion at that session

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

63

was: "On the Flagrant Infringements of Party and State Discipline, Favoring Exaggerated Accounts, Eye-Washing, Deceiving the State and Perverting the Policy of Selection of Personnel in the Tashaus Regional Party Organization."231 Some other details are also worth touching on here in order to clarify the point of the issue. Thus, B. Atayev, first secretary of the regional Party organization, K. Mollayev, chairman of the regional executive committee, and two secretaries of the regional Party organization (N. Lomov and U. Shamuratov) were dismissed from service, the first three being also expelled from the CPSU. Meanwhile, Atayev was for fifteen years first secretary of the regional committee. Moreover, Pravda’s special cor¬ respondent, V. Loginov, writes not only that "the former leaders of the republic have backed Atayev up," but also that "in the last two years at the plenary sessions of the Party committee of the republic there was not a single coming out with critical remarks about secretaries or heads of departments of the regional Party committee."232 All these because the atayevshchina (as Loginov calls the fraudulent display of prosperity, all kinds of law breaking and swindles, as well as nepotism, fellow countrymen relations and servility as main criteria for selection of personnel, persecutions of disagreeable people, and other negative phenomena that flourished in the Tashauz region under Atayev) was been backed up also by the current leadership of the Turkmen SSR. Loginov relates that this was the reason why, at the plenary session, the Turkmen Party organization's Central Committee secretaries V. Zhulenev, M. Mollayeva, K. Shakhatmuradov, the Turkmen SSR Council of Ministers Chairman A. Khodzhamuradov and the CC administrative organs department head A. Bekiev were subjected to criticism, the latter being dismissed. Pravda's correspondent adds that, at the plenary session, negative phenomena that occur in other regional Party or¬ ganizations of Turkmenistan too were subjected to criticism. He quotes, at the same time, a statement from the speech by Turkmen Party Central Committee (TCP CC) first secretary, S. Niyazov, who remarked upon the conduct of the CC Bureau members: "We often kept our views to ourselves. We kept them to ourselves, wanting not to be on bad terms. Often having hearts of another opinion, we do not dare to express it at meetings by ourselves."233 The most relevant point of such a statement is that Niyazov, who became head of the TCP CC near the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, solemnly promised at that congress to eradicate negative phenomena that flourished in the republic under the leadership of his predecessor.234 Confessing a year and a half after the April 1985 CPSU CC Plenum that he and other members of the TCP CC Bureau often "do not

64

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

dare to express their opinion/' Niyazov put his finger on an incurable Soviet weak spot. This means, that although the present-day Soviet rulers took strong measures against bribery, corruption, whitewashing, deceiving the state, and so on, all sorts of law breaking persist and will persist in Soviet society. Moreover, it may be safely asserted that, although exposure of such transgressions will continue, it will lose more and more of its intensity and frequency. As evidence in support of such an assertion, can be cited, for example, an acknowledgement by the Moldavian Community party CC second secretary, V. Smirnov, that records under the procurator's supervision show that, in 1985, 285 officials were made to answer for exaggerated accounts and whitewashing but, as of September 1986, only twenty-one officials were been punished for such infringements.235 It may also be safely asserted, however, that the longer Gorbachev is in power, the more the attainments of "the new thinking of the restructuring, of the acceleration of the country's socioeconomic life" will be praised. In support of this assertion we can cite, for example, a speech by the Moldavian Party CC first secretary, S. Grossu, in which he stated: "The last few months of the current year show that positive changes have begun occurring in the thinking and actions of our people. . . . The rate of increase of industrial production in 5 months of this year (1986) exceeded the rate attained last year by more than double. Fourteen percent more fixed capital was placed into operation in capital construction than in the corresponding period of last year, and 39 percent more housing was introduced. Meat production increased by 18 percent, while milk production increased by 5 percent."236 Or, for example, the speech by CPSU Central Committee secretary, E. Ligachev, on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution, which confirms on an all-Union scale the same thing. In this speech Ligachev, on the one hand, underlined that, in the pre-April 1985 period, "the moral sphere was one of the most contaminated" in the USSR and that Soviet "cadres were degenerating."237 But, on the other hand, he declared that the process of restructuring the socioeconomic development of the country "has a revolutionary character," the air which Soviet people "breathe became fresher, . . . appreciable changes occurred in the ethical-psychological climate, . . . drowsiness and nonchalance became a thing of the past," that "the first ten months of the twelfth Five-Year Plan show an increasing dynamism in the development of the national economy: the highest rate of growth in national income and industrial production of the eighties has been reached,. . . the rate of agricultural production's

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

65

increase almost doubled in comparison with the average annual level of the Five-Year Plan's target."238 The seventy-year rule of the CPSU proves that, at congresses, plenums, and conventions of Party, as well as of Soviet bodies, consideration will be always given also to the shortcomings and difficulties of Soviet realities. But, by now, there are quite distinct indications not only of the continuous self-glorification of the CPSU, but also of the growing cult of its current general secretary's personality. Significant in this connection are, for example, congratulations on the sixty-ninth an¬ niversary of the October Revolution, which was published in Soviet newspapers. In those congratulations, addressed to Gorbachev and Gromyko by the president of North Korea, the latter spoke about "the signal successes the Soviet people achieve under the experienced guidance of the CPSU headed by comrade Mikhail Sergeevich Gor¬ bachev."239 The latest developments in the USSR show that the time is not far distant, when also members of the CPSU CC Politburo will extol General Secretary Gorbachev (if he continues to be in power some years to come) as it praised Brezhnev to the skies. For example, E. Shevardnadze, who said at the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU, in February 1981: "The report of Leonid Ilich Brezhnev ... is not only an epoch-making document, but also a living organism all of whose cells are linked with each member of our society. It seems that this living organism has absorbed all qualities of its author, of its creator, our wise leader, the great Leninist revolutionary Leonid Ilich Brezhnev."240 In the speech on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the October Rev¬ olution, E. Ligachev said that "restructuring means a remaking of deep, fundamental patterns of economy, of political and social spheres. "But, in the same speech, he declared also that "restructuring does not mean a change of the Soviet social systems essence. i41 An analysis of these tenets of the present leadership of the CPSU shows that they are essentially incompatible. Because the first one, as I have tried to show above, is not at all in harmony with Soviet realities, while the second reflects them. Thus, closely connected with the tenet of restructuring is the term "democratization. This is bound up with the political slogan that says that deepening of democracy "means first and foremost a steady broadening of the framework of socialist self-government, and edu¬ cating each Soviet citizen to feel himself a master of the country," as, for example, Ligachev asserted on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution.242 "We should create," Gorbachev told the

66

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

activists of the Krasnodar Territory CPSU organization, "such pre¬ requisites in every working collective, in every Party organization, in every region, republic, branch, in every central department, in the whole party, when every one of our citizens will fell himself a master of the country."243 All previous leaders of the USSR have repeated over and over again that Soviet citizens are the masters of their country, and now, after seven decades of Soviet rule, it appears that not more than the prerequisites for such a feeling should be created! Gorbachev has repeatedly stated (and Soviet public figures have reiterated) that the current leadership of the USSR "creates legal possibilities so that the deputies' soviets might manifest themselves completely as the power of the working people,"244 that openness (glasnost') in the USSR should be broadened, and that Soviet society should not content itself with half-truths as in the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s.245 Such statements are first-hand evidence that the overwhelming part of the Brezhnev period—for Soviet leaders as well as for subservient proponents of their policy—home truths were hard to swallow, and they had resorted to half-truths as a means to embellish reality, and even to glaring untruths. Meanwhile, not only half-truths, but glaring untruths continue to be a hallmark of the current leadership of the CPSU. Thus, Soviet specialists in the social sciences wrote, at the end of the Brezhnev period, about strict observance of the right of each nationality to due representation in Party and state bodies, about respect for national feelings, and the ethnic dignity of each person in the USSR. The authors of a book published under the aegis of the USSR Academy of Sciences in that period asserted that "the Soviet regime ensures the permanent taking into consideration of all nations' and nationalities' interests," that "the Soviet regime considers in detail the system of nations' and nation¬ alities' representation in various spheres of public life."246 As an example of such representation the fact was cited that each Union republic elects thirty-two deputies to the Supreme Soviet's Soviet of Nationalities, which means "that the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR, Estonian SSR and Moldavian SSR have equal representation in the Soviet of Nationalities."247 Meanwhile, equal numbers of deputies elected from the Union republics to the Soviet of Nationalities does not mean that these republics are equally represented in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR as a whole. The 1977 constitution says that "the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of the Nationalities shall have equal numbers of deputies" (article 110), and that "the Union Soviet shall be elected by constituencies with equal populations." This is why it should be considered that Union republics have no equal

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

67

representation in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. This is all the more so, as (a) the composition of the deputies from the Union republics in the Union Soviet is of incomparably greater political weight than the composition of their deputies in the Soviet of Nationalities; (b) upon Moscow's instructions, high-ranking officials from outside the Union republics are included in lists of candidates and then elected to the Supreme Soviet, so that they represent the most influential figures among the deputies from the Union republics; (c) "decisions and other acts of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR are adopted by a majority of the total number of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR [1977 constitution, article 114]"; (d) "in the event of disagreement between the Union Soviet and the Soviet of Na¬ tionalities, the matter at issue shall be referred for settlement to a conciliation commission formed by the chambers on a parity basis, after which it shall be considered for a second time by the Union Soviet and the Soviet of Nationalities at a joint sitting [ibid., article 115]." In the last years of the Brezhnev period, six top-level officials from the Moldavian SSR were elected from outside this republic to the Union Soviet, and they comprised 54.6 percent of the whole "Mol¬ davian delegation" in the Union Soviet of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.248 But such a system of forming the composition of deputies from the non-Russian Soviet republics is practiced under Gorbachev too. In June 1986, four months before a condemnatory resolution of October 1986 of the CPSU CC was adopted, S. Grossu made a speech at a plenum of the Moldavian Komsomol CC in which he, as usual, spoke about shortcomings. He noted, for example, "that the rate of growth of labor productivity and of production quality is still low at many enterprises" and so on. But, first of all, he emphasized that "the last few months of the current year show that positive changes have begun occurring in the thinking and actions of our people. Intolerance of the negative phenomena of previous years and of violations of labor discipline and order is intensifying, the enthusiasm for labor of the masses and responsibility of personnel are rising, and production is undergoing organizational and technical restruc¬ turing. As a consequence, the economy is becoming more dynamic."249 Meanwhile, after the October 1986 resolution was adopted, S. Grossu confessed that in Moldavia "there is not a single branch in which cover-ups were not exposed," that "the proportion of units where . . . deceiving the state by exaggerated accounts has increased from 7.6 to 10.8 percent in the first half of the current year [1986] in

68

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

comparison with the corresponding period of the last one/' that "all cities and districts have been contaminated by exaggerated accounts/' and that "similar grave transgressions had taken place in industry and in agriculture, in transport and in construction, as well in the sphere of service to the population."250 Not only Grossu and other participants at the October plenum, but also the resolution of the latter disclosed that, right up to the last, with Moscow's control of the republic, falsifications, frauds, swindles, and so on were practiced on a large scale. This is why, as it was divulged in Grossu's report, only in the last two and a half years in Moldavia "10,000 members were expelled from the CPSU," and "from the Supreme Soviet of the republic 27 deputies were removed."251 All this, in spite of the fact that central bodies of the CPSU have repeatedly subjected the republic's leadership to criticism. Thus, in his speech at the plenum, G. Eremei (chairman of the republic's Council of Trade Unions) revealed that, in 1976, "on the working peoples' signals and the initiative of the Party Control Committee [PCC] of the CPSU CC, the Bureau of the Moldavian CP Central Committee examined the problem of exaggerated accounts, but there were no serious conclusions."252 Eremei (who was at one time first vice-chairman of the republic's Council of Ministers) em¬ phasized that "over a long period of time the Bureau and the Secretariat of the Moldavian CP CC did not provide true information, tried to distort the real state of affairs, and sometimes have misinformed even the CPSU CC and the government of the country." For the first time, blame was laid publicly for the ingrained dishonesty in the republic's life, for the deep-rooted cover-ups, and deceiving the state by exaggerated accounts on the former first secretary of the CC, I. Bodiul. So that the failures of his hare-brained plans couldn't be found out, Bodiul had created a republic headquarters led by the first vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers, G. Stepanov. That body, which consisted of seven members and alternate members of the Moldavian CP CC and seven members of the republic's Council of Ministers, "became, in fact, a headquarters for organizing exag¬ gerated accounts [Eremei]," a body of "falsification and constraint under duress [speech by A. Sangelly, first secretary of Dondusheni District Party committee]," whose participants "turned into jugglers, who, out of nothing, could create any quantity in any agricultural production [speech of I. Serbin, first secretary of Glodeni District Party committee]." Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that the speakers at the Plenum of October 1986 have used, for the realities of Soviet Moldavia and the behavior of its officials, such terms as

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

69

"falsifications," "frauds," "cover-ups," "subjectivism," "abuse of power," "ostentatious parade," "favoritism," "self-seeking," "bribery," "hare-brained plans," "dread of superiors," "social demagogy," "pseu¬ docare for people's welfare," etc.253 In the Bodiul period, Eremei told the participants of the plenum, special routes "were worked out for visitors and inspectors. In order to display outward appearances of progress and prosperity, cattle owned in common were driven from one collective farm to another." It is not surprising, therefore, that the disclosure of such misdemeanors and frauds gave rise at the plenum to certain legitimate questions, especially as both Grossu and some other speakers had touched on a very significant point. For example, Grossu said in his report that the implementation of many directions of the CPSU CC regarding "the need for strengthening the struggle against sham efficiency and fake prosperity, which over a long period of time took place and continue to take place nowadays in Moldavia, were in an arbitrary manner, put off by both the central and local Party and state bodies, and economic and public organizations year after year." Deserving of note in this connection also is an assertion by the first vicechairman of the Moldavian Council of Ministers, E. Kalenik. Trying to justify himself somehow or other, as well as to explain the behavior of his colleagues, who also were members of the Central Committee Bureau in the Bodiul era, Kalenik said: "But not everything was as quite simple as described today. We believed in the infallibility of the volitional characteristics of a personality who enjoyed enormous support. Also then, there was an atmosphere of severity, exaction, seriousness." The "personality who enjoyed enormous support," that is to say, Ivan Bodiul, was pensioned off and lost his post as vice-chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and then, six months before the 14 October 1986 resolution of the CPSU Central Committee, he was removed also from the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (before the expiration of his term of office).254 Such obvious punishment explains the exposure of Bodiul at the Moldavian CP Central Committee plenum. It made it clear that it was absolutely right to call BodiuTs honesty into question, to emphasize that "everybody should receive his [just] deserts, and nobody should escape responsibility [speech by G. Shimanski, first secretary of Chimishlia District Party com¬ mittee]." It should be remembered that the speakers at the October plenum repeatedly emphasized that, as far back as 23 September 1981 (some months after Bodiul got the push from his post of first secretary of

70

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

the Moldavian Party organization), the PCC of the CPSU Central Committee revealed gross deceptions in the republic and adopted a decision "On Exaggerated Accounts of Fulfillment of the State Plan for Meat Purchases in the Moldavian SSR." But, although the PCC inflicted severe punishments upon the offenders (first of all upon G. Stepanov), the Moldavian CP Central Committee Bureau did not carried out its decision. This is why the first secretary of the Slobodzia District Party committee, I. Russu, said at the plenum: "We repeatedly heard, over a long period of time, that the Moldavian Party organization was above of criticism. . . . But, until now, nobody told the republic's activists why the Party organization was above criticism and who is to blame for all this, who forbade executives of the CPSU Central Committee to pursue a line based on principle, to criticize and correct the leadership of the republic." Such "dotting the i's and crossing the t's" was merely a trick worth two of Grossu's and Kalenik's. The wording resorted to by Grossu ( many directions of the CPSU CC . . . were, in an arbitrary manner, put off by both the central and by local Party and state bodies") and by Kalenik ("we believed in the infallibility ... of a personality who enjoyed enormous support") are euphemistic expressions for "Brezh¬ nev," while Russu overemphasized the point. But Grossu, Kalenik, Russu, and other participants in the October plenum, as well as the overwhelming majority of the presently most active members of the Moldavian Party organization, know very well that, until his dying day, Brezhnev was the "enormous support" for Bodiul, and that he pulled Bodiul through in the mid-1970s and beginning of the 1980s as he had at the beginning of the 1950s. Another most important point that should be stressed in connection with the October 1986 plenum is the following. Many members of the present Central Committee, up to and including its Bureau, were also in Bodiul s period top-level Party and governmental functionaries (S. Grossu, G. Eremei, E. Kalenik, I. Kalin, P. Voronin). Both in Grossu's report at the plenum and in the speeches of Eremei, Kalin, Kalenik, and Voronin can be observed an obvious tenseness in the relations among them and a certain attempt to justify themselves. Thus, Grossu mentioned his own "neglect of duty" and qualified his weaknesses as "flabbiness, inconsistency and liberalism with respect to delinquencies of certain high-level executives." However, he res¬ olutely criticized, for example, E. Kalenik. "I would like to remind him and all those who allude to circumstances, that the rules of the CPSU demand from each of us to combat ostentation, conceit, com¬ placency, to rebuff firmly all attempts at suppressing criticism, to

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

71

resist all actions injurious to the Party and the state, and to give information about them to Party bodies up to and including the CPSU CC. And never was anybody forbidden the use of this right.” According to the rules, every member of the CPSU indeed has the duties and the right to which he referred. But, as a matter of fact, Grossu himself did not fulfill these duties and did not use that right, either in the Bodiul period or in his own. This is so because these duties and the rights have nothing in common with Soviet realities. The latter, as well as the rules of the CPSU, reflect the Soviet Communist party's and its members' moral and conduct standards, which are, in outward form, very reasonable but quite different in essence. It is safe to say that, if the October 1986 plenum of the Moldavian CP CC had opened two months later, the above-mentioned question put by Russu and the euphemisms used by Grossu and Kalenik wouldn't have been necessary. It was only on 19 December in an article in Pravda, on the occasion of the his eightieth birthday that Brezhnev was, for the first time, openly accused of wrongdoings committed under his leadership.255 In illustration of the meaning of the word revoliutsioner ("revolu¬ tionary”), Ushakov's dictionary cites the following statement by Lenin: "To be a revolutionary means to break down all that is bad and obsolete in an all-out, relentless manner.” In this political and moral sense, neither Gorbachev nor anybody else among the current Soviet leaders are revolutionaries, although Gorbachev is trying his hardest to present himself as such a man. He was not at all a revolutionary in the past years when he extolled, with no less "enthusiasm" than others', Brezhnev's merits and leadership. One can say with certainty that, for example, when Gorbachev was first secretary of the Stavropol territorial committee of the CPSU, there were no fewer wrongdoings, including deceiving the state by exaggerated accounts, in the Stavropol territory than in others. Gorbachev is not at all a revolutionary in the Leninist sense even now. Deserving of note in this connection is the fact that Gorbachev (as well as all other present members of the CPSU CC) never criticized Soviet foreign policy under Brezhnev. Thus, they neither disapproved the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 nor Afghanistan in 1980. Quite the contrary. In October 1986, for example, the CPSU CC welcomed back several regiments that had been withdrawn from Afghanistan and described the Soviet soldiers as patriots, who had accomplished their "internationalist duty.”256 In his internal policy, Gorbachev tries to enhance the economic might of the USSR, to discipline the country's manpower, to modernize

72

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

industry, agriculture, and livestock raising, and to increase their effectiveness. But his endeavors to improve Soviet society are not at all accompanied by fundamental qualitative changes in the very essence of Soviet social system.257 This is why Gorbachev's attempts to improve Soviet society internally cannot have any success, and there are good reasons to believe that, in this respect, his efforts will end in failure. The afore-cited resolutions,258 as well as other ones adopted in OctoberNovember 1986, are certain signs of such a probability.259 Perhaps a most convincing argument in support of such a conclusion is the following. As has been said, Gorbachev and the members of the Politburo repeatedly emphasized that the CPSU "raised the question of 'the matter of truth,' of telling the truth both in life and in science."260 However, both Soviet communist leaders, and the specialists in the social sciences are not telling the truth. To show that they follow the traditions of the past periods, two examples will suffice. The first mainly concerns the communist leaders. The second, the specialists in the social sciences. Thus, article 100 of the 1977 constitution of the USSR determines which bodies are competent to nominate candidates for election to the Soviet of people's deputies in such terms:

The following shall have the right to nominate candidates: branches and organizations of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, trade unions, and the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, cooperatives and other public organizations, work collectives, and meetings of ser¬ vicemen in their military units. Citizens of the USSR and public organizations are guaranteed the right to free and all-around discussion of the political and personal qualities and competence of candidates, and the right to campaign for them at meetings, in the press, and on television and radio.

In reality, however, nomination of candidates is exclusively in the hands of the branches and organizations of the CPSU or, rather, of those who head them. As a matter of not a little significance in the quesiton under examination, for example, the Moldavian SSR Pro¬ curator I. Ceban's speech at the October 1986 plenum of the CP Central Committee of that republic should be considered. Ceban complained about the behavior of the first secretary of the Chimishlia District Party committee who, in taking revenge on the district procurator for the revelation of serious cases of disobeying the law, "did not nominate him as candidate for election either to the district Party committee, or to the Soviet of the district people's deputies.261

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

73

Such incidents and ones similar, Ceban said, took place in other districts too.262 Thus, such incidents are of frequent occurrence. They show, therefore, that Soviet realities are not at all in harmony with the constitution of the USSR whose article 168 states: "The agencies of the procurator's office exercise their power independently of any local bodies whatsoever, and are subordinate solely to the procuratorgeneral of the USSR." As an example, there was the selection of deputies from the Moldavian SSR to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for which new elections were organized by the respective constituents. On 10 October 1986, the newspaper Sovetskaia Moldavia published information from the republic press agency, ATEM, entitled "People's Candidate." The next day, 11 October 1986, followed another ATEM item on the same issue, entitled this time "Unanimous Support."263 The hasty second report speaks for itself on the rottenness of the Soviet electoral system, especially as the candidate, Y. A. Sklyarov, had not lived, is not living today, and, most probably, will not live for some time in the future in Soviet Moldavia. It is safe to say also that the participants in the preelection meetings at which Sklyarov, head of the CPSU Propaganda Department, was been proposed as candidate for the Union Soviet had never seen him and that the overwhelming majority had even never heard of him. That applies equally to "the representatives of the public organizations and work collectives of Rybnitsa, Rexina, Kamenka, Orhei and Chernenko districts "who gathered at the electoral meeting of the Rybnitsa constituency no. 703 and "unanimously supported the proposal to nominate Y. A. Sklyarov" the next day.264 All these show that Gorbachev and his fellow at the head of the CPSU continue the obfuscatory tradition of their predecessors and describe Soviet elections as democratic and the candidates for election as "people's candidates." It should be remembered that Brezhnev declared at the TwentyFifth Congress of the CPSU that the way of life of Soviet Communists "is the way of the truth,"265 and then, at the Twenty-Sixth Congress, he appealed to Soviet art workers "to assert the truth of life."266 True, on 4 December 1986, at a conference of specialists in the social sciences held in Kishinev, the secretary of the Moldavian CP CC, N. Bondarchuk, stated that "deviations from historical truth, embellish¬ ment of reality, smoothing [rough spots] are inherent even in the Outline of the History of the Moldavian Communist Party."267 Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Outline was headed by I. Kalin (at that time, secretary of the CC). The Outline had been published in 1981 under the auspices of the Institute of Party History, and there can

74

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

be no doubt that all participants at the conference, including first secretary of the CC. S. Grossu, knew very well that criticism of the faults of this work was not only belated but hypocritical. All partic¬ ipants, without exception, undoubtedly knew that no less hypocritical was a statement made at the conference: "We cannot put up with such a situation where the student hears one thing in lectures, but in real life sees something different."268 In the Brezhnev period, Soviet specialists in the social sciences had rebuked all who wrote that "deviations from historical truth and embellishment of reality" permeated their works. Today, under Gor¬ bachev, they obey the same rules, and drastically rebuke all those who argue, for example, that Soviet elections are, in fact, a mystification that has nothing in common with the people's will. Such mystifications permeate many essential spheres of Soviet life all over the country, including the RSFSR. But they are most outrageous in the Union non-Russian republics, which, according to both the constitution of the USSR and their own constitutions, are sovereign states. Because social motives of discontent are inherent both in the RSFSR and in the Union non-Russian republics; but in the latter the social motives are deepened by the national ones. ATEM wrote in its report on the above-mentioned conference of specialists in the social sciences that, in some educational institutions of the republic, class appreciation of the historical past of the Moldavian people is not sufficiently used and the importance of the fraternal Soviet peoples in the carrying out the socioeconomic transformations in Soviet Moldavia in the years of the Soviet regime is not emphasized enough, and that the attention of the participants was directed to the need to use actively "the favorable conditions of the republic, which include many nationalities, in order to intensify the patriotic and internationalist education of the students." ATEM's report underlined also that "a certain segment (otdel'naia chastr) of students manifest political shortsightedness and national narrow-mindedness, make im¬ mature assertions," and that such phenomena "arise from the fact that young people are in ignorance of Leninist theories of nations and national relations, of the republic's history, and of problems related to the formation of the Moldavian statehood."269 Thus, although there exist in the educational institutions of such a small republic as the Moldavian SSR thirty-four departments of the social sciences with a large staff of 425 teachers, its young people are in ignorance of both the republic's history and of the formation of Moldavian statehood, as well as of Leninist theories of nations and national relations.270 Whoever is familiar with the euphemistic

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

75

language of Soviet documents knows what is the real meaning of such statements: first, that a "certain segment" of the republic's students means the Moldavian students. Second, this segment is not in ignorance of the factors cited but do not believe in them. The Moldavian students and their teachers of Moldavian extraction (even those of the latter who act in obedience to the rules from Moscow) know very well that they are part and parcel of the Romanian people. This is why at the conference the need to enforce control on the admitted candidates for postgraduate studies was accentuated, especially for the training of a reserve of scientists who will succeed the heads of departments in due course. Third, the "conditions of the republic, which includes many na¬ tionalities" are, in fact, not at all favorable to the Soviet "patriotic and internationalist education of the students." Because the multi¬ national character of the Union non-Russian Soviet republics results not from a natural demographic evolution, but from a systematically accelerated process of their transformation into ordinary administrativeeconomic territories of the USSR, the emphasis at the conference that "it is necessary to achieve a profound understanding by students of the role of Russian ... as a means of strengthening the international unity of Soviet people" is most significant in this respect.271

Notes, Chapter 1 1. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973), p. 21. 2. Ibid., pp. 23, 57. 3. Ibid., p. 21. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 23. 6. P. Fedoseev, Iu. Volkov, E. Gel'bukh, V. Zevin, A. Krakhmalev, M. Kulichenko, eds., Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie o sotsializme i sovremennost' (Moscow, 1975), p. 334. (Hereinafter: Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie). 7. P. Rogachev, M. Sverdlin, "Patriotizm i natsia," in Sotsializm i natsia (Moscow, 1975), p. 182. 8. Ibid., p. 180. 9. Programma kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, pp. 21, 23. 10. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 44. 13. Dokumenty mezhdunarodnogo soveshchania kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii (Moscow, 1969), p. 22 (Fedosiev, p. 335). 14. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, loc. cit.

76

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program 15. Istoria kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 2nd ed. (Moscow,

1973), p. 511. 16. V. Dolgin, V edinstve-sila sodruzhestva sotsialisticheskikh stran (Moscow, 1977) , p. 35. 17. Mirovaia sistema sotsializma: ekonomicheskie i politicheskie aspekty edinstva (Moscow, 1975), p. 100. 18. B. Pugachev, Sblizhenie stran sotsializma. Voprosy teorii i praktiki (Moscow, 1981), p. 185. 19. Ibid. 20. K. Zarodov, Sotsializm, mir, revolutsia (Moscow, 1977), p. 146. 21. KPSS v rezoliutsiakh i resheniakh s'ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov Tsk (Moscow, 1971), tom 7, p. 210. 22. B. Pugachev, op. cit., p. 177. 23. Ibid., pp. 185, 193. 24. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, pp. 322-323, 334-335. 25. A. Doronchenkov, Internatsional'noe i natsional’noe v mirovoi sotsialisticheskoi sisteme (Kiev, 1975), p. 11. 26. B. Pugachev, op. cit., pp. 42-43. 27. Ibid., p. 22. 28. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, p. 334. 29. Ibid. 30. B. Pugachev, op. cit., p. 25. 31. V. Shevtsov, The State and Nations in the USSR (Moscow, 1982), p. 13. 32. V. Pugachev, op. cit., p. 15. 33. Ibid., p. 46. 34. V. Shevtsov, op. cit., pp. 12-13. 35. See Chapter 7. 36. B. Pugachev, op. cit., pp. 15, 25, 37, 46; Markisistsko-leninskoe uchenie, p. 334. 37. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, pp. 10-11. 38. I. Dudinskii, Sotsialisticheskoe sodruzhestvo: osnovnye tendentsii razvitia (Moscow, 1976), p. 59. 39. L. Metelitsa, Rastsvet i sblizhenie sotsialisticheskikh natsii (Moscow, 1978) , p. 42. 40. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, p. 334. 41. Iu. Shiriaev, "Sotsialisticheskii internatsionalizm v ekonomicheskikh otnosheniakh bratskikh stran na sovremennom etape," in Sotsializm i natsia; Materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii "Razvitie i internatsional'noe sotrudnichestvo sotsialisticheskikh natsii" (Moscow, 1975), p. 376. (hereinafter: Sotsialism i natsia). 42. E. Borshy, "National'nye i internatsional'nye interesy v otnosheniakh mezhdu sotsialisticheskimi stranami," Sotsializm i natsia, p. 352. 43. H. Noibert, "O sootnoshenii natsional'nogo i internatsional'nogo v sotsialisticheskom sodruzhestve gosudarstv," Sotializm i natsia, p. 354. 44. Pravda, 22 July 1974.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

77

45. E. Bagramov, "Marksistsko-leninskaia teoria natsionul'nykh otnoshenii i sovremennaia ideologicheskaia bor'ba, Sotsializm i natsia, p. 59. 46. R. Gradovskii, “Vospitanie trudiashchia mass v dukhe internatsionalizma," Sotsializm i natsia, p. 465. 47. I. Erhan, President Nicolae Ceau§escus Contributions to the Creative Development of the Theory and Practice of Socialist Construction. Romanian Books, no. 2 (1985), p. 2. 48. S. Burcan, Statul national §z politica mondiala. (Cluj-Napoca, 1985). 49. Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie, p. 324. 50. N. Ceau§escu, “Romania pe drumul desavirsirii constructiei socialiste," Rapoarte, cuvintari, articole (Bucharest, 1968), pp. 360, 407. 51. C. Visan, “Adevarul invinge," Cintarea Romaneie, no. 8 (1983), p. 5. 52. Ibid. 53. M. Musat, F. Tanasescu, “Stravechea Dacie—pamant romanesc generos, Anale de istorie, vol. XXVIII, no. 4 (1982), pp. 62, 64, 68. 54. I. Ceausescu, “Transilvania de la daci la 1918. Doua milenii de lupta si munca pentru mentinerea §i afirmarea fiintei si demnitatii nationale, Anale de istorie, vol. XXIV, no. 6 (1978), p. 72. 55. N. Corlateanu, S. Brysiakin, A. Mosanu, “Novyi trud po istorii Moldavii. K vykhodu v svet odnotomnogo izdania Tstoria Moldavskoi SSR,'" Sovetskaia Moldavia, 5 February 1983. 56. See M. Bruchis, Rossia, Rumynia i Bessarabia. 1812-1918-1924-1940 (Jerusalem, 1979). 57. N. Corlateanu, “Moldavskii iazyk," Sovetskaia Moldavia. Kratkaia Entsiklopedia (Kishinev, 1982), pp. 400-401. 58. See K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Band 37 (Berlin, 1967), S. 3. 59. A. Russo, Opere alese (Kishinev, 1955), p. 312. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., pp. 112-114, 302-303. 62. O. Vladimirov, “Vedushchii faktor mirovogo revoliutsionnogo protsessa," Pravda, 21 June 1985. 63. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, p. 120. 64. P. Rogachev, M. Sverdlin, “Patriotizm i natsia," Sotsializm i natsia (Moscow, 1975), pp. 177, 179. 65. Ibid., p. 182. 66. K. Gusev, “Ob istoricheskom razvitii natsional'noi i obshchenatsional'noi gordosti sovetskikh liudei, Sotsializm i natsia, pp. 469-470. 67. O. Bogomolov, “Mnogoobrazie form sotrudnichestva i vzaimopomoshchi sotsialisticheskikh stran—vazhneishee uslovie uprochenia mirovogo sotsializma," Sotsializm i natsia, p. 88. 68. P. Rogachev, M. Sverdlin, “Patriotizm novoi istoricheskoi obshchnosti liudei—sovetskogo naroda," Aktual'nye voprosy razvitia natsional'nykh otnosh¬ enii v svete reshenii XXIV s'ezda CPSS. Materialy k nauchnoi konferentsii ‘Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR' (Moscow, 1972), p. 15. 69. Ibid., Patriotism i natsia, p. 181.

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

78

70. V. Shevtsov, op. cit., p. 115. 71. A. Mordvinov, "Aktual'nye problemy razvitia mezhnatsional'nych otnoshenii v SSSR," Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (1971), p. 26. 72. Iu. Semenov, "Mesto sovetskogo naroda sredi istoricheskikh obshchnostei liudei," Narody Azii i Afriki, no. 5 (1973), p. 55. 73. A. Dashdamirov, Sovetskii narod. Nekotorye filosofsko-sotsiologicheskie problemy edinstva novoi istoricheskoi obshchnosti (Baku, 1977), p. 17. 74. A. Talbiev, "Dve tendentsii v natsional'nykh otnosheniakh pri sotsializme," Aktual'nye voprosy razvitia natsional'nych otnoshenii. . . . , p. 42. 75. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR. Problemy teorii i metodologii (Moscow, 1981). 76. Ibid. "Politika KPSS v oblasti natsional'nykh otnoshenii v usloviakh razvitogo sotsializma,'' Nauchnyi kommunizm, no. 2 (1976), p. 56. 77. Ibid., Natsia i sotsial'nyi progress (Moscow, 1983), p. 189. 78. M. Dzunusov, "Natsional'nye otnoshenia v razvitom sotsialisticheskom obshchestve," Aktual'nye problemy razvitia natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR (Makhachkala, 1973), p. 48. 79. N. Zaitsev, "K voprosu ob opredelenii poniatia-sovetskii narod kak novaia istoricheskaia-obshchnost' liudei, Aktual'nye problemy stroitel'stva sot¬ sializma i kommunizma, Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, no. 493 (Tashkent, 1976), p. 52. 80. S. Kaltakhchian, "Edinstvo, rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii-zakonomernost' sotsializma," Sotsializm i natsia, p. 267. 81. V. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1948), p. 325. 82. Ibid., p. 324. 83. G. Zimanas, "Sblizhenie sotsialisticheskikh natsii," Aktual'nye voprosy razvitia natsional'nykh otnoshenii. . . . , p. 23. 84. A. Agaev, "Nekotorye aktual'nye problemy teorii sotsialisticheskoi narodnosti," Sotsializm i natsia, p. 243. 85. M. Kulichenko, "Aktual'nye problemy marksistsko-leniniskogo uchenia o natsiakh i natsional'nykh otnosheniakh v usloviakh sotsializma," Sotsializm i natsia, pp. 80-81. 86. V. Lenin, Collected Works, vol., 23, p. 42 (footnote). 87. Ibid., p. 68. 88. V. Ten, Vernost' internatsionalizmu—osnova leninskoi natsional'noi politiki partii," Aktual'nye problemy stroitel'stva sotsializma i kommunizma.

. . . , p. 41. 89. I. Tsamerian, Sovetskoe mnogonatsional'noe gosudarstvo-orudie stroitel'stva kommunizma," Aktual'nye problemy razvitia natsional’nykh otnoshenii v SSSR, p. 71. 90. M. Isayev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions (Moscow, 1977), p. 36. 91. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no iazykovoi problemy v SSSR, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1982), p. 49. 92. V. Kozlov, NatsionaTnosti SSSR. Etnodemograficheskii obzor, (Moscow, 1982), p. 218.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

79

93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., p. 291. 95. Iu. Bromlei et ah, Present-Day Ethnic Processes in the USSR (Moscow 1982), p. 245. 96. Ibid., p. 246. 97. Naselenie SSSR, pp. 23, 28. 98. Ibid., p. 23. 99. Ibid., p. 28. 100. ibid., pp. 28-30. 101. Ibid. 102. Iu. Bromlei, Ocherki teorii etnosa (Moscow, 1983), p. 378. 103. V. Kozlov, op. cit., p. 234. 104. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR 183-184. ' ‘ 105. Ibid., p. 176.

dd

106. See A. Efendiev, “Ob osnovnykh printsipakh perevoda uchebnoi literatury s russkogo na azerbaidzhanskii iazyk"; R. Sulaimankulov, “O trudnostiakh perevoda uchebnoi literatury po fiziko-matematicheskim naukam s russkogo na kirgizskii iazyk"; A. Sytdykov, "O putiakh obespechenia dostupnosti perevoda uchebnoi literatury; A. Urazaev, “Iz opyta perevoda uchebnoi literatury po istorii i geografii s russkogo na uzbekskii iazyk," in Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania po perevodu literatury s russkogo na iazyki narodov Sredenei Azii, Kazakhstana i Azerbaidzhana (Alma-Ata, 1960), pp. 297357; M. Bruchis, Cuvant despre traduceri (Kishinev, 1968), pp. 129-160. 107. K. Khanazarov, loc. cit. 108. Ibid., p. 178. 109. V. Avronin, “Dvuiazychie i shkola," in R Azimov, Iu. Desheriev, F. Filin, eds., Problemy dvuiazych'ia i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), p. 56. 110. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973) p. 115. 111. V. Kozlov, op. cit., p. 231. 112. faktory p. 72. 113. 114. 115. 116.

M. Guboglo, Sovremennye etnoiazykovye protsessy v SSSR. Osnovnye i tendentsii razvitia natsionalno-russkogo dvuiazychia (Moscow, 1984)

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

Sovetskaia Kirgizia, 13 January 1979; see: M. Guboglo, op. cit., p. 141. Iu. Bromlei et ah, Present-Day Ethnic Processes. . . . , p. 139, M. Guboglo, op. cit., p. 203. Ibid., pp. 273, 277. Iu. Bromlei et ah, op. cit., p. 246.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 70. pp. 72, 260. pp. 261, 276. pp. 150-151.

122. N. Mumzhy, “O nekotorykh priemakh ispolzuemykh burzhuaznoi propagandoi dlia fahsifikatsii sotsialisticheskoi deistvitehnosti v Moldavii," Uspekhi Sovetskoi Moldavii i mify antikommunizma (Kishinev, 1976), p. 24.

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123. Ibid. 124. N. Bruchis, "Ob osveshchenii problem obshchestvenno-politicheskogo perevoda v respublikanskoi pechati,” Voprosy istorii kompartii Moldavii, tom 1 (Kishinev, 1973), p. 276. 125. See M. Ignat, "Un pas de la mediocritate" Moldova socialista, 23 September 1971; L. Busuioc, "Culoarea preponderenta cenusiul," Cultura, 17 July 1971. 126. M. Bruchis, Cuvant despre traduceri (Kishinev, 1968), pp. 133-160. 127. M. Isaev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions (Moscow, 1977), p. 372. 128. Ibid., p. 373. 129. Ibid. 130. F.-R. McKenna, Language Policy and the Development of Elites in Soviet Uzbekistan (paper presented at the Second World Congress For Soviet and East European Studies: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, 30.9-4.10, 1980), p. 16. 131. Ibid., p. 4. 132. P.-B. Henze. "The Significance of Increasing Billingualism among Soviet Muslims," in Y. Ro'i, The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy (London, 1984), p. 119. 133. Ibid., pp. 122, 127. 134. Ibid., pp. 117-118. 135. See Voprosy terminologii. Materialy vsesoiuznogo terminologicheskogo soveshchania (Moscow, 1961); Voprosy razvitia literaturnykh iazykov narodov SSSR (Alma-Ata, 1964); Vzaimiodeistvie i vzaimoobogashchenie iazykov narodov SSSR (Moscow, 1969); Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), etc. 136. See M. Guboglo, op. cit„ p. 279. 137. Ibid., Razvitie dvuiazychia v Moldavskoi SSR (Kishinev, 1979), pp. 6465. 138. Ibid., p. 86. 139. Ibid., p. 43. 140. D. Tanasoglu, "Gagauza, limba. . . . ," Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 2 (Kishinev, 1971), p. 231. 141. M. Guboglo, op. cit., p. 64. 142. Ibid., p. 66. 143. Ibid. 144. M. Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People: A Study of the Nationalities Policy of the Communist Party in Soviet Moldavia (New York, 1984), pp. 3637. 145. Ibid., pp. 7-14. 146. See Naselenie SSSR. Po dennym vsesoiuznoi perepisi naselenia 1979 goda (Moscow, 1980), p. 25; Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 2 (Kishinev, 1971), p. 230. 147. Pravda, 27 May 1983.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

148. M. Guboglo, Sovremennye etnoiazykovye protsessy v SSSR. 123.

81

p

149. Pravda, 27 February 1986. 150. Naselenie SSSR, p. 24. 151. F. Filin et al., eds., lazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), pp. 163-164. 152. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR, p. 215. 153. Pravda, 5 March 1986. 154. G. Gamzatov, "Voprosy dvuiazychia v Dagestane," Izvestia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seria Literatury i iazyka, tom 42, no. 3 (1983), p. 247. 155. Ibid., p. 248. 156. Pravda, 26 February 1986. 157. M. Dzunusov, "Natsionali'nye otnoshenia v razvitom sotsialisticheskom obshchestve," M. Abdullayev, A. Aliev, M. Dzunusov, eds., Aktual'nye problemy razvitia natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR, (Makhachkala, 1973), p.

48. 158. A. Agaev, "Funktsia iazyka kak etnicheskogo priznaka," lazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), p. 127. 159. Naselenie SSSR, p. 23. 160. Ibid. 161. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR, 2nd ed„ p. 172. 162. A. Agaev, art. cit., pp. 125-126. 163. Pravda, 7 March 1986. 164. M. Isayev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions (Moscow, 1977), pp. 21, 23. 165. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 59. 166. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Priniata XXII s'ezdom CPSS, p. 21. 167. P. Fedoseev et al., Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie o sotsializme i sovremennosti, (Moscow, 1975), p. 303. 168. Pravda, 25, February 1976. 169. M. Dzunusov, M. Skibitskii, I. Tsameryan, eds.. The Theory and Practice of Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow, 1976), p. 271. 170. Pravda, 24 February 1981. 171. A. Butenko, Yu. Novopashin, B. Pugachev, eds., Consolidation of Socialist Countries' Unity. Problems of Theory (Moscow, 1981), p. 177. 172. S. Anghelov et al., eds., Sotsialisticheskii internatsionalizm. Teoria i praktika mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii novogo tipa (Moscow, 1979). 173. S. Anghelov et al., eds.. Socialist Internationalism. Theory and Practice of International Relations of a New Type (Moscow, 1982), p. 203. 174. "Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Novaia redaktsia. Priniataia XXVII s'ezdom KPSS," Pravda, 7 March 1986. 175. Pravda, 26 February 1986. 176. Pravda, 7 March 1986.

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82

177. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Priniata XXII s'ezdom KPSS, (Moscow, 1973), p. 19. 178. Pravda, 7 March 1986. 179. Ibid. 180. Pravda, 24 February 1981. 181. Pravda, 7 March 1986. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 184. Ibid., 26 February 1986. 185. 186. 187. 188.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 28 February 1986. Ibid., 1 March 1986.

189. 190. 191. 192.

Ibid. Ibid., 2 March 1986. Ibid., 1 March 1986. Ibid., 26 February 1986.

193. 194. 195. 196.

Ibid. Ibid., 1 March 1986. Ibid., 2 March 1986. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 3 August 1986.

197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., 28 January 1986. 199. Igor Gamaiunov, "Opavshie iabloki. Chto zastavilo uvazhaemykh v proshlom liudei prestupit' zakon?" Literaturnaya Gazeta, 9 October 1985. 200. Ibid. 201. Ibid. 202. "Constitution [Fundamental Law] of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Article 6, (Moscow, 1977), p. 4. 203. For large party circles in Soviet Moldavia it was an open secret that the main factor of Bodiul's promotion was the intimacy of his pretty wife Claudia with Brezhnev. 204. Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 1 (Kishinev, 1970), p. 453. 205. Ibid., vol. 7 (1977), p. 414. 206. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 20 April 1986. 207. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovietskogo Soiuza, (Moscow, 1973), p. 121. 208. Scintea, 23 May 1956. 209. G. Ionescu, Communism in Romania. 1944-1961 (London, New York, Toronto, 1964), p. 263. 210. Pravda, 26 February 1981. 211. Ibid. 212. Ibid., 27 February 1986. 213. Ibid. 214. Ibid., 29 February 1976.

Program of the Communist Party, 1961-1986

83

215. Ibid., 2 March 1976. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221.

Pravda, 2 October 1986. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

222. Moscow TV, Channel 1, 10 November 1986. 223. See A. Belikov, V. Zhilyakov, N. Styzhkin, “Sovet partii c narodom. Vstrechi M. S. Gorbacheva s trudiashchimisia Krasnodarskogo i Stavropol skogo kraya," Pravda, 20 September 1986. 224. Pravda, 21 September 1986. 225. Ibid. 226. Ibid. 227. Ibid,, 19 September 1986. 228. Ibid., 21 September 1986. 229. New Times, no. 42, 27 October 1986, p. 30. 230. 231. 232. 233.

Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, p. 120. V. Loginov, "Pri svete pravdy," Pravda, 24 October 1986. Ibid. Ibid.

234. Pravda, 2 March 1986. 235. V. Smirnov, "Vremia strogogo partiinogo sprosa," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 9 September 1986. 236. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 8 June 1986. 237. E. Ligachev, "Kursom oktiabria, v dukhe revoliutsionnogo tvorchestva," Pravda, 7 November 1986. 238. Ibid. 239. Pravda, 8 November 1986. 240. Pravda, 241. 242. 243. 244.

E. Shevardnadze, speech at the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU, 26 February 1981. Pravda, 7 November 1986. E. Ligachev, "Kursom oktiabria. . . ." Pravda, 21 September 1986. Ibid.

245. Ibid., 26 February 1986. 246. Iu. Bromlei, E. Bagramov, M. Guboglo, M. Kulichenko, eds., Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR v svete reshenii XXVI s'ezda CPSS (Moscow, 1982), p. 345. 247. Ibid. 248. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 7 March 1979. 249. Ibid., 8 June 1986. 250. Ibid., 24 October 1986. 251. Ibid. 252. Ibid., 25 October 1986.

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

84

253. Ibid. 254. Ibid., 20 April 1986. 255. Pravda, 19 December 1986. 256. Ibid., 14 October 1986. 257. Both Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo repeatedly emphasized this point. See, for example, E. Ligachev, "Kursom oktiabria. 258. The resolution of the CPSU CC on the Moldavian CP CC, the Kirovograd Regional Committee of the Ukrainian CP, and the USSR Ministry of Moto-car, that of the Communist Party Central Committee of Turkmenistan on the Tashauz Regional Party Committee. 259. See "V komitete partiinogo kontrolia pri Ts.K. KPSS," Izvestia, 25 October 196; "V Politbiuro Ts. K. KPSS," Pravda, 21 November 1986. 260. Pravda, 2 October 1986. 261. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 25 October 1986. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. cember 268. 269. 270.

Ibid. Ibid., 10 and 11 October 1986. Ibid., 11 October 1986. Pravda, 25 February 1976. Ibid., 24 February 1981. "Vysokoe prizvanie obshchestvovedov," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 5 De¬ 1986. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

2 The Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Its Implications

In Soviet legal, historical, sociopolitical, and other literature, the term (Soviet) state is understood, as a rule, not as an individual union or autonomous republic, but as the country in its entirety, and it serves as a contextual synonym of such terms as USSR, Soviet Union, Soviet land. However, Soviet literature that considers the juridical status of union republics and their proclaimed right to self-determination and even secession from the USSR uses the term state, as, for example, in the constitution of the RSFSR, to define their legal status within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It follows from the above that the term (Soviet) state is used in the USSR both in a wider sense as a synonym for the country as a whole, and in a narrow sense as a synonym for an administrativeterritorial formation having the status of a Union national republic. However, aside from these instances, it can be said that in Soviet scholarly and sociopolitical works, in periodicals, and in other pub¬ lications, the term state is used exclusively in the wider sense. For example, in the constitution of the RSFSR, the largest Union republic of the USSR in territory, population, and economic potential, the term (Soviet) state occurs in the narrower sense three times only: in the first article, which says that the RSFSR “is a socialist state of the whole people"; in article 68, which states that it is "a sovereign Soviet socialist state"; and in article 78, which records that each of the autonomous republics of the RSFSR "is a Soviet socialist state." On the other hand, the RSFSR constitution uses the term in its wider sense forty times. For example, "the state helps enhance the social homogeneity . . . and the all-round development, drawing together all the nations and nationalities ... of the USSR" (article 19); or. 85

86

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

“when abroad, citizens of the RSFSR enjoy the protection and assistance of the Soviet state" (article 31). The third occurrence of the term state in its narrow sense in the constitution of the RSFSR clarifies the assertion that, in this sense, it serves in the Soviet vocabulary merely to designate property. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic encompasses sixteen of the autonomous republics now existing in the USSR; these include the Bashkir Autonomous SSR and the Tatar Autonomous SSR. The territory of the Bashkir ASSR (143,600 square kilometers) is more than quadruple the size of the territory of, for example, the Moldavian SSR (33,800 square kilometers), and the territory of the Tatar ASSR (68,000 square kilometers) is more than twice that of Moldavia. Yet, both the Bashkir and Tatar autonomous republics are nearly equal to Moldavia in population. To preserve the appearance that the RSFSR, according to its name, is a federated state formation, the article in its constitution considering the autonomous republics' status says that each such republic “is a Soviet socialist state" (article 78). However, article 82 of the constitution of the USSR, which legalizes the status of autonomous republics, states: “An autonomous republic is a constituent part of a Union republic.1 As much as the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union, as rep¬ resented by its highest bodies of state authority and administration, shall cover “control over observance of the constitution of the USSR, “ensurance of conformity of the constitutions of Union republics to the constitution of the USSR," and “in the event of a discrepancy between a Union republic law and an all-Union law, the law of the USSR shall prevail," the autonomous republics are not states.2 Neither is the Union republic properly a state, notwithstanding the fact that the constitution of the USSR solemnly proclaims that “a Union republic is a sovereign Soviet socialist state" (article 76), and that “each Union republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR" (article 72). For the article stating that “the sovereign rights of Union republics shall be safeguarded by the USSR" (article 81) emasculates the seventy-second article cited above. Not having in its possession such an indispensable attribute of a sovereign state as its own armed forces, each Union republic is, naturally, unable to defend its “sovereign" rights. Furthermore, because the leadership of the armed forces of the USSR and the right to decide on issues of war and peace are reserved for the Kremlin rulers, the Union republics in fact do not possess the ability to “freely to secede from the USSR." Any attempt by a Union republic to secede can

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

87

always be nipped in the bud, for the ostensibly legitimate reason that it would be contrary to interests of "all-Union importance." That the Union republics (like the autonomous republics) are not properly states can also be seen from their own constitutions. An analysis of the constitution of the RSFSR confirms this point. Thus, for example, article 68 states: "The RSFSR concedes to the USSR, as represented by its highest bodies of state authority and administration, the right defined by article 73 of the constitution of the USSR." However, the rights enumerated in all of the twelve points of article 73, which "the RSFSR concedes to the USSR," i.e., transfers them to the exclusive jurisdiction of the USSR, are attributes not only of sovereignty in general, but also of statehood in particular. Thus, the jurisdiction of the USSR, represented by its highest bodies of state authority and administration, covers, for example, the determination of the state boundaries of the USSR and approval of changes in the boundaries between Union republics, issues of war and peace, direction of the armed forces, establishment of the general procedure for and coordinatioin of the relations of Union republics with other states and with international organizations, foreign trde, ensurance of con¬ formity of the constitutions of Union republics to the constitution of the USSR, and settlement of other matters of all-Union importance. All points of article 73, without exception, prove that Union republics are not states, especially not sovereign states. Its second and twelfth points reveal, furthermore, that the preceding article 72, which states that "each Union republic shall retain the right to secede freely from the USSR," is merely a front to create an appearance that Union republics are sovereign states. First, the issue of secession by any Union republic has an "all-Union importance;" second, the change in the state boundaries of the USSR resulting from any such secession is subject to the decision not of any of the Union republics, but of "highest bodies of state authority" of the USSR. Therefore, the efforts by obedient Soviet authors to create the imprssion that the right of a Union republic to secede from the USSR "can be effected on one condition only: that the people of the republic freely express their will to do so," that "for the realization of this right, no assent by highest bodies of authority of the USSR or of other Union republics is required," and that this right "cannot be abolished, modified or limited," are entirely unfounded.3 It is thus evident that the spirit of the constitution of the RSFSR is an example that Union republics are not properly states. But the RSFSR constitution also proves a different point. It demonstrates that the RSFSR is the dominant republic in the USSR both economically

SS

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

and politically, and that the Russian people are dominant not only among the peoples and nationalities of the RSFSR, but in the USSR as a whole. The constitutions of all of the Union republics literally repeat the sixth article of the constitution of the USSR, which states: The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist party of the Soviet Union. . . .' Since this is the only article in Soviet constitutions that legalizes the status of the Communist party in Soviet society and state, its importance with regard to non-Russian Union republics is that the central committees of Communist parties of non-Russian national republics possess equal rights (established in March 1919 by the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist party) with the regional committees of the Party; they are therefore fully subordinated to the Central Committee of the CPSU.4 Opposing the use in historical party literature of the term national detachments of the Party,5 a Soviet author points out, on the one hand, that "unlike the . . . union state as a federation of national states, the CPSU is not a federation of autonomous organizations," that the CPSU "is international, as well in its essence and composition, as in the organizational principles of its structure," that it "is built up not on a national-territorial basis, but on a territorial-production basis."6 On the other hand, he stresses that "the republican organizations of the CPSU ... as component detachments of a multinational CPSU ... are not national, but international organizations ... of Lenin's party," and that they "organize, within the republic ... the imple¬ mentation of directives of the Central Committee of the CPSU."7 Those statements, based on the CPSU rules, prove that the party organizations of Union republics and their central committees, whose role, according to the rules, is "to organize within the republic the implementation of the directives of the CPSU Central Committee, are first and foremost, executors of the will of the Kremlin rulers and not of the population of the respective republic. When those rulers conclude that their henchman at the head of a republic party orga¬ nization fails to implement the directives of he CPSU Central Com¬ mittee, condones manifestations of localism, or worse, encourages such tendencies, the Kremlin rulers remove him without awaiting a congress of the republic party organization. They send to the republic their new henchman or they appoint one of the local party activists who, in their opinion, will more zealously implement their directives.

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

89

Thus, although each non-Russian Union republic has its own central committee of the Communist party organization, the republic party organization and its central committee do not possess the prerogatives of institutions of sovereign states. The use of the term "country” in the constitutions of all of the Union republics and in Soviet sociopolitical and other literature, exclusively as a synonym of the USSR as a whole, confirms all that has been said above about the use of the term "state." "Country" in Soviet terminology is not synonymous with Union or autonomous republic. Then a seeming paradox arises. The largest Union republic, the RSFSR, does not possess its own republic party organization, or a central committee of such an organization. Several reasons exist for such "discrimination," the foremost of which is by no means the need to avoid duplicating the functions of the Communist party of the RSFSR and its central committee (if they existed) by the CPSU and its central committee. Duplicating of functions occurs when a Supreme Soviet of the USSR, a Council of Ministers of the USSR, and ministries of the USSR exist side by side with a Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, a Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, and ministries of the RSFSR. The principal reason is, in all probability, that the Kremlin rulers consider it dangerous for themselves to allow the existence of such parallel party institutions in the RSFSR. If there existed in the RSFSR (as in all other Union republics) a republican party organization with its own central committee, this communist organization could present a serious potential threat to the leaders of the CPSU. Persons installed by the CPSU at the head of such a local organization could, for various reasons, break obedience in certain circumstance and adopt, in their republic party central committee, resolutions contrary to the will of their Kremlin bosses. Such an eventuality could prove fatal to the Kremlin rulers. To the republic party organization, built on the territorial-production prin¬ ciple, would belong, according to party rules, the leaders of higher ruling bodies of the USSR functioning in the territory of RSFSR, and the resolutions of a central committee of the RSFSR could be rep¬ resented also as expressing the will of those leaders. The dominant position of the Russian people in the USSR is manifested, for example, by the fact that they have begun to grow steadily and, even in some Union republics, to exceed the peoples by whose names the republics are called. According to the 1979 census, the Russians comprised 40.8 percent of the population of Kazakh SSR (Kazakhs 36.0 percent), 21.1 percent of the Ukrainian

90

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

SSR (Ukrainians 73.6 percent), 32.8 percent of the Latvian SSR (Latvians 53.0 percent), 27.9 percent of the Estonian SSR (Estonians 64.7 percent), and 25.9 percent of the Kirghiz SSR (Kirghizes 47.9 percent).8 Even in those Soviet republics in which Russians do not yet constitute a numerically important proportion of the population (although, in most of them, the trend is an increase both in the proportion and in absolute numbers), they occupy key positions and exert a decisive influence on their continuing conversion from national-political into mere territorial-administrative formations.9 The final goal of the national policies of the CPSU, as shown by party documents, is the merging of the peoples of the USSR into one Soviet nation. In his address on the sixtieth anniversary of the USSR, Iu. Andropov mentioned this issue: "Our final goal is obvious. It is, in V. I. Lenin's words, not only a convergence of nations, but also their merging."10 Every effort is now being directed to achieve this goal in the foreseeable future, and these efforts by the authorities have been reflected in certain shifts in Soviet sociopolitical terminology. However, the continuing use in that terminology of certain "vestigial" terms demonstrates that the real aim of the Kremlin rulers in their national policies is not the merging of peoples and nationalities of the country, but their absorption by the Russians, the dominant people in the USSR. Thus, while doing all they can to strengthen a united Soviet state, the Kremlin rulers and their sycophants attack not only manifestations of departmental narrowness and localism, but also, with flagrant intolerance, any mention by representatives of non-Russian peoples of the merits of their particular nations, unless such mention is accompanied by stressing the assistance of other peoples of the USSR in realizing its achievements. The only exception is the Russian people. The Kremlin leaders write that all other peoples should "address special words of gratitude to the Russian people," that "without its unselfish brotherly assistance no present achievements of any of the republics would be possible,"11 that the Russian people, being a more advanced nation, consciously accepted material sacrifices and priva¬ tions, striving to help its brothers to recover what they missed,"12 that all peoples of the USSR nourish "love and brotherly feelings toward the great Russian people,"13 and on and on. The constitution of the RSFSR declares, on the one hand that "the formation of the RSFSR ensured favorable conditions for the Russian people and for all nations and nationalities of the Russian Federation

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

91

■ • ■ , and on the other hand that the people of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic . . . proclaims this constitution." The terminological collocation, "the people of the RSFSR," is consistent with the proposition of the Kremlin leaders and of obedient Soviet scholars on the "new historical community of people, the Soviet people" that has emerged in the USSR. In the mind of the compilers of the constitution of the RSFSR, the people of the RSFSR is an inseparable, integral part of that "new community." In the same sense, the collocation, "people of the Moldavian SSR," in the preamble of the constitution of the Moldavian SSR, which states that "the people of the Moldavian SSR proclaims this constitution," is fully consistent with that proposition.14 However, the use in the constitution of the RSFSR of another terminological collocation— the Russian people, the nations and na¬ tionalities of the Russian Federation"—is not consistent with the proposition on "the new historical community of people, the Soviet people." The collocation should be considered as "vestigial" in relation to the terminology being worked out in connection with the notion of a Soviet people. The "vestigial" term "Russian people" occurs also in the constitution of the Moldavian SSR, which states: "The great Russian people extended tremendous help to the working masses of Moldavia," but lacks any mention of a Moldavian people.15 Although the RSFSR has been designated a federated republic, its constitution does not mention, other than the Russian people, the names of any of the other peoples in this "federation." The discrepancies in the use of the Russian people and people of the RSFSR (or Moldavian SSR, etc.) is due, on the one hand, to the lack of harmony between the theory of convergence and merging of peoples and nationalities of the USSR and, on the other hand, to the trend, actually occurring in the USSR, to increase the factual domination by the Russians and to absorb into the Russian people, other peoples and nationalities. To make this domination irreversible, the Kremlin rulers, in addition to other means, are applying a policy of systematic increase of multinationality of the non-Russian republics, accompanied by official statements on the necessity of taking into account the requirements of their inhabitants who do not belong to the indigenous population,16 and on the necessity "to strive that all nationalities existing in a given republic be duly represented in the links of Soviet and party bodies."17 Iu. Andropov, from whose speech on the sixtieth anniversary of the USSR these words are quoted, confirmed the decisions of the Twenty-Sixth Congress, and also stressed that "an arithmetical approach to the solution of such problems is pointless."18

92

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

In fact, this statements mean, as is shown, for example, by the situation prevailing in Soviet Moldavia, that key posts in the republic are occupied by persons of Russian nationality, and that the proportion of their participation in the leadership of the higher party and state bodies is incomparably greater than their proportion of the total population.19 With regard to the absorption by the Russian people of increasingly more substantial strata of other peoples and nationalities of the USSR, the following should be added: Soviet sources manifest evidence that an intensive process of linguistic assimilation and ethnic transformation of non-Russian populations is being pursued. According to obedient Soviet authors, linguistic assimilation in the USSR is a voluntary process, and is, "as a rule, a necessary condition and an important stage of ethnic assimilation."20 But, in reality, this process is generated primarily by the policies of the ruling party, and is far from voluntary. Thus, the program of the CPSU not only condemns manifestations of localism, but also insists that "manifestations of national aloofness in . . . employment of workers of different nationalities in the Soviet republics are impermissible."21 According to past and present theo¬ reticians of the CPSU, class interests prevail over national interests, and the interests of the USSR prevail over the national interests of the individual Union republics, in spite of the fact that their consti¬ tutions and the constitution of the USSR pronounce them sovereign states. Significant in this respect are the conclusions of economists from non-Russian Soviet republics, and the criticism to which these conclusions have been subjected by a Moscow specialist on the theory of nation and national relations. S. Chirca, in his research study of the rates and proportions of economic development of Soviet Moldavia, raised the issue of inter¬ republic migration of manpower resources. He concluded that the substantial inflow to the industries of Moldavia by working masses from other republics is causing significant deficiencies in the republic's balance of manpower.22 In connection with the same phenomenon in the Kirghiz SSR, T. Koichuev stressed that "it is expedient to limit the inflow of population from elsewhere."23 M. Kulichenko attacked these conclusions and also the efforts of specialists from non-Russian republics to demonstrate the validity "of the law of the prevailing development of the production of means of production in order to prove rates of industrial development of their republics higher than that prevailing in the rest of the country." Asserting that such an approach furthers the isolation of peoples and is inimical to their unity, he pointed out that one cannot be concerned only with the

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

93

advancement of economy, that "life requires being concerned, at least as much as currently prevails, with perfecting socialist national re¬ lations." He added that "one of the most important means for such perfecting is a multifaceted encouragement of contacts between nations and nationalities."24 Kulichenko quotes from Izvestia: "Economic sup¬ port of one people by another has become something greater: a social experiment of voluntary migration of specialists from regions possessing more manpower, to regions lacking such specialists, and the creation, instead of different national cultures, of common culture—a Soviet culture."25 In addition, he noted that the exchange of cadres led to the situation in the second half of the 1970s, when, in all of the republics, the proportion of the cadres of nonindigenous nationality was fairly substantial: in the Ukraine and in Belorussia it was about 40 percent, in the republics of Central Asia from 45 to 60 percent, and in the Baltic republics 20 to 50 percent. He added that "it not only confers on the working communities an international character, but especially it brings into their lives a spirit of internationalism, furthers the creation of international values in material and spiritual life, and thus brings about the convergence of nations."26 When the issue is formulated in this way, and it is so formulated by proponents of the CPSU's national policy, the patriotically inclined or merely objective Soviet researchers, whose assertions do not conform to the aims of this policy, find themselves in a difficult situation. Their subsequent works undergo severe control by the corresponding scholarly councils and by the censors of Glavlit, and in future vicis¬ situdes of Soviet domestic and foreign policy, they may be reminded of their "past sins." The obedient Soviet specialists write that "sometimes the disregard of national relations when characterizing the economic connections of Union republics is absolutely inadmissible."27 However, some Soviet authors, whether patriotically inclined or merely objective, make assertions such as that "one cannot refer to a lack in the indigenous population of stable habits and traditions for industrial work" as a reason for transferring manpower from one republic to another, indicating that, by far, not all such transfers are voluntary. Besides ensuring the necessary manpower resources for republics lacking them, one of the primary aims of Soviet authorities in their policy of population migration is to create in all republics multinational communities as a solid basis for the country's russification. In the 1970 census, Russian was named as their native language by 13 million non-Russian people (11.5 percent of the total number); by the 1979 census, that number had grown to 16.3 million (13.1

94

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

percent). If we agree that "groups of people who change their language usually change also, ultimately, their ethnic affiliation," we can un¬ derstand the apprehensions of the non-Russian patriotically minded intelligentsia about the fate of their peoples.28 The widespread bil¬ ingualism in the USSR, mostly with Russian as the second language, must be seen as one of the chief prerequisites for changing one's languages. "In the seventies the progress of national [non-Russian]Russian bilingualism has accelerated," and "the total number of persons who named Russian as their second language, fluently mastered by them, increased in the nine years from one census to the next (19701979) by 46.3%, whereas the number of persons with 'other' second languages decreased by 18%."29 These facts reveal that Soviet au¬ thorities are pursuing a deliberate policy of accelerating the country's russification, accompanied by "plausible" assurances of voluntary linguistic assimilation by members of numerically small peoples and national groups. The trend of transition to the Russian language has become, in the USSR, "one of the characteristic particularities of national-linguistic processes,"30 and it occurs as well in small nationalities (e.g., Mord¬ vinians) as in large peoples (e.g., Ukrainians or Belorussians).31 Due to linguistic assimilation with subsequent ethnic transformation, the number in 1979 of such people as the Mordvinians, by whose name an autonomous republic has, should have been, according to the calculations of Moscow demographer V. Kozlov, "more than 1,600,000 and not 1,192,000 as shown by the census."32 The overall mean population increase in the USSR in the years 1970 to 1979 was 8.4 percent, whereas the growth of Ukrainians was only 3.9 percent, and of Belorussians only 4.5 percent. These facts reveal that large groups of Ukrainians and Belorussians are being absorbed by other peoples, especially by the Russians. The acceleration of assimilation is also significantly stimulated by the increases in nationally mixed marriages, as encouraged by the authorities. They, like the migration processes, play an important role in the russification of the country. ★

*

*

Obedient Soviet scholars, especially those close to the Central Committee of the CPSU, are primarily guided in their research not by the theory of Marxism-Leninism or by the real practice of the development of national relations within the USSR, but by the need to elaborate theses and propositions corresponding to the latest

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

95

directives of the CPSU, in the person of the secretary-general of its Central Committee. Thus, after the project of the presently valid constitution of the USSR was published, the constitution committee received suggestions to include in it, according to Brezhnev," the concept of a united Soviet nation, and either liquidating the Union and autonomous republics, or severely limiting the sovereignty of Union republics by depriving them of the right to secede from the USSR and the right to maintain foreign relations."33 One reason for such suggestions is the far-reaching process of the country's russification, which has also been reflected in the fact that, in works of Soviet specialists on the theory of nations and national relations," appeared prognoses of a merger of nations in the foreseeable future" and assertions that in the USSR a process of "consolidating a united Soviet nation" is occurring.34 However, an overt recogntion by Moscow that a consolidating of a united Soviet nation is even now progressing in the USSR would bring, from the viewpoint of Kremlin rulers, extremely harmful con¬ sequences both within the country and beyond its borders. Such a recognition and the practical actions resulting from it (in the spirit of the suggestions received by the constitution committee) would lead to a sharp aggravation of the already existing resistance to the process of denationalization on the part of the non-Russian population of the country. Furthermore, such recognition and the actions resulting from it would cause significant harm to the external political position of the USSR by depriving its ideologists of the ability to flaunt the hackneyed propaganda about the flourishing of non-Russian peoples and nationalities in the USSR, and by opening the eyes of the world to the true aim of Moscow's national policies. Explaining the reasons for declining such suggestions, Brezhnev declared that Soviet authorities "would be embarking on a dangerous path if they began artificially to speed up the natural process of the convergence of nations."35 Affirming also that the constitution "ensures an all-around flourishing and steadfast convergence of all nations and nationalities of the country," he stressed that this convergence "suggests the necessity of strengthening the basis of the USSR as a united federal multinational state."36 Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev as head of the CPSU and of the Soviet state, also referred to the basis in the constitution of the USSR "for further flourishing and convergence of all nations and nationalities of the country," stressing, at the same time, that on this

96

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

issue, one "cannot forestall events, just as it is inadmissible to restrain already ripened processes."37 Thus, while the Kremlin rulers do all they can to accelerate the denationalization of the country's non-Russian population, they have decided to maintain the appearance that the non-Russian peoples and their national statehood are flourishing. Thus, proceeding from the real aims of Moscow's national policy, M. Kulichenko interpreted the dichotomy of the flourishing and con¬ vergence of nations and nationalities of the USSR in this manner: "In the correlation of the tendencies of socialism toward the convergence of nations and the flourishing of each nation, the dominant role belongs to the tendency of convergence."38 The same author (one of the specialists in the theory of the nation, who is closest to the Central Committee of the CPSU) altered beyond recogntion Stalin's wellknown definition of the concept of "nation." He stated that "the formulation of the concept of 'nation' by I. V. Stalin played an important role in Marxist-Leninists' understanding of its essence."39 Stalin's definition is this: "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture."40 But the definition proposed by Kulichenko is not only much more cumbersome, it is fundamentally different from Stalin's. According to Kulichenko, "A nation is a stable sociohistorical com¬ munity of people [liudei\ of the era of capitalism and formation of full communism, being a natural product and an inevitable form of social progress, created and developing on the basis of the unity [under capitalism, a very limited basis and therefore primarily con¬ ditional of the people's (naroda) economic and sociopolitical life] its language, territory, national culture, national consciousness and na¬ tional psychology; and also developing on the basis of the results of mutual influencing and mutual enrichment of values created of peoples [narodami]."41 The author's effort to adapt Marxist theory to the present national policy of the ruling part of the USSR is revealed by the stress laid at the very beginning of the definition on the nation as a sociohistorical community, and that this is a community "of the era of capitalism and formation of full communism." Kulichenko specifically avoids the characterization of a nation as socioethnic community.42 In an earlier work, he states that the use of the concept of socioethnic community leads to a wrong evaluation of the correlation between social and ethnic factors in the concept of 'nation,' to underestimating the first and overestimating the latter."43

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

97

That in the definition of the concept of "nation” its "ethnicity” is intentionally ignored whereas its "sociality” is mentioned, proves that Kulichenko, as with the dominance of the convergence of nations, developed his definition in accord with the CPSU's policies of ac¬ celerated denationalization of the non-Russian population of the country. Kulichenko's stressing that a nation is a historical community not only during the era of capitalism, but also during the formation of full communism, proves that he tailored his definition to a policy of calming the non-Russian population of the USSR, and not frightening foreigners, especially the young countries in Asia and Africa who still might choose socialism. This definition is the direct opposite of Stalin's since Kulichenko ranks as the first criterion of a nation not the common language, but the unity of economic and sociopolitical life. This priority is related to the definition of the "USSR as an integral, federal, multinational state,” and also to the authorities' policies of strength¬ ening the all-Union foundations of the Soviet state and systematically emasculating the artificially preserved forms of national statehood of non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR.44 Kulichenko's naming the unity of the people's economic and so¬ ciopolitical life as the primary criterion of a nation is also explained by his efforts to adapt theory to policies. The two occurences of the term "people" in his definition, proves it. Kulichenko, like other Soviet authors, repeatedly uses in his works "people" as an absolute synonym for "nation"; thus, he asserts: "All this immeasurably enriches the material and spiritual values of a nation and furthers its genuinely brotherly relations with all peoples."45 But, in his definition, they are not synonymous terms. Kulichenko's publication of 1983, in which the above definition of the concept of the nation appears, reveals the reason. In that work, Kulichenko subdivides social communities into three groups. The group that is pertinent to this issue comprises, according to Kulichenko, three kinds of communities: (1) classes, (2) nations and nationalities, and (3) new communities, which "are both social and international." He adds that the first of the new communities "has been formed in the Soviet country," and that "presently, initial birth processes of new communities are progressing in certain socialist countries and within their world community."46 Kulichenko finds it necessary to complete his statement as follows: "Certain specialists sometimes attribute new historical communities to the second kind of com¬ munities, and it turns out that the Soviet people completes such a cycle of communities as tribe-nationality-nation. This, however, cannot be accepted."47 If we add that, in his table of the national structure

98

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

of Soviet society, Kulichenko lists only nation, nationalities, national groups, and ethnic groups; it thus becomes clear that “people” in his definition of the concept of nation means also the Soviet people as a whole, as well as the individual Soviet nations of the Union republics.48 Thus, in this respect too, the theories elaborated by Kulichenko and reflected in his definition of the concept of nation, are adapted to the policies of the Kremlin rulers, especially to their assurances that the consolidation not of a united Soviet nation, but of a united multinational Soviet people, is progressing in the USSR. In connection with the proposition elaborated by the ideologists of the CPSU that the development of real socialism created in the USSR a new historical community, Soviet people, the usual homo¬ geneous terminological pairs natsional'nosti-natsii, narodnosti-narody became disconnected in Soviet historical works; in recent decades, they invariably used the contaminated, hybrid terminological pair natsii-narodnosti. A direct connection exists between the absence of the term “people” in all of the three kinds of the first group of social communities and in the other two groups of Kulichenko's classification of communities and the aforementioned terminological shift. Kuli¬ chenko seeks by any means to obscure the progressive russification of the non-Russian population of the USSR by his assertions that the Soviet people, as a new historical community, does not complete “such a series of community forms as tribe-nationality [narodnost']nation." In reality, the CPSU and its sycophantic specialists are preparing the ground for the future transition from the formula describing the consolidation of a united multinational Soviet people, to a formula asserting that the consolidation of a united Soviet nation is progressing in the Soviet state. According to the leaders and ideologists of the CPSU, the working class “is the decisive force in the struggle for the creation of socialist national relations.”49 Its proportion in the social class structure of the population of the USSR grows steadily. By the early 1980s, the Soviet working class already reached “60% of the employed population of the country"50 and “constitutes the largest social group in all union republics."51 It was customary in former decades to describe the working class in non-Russian Soviet republics as national detachments of the working class of the USSR. But Soviet historians had stopped using this term by the late 1960s. At the scholarly conference in Kishinev in November 1971 on “Issues of the History of the Moldavian Communist Party," the local historian, V. Barbulat, presented an address on the growth of the national detachment of the working class of Soviet Moldavia.52

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

99

However, M. Iskrov, scientific secretary of the Institute of MarxismLeninism of the CPSU CC, who attended the conference, criticized Barbulat's thesis in his concluding speech. He pointed out that the working class in all Soviet republics is international in its composition, and it is therefore unjustified to talk of its “national detachments." This criticism led to the exclusion of Barbulat's address from the published materials of the conference.53 Both in past decades and also at present, the titles of works on the working class of Soviet republics include the name of that republic; for example, the working class of the Moldavian SSR/Moldavia, of the Azerbaidjan SSR/Azerbaidjan.54 However, no works exist whose titles include such terms as “Moldavian working class," "Uzbek working class," or even "Ukrainian working class."55 Such termi¬ nological collocations as "the working class of the Moldavian SSR," etc. are actually devoid of any ethnic-national coloring. They have a purely territorial-administrative tint, such as "Krasnoyarsk working class." The situation has not changed regarding the use of these terms, although the new constitution of 1977 states that the USSR “is a socialist state of the whole people, expressing the will and interests of the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia, the working people of all the nations and nationalities of the country" (article 1), and that the USSR "is an integral, federal, multinational state" (article 70). When the 1977 constitution confirmed the status of the USSR as a multinational state, the use of the terminological collocation “national detachments of the working class" was resumed, but the situation did not change. Thus, Andropov stated in his address on the sixtieth anniversary of the USSR that the CPSU “always paid maximal attention to the growth of the national detachments of the Soviet working class, the leading force ... of the society."56 Although “national detachments of the working class" was again accepted for use by ideologists of CPSU and sycophantic specialists on the theory of nations and national relations, its use is not consistent either with the reality it is intended to reflect, or with the spirit of the respective utterances.57 Thus, the quotation from Andropov continues with the statement that, although the workers constitute “the largest social group" in all Union republics, in some of them “the indigenous nationality should be more fully represented in the working class."58 Referring in this connection to the resolution of the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU on the necessity to enlarge and improve the training of qualified workers “from all nations and nationalities inhabiting the republic," Andropov stressed the political importance of the issue, because, in his words,

100

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

"multinational working people and especially workers' collectives, are merely the milieu in which the internationalist spirit is best fostered."59 Thus, the so-called national detachments of the Soviet working class in Union republics are actually not national, but multinational de¬ tachments, and what is meant is not the national character, but the national composition of the working class in those republics. Examining the economic development of autonomous republics in the RSFSR, a Soviet researcher stressed that in these republics "a specific feature ... is that the working class grew up as a multinational class," and that "it grew, in the first place, on account of the local population and of Russian workers who arrived from elsewhere."60 A similar growth process of the working class occurred not only in autonomous republics, but also in Union republics. This process is directly connected with the conclusion of Soviet researchers, which Kulichenko has questioned, that "the Soviet people, as a new historical community, could not be created without a gradual erasing of national differences, without the natural historic process of merging of na¬ tions."61 As a result of a decades-long systematic policy of flooding nonRussian administrative-territorial formations of the USSR by popu¬ lation layers from other republics, Moscow transformed all these territories into multinational territories. The multinational character of each of them has become the decisive factor in their entire sociopolitical life, and there are now, as already mentioned, such Union republics as Kirghizia and Kazakhstan, in which the indigenous population long ago lost its numerical superiority. But, even where Russians have not yet reached high percentage of the population, they nevertheless play a decisive role in the denationalization of the indigenous populations of the non-Russian republics. In recent decades, the efforts by Moscow to achieve the russification in them of all levels of party and state bodies can be seen, for example, from a statement in Andropov's address that one must constantly strive for all nation¬ alities in a republic to be duly represented on different levels of party and Soviet bodies.62 The aim of such policies is not merely the denationalization of non-Russian Soviet republics, but their general russification. Numerous facts confirm the above:

1. The constitution of a Union republic opens with an article stating that it was proclaimed by the people of the republic (the people of the Ukrainian SSR, of the Moldavian SSR, etc.) and not by

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

101

the name of the people (the Ukrainian people, the Moldavian people, etc.). 2. Moscow rulers and their sycophants condemn all manifestations of pride in achievements by any people, small or numerous, if, at the same time, it is not stressed that they would not have been possible without help from other peoples of the USSR, especially from the great Russian people. The rulers and their henchmen are also making every effort to promote in the USSR a cult of Russian culture, literature, language, etc. In works of proponents of the policies of the CPSU, glorification of the Russian people by assurances that it, "as a more developed nation, deliberately accepted material privations in order to help its brothers,"63 is accompanied by complaints that "the achieve¬ ments in developing the economy and culture of individual republics are sometimes described without revealing the main source of each republic's achievements, the unity, brotherhood and collaboration of all nations and nationalities of the USSR."64 3. Soviet writings invariably stress, especially in recent years, that the working collectives in all Soviet republics are multinational in composition and internationalist in spirit. Thus, the termi¬ nology of research works on the working class does not include such collocations as the Ukrainian, Belorussian, or Kazakh working class. However, in the terminology used in works on the theory of nation and national relations, the collocation "Russian working class" has been preserved, and every effort is made to stress that it lent the formerly oppressed peoples of Russia "colossal help in establishing Soviet power and in building a new life."65 4. There can often be found in works by obedient Soviet scholars statements and slogans on the continuing flourishing of the languages of non-Russian peoples and nationalities in USSR, accompanied by admissions that, in actual fact, a systematic displacement of non-Russian languages from their most important social functions is occuring under the pressure of the manysided development of the Russian language and its dissemination throughout the country. Thus, Iu. Desheriev, an active proponent of the language policy of the CPSU, writes that, in mature socialism, whose criterion is "intermingling of all social classes, groups, nations and nationalities ... the need of every republic for bilingualism grew, as did also the use of the Russian language not only at work, but also at leisure, in everyday life."66 5. In identifying the "Soviet people" as a new historical community, Soviet specialists on the theory of nation and national relations

102

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

point out that the Soviet people is not a nation, but a multinational community. This definition conforms to the assurances of the Kremlin rulers that the constitution of the USSR designates durable, stable political-juridical foundations for the further flourishing and convergence of all nations and nationalities of the country."67 All this explains the occurrence in the constitution of the USSR and in the works of Soviet researchers of national relations, of the terminological collocation friendship of nations and nationalities of the USSR: "It is the duty of every citizen of the USSR ... to strengthen the friendship of the nations and nationalities of the multinational Soviet state" (article 64 of the constitution); "among the great achievements . . . are the strengthened cohesion and friendship of all nations and na¬ tionalities."68 Although this agrees with the constitution and with the definition of the Soviet people as a multinational community, the use by Soviet specialists of the "friendship of the peoples of the USSR," which is not consistent with the text of the constitution or with the aforementioned definition, con¬ tinues in almost every instance. But an opposing use of terms can also be found. Soviet specialists usually use the hybrid terminological pair natsii-narodnosti, consistent with the docu¬ ments of the CPSU, the constitution of the USSR, and the definition of the Soviet people as a multinational community, whereas, in some of their writings, the homogeneous termi¬ nological pairs natsii-natsional'nosti, narody-narodnosti, also oc¬ cur.69 This terminological incongruity can be explained by the fact that basic terminological categories of the theory of nations and the national relations, as elaborated by specialists closely associated with the Central Committee of the CPSU, penetrate into party documents and thus become established in the historical and sociopolitical literature, but are not always unreservedly accepted by other specialists in the field or by scholars of similar specialities. Moreover, the authors of these terminological categories often meet difficult obstacles when the need arises to replace terms firmly established in the Soviet socio¬ political vocabulary; it is not simple to modify such expressions according to their terminological categories. Thus, Kulichenko continues to employ everywhere "friendship among peoples." The following should be added: certain Soviet scholars, especially from non-Russian republics, who are guided by the letter, not by the

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

103

spirit of party documents, propound propositions in their writings that are absolutely unacceptable from the standpoint of the true aim of the national policy of the CPSU. Resolutions of the Central Committee and the congresses of the CPSU frequently use political slogans on the flourishing of Soviet nations and nationalities, and on expanding the rights of Union republics. U. Kudaibergenov concluded from these slogans that the national statehood of Soviet nations shows two tendencies: the first is a natural process of expansion of the rights of Union republics, and the second is a strengthening of juridical guaranties of their sovereignty. Rejecting these conclusions, M. Kulichenko affirms that both these tendencies "not only do not occur in Soviet reality, but have no place at all in socialism, especially in its mature stage."70 He is correct because, as has been shown above, in the USSR totally different tendencies are in evidence. But Kulichenko is absolutely wrong when he rejects the conclusion of another Soviet scholar, K. Khabibullin, who, on the basis not of the letter of documents of the CPSU and of the writings of its obedient specialists, but of their spirit, wrote that "the buildup of a national consciousness is not an aim of the socialist state."71 Even in Kulichenko's writings many statements occur that confirm that Khabibullin's con¬ clusions fit the Soviet realities. For example, Kulichenko asserted that, in the USSR, "in the correlation of national and international factors, the leading role belongs to the international," and "if we compare the increase in significance of social and national factors, it becomes evident that the role of the former grows more significantly."72 There exist in the USSR, as Kulichenko admits, "adversaries of merging the nations, advocates of perpetuating the nations," who, "even now, often oppose many steps leading to a convergence of nations." He also writes that they are researchers who maintain that "the merging of nations in the USSR reveals even now, in the process of convergence, that convergence and merging . . . are a simultaneous process." Kulichenko resolutely rejects such conclusions for the reason that they, according to him, "fit neither the reality nor the policies of the CPSU."73 However, his admission that, in the USSR, there are ad¬ versaries of "many steps leading to a convergence of nations," proves the contrary: that these adversaries combat both the policies of the CPSU ("many steps leading to a convergence of nations"), and the denationalization and russification of the non-Russian population of the USSR ("simultaneous processes of convergence and merging").

104

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

Notes, Chapter 2 1. Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (Moscow, 1977), p. 30. 2. Ibid,, p. 28. 3. A. Lisetskii, Osnovy natsional’noi politiki KPSS v usloviakh razvitogo sotsializma (po materialam Moldavskoi SSR) (Kishinev, 1970), p. 78. 4. KPSs v rezoliutsiakh i resheniakh s'ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov Tsk (Moscow, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 73-74. 5. P. Pospelov, “Lenin i istoriko-partiinaia nauka," in V. 1. Lenin i istoricheskaia nauka (Moscow, 1968), p. 16. 6. Lisetskii, Osnovy natsional' noi politiki KPSS, p. 142. 7. Ibid., p. 143. 8. Naselenie SSSR. Po dannym vsesoiuznoi perepisi naselenia 1979 goda (Moscow, 1980), pp. 28-30. 9. M. Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People. A Study of the Nationalities Policy of the Communist Party in Soviet Moldavia (New York: East European Monographs, Boulder, 1982), pp. 80-101. 10. Iu. Andropov, Shest'desiat' let SSSR (Moscow, 1982), p. 10. 11. Ibid., p. 9. 12. Iu. Bromlei, E. Bagramov, M. Guboglo, M. Kulichenko, eds., Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR v svete reshenii XXII s'ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1982), pp. 339-340. 13. Ibid., p. 347. 14. Moldova Socialista, 16 April 1978. 15. Ibid. 16. Materialy XXIV s'ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1981), p. 57. 17. Adropov, Shest'desiat' let, p. 15. 18. Ibid. 19. Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People, pp. 55-59, 73, 75-76, 78, 89. 20. V. Kozlov, Natsional’nosti SSSR. Etnodemograficheskii obzor, 2nd ed. (Mos¬ cow, 1982), p. 239. 21. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973), pp. 114, 116. 22. S. Chirca, Tempy i proportsii ekonomicheskogo razvitia soiuznoi respubliki (Kishinev, 1973), pp. 83-93. 23. T. Koicheuv, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Kirgizii i faktory ego uskorenia (Frunze, 1973), p. 10. 24. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR. Problemy teorii i metodologii (Moscow, 1981), pp. 324-325. 25. Ibid., p. 336. 26. Ibid., pp. 345-346. 27. Ibid. p. 325. 28. Kozlov, Natsional'nosti SSSR, p. 234.

Constitution of the RSFSR and Its Implications

105

29. Bromlei, Bagramov, Guboglo, Kulichenko, Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii, p. 169. 30. Kozlov, Natsional'nosti SSSR, pp. 252-253. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 283. 33. L. Brezhnev, O Konstitutsii SSSR (Moscow, 1977), p. 39. 34. Lisetskii, Osnovy natsional'noi politiki KPSS, p. 123. 35. Brezhnev, O konstitutsii, p. 40. 36. Ibid., p. 19. 37. Andropov, Shest'desiat’ let, pp. 9-10. 38. M. Kulichenko, "Politika KPSS v oblasti natsional'nykh otnoshenii v usloviakh razvitogo sotsializma," Nauchnyi kommunizm, no. 2 (February 1976), p. 56. 39. M. Kulichenko, Natsia i sotsial'nyi progress (Moscow, 1983), p. 65. 40. I. Stalin, Sochinenia, vol. 2. (Moscow, 1953), p. 296. 41. Kulichenko, Natsia, p. 66. 42. M. Dzhunusov, “Natsia kak sotsial'no-etnicheskaia obshchnost'," Voprosy istorii, no. 4 (April, 1966). 43. M. Kulichenko, Natsional'nye otnoshenia v SSSR i tendentsii ikh razvitia (Moscow, 1972), p. 30. 44. Brezhnev, O konstitutsii, p. 19. 45. Kulichenko, Natsional'nye otnoshenia, pp. 46, 48, etc. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid. Ibid., p. 170. Bromlei, Bagramov, Guboglo, Kulichenko, Razvitie natsionaVanykh ot¬

noshenii, p. 148. 50. Ibid. 51. Andropov, Shest'desiat' let, p. 14. 52. A. Lutchenko, "Nauchnye konferentsii v Kishineve i Minske," Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 3 (March, 1972), p. 146. 53. S. Afteniuc, A. Lisetskii, A. Lutchenko, P. Luchinskii, I. Sabadyrev, D. Shemiakov, eds., Voprosy istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii (Kishinev, 1973). 54. B. Vizer, A. Mokhova, L. Repida, P. Rybalko, Razvitie rabochego klassa MSSR. 1940-1965 (Kishinev, 1970); B. Abdulaev, Rabochii klass Azerbaidzhanskoi SSR v poslevoennye gody. 1946-1950 (Baku, 1965); B. Gurbanov, Rabochii klass Azerbaidzhana na puti k razvitomu sotsializmu. 1945-1958 (Baku, 1982); etc. 55. D. Shelest, Kolichestvennye i kachestvennye izmenenia v sostave rabochego klassa Ukrainskoi SSR. 1959-1970 (Dnepropetrovsk, 1971). 56. Andropov, Shest'desiat' let, p. 14. 57. Bromlei, Bagramov, Guboglo, Kulichenko, Razvitie natsional'nykh ot¬ noshenii, pp. 157, 180, etc. 58. Andropov, Shest'desiat' let, p. 14. 59. Ibid.

106

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

60. V. Alekseev, "Reshaiushchii etap likvidatsii ekonomicheskogo neravenstva narodov (na primere avtonomnykh respublik RSFSR)," Iz istorii natsionalnogo stroitel'stva v SSSR (Moscow, 1967), p. 25. 61. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie, p. 233. 62. Andropov, Shest’desiat' let, p. 15. 63. Bromlei, Bargamov, Guboglo, Kulichenko, Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii, p. 340. 64. Ibid., p. 378. 65. Kulichenko, Natsia, pp. 152, 157, 160. 66. Iu. Desheriev, "Iazykovye problemy ukreplenia dukhovnoi obshchnosti sovetskogo naroda," in Bromlei, Bagramov, Guboglo, Kulichenko, Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii, p. 297. 67. Andropov, Shest'desiat' let, p. 15. 68. Kulichenko, Natsia, p. 167. 69. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 12 (December, 1983), p. 145. 70. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie, p. 282. 71. K. Habibullin, Samosoznanie i internatsional'naia otvetsvennost' sotsialisticheskikh natsii (Avtoreferat doktorskoi dissertatsii Leningrad, 1976), p. 16. See Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie, p. 95. 72. M. Kulichenko, "Aktual'nye problemy marksistsko-leninskogo uchenia o natsiakh i natsional'nykh otnosheniakh v usloviakh sotsializma," in Sotsializm i natsia (Moscow, 1975), pp. 71-73. 73. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

3 The Party's Policy and Its Reflection in the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR

Anybody who is familiar with Soviet realities knows very well that all the non-Russian republics of the USSR have been subjected by Moscow to her rule. Therefore, it seems to be pointless to produce here evidence in support of what every specialist knows for a fact. Nevertheless, it will be useful to examine the matter in such a way that throws a new light on the discrepancies between the words and deeds of Soviet leaders, and between the laws and principles of the Soviet state and party bodies as they are reflected in the constitutions, the CPSU's program, in the theories of Russian and non-Russian obedient scholars in the social sciences, etc., on the one hand, and the real state of affairs in the Soviet Union, on the other. Such discrepancies are not incidental ones, since the text of the abovementioned sources do not reflect the true meaning of the CPSU's purposes in its nationalities policy. It can be shown by means of an analysis of certain terms and statements constantly used in Soviet documents, and historical, political, and sociolinguistic works. Along¬ side these documents, adopted by the highest party and state bodies of the USSR, and speeches and publications of the CPSU's leaders and theorists, the most relevant sources from which these terms and statements have been taken are the constitution and the state anthem of the Ukrainian SSR, as well as speeches of delegates of the Ukrainian communist organization to congresses of the CPSU. B. Topornin, a Soviet specialist in constitutional law, asserts in a study of the new Soviet constitution that a "Union republic is a sovereign Soviet socialist state that voluntarily united with other Soviet republics," and that "the establishment of the USSR has not erased their sovereignty."1 These statements certainly correspond to the letter 107

108

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

of both the constitution of the USSR, and the constitutions of all the Union republics. But they do not correspond at all to the spirit of Soviet constitutions, with their true purposes. Indeed, the sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR, for example, is expressed both in the article 76 of the constitution of the USSR, and in the article 68 of the constitution of Soviet Ukraine. Article 76 of the first constitution says: "A Union republic is a sovereign Soviet socialist state that has united with other Soviet republics/'2 and the article 68 of the Ukrainian constitution says: "The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a sov¬ ereign socialist state."3 Topornin, who is head of a department in the Institute of State and Law of the USSR's Academy of Sciences, considered it necessary to add, in connection with his statements, that "the Union republic preserves its independence in the exercise of state power in all economic, social, political and cultural matters, barring those falling within the jurisdiction of the USSR." He writes, moreover, that "the sovereign rights of a Union republic extend throughout its territory, . . . however, the territory of a Union republic is, at the same time, a component part of the territory of the [Soviet] Union and is also under the sovereignty of the federation."4 He tries to convince the reader that there is not "any internal contradiction in this duality," and that, in the Soviet Union, there is not "any confrontation between or isolation of the sovereignty of the federation and that of the Union republics."5 However, the real state of affairs in the Soviet country proves that the USSR as a state is based not on the principle of federation, but on the principle of unitarism. In fact, the non-Russian Union republics, as constituent parts of the so-called federation of Soviet socialist republics do not enjoy the rights of sovereign state formations, and the USSR, as a whole, is far from being a "voluntary association of equal republics."6 The stipulation of the constitution of the USSR that "each Union republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR" (article 72), obliges Soviet specialists to maintain that "every Union republic has the right of free secession . . . this right being limited by no conditions."7 But the following article 73 of the All-Union Constitution states that the jurisdiction of the USSR "shall cover . . . settlement of matters of All-Union importance." Consequently, the preceding article is merely a front. Because the withdrawal of a Union republic from the USSR is "a matter of All-Union importance," and, as to that, only the highest bodies of state authority of the USSR can give a decision in this matter. It should be added also that the fact that heads of some Union republics are full or alternate members of the

The Party's National Policy

109

Politburo of the CPSU CC or that one of the two chambers of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the Union Soviet, is elected by constituencies with equal populations, shows that these republics are not only of different importance but are not equal at all. Meanwhile, even the most important Soviet republic after the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, which has more deputies in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR than any other non-Russian Soviet republic, and whose head is a full member of the Politburo of the CPSU's Central Committee, is not a state and, moreover, not a sovereign state as both the USSR constitution of 1977 (Article 76) and the constitution of the Ukrainian SSR of 1978 (article 68) proclaim. At the end of the 1960s, in the multivolume reference work The Soviet Union. A Geographical Description, appeared the volume, "The Ukraine. A General Survey," which had been written by a group of Ukrainian scholars. The Ukraine of the 1960s is characterized by trends in favor of a rebirth of Ukrainian national consciousness. It was the period of the (Piotr) "Shelest' era," which was accompanied by a strong reaction by Ukrainian historians against the russification policies of the Russian Communist party and in favor of Ukrainian historical scholarship and the Ukrainian culture in general."8 The Shelest era was a natural continuation of the "destalinization" process, which had begun in the USSR in the previous decade. In the Ukraine, one of the relevant manifestation of this process was the struggle against the russification of the Ukrainian language and the most invincible defender of the national language in these years was the writer Oleksii Kundzich.9 The terminology used by the authors of the "Survey" reflected the dominant trends of the period.10 Such terms as "state" (gosudarstvo), "country" (strana), and "homeland" (rodina) appear often in their work as symbols, as patrimonies of the Ukrainian people and nation. That can be demonstrated by the use of these terms in the following sentences: "Veliki razmery Sovetskogo Ukrainskogo gosudarstva" ("The dimensions of the Soviet Ukrainian state are very large," (p. 10), "Sovetskaia Ukraina kak suverennoe sotsialisticheskoe gosudarstvo" ("The Soviet Ukraine as a sovereign socialist state," p. 18), "Ukraina— morskaia strana” ("The Ukraine is a maritime country," p. 13), "Ukraina— strana bol’shoi i slozhnoi istorii" ("The Ukraine—a country that has a rich and complex history," p. 13), "Na protiazhenii vekoy . . . ne utratil [ukrainskii narod] svoi luchshie natsional'nye cherty—bezgranichnuiu liubov' k Rodine, trudoliubie, . . . chuvstvo iumora, gostepriimstvo i radushie ..." ("In the course of centuries the Ukrainian people has

no

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

not lost its national traits—infinite love for its homeland, zeal, a sense of humor, hospitality, cordiality . . . " p. 14). In the "Survey" of the Ukraine, as in other reference books on the non-Russian Soviet republics, can be found such stereotypical formulae as: "The successes of the Soviet Ukraine were possible because of the indissoluble relations of its national economy with the economy of the whole Soviet Union" (p. 133); or "thanks to the help of the brotherly republics, the Ukraine started a new, unprecedented dynamic developing and perfecting of its economy and culture" (p. lb). That the Ukrainian authors have paid such lip service to Moscow complement many other sentences in their work. For example, "Great spiritual values have already been created by the Ukrainian people in the prerevolutionary era" (p. 17); "the Ukrainian socialist nation has become one of the most advanced nations of our epoch" (p. 18); "the Ukrainian SSR has become an advanced country of the contem¬ porary, including new and up-to-date machine building (p. 17). At the beginning of the 1970s, the great pride taken by Ukrainians of science and culture in the achievements and successes of the Ukrainian people found expression in Piotr Shelest's book, Ukraina nasha radians'ka, which brought about his removal from his position as first secretary of the Communist party of the Ukraine.11 The following fourteen years, the years of V. Shcherbitskyi at the head of the republic's communist organization, are characterized by a continuous effort aimed at the russification of Ukraine. These efforts found expression, for example, in the text and in the substratum of the constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, which was adopted on 20 April 1978. Thus, the term "state" occurs in the text of the constitution fortyseven times. It is used forty-one times as a synonym for the USSR and the Soviet state as a whole, three times to signify foreign states, and also three times as an equivalent of the Ukrainian SSR, as in the following: "The workers and peasants of Ukraine with the fraternal aid of the Russian proletariat ... for the first time in history created their state—the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" (preamble), "The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a Soviet socialist state of the whole people. ..." (article 1), and "The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a sovereign Soviet Socialist state" (article 68). In all three instances, "state" is used as an ornamental accessory, which serves to disguise the fact that Ukraine is deprived of any sovereignty, as all other non-Russian Soviet republics are deprived.

The Party's National Policy

111

The term country is also used in such a way that shows indubitably that the Ukraine does not have the status of a state. Thus, this term occurs eight times in the text of the Ukrainian constitution. It is used seven times as a synonym for the USSR and the Soviet state as a whole. The unification of the fraternal Soviet republics in an integral, federal state . . . multiplied the forces and opportunities of the peoples of our country (preamble); "The Ukrainian SSR participates in the security and defense capability of the country" (article 30). The term is used one time out of eight to signify foreign countries, in the context of article 67 where it states that "it is the internationalist duty of citizens of the Ukrainian SSR to promote friendship and cooperation with peoples of other countries. ..." But it is never used in the constitution as a synonym for the Ukraine or the Ukrainian SSR. It should be added that such terms as rodina, otechestvo (vitchizna, bat’kivshchina), with the meaning of "mother country," "motherland," "fatherland," "homeland," are also never used in the Ukrainian constitution text as synonyms for the Ukraine or the Ukrainian SSR. They are always understood to mean the USSR as a whole (article 29: "In conformity with the constitution of the USSR defense of the socialist motherland is one of the most important functions of the state, and is the concern of the whole people"; article 60: "Defense of the socialist motherland is the sacred duty of every citizen of the Ukrainian SSR. Betrayal of the motherland is the gravest of crimes against the people"; etc.) The same can be said about the use of these terms in the anthem of the Ukrainian SSR. They lack any national Ukrainian sense, being synonyms for the USSR or the Soviet Union as a whole. The context in which they occur in the Ukrainian anthem clearly proves it. For example, the refrain:

Slava soiuzu radians'komu, slava! Slava vitchizni naviki-vikiv! Zhivi, Ukraino, radians'ka derzhavo, V edinii rodini narodiv-brativ!,

or the last verse of the anthem:

Mi slavim trudom bat'kivshchinu mogutniu, Utverdzhuem pravdu bezsmertnikh idei. U svit komunizmu—velichne maibutne Nas Lenins'ka partia mudro vede.n

112

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

The provisions of the constitutions of the Union republics "em¬ bodying the principle of socialist statehood" are identical to those of the All-Union Constitution.13 Thus, the provision of article 129 of it that says that "The Supreme Soviet of the USSR, on the recommen¬ dation of the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, may include in the government of the USSR the heads of other bodies and organizations of the USSR" found expression in an identical way in the constitutions of all the Union republics. Article 116 of the constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, for example, states: "The Supreme Soviet of the USSR, on the recommendation of the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, may include in the government of the USSR the heads of other bodies and organizations of the USSR" found expression in an identical way in the constitutions of all the Union republics. Article 116 of the constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, for example, states: "The Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR . . . may include in the government of the Ukrainian SSR the heads of other bodies and organizations of the Ukrainian SSR." This is the single occurrence of "government" of the Ukrainian SSR in the whole text of the constitution. If we take account of the fact that, in all kinds of Soviet sources, the term "government" without any speci¬ fication is used always as a synonym for government of the USSR, government of the Soviet Union, or Soviet government then we should conclude that the term "government of the Ukrainian SSR" in the constitution of the Ukraine has the function of an ornamental accessory. Such terms as the "Ukrainian proletariat" or the "Ukrainian working class" are not used at all either in the Ukrainian constitution or in other Soviet sources. But, in the text of the Ukrainian constitution, there occurs the term the "Russian proletariat," and in other Soviet sources are used both that term and "Russian working class." At first sight, this phenomenon seems to be a natural expression of the glorification of all that is connected with Russia and the Russian people. There is the fact that, in the first lines of the constitution of the Ukrainian SSR "Russia" occurs twice, although in the whole text "Ukraine" is missing. In the anthem of the Ukrainian SSR, there is the "Russian people," but not the "Ukrainian people." The avoidance of the terms "Ukrainian proletariat" or "Ukrainian working class" in the Ukrainian constitution, as well as in other Soviet sources, is consistent with the theory that the Soviet working class is multinational in its composition, and internationalist in spirit. This is the reason why studies on the working class of the non-Russian republics of the USSR are entitled The Working Class of the Ukrainian (or Belorussian, or Uzbek, or Moldavian, etc.) SSR and not the "Ukrainian [etc.] working

The Party's National Policy

113

class. This is also consistent with the thesis that, in the USSR, a new historical community of people, the Soviet people, has arisen. From such a point of view, "Russian proletariat" or "Russian working class" are vestigial terms; but they persist in Soviet terminology. Although the use of these "vestigial" terms contradict the concepts of both the Soviet people as a new historical community and of the multinational character of the proletariat or the working class, Soviet authors do not renounce them. The terms are in harmony with the long-range aim of the CPSU to transform all over the country's population into a single Russian nation with a single, Russian language and culture. The shifts in Soviet theories of nations and national relations, which occured in these last decades in connection with the concept of the Soviet people as a new historical community, find expression in certain perturbations in the use of such key terms of the respective microterminological systems as "people-nation-nationality (narod-natsia-narodnost'). Thus, the concept, the Soviet people," is defined by theorists of the CPSU as a social and international community."14 At the same time, according to some prominent Soviet specialists, one of the most important hallmarks of "nation" as a synonym for people in such collocations as the Ukrainian people or the Byelorussian people, etc. is the ethnic factor. N. DzandiTdin, for example, asserts that a nation is a most developed, qualitatively new, higher form of ethnic com¬ munity. 15 According to M. Dzhunusov, the differences between "na¬ tion (natsia) and nationality" (narodnost') "do not consist in the character and the level of the socialist social relations, but in the level of their ethnic development."16 Even Soviet specialists who, like M. Kulichenko, emphasize the priority of the social factor in the concept of nation, admit that a nation is not only a social community, but, "at the same time, an ethnic one."17 Therefore the use of the term "people" in the terminological collocation Soviet people," and in such phrases as "Ukrainian people" or "Belorussian people," etc. (as synonyms for the Ukrainian nation or the Belorussian nation, and so on) carries ambiguity in the sense that, in Soviet people, the accent is on the social economic factor of the concept "people," whereas, in "Ukrainian people," the accent is mainly on the national-ethnic factor of the concept of people. This is the reason why, in taking account of the concept of the Soviet people, specialists on the theory of nations and national relations resort in their works to the term "nation" and not "people" for the peoples of the USSR. M. Kulichenko asserts, for example, "that both

114

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

the community of economic life as well the community of political life of the Soviet people as a whole, and of the nations that form part of the Soviet people complete . . . one another," or that just the community of political life of the Soviet people as a whole stipulatejs] mainly that some nations and nationalities [natsii, narodnosti\ didn't have a social need to create their own national statehood."18 Meanwhile, in spite of their efforts to emphasize the international character of the Soviet people as a new historical community, the authorities of the USSR do all that can be done to transform the population of the country into a single Soviet nation. On the other hand, although Soviet leaders as well as obedient Soviet scholars are striving to convince public opinion abroad that "the nations in the USSR are thriving," the final aim of the communist rulers is to transform the non-Russian peoples into Russian-speaking peoples and to denationalize the basic population of the non-Russian Soviet republics.19 Under the circumstances, even such terminological forms as the "Ukrainian," "Belorussian," or "Moldavian people" became superfluous and are often supplanted by such as "the people of the Ukrainian SSR" or "the people of the Belorussian SSR," and so on. Not accidentally, in the constitutions of some non-Russian Union republics, one cannot find the name of their basic populations. For example, the compilers of Soviet Moldavia's constitution did not use at all the term "Moldavian people."20 Although "Ukrainian people" occurs twice in the Ukrainian constitution's preamble, it is stated at the end of the preamble that "the people of the Ukrainian SSR . . . adopt and proclaim this constitution."21 Such a formula as the proclamation of the constitution by the people of the republic, and not by its basic population is used in all the constitutions of the Union republics without exception. Thus, in his closing speech at the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, which adopted the republic's constitution on 20 April 1978, V. Shcherbytskyi used "people of the Soviet Ukraine" three times, "the working people of the republic" three times, and "the Ukrainian people" only one time.22 Two years before the adoption of this constitution, Shcherbytskyi, in his speech at the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU, used ten times the term "people," including nine times as a synonym for the Soviet people as a whole, as well as one time in the collocation "the people of Ukraine." But the term "Ukrainian people" is nowhere to be found in the text of this speech.23 Eight years after the adoption of the Ukrainian republic's constitution, Shcherbytskyi, in his speech at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU, used the term "people" four times, and all of them as synonyms

The Party's National Policy

115

for the Soviet people as a whole. Even the term "people of Ukraine/ Ukrainian SSR" does not occur in this speech.24 Particular Ukrainian patriotism, like any other kind of national non-Russian patriotism, incurs blame for "localism" or "parochialism" (mestichestvo), and that label is one of the most negative in Soviet realities because its practitioners are considered by Moscow susceptible to nationalism. When members of the basic population of a historical territory defend their patrimonies, manifest feelings of self-assertion, write or speak in support of their national dignity, look with pride at their achievements, or openly appreciate the heroic events and figures of their history, the originality of the culture, and customs of their people, they can be described as patriots. Indeed, under the existing circumstances in the USSR, each of the approximately 140 million Russians living in RSFSR, other Soviet republics, and abroad who behaves in such a manner qualifies under the CPSU's nationalities policy as a patriot. However, under the same conditions, none of the approximately 45 million Ukrainians in the Ukraine, other Soviet territories, or abroad who behaves in such a manner will be described by obedient Soviet authors as a patriot. Moreover, every Russian in the world who glorifies the Russian people and its culture, literature, language, selflessness, internationalism, and historical merits in its turning from capitalism to socialism, defending the gains of the October Revolution, the building of socialism and communism, its contribution in the victory in the World War II, etc., etc., will be greatly appreciated by obedient Soviet authors. But any Ukrainians in both the USSR and abroad who dare glorify the Ukrainian people and do not emphasize, at the same time, that all their achievements could not be possible without the selfless help of the great Russian people, expose themselves to harsh criticism. Actually, Shelest's attitude toward Ukrainian history and culture as an encouragement to the Ukrainians of science and culture that brought, in the second half of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the rise of national self-consciousness was the main cause for his being charged with ideological deviations and replaced by Shcherbytskyi. As a mouthpiece of Moscow, Shcherbytskyi makes every effort to promote its nationalities policy in the Ukraine. To understand the real meaning of the Soviet concept of "patriotism" it is worth noting the wording in Shcherbytskyi's speeches, in which he used the term "Ukrainian working-class emigres" (Ukrainskaia trudovaia emigratsia). It was shown above that party officials in the Ukraine and obedient scholars do not at all use the term "Ukrainian" in the collocation "Ukrainian working class," and prefer to avoid this term in the

116

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

collocation "Ukrainian people." Here, the following deserves to be noted. On 19 April 1978, in his speech at the session of the Supreme Soviet that adopted the Ukrainian constitution, Shcherbytskyi said that its draft has been welcomed by "the Ukrainian working-class [emigres] in the United States of America, Canada, and other countries."25 The use of such a term by Shcherbytskyi was not incidental. In December 1977, he used it in his address on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Ukrainian SSR.26 Quoting Shcherbytskyi, the authors of a book entitled Developed Socialism and the Crisis of ",Sovietology" qualify the members of this emigration as their "com¬ patriots from abroad" (nashi zarubezhnye sootechestvenniki).27 On the other hand, Soviet authors call all persons belonging to the antiSoviet ("anticommunist," "counterrevolutionary") emigration "rene¬ gades": those of Russian, Ukrainian, or any other Soviet national extraction living abroad, who attack the policy and practice of the CPSU and its leaders.28 Thus, Soviet authors divide members of the emigration into "com¬ patriots" (sootechestvenniki) and "renegades (otshchepentsy). Their prin¬ ciple, in the first case, says that people of Russian, Ukrainian, etc. extraction living abroad who are not against the USSR (its ruling party, nationalities policy, etc.) are with them. Moreover, in accordance with this principle, all these people are detached, but, at the same time, constituent parts of the respective nations (nashi zarubezhnye sootechestvenniki). In the second case, the principle remains: he who is not with us is against us. In accordance with this principle, such emigres ceased to be part of the respective Soviet nations or, in other words, otshchepentsy. The opportunism of the Soviet leaders and Soviet scholars is evident. Even the most ardent custodians of Marxist-Leninist doctrine assert that people of the USSR, living a long time in places far from the territory of their ancestors, are undergoing a process of nationalethnic transformation that leads to their merging into the basic population of their respective Soviet republics.29 Giving an estimate of Shcherbytskyi's mission, S. Horak noted that the first secretary of the Ukrainian communist organization "was charged with the task of returning the Ukraine to a subject position in line with Moscow's policy of russification and of creating a . . . 'Soviet society' with no place for any Ukrainian national manifes¬ tation."30 Shcherbytskyi's efforts at preventing any kind of patriotic tendencies in the republic found expression in the terminology used by him as well as by other party functionaries and subservient men of culture and science in Ukraine.

The Party's National Policy

117

Thus, for example, V. Iurchuk, director of the Institute of the History of the Communist Party, one of the active promoters of the russifying policy in Ukrainian historical scholarship, in an article published in 1985, used thirteen times the terms bat'kivshina, vitchizna, and godina ("fatherland," "mother country," "homeland"). But none of them is a synonym for the Ukraine; they are used in his text to mean the USSR.31 The CPSU and the Soviet specialists are trying to assure the world that the Soviet people is an international community and that the drawing together of nations [in the USSR] does not signify a merger of nations. 32 But, in reality, the CPSU pursues a policy of accelerating processes and fostering tendencies that lead to the transformation of the country's population into a single Russian-speaking Soviet nation. Lenin himself wrote repeatedly that the final aim of the Communist party "is not only the convergence, but also the merging of nations," and Andropov repeated this assertion at the end of 1982.33 In the above-mentioned article, V. Iurchuk asserts that, in the first period of World War II, "to the rear regions of the country ... 10 million people were evacuated, including 3.5 million citizens from the [Ukrainian] republic," that "to the Urals, to Western and Eastern Siberia, to Central Asia, and to the Volga Basin about 1,500 big plants, including approximately 550 from the Ukraine were trans¬ ferred."34 The wording of these sentences shows clear that the Ukraine is treated as a historical territory of Russia ("of the country") and not as a national one or as the homeland of the Ukrainian people. By means of such wording, the term "Ukraine" lose its national traits by being transformed into a simple geographical category as, let us say, Central Asia or Siberia. The publications by the official institutions of the social sciences in the Ukrainian SSR (as well as in all non-Russian administrative territories of the USSR) bear abundant evidence of such obliteration of the national ethnic traits of the Ukrainian people. As a noteworthy example of such can be mentioned a review in the same issue of the magazine in which Iurchuk's article appeared. In this review, there is no mention at all of such terms as "Ukrainian people," "Ukrainian working class," and so on. This is in spite of the fact that both V. Shinkaruk, the reviewer, and A. Kapto, the author of the reviewed book are top people in the Ukrainian SSR, the former as director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the republic, and the latter as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Ukraine. Also, the author of the book35 treats such problems as methodology, theory, and practice of class education,

118

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

socialist patriotism, and internationalism, "exchanging of spiritual values between the Soviet republics, and and Leninist nationalities policy propaganda (Emphasis mine—M. B.)."36 When any non-Russian leader or scholar in the USSR—Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldavian, or whoever—talks, as does Shinkaruk, about the unity of patriotism and internationalism, systematically using such wording in which the terms "people," "society, party occur always as synonyms for the Soviet people, Soviet society, or Communist party of the Soviet Union, he is neither a patriot nor even an internationalist, but an obedient proponent and supporter of Moscow s nationalities policy. However, although such non-Russian top-ranking leaders and scholars are doing all they can to russify the non-Russian peoples of the USSR, there are, in all non-Russian republics, forces that want to accelerate even more the transformation of these republics into simple administrative territories of the country. Thus, in 1977, during the discussion of the draft constitution of the USSR there were submitted to the Constitutional Commission (chaired by Brezhnev) a lot of amendments and supplements to its articles, including ones to "introduce into the constitution the concept of a single Soviet nation, to put an end to the existence of the Union and autonomous republics or to limit substantially the sovereignty of the Union republics, depriving them of the right to secede from the USSR and the right to enter into relations with other states."37 These kinds of proposals, for obvious reasons of both foreign and domestic policy, were rejected. Nevertheless, even after the adoption of the constitution of the USSR, which states that "each Union republic shall retain the right to secede freely from the USSR" (article 72), during the discussion on the draft constitution of the Ukrainian SSR in March-April 1978, as acknowledged by Shcherbytskyi, the Constitutional Commission "received letters whose senders had suggested that it is not advisable to maintain in the text of the Fundamental Law of the republic the provision on the right of the Ukraine to secede freely from the USSR."38 The fact that Shcherbytskyi, as is usual in Soviet vocabulary in such instances, did not resort to the euphemistic indefinite pronoun otdel'nye in its adjectival form—otdel'nye pis’ma ("certain letters"), is most significant in the sense that such letters had been submitted to the Constitutional Commission of the Ukraine in large amounts. One can guess that Ukrainians among the senders of such letters were persons in a stage of national-ethnic transformation whose native language had become Russian and who identified with the purposes of Moscow's nationalities policy or careerists striving to demonstrate

The Party's National Policy

119

their obedience to Moscow. The latter would have might be such people as A. Vatchenko or V. Mysnichenko. Ten years ago, Vatchenko, as the first secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional Committee of the Communist party of the Ukraine, in his speech at the TwentyFifth Congress of the CPSU, made no mention of the Ukraine or the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian Communist party, its Central Com¬ mittee, the Ukrainian working class, and so on. Such terms as "country," "state," "homeland," "party," "Communist party," "Central Committee," "working class" in the text of his speech, in which he touched on the principles of "patriotism" and "proletarian interna¬ tionalism," occur as synonyms for the USSR, for the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPSU, and for the Soviet working class as a whole.39 The same should be said about the working of Mysnichenko's speech (he being first secretary of the Kharkov Regional Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine) at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU. No wonder that, soon after the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU, Vatchenko was advanced to the position of chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, and it will not be surprising if Mys¬ nichenko will also be promoted in the future to a higher position. Nevertheless, the overwhelming part of the letters asking to leave out the right of the Ukraine to secede should be attributed to nonUkrainian inhabitants of the republic—first and foremost, Russians who live in Ukraine. According to the figures of the 1979 census, Russians numbered about 10.5 million or over 21 percent (21.1) of the population of the republic.40 These inhabitants of the Ukraine are, in all conscience, a constituent part of the Russian people, the dominant one in the USSR. They are also, in spite of the fact that the Ukrainians are not only the basic, but the most numerous, nationality, the real masters of the situation. This is the reason we should assume that the letters were sent mostly by persons belonging to the Russian population, who were moved by feelings of Russian chauvinism, and who could not reconcile themselves even to the illusory maintainance in the constitution of the right of the Ukraine "to secede freely from the USSR." I say "illusory," since article 73 of the All-Union Con¬ stitution states: "The jurisdiction of the USSR, as represented by its highest bodies of state authority and administration, shall cover . . . ensurance of confirmity of the constitutions of Union republics to the constitution of the USSR," as well as the "settling of matters of all-Union importance."41 In addition, insofar as article 68 of the republic constitution states that "the Ukrainian SSR ensures to the USSR, as represented by its highest bodies of state authority and

120

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

administration, the right defined by article 73 of the constitution of the USSR/'42 the assertion of Soviet professor B. Topornin that "every Union republic has the right to free secession from the Union [SSR], this right being limited by no conditions" is purely and simply unfounded.43 Not only article 73 of the All-Union Constitution and article 68 of the constitution of the Ukraine, but also article 6 of both the former and the latter, which states that "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society is the Communist party of the Soviet Union," that this party, "armed with Marxism-Leninism, determines . . . the course of the home and foreign policy of the USSR," and that "all party organizations shall function within the framework of the constitution of the USSR," exclude from reckoning the possibility of Ukraine's secession. Also, in Moscow's interpretation of MarxismLeninism, any attempt to secede from the USSR will signify auto¬ matically a betrayal of the principles of socialist internationalism. Although the Russians in the Ukrainian SSR know all this very well, they don't want kept in the republic's constitution even such an illusory possibility. They know that the continuous, intensive russification of the Ukrainian SSR has created in the past, and will create in the future, defenders of the inheritance of the Ukrainian people, fighters against the authorities' efforts to transform its nationalethnic consciousness into a Russian-minded one. And, inasmuch as the Russians consider all Soviet territories as "their own country," "they have dared" to ask for the elimination the right of the Ukraine to secede from the USSR—even after the adoption of the All-Union Constitution. In the 1970s, under pressure, Moscow let the proponents of its nationalities policy write about the need to meet the requirements of the non-indigenous population in the non-Russian Soviet republics. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that in Soviet works assertions often appear, such as the following: "Indigenization [korenizatsia] is a matter of the past," and "preferential treatment on the basis of nationality may give rise to national careerism [and] may accentuate the national sensitivity of other nationalities that are vulnerable to displays of injustice."44 In the 1970s and 1980s, statements in this spirit began to appear both in documents of the CPSU, and in speeches of its leaders. Thus, for example, in his report to the festive gathering marking the sixtieth anniversary of the USSR, Andropov asserted that "representation of the working people in the party and state bodies of the republics of the [Soviet] Union as a whole is not a matter of certain formal norms,"

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and that “an arithmetical approach to such problems is not accept¬ able/'45 r Such statements may appear to be founded on lofty internationalism, but, in reality, they reflect the tendency to deprive the indigenous peoples of the non-Russian territories of any advantages in having their own names and to transform these territories into ordinary administrative-geographical regions of the USSR. In recent years, the russifying policy Moscow pursues in Ukraine, as well as in all other non-Russian republics, found its most relevant expression in the efforts to accelerate the transformation of Russian into the main means of communication not only between, but also of the non-Russian Soviet peoples by squeezing out their mother tongues from the most important social functions. The decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU and of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, adopted in May 1983, being directed toward a strengthening of the positions of the Russian language in the non-Russian territories of the USSR, should be defined as a general attack by Moscow against the national identity of the non-Russian population of the country.46 To imagine the danger of losing one of the most important hallmarks of national-ethnic identity the new Moscow “language offensive" presents, the following should be said. As early as the mid-1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, Oleksii Kundzich and other patriotically minded Ukrainians of science and culture courageously rose in alarm over the dangerous language situation in the republic, which had resulted from the dominance of the Russian language. Thus, Kundzich wrote not only that the Ukrainians, “all day long, from the first news on the radio . . . until late night shows on TV of dubbed films, are listening to and reading mostly . . . translations,"47 but also that the flood of bad translations "destroy the norms of the [Ukrainian] language," and that the jargon of such translations "has become a sickness of the original literature and of the Ukrainian literary language in general."48 No doubt, patriotically minded, cultured Ukrainians will react against the new assaults on their mother tongue and try to defend it from further decline. As for the Ukrainians who live abroad, the following should be said. Being alarmed at the shocking news of the undeclared attack on the non-Russian languages in the USSR, those who were fully aware of the gravity of the situation have described Moscow's efforts to strengthen the position of Russian in the nonRussian republics and the consequent measures taken by yes-men in Ukraine as “a new 'Valuyev' assault upon the Ukrainian language.''49 Such a comparison of the actual state of affairs in the Ukrainian

122

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

language to its status after the May 1863 prohibition by the Russian minister, P. Valuyev, against publishing Ukrainian books and scientific works can be used by subservient Soviet scholars as proof that “the Ukrainian anti-Soviet emigres" resort to crude falsifications.50 Indeed, even after the measures taken by Soviet authorities to foster the further dissemination of the Russian language in the Ukraine, nobody forbids the publishing of Ukrainian books and scientific works. On the contrary, in the Soviet Ukraine, yearly, many hundreds of Ukrainian books and scientific works still continue to appear. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of primary and secondary schools in the Ukrainian SSR are still Ukrainian-medium ones, and Ukrainian is still the language of the curricula in the republic's colleges of education and philological departments of the universities. From this point of view, the Ukrainian language in the USSR is in a much better position than, let us say, most of the minorities' languages in Western countries. This is why Soviet leaders and obedient scholars, as well as the "Ukrainian working-class emigres" and leftist scholars in Western countries, blame all those who talk about the decline of Ukrainian (and other non-Russian languages) in the USSR for falsifications of fact. And such an accusation seems as if it is justifiable. However, that accusation, on the part of Soviet leaders and obedient scholars, is ill-intentioned and unfounded at best on the part of Western people. First of all, the question is not if Ukrainian and the other non-Russian languages of the USSR are in better, or even much better, condition in comparison to the minorities' languages in foreign countries. According to the letter of the USSR constitution and the constitutions of the Union republics, the Ukrainian SSR, as well as the other non-Russian Union republics, are sovereign states, and the languages of their indigenous peoples should be compared to the languages of the majority peoples of foreign countries, both Western and Eastern. From this view, Ukrainian and the other languages should be compared, at least, with such, say, languages like Portuguese or Czech. Such a comparison will prove the lamentable condition of the Soviet non-Russian peoples' languages. Even Soviet scholars themselves offer us enough proof that the non-Russian languages in the USSR, including those of the basic populations of the Union republics, are being gradually supplanted in their most important social functions by Russian. Thus, in the early 1960s the Tatar writer, R. Mustafin, stated that "life itself has delimited the spheres of usage of Russian and the national languages," and that "in the field of science, technology, and industrial production,

The Party's National Policy

123

Russian dominates." The Moscow specialist on language problems, M. Isaev, has added that "this statement could be applied to each of other literary languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation."51 In the late 1960s, A. Agayev, another Soviet specialist on language problems, wrote that Russian collaborates with the non-Russian lan¬ guages in the USSR on the principle of The division of labor,' acting in different spheres of the peoples' social life," that it carries out for different peoples different social functions, and its functions sometimes may prevail over the functions of the native language."52 Agayev concluded: But, as far as the loan language remains 'a second native language, it cannot carry out and does not carry out the functions of an ethnic hallmark."53 The same Agayev then asserted that "in the full sense of the concept 'language community,' the Soviet Ukrain¬ ians do not have such a community since every eighth Ukrainian is Russian-speaking."54 This assertion was made in May 1966, and, in the following years, the process continued. According to the 1970 census, for each seventh Ukrainian in the USSR, the Ukrainian language had ceased to be the mother tongue, and, according to the 1979 census, already for each sixth Ukrainian, the language of his people ceased to be the mother tongue.55 In May 1959, at an all-Union conference on terminology, the "principle of minimal differences between Soviet literary languages,"56 the principle of unifying terminology on the basis "of a single source, ... the Russian language" was advanced.57 During the conference, scholars from the non-Russian republics expressed their concern that the enacting of such a principle would endanger the future of the non-Russian languages.58 V. Borkovski, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, tried to calm these scholars, to convince them that the principle referred to "minimal differences only in terminology, and only in borrowed terminology," and that the en¬ actment of the principle did not have to destroy the norms of the non-Russian languages.59 Meanwhile, talking about Turkish-Russian bilingualism, the Moscow professor, N. Baskakov, noted not only that Russian had and has wider social functions, but also that its influence "has radically changed the lexical structure of the Turkish languages."60 This was said at the end of the 1960s. In 1985, at an all-Union conference on "The Russian Language as a Means to Internationalist Education," it was stated that "the process of internationalization is the main tendency in the contemporary condition of the languages of Soviet peoples," and that this process leads "to the shaping of a

124

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

common word stock [obshchii leksicheskii fond] in the creation of which the most important role belongs to the Russian language. 61 Although, for objective and subjective reasons, the speed and form of the process of supplanting the languages of the non-Russian peoples by Russian may be different in one or another national-administrative formation of the USSR, the general tendency in absolutely all the Soviet republics is the same. This is the reason why the acceleration of this process has provoked such a sharp reaction from Ukrainians abroad, which does qualify the new efforts by Soviet authorities to further strengthen the position of the Russian language in the Ukraine as a "Valuyev" assault upon the Ukrainian language.

Notes, Chapter 3 1. B. Topornin, The New Constitution of the USSR (Moscow, 1980), p. 156. 2. Ibid., p. 261. 3. "Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Ukrainskoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki," Pravda Ukrainy, 21 April 1978. 4. B. Topornin, op. cit., p. 157. 5. Ibid. 6. Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (Moscow, 1977), p. 26. 7. B. Topornin, op. cit., p. 161. 8. L.-R. Wynar, "The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography in Soviet Ukraine: A Brief Overview," Nationalities Papers, vol. VII, no. 1 (1979), p. 16. The author uses the term "Russian Communist party" as a synonym for the CPSU. 9. A. Kundzich, "Perevodcheskaia mysl' i perevodcheskoe nedomyslie," Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda (Moscow, 1955), pp. 213-258. 10. A. Marinich et al., eds., Ukraina. Obshchii obzor. S. Kalesnik et al., eds., Sovetskii Soiuz. Geograficheskoe opisanie v 22-kh tomakh (Moscow, 1969). 11. P. Shelest', Ukraina nasha radianska (Kiev, 1970). 12. "Gimn Ukrains'koi RSR," Pravda Ukrainy, 26 March 1978. 13. B. Topornin, op. cit., p. 159. 14. M. Kulichenko, Natsia i sotsial'nyi progress (Moscow, 1983), p. 37. 15. See M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR. Problemy teorii i metodologii (Moscow, 1981), p. 50. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 54. 18. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 19. N. Mikeshin, History Versus Anti-History. A Critique of the Bourgeois Falsification of the Postwar History of the CPSU (Moscow, 1977), p. 110. 20. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 16 April 1978. 21. Pravda Ukrainy, 21 April 1978.

The Party's National Policy

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22. Ibid. 23. Pravda, 26 February 1976. 24. Ibid., 27 February 1986. 25. Pravda Ukrainy, 20 April 1978. 26. V. Shcherbitskyi, Izbrannye rechi i stati (Moscow, 1978) p. 553. 27. M. Mitin et al., eds., Razvitoi sotsializm i kirzis "sovetologii" (Moscow, 1982), p. 144. 28. Ibid., pp. 129-145. 29. See M. Kulichenko, op. cit., pp. 76-79. 30. Nationalities Papers, vol. XII, no. 2 (1984), p. 291. 31. V. Iurchuk, "Natkhnennik i organizator velikoi peremogi," Kommunist Ukraini, no. 5 (1985), pp. 22-32. 32. G. Glezerman, Classes and Nations (Moscow, 1980), p. 200. 33. Iu. Andropov, Shest’desiat' let SSSR (Moscow, 1982), p. 10. 34. V. Iurchuk, art. cit., p. 29. 35. A. Kapto, Klassovoe vospitanie: metodologia, teoria, praktika (Moscow, 1985). 36. V. Shinkaruk, "Sertsevina vikhovannia novoi liudini," Komunist Ukraini, no. 5 (1985), p. 93. 37. L. Brezhnev, O konstitutsii SSSR (Moscow, 1977), p. 39. 38. Pravda Ukrainy, 20 April 1978. 39. Pravda, 29, February 1976. 40. Naselenie SSSR. Po dannym vsesoiuznoi perepisi naselenia 1979 goda, (Moscow, 1980), p. 28. 41. Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, pp. 27-28. 42. Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Ukrainskoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki, Pravda Ukrainy, 21 April 1978. 43. B. Topornin, op. cit., p. 161. 44. A. Lisetskii, Voprosy natsional'noi politiki CPSS v usloviakh razvitogo sotsializma (po materialam Moldavskoi SSSR) (Kishinev, 1977), pp. 135, 139. 45. Iu. Andropov, op. cit., pp. 14-15. 46. Pravda, 27 May 1983. 47. O. Kundzich, Slovo i obraz. Literaturno-kritichni stati (Kiev, 1966), p.

202. 48. Ibid., p. 199. 49. "Nastup novitn'oi valuevshchini na ukrains' ku movu," Suchasnist, vol. 11 (271) (November 1983), pp. 91-99. 50. Ibid., p. 99. 51. M. Isaev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions (Moscow, 1977), p. 202. 52. A. Agaev, "Funktsia iazyka etnicheskogo priznaka," lazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), p. 137. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 127.

126

The Soviet Constitution and CPSU Program

55. Naselenie SSSR . . . , p. 23. 56. V. Vinogradov, "Vstupitel'noe slovo," Voprosy terminologii (Moscow, 1961), p. 9-10. 57. T. Bertagaev, Iu. Desheriev, M. Isaev et al„ "RoF russkogo iazyka v razvitii slovar'nogo sostava iazykov narodov SSSR," Voprosy terminologii, p. 43. 58. See Voprosy terminologii, pp. 142-143, 183. 59. V. Borkovskii, "Itogovoe vystuplenie na zakliuchitel'nom zasedanix plenuma," Voprosy terminologii, p. 221-222. 60. N. Baskakov, "Dvuiazychie i problema vzaimoproniknovenia razlichnykh urovnei pri vzaimodeistvii iazykov (na materiale tiurkskikh iazykov), R Azimov, Iu. Desheriev, F. Filin, eds., Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), p. 77. 61. Limba §i literatura moldovaneasca, vol. XXIX, no. 1 (1986), p. 75.

PART II

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

4 The National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

According to Soviet specialists in literature, "socialist realism" is the concept of Soviet literature, while partiinost' ("Party spirit"), as an essential component of this concept, "is the feature that marks off socialist realism from any other kind of realism."1 At the same time, a basic thesis of the proponents of socialist realism states that, in the USSR, mutual interaction and impact and enrichment of Russian and non-Russian literatures take place. Meanwhile, under the conditions existing in the Soviet Union, the partiinost' of a literary work was and is determined not so much by the way in which its social and class motifs and its representation of reality conform to the basic principles of the programs laid down by the country's ruling party. Rather, the factor that determines partiinost' is the extent to which it conforms to the aims pursued by the Party at any given stage. Thus, when Stalins cult of personality was flourishing in the USSR, works Soviet literary critics considered to be imbued with the spirit of partiinost' included novels such as E. Mal'tsev's From the Bottom of the Heart and S. Babaievski's Bearer of the Golden Star. In other words, novels in which the deeds of those totally subservient to Stalin's Communist party were praised. After Stalin's death, and in the wake of Khrushchev's unmasking off "the cult of personality and its consequences," partiinost’ in Soviet literature was identified with the representation in artistic images not only of the successes of the new party leadership and the new leader himself, but also of the blunders made by the Party under the leadership of its late dictator. After the "party overturn" effected by the Brezhnev group in October 1964, much of what obedient Soviet specialists in literature identified with the spirit of partiinost' in literary works during the decade of Khrushchev's rule was criticized by the new Kremlin rulers as the 129

130

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

fruit of “subjectivist and voluntarist management/' contradicting the principles of the Communist party. According to obedient Soviet literary intelligentsia, partiinost', as an element that defines the ideological worth of a creative literary work, is closely connected to the author's conception of man and the world, with what is called the “class position of the writer" in Soviet literary science. Soviet literary critics see the latter, like the partiinost' of a literary work, to be inextricably linked with Moscow's past and present great power policies. The Ukrainian scholar M. Braichevski's stated “all concrete phe¬ nomena that have occurred in the history of the Ukraine, whether events, tendencies, the activity of individuals or these individuals themselves, have been evaluated according to their position vis-a-vis Russia and not according to their social class content. If anyone advocated the concept of 'reunification,' he received favorable criticism, regardless of all other factors. If someone cast doubt on this idea or [G-d forbid] took part in an anti-Russian, anti-tsarist liberation struggle, he was labeled as a 'loathsome traitor,' 'enemy henchman,' and 'bitterest enemy,' this also regardless of his class position and social program."2 This reflects the predominant tendencies of Soviet historiography not only of the Ukraine, but of all other non-Russian Soviet republics. This statement can also be applied to the history of literature of all non-Russian administrative-political formations of the USSR without exception. Thus, Ion Druta, Soviet Moldavia's greatest modern writer, was repeatedly criticized by specialists in literature for his lack of a class position.3 At the same time however, the author's concept of man and the world, as expressed in his works, does not contradict the principles declared in the program documents of the USSR's ruling Communist party. In Druta's works, the author's prevailing position contradicts not these principles, but Moscow's policy of isolating the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia from the language, literature, and history of the Romanian people. This reflects the Moldavian writer's national, rather than class, position, a position directed by his asides against Moscow's great power policies and practices. Thus, the criterion for judging the partiinost' of literary works and their authors' class position is, in fact, based on the need to reflect, in artistic images, the policies conducted by Moscow's successive rulers, and the subordination of the national interests of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR to the goals at which these policies are directed. The leadership of the Communist party assigned an important role in achieving this by glorifying everything Russian. Academician Grekov's proposition, formulated in 1945, that, "a source,

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

131

whatever it may be, can be useful only when the researcher himself really knows what he wants from it,” served and serves as a guide for bestowing praise on the Russian people in Soviet historiography.4 As the Kazakh writer, O. Suleimenov, noted, Soviet history "obediently revealed only what it was expected to reveal” by using this method.5 In practice, this signifies that Russian historians in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities of the RSFSR, Russian historians who live and work in non-Russian Soviet republics, and also historians from the indig¬ enous population of these republics are required to defend, in their works, the national interests of the Russian people, as they are understood by the USSR's communist leadership. It also signifies that historians from among the non-Russian Soviet nationalities must sacrifice their own peoples' interests, their national pride, and national self-respect on the altar of Russian national interests. In varying ways and to a varying extent, similar demands are made of all Soviet citizens of science and literature. At the same time, the authorities constantly encourage the elaboration of these that might serve to soothe the conscience of non-Russian national figures. The current slogan of the interaction and mutual enrichment of the literatures of the Soviet peoples can be related to such theses in the field of literature, for example. Thus, the well-known Soviet specialist in literature, L. Timofeev, writes that Soviet literature is based "on the interaction of all the literatures of the country's nationalities.”6 The real state of affairs in Soviet literature, however, testifies to one-sided influence by Russian literature on non-Russian literatures. As much as the former enriches the latter, so does it corrupt them into obediently serving the interests and the goals pursued by the Communist party. As part of its policy toward nationalities, the CPSU constantly encourages the development of non-Russian Soviet republics into multinational formations. Consequently, whole detachments of Russian and Russian-speaking writers, and Russian-language literary-artistic magazines have appeared in these republics. The works of these writers are an essential part of the USSR's all-Russian literature, which is not subject to the influence of corresponding national, nonRussian literatures. It is safe to say that there is not one work of the Soviet specialists in literature that has not somehow touched on the question of the influence of Russian on the non-Russian literatures of the USSR. Writers and literary critics speak of the influence both of classical and Soviet literature as a whole, and individual representatives of Russian literature in the literatures of the country's non-Russian nationalities.

132

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

The one-sided influence of Russian literature on all other national literatures of the USSR is a general Soviet phenomenon. Writers and literary critics in Soviet Moldavia, for example, note the influence of Nekrasov on Andrei Lupan, Chekhov on Ion Drufa, Maiakovski on Emilian Bucov, and Gorki on the whole of Moldavian literature. Individual and collective researches have been devoted to the subject.7 There is not a single line in the works of all these writers and literary critics, however, which mentions the influence of Moldavian literature as a whole, classical and modern, on Russian literature. Neither is any mention made of the influence of Moldavian writers, if not on Russian writers as a whole, then at least on those Russian writers who live and work in Soviet Moldavia. The latter, like the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of people of non-Moldavian extraction, who arrived and settled in the republic in the postwar period, have no need at all to learn the literature or even the language of its indigenous population. "The unswerving course toward the convergence of nations and nationalities," as a constantly repeated slogan of the CPSU's national policy, is, in fact, based not on mutual confluence, but on creating the conditions for the assimilation and, in the final account, absorption of all the non-Russian nationalities, together with their cultures, languages, and literatures by the Russian people.8 In corroboration of their thesis that Soviet literature is "a concord of fraternal literatures, mutually connected, interacting and mutually enriching on the basis of the experience of building socialism and communism," obedient Soviet specialists in literature assert that "each national literature makes its own contribution to the treasure house of the spiritual values of the Soviet people as a whole."9 Meanwhile, the main criteria for determining the value of literary works in the eyes of the Soviet authorities are partiinost' and the way in which the author's social-class position are reflected within them. Obedient literary critics recognize as belonging to "the treasure house of the spiritual values of the Soviet people as a whole," those works that answer these requirements as they are understood by the Communist party. As far as non-Russian Soviet writers are concerned, such an attitude to their work signifies that it is appraised, for the most part, not according to its literary-artistic qualities, but by ideological con¬ siderations and by the successive and final goals pursued by the CPSU in its national policy. The only literary works written by representatives of the indigenous population of the non-Russian republics that conform to the ideological considerations and goals of the CPSU are those that are shown, in

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

133

one way or another, to have glorified the Russian people, their language, literature, culture, and history, their decisive role in the revolutionary movement, in establishing Soviet power, in the wars of tsarist and Soviet Russia, in the building of socialism, and the development and prosperity of the country's non-Russian peoples and nationalities, etc. All works in which non-Russian Soviet writers praise, in one way or another, their own peoples' culture, languages, literatures, and their past and present achievements are proved to be in contradiction with the above-mentioned ideological considerations and goals if they fail to simultaneously emphasize the positive influence of everything Russian on the historical destiny of these peoples. Their works receive even fiercer condemnation if they reveal that the Russians fought against these nations as enemies on successive occasions in the course of history. Conforming literary critics present a spirit of subservience to Moscow and everything Russian as a manifestation of the interna¬ tionalist spirit inherent in Soviet multinational literature. At the same time, non-Russian Soviet writers' idealization of their peoples' historical past, glorification of their national heroes, and the like are subject to criticism. According to one such literary critic, "Patriotism without socialist internationalism leads unavoidably to a catastrophic narrow¬ ing, to the decay of patriotic consciousness, and to the betrayal of patriotism by deceitful and dangerous nationalist chimerae.10 According to the interpretation of patriotism as being conditioned by interna¬ tionalism, non-Russian writers should actually educate their readers in the spirit of Russian great power aspirations and ideals as they are understood by the CPSU's ideologists. The following statement made by Ivan Bodiul, who was Moscow's creature in Soviet Moldavia for two decades, serves as an example of what this requirement signifies in reality: "Particularly dear to us are the works produced during the period of the revolutionary movement in Bessarabia, in the difficult years of the underground and in the years when Soviet power was being established.11 True to the principles of socialist realism, their authors reflect the interests and the hopes of the Moldavian people. These books will always serve as a symbol of partiinost' and narodnost' ["folk character"] of literature, [and] as a model of writers' fulfillment of their lofty civic and patriotic duty."12 The sense that Bodiul conveyed in the concept of "lofty civic and patriotic duty" obviously stems from his address to the plenum of the Central Committee of the Moldavian communist organization in February 1967. In connection with the decline in Soviet-Romanian relations in the mid-1960s and the strengthening, in connection with

134

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

this decline, of pro-Romanian sentiments among the national intel¬ ligentsia and students of Soviet Moldavia, Bodiul spoke at the plenum of the supposedly eternal longing "of the Moldavian people for reunification with the Russian state," and declared that "children and future generations must know full well that their fathers could not conceive of life outside Russia."13 Conformist Soviet Moldavian writers make pronouncements that fully fit the position stated above. Thus, at the Sixth Republican Congress of the Writers' Union in April 1981, its first secretary, Pavel Botu, declared that the writer's task is "an essential part of the Party's work in educating the new man," that literary works "which chro¬ nologically reflect more distant historical themes" are only relevant if their problems "are linked with the present," and their authors work "to actively respond to current problems." Together with this, he noted as gratifying (in his words) the tendency, observable in the modern Moldavian novel, to broaden the choice of themes, even to the extent of encompassing "the common destiny of fellow countrymen and all Soviet citizens within the bounds of that geographic, spiritual and economic expanse which bears the name of the Soviet mother¬ land."14 The foregoing material is evidence that the proponents of the Communist party's policy toward Moldavian literature are not guided solely by the directives contained in the report to the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU. The directives state that Communists are "against tendencies directed at an artificial obliteration of national peculiarities," but, at the same time, they consider "an artificial exaggeration [of such peculiarities—M.B.] to be unacceptable," seeing their own "sacred duty" to be in "educating the working people in the spirit of Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism," and in the spirit "of belonging to one great Soviet motherland."15 The proponents of the CPSU policy know where lies the real sense of these directives. They know that protests that the CPSU is "against tendencies directed at the artificial obliteration of national peculiarities"16 are an essential part of the theory, developed in the USSR, of national relations.17 They know that this theory serves Moscow as a means for drawing a veil over the fact that its aim of educating the nonRussian population" in the spirit of belonging to one great Soviet motherland" is, in reality, based on stepping up the obliteration of their national particuliarities and on transforming, ultimately, all said and done, the country's entire population into a single Russianspeaking nation, with literature, science, and culture all being in the Russian language.

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

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This all characterizes the development of literature not only in Soviet Moldavia. Quoting the statement of the well-known Soviet Kazakh writer, Mukhtar Auezov, that "the spiritual homeland of the contemporary Kazakh writers is Soviet Russia," the authors of one of the main papers read at an all-Union conference on the problem of "Conformity in the Development of National Languages in Con¬ nection with the Development of Socialist Nations," then added the following: "Each writer's own culture, his education and the creative development of his whole being are inextricably bound up with Russian culture. For many of our readers, Russian is as much a mother tongue as Kazakh. . . . The influence of the Russian language and Russian literature is strongly expressed in the thought, feelings, speech, metaphors and choice of words of every Soviet Kazakh writer."18 The directives contained in the program adopted by the CPSU in 1961 that say "manifestations of national aloofness in the education and employment of workers of different nationalities in the Soviet republics are impermissible" have, in successive years, had wide repercussions in the works of Soviet authors in which questions of national relations are examined or touched on in one way or another.19 With the passage of time, this provision in the CPSU's program has been transformed, in the work of proponents of the CPSU national policy, into a clearly expressed tendency. This tendency is essentially directed against the relative privileges enjoyed in the non-Russian republics of the USSR by representatives of the various peoples and nationalities after whom these national-administrative political for¬ mations were named. Professor A. Lisetski of the University of Kishinev defended the position that "equality can also be manifested in inequality," in the sense that "there is no need at all for observing the principle of strict proportionality, corresponding to the specific [demographic] weight of the basic ethnic groups composing the population in any elective, administrative, public or economic body."20 At the same time, he affirmed that "there still persist survivals of national narrow-mind¬ edness in cadre policy," and that "often major importance is attached to national factors in the selection of cadres, without due account being taken of political and professional qualities. Lisetski expounded on his argument by writing that, "in the strict sense of the word, the indigenous inhabitants of the Union and autonomous republics do not only include representatives of the nationalities who gave a name to their national statehood," and that "an approach to evaluating the worth of cadres that only takes into account their belonging to

136

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

the indigenous nationality can . . . upset the national sentiments of specialists from other nationalities."21 Such a defense of the nonindigenous populations of the USSR's non-Russian republics in the work of Russian, basically Soviet, re¬ searchers on the theory of nation and national relations amounts to a nihilistic approach to the national statehood of the non-Russian nations and nationalities. This approach is a counterweight to the idea of broadening the rights of the non-Russian administrativepolitical formations, which is found in the works of researchers who are mostly of non-Russian extraction; it is a counterbalance to these non-Russian scholars' idealization and immortalization of the national statehood of their own peoples. As early as the late 1960s, Soviet Russian specialists wrote that the national statehood of the non-Russian peoples of all the Union republics would be developed into autonomous republics (that is, by the loss of their status under the constitution as sovereign states), as takes place in the USSR a process of "ethnic merging of peoples and nations."22 As if expounding this proposition, another Soviet Russian scholar pointed out a little earlier, that the merging of nations "will take place in the foreseeable future."23 Although processes that are actually taking place in the USSR and the aim pursued by Moscow in its national policy lie at the root of such formulae—elaborated by Soviet authors—these formulae were contested by the advocates of this policy who are closest to the CPSU leadership because such formulae corroborated more far-reaching processes of ethnic transformation and linguistic assimilation among the non-Russian populations. Moscow, however, still considered it inopportune to initiate appropriate legislation for the state-adminis¬ trative and national-political reorganization of the country. Therefore, the communist authorities did not agree with the proposals raised during the discussion of the draft format of the constitution of the USSR in 1977 "to abolish Union and autonomous republics."24 They declared that "there is no need to introduce any fundamental changes in the structure of the Soviet socialist statehood."25 The preservation of the existing structure of Soviet statehood for the country's non-Russian peoples in no way signifies that the com¬ munist authorities have turned away from speeding up the ethnic transformation and linguistic assimilation of these peoples or from the systematic emasculation of national, non-Russian content from their respective forms of statehood. In keeping with all this, Lisetski's previously mentioned statement refers to those who should be considered as indigenous inhabitants

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

137

of the Union and autonomous republics. The essential meaning of this statement can be found in the text of the constitution of the Moldavian SSR, which was adopted in 1978. Not only does this text completely fail to mention the ethnonym of the republics indigenous inhabitants, the Moldavians, but also clearly expresses the proposition that the administrative-territorial formation named after them belongs not to them but to "the people of the Moldavian SSR. The preamble says: "The people of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic proclaim this constitution." It contains an addition that is notable in the present context in comparison to the text of the draft constitution published on 21 March 1978. This addition states, "The working people of Moldavia, true to V. I. Lenin's behest defended the achievements of the great October rev¬ olution and acquired socialist statehood owing to the immense help of the great Russian people and other peoples ... of the country."26 The addition of such an apology for the Russian people (in the complete absence of any mention of the Moldavian people in the text of the constitution) and the supposition that the working people of Moldavia (and not the Moldavian people) defended the achievements of the revolution" and "acquired socialist statehood" serves as an indicator that the denationalization of the east Pruthian Moldavians has acquired constitutional status. It should also be added that the use of such wording proves that the communist authorities' policies are aimed at depriving the names of the non-Russian republics of the USSR of their national color and changing them into the usual geographical terminology. Evidence that this is occurring throughout the USSR can be found in works of Muscovite scholars who stress the need to "better satisfy the needs of the nonindigenous populations of the Union and au¬ tonomous republics."27 A leading article of the monthly magazine, Sovetskaia etnografiia (Soviet Ethnography), based on the proceedings of the June 1983 plenum of the CPSU CC remarked that "the peculiarities of development and the requirements in the field of language, culture and everyday life of the nonindigenous population groups in the republics need in-depth studies."28 The author of an article published in the same issue of Sovetskaia etnografiia, Iu. Bromlei, mentioned "the national aspects of providing genuine equality," and that the 26th Congress of the CPSU laid down the task of "consistently implementing this principle in relation to representatives of the nonindigenous nationalities who live in all the republics."29 The real state of affairs behind the "anxiety" (constantly increasing in recent years) shown by the Communist party of the USSR and

138

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

proponents of its policy over representatives of the nonindigenous nationalities in non-Russian Soviet republics is, in fact, based on the Soviet authorities having launched of a broad campaign for further reinforcing the position of the Russian segment of the population in these republics, and of the Russian languge, literature, and culture. The content of Bromlei's article is evidence that what is spoken of is not the provision of "genuine equality" for the nationalities of the non-Russian republics, but the systematic strengthening among them of the Russian element in every facet of life. Thus, while indicating that "the study of ethnolinguistic processes is an important aspect of ethnographic activity," Bromlei simultaneously emphasized that "lan¬ guage policy has not only a sociocultural, but also a production significance." He stressed that, "in conditions of improvement of developed socialism, there is a growing role for the intensive study" of the Russian language as a necessary means of intranational com¬ munication among all the peoples of the USSR.30 At the same time, on the subject of the growing proportion in the population of the whole country of nonindigenous people, living in non-Russian Soviet republics, he remarked that, "in 1979, the number of people who are not indigenous inhabitants of Union and autonomous republics was 55 million," that is, nearly 20 percent of the population of the USSR.31 Alluding to the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU's emphasis that "such nonindigenous peoples [have their] specific needs in the areas of language, culture and everyday life," Bromlei called on Soviet ethnographers "to study these needs."32 Noting, at the same time, as a positive phenomenon the fact "over the space of two decades, between the census of 1959 and the census of 1979, the number of people with a full command of Russian grew from 76% to 82% of the population of the whole country," he expressed concern over the unevenness "in the increase in the multinational character of the republics."33 The author revealed exactly why the proponents of the CPSU's national policy were concerned. Although, "over the past twenty years, nearly five million Russians migrated beyond the bounds of the RSFSR," he wrote, "in certain republics, mainly those of the south, their demographic ration fell, either in relative or even in absolute terms."34 The wording of Soviet documents of recent years, and its reflection and development in the works of obedient Soviet historians, specialists in literature, and ethnographers, as well as data cited in these works and documents, testify to a broad-front assault aimed at further depriving the non-Russian Soviet peoples and nationalities of their

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

139

national identity, accelerating their ethnic transformation, and merging them into a single Russian-speaking nation in the future. The positions worked out by Soviet proponents of the language policy and the language situation in the non-Russian republics of the USSR reflect, more saliently than anything else, the gulf between the Communist party's slogans and the linguistic processes unfolding in the country in the wake of the policy conducted by the Party toward the non-Russian nationalities. Thus, the essential point of the most ubiquitous slogans that is constantly repeated in the works of loyal Soviet historians, philosophers, theorists of literature, and especially linguists, is that Russian-non-Russian bilingualism, which is being encourged in every way possible by the communist authorities, leads to interaction between and mutual enrichment of the languages spoken by the peoples of the USSR. This propaganda device is used as the heading for books and lectures, and as the title of scientific confer¬ ences.35 Meanwhile, the facts as presented in the works of Soviet authors speak of quite a different state of affairs. Thus, Iu. Desheriev, N. Corlateanu, and I. Protchenko, the authors of the main paper at an all-Union conference, were obliged to recognize that, in the USSR, "voices resound denying that there is mutual enrichment of languages," that there are Soviet specialists who "assert that the Russian literary language is not being enriched by borrowings from the languages of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR."36 Although the authors of the paper did not identify with these assertions and, on the contrary, declared them to be mistaken, their paper contains proof that such assertions are quite well founded. They announced, for example, that Russian "has been enriched and continues to be enriched by useful borrowings from other language," and affirmed that "not only etymological Russian dictionaries, but also modern linguistic practice, which gives many examples of Russian borrowings from the languages of other peoples of the USSR, are proof of the strong linguistic ties between the Russian people and other peoples."37 But the borrowings they gave as examples of the enrichment of Russian by non-Russian languages are, in actual fact, the result of linguistic processes that occurred mainly in past centuries. Russian borrowings from only two languages, those of the indigenous populations of Bessarabia and of Ukraine were mentioned in Desheriev, Corlateanu, and Protchenko's paper. The groundlessness of their assertions, in contrast to other Soviet specialists' assertions that, at present, "the Russian literary language is not being enriched by borrowings from the languages of the peoples of the USSR," is revealed in their paper by the fact that they themselves

140

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

consider it necessary to remark, for example, that "the influence of Russian on the Chechen language cannot be compared with the influence of Chechen on the Russian language, if it is possible to speak of any such influence at all."38 Thus, they at least recognized that not all non-Russian languages have an influence on Russian. A special paper entitled "The Development and Enrichment of the Russian Language by Borrowings from the Languages of the Peoples of the USSR" was read at the same conference. The statements contained in this and other papers read at the conference, as well as the linguistic data contained in them, however, bore witness to the enormous and almost exclusively one-sided influence of Russian on the non-Russian languages during the Soviet period. Thus, dividing the borrowings from other languages in Russian into five historical periods, the Soviet authors remarked that such words as piala, parandzha, ketmen, aryk, chaikhara, kishlak, aksakal, basmach, karagach, made their way into the Russian language in the Soviet period.39 Not only the paucity of borrowings during the Soviet period, compared to others, but also the fact that many of them entered Russian in the last century (for example Lermontov's Sukhie vetvi karagacha bili menia po litsu ("The dry branches of the karagach struck me about the fact") shows that it is scarcely possible to speak of the non-Russian languages having any influence on Russian at all. What is more, the examples given by the authors of borrowings during the Soviet period refer to the specific realities (phenomena, objects, etc., connected with a particular people, which usually are transferred to other languages in full or partial transliteration).40 The systematic supplanting of the non-Russian languages has reached the extent that, of the 130 languages spoken in the USSR, there are now "more than sixty in which no printed material is published."41 Proponents of the CPSU's language policy write that the reason for this situation is "the reluctance of small nationalities to produce or preserve their national writing any longer, and to publish literature and periodicals in their national language." Soviet specialists write that such reluctance by small nationalities "is also characteristic of their intelligentsia."42 The same source states, however, that "the role of the national languages is growing," that the latter are reaching new heights in their enrichment and development," and the rising of one of the languages "as a means of international communication is not happening by pushing aside the others."43 Official Soviet data, according to which the publication of books in Russian has grown by 320.8 percent between 1940 and 1979, while, for the same period, the figure for the publication of books in non-

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

141

Russian languages grew by only 137 percent, prove how groundless are assertions such as those mentioned above.44 It should be added that the very modest growth in the publication of non-Russian books, compared to the growth in Russian books, is heavily exaggerated. This is because that increase cannot be accounted for by a real demand for the literature in the mother tongue of the non-Russian population. The Soviet specialist, Desheriev, acknowledged that, in the autonomous republics, national regions, and districts, sociopolitical and scientifictechnical literature is being published "without regard for the social functions fulfilled by the respective languages," and that, consequently, "all this literature is gathering dust in shops and stores," and "much resources and efforts are wasted needlessly, without any social ne¬ cessity."45 However, all this is happening in the Union republics too.46 The dissemination in the national (non-Russian) Soviet republics of non-Russian-Russian bilingualism, on the one hand, and the Russiannon-Russian one, on the other, gives most relevant evidence of the essence and the goals of the CPSU national policy. Soviet specialists in the field, doing the best they can to prove that bilingualism among the Russian inhabitants of the non-Russian republics is a phenomenon of significant proportions, are forced to declare that the Soviet censuses' figures are not trustworthy. Thus, M. Guboglo asserts that "the real scale of the Russian population's bilingualism, especially in the Union republics, is obviously under¬ stated." He contends, for example, that, "according to the 1970 census data, 11.1 percent of Russians spoke fluent Russian in the cities of Soviet Moldavia," while "the real scale of Russians' bilingualism was much more larger," namely 52.1% of the Russian inhabitants of the cities, i.e., 4.7 times more than according to the census records."47 Guboglo adds that the same 1970 census indicated that "only 19.0% of the Russian inhabitants of Belorussia spoke fluent Belorussian," while, in fact, "in the mid-seventies, 78.2% of Russians living in the cities of the Belorussian SSR spoke, to a certain degree, Belorussian."48 "In other words," he says, "it can be supposed that the census 'understated' the real scale of Russian-Belorussian bilingualism in the Belorussian SSR no less than fourfold."49 It seems probable that Guboglo's criticism of the census question¬ naires will not be set aside at the next census. In that sense, according to the questionnaires, Soviet citizens will answer both if they fluently speak a second language and they understand it. The opportunity for Soviet specialists to discuss, in this way, the matter of Russian bilingualism in the non-Russian Union republics came quite recently, under the so-called glasnost'. In 1986, Iu. Bromlei emphasized that

242

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

"an important aspect of the language problem is connected with the Russians' and other nonindigenous nationalities' mastering of the languages of the indigenous inhabitants of the republics. "This," he wrote, "improves personal contacts and contributes to the adaptation to the ethnically different environment."50 However, the previous census records constantly show a very low level of mastering by Russians of the indigenous inhabitants' languages in the national (non-Russian) republics of the USSR. Records from the two last censuses, which were reproduced by Guboglo, show that, on average, only 4.7 percent of the Russian inhabitants of the non-Slavic Union republics of the USSR fluently spoke the language of the indigenous populations of these republics in 1970, and only 5.3 percent in 1979.51 Moreover, the same records bore witness that, in the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Moldavian SSR, the average was 18.7 percent in 1970, and 19.2 percent in 1979. And these because, until mid-1940, the former three republics were independent states, and the latter was a constituent part of an independent state, so that understanding the official languages of these states was necessary to their Russian inhabitants at one time. On the other hand, in such Soviet national republics as the Kirghiz, the Tadjik, the Turkmen, the Kazakh, and the Uzbek SSR, the average was 2.06 percent in 1979. The main goal of Guboglo's article was to hide somehow that, as a rule, Russian inhabitants of the national administrative-territorial formations of the USSR do not need to know the languages of the indigenous populations of these territories. In order to keep up appearances that the scale of the Russians' bilingualism in the nonRussian republics is significant, this author resorts, as an important factor, to the circumstances that the curriculum of Russian-medium schools in each Soviet republic includes the study of the language of its indigenous population. As a matter of fact, however, in the Russian-medium schools of the non-Russian republics, the indigenous population's language is a minor subject, so that one can hardly say that graduates are bilingual. In such circumstances, one can speak about a smattering of some words and phrases in the national language, but not about bilingualism. Indeed, the same author is forced to assert that, as regards the languages of the indigenous nationalities, "[any] advance was the least remarkable. Moreover, in the republics' scientific publications, even a mention that there is a necessary, well-reasoned, persuasive, and purposeful propaganda for the study of the indigenous nationality's language can seldom be found."52 Just because truly Russian-non-

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

143

Russian bilingualism in the national Soviet republics is so low-keyed, Guboglo states in his article: "As [the authorities] take steps to create auspicious conditions for mastering Russian, to the same degree, it is right to raise the question of creating suitable conditions for the mastering of the language of the nation, which gave its name to a Union republic, by the latter's nonindigenous inhabitants, including Russians."53 Guboglo's conclusion that an increased mastery of the languages of the non-Russian nations is necessary for Russian inhabitants of the national republics by means of "broadcasting lessons by radio and TV, of courses in the national languages of the non-Russian republics' indigenous population, publication of phrase books, training appliances and so on," is, in itself, of deep significance.54 It figures in an article published in 1987, and this is a sure sign that the enormous discrepancy between the non-Russian-Russian bilingualism, on the one hand, and the Russian-non-Russian bilingualism, on the other, in the national republics of the USSR, destroys so many slogans of the proponents of the CPSU national and language policies.

Notes, Chapter 4 1. M. Hayward, "The Decline of Socialist Realism," Survey, vol. 18, no. 1 (82) (1972), pp. 74-75. 2. M. Braichevskii, "Prisoedinenie ili vossoedinenie. Kriticheskie zamechania po povodu odnoi kontseptsii," Natsional'nyi vopros v SSSR. Sbornik dokumentov (Suchasnist, 1975), p. 73. 3. See I. Racul, "Pravda zhizni i pozitsia pisatelia," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 25 June 1965; L. Aninsky, "Un element esential al prozei," Nistrul, no. 4 (1959), p. 129; M. Novokhatskii, "Na uroven' vremeni," Kodry, no. 6 (1973), p. 146; A. Mereuta, "Podderzhat' zolotom dostovernosti Sovietskaia Moldavia, 19 February 1977; etc. 4. B. Grekov, Kievskaia Rus' (Moscow, 1945), p. 21. 5. O. Suleimenov, Az i ia. Kniga blagonamerennogo chitatelia (Alma-Ata, 1975), p. 173. 6. L. Timofeev, "Na puti k tvorcheskomu edinstvu," Velikii Oktiabr' i mirovaia literatura (Moscow, 1967), pp. 45-46. 7. See V. Shvachin, Maiakovskii i moldavskaia liricheskaia poezia. 1924-1960. (Kishinev, 1964); G. Bogaci, S. Cibotaru, (eds., M. Gorki §z cultura moldoveneasca (Kishinev, 1968); S. Panzaru, "Gor'kovskie motivy i obrazy v tvorchestve moldavskikh pisatelei," Vostochnoslaviansko-vostochnoromanskie iazykovye, literaturnye ifol’klornye sviazi. Tezisy dokladov i soobshchenii mezhduzovskoi nauchnoi konferentsii. 11-16 oktiabria 1966g. (Chernovitz, 1966); V. Coroban, "Gorkii is moldavskaia sovetskaia literatura," Moldavsko-russko-ukrainskie literaturnye i

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

144

fol'klornye sviazi, vypusk 2 (Kishinev, 1967); C. Popovici et al., eds., Moldavskorussko-ukrainskie literaturnye sviazi nachala XX veka. 1901-1917 (Kishinev, 1982); G. Lomidze et al., eds., Puti khudozhestvennykh iskanii sovremennoi sovetskoi literatury (Kishinev, 1982); etc. 8. See Materialy plenuma tsentral'nogo komiteta KPSS.14-15 iunia (1983g. (Moscow, 1983), p. 17. 9. S. Cibotaru, "Niti dukhovnogo rodstva," Kodry, no. 12 (1982), p. 137. 10. G. Lomidze, "Patriotizm §i internationalizm," Nistru, no. 1 (1970), p.

120. 11. Only completely uninspired literary attempts of the period of “the establishment of Soviet power" (by Dumitru Milev, Ion Canna, and others) can serve as "a model of partinost' and fulfillment of patriotic duty," in the sense given to these concepts in Bodiul's statements. Neither works relating to "the period of the revolutionary movement" (in Bodiul's statements, that is, those works written up until 1917 when Bessarabia was part of the Russian Empire), nor those works that appeared in "the difficult years of the under¬ ground" (in the same context, from 1918 to 1940 when Bessarabia was part of Romania) can serve as “a model of partinost' and fulfillment of patriotic duty" in the sense of the above-mentioned statements. The works of the authors alluded to by Bodiul were, in the first case (up until 1917), permeated not with blind praise of everything Russian, but with concern over the authors' people who were enslaved by the Russian state, with calls to fight against the oppressors, and with love for their language, traditions, and national values. In the second case (from 1918 to 1940), the works alluded to by Bodiul (those of Emilian Bucov, Andrei Lupan, and others) were not full of motifs in keeping with Moscow's designs on Bessarabia or with echoes of statements by the Moscow-directed communist underground that the east Prutian Moldavians were a separate nation with their own language, which differs from Rumanian, but, rather, contained protests against the system as it was in Rumania and calls to fight against this system. 12. Cultura, no. 20, 15 May 1971. 13. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 16, February 1967. 14. P. Botu, "Literatura sovietica moldoveneasca—cronicar §i constructor al vietii noi," Nistru, no. 6 (1981), pp. 123-124, 127-128. 15. Materialy XXVI s'ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1981), p. 57. 16. Official acknowledgment that such tendencies exist in the USSR is in itself remarkable. To borrow from Soviet terminology, such an acknowledgment serves as evidence of the presence of great power and chauvinistic tendencies in the USSR. 17. See M. Kulichenko, Natsia i sotsial'nyi progress (Moscow, 1983), pp. 172-190. 18. E. Akhunzianov, P. Skorin, N. Tereshchenko, A. Feoktistov, L. Pok¬ rovskaia, "Russkii iazyk—odin iz osnovnykh istochnikov razvitia i obogashchenia iazykov narodov SSSR," in N. Baskakov et al., eds., Vzaimodeistvie i vzaimoobogashchenie iazykov narodov SSSR (Moscow, 1969), p. 78.

National Question and Language Policy in the USSR

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19. Programma KPSS (Moscow, 1973), p. 116. 20. A. Lisetskii, Voprosy natsional'noi politiki KPSS v usloviakh razvitogo sotsializma (Po materialam Moldavskoi SSR) (Kishinev, 1977), pp. 138-199. 21. Ibid., p. 140-141. 22. I. Kislitsyn, Voprosy teorii i praktiki federativnogo stroitel'stva Soiuza SSSR. (Perm', 1969), pp. 119, 184. 23. P. Semenov, "Natsia i natsional'naia gosudarstvennost' v SSSR," Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1966), p. 81. 24. L. Brezhnev, O Konstitutsii SSSR. Doklady i vystuplenia (Moscow, 1977), p. 39. 25. Ibid., p. 19. 26. See Sovetskaia Moldavia, 16 April, 1978. 27. M. Kulichenko, op. cit., p. 179. 28. Sovetskaia etnografia, no. 6 (1983), p. 6. 29. Iu. Bromlei, "O nekotorykh aktual'nykh zadachakh etnograficheskogo izuchenia sovremennosti," Sovetskaia etnografia, no. 6 (1983), p. 14. 30. Ibid., p. 20. 31. Ibid., p. 21. 32. Ibid., p. 14. 33. Ibid., p. 21. 34. Ibid. 35. See Iu. Desheriev, Zakonomernosti razvitia i vzaimodeistvia iazykov v sovetskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1966); I. Beloded, Iu. Desheriev, M. Isaev, N. Corlateanu, "Voprosy vzaimodeistvia i vzaimoobogashchenia iazykov narodov SSSR," Vostochnoslaviano-moldavskie iazykovye vzaimootnoshenia (Kishinev, 1967); N. Baskakov, F. Filin, Iu. Desheriev, I. Protchenko, M. Mukharyamov, L. Makhmutova, M. Isaev, eds., Vzaimodeistvie i vzaimoobogashchenie iazykov narodov SSSR. Osnovnye protsessy vnutristrukturnogo razvitiatiurkskikh, finnougorskikh i mongol'skikh iazykov (Moscow, 1969); etc. 36. Iu. Desheriev, N. Corlateanu, I. Protchenko, "Osnovnye teoreticheskie i prakticheskie voprosy vzaimodeistvia i vzaimoobogashchenia iazykov na¬ rodov SSSR," in N. Baskakov et al., eds., Vzaimodeistvie i vzaimoobogashchenie iazykov narodov SSSR, p. 27-28. 37. Ibid., p. 33. 38. Ibid., p. 45. 39. N. Baskakov, V. Abaev, T. Bertagaev, E. Bokarev, I. Dobrodomov, V. Lytkin, S. Ozhegov, G. Izhakevich, "Razvitie i obogashchenie russkogo iazyka za schet zaimstvovanii iz iazykov narodov SSSR," in N. Baskakov et al., eds., Vzaimodeistvie i vzaimoobogashchenie iazykov narodov SSSR, p. 53. 40. A. Fedorov, Osnovy obshchei teorii perevoda. Lingvisticheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1968), p. 181. 41. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR. 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1968), p. 101. 42. Ibid., pp. 98-99. 43. Ibid., p. 110.

146

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

44. Ibid., p. 200. 45. Iu. Deseriev, "Problema funktsional'nogo razvitia iazykov i zadachi sotsiolingvistiki," lazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), p. 61. 46. M. Bruchis, One Step Back, Two Steps Forward. (Boulder, 1982), p. 17. 47. M. Guboglo, "Faktory i tendentsii razvitia dvuiazychia russkogo naselenia, prozhivaiushchego v soiuznykh respublikakh," Istoria SSSR, no. 2 (1987), p. 30. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Iu. Bromlei, "Sovershchenstvovanie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR," Kommunist, no. 8 (1986), p. 84. 51. M. Guboglo, art. cit., pp. 32, 35. 52. Ibid., p. 43. 53. Ibid. 54. G. Gamzatov, "Voprosy dvuiazychia v Dagestane," Izvestia Akademii nauk SSSR. Seria Literatury i lazyka, tom 42, no. 3 (1983), p. 251.

5 Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

Soviet specialists in the social sciences, basing themselves on the proposition in the program of the CPSU that “peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems does not imply weakening the ideological struggle/' severely criticize those Western authors who, in their works, cast light upon the shadowy aspects of theory and practice of the ruling party in the USSR.1 Statements by Western scholars that express doubts about the veracity of data contained in documents of the CPSU and about the accuracy of assumptions and conclusions based on these data, are rejected as totally unfounded inventions. Scholars of countries having the same social system as that of the Soviet Union are subject to no less severe attacks if, in their works, they contest directly or indirectly the theses and positions of Soviet authors. These Western scholars are termed bourgeois falsifiers, whereas the unfavored scholars and political leaders of socialist countries are qualified as revisionists, a no less pejorative term in the Soviet vocabulary (“the powers of international imperialism . . . leaning on the services of revisionists of various strains"),2 or by the contextual synonym other falsifiers (“ . . . to expose contemporary bourgeois and other falsifiers of history").3 The euphemism "other" is extracted from the materials of a scientific conference organized in November 1971 by the Moldavian Institute of Party History, together with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU. It was used to designate, in a concealed way, the historians of socialist Romania, who describe the "Bessarabian question" in a spirit contrary to the propositions laid down by Soviet historiography. In defining the events of early 1918 as the “forcible tearing away [by Romania] of Bessarabia," Soviet historians cannot, naturally, accept the fact that, "in various works by contemporary Romanian historians, this position is . . . doubted."4 147

148

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Moreover, beginning in the mid-1960s, this supposition is not only doubted, it is utterly rejected in a whole series of works by Romanian historians5 and in public speeches by the secretary general of the Romanian Communist party.6 Although, in the following years, the “Bessarabian question" did not bring about an open political confrontation on a national-Party level in Soviet-Romanian relations, it nevertheless continues to be felt in the substrata of these relations. The question emerges especially in some works of Romanian historians, and in all works of Soviet historians who make any mention of it. Some works by Romanian historians, which encompass the period around 1918, like the First World War (1979) and Toward a National Unity of the Romanian People, (1979), omit completely the Bessarabian events of the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918.7 However, other Romanian works covering this period do consider them. They present them in a way that leaves not the slightest doubt that the theses and propositions elaborated by Soviet historians regarding the Bessarabian question are, according to the authors of these Romanian works, nothing less than a gross falsification of the history of Bessarabia and its indigenous population, the east Prutian Romanians (Molda¬ vians). A comparison of the interpretation of this problem in two works both published in 1982, one in Bucharest and the other in Moscow, shows that, according to the position of Romanian scholars, the Soviet historians are to be considered as falsifiers—and vice versa. Thus, in the book Political Life in Romania, published in 1982 in English under the aegis of the Romanian Academy of Sciences (the Romanian original was published in 1976 and a French translation in 1978),8 the authors cite the passage in the official declaration of 27 March 1918 on the unification of the interfluvial territory of the Prut-Dniester with Romania, which states not only that Bessarabia was wrested more than one hundred years ago by Russia from the body of old Moldavia, but also that Bessarabia, “on the strength of historic right and the basis of the principle that nations must decide their own future, unites . . . forever with its motherland, Romania."9 The authors conclude that "the act of 27 March [1918], which crowned the struggle waged for more than a century by the Bessarabian Romanians to preserve their national entity [and] had a markedly progressive character, matched the laws of development of the modern Romanian nation."10 This statement sheds additional light on the depth of the rift between the position of modern Romanian histo-

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

149

riography regarding the Bessarabian question and the attitude of Soviet historiography. The following quotation from the History of the USSR, published in Moscow in 1982 and approved by the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education as a textbook for institutes of culture, demonstrates this rift: In 1940 the question of returning the territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the USSR was peacefully solved."11 Based on the premise that "Bessarabia was wrested from the Soviet motherland at the beginning of 1918, this statement reflects the position on the Bessarabian question that, in one form or another, is propounded by all Soviet authors.12 However, an analysis of the past history of the Prut-Dniester interfluvial territory and its indigenous population, as well as the facts and events at the beginning of 1918 (when Bessarabia became a part of the Romanian state) and in the middle of 1940 (when Bessarabia was incorporated into the Soviet Union), demonstrates the weakness of the Soviet position from the historical and juridical aspect of the Bessarabian question. In a book published in 1979, I dealt in detail with this question of dismemberment, when on 2 August 1940 the Union Moldavian SSR was formed, from Bessarabia and the autonomous Moldavian SSR (which had been created in 1924).13 Although, after the creation in 1924 of the autonomous republic, Soviet propaganda and the Bessarabian communist underground movment were invariably conducted with the slogan of uniting Bessarabia with that republic, in 1940, Moscow included in the newly formed Union Moldavian SSR only a part of the territories of Bessarabia and of the autonomous Moldavian republic. Moreover, this dismemberment, as attested by the facts brought up in the book, was effected by the USSR without any opinion poll, formal or otherwise, of the population of the annexed territory, and without any preliminary resolution on the part of the authorities of the autonomous Moldavian Republic, which in fact found itself liq¬ uidated. In their effort to conceal from the modern reader Moscow's arbitrary actions in creating the Union Moldavian Republic, the authors of the History of the USSR, intended as a textbook for students in institutes of culture, had to recur to outright falsifications. This point is confirmed not only by their statement that "the territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were returned to the USSR," but also by the declaration immediately following it that, "in order to meet the wishes of the working people of Bessarabia and Moldavia, the seventh session

150

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR promulgated in August 1940 the law on the creation of a Moldavian SSR."14 The Soviet ultimatum presented to Romania on June 1940 demanded Romania not to return Northern Bukovina, but to hand over this territory, on the pretext that its population is "in its overwhelming majority related to the Soviet Ukraine both by a common historical fate and by a common language and national composition," and on the additional pretext that such an act would "compensate for the enormous damages inflicted on the Soviet Union and the population of Bessarabia by 22 years of Romanian dominion there."15 The expression to hand over reveals that the territory of Northern Bukovina, which had never been a part of the Ukraine or Russia, was severed from Romania. That expression could not provide historical or legal justification for the action by the Soviet government, which accordingly substituted for it the term "return," which is adequate for the subsequently elaborated Soviet proposition of the "reunifi¬ cation" of northern Bukovina with the Soviet Union: "With the Soviet Union have also been reunited Bessarabia . . . and northern Bukovina";16 "in 1940, northern Bukovina was reunited with the Ukrainian SSR";17 "northern Bukovina has been reunited with the Soviet Ukraine";18 and "northern Bukovina has been reunited with the Soviet Ukraine and accepted into the USSR."19 To justify its claims to Bessarabia, Moscow resorted, in its ultimatum of 26 June 1940, to the pretense that, "in 1918 Romania, exploiting the military weakness of Russia, tore off by force from the Soviet Union [Russia] a part of its territory, Bessarabia, and thereby broke the age-long unity of Bessarabia, inhabited mainly by Ukrainians, with the Ukrainian Soviet Republic."20 Even the most obedient Soviet historians are compelled to repudiate the latter part of that quotation, the only one providing a historical and legal justification for the ultimatum. Thus, A. Lazarev, the author of a monograph on the Bessarabian question, writes, "It is sad that even in the note of V. M. Molotov to the royal government of Romania on 26 June 1940, Bessarabia was described as a territory 'inhabited mainly by Ukrain¬ ians,' which in no way corresponds to the factual national composition of the region's population."21 In justifying its demand for northern Bukovina by insisting that the population of the territory is "in its overwhelming majority related to the Soviet Ukraine both by a common historical fate and by a common language and national composition," Moscow exaggerated the proportion of the Ukrainian element in the population of the territory. Moreover, the reference in this ultimatum to a common

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

151

historical fate and language of the northern Bukovinian Ukrainians and the indigenous inhabitants of Ukraine started a chain reaction, since it made no mention of the Moldavian population of Bessarabia and, contrary to the truth, affirmed that it is inhabited "mainly by Ukrainians." J J The compilers of the ultimatum intended to strengthen Soviet claims to the territory of northern Bukovina, which never before had been a part of the Soviet Ukraine, by a reference to the community of historical fate and language of the majority of its population with the indigenous population of Ukraine. They were therefore constrained to conceal that (a) that the Moldavians, not Ukrainians, comprised the majority of Bessarabia's population, (b) that Bessarabia was a historical territory of the Romanian people, and (c) that the Bessarabian Moldavians had a common historical fate and language with the indigenous poplation of Romania. Being a specialist on "Moldavian Soviet statehood," A. Lazarev dared to mention the first of these circumstances. But he ignored the other mysteries of the ultimatum, because the positions and theses on the Bessarabian question elaborated by him and by all other conforming Soviet authors are based on the first half of the passage of the ultimatum quoted above. The fact that the terms Soviet Union" and "Russia" appear as synonyms shows that the compilers of the ultimatum of 26 June 1940 based the Soviet position on the Bessarabian question on the "historic rights of the USSR to this territory. This basis flatly contradicts the fact that, as far back as 1924, the Soviet delegation to the Vienna Conference declared, after it ended in failure, that the government of the USSR "does not adopt, with regard to Bessarabia, the viewpoint of historic rights inherited from the tsarist government."22 Meanwhile, the attempt to justify the demand that "Bessarabia be returned to the Soviet Union" on the pretence that in 1918 Romania tore it off from the Soviet Union (Russia), appeared not to agree fully with efforts made after World War II to formulate positions and theses that could legitimate Moscow's actions in the Bessarabian question from the standpoint of the principle of the right to national selfdetermination, as proclaimed by the Bolsheviks. In this connection, obedient Soviet historians sought to elaborate, by all means, a theory of the victory of Soviet rule in Bessarabia at the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918 that would enable them to explain the subsequent inclusion of the region into Romania by its having been torn off from Soviet Russia, and then to make its "return" to the Soviet Union in 1940 to appear as a reunion. However,

252

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

this artificial theory crumbles when confronted by the facts. An analysis of the Bessarabian events of 1917 and the beginning of 1918 and the Soviet interpretations is vitally important in explaining the causes of some very substantial changes by Soviet authors of their own terminology. During the entire period of 1918—1940, the Moscow-inspired com¬ munist movement in Bessarabia continually propounded, as a basic slogan, the demand of Bessarabia's "joining the USSR,” its "union with the USSR [the Moldavian Autonomous Republic].''23 Only after the Union Moldavian SSR was formed, especially after World War II, when the theory of the establishment of Soviet rule in Bessarabia at the end 1917 and the beginning 1918 was developed, did the ter¬ minology correspondingly change, with the abandonment of previously dominant formulations and the adoption of expressions concordant with the aforementioned position, of the "reunion of Bessarabia with the Soviet Union.” In another History of the USSR, intended for students entering institutions of higher learning (1983), the authors insist that, in 1918, "Romania of the boyars conquered Bessarabia."24 But a Romanian historian, in his book Voievodatul Transilvaniei25 (published also in 1982 in English under the title A History of Transylvania) declares in connection with the Bessarabian events of the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, that "Sfatul Jarii" (The National Council), in which "the entire population of the province was represented, both the Romanian majority and most of the minorities," created on 2 December 1917 "the Federated Democratic Moldavian Republic and, on 27 March 1918, adopted a resolution saying: "From this day forward and forever, the Moldavian Democratic Republic is united with its mother Romania."26 But the authors of the History of the USSR attempt to persuade a new generation of Soviet youth that, during the years when Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were part of the Romanian state, the working people of these territories led a fight "for their social and national liberation, for reunion with their brothers in blood, the Ukrainians and the Moldavians."27 Such statements thus constitute two irrec¬ oncilable interpretations of historical facts and events by modern Soviet historians on the one hand, and by Romanian historians on the other. Soviet specialists are ostensibly encouraging "creative discussion" by scholars in socialist countries on "scholarly and political prob¬ lems."28 Actually, however, by "creative" discussion they mean, espe¬ cially when dealing with such problems as the Bessarabian question.

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

153

not a discussion leading to an agreement based on an impartial examination of objective reality, but an imposing of theses and propositions previously formulated by Soviet specialists. Thus, in the late 1950s, when in Romania measures were taken against Hungarian nationalist feelings in Transylvania, to liquidate the internal and neutralize the external factors furthering these emotions, the leadership of the Romanian Communist party, headed by Gheorghiu-Dej, did not dare allow any mention of the position of traditional Romanian historiography on the Bessarabian question in the scientific and sociopolitical publications appearing in the country. Under these conditions, Soviet historians, at the scientific session held in Kishinev in November 1958 with the participation of Romanian historians, repeatedly adduced the propositions and theses on the Bessarabian question developed by them (for example, that "at the end of December 1917 and the beginning of January 1918 ... the power in Kishinev actually passed into the hands of Soviet organs, that "Bessarabia was wrested from the Soviet Republic in 1918," that the working people of the province fought "against intervention" for their social and national liberation, and so on).29 Romanian historians not only did not attempt to refute these Soviet assertions, but kept silence about other facts and events directly concerning the Bessarabian question. Thus, Valerian Popovici, the director of the Ia§i history department of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, submitted a report entitled "The Progressive Role of Russia in the Development of Economic and Political Autonomy of the Romanian Principalities at the End of the 18th and the Beginning of the 19th Centuries." Since the seizing by Russia, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of a large portion of the ancestral territory of the Moldavian principality was entirely incompatible with the announced theme on the progressive role of Russia, the Romanian scholar, conforming to the positions then still holding in the historiography of his country, observed total silence about the events of 1812, in spite of the fact that his report discussed the period between the Russian-Turkish peace treaties at Kuchuk-Kainardji in 1774 and Adrianople in 18 2 9.30 Nevertheless, the repeated use, in the context of the period treated by Popovici, of the term "farile romane" (literally, "Romanian lands") did not agree with the contentions of Soviet historians that, before the events of 1859 (when the Danube principalities were united), the Moldavian prin¬ cipality could not have been called a Romanian land. As already mentioned, it was later, especially from the mid-1960s, that the position of Romanian scholars who referred in their works to the Bessarabian events of 1812, 1918, and 1940, became totally

154

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

opposed to that of Soviet historiography. Since the Soviet historians persisted in maintaining their previous position in the Bessarabian question, they seemingly should have initiated an open "creative discussion" of this "scholarly and political problem" together with their colleagues from socialist Romania. Instead, an indirect struggle between Soviet and Romanian historians over the Bessarabian question has now been pursued for over two decades. Romanian historians cannot propose convening a common Romanian-Soviet conference on problems of Bessarabia for many reasons, especially because any such initiative on their part would be denounced by Moscow's rulers as an anti-Soviet provocation. And Soviet historians do not want to convene such a common conference because, among other reasons, they fully understand that Romanian scholars not only have long since ceased to repeat blindly the theses and propositions worked out in the USSR on the Bessarabian question, but they are not even disposed even to listen to them without reacting. In international forums not only of representatives of socialist countries, but especially of scholars of the USSR and the Western world, Soviet specialists in the social sciences avoid, as a rule, common creative discussions of all scholarly and political problems on which their positions, theses, and theories diverge from the interpretations of those problems by Western scholars. Having been raised in the spirit of unconditional support of the Communist party and the tenets laid down in the latest decisions and resolutions of its leading organs, Soviet scholars are bound to rebuff any statement implying criticism of the theory and practice of the Party. The rulers of the Kremlin demand an implacable attitude toward anyone who doubts the correctness of the theoretical propositions or practical actions of CPSU or, worse, uncovers their true underlying motives, and, usually, they prefer to not allow their scholars to participate in congresses, conferences, and symposia organized in the West. Announced Soviet participations in scholarly meetings in Western countries are therefore frequently canceled, usually without expla¬ nation. Thus, the program of the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies in West Germany in 1980 listed reports by Moscow, Leningrad, and Novosibirsk historians, sociologists, linguists, and specialists in literature.31 The reports were not made, because the Soviet specialists did not appear at the congress. The same occurred at the 1983 Seventeenth International Congress on Romance Linguistics and Philology in Aix-en-Provence. At this congress, not only was their participation announced in the program,32 but even the theses

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

155

of their reports were published.33 At this congress, a Soviet delegation of eighteen scholars, among them seven from the Moldavian SSR, was expected. The most probable reason for the nonappearance of the Soviet delegation is that the scholars from Kishinev proposed to produce in their reports, as they had done at previous international congresses, material and linguistic data that could not testify to the existence of an independent national language of the Moldavian SSR as a separate Eastern Romance language, different from the Romanian. Thus, for instance, all the loan words from other languages in the report by S. Berejan, as well as new microstructures that did not exist previously, but were formed by these loan words' penetration into the language are represented by the scholars from the Moldavian SSR as phenomena of the Moldavian lexical system.34 However, all of them without exception are components of the Romanian language and its lexical system.35 Furthermore, other scholars from Soviet Moldavia who intended to examine certain aspects of their republic's national language, would not have been able to convince their audience at the congress that it is legitimate to treat it as an independent Eastern Romance language. Thus, the report of T. Iliashenko opens with a reference to the wellknown proposition that “similar social and economic circumstances in the evolution of peoples give birth to analogous mentalities, identical cultural phenomena, and expression of these phenomena by similar linguistic means." Mentioning that the Russian Soviet academician V. Shishmarev had studied the “sociocultural climate of the Middle Age period of the French and Provencal languages" on the basis of this proposition, which he accepts as an axiom, Iliashenko declares that, "by applying this axiom to the Old Moldavian language, . . . one can draw certain parallels between the means of expression of the troubadours and the ancient Moldavian bards." And she supports her conclusion that “the tonality of these two languages—the Moldavian and the Provencal—produced certain phonetic similarities in the course of their evolution," by citing the fact that these phonetic similarities had been noted by the Romanian academician I. Iordan.36 Such artifices enable the conformance to the demands of the Moscow stooges heading the Moldavian SSR, and to creating a theory of an independent Moldavian language different from the Romanian. But specialists in Romance linguistics cannot be persuaded by such artifices. They know that I. Iordan considers Old Moldavian a regional dialect of the common Romanian language, a component of which is also the national idiom of Soviet Moldavia. But Iliashenko attempted to twist the concepts of the Romanian scholar Iordan in order to link

156

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

the Old Moldavian language with the national idiom of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia, as a separate Eastern Romance lan¬ guage. The theme of Iliashenko's report, as its published theses show, conforms to the goal of the Scientific Council on the "Specifics and Perspectives of Development of the National Moldavian Language, headed by her. Her reports, such as the "Significance of Diachronic Constants for the Study of the History of the Moldavian Language" and "Some Supplementary Data for a Periodization of the Moldavian Language," submitted to meetings of that Scientific Council, conformed absolutely with the language policy pursued by the CPSU in Soviet Moldavia. But these reports, which she read in May 1983 and in May 1984 respectively (before and after the congress at Aix-en-Provence), suffered from shortcomings characteristic of her appearances at schol¬ arly meetings both in the USSR and abroad. I described these shortcomings in 19 8 2.37 I refer to the fact that, in all of her works, Iliashenko always considered the linguistic phenomena of the Romanian language and presented them as phenomena, even as exclusive phe¬ nomena, of the Moldavian language. Thus, the May 1983 report contains the assertion that the Moldavian language model, "§i-a facut, with the pronoun in the dative case, does not exist in other Romance languages."38 In fact, however, this model is found in the works of renowned authors from all of the historic territories of Romania, and is mentioned in dictionaries of the Romanian language.39 Iliashenko's efforts to propose a new periodization of the Moldavian language should be considered as conceptually unifying the reports of 1983 and 1984 with the theses of the report she did not submit at Aix-en-Provence. Such a periodization would make it possible to pretend that the literary Moldavian language was formed not in the nineteenth century, conforming to the formulation of N. Corlateanu heretofore dominant in the republic's linguistics,40 but in the sixteenth century.41 The need to discard Corlateanu's formulation was imposed by its unsuitability even for internal use. Lor, according to the theories of Soviet Moldavia's historiography, "the eastern part of Moldavia [the territory of Soviet Moldavia] had never belonged to Romania. . . . Only the western part of the Moldavian nationality (narodnost') par¬ ticipated, after 1859, in the formation process of the Romanian nation, whereas the eastern Moldavians, continuing to develop separately, formed in independent Moldavian nation, possessing its own culture and its own language."42

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

157

However, Iliashenko's periodization is no less vulnerable than Corlateanu's. In essence, the new periodization represents an attempt to resolve the contradiction between the theory of the obedient historians about the formation of a separate Moldavian nation, and that of the republic's obedient linguists on the formation of that nation's literary language. Nevertheless, Iliashenko's periodization could not, by removing the above-mentioned contradiction, legitimate the theory of an independent idiom of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia a constituting an Eastern Romance language separate from the Romanian language. A. Russo, V. Alecsandri, M. Eminescu, I. Creanga, and other nineteenth-century writers, who have been rec¬ ognized as classical writers of the national literature of Soviet Moldavia, all wrote with full conviction in the Romanian language. And Varlaam, the seventeenth-century metropolitan of Moldavia, also was conscious that he wrote in the Romanian language. For this reason, the author of a paper read at a meeting of the scientific council headed by Iliashenko had recourse to ellipses when he quoted the title of Varlaam's principal work.43 The conformist linguists of Soviet Moldavia are compelled to use such artifices to obscure the fact that cultural and literary figures from all historical territories of the Romanian people, including those of Bessarabian extraction, saw their language as Romanian in the nineteenth and previous centuries. The dependence on such artifices reveals the futility of their efforts to construct a theory of an inde¬ pendent national language of Soviet Moldavia. Fear that the proposition of the east Prutian Moldavian idiom constituting an independent Eastern Romance language would provoke a critical reaction from foreign specialists on Romance languages, as had already happened more than once at international congresses in the past, caused the Soviet authorities to not allow the participation of Soviet scholars at the congress in Aix-en-Provence.44 Such a reaction would have been especially undesirable from the Soviet standpoint, since, only a fortnight after the international congress, a symposium was scheduled in the capital of the Moldavian SSR, on "The National Languages in Developed Socialist Society." Significant in this respect is the fact that, in addition to the USSR's specialists, scholars from Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia also participated in the symposium.45 Romanian scholars did not participate; they do not cooperate in the internationally coordinated program in which scholars from the socialist countries have been preparing, since 1980, a monograph called "On the Func¬ tioning of Literary Language at the Contemporary Stage of Socialist

158

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Society/'46 The fact that Romanian scholars not only are not co¬ authors of this monograph, but even do not participate in the pro¬ ceedings of the conference preparing it, leads to some definite con¬ clusions. In the first place, the Romanian Communist party has no desire that the cooperation of Romanian linguists in the compilation of a monograph that would propound the Soviet linguists' theory on an independent language of east Prutian Moldavians should be interpreted as an acceptance of that theory. On the other hand, the Communist leadership of Romanian could not permit its scholars to deny openly that theory at joint conferences of linguists from the socialist countries. That such conclusions are fully justified is confirmed by a paper prepared by R. Udler for the Seventeenth International Congress on Romance Linguistics and Philology. The Soviet Moldavian scholar entitled his paper "The Local Patois of the Moldavian Language in the Carpathian Dialectal Atlas."47 The compilation of a General Dialectal Carpathian Atlas (GDCA) began several years before under the guidance of an international board headed by the Moscow professor S. Bernstein. R. Udler wrote his paper on the material in the first volume of the GDCA, which he edited. Although teams of scholars from different Eastern European socialist countries are cooperating in the compilation of the five-volume Atlas, Romanian scholars are conspicuous by their absence. Apparently in order to attract them, Soviet authors developed a series of propositions intended "to lead to solutions acceptable to all." The most important of these propositions contained the statement that "dialectal phenomena marked on the maps of the GDCA and mentioned in the notes to them, should be viewed as belonging to a common uninterrupted [all-Carpathian] dialect zone of a specific chronological period," that "these dialectal phenomena should not be attributed to one national language or another," and should not "be designated according to a national-linguistic criterion."48 The Romanians realized, however, that their participation in the compilation of the GDCA would, in the future, be interpreted as their recognition of the idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians as a language separate from the Romanian language. They therefore preferred to avoid fallaing prey to the linguistic policies of the Soviet Communist party. The summary of Udler's projected paper to the Seventeenth In¬ ternational Congress on Romance Linguistics and Philology substan¬ tiates the Romanians' attitude. The heading of the paper mentions the "local patois" of the Moldavian language in the GDCA. However,

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

159

the GDCA's "common all-Carpathian dialect zone" contains elements not only of the patois of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia, which the obedient Soviet linguists consider to be component parts of an independent Moldavian language, and not only of the patois of west Prutian Moldavia (which they accept as components of the Romanian language), but also of the patois of Transylvania and other Romanian territories, which they also recognize as component parts of the Romanian language. Although this fact diverges totally from the term Moldavian language used by Udler in the heading of his paper, it is nevertheless veiled in its text by expressions attributable to all component parts of the Romanian language, such as "Eastern Romance linguistic elements," "Eastern Romance influence," "Romance ele¬ ment," etc.; whereas, in the text, the term "Moldavian language," appearing in the heading, is conspicuously absent.49 It has already been mentioned that such inherent contradictions of the Soviet Moldvaian linguists' reports and addresses submitted to various international forums, repeatedly became the object of criticisms by specialists in the Romance languages. Furthermore, it can be supposed that the imminent symposium on "National Languages in Developed Socialist Society" determined Soviet authorities not to allow their scholars to participate in the congress on Romance linguistics in France. The question of participation or nonparticipation by Soviet scholars, as well as by scholars from other socialist countries, in international scholarly symposia, conferences, and congresses, and in thrashing out scholarly problems jointly with scholars from other countries (both socialist and especially nonsocialist), is ultimately decided not by universities or academies, but by party and state bodies. The following characteristic case reveals that the authorities in socialist countries are often guided by considerations far from scientific. In 1985, in connection with the 1,100th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius, one of the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet, festivities in his memory were held in several socialist countries of Eastern Europe; one of these was an international scholarly conference in the Bulgarian capital. Because the life and deeds of Methodius are connected by the Bulgarians with their people, and by the Yugoslavs with theirs, the Yugoslav scholars absented themselves, although their papers had been scheduled.50 Western specialists, whose works explain certain negative aspects of the USSR's domestic politics as a result of the attitude of the USSR toward other socialist countries, are accused by Soviet scholars of tending to "undermine the unity of the world socialist community"

260

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

and to cause erosion of the socialist system “both in the Soviet Union and in other Socialist countries.''51 However, such erosion should be explained primarily not by the examination by Western scholars of negative aspects of the Soviet Union's domestic and foreign politics, but by the objective realities underlying its relations with other socialist countries. However, it is a fact that debatable questions deeply rooted in the consciousness of the inhabitants of the USSR and of other socialist countries, are forbidden to become the object of open bilateral scholarly discussion, and this fact adds an important significance to their examination in works of Western authors. For the contents of such works, exposing the essence of these debatable questions and even their very existence in the substratum of the Soviet Union's relations with one or another member of the “world socialist community," ultimately penetrates to the social con¬ sciousness both in the West and in the East. Therefore, the documents of the CPSU stress that “there is a marked intensification of attempts to corrupt the conscience of Soviet people,"52 and also that "the main thing in the ideological activity of the party ... is an irreconcilable, offensive fight against bourgeois and revisionist ideology."53 Due to the vulnerability of Soviet domestic and foreign politics and of the Soviet position on debatable questions existing between the USSR and individual members of the “world socialist community," the obedient Soviet scholars are compelled, in their efforts to defend the politics of their country's ruling party and government, to resort to strongly pejorative epithets for all those who directly or indirectly impugn or criticize those politics. Soviet authors use these means in their “irreconcilable, offensive fight" not only against the champions of bourgeois ideology (non-Communist gov¬ ernments, political parties, and scholars of the West), but also against the revisionists (communist parties and their representatives). Thus, Western authors who criticize various aspects of domestic and foreign politics of the CPSU and the Soviet government, are “unmasked" in a work published in 1982 under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. They are accused of attempting to "drive a wedge between communist parties" and to "elevate some divergences inside the communist movement on the evaluation of certain processes and phenomena of social life, to the degree of major divergences," and to resort to "provocative methods," "anticommunist fictions," "falsification, slander, distortion of objective truth," "false 'conceptual' propositions," “pseudoscientific 'proofs,'" "anti-Soviet characterizations of the national policies of the CPSU," "ideological diversions," and many more of the same.54

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

161

Those ruling communist parties who not only do not submit totally to Moscow, but even dare to speak out against her policies in relations with socialist countries, are also favored by Soviet scholars with humiliating epithets. Thus, the leaders of the Chinese Communist party were excoriated by them as "a group of political bankrupts," "Peking chauvinists and aggressors" who "degraded themselves to the depths of petty bourgeois nationalism and great power chau¬ vinism."55 At the Twenty-Sixth Congress of the CPSU, Brezhnev declared that "the divergences between Communists are surmountable provided, of course, that they are not divergences of principle between revo¬ lutionaries and reformists, between creative Marxism and dogmatic sectarian, leftist adventurism. Such issues permit no compromise, today, as in Lenin's time."56 If we take into account that, for the Communist party of the Soviet Union, according to statements by its leaders and their obedient scholars, "unity of theory and practice is the governing law of all activity," then the essence of such pro¬ nouncements is that, in any divergence of principle "between creative Marxism and dogmatic sectarian, leftist adventurism," the CPSU always represents and defends "creative Marxism."57 This cult of the infallibility of the ruling party has been preached in the Soviet state since the Bolsheviks seized power. In those rare instances when faults are disclosed, a unanimous resolution by the Central Committee attributes them to negative traits in the party leaders, but only after either their deaths (the personality cult of Stalin or the stagnation, corruption, etc., under Brezhnev) or removal from power (Khrushchev's subjectivism, voluntarism). It is pertinent to note that, before Stalin's death or before Khrushchev's removal or before Brezhnev's death, not a single resolution condemning their deeds was ever adopted. This arrogation of infallibility shows that the Mensheviks were right in their controversy with the Bolsheviks in organizational matters when they declared, in 1903, that Lenin's organizational principles would lead to the working-class party's transformation into a "factory," and its members into "cogs and wheels." It also manifests the vacuity of the epithets continually poured by Kremlin rulers and their obedient scholars upon all those who, from beyond the borders of the USSR, unmask the birth defects of the Soviet regime, or criticize the political actions of the CPSU and the Soviet government. Obedient Soviet scholars assure us that (a) "the ruling Communist party is responsible for all that happens in the country," (b) "the party leadership encompasses literally all development processes of social life," and (c) "the party leadership always has had these

162

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

attributes, at all stages of socialist society."58 Moreover, all obedient Soviet scholars without exception "always, at all stages of socialist society," glorify the actions of the ruling party's current leader, and exult that the decisions of the party leadership subject to him are "a model of a wholesome and profound scientific; approach to the analysis of trends and the definition of the tasks of further development. . . . They contain a truly complex, multilateral development program of all facets of the life of Soviet society."59 Thus, it has always been: in Stalin's time, in Khrushchev's time, in Brezhnev's time, and in the time of the short-lived Andropov and Chernenko. Before World War II and immediately thereafter, anyone who wrote from outside the USSR criticizing the horrible trials of 1937 and 1938 and other years against the alleged enemies of the people and denouncing the mass killings perpetrated on direct orders from Stalin was favored by the obedient Soviet scholars with epithets like "falsifier," "agent provocateur," and "enemy of the Soviets." During the decade after Stalin's death, anyone who mentioned the "flamboyance and ballyhoo surrounding imaginary achievements" in Khrushchev's re¬ gime, was similarly favored.60 Up to the present, such Soviet scholars continue to label with the most humiliating names in the Soviet vocabulary all those outside the Soviet Union (even members of leaders of communist parties) who dare to criticize negative aspects of the policies and practices of the CPSU and the Soviet government, in spite of the fact that eventually, usually upon the installation in the Kremlin of a new potentate, the obedient Soviet scholars themselves criticize these same policies and practices. Thus, in compliance with the June 1983 directives of the plenary asession of the CPSU CC, the propaganda against Western mass media and centers of Soviet studies has been intensified. Within the framework of the campaign thus begun, the scientific council on problems of foreign ideological trends at the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Moldavia and the section for problems of counterpropaganda and international connections at the magazine Kommunist Moldavii organized a conference for ideological activists in the republic's capital, Kishinev.61 The central theme of the conference was the "fight against bourgeois and revisionist ideology." V. Tsaranov, director of the Institute of History of the republic's Academy of Sciences, and I. Iatsenko, deputy chief editor of Kommunist Moldavii, submitted the principal addresses; they resorted to their favorite ploy of casting pejorative names at foreign press organs and scientific institutions who critically examine problems connected with Soviet Moldavia.

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

163

The speakers' copious use of abusive language included such epithets as “ideological diversions/' “opportunistic and revisionist falsifica¬ tions," “the mad fight of communism's ideological adversaries," “na¬ tionalistic nonscientific theories of modern bourgeois Moldavian stud¬ ies," “falsifiers of history."62 These insults constituted a peculiar substitute for reason in their attempts to "educate the inhabitants of the republic in a patriotic and internationalist spirit" and to portray the foreign critics of the CPSU and its henchmen in Soviet Moldavia as dishonest and venal people of bad faith. But the CPSU CC's resolution of 6 December 198363 and the decisions of the plenary session of the CC of the Moldavian Communist party of 3 February 1984 which were related to it, corroborate Western authors' criticisms of the negative aspects of Soviet reality and prove the vacuousness of the diatribes directed at these authors by obedient Soviet scholars.64 In the abovementioned address, V. Tsaranov states that "one can hardly name an important problem in the history of Moldavia that has not been falsified in bourgeois historiography."65 Thus, if we take such a cardinal problem in Soviet Moldavia's history as the participation of Bessarabia's population in the fight for the establishment of Soviet power and the incorporation of the region into the Soviet Union, then we see that works published in the west have repeatedly mentioned that the Moldavian masses did not support the establishment of Soviet power in Bessarabia in 1917 and the beginning of 1918, nor did they favor its severance from Romania and incorporation into Russia (the Soviet Union) in subsequent years. Conformist Soviet scholars “un¬ mask" the authors of these works as falsifiers of history. However, Soviet sources themselves offer a plethora of proofs that the conclusions by the authors under attack are well founded. Thus, the first issue in 1985 of the magazine Communistul Moldovei contained an article signed by the deputy director of the Moldavian Communist party's Institute of Party History, A. Novae, and by the senior scientific researcher of that institute, A. Roman; the article was entitled "The Bolsheviks of Moldavia in the Fight for Soviet Power."66 In the spirit dominating the historiography of Soviet Moldavia, the authors describe the Bessarabian events of the period March-December 1917, and mention the names of thirty-two participants in those events who fought for the establishment of Soviet power in the province. Not one representative of the native population, the Bessarabian Molda¬ vians, was among them.67 That this is no chance omission, but a normal phenomenon reflecting the national composition of those who fought for Soviet power in

164

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Bessarabia in 1917, is corroborated, inter alia, by the fact that a notice by a Soviet specialist on the history of this period, published in the third issue of the same magazine for 1985, lists thirteen fighters for the establishment of Soviet power in Bessarabia in 1917; not a single Moldavian is included.68 After the joining of Bessarabia to Romania in January 1918, the Moldavians, who had been an oppressed national minority in tsarist Russia, then became part of the dominant nation in Romania. The overwhelming majority of them did not support the Moscow-inspired Bessarabian communist movement and its efforts to wrest the province from the Romanian state. This is confirmed by an article published in 1984 by the magazine Kommunist Moldavii'. Its author had co¬ authored a monograph dedicated to those strata of Bessarabia's pop¬ ulation that supported in the years 1918-1940 its annexation to the Soviet Union.69 That monograph, which covers the entire period that Bessarabia belonged to Romania, is able to mention only very few of the many hundreds of participants in the communist movement of Bessarabia who were members of the province's indigenous pop¬ ulation. And the magazine article, which covers the years 1918-1919, indicates exclusively non-Moldavian family names; these include G. Staryi, P. Dobrodeiev, A. Gliadkovskaia, I. Cherkasov, Z. Froilovich, I. Shapovalov, etc.70 The article reveals, for instance, that not a single Moldavian had been a member of the Bender County Committee of the Communist party, and that the Regional Committee of Bessarabia consisted entirely of persons of non-Moldavian extraction, many of whom had been especially sent by Moscow to organize in Bessarabia a subversive movement against Romanian rule.71 Tsaranov mentions in his address, as an important point of Mol¬ davian history, which suffered “falsification in bourgeois historiog¬ raphy,” the creation, in 1924 on the left bank of the Dniester, in Ukrainian territory, of an autonomous Moldavian SSR. He insists that the “falsification” of this point constitutes the affirmation by Western authors “with no grounds whatsoever” that the Moldavian Autonomous SSR “had allegedly been created as a bridgehead for the eventual occupation of Bessarabia. Then he continues: “Having armed them¬ selves with that lie, which had been invented by Romanian bourgeois historiography as far back as the 1920s, modern sovietologists proceed to declare that the creation of an autonomous MSSR did not answer the needs of the Moldavian population of the left bank of the Dniester."72 However, an excerpt from a report by M. V. Frunze to the CC of the RCP(b) CC of 25 July 1924, published in the same issue of Kommunist Moldavii in 1984, proves that Tsaranov's accusations

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

165

are unfounded and that both Romanian historiography of the 1920s and modern sovietology explain correctly the reason for the creation in 1924 of the autonomous Moldavian republic on the Ukrainian bank of the Dniester. Frunze wrote his report after the failure of the Romanian-Soviet Vienna conference on the Bessarabian question (March-April 1924), and declared that a Moldavian republic or region established along the left bank of the Dniester, although small in area, would become a "mighty instrument to influence the attitudes of Bessarabian workers and peasants, strengthening the hopes of the masses for deliverance from Romanian oppression."73 Thus, the statements that the autonomous Moldavian republic was not created to satisfy the wishes of the Moldavian population, are fully substantiated. They are also confirmed by the following facts. The extracts published in Kommunist Moldavii from a collection of documents prepared by the Institute of Party History on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the republic, and Soviet publications prior to the resolution of 29 July 1924 of the Politburo of the RCP(b) CC, "On the Moldavian SSR," including media releases, mention no appeals by the Moldavian population of the Dniestser's left bank to create a Moldavian republic,74 The resolution by the CPSU CC of 6 December 1983 was adopted after an examination of the efforts of the CC of the Moldavian Communist party to perfect the style and methods of work of party organizations in the light of the resolutions adopted by the November (1982) plenary session of the CC of the CPSU. Andropov and Chernenko adopted attitudes similar to those of their immediate predecessors, in that they followed neither Khrushchev, who unmasked Stalin's crimes, nor Brezhnev, who condemned Khru¬ shchev's faulty leadership. Andropov and Chernenko were aware that they could only discredit themselves, as did Khrushchev, by criticizing their predecessors, whose image and deeds they deified in their public appearances while they were alive. In addition, they lacked Brezhnev's justification for criticizing his predecessor's policies and practices: Brezhnev participated in the conspiracy that led to Khrushchev's removal. Thus, after his predecessor's death, Andropov declared that Brezh¬ nev's name is "tied to the struggle ... of the Party in the defense of Marxism-Leninism, to the elaboration of a theory of developed socialism, ... of solutions to the pressing problems of building communism."75 And, after Andropov's death Chernenko assured the February 1984 plenary session of the CPSU CC that he would maintain the Party's line of principle, which his predecessor "carried out

166

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

consistently and insistently.”76 And Gorbachev declared in the March 1985 plenary session of the CPSU CC that "Chernenko devoted all of his energy and knowledge to the development of the country's economy, to the growth of the well-being and culture of the people, to ensuring the security of the fatherland, to the preservation and strengthening of peace on earth," and that he "guarded as the apple of his eye the unity of the Communist party, the collective character of the activities of the Central Committee and its Politburo."7 Andropov and Chernenko differed from Brezhnev and especially from Khrushchev in that not only did they not subject their predecessors to open criticism, but they extolled them in every way. However, Andropov and Chernenko emulated their predecessors Khrushchev and Brezhnev in that, upon achieving power, they all stressed, at first, the importance of the CPSU maintaining Lenin's principles, especially the principle of collective leadership. Subsequently however, with the strengthening of the positions of Khrushchev and Brezhnev at the head of the CPSU and the Soviet state, party documents stressed less and less the principle of collective leadership, and more and more the personal contribution of the current leader to the entire scope of party and state activities, connecting him with Lenin while bypassing all intermediaries. This process is deliberate; it intends to create an image of the new leader as a successor to Lenin's cause, as one who creatively develops the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, and as a worthy leader of the world communist movement. The current Kremlin ruler thinks it necessary, in order to legitimate his extraordinary position and role in the Communist party and the Soviet state, to proclaim a radical improvement in party and state life. Khrushchev proved that open criticism of Stalin's policies on bilateral relations with communist parties of other countries can only do harm to the CPSU and the Soviet state. Consequently, subsequent Kremlin rulers did not adopt his line. But, just as the longest-in-power Kremlin ruler described himself during the height of the personality cult, "Stalin is the Lenin of today," so the leaders after him attempted to do the same without calling it by name. Each leader sought to create for himself an aura of infallibility by cultivating identical formulas in essence: "Khrushchev is the Lenin of today," "Brezhnev is the Lenin of today," "Andropov is the Lenin of today," "Chernenko is the Lenin of today," "Gorbachev is the Lenin of today." In reply to a question by American journalists about his "new style of politics in the USSR," Gorbachev said: "It is not just my own personal style. This is something that we all learned from Lenin. It goes back to

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

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Lenin. He said on quite a few occasions that to know life you must live as the masses do, live among the masses, learn from the masses, feel their pulse at work and reflect their thinking, their mood in your policies."78 Every Kremlin ruler after Stalin raised the curtain on the chronic ills of Soviet economics and the Soviet way of life, so highly praised in his predecessor's time. However, after proposing at the outset of his term a comprehensive plan for healing all of those ills, the Kremlin ruler, like his predecessors, follows the beaten path of creating a smoke screen of an ostensible recovery, realized under his leadership, of Soviet society from the ills inherited from the previous leader. Andropov, for example, a year after having disclosed the grave faults in the organization of production and in the state administration bodies, began to declare that he had succeeded in improving the situation, raising the initiative and responsibility of the cadres to increase the rate of economic growth, and effecting a positive im¬ provement in the country's economy.79 His simultaneous acknowl¬ edgment of deficiencies in various spheres of the country's economy was directed toward further development of Soviet economics. The party forums usually attribute the difficulties of Soviet economics to the growth of an enormous economy, not to its chronic ills. Andropov however, at the beginning of his regime, insisted not on surmounting the difficulties of growth, but on eradicating the chronic ills of Soviet society as a whole, which he inherited from his predecessor, as the following facts show. One of the usual means the Kremlin rulers use to redress what they consider to be alarming phenomena in the USSR, is to scrutinize a particular republic, territorial, regional, or even municipal party organization. Flagrant infringements and grave deficiencies discovered in the activity of that party organization are usually inherent to the entire network of the country's party institutions; the consequent resolution then serves as a directive for all of those institutions. The CC of the Moldavian Communist party was selected for scrutiny; discovery of its faulty activities served Moscow in mobilizing the entire country for the implementation of the program for uprooting the chronic ills of Soviet economy and society, which Andropov announced when he assumed power. Previously, on 2 December 1982, the CC of the Moldavian Com¬ munist party had heard in plenary session a report by its first secretary, S. Grossu, the tasks of the republic party organization, which ensued from the resolutions of the recent (November 1982) plenary session

168

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of the CPSU CC and from the address to it by Andropov, the new secretary-general. After that plenary session, the authors of materials on Soviet Moldvaia continued mechanically to stress, first of all, the republic's achievements. For instance, they exulted that the total industrial output during the ten months of 1982 considerably surpassed the level of the previous year, that the productive capacity of different branches of the agricultural-industrial complex increased, that the total agri¬ cultural output increased by 10 percent over the mean yearly level of the tenth Five-Year Plan, and that the real income of the population rose.80 Still, as usual when party forums examine problems of eco¬ nomics, cadre policy, culture, etc., some failures were also noted. For example, "Quite a number of farms in some districts have not exploited the opportunities available to them for the increase of agricultural production."81 But, after 6 December 1983, when the activities of the CC of the Moldavian Communist party were examined by the CPSU CC, a sudden change in outlook occurred. The published materials from the February 1984 plenary session of the CC of the republics Party stressed not achievements, but deficiencies, and the first secretary of the CC excoriated the chronic ills of the republic's industry, agriculture, construction, etc. He complained, for instance, that no basic improve¬ ment occurred in the style of the activities of the party organization and especially of the CC of the Moldavian Communist party; that no active steps were taken to establish a constructive party style in the activities of the Council of Ministers of the Moldavian SSR, and of the republic ministries and departments, to eliminate bureaucracy and to eradicate manifestations of localism; that there are "grave failures in the development of industry, agriculture, capital construction, transportation, communications, execution of production plans and tasks," that "the collective farms have not fulfilled their tasks for the first three years of the current five-year plan"; and that "year after year, housing construction plans in the republic are not fulfilled."82 The December 1982 plenary session of the CC of the Moldavian Communist party resorted to stereotyped demands and suggestions. Its resolution stated that activities in all municipal and district party committees and primary party organizations should be well organized, and that extensive political work and work organization is needed to explain the tasks ensuing from the resolutions adopted by the November plenary session of the CPSU CC.83 The recommendations of the February 1984 plenary session contained, on the contrary, particularly stringent requirements from the Bureau of the CC of the Moldavian

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

169

Communist party, from the Council of Ministers, and from all of the party and Soviet bodies subject to them without exception. These requirements stressed, for example, that "the Council of Ministers and the heads of ministries and departments must radically alter the style of their work"; that "the Bureau of the Moldavian Communist party CC must raise the level of the activities of republican ministries and departments"; and that the "republic's Council of Ministers and the Council of Collective Farms must develop proposals "on perfecting the management structure of the agricultural-industrial complex, on effecting a substantial simplification and shrinkage of the economic apparatus in all of its branches."84 That S. Grossu slavishly acquiesced to the sharp criticisms of the activities of the CC that he heads and of the republic's Council of Ministers subject to it is demonstrated by the following statement in his address to the February 1984 plenary session: "Flenceforth, all committees and organizations of the Moldavian Communist party will enhance their activities to conform to the resolutions of the CPSU CC."85 This unquestioningly obsequious and servile attitude toward the severe criticism to which the Kremlin subjected all the activities of the Soviet Moldavian party organization and it leadership, shows that the article in the constitution of each Soviet Union republic, declaring that the respective republic is a "sovereign Soviet socialist state," is merely empty words.86 Not one of these republics is either "sovereign" or a "state." Both the leadership of the non-Russian republics and their specialists in the social sciences have to adapt themselves, if they want to maintain their position in society, to Moscow's policy and practice. The former must not only without demur obey directives received from Moscow but also secure the republic's social sciences from ideas and influences that are in disagreement with the national policy pursued by the CPSU.

Notes, Chapter 5 1. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973), p. 122. 2. S. Afteniuk et al., eds., Voprosy istorii kompartii Moldavii. XXIV s'ezd KPSS i istoriko-partiinaia nauka v Moldavii. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, tom I (Kishinev, 1973), p. 135. 3. Ibid., p. 120. 4. Ibid., pp. 144, 140.

170

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

5. See Dictionar enciclopedic roman, vol. 4 (Bucuresti, 1966), pp. 51, 203. 6. N. Ceau?escu, Romania pe drumul desavirsirii constructiei socialiste (Bu¬ charest, 1968), pp. 357-358, 360. 7. M. Popa, Primul razboi mondial. 1914-1918. (Bucharest, 1979); V. Netea, Spre unitatea statala a poporului. Legaturi politice §z culturale intre anii 18591918 (Bucharest, 1979). 8. M. Musat, I. Ardeleanu, Viata politica in Romania. 1918-1921, 2nd ed. (Bucharest, 1976), p. 14. 9. M. Musat, I. Ardeleanu, Political Life in Romania. 1918-1921. (Bucharest, 1982), p. 14. 10. Ibid., p. 15. 11. N. Artemov, ed., Istoria SSSR, vol. 2, p. 186. 12. Ia. Grosul, N. Mokhov, lstoricheskaia nauka Moldavskoi SSR (Moscow, 1970), p. 78. 13. M. Bruchis, Rossia, Rumynia i Bessarabia. 1822- 1918. 1924. 1940. (TelAviv-Jerusalem, 1979), pp. 214-245. 14. N. Artemov, op. cit. 15. Pravda, 29 June 1940. 16. Istoria kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1973), P. 461. 17. Ukrains'kii radians'kii entsiklopedicheskii slovnik, vol. 1 (Kiev, 1966), p. 249. 18. Sovetskaia Bukovina (Uzhgorod, 1971), p. 36. 19. Iu. Kondufor, V. Kotov, Istoria SSSR (Kiev, 1983). 20. Pravda, loc. cit. 21. A. Lazarev, Moldavskaia sovetskaia gosudarstvennost' i bessarabskii vopros (Kishinev, 1974), p. 126. 22. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, vol. 7. (Moscow, 1963), p. 168. 23. Listovkii kommunisticheskogo podpolia Bessarabii (Kishinev, 1960), pp. 3-488. 24. Iu. Kondurov, V. Kotov, op. cit., p. 268. 25. St. Pascu, Voievodatul Transilvaniei, 2 vols. (Cluj, 1972, 1979). 26. Ibid., A History of Transylvania (Detroit, 1982), pp. 265-266. 27. Iu. Kondurov, V. Kotov, loc. cit. 28. P. Fedoseev, Iu. Volkov, F. Gel'bukh, V. Zevin, A. Krukhmalev, M. Kulichenko, eds., Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie o sotsializme i sovremennost’ (Moscow, 1975), p. 350. 29. Ia. Grosul, N. Mokhov, eds., Vekovaia druzhba. Materialy nauchnoi sessii Instituta istorii moldavskogo filiala AN SSSR. 27-29 November, 1958 (Kishinev, 1961), pp. 8, 371, 375, etc. 30. V. Popovici, “Rolul progresist al Rusiei in dezvoltarea autonomiei economice si politice a Jdrilor Romane la sfirsitul sec. XVIII si inceputul," sec. XIX, Ia. Grosul, N. Mokhov, Vekovaia druzhba . . . . , pp. 128-138. 31. Zweiter Weltkongress fur Sowjet-und Osteuropa Studien. Programm (Garmisch-Partenkirchen), 30.09-4.10 (1980), pp. 53, 62, 64, 65, 83.

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders

171

32. "17eme Congres international de linguistique et philologie romanes," 29.08-3.09, 1983. Deuxieme circulaire. Janvier 1983, p. 9. 33. XVII-e Congres international de linguistique et philologie romanes, (Aix-en-Provence), 29.08-3.09 1983. Resumes des communications. 34. Ibid., S. Berejan, "Mutations dans le systeme lexical moldave causees par le contacts avec d'autres langues," p. 304. 35. Dictionarul limbii romine moderne (Bucharest, 1958), pp. 131, 323, 445, 532, 536, 562, 622, 631, 908, 936, 950. 36. T. Iliachenko, "Quelques elements de la langue des troubadours dans le vieux moldave," XVII-e Congres international de linguistique et philogie romanes, p. 352. 37. M. Bruchis, One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: On the Language Policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the National Republics (Moldavian: A Look Back, a Survey, and Perspectives, 1924-1980), (East European Monographs: Boulder-New York, 1982), pp. 223-224, 230, 232, 243-245, 250-265, 279289, etc. 38. Limba $i literatura moldoveneasca, vol. XXXVI, no. 3 (1983), p. 70. 39. Dictionarul limbii romane literare contemporane, vol. 1 (1955), p. 327; vol. 2, (1956), p. 250. 40. N. Corlateanu, Egala intre egale (Kishinev, 1971), p. 15. 41. Limba §z literatura moldoveneasca, vol. XXVII, no. 4 (1984), pp. 64-67. 42. A. Lazarev, op. cit., p. 749. 43. "Limba §i literatura moldoveneasca," vol. XXVI, no. 3 (1983), p. 71. 44. See "Actes du VUI-eme Congres international de linguistique et phil¬ ologie romanes (Firenze, 1958), pp. 445-552; "Actes du X-eme congres international de linguistes," vol. 1. (Bucharest, 1970), p. 108; Actele celui de¬ al XH-lea congres international de lingvistica si folologie romanica, vol. II (Bucharest, 1971), p. 359. 45. Sovetskaia Moldavia, September 20, 1983. 46. Ibid. 47. R. Oudler, "Les patois de la langue Moldave dans l'Atlas dialectologique des Carpathes," XXVII-e Congres international de linguistique . . . . , p. 317. 48. ",Sedinta a Xlll-cea a Colegiului de redactie international al 'Atlasului dialectologic carpatic comunLimba §i literatura moldoveneasca, vol. XXVI, no. 4 (1983), p. 76. 49. R. Oudler, loc. cit. 50. "Mezhdunarodna nauchna konferentsia, posvetena na 1100-godishninata ot smirta na velikia slavianski uchitel' Metodii," Program, Sofia, 2026 Mai, 1985. 51. M. Mitin, L. Brutian, V. Ivanov, Iu. Igritskii, M. Keizerov, S. Korolev, V. smolianskii, Razvitoi sotsializm i krizis 'sovetologi' (Moscow, 1982), pp. 1920. (Hereinafter: Razvitoi sotsialism). 52. Materialy XXVI s'ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1981), p. 75. 53. Materialy XXIV s'ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1971), p. 205. 54. Razvitoi sotsialiam, pp. 22, 25, 27, 40, 41, 114, 116, 119, etc.

172

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

55. See O dal’neishem uluchshenii ideologicheskoi, politiko-vospitatel'noi raboty: Postanovlenie Ts. K. KPSS ot 26 aprelia 1979g. (Moscow, 1979), p. 6; S. Dmitriev et al., eds., Kritika burzhuaznykh kontseptsii istorii i politiki KPSS (Leningrad, 1974), p. 54. 56. Materialy XXVI s’ezda KPSS, p. 17. 57. Iu. Bromlei, E. Bagramov, M. Guboglo, M. Kulichenko, Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR v svete reshenii XXVI s'ezda KPSS (MOscow, 1982), p. 55. (Hereinafter: Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR”). 58. P. Fedoseev, Iu. Volkov, F. Gel'bukh, V. Zevin, A. Krukhmalev, M. Kulichenko, op. cit., pp. 302, 306. 59. Ibid., p. 307. 60. Istoria kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 4th ed., p. 629. 61. Comunistul Moldovei, no. 4 (1984), pp. 72-78. 62. Ibid. 63. "La Comitetul Central al PCUS," Comunistul moldovei, no. 1 (1984), pp. 16-21. 64. Comunistul moldovei, no. 2 (1984), pp. 3-30. 65. Ibid., no. 4 (1984), p. 74. 66. A. Novae, A. Roman, "Bolsevicii din Moldova in lupta pentru puterea sovetelor," Comunistul moldovei, no. 1 (1985), pp. 34-41. 67. L. Fishelev, G. Laifer, I. Godunov, N. Troshin, P. Dobrodeev, A. Grizo, L. Tomakh, P. Parfenov, V. Borisov, G. Ivanov, A. Solovev, P. Starostin, A. Khristev, I. Meleshin, G. Achkanov, A. Volkov, I. Zhulovskii, S. Kalinin, S. Firsov, S. Bondar', F. Smirnov, A. Tarnopol'skii, I. Rozhkov, I. Gusarov, V. Iudovskii, V. Kornev, F. Rogov, P. Kniagnitskii, A. Savitskii, A. Grinshtein, V. Volodarskii, G. Kotovskii. 68. N. Roitman, "Din indemnul datoriei," Comunistul moldovei, no. 3 (1985). The author mentioned the following names: E. Venediktov, I. Meleshin, A. Volkov, I. Rozhkov, I. Iakir, P. Lazarev, A. Kamenskii, G. Kotovskii, I. Garkavyi, P. Kniagnitskii, F. Levenzon, I. Avasapov, M. Meerson. 69. N. Berezniakov, I. Bobeico, la. Kopanskii, U. Murzak, V. Platon, Bor'ba trudiashchiesia Bessarabii za svoe osvobozhdenie i vossoedinenie s sovetskoi rodinoi. 1918-1940 (Kishinev, 1970). 70. V. Platon, "Pagini din istoria ilegalitatii comuniste," Comunistul mol¬ dovei, no. 3 (1984), pp. 83-86. 71. Ibid. 72. Comunistul moldovei, no. 4 (1984), p. 74. 73. Ibid., no. 2 (1984), p. 40. 74. Ibid., pp. 39-43. 75. Materialy plenuma tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS, 12 November 1982, (Moscow, 1982), p. 6. 76. Pravda, 14 February 1984. 77. Ibid., 12 March 1985. 78. Time, no. 36, 9 September 1985, p. 17. 79. Pravda, 27 December 1983.

Time-Serving Scholars and Party Leaders 80. "Pe calea leninista a fauririi si pacii," Comunistul moldovei, no (1982), p. 18, 20. 81. Ibid.

173 12

82. S. Grossu, "Sarcinile organizatiei republicane de partid pentru indeplinirea hotaririi CC al PCUS 'Cu privire la munca desfasurata de CC al PC al Moldovei pentru perfectionarea stilului si metodelor activitatii organizatiilor de partid in lunina hotaririlor plenarei din noiembrie (1982) a CC al PCUS,'" Comunistul moldovei, no. 2 (1984), pp. 4-25. 83. “Pe calea leninista a fauririi si pacii," p. 21. 84. S. Grossu, "Sarcinile organizatiei republicane de partid . . . ," pp. 8-

22. 85. Ibid., p. 5. 86. Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Rossiiskoi Sovetskoi Federativnoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki (Moscow, 1978), p. 19.

6 Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

In 1983, the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a book entitled Language—Reality—Language (Iazyk—realnost'—iazyk). The author. Professor R. A. Budagov of Moscow Uni¬ versity, a specialist in Romance languages, had once addressed a joint academic session of the Moscow Institute of Linguistics and the Kishinev Institute of History, Language, and Literature. The conference, which was held in December 1951 in the capital of the Moldavian SSR, was devoted to questions of Moldavian linguistics. Budagov's address, like those of the other Moscow scholars (V. Vinogradov, S. Bernshtein, D. Mikhalchi, B. Serebrennikov, and especially V. Shishmarev), played an important role in the future development of the literary form of the national idiom of Soviet Moldavia's indigenous population—the east Prutian Moldavians (Romanians). After World War II, a bitter struggle developed between Bessarabians active in the fields of science, literature, and culture (the right-bankers) and newcomers from the left bank of the Dniester (the left-bankers), whom Moscow had placed in charge not only of the party and state apparatus in Soviet Moldavia, but also its institutions of higher education and academic establishments. In the ensuing struggle, the position taken by the Moscow scholars at the conference contributed in the long run to the defeat of the left-bankers. The left-bankers, led by the director of the Institute of History, Language, and Literature, I. D. Ceban, tried to impose on the indigenous population of the Union Moldavian SSR (established at the beginning of August 1940) the russianized jargon, in which books and newspapers had been printed in the years 1938-1940 in the autonomous Moldavian SSR (established on Ukrainian territory in 1924), on the left bank of the Dniester, as the national literary language. Although similar attempts were made by left-bankers in subsequent years, the force 175

176

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of their attacks on Bessarabian academics and writers diminished considerably following the complete academic discreditation of Ceban and his followers, whose theses concerning the Slavic essence of the Moldavian language were decisively refuted by the Moscow scholars at the conference.1 Refuting claims that "Moldavian does not belong to the Romance languages," Budagov declared that such claims "had caused great damage to Moldavian linguistics and led it into a blind alley" because "Moldavian must unquestionably be considered one of the Romance languages, since both the grammatical structure of Moldavian and its basic word stock are primarily Romance."2 Budagov, like the other well-known Soviet linguists, who took part in the Kishinev conference at the end of 1951, could not, of course, support the left-bankers and their statements regarding the "Slavic essence of the Moldavian language." In doing so, he showed himself to be a scholar, whose conclusions and formulations were based on the objective data of the subject under examination. Thus, he examined "the Romanian and Moldavian languages in their unity" and estab¬ lished that "the common proto-Latin and common Romance word stock is of great importance for an understanding of the peculiarity of the vocabulary of th Moldavian and Romanian languages"; that the language of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia has preserved "the basic features of Romance grammatical structure and the common Romance word stock."3 However, those linguists, like Budagov, who had been invited to the conference at the end of 1951 from beyond the borders of the Moldavian republic, showed themselves to be not merely scholars, but Soviet scholars. The latter, as a rule, unquestioningly adopt the officially stated positions of the Soviet Communist party and adapt their pronouncements to them. Stalin's inclusion of the language of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia among the languages of other Soviet peoples (in a statement published in Pravda on 20 June, 1950 within the framework of the famous discussion on lin¬ guistics), served as dogmatic truth for all the participants of the Kishinev conference.4 Budagov, therefore, as may be seen from the above quotations, repeatedly referred in his address to the "Moldavian and Romanian languages," to the Moldavian language as an inde¬ pendent "Eastern Romance language." In doing so, he ignored objective scientific data, and conformed to the Soviet Communist party's lan¬ guage policy, including the frequently proclaimed (as in the statement by Stalin) independence of the language of the east Prutian Moldavians in relation to Romanian.

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Accepting the official Soviet position on the existence of an in¬ dependent Moldavian nation on trust, and referring to Stalin's statement that "every nation, whether great or small, has its own characteristic qualities, its own specific character, which belongs to it alone and is not to be found in other nations,' Budagov tried to demonstrate in his address that, like any national language, the contemporary Moldavian language contains ... a number of characteristic peculiarities in its vocabulary and its grammatical structure."5 Besides, neither the concrete examples, cited in Budagov's address, in support of the differences in the system of word formation in Moldavian and Ro¬ manian and in the individual characteristics of the former in comparison with the latter, nor the conclusions he draws from this are distinguished by scientific reliability. The reasons are as follows. As an example of the differences in vocabulary between Moldavian and Romanian, Budagov offered a series of two different words with the same meaning (borta-gaurd = "hole"; ciobota-cizma = "boot"; coromisla-cobiliia = "yoke"; etc. Budagov then assures us that the first word in each pair belong, according to the Romanian linguist Iorgu Iordan, to the Moldavian language, and the second to Romanian.6 This is not the only instance when Budagov, in conforming to the official Soviet position on the Moldavian language, ascribed to Ro¬ manian linguists ideas that do not correspond to the real meaning of their examples. This is exemplified also in the following statement from his address: "§aineanu denotes in his Defining Dictionary of Romanian the verb a gati [to prepare] as a Moldavian word in Romanian."7 Iorgu Iordanu had referred to Moldavian lexical elements in Ro¬ manian as provincialisms in comparison with their literary synonyms, while Lazar §aineanu recorded them in his dictionary with the note Mold., i.e., words of the Moldavian dialect of Romanian, used in the national literary language of the Romanian people. Thus, these same lexical elements were presented by Budagov in his address as having been acknowledged by Romanian linguists as being foreign elements in Romanian. It was impossible, however, for Budagov not to know that the abbreviation Mold. (Moldova), for example, in the Defining Dictionary of Romanian, just like the abbreviation Munt. (Muntenia), Tr. (Transilvania), Buc. (Bucovina) in the same dictionary, indicates that these words, in §aineanu's concept (like the first words in each of the synonym pairs in Iordan's conception), are "provincial equiv¬ alents" (echivalente provincial), which "constitute one of the sources of synonyms" in the Romanian national language.8

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In his book Language—Reality—Language, Budagov maintains that he belongs to the Marxist linguists, the only group of linguists, in his view, who are in a position to develop the science of language.0 On the other hand, he considers it the task of linguists not only to describe, but also to possess a proper understanding of the facts of language.10 It was in this spirit that he called upon the Moldavian linguists at the Kishinev conference at the end of 1951 to direct their efforts at illustrating the peculiarity of the Moldavian language, and exhorted them to study “not only that which binds it to all the other Romance languages, but also that distinguishes Moldavian from all other Romance languages, including Romanian."11 Budagov marshalled a whole array of linguistic materials in his address to the conference, which were supposed to testify to the peculiarity of the idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians and its difference from other Romance languages, including Romanian. Alluding to the Russian specialist in Romance languages, M. Sergievskii, who had died in 1946 (and who had contributed during the prewar years to the separation of the idiom of Moldavians from the autonomous Moldavian SSR from the Romanian language and its conversion into a Russianized jargon), Budagov listed as one of the most important characteristics of the Moldavian language its absorption of "Slavic, especially Russian words" (okrug, otnoshenie, pravlenie, poshte, raion, starshina, polk, pokhod, bolnitse, priog, parakhod, kino, poliklinike, kolkhoz, sovkhoz, stakhanovets, sovet, pyatiletke).12 While emphasizing the heavy influence of Russian on Moldavian "in purely lexical terms," Budagov also noted (with reference to a doctoral thesis by L. I. Lukht, prepared under his supervision. The Role of the Russian Language on the De¬ velopment of the Vocabulary of Contemporary Moldavian) "characteristic features of Moldavian word formation . . . [are] very unique, with a noticeable influence of Russian word formation."13 As an example, he gave "compound formations with tot ("every," "all," "whole"), which are not very productive in contemporary Romanian," but which "in contemporary Moldavian . . . appear to be productive under the influence of Russian" (totnorodnik = vsenarodnyi, totunional = vsesoyuznyi).u In his effort to prove, at any cost, "the peculiarity of the Moldavian language," Budagov adduced a number of other examples of the differences between Moldavian and Romanian. For instance, the cor¬ respondence, in a number of cases, between the Russian suffix ost' and the Moldavian suffix in(a (neostorozhnost' = nesocotin\, vidimost' = putin(a de vedere, gotovnost' = gdtin(a); and the greater use of the

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

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prefix ne in Moldavian than in Romanian. Budagov established his case regarding the prefix ne in the following way:

If we compare all the Romanian words beginning with the negative prefix ne in I. D. Ceban's Russian-Moldavian dictionary of 1949 with all the Russian words beginning with the same negative prefix ne in M. B. Sergievskiis Russian-Romanian dictionary, the translation of these words into Moldavian and Romanian will prove to be most instructive. As a general rule, ne is retained significantly more frequently in Moldavian than in Romanian, where it is frequently rendered by means of other, purely Romance (Latin) prefixed in [im, i], des or descriptively. For example, nevidimyi = nevazut in Moldavian, = invizibil in Romanian; nevyrazimyi = nespus, de neexprimat [Moldavian], inexprimabil [Roman¬ ian]; neosushchestvimyi = de neinfaptuit, de neimplinit [Moldavian], irealizabil [Romanian].15

The language data which Budagov uses to support his thesis of the peculiarity of the Moldavian language and the difference between it and Romanian only go to prove, however, that he was not merely treating the facts of the language superficially, but that he had thoroughly misinterpreted them. The superficiality with which Budagov treats his linguistic material is attested to by the fact that he resorted to translations of words in the 1949 Russian-Moldavian dictionary. Like other participants of the 1951 conference from outside Soviet Moldavia, Budagov decisively rejected the "nonscientific discussions of the mixed nature of the Moldavian language," which meant that he was criticizing in the first plan I. Ceban, the leading protagonist of these arguments.16 Yet, on the other hand, he resorted, without a moment's hesitation, to the translation of Russian words rendered in the spirit as those arguments in a dictionary the editor of which was Ceban himself. As a result of Ceban's language policy, his Russian-Moldavian dictionary was decisively rejected by the overwhelming majority of people engaged in literature and culture in Soviet Moldavia, who used the idiom of the indigenous population in their activities. The unequivocal confirmation of the Romance nature of the Moldavian language by scholars from Moscow and Leningrad at the 1951 con¬ ference contributed in no small measure to the success of these people in their struggle against Ceban and his efforts aimed at converting their language into a russianized Moldavian-Russian jargon. Since Budagov, as he has pointed out, considered himself a Marxist scholar, he sought to adapt his position on the Moldavian language

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

to the Soviet Communist party's language policy. This can be seen in his pronouncements on the peculiarity of the Moldavian language and its differences from Romanian. However, the intensified process of replacing russicisms and identifying the literary form of the idiom of east Prutian Moldavians with the national Romanian language, which began following the 1951 conference, indicates that he did not grasp the significance of the confirmation by him and his colleagues from outside Soviet Moldavia of the Romance nature of the Moldavian language, and did not anticipate its consequences. Thus, if we turn our attention to the examples offered in Budagov's 1951 address as indicative of the peculiarity of Moldavian and its difference from Romanian, then it can be seen that (apart from words drawn from Soviet reality like sovet, kolkhoz, sovkhoz, stakhanovets, etc., which have entered into many of the world's languages) both russicisms such as okrug, otnoshenie, pravlenie, etc., and compound formations of the type totnorodnik, totunional, as well as lexical formations such as putin^d de vedere, nevesel, de neexprimat, de neinfdptuit, etc., proved, in sub¬ sequent years, to be beyond the pale of the national literary language of the east Prutian Moldavians and were not recorded by the compilers of, for example, the 1978 orthographic dictionary of Moldavian.17 In this connection, it is very instructive to note that all the words defined as exclusively Romanian in Budagov's 1951 address (gaurd, cizma, cobili\d, os, porumb, etc.) were included in the above-mentioned or¬ thographic dictionary and in other dictionaries published in subsequent decades in Soviet Moldavia.18 The publication of the first one-volume collections of selected works of the national literature classics in Soviet Moldavia (thanks, to a large extent, to the impact of the 1951 conference, which led to I. Ceban's removal as director of the Institute of History, Language, and Literature) also contributed to the identification of the literary form of the national idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians with the Romanian language in the early 1950s. Only writers from Bessarabia or west Prutian Moldavia “qualified" as classics of Moldavian literature in the eyes of the republic's authorities. However, all writers of the past, without exception, (be they from Bessarabia, west Prutian Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Banat, Maramure§, Oltenia, or Bucovina) considered themselves Romanian, and not only aspired to write in the language understood by all Romanians, but were also adherents of the unity of the Romanian people and bearers of its national consciousness. The language of the approved writers of the past served as a shield behind which all Bessarabians active in culture and literature sought protection, when, following the fall of Ceban and

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

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his followers, they began to make freer use of the language in which they had been schooled in the years during which Bessarabia had formed part of Romania. For the younger generation who had grown up studying in Ceban's russianized grammar, and who were making their first steps in literary endeavors, the language of the classics served as a model for imitation and their works as a symbol of belonging to the Romanian people. Substantive linguistic changes that took place in Soviet Moldavia in the first half of the 1950s, the address by the well-known Italian linguist. Carlo Tagliavini, at the Eighth Congress of Romance Linguistics in Florence in 1956 (where the thesis whether or not the idiom of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia is an independent Eastern Romance language was discussed), and, finally, the exposure of Stalin's personality cult at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Commmunist Party exercised a major influence on Budagov's position regarding the question of the national language of the east Prutian Moldavians and whether it could properly be declared to be an independent language, separate from Romanian.19 As early as October 1955, at a conference in Kishinev, Budagov exhibited a different position from that taken at the 1951 conference "in the evaluation of the relationship between the Moldavian and Romanian languages."20 Moreover, after Tagliavini's address and the "thaw" that set in following the exposure of Stalin's personality cult, Budagov, together with another participant of the 1951 conference, S. B. Bernshtein, a Moscow Uni¬ versity professor, wrote a letter to the central committee of the Moldavian Communist party. Basing themselves on the fact that the only difference between the language of the book of poetry by the outstanding nineteenth-century poet, M. Eminescu, published for the first time in Soviet Moldavia in 1954, and that of his works published in Romania, was the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in the former case and the Latin orthography in the latter, Budagov and Bernshtein pointed out that there are no grounds for considering the idiom of the indigenous population of the republic, the east Prutian Moldavians, to be an independent language separate from Romanian. If, in the early 1950s, Budagov had referred in his works to the Romanian and Moldavian languages on equal terms, then, after Tagliavini's address and the exposure of Stalin's personality cult, he no longer mentions the existence of Moldavian as an independent Romance language. The following example illustrates the shift in Budagov's definition of the idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians. In his Outlines of Linguistics, which appeared in 1953, he writes: "The Latin words mater ["mother"] and pater ["father"] occur in all Romance languages

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

except Romanian and Moldavian."21 However, in the second edition of his Introduction to the Science of Language, published in 1965, he rewrote this statement as follows: "The Latin mater and pater occur in all Romance languages with the exception of Romanian."22 By emphasizing "with the exception of Romanian,' Budagov publicly declared in print that the national language of the Romanian people served, in fact, as the literary idiom of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia. This admission of fact also informed Budagov's book Language, History, and Contemporaneity, which appeared in 1971. An example of this can be found in the following statement from the book: "These two languages [Old French and Provencal—M. B.] together with Romanian form, on the syntactical level, a system which rests on the functional differentiation of substantival cases, whereas the other [my emphasis—M. B.] Romance languages do not have these substantival and adjectival case differentiations."23 The fact that Moldavian is not mentioned alongside Romanian in this instance shows that Budagov no longer considered it possible in those years to proclaim the idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians to be an independent Romance language, separate from Romanian. Subsequently, however, in view of the communist authorities' manifest stubbornness in denying the (scientifically obvious) fact that the national language of the Romanian people, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, serves as the literary language in Soviet Moldavia, Budagov once again, as in the early 1950s, reverted from a scientific to a partyclass position. His book Language—Reality—Language, published in 1983, is evidence of this shift. In this book, Budagov once again speaks of the idiom of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia as an independent language ("that which already appears to be almost dead in Spanish and French, is alive in contemporary Romanian and Moldavian").24 However, he no longer offers even one example of the difference between them; on the contrary, he seems to emphasize their unity ("In the Romanian and Moldavian languages . . . there are four types of article, and not two or three as in other Romance languages; the definitiveness of a substantive can be rendered also with the help of a postposited article"; "Contemporary Romanian and Moldavian synchronic con¬ structions of the type omul cel bun—'a good man'—were also at one time synchronic constructions in other Romance languages").25 Fur¬ thermore, even in cases where Budagov's examples of concrete linguistic data refer to Romanian, without a simultaneous mention of Moldavian,

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183

they are all without exception present in the idiom of the east Prutian Moldavians. The fact that in his book there is not a single example exclusively of this idiom, demonstrates that any mention of it by Budagov as an independent Romance language (along with Romanian) can be ex¬ plained by the Moscow scholar's basic point of departure, which is not objective reality, but the aims of Moscow's language policy in Soviet Moldavia. The positions formulated by Budagov, however, often do not conform to Soviet language policy, nor to the language situation created by it in the non-Russian Soviet republics, especially in Soviet Moldavia. To these positions belong, for example, the statement: "With the exception of those cases where the literary language is foreign in relation to the popular language [as for instance Latin in the Middle Ages and in the age of the Renaissance in Western Europe], the literary language grows out of the popular language, is based on it, profoundly interacts with it, and cannot exist without it."26 Or, for example, the statement that, "as a general rule, at each historical period the literary language represents the pride of the culture of a given people [Budagov's emphases—M. B.]."27 These examples and many other similar statements from the author's book Language—Reality— Language (e.g., "the grammatical resources of every developing lan¬ guage are continually improving themselves and its styles being differentiated"), are on the whole correct so long as they are talking of freely developing languages, but are far removed from reality when applied to the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR.28 These statements are in keeping with the letter of the Soviet Communist party's publicly proclaimed language policy, but not in keeping with the spirit of this policy as it is conducted in practice or with the linguistic situation in the country that has arisen under its influence. The well-known Ukrainian writer and literary critic, Oleksii Kundzich, once remarked, when referring to an article in the Ukrainian Lexicographical Bulletin, which stated that "the Ukrainian literary language is developing and improving on the basis of the popular language," that "this stereotyped phrase in the context of the article has a ring of undisguised irony," since "the condition of the [Ukrainian] literary language is cause for alarm."29 In his other works, Kundzich wrote not only of uncouth translationese with its "hybrid syntax and hybrid vocabulary," but also that "this translator's jargon has become a sickness of the original literature, and the literary language in general."30 Kundzich noted a whole series of reasons for the decline of the Ukrainian literary language. He emphasized, in particular, the

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

destructive role of the literal and word-for-word translations by the Ukrainian lexicographers who compiled the Russian-Ukrainian dic¬ tionaries. The latter not only frequently render Russian words by the same Russian words (chulki-chulki, "stockings," bluz-bliz, "close," portyanka-portyanka, "puttees/ and many others),31 but also translate "many interlanguage (mezhyazychnyi) homonyms . . . not by their Ukrainian equivalents, but according to Ushakov's dictionary."32 While pointing out that "'literalism' (bukvalism) in vocabulary is not merely an ugly phenomenon, but that it threatens to destroy the literary language," Kundzich, moreover, wrote that translator's jargon "is also ruining the language even without the stamp of legitimacy from the dictionaries but by way of direct influence."33 The Ukrainians, as this same author remarked, hear and read many translated texts, all of which are permeated with syntactical constructions, vocabulary, and phraseology that contradict the internal laws of development of the Ukrainian language and is destroying its system and structure.34 The linguistic situation that has arisen in the Ukraine is not exceptional in the USSR. In other non-Russian Soviet republics too, as well as in the national non-Russian territories of the RSFSR, translator's jargon and its "direct influence" is threatening the very existence of the national, non-Russian languages. Thus, for example, at the beginning of the 1960s, Soviet authors were commenting on the sad state of the Komi literary language. Not just school books suffered, replete with "expressions and Russian words alien to the Komi language," but, literary works in particular, where there were "so many expressions alien to the Komi language that the reader cannot understand what he is reading about."35 Given such a linguistic situation, the literary languages of the nonRussian peoples of the USSR, quite apart from whether they enjoyed rich literary traditions (like Ukrainian) or not (like Komi), do not represent the pride of their peoples' culture in the Soviet era. In the Soviet era, non-Russian literary languages cease, as a rule, to interact with their popular languages, becoming severed from them. The popular languages are subjected to intense russification and are displaced from their most important social functions. Still less enviable is the situation of those non-Russian Soviet languages, which in preSoviet years did not enjoy any significant literary traditions. Their very limited social functions are becoming more and more restricted and the majority of them have already entered the stage of gradual extinction. In this connection, let us once again refer to the book Language— Reality Language. In it, Budagov writes that "certain Soviet linguists.

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

185

afraid of 'offending' representatives of the less-developed languages, completely dismiss the very important question of language development and use the adjective "developed” (razvitoi-ravitye) in regard to such idioms that are languages only in quotation marks.”36 And he adds that "there is nothing 'offensive' vis-a-vis the less developed languages. All that has to be done is to create for them favorable social conditions, and these languages will have the opportunity of constantly im¬ proving.”37 When talking of the equality of all natural languages by their nature and of the different level of their development, Budagov would appear to be repeating the thesis met within recent years in the works of advocates of the Soviet Communist party's language policy, according to which "equality of rights does not mean equality of possibilities for languages,"38 and "Soviet reality shows that languages may enjoy equality, but not always parity."39 These definitions are repeated in one form or another by Soviet authors in connection with positions developed by advocates of the Party's national and language policies, which regard the Soviet people as a new historical community of people and the Russian language as the language of communication among the peoples and nationalities of the USSR. The Party's encouragement of the systematic displacement of the non-Russian peoples' and nationalities' languages from their most important social functions, and the gradual, yet constantly intensifying, conversion of the great majority of these languages into "languages in quotation marks" began long before the thesis of the Soviet people as a new historical community of people was developed. It began in the second half the 1930s when writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet in its Russian form was introduced, at the insistence of Moscow, into many republics where, until then, writing was based on the Latin alphabet. Even those languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities that possessed rich literary traditions, ex¬ perienced, as a consequence, not only a loss of parity in comparison with Russian, but also a loss of equality of rights. And this was not all. Although Russian had become in recent years "subject number one" in the national non-Russian schools and "on the average, from 14 percent of 17 percent of the total allotment of study time"40 was given to teaching it, the question of the continuing "improvement of the teaching of Russian in schools" continues to command the attention of the communist parties in the non-Russian Soviet republics.41 The process of making Russian the main instrument of communication throughout the territory of the USSR, along with the systematic

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

ousting of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples and nationalities from their most important social functions has been encouraged by Moscow in every possible way. Evidence of this can be found in the positions and theses developed by Soviet scholars in connection with the linguistic situation that had arisen in the USSR as a result of the deliberate national policy practised by the Communist party. Thus, other corresponding theses and positions are formulated in the works of Soviet authors, in addition to those already mentioned that speak of “equality of rights not meaning equality of possibilities for languages," and of "Soviet reality showing that languages may enjoy equality but not always parity." These include, for example, the theses of the Russian language as the second native language of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR; of the division of labor and social functions between Russian and the non-Russian languages ("the Russian language completely dominates the fields of science, technology, and industrial production");42 of the unification of terminology on the basis of the principle of minimal divergence of terms among the Soviet literary languages of the peoples of the USSR; of the ongoing development of social processes in the USSR which "is leading not to an increase in the number of existing languages, but to their gradual decrease, to the gradual and consistent replacement of some languages by others, etc.43 In his book. Language—Reality—Language, Budagov points out that a language policy "may or may not be in the interests of the people, depending on how, by whom, when, in what conditions and with what aim it is carried out," and, on the other hand, that “people, and above all the outstanding representatives among them—writers, scholars, public figures—influence the literary languages, develop them, and lay down their norm."44 Budagov maintains that only the materialistic (ideally Marxist) conception of language is capable of developing linguistics further; that "in all theoretical questions of linguistics Soviet scholars always seek to base and develop the Marxist principles of their research."45 Since, under the Soviet regime, the Central Committee of the Com¬ munist party is the most authoritative spokesman on Marxist principles in any field of learning, one must assume that Budagov considers also those people installed by Moscow at the head of the party and government apparatus in the USSR's non-Russian republics to be those public figures who, in Budagov's words, “influence the literary languages." However, if such people were to be so bold as to oppose the predominance of the Russian language and its increasing dis¬ placement of the national languages from their most important social

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functions, Moscow would not hesitate to remove them from their posts. This explains why all these public figures and, similarly, their proteges at the head of the academic establishments and creative unions of the non-Russian republics take care to strengthen the position, first and foremost, of the Russian language in the USSR's national republics, and not the respective non-Russian languages. It is precisely because of this activity, directed and encouraged by Moscow, that Russian has become the number one subject in Soviet non-Russian schools, engaging up to 17 percent of the total study time. Soviet authors who espouse CPSU language and national policy cannot but acknowledge the fact that, in the USSR, “many-faceted and profound processes of the 'sifting' of languages are taking place," in other words, the extinction of more and more non-Russian lan¬ guages.46 And how could they not help admitting it, when statistics from the Soviet population censuses testify to the dying out of the very nationalities that speak these languages. Thus, the results of the 1959 Soviet population census record 109 nationalities, the 1970 census 105, and the 1979 census 92.47 Soviet works explain this phenomenon "as a natural process of voluntary assimilation by the small nationalities and ethnic groups" in the USSR, and by the fact that, “among a considerable number [of the small nationalities], national consciousness has gradually matured, under the influence of the friendship and mingling of peoples, into acceptance of assimilation and merging with other nations as an historically progressive and inevitable stage in their lives."48 However, linguistic assimilation, as a stage in the process of ethnic transformation, affects not only and not exclusively the small nationalities in the USSR, as the proponents of the Party's language policy would have us believe, and moreover, it is far from being a voluntary process. The results of the Soviet population censuses demonstrate that even those Soviet peoples, after whom the Union republics are named, like the Belorussians, are also subjected to intensive russification. The number of Belorussians for whom the Belorussian language has ceased to be their native tongue totaled 2.4 million in 1979, or more than 25 percent of the total population of 9,463,000.49 It should be noted in this connection that, according to the data from the 1979 census, the indigenous population of the non-Russian Union republics (excluding the Belorussians and Ukrainians) exhibit a very great attachment to their native languages: Ukrainians 82.8 percent, Uzbeks 98.5 percent, Belorussians 74.2 percent, Kazakhs 97.5 percent, Azerbaidjanians 97.9 percent, Armenians 90.7 percent, Geor¬ gians 98.3 percent, Moldavians 93.2 percent, Tadjiks 97.8 percent,

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Lithuanians 97.9 percent, Turkmens 98.7 percent, Kirghiz 97.9 percent, Latvians 95 percent, and Estonians 95.3 percent.50 On the basis of these figures, some Western authors conclude that “the non-Slavic nations and those nations whose cultural traditions are genuinely distinct from the cultural traditions of the Russians, are successfully resisting linguistic and biological Russification."51 The reasons given by certain Soviet demographers, on the other hand, to explain this phenomenon, are closer to the truth. Their reasoning suggests that, among the indigenous inhabitants of these republics and “those members of the indigenous nationality who have returned, national cadres are forming in the administrative and governmental, cultural and educational, and other establishments"; that “language has become a symbol of national affiliation, a lever for social advancement and is declared as a native language even though its speakers are using for the most part another language, more often than not, the language of communication among nationalities," i.e., Russian.-12 The claims of the advocates of the CPSU's national and language policies that the process of assimilation of the non-Russian nationalities is voluntary, are also far removed from reality. K. Khanazarov, the director of the Institute of Philosophy and Law at the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences, whose words on the "natural and voluntary assimilation of the small nationalities and ethnic groups" were quoted above, wrote at the end of the 1970s with regard not only to the small nationalities and ethnic groups, but, in general, to the whole non-Russian population of the USSR, that “the development among Soviet people of a kind of 'indifference' to the language question on the part of the working masses is closely connected with the devel¬ opment of linguistic internationalism among Soviet people."53 No less loyal a Soviet scholar than Khanazarov, the literary scholar G. Lomidze remarks that, “according to the logic of the author's [Khanazarov— M. B.] arguments, it appears that love for one's native language is tantamount to being an obstacle to penetrating the highest spiritual sphere of human relations—the sphere of internationalism," and he adds that "many writers and poets react sensitively to the superficial prophecies of certain theoreticians, who with a sense of inexplicable joy and fervor announce the imminent advent of a new era of monolingualism or even speechlessness."54 Contradictory statements on the prospects for the development of the Soviet nations and their statehood are also not infrequent in Soviet publications. For example, some Soviet authors (as a rule, represen¬ tatives of the dominant Russian people) write that the descent from higher forms to lower forms represents the main trend in the devel-

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189

opment of Soviet national statehood, and that the transformation in 1957 of the Karelian-Finnish SSR into an autonomous republic is only the beginning of the process, and that the development of Soviet national statehood of all the Union republics will follow this path.55 At the same time, it is also emphasized that the transformation of the Union republics into autonomous republics "can be utilized as one of the ways in which Soviet federalism may develop into Soviet unitarism."56 By the second half of the 1920s, the thesis had already been formulated that "the struggle for communism has entered the stage when national culture is becoming . . . the greatest obstacle."57 The conclusions and positions deriving from this thesis occur in one form or another in subsequent years in the works of the advocates of the CPSU's national policy. Thus, it is pointed out that "the present assimilation of the population in the USSR is a completely natural and normal process";58 that the Soviet people is acquiring ethnic characteristics to which belong, for example, the Russian language as a language of communication among nationalities;59 that "already in our time, the preconditions are taking shape and the face of a new ethnic community, born of the practice of communist construction— the Soviet nation, is appearing."60 The authors of such statements, relying on the spirit of the Party's national policy and the advanced process of russification undergone by the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, anticipate in their works the subsequent development of ethnic transformation and linguistic assimilation of ever greater sectors of the non-Russian population of the USSR, and the merging of this whole population, ultimately, into a single Soviet nation, along with the progressive conversion of Soviet federalism into Soviet unitarism, and the Russian language from a language of communication among nationalities into the sole language of the new historical community of people, the Soviet nation (natsia). Very typical of the positions formulated by these Soviet authors in this connection are those stating that, in the USSR, "the denationalization of the nonRussian republics and the juridical merger of nations are taking place";61 that "there will not be any special need to maintain national Soviet statehood [of the non-Russian republics]";62 that the process of linguistic assimilation "has intensified during the years of Soviet rule," and that "groups of people who have changed their language will, in the future, usually change their ethnic affiliation too."63 Arguments and statements like these correspond to Soviet reality. At present, 82 percent of the population of the USSR speak Russian and one-quarter of all schoolchildren of non-Russian nationality attend

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

schools where Russian is the language of instruction.64 This is testimony to an ever-intensifying process of linguistic assimilation and, in the long run, the ethnic transformation of more and more significant sectors of the non-Russian population and entire Soviet nationalities (according to the results of population censuses in the USSR, the overall number of peoples and nationalities has been declined from 194 in 1926 to ninety-two in 1979).65 There are, however, those Soviet authors (as a rule, representatives of the non-Russian nationalities), who, on the contrary, regard the extension of the rights of the republics forming part of the USSR, and the continuing development of the languages spoken by the nonRussian peoples and nationalities, as the main trend in the refinement of Soviet national statehood, and the ascent from lower forms of the latter to higher forms as its basic norm.66 Thus, two contradictory approaches to the question of the continuing development of the national statehood and languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities can be traced in the Soviet sources. If, in the first case, the position of the authors coincides with the spirit and ultimate goals of Moscow's national policy, then, as a rule, the second case relates to those authors whose position is based on the letter of latest, current documents of the country's ruling Communist party, in which its ultimate goals are somehow concealed. An interest in preserving and developing national statehood, as well as the language, culture, and historical heritage of the nonRussian peoples and nationalities is shown not only by the repre¬ sentatives of these peoples, for whom "language has become a symbol of national affiliation, a lever for social advancement," but also by the non-Russian-speaking writers, for whom language is the most important medium of creativity.67 For this reason, even most loyal Soviet non-Russian writers generally speak up in defense of the role of the native tongue. In the 1960s and 1970s, when both scholarly publications and literary works were announcing, with great insistence, the imminent advent of the era of monolingualism (Russian) in the USSR and the formation of a single Soviet nation, many such non-Russian writers gave forceful expression to their love and attachment to their native language. For example, in the poem "Native Tongue," Rasul Gamzatov, the Avar poet from Daghestan exclaims with great passion: Another tongue heals the ailments Of someone else, but I shall not sing in it, And if tomorrow my language shall disappear,

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

191

Then I am ready to die today. I am always Even if they Even if it is But it is my

heartsick for it, say that my language is poor. not heard from the rostrum of the assembly. very own, for me it is great.

And in order to understand Makhmud, Will my heir have to read in translation? Am I one of the last writers Writing and singing in Avar language?68

The Balkar poet, Kaisyn Kuliev sings a hymn to his native language in the poem "Language of My Native Hills": And even though we Balkars are few in number, nonetheless, from childhood We do not conceive of life, without your words. We cannot mourn the dead, make the living understand, without your mediation. . . ,69

In Soviet Moldavia, many loyal poets also dedicated impassioned verses to their native language. Petrea Zadnipru, for example, in the poem "Snowy Russia" wrote of Russia and the Russians: For you, Russia, led my small people From the Dniester out of darkness To prosperity and strength, Like a mother, like an older sister. . . 7°

While in the poem "Bessarabians," dedicated to the period 1918— 1940 (when Bessarabia formed part of Romania), he accused Romania and the Romanians, without the slightest misgivings of conscience: They made us strangers in our own home . . . Humiliated us, scattered us abroad. With the single barbaric aim and intention Of making us forget our own name. And our language congeal in our breasts.71

Despite all this, Zadnipru expressed his attachment to his native language in the following lines from the poem In limba mea (In My Language");

192

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

No one language is like another, And I will live and die, speaking in my own language.72

By singing Russia's praises (which, in his words "had led" the east Prutian Moldavians "out of darkness") and cursing the Romanians (who had made—so he would have us believe—the sons and daughters of his people "strangers in their own home"), Zadnipru was rendering in rhyme the hackneyed formulas and positions of Soviet historiography and in the national literature of Soviet Moldavia for which he himself proved to be a mouthpiece in the interests of Moscow in the Bessarabian question. That Zadnipru exhibited an interest in preserving his own language cannot be explained, therefore, by the fact that he was one of the prominent representatives of the east Prutian Moldavians. A man who places "class interests" (which the ideologists of the CPSU identify in practice with the interests of Moscow) above national interests cannot be considered to be one of the "prominent repre¬ sentatives" of a people, to whose writers he belongs. To write of the persecution of the east Prutian Moldavians and their language by the Romanians in the years 1918-1940 amounts to a premeditated distortion of history, far removed from the national ideals of his own people, all with the aim of currying favor with Moscow. The interest shown by Zadnipru and others like him, both in Soviet Moldavia and in the other non-Russian republics of the USSR, in the preservation of their respective national statehoods, languages, and literatures can be explained by the fact that they are all less concerned for the ultimate fate of their peoples, than, first and foremost, for their own personal well-being. Moscow's efforts at creating the ap¬ pearance of a steady consolidation of the national statehoods of the country's non-Russian peoples and nationalities, and the flourishing of their languages, literatures, and cultures have given rise to a favorable climate for the publication in Russian translation of numerous works whose artistic level is beneath criticism even by Soviet standards. Not surprisingly, such works by writers from the national republics of the USSR make their appearance "in Russian translation, shortened by a third or a half," or in such a form that they have "nothing in common with the original," since "whole pages are added" by the translator.71 Nor is it surprising, moreover, that works by non-Russian Soviet writers, "which do not deserve to be published even in their own original language," appear in Russian translation.74

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

193

Besides these so-called writers (who pray that their ungifted works will acquire a more acceptable aspect with the help of Russian translators), there also exist other non-Russian writers. In recent years, many writers and poets have made their appearance, who (as a result of the advanced processes of linguistic assimilation and ethnic trans¬ formation) write “not only in their native language, but also in Russian."75 Loyal specialists in literature note, in this connection, that such writers are nurtured on "two national cultures," clasping "two national sources."76 In reality, however, these writers are becoming further and further removed from their own national language. Thus, the Georgian scholar V. Machavariani writes of Chinghiz Aitmatov (whose works enjoy every kind of approval and encouragement from the Soviet authorities, who have awarded him a Lenin Prize for literature), that, "without translation, the Kirghiz, who do not yet know Russian very well, cannot understand the writer who calls himself a writer of his people."77 The Armenian scholar, A. Petrosyan, discusses the same Aitmatov: "Typically, when evaluating the story Dzhamil, some [Soviet—M. B.] critics reproach the wroter for aban¬ doning his national sources, while others, on the contrary, praise him for having crossed over national limits."78 In doing his utmost to show that Aitmatov's story Farewell, Gulsary, though written in Russian, "is a genuinely national work," the Kirgiz author A. Sadykov mentions that the Lak, Effendi Kapiev, the Abkhaz, G. Gulia, the Chuvash, P. Khuzangai, the Chukchi, Yu. Rythkheu, the Kazakhs, Olzhas Suleimenov and Anuar Alimdzhanov, the Azerbaijanian, Gasan Seidbeili, the Moldavians, I. Drufa and P. Darienco, the Kirghiz, Chinghiz Aitmatov and Mar Baidzhiev, and many other “writers of the nonRussian people wrote and still write in Russian."79 An attempt to provide a theoretical basis for this phenomenon, in line with Soviet policy in the field of literature, was made by Moscow University's russified Professor Aziz Sharif. He formulated the position that language “does not constitute the only, nor even the primary characteristic of national form of literature."80 If the first part of this thesis conforms undoubtedly to the truth, then the second part is, at the very least, debatable. Without a doubt, in world literature, there are writers who, although they wrote some works or even all their works not in the language of their own people, nevertheless considered themselves representatives of their people and, as such, are included in the annals of their people's national literature. Thus, the famous patriotic prose poem by Alecu Russo, Song of Romania was written in French. Or, to take another example from the national literature of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia, one of their greatest

294

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

representatives, B.-P. Ha§deu, wrote poems in Russian in his youth. His father (Alexander Ha§deu) was a Russian-language writer; his grandfather (Tadeu-Faddei Ha§deu) a Polish-language writer; his uncle (Boleslav Ha§deu) a Russian-languate writer, and his daughter (Iulia Ha§deu) a French-language poetess. Nevertheless, all of them have taken their place in the national literature of the east Prutian Moldavians and the Romanian people as a whole.81 So far, so good. However, this cannot serve as corroboration of the second part of Sharif's thesis. For, when discussing the national form of a literature, considered as a whole (and not just that linguistic form in which certain works were written by individual authors as a result of the specific circumstances of their life and work), language cannot in any case be excluded from its main characteristics ("nor even the primary characteristic"). More¬ over, in this sense, language is the primary characteristic. The use of Sharif's thesis to describe the actual linguistic shifts taking place in Soviet non-Russian literatures does not stem from untypical, individual cases, but from the general process of denationalization of the creative forces, including those of writers, of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, that can be observed in the USSR.82 , When a literature becomes afflicted by a sickness, the symptoms of which are that "not only the older writers, but also the younger ones who are just starting out" crave to see their works published not in their native tongue, but in another language (Russian), as is the case, according to a Soviet author, in the Daghestan ASSR,83 then this literature as a whole has reached the stage of losing its national essence, has reached the stage of extinction. It isn't just literature, but also the people creating it. The example of the Daghestan Au¬ tonomous Republic and the numerous nationalities inhabiting it, is very significant in this respect. Daghestan scholars have for a long time already been writing not only that the literature of this republic "is breaking down the barriers between the nationalities and is becoming an overall Daghestan literature," but also that, in this republic, "a steady convergence of nations can be observed"; that "prospects exist for the creation of a single nation"; that "the Avar, the Dargin, and Nogai will consider themselves Daghestanian and that's what they will write in their passports."84 A book published in the early 1980s by one of the leading Soviet specialists on the theory of nations and national relations emphasizes that "there are enough grounds for confirming the formation within the borders of the Daghestan ASSR of a single international com¬ munity the Daghestan people," which, as a new community of people, represents an "inalienable, integral part of the Soviet people."85

Between National Consciousness and loyalty

195

The author of the book writes that, in Daghestan, "several dozens of the numerically small nationalities and ethnic groups have unified, in full or in part, with the larger groups, most frequently with the Avars, Dargins, Lezgins, Kumyks." On the other hand, he talks of the unity of all the nationalities, nations, national and ethnic groups inhabiting the republic," and also of how "a common culture for all of them" has been formed.86 The same Moscow author, moreover, points out that the "leading role in solidifying the ranks of the nationalities and ethnic groups [of Daghestan—M. B.] into a new community is played by the Russian language," which, according to him, is seen in the republic "not only as the commonly acknowledged medium of communication among nationalities, but also, in many ways, as an instrument of the national development of peoples and of their convergence."87 Claims to the effect that a common culture has been formed in Daghestan with the Russian language playing a leading role "in solidifying the ranks of the nationalities and ethnic groups" of the republic reflect the advanced steps of denationalization in which its population finds itself, and testifies to the intensive Russification to which it is subjected.88 On more than one occasion, Moscow has made attempts to accelerate the—in any case irresistable—process of denationalization of Dagh¬ estan's nationalities. Evidence of this can be found in particular in Gamzatov's book My Daghestan, where he quotes the poet Abutalib Gafurov as admitting that the authorities "intended to unite in one theater seven national Daghestan theaters," and that "they tried to make one newspaper out of five national Daghestan newspapers."89 Concerned for the fate of his native language and literature, Gamzatov writes that, when literature "changes the customs and habits, language and character of its people, when it betrays its people, then it is fading and withering away, and no amount of administering will help it."90 Both the Avar, Rasul Gamzatov, and the Lak, Abutalib Gafurov, were awarded the title of national poet of Daghestan. Both writers are as loyal as can be to Moscow. Thus, for example, Gafurov addressed one of his fellow writers who has asserted that he was neither Avar, nor Tat, nor Tabasaran, but Daghestani, as follows:

Listen, Mytarov, that you are not Avar, nor Kumyk, nor Tat, nor Nogai, nor Lezgin, I have known for a long time. But that you are also not Tabasaran, I hear for the first time. Who are you then? Tomorrow, perhaps, you will write that your name is not Mutalib and not Mytarov. I, for example, am Abutalib Gafurov. I am, firstly, a Lak, secondly

196

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Daghestani, and thirdly, a poet of the land of the Soviets. Or, you can enumerate them in the reverse order: firstly, I am a Soviet poet, secondly I live in the Daghestan republic, and thirdly, I am by nationality a Lak and write in the Lak language. For me, this is all indissoluble. ... I have no wish to deny any one of these. And I will go through fire for them.91

In face of the danger threatening the national languages and literatures, many Moscow loyalists among the non-Russian writers, such as Gamzatov and Gafurov resolutely defended their languages, declaring language to be "a gift to the people for all eternity, and it cannot be replaced or annulled."92 There are, however, non-Russian writers of a different kind who consider themselves firstly (and primarily) to be national, and only secondly, Soviet men of culture, with no thought whatever of reversing this order (in the way that Gafurov changes it). The numerous scientific works, published by obedient Russian and non-Russian scholars from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s and devoted specifically to the theory of nations and national relations, contained theses, positions, and formulations that were adapted, in general, to the advanced stage of denationalization of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities in the USSR. However, the discussion of the question of the theory of nations, which developed in the journal Voprosy istorii, for example, in the years 1966-1970, revealed a polarity in the viewpoints of the participants. Despite this, some of the participants in the discussion maintained that "there are no grounds for a fundamental review" of Stalins definition of the concept "nation" in his article "Marxism and the National Question,"93 and the journal's editors even maintained in the concluding article that "the well-known definition of nation, formulated by I. V. Stalin, is a summarization of all that was said by K. Marx, F. Engels and V. I. Lenin on the question of the essence and main characteristics of a nation."94 In reality, however, Stalin's definition ("A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture") was subjected to a fundamental review not only in the course of the above discussion, but also on other occasions.95 While some Soviet scholars were writing of the irrefutability of Stalin's definition, others were, in practice, refuting it, by altering it out of all recognition in their interpretation.96 The latter not only introduced substantive changes into the sequence of the four basic

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

197

characteristics of a nation enumerated in Stalin's definition, but also ignored some of them altogether or added new ones. Language, for example, was moved by some scholars from first place among the characteristics of a nation according to Stalin's definition to second place,97 and by others to third place.98 Several Soviet authors shifted language to third place when enumerating the basic characteristics of the concept “capitalist nation," and generally excluded it from the definition of “socialist nation."99 There were also Soviet scholars who rejected the fourth characteristic in Stalin's definition. Thus, for ex¬ ample, S. Kaltakhchyan wrote that “'common psychological makeup manifested in a common culture' does not reflect the essence of a nation in a capitalist society."100 At the same time as the discussion on the theory of the nation was being carried on the pages of the journal Voprosy istorii, theses and positions similar to those posited by its participants were being put forward in linguistic and literary studies and artistic images corresponding to the spirit of the discussion were appearing in works of literature. Iu. Desheriev, for example, one of the more active proponents of the CPSU's language policy, wrote that "certain lan¬ guages that are already no longer capable of fulfilling the needs of their speakers now—in our own times—become a kind of break, retarding their development," and, on the other hand, that "a language can die, if the society has ceased to have any further use for it."101 In the literary studies, however, the idea is expressed with increasing firmness that the dissolution of the national into the general is adversely affected by "the erection of artificial obstacles—calls for the devel¬ opment, first and foremost of the specifically national in each culture"; that “an embodiment of such calls in creative practice will only have the effect of postponing the merging of national cultures into one, common, international culture."102 The trends that emerged within the framework of the discussion on the theory of the nation, as well as outside it, found an echo in artistic literature, for example, in the following lines from the poem by the Russian Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvenskii, On Nationality:

For me the Earth is better for life after October

. . nineteen-seventeen!

I believe in the Power— the eternal. This one!

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The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Red by concept. By flag. By color. I shall never hide behind a heavy curtain By nationality I am— A Soviet.103

When quoting these lines, G. Lomidze, one of the advocates of the Soviet Communist party's policy in the field of literature, was forced to admit that, with this ending ("By nationality I Am—A Soviet"), "Rozhdestvenskii's poem touched many people to the quick." The attempt by the loyalist literary scholar to explain this ending by the poet's intention "to give a palpable image to the ideological unity of the Soviet peoples" and also the conclusion he draws in this connection that "there are no contradictions between national and socialist goals," could not, of course, reassure all those whom the poem had alarmed.104 All of them not only took into consideration that the poem (like other artistic, publicist, and scientific works expressing similar ideas) has deep roots in Soviet reality, but were also afraid that it anticipates an official announcement in the foreseeable future to the effect that the multinational Soviet people has grown into a single Soviet nation. So direct a threat of liquidation of the national statehoods of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities in the USSR alarmed, as was already pointed out, even those active in the fields of literature, culture, and science who placed their own personal well¬ being above national interests and emerged in their respective Soviet republics in the role of loyal proponents of Moscow's policies. However, not only the opponents of the Soviet regime from the ranks of the non-Russian nationalities, but also the representatives of the latter, who consider themselves primarily national figures, and only then also Soviet, expressed their opposition, on more than one occasion in the 1960s and 1970s (and even long before that), to the efforts by Moscow and the advocates of its policies to bring about the denationalization of their peoples and nationalities. In the latter case, we are referring to such writers, scholars, and people of culture as the Ukrainians, I. Dzyuba, M. Braichevskii, the Georgians, V. Machavariani, A. Menabde, the Belorussian, V. Bykov, and many others. Some of them paid for their display of concern for their people, its history, culture, literature, and language with long years of im-

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199

prisonment. Others were subjected to humiliating criticism in the Soviet press, still others dismissed from their posts, and so on. Important works like Ivan Dzyuba's Internationalism or Russification? (in which he condemns the authorities' policies, which have led to a mass switch in the non-Russian schools in the USSR from instruction in their native language to instruction in Russian, and the disappearance of entire nationalities), or, for example, M. Braichevskii's brilliant article "Annexation or Reunification?" (Prisoedinenie Hi vossoedinenie?) (in which he exposes Russian great-power chauvinism in the Soviet historical sciences) were not, of course, published in the USSR, but only in the West.105 Not only in the Ukraine, but in other Soviet republics too, there were and still are activists in the fields of science, literature, and culture, who directly or indirectly voiced their opposition to the policy of denationalization of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities. As things turned out, certain of their pronouncements sometimes found their way into print in the USSR. A good example would be the article "The Nation, Its Culture and Language" published in two parts in the journal Literaturnia Gruzia. Referring to the letter of Party documents, the author of the article, Vladimir Machavariani, writes that "the party stands for the flourishing growth of nations, their statehood, economic life, and the preservation of their territorial integrity, national language and national culture." However, he sub¬ jected to devastating criticism the prominent advocates of the Party's national (including language) policy, pointing out that this policy "has nothing in common with the claims of Kaltakhchyan, Desheriev, Aleksandrov and their like."106 Machavariani's use of the expression and their like (which in the Soviet social-political lexicon usually refers to persons of the enemy camp) in relation to all who voice opinions in the spirit of the wellknown Soviet scholars mentioned by name is not accidental. This expression is in keeping with the substance of his article as a whole and is evidence that the first part of the above-quoted passage served to conceal the fact that the spirit of the passage as a whole was directed, in reality, against the national policy being conducted by the Soviet Communist party, and against that same policy, which he invoked against the theses and positions of its loyal proponents. In his passionate defense of national cultures and languages, Machavariani emphasized that "both numerically large and small peoples create in their national culture ethical standards common to all mankind"; that "language is the most cherished, the greatest creation of a people's genius, and when a language dies, the people

200

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

will also die sooner or later."107 At the same time, with visor raised, he voiced his opposition to those who claimed that language is not the main (or not even an obligatory) characteristic of a nation, to those who did not include national culture among the characteristics of a nation (or even disqualified it as such), and who declared that "multilingualism retards the general progress of mankind." However, Desheriev, Kaltakhchyan, Aleksandrov, "and their like," when elab¬ orating their formulations and positions, base themselves on the spirit of Soviet Communist party program. This is why the open rebuff to all those Soviet scholars by the Georgian author appeared, in essence, to be an indirect rebuttal of the spirit of that program, even though he does base himself on their letter. If Ivan Dzyuba's work "Internationalism or Russification?" was written at the end of 1965, Mikhail Braichevskii's historical essay "Annexation or Reunification?" sometime around 19696, and Vladimir Machavariani's article in 1971, then the book by the Kazakh, Olzhas Suleimenov, Az i ia (which is similar to Braichevskii's work in con¬ ception) was published in the capital of the Kazakh SSR in 1975. All this testifies to the unabating dissatisfaction of patriotically inclined representatives of the non-Russian nationalities with CPSU policy, which is assuming increasingly threatening dimensions for the latter's very existence as national communities. Braichevskii wrote in 1966, with pain and anger, that under Moscow's diktat: "The activity of individual personalities and the personalities themselves, everything is evaluated not from the point of view of their class and social essence, but their position vis-a-vis Russia."108 Suleimenov, in 1975, expressed his profound indignation at the reinterpretation of the centuries-old history and culture of the Kazakh and all the other Turkic peoples of the USSR in the following passage: So long as the Turkologists themselves are unable to keep up their trousers without the help their dutiful apprenticeship, and—unhearing and unseeing—go on repeating endlessly the insulting truths of their handsome teachers, we shall wander around our house in black headbands of Themis.109

Suleimenov's outspoken attack on the "handsome teachers" (i.e., representatives of the central party, government, and academic and social institutions and organizations of the USSR), as well as on those who, 'unhearing and unseeing," repeat their "insulting truths" (i.e., loyalists active in the fields of culture, science, and literature of the peoples of the Soviet East) serves as a graphic corroboration of fact

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

201

that Moscow's national policy arouses anti-Russian feelings and moods in all the non-Russian republics, including Kazakhstan. Moreover, in the Kazakh SSR, where Russians began some time ago to significantly outnumber (5,991,000 in 1979, or 40.8 percent of the population) the Kazakhs (5,289,000 in 1979, or 36 percent), even those representatives of the latter who were most loyal to Moscow frequently formulate theses and positions that are not in keeping with Moscow's policy goals.110 Thus, for example, pointing out in one of his works that the nation represents "the highest form of ethnic community,"111 the Kazakh historian N. Dzhandildin writes in another work that, so long as Kazakhs residing in other Soviet republics do not break their ties with the indigenous population of the Kazakh SSR, "they keep the ethnic unity with them."112 At the same time, he emphasizes that all Russians "living among the non-Russian peoples of the USSR, maintain their ethnic unity with the Russian nation, constitute a single whole with it";113 and that it is unrealistic to assume that Russians living in Kazakhstan "can assimilate in time with the Kazakhs."114 The loyalist Kazakh scholar was attempting to introduce a refinement into the definition given to the concept "nation" by the Moscow scholars (according to which a nation is not a genetic-ethnic community, but primarily a social-historical one because the Kazakhs, who already constitute today only one-third of the population of the republic that bears their name, are threatened with a reduction of status in their national statehood).115 Outbursts of dissatisfaction with the Soviet Communist party's national policy on the part of the patriotically inclined non-Russians of literature and culture, as well as the contradictory, at times dia¬ metrically opposed, statements by academics specializing in the theory of nations and national relations, caused unrest among Moscow's creatures who headed the USSR's national republics. This unrest was reflected, as early as 1966, in the following words of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist Party, I. Bodiul, at the Twenty-Third Congress of the Soviet Communist party: "It cannot be considerred normal that [in] the textbooks, published recently, conflicting definitions of nation are given; the textbook Foundations of Marxist Philosophy, used in institutions of higher ed¬ ucation, omits altogether a section on the Marxist-Leninist theory of nation. Confusion reigns in the instruction of these questions in institutions of higher education and technical colleges."116 It was by no means a coincidence that Bodiul spoke out on this question at the Party Congress. By the mid-1960s, Romanian-Soviet relations had become strained, and, in the context of these relations.

202

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

above all in their undercurrent, there surfaced the "Bessarabian ques¬ tion." The historians of Romania, who in the first postwar decades had blindly repeated the theses and positions laid down by Soviet historiography, began examining it in their publications from positions that, in principle, coincided with the general theses formulated in Romanian historiography long before the Communists came to power in their country.117 All this had an impact on the internal political situation in Soviet Moldavia, whose indigenous population is part of the Romanian people severed from Romania by Moscow. In connection with the deterioration of Romanian-Soviet relations, anti-Russian and pro-Romanian sentiments increased among the east Prutian Molda¬ vians. BodiuTs attempts at the February 1967 plenary session of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist party to explain this by the fact that "some individuals easily fall under the sway of disorienting propaganda and frequently become themselves its dis¬ seminators, but are not always censured for it," testified not only to the existence of such sentiments ("some individuals") in the republic under his administration, but also to the serious support they were enjoying ("are not always censured").118 BodiuTs claim in his address to the February 1967 plenum regarding the eternal quest of "the Moldavian people for reunification with the Russian state," as well as the words of his appeal ("Our children and future generations must understand properly that their fathers did not conceive of life for themselves without Russia"), pointed out to the loyal proponents of the CPSUs national policy in the Moldavian SSR the direction in which the eradication of pro-Romanian sentiments among the indig¬ enous population must necessarily take.119 The manifestations of anti-Russian sentiments in Soviet Moldavia that disturbed the authorities during the period of strained SovietRomanian relations in the mid-1960s took the form of anti-Russian graffiti on the facades of high schools and in the lecture rooms of institutes of higher education, and also attempts to send pleas to Ceau§escu to intervene on behalf of the east Prutian Moldavians, and so on. Some of those "caught red-handed" perpetrating such crimes were sent to prison (A. Corbu, G. Ghimpu); others were dismissed from their jobs (K. Zubcu) or demoted (I. Osadchenko). Such sentiments in the national literature of the republic were no less disturbing to the authorities. The reason for this was that, although the majority of writers, literary critics, and literary scholars, like P. Zadnipru, tried to keep in step with the demands made on literature

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

2 03

by the ruling party, there were those among them who permitted serious deviations from these demands in their works. The loyalist journalist, I. Grecul, for example (at one time deputy editor-in-chief of the organ of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist party, the newspaper Moldova socialista) published an article in the Moscow organ of the USSR Writers' Union, Literaturnaia gazeta, which was fundamentally in keeping with the line laid down by Bodiul in Soviet Moldavia in the field of literature. Grecubs article was a response to a reader's letter published in the 16 March 1965 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta, in which the following question was posed: "Is it not time to recognize as an empty phrase" the familiar claim that Soviet literature "is socialist in content and national in form?" Grecul wrote in his article that "as the Soviet peoples draw nearer to communism, the common, international elements in their culture occupy an ever large place and the particular, national elements an ever smaller place"; that "Soviet literature and art must be regarded as single, international, both in content and form, but incorporating some national elements."120 Grecul's article was criticized by the most prominent advocates of the Party's policy in the realm of literature and culture121 (because it reflected in an undisguised manner the direction in which the Soviet Communist party was guiding the development of literature) and also by many representatives of the non-Russian literatures (because it was written with the clear intention of urging forward the processes of the internationalization and denationalization of non-Russian Soviet literatures).122 The article, nevertheless (like the reader's letter to Literaturnaia gazeta of 16 March 1965), was based on the real policy goals of the Soviet Communist party and took into account the advanced stage of denationalization of Soviet non-Russian peoples and nationalities. While such loyalists as I. Grecul were voicing their positions during the period of strained relations between Romania and the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s, certain representatives of the national in¬ telligentsia of the east Prutian Moldavians were airing entirely different views in Soviet Moldavia. This was true, first and foremost, of the writers who embodied the attachment of their people to national interests in their artistic images (I. Drufa, V. Vasilache, G. Vieru, A. Busuioc, P. Carare, etc.). Some of them, unable to resist the "carrot and stick" policy of the authorities, subsequently abandoned the positions they had held in the 1960s, while others continued to stand by their creative convictions in the years that followed.

2 04

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Very significant in this respect is the symbolic image of the bull in V. Vasilache's novel, Povestea cu cuco§ul ro$u (Tale of a Red Cock), the first volume of which appeared in Kishinev in 1966, at the very height of the tension in Soviet-Romanian relations. The author not only mentions in the very opening lines the legendary bison as the ancestor of the bull, which "now goes around submissively on a tether,"123 but emphasized this on several occasions throughout the novel: "Valera said: 'Release him for good into the forest, so that he will turn into a bison. . . . And Vlad called him a Symbol! (Russian edition, 1969, p. 132; see also p. 196). The following passages from the text of the novel, and especially the hidden meaning that emerges from reading between the lines, talk of the bull as a symbol of a people, unbroken and freedomloving in the past, who, having lost its independence, paces around today at the end of his enslaver's reins: a. Ah, my little white bull calf, if only he had a tongue not only for chewing corncobs, but also for telling his woes. For instance, that he was once lord of the forests and springs and appeared in the coats-of-arms of sovereigns and on their banners, unbowed, with his horns ranged against the crescent, which used to beat a fearful retreat from him amid the flashing of the yataghans and the thunder of the hooves. . . . Never, not for anything in the life of his fathers and forefathers could it have been possible to imagine that this proud antlered creature would pace about, submissively, lop-eared, on an imaginary tether, (p. 51) b. You have become conceited, bull! . . . Well, it was understandable before, you were found in song and on coats-of-arms, but now ... all that remains of you is a metaphor. . . . Why don't you then, while still bursting with strength, go to the museum, where your great-great-great-great-forebears are. Take a look at them there, where they stand like stone cretins, (p. 191)

Literary scholars and literary critics of Soviet Moldavia realized perfectly that, in the symbol of the bull that emerges between the lines, there lies a comparison between the present dependent status of the east Prutian Moldavians ("How free, when it is by no means free") and their glorious past, when the bison appeared on banners with which their great-great-great-grandfathers went to war in defense of their freedom and independence against the forces of the Ottoman Empire ("the crescent"). The fact that the publication of Vasilache's novel "was greeted enthusiastically by many critics," demonstrates that these critics tacitly sympathized with the position of the author

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

205

of Tale of a Red Cock regarding the question under discussion.124 On the other hand, there were critics, who (quite decidedly in disagreement with those who, in their words, "concentrate their attention too much on the expressive means of the book and avoid questions of an ideological, social tendency") posed the question, "What lost inde¬ pendence, what naive self-deluding love of freedom and insubordi¬ nation is the novel talking about?" Pointing out that, in the novel, there is no positive principle," these critics accused Vasilache of replacing this principle with "unfounded criticism, frequently sneering."125 Therefore, some critics (including V. Coroban, I. Ciocanu) evaluated the novel as an original and interesting work, distinguished by its elevated qualities, seldom met with in contemporary Moldavian prose.126 Others, (including I. Racul, V. Senic), on the contrary, wrote of the works "serious ideological and aesthetic defects." It can be said that, in the long run, the former (like Vasilache) were giving expression to the national ideals of the east Prutian Moldavians. The latter, on the other hand, were defending the interests of Moscow, whose policy was to pursue the denationalization of the indigenous population of Soviet Moldavia, and its ever greater sev¬ erance from the Romanian people. Vasilache turned out to be among those who were unable to withstand the pressure of criticism from such Moscow yes-men as Racul, Senic, and their like. At a "round¬ table" discussion organized in March 1971 by the editorial board of the journal of the republic's Writers' Union, he complained that "publishing forums experience some kind of fear of the manuscript of the second part of the Tale of a Red Cock: it was slated for publication in 1970, but was transferred to the 1971 schedule, and afterwards to the 1972 schedule."128 Vasilache succeeded in having the second part of his novel published in the journal Nistru, but at the price of rejecting all mention in it of the bull as a symbol of his people's former glory.129 Faced with a hostile attitude toward the novel, Vasilache declared at the round-table discussion, "It seems, that I shall begin writing in Russian. In the Soviet Union there are many journals and many publishers."130 Vasilache did not go that far, but another Moldavian writer. Ion Drufa, whose works had won the highest praise from Coroban and other patriotically oriented literary scholars and critics from Soviet Moldavia,131 but which were subjected to severe, at times devastating, criticism by Racul and similar Moscow yes-men in the field of literary criticism in the republic, really was forced to write some of his works in Russian.132 It should be noted that the loyal advocates of Moscow's policies, they too recognizing Drufa's great

206

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

talent, criticized him for a “non-class position," for deviation from social truth," and for an “insufficiently clear social and class ap¬ proach."133 The truth is, however, that Druja's works, such as the novel The Burden of Our Kindness (Povara bundtaiii noastre), the short story The Tocsin (Clopotniia)—entitled Smell of Ripened Quince in the Russian version, and the play Doina were criticized not because of the writer's non-class position, but mainly because of his national position. Drufa succeeded in publishing the last two of the works listed above only in Russian. Fortunately for him, the Moscow editors did not notice the profound Romanian national sentiment concealed between the lines of the printed text. From time to time, the communist authorities of Soviet Moldavia and their yes-men come up against manifestations of national patri¬ otism that turn into expressions of open anti-Russian and, at times, anti-Soviet feeling. One such expression was to be found in the book by the satirist, Petru Carare, Arrows (Sageii), published in 1972 by Cartea Moldoveneasca and confiscated immediately. The following circumstances should be considered indicative of the fact that there exists constant opposition to the efforts of the Soviet authorities to bring about the denationalization of the east Prutian Moldavians. Patriotically oriented people of culture among these Moldavians spoke out against the Cyrillic alphabet, aiming instead at the introduction of the Latin alphabet and the replacement of Russian by Moldavian in official correspondence.134 Faced with the stubborn refusal by the authorities to forfeit what was essentially the only difference between the literary form of the language of the republic's indigenous population and the Romanian language, many persons of culture systematically do not observe the orthographic rules laid down by the loyalist linguistic scholars, and use the corresponding accepted literary forms of the Romanian language. As was mentioned above, R. Budagov stated in 1983 that the prominent representatives of the people influence the development of the literary language and lay down the norm. When applied to the non-Russian languages of the USSR, however, it is not, as the experience of Soviet Moldavia shows, the prominent cultural figures, but the loyal advocates of Moscow's policies who lay down the norms of the national language in accordance with those policies that frequently contradict the internal laws of its development. Patriotically inclined people of science and culture are, however, violating such abnormal norms and are, in fact, showing their concern for the language's natural devel¬ opment.

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

207

As pointed out earlier, the assimilatory positions regarding questions of the theory of the nation and national relations, which found public expression in the 1960s and 1970s, and, on the other hand, the threatening dimensions of the process of denationalization of the nonRussian peoples and nationalities in the USSR, caused profound concern and ever-growing dissatisfaction not only among the patri¬ otically oriented, but even among significant loyalist strata. All this compelled the leadership of the Soviet Communist party to dampen the ardor of the most zealous advocates of its national policy. When, during the discussions on the projected USSR constitution of 1977, proposals were made to the Constitution Committee to introduce into its final text "the concept of a single Soviet nation" and "to liquidate the Union and autonomous republics,"135 Brezhnev declared, in the name of that leadership: "We would be embarking on a dangerous path, if we were to begin artificially accelerating . . . the objective process of the convergence of nations."136 Moscow's decision to rein in the impetuous advocates of its national policy was calculated mainly to reassure its loyal representatives among the non-Russian peoples and nationalities. This decision did not mean, however, that Moscow was abandoning the Soviet Com¬ munist party's ultimate goal of denationalizing the country's nonRussian peoples and nationalities or was preparing to retard the process of russification, which it encourages and spurs on in every possible way. This is precisely the reason that the scholars, specializing in the theory of the nation and national relations, from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the Soviet Com¬ munist party began writing, on the basis of the decision to conceal the russification process, that despite "the current processes of con¬ vergence of the nations and nationalities and the tendencies of future development of these processes, the question of the merging of nations remains, "for the present, purely theoretical, and not of any immediate practical significance."137 The reaffirmation in the 1977 constitution of the decision to preserve the national state system of the USSR serves the non-Russian Moscowloyalist cadres (for whom national affiliation is "a lever for social advancement") as evidence that the question of the liquidation of national republics is, in the meantime, not on the agenda.138 And this suits them perfectly since they, in all probability, proceed upon the assumption that, so long as the national statehood of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities is not liquidated, the global russification of the country, pursued by Moscow, does not present a direct threat to them. But the reconfirmation in the constitution of the present national

208

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

state system of the USSR was accompanied by demands that Moscow made of its non-Russian cadres and their hangers-on, the implemen¬ tation of which serves the goal of the continuing denationalization of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities. In essence, these demands require that Moscow's proteges in the non-Russian state-administrative formations of the USSR and those who do their bidding be charged with guaranteeing: a. Unquestioning support of Moscow's domestic and foreign policies; b. Extolling of everything Russian and inadmissability of a positive evaluation of any events, phenomena, or historical facts, if they shed light in any way on the darker sides of relations with the Russian people; c. Accompanying any manifestation of pride in the achievements of one's people with the indispensable expression of gratitude and acknowledgment to all the peoples of the USSR, and, in the first place, to the great Russian people for its display of unselfish help; d. Preparing the ground favorably for the never-ending flow of considerable masses of inhabitants from other republics as the main growth trend of the multinational union and autonomous republics;139 e. Encouraging in every way possible the steady consolidation of the Russian language at the expense of all the non-Russian languages without exception, and of the progressive displacement of the latter from the most essential, social functions; etc., etc. All this gives rise to feelings of deep anxiety among the patriotically oriented representatives of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR and leads, from time to time, to more and more unconcealed outbursts of indignation.

Notes, Chapter 6 1. See D. Mikhal'chi, "Zadachi moldavskogo iazykoznania," Voprosy mol¬ davskogo iazykoznania (Moscow, 1953), p. 58. 2. R. Budagov, "Moldavskii iazyk sredi romanskikh iazykov," V. F. Shishmarev, V. P. Sukhotin, D. E. Mikhal'chi, eds., Voprosy moldavskogo iazykoznania (Moscow, 1953), p. 121. 3. Ibid., pp. 124-126. 4. I. Stalin, Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznania (Moscow, 1952), p. 8. 5. R. Budagov, loc. cit., p. 121.

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

209

6. Ibid., p. 127. 7. Ibid., p. 130. 8. L. §aineanu, Diciionar universal al limbei romane, 6th ed. (Bucharest, 1929), p. XLII. 9. R. Budagov, lazyk—real'nost'—iazyk (Moscow, 1983), p. 14. 10. Ibid., p. 227. 11. R. Budagov, Moldavskii iazyk sredi romanskikh iazykov, p. 133. 12. Ibid., p. 128. 13. Ibid., p. 129. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 16. Ibid., p. 121. 17. Diciionar ortografic al limbii moldovene$ti (cu elemente de ortoepie), 2nd ed. (Kishinev, 1978). 18. See Diciionar moldovenesc-rus (Moscow, 1961); Diciionar explicativ al limbii moldovene$ti, 2 vols. (Kishinev, 1977). 19. C. Tagliavini, “Una nuova lingua leteraria romanzza? II Modavo," in Actes de Vlll-eme congres international de linguistique et philologie romane, (Firenze, 1958), pp. 445-452. 20. See D. Mikhal'chi, “Soveshchanie po voprosam razvitia moldavskogo literaturnogo iazyka," Voprosy iazykoznania, no. 2 (1956), p. 142. 21. R. Budagov, Ocherki po iazykoznaniu (Moscow, 1953), pp. 254, 261. 22. R. Budagov, Vedenie v nauku o iazyke (Moscow, 1965), p. 406. 23. R. Budagov, Iazyk, istoria i sovremennost' (Moscow, 1971), p. 243. 24. R. Budagov, Iazyk—real'nost'—iazyk, p. 121. 25. Ibid., pp. 120-121. 26. Ibid., p. 82. 27. Ibid., p. 248. 28. Ibid., p. 157. 29. O. Kundzich, “Perevod i literaturnyi iazyk," in Masterstvo perevoda (Moscow, 1959), pp. 44, 10. 30. O. Kundzich, Slovo i obraz. Literaturno-kritichni stati (Kiev, 1966), pp. 128, 199. 31. Ibid., pp. 132, 172. 32. Ibid. 33. O. Kundzich, Perevod i literaturnyi iazyk, pp. 36-37. 34. O. Kundzich, Slovo i obraz, p. 202. 35. Iu. Desheriev, I. Bagmut, E. Bokarev, N. Sukhov, eds., Voprosy terminologii. Materialy vsesoiuznogo terminologicheskogo soveshchania (Moscow, 1961), p. 21. 36. R. Budagov, op. cit., p. 235. 37. Ibid., p. 236. 38. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR, wnd ed. (Moscow, 1982), p. 213.

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

210

39. K. Khanazarov, "Kriterii dvuiazychia i ego prichiny," in Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), p. 123. 40. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy. . . , p. 176. 41. See "Hotarirea plenarei a X-a a CC al PC al Moldovei," communistul moldovei, no. 8 (1983), p. 26. 42. Literatura i zhizn', 17 December 19691. 43. Iu. Desheriev, I. Bagmut, E. Bokarev, N. Sukhov, eds., Voprosy terminologii, pp. 10, 40. 44. R. Budagov, op. cit., pp. 242-243. 45. Ibid., pp. 14, 254. 46. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 51. 47. Naselenie SSSR (Moscow, 1980), pp. 23-25. 48. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 47. 49. Naselenie SSSR, p. 23. 50. Ibid., pp. 23-24. 51. A. Bennigsen, "Langues et assimilation en URSS," in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 33 (1982), p. 60. 52. V. Kozlov, Natsional’nosti SSSR. Etnodemograficheskii obzor (Moscow, 1982), p. 244. 53. See Teoreticheskie voprosy sotsialisticheskogo internatsionalizma (Moscow, 1968), vyp. IV, p. 44. 54. G. Lomidze, Leninizm i sud'by natsional’nykh literatur (Moscow, 1972),

p. 80. 55. I. Kislitsyn, Voprosy teorii i praktiki federativnogo stroitel'stva Soiuza SSR (Perm', 1969), pp. 118-120. 56. Ibid. 57. V. Vaganian, O natsional'noi kul'ture (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), p. 25. 58. V. Perevedentsev, "Vzaiimosviaz' migratsii naselenia i etnicheskogo sblizhenia narodov v sovremennykh usloviakh," in Voprosy narodonaselenia i demograficheskoi statistiki (Moscow, 1966), p. 111. 59. F. Filin, "Leninskoe uchenie o natsii i nekotorye problemy natsional'nogo iazyka," in lzvestia AN SSSR, seria literatury i iazyka. vol. 12, no. 2, p. 151. 60. M. Ikhilov, "Ot razdroblennosti k edinstvu/' in Sovetskii Dagestan, no. 1 (1970), pp. 8-9. 61. P. Semenov, "Natsia i natsional'naia gosudarstvennosti' v SSSR," Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1966), p. 81. 62. See Nekotorye voprosy teorii sovetskoi natsional'noi gosudarstvennosti (Alma-Ata, 1962), p. 20. 63. V. Kozlov, op. cit., pp. 244, 234. 64. See Iu. Bromlei, E. Bagramov, M. Guboglo, M. Kulichenko, eds., Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v SSSR v svete reshenii XXVI s’ezda KPSS (Moscow, 1982), p. 279. (Hereinafter: Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii. . .). 65. Ibid., p. 215; K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 50.

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

211

66. S. Radzhabov, Perspektivy dal’neishego razvitia sovetskoi natsional’noi gosudarstvennosti, rastsvet sotsialisticheskoi demokratii v period razvernutogo stroitel'stva kommunizma (Dushanbe, 1962), p. 11. 67. V. Kozlov, op. cit., p. 244. 68. Kogo-to istseliaet ot boleznei Drugoi iazyk, no mne na nem ne pet', I esli zavtra moi iazyk ischeznet. To ia gotov segodnia umeret'. Ia za nego vsegda dushoi boleiu, Pust' govoriat, chto beden moi iazyk, Pust' ne zvuchit s tribuny assamblei, No, mne rodnoi, on dlia menia velik. I chtob poniat' Makhmuda, moi naslednik Uzheli prochitaet perevod? Uzheli ia pisatel' iz poslednikh, Kto po-avarski pishet i poet? . . See R. Gamzatov, Moi Dagestan (Moscow, 1972), p. 69. 69. I pust' balkartsev malo nas, no s detstva Ne myslim my zhit'ia bez slov tvoikh, Ne mozhem my bez tvoego posredstva Oplakivat' mertvykh, vrazumit' zhivykh. . . See Pravda, 31 December 1968. 70. Ved' k protsvetaniu i sile Narod moi malen'kii s Dnestra Iz t'my ty vyvela, Rossia, Kak mat', kak starshaia sestra. . . See Kodry, no. 1 (1978), p. 6. 71. Ci ne-au facut straini la noi in casa, . . . . . Ne-au umilit, ne-au razle(it prin lume Cu-acelasi gmd, cu-acelafi scop pagin Ca sa uitam de propriul nostru nume §i graiuil blind sa ni se stinga'n sin. See Moldova socialista, 2 August 1968. 72. E fiecare limba fara seaman. In limba mea trai-voi §i-o sa mor. See N. Corlateanu, "Probleme de limba In opera lui Marx," Limba §z literatura moldoveneasca, no. 2 (1983), p. 6. 73. K. Nurmakhanov, "Perevod—zolotoi fond," Zhuldyz (Alma-Ata), no. 7 (1962).

212

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy 74. Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 August 1969. 75. See Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii, . . . , p. 276. 76. Voprosy literatury, no. 12 (1972), p. 52. 77. V. Machavariani, "Natsia, ee kul'tura i iazyk,

Literaturnaia Gruzia,

no. 7 (1971), p. 79. 78. A. Petrosian, "Glazami istorii," in I. Varticean, Iu. Desheriev, N. Corlateanu, N. Kravtsov, G. Lomidze, E. Tereshchenko, S. Cibotaru, eds., Natsional'noe i internatsional'noe v literature, folklore i iazyke (Kishinev, 1971), pp. 67-68 (hereinafter: Natsional’noe i internatsional'noe. . .). 79. A. Sadykov, "Dvuiazychie i voprosy natsional'nogo kolorita," Nat¬ sional'noe i internatsional'noe. . . , pp. 146-147. 80. A. Sharif, "Ne v tom kliuche," in Puti sovetskoi mnogonatsional’noi literaturi, (Moscow, 1967), p. 307. 81. See Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 7 (1977), pp. 215-216, 269-270. 82. A. Sadykov, art. cit., p. 148. 83. N. Aliev, "Perevod-ne remeslo, a tvorchestvo," Dagestanskaia Pravda, 11 February 1962. 84. See R. Gamzatov, op. cit., p. 342. 85. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR. Problemy teorii i metodologii (Moscow, 1981), p. 381. 86. Ibid., pp. 381-382. 87. Ibid., p. 382. 88. Ibid. 89. See R. Gamzatov, op. cit., pp. 3426343. 90. Novyi mir, no. 11 (1968), p. 146. 91. See R. Gamzatov, Moi Dagestan, pp. 341-342. 92. Ibid., p. 222. 93. I. Tsamerian, "Aktual'nye voprosy marksistsko-leninskoi teorii natsii," in Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1967), pp. 107-108. 94. Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (1970), p. 90. 95. I. Stalin, Sochinenia, vol. 2, p. 296. 96. "Izvestia AN SSSR," Seria literatura i iazyk, vol. XXIX, no. 2 (1970), p. 112. 97. S. Kaltakhchian, "K voprosu o poniatii natsia," in Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1966), p. 47. 98. E. Aleksandrov, "V. I. Lenin o natsional'nom i natsional'no-kolonial'nom voprose," Politicheskoe obrazovanie, no. 10 (1970), p. 78; I. Tsamerian, art. cit., p. 115. 99. P. Rogachev, M. Sverdlin, "O poniatii natsia," in Voprosy istorii, no. 1 (1966), pp. 45-47. 100. S. Kaltakhchian, art. cit., p. 39. 101. Iu. Desheriev, Zakonomernosti razvitia i vzaimodeistvia iazykov v sovetskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1966), pp. 363-364. 102. Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 August 1965.

Between National Consciousness and Loyalty

213

103. Mne Zemlia dlia zhizni Bolee prigodna posle Oktiabria semnadtsatogo goda! Ia v derzhavu veruiu— vechnuiu. Etu! Krasnuiu po smyslu. Po flagu. Po tsvetu. Nikogda ne spriachus' za kondovoi zavesoi. . . Po natsional'nosti Ia— Sovetskii. See Izvestia, 24 January 1972. 104. G. Lomidze, Leninizm i sud'by natsional’nykh literatur (Moscow, 1972), p. 82. 105. Natsional'nyi vopros v SSSR. Sbornik dokumentov. (Suchasnist, 1975), pp. 62-132. 106. V. Machavariani, art. cit., Literaturnaia Gruzia, no. 7, p. 82. 107. Ibid., no. 6, p. 72; no. 7, p. 79. 108. See Natsional'nyi vopros v SSSR. . . . , p. 73. 109. O. Suleimenov, Az i Ia. Kniga blagonamerennogo chitatelia (Alma-Ata, 1975), pp. 220-221. 110. See Naselenie SSSR. . . , p. 28. 111. N. Dzhandil'din, Priroda natsional'noi psikhologii (Alma-Ata, 1971), p.

9. 112. N. Dzhandil'din, Monolitnoe edinstvo (Alma-Ata, 1975), p. 102. 113. N. Dzhandil'din, Priroda natsional'noi psikhologii, p. 277. 114. N. Dzhandil'din, Monolitnoe edinstvo, p. 103. 115. P. Fedoseev, "Leninskoe uchenie po natsional'nomu voprosu i sovremennost'," in Leninizm i opyt stroitel'stva sotsializma v respublikakh Sovetskogo Vostoka (Frunze, 1970), p. 4. 116. Pravda, April 3, 1966. 117. See M. Bruchis, Rossia, Rumynia i Bessarabia. 1812-1918-1924-1940 (Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem, 1979), pp. 63-66. 118. I. Bodiul, "O podgotovke k 50-letiu velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii i zadachakh partiinoi organizatsii respubliki," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 16 February 1967. 119. Ibid. 120. I. Grecul, "Videt' ne tol'ko chastnoe (Novaia zhizn'—i novye pesni)," Literaturnaia gazeta, 17 June 1965.

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

214

121. See A. Egorov, "Stroitel'stvo kommunizma i razvitie natsional'nykh khudozhestvennykh kul'tur," Kommunist, no. 1 (1969), p. 35. 122. See K. Kasumzade, "K probleme natsional'nogo kharaktera v liter¬ ature,” in Natsional'noe i internatsional'noe. . . . , p. 141. 123. V. Vasilache, Povestea cu cuco§ul ro$u (Kishinev, 1966); in Russian, Skazka pro belogo bychka (Moscow, 1969), p. 8. 124. I. Racul, V. Senic, "Skazka—eto ser'ezno. Eshche raz o 'Skazke pro belogo bychka,'" Kommunist Moldavii, no. 5 (1973), p. 73. 125. Ibid., pp. 75, 77-78. 126. See V. Coroban, "Imagina(ia in drepturile sale," Moldova socialista, 9 June 1966; The same: "Romanul moldovenesc contemporan," Maturitate (Kishinev, 1967), p. 92; I. Ciocanu, Articole §z cronici literare (Kishinev, 1969), pp. 80-82. 127. I. Racul, V. Senic, art. cit., p. 77. 128. "Scriitorul—editorul—cititorul," Nistru, no. 3 (1971), p. 142. 129. See Nistru, no. 11, 12 (1971); no. 1 (1972). 130. Ibid., no. 3 (1971), p. 141. 131. V. Coroban, Romanul moldovenesc contemporan. (Estetica genului) (Kish¬ inev, 1974); M. Cimpoi, "Un univers artistic," in Maturitate, pp. 299-314. 132. I. Racul, "Pravda zhizni i pozitsia pisatelia," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 25 June 1969; A. Mereuta, "Podderzhat' zolotom dostovernosti," Sovetskaia Mol¬ davia, 19 February 1977. 133. See M. Novokhatskii, "Na uroven' vremeni," Kodry, no. 6 (1973), pp. 144-145, 149; S. Rybak, "Sovmestnyi poisk," Kodry, no. 2 (1976), p. 137; A. Mereuta, art. cit.; I. Racul, art. cit. 134. A. Grecul, Rastsvet moldavskoi sotsialisticheskoi natsii (Kishinev, 1974), p. 256. 135. L. Brezhnev, O konstitutsii SSSR (Moscow, 1977), p. 39. 136. 137. 138. 139.

Ibid., p. 40. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizheni natsii v SSSR. . . , p. 427. V. Kozlov, Natsional'nosti SSSR. . . , p. 244. M. Kulichenko, op. cit., p. 319.

7 The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party and Its Defenders

From 4 August through 10 August 1984, the Seventh World Congress of Applied Linguistics was held in the Belgian capital (AILA - 1984, Brussels, Belgium).1 The congress included a symposium on the subject of "The Languages of the Non-Russian Soviet Nationalities: A Gradual Reduction of Social Functions." Neither the content of the presentations ("On the Status of the Language of the Indigenous Population of the Ukrainian SSR" by Professor G. Perfecky, United States; "The National Language of the Karelian ASSR" by Professor P. Austin, Canada), nor the title of the symposium itself were to the liking of the Soviet scholars who participated with presentations and reports to other sections of the Brussels congress, and appeared at the symposium in the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples with the clear intent of disrupting the proceedings. They were unable to provide an intelligible explanation for the use of Finnish as the official language of the Karelian ASSR, in view of the Canadian professor's statement that "there is the continuing anomaly of having the language of a neighboring bourgeois state as the official language of a Soviet autonomous republic. The uniqueness of this situation is even more apparent when one realizes that Finns constitute only 2.7 percent of the population of Karelia."2 What really caused them to bristle, however, was the conclusion of the other presentation, based on a survey of numerous examples from Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries and the elevenvolume Explanatory Dictionary of Ukrainian (Tolkovyj slovar’ ukrainskogo jazyka), that "russification is the use of any word or phrase in Ukrainian that is closest in form to its equivalent in modern Russian."3 Listening to their replies, one recalled the character in Chekhov's tale who countered his neighbor's assertion that "there are black spots on the 215

216

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

sun" with the irrefutable argument: "It's impossible because it could never be possible." The Soviet scholars attempted to dismiss the impression left by the countless examples in the U.S. scholar's presentation, illustrating the introduction of russified vocabulary and phraseology and the concomitant massive displacement of Ukrainian by compilers of dic¬ tionaries in the Ukraine. Accordingly, they fell back on the hackneyed position taken by exponents of the CPSU's language policy, which maintains that all the languages of Soviet peoples interact and are mutually enriched. Just as Russian is a source of enrichment for the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, so the latter, in turn, are a source of enrichment for Russian. Both the conclusions drawn by Perfecky on linguistic russification in the Ukraine, and the examples he brings, attesting to the worrisome proportions already reached by this process, demonstrate that the fears, voiced at the end of the 1950s by linguists from the nonRussian republics of the USSR, regarding the "principle of minimal divergence of terminology in the literary languages of the peoples of the USSR," first formulated at that time, were fully justified. Although the exponents of the CPSU's language policy sought to reassure alarmed linguists and literati in the non-Russian Soviet republics that it was merely a question of Russian serving as a model for newly coined terminology, in reality, long-term goals of far greater significance were being pursued in the application of this principle.4 These long¬ term aims are intended to intensify the one-sided influence of Russian on all levels of non-Russian Soviet languages, to root out from them long-established terminology and commonly used words, to introduce Russian morphological, syntactical, stylistic, and other models, to displace non-Russian languages from their most important social functions, and turn them into second-class means of communication. The definition of this phenomenon in the title of the symposium itself (a gradual reduction of social functions) gave rise to impassioned protestations from the Soviet participants at the Brussels congress. While granting that the social functions of the languages spoken by the numerically small ethnic groups were diminishing in the USSR, they nevertheless defended the catchwords adopted by exponents of the CPSU's language policy according to which the languages of the peoples and nationalities, after whom the Union and autonomous republics are named, are continuing their rapid development and steadily broadening their social functions. Yet, even by the early 1960s, something quite contradictory to the official slogans could be detected on many occasions in the academic literature of the USSR. It was.

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

217

for example, perfectly legitimate to use the term “division of labor”5 when referring to the language situation in all the Soviet republics, or to write that "the Russian and national languages delineate their spheres of usage," and that "Russian reigns supreme in the realm of science, technology and industrial production."6 That this refers not only "to all the literary languages of peoples of the Russian Federation," as M. Isaev, a Soviet specialist in language planning, wrote in 1973/ but, in general, to all the languages of the non-Russian peoples in the USSR, without exception, is indicated by the following statement made in 1981 by M. Kulichenko, a leading Soviet specialist in the theory of nations and national relations. "By virtue of its [the Russian languages—M.B.] major role," writes Ku¬ lichenko, "industry functions in the republics, many organs of state authority operate, and a considerable number of cultural institutions work. This means that the creation of new national values—material and spiritual—and in many respects the practice of old values, is very often impossible without the use of the Russian language."8 The effort invested by the authorities in extending the social functions of Russian still more at the expense of the non-Russian languages is further attested in the admission contained in an editorial in Izvestiya Akademii nauk SSSR. Seriya literatury i yazyka (1983, no. 6) that "the implementation of recommendations for improving the study and teaching of Russian in the national [non-Russian—M. B.] schools and for broadening its social functions is being stepped up" (vol. 42, p. 500). Despite the gulf between the real language situation in the nonRussian administrative-political formations of the USSR and the official positions regarding the flourishing development of the non-Russian peoples' languages and the extension of their social functions, there are still scholars in the West who accept these positions on trust and disseminate them. An example is the teacher at the Belgian Institut superieur d'etat de traducteurs et interpretes, G. Blankoff-Scarr, who spoke on the "Main Tendencies in the Development of Language Life in the USSR" at the eighth session of the congress.9 Blankoff-Scarr's presentation, which was based on Soviet statistical data, as well as on the theses and positions formulated by the exponents of the Soviet Communist party's national languages policy, placed the leader of the USSR Academy of Sciences delegation, M. Guboglo, whose own report on "The Solution to the Problem of National Languages in Soviet Society Today" figured in the program of the congress's ninth session in an "awkward" position.10 Guboglo, who addressed the congress one day after Blankoff-Scarr, declared that.

218

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

since he "does not wish to repeat what Blankoff-Scarr said in her report," he would lead a discussion on the national and international in the way of life of the Soviet people, instead of on the question of national languages in Soviet society. (Guboglo's discussion reflected the content of an article he published in mid-1983, copies of which were circulated among the participants.)11 Typically, the Soviet scholars appeared at the symposium on the languages of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR accompanied not only by the representative of UNESCO (the Russian, V. Koptilov), but also Blankoff-Scarr, who did her best to lend support to their remarks. This is not surprising when one considers that according to the "bottom line" of her presentation at the eighth session "a process of internal linguistic consolidation" appears to be one of the main trends "of the current ethnolinguistic situation" in the USSR.12 The published theses of Guboglo's unpresented report state that "the increasing functional development of national languages is main¬ tained through the creation of specialized dictionaries which enrich the vocabulary of these languages."13 The phrase about "the increasing functional development of national languages," which contradicts the real language situation in the non-Russian republics of the USSR, is a variation on the above-mentioned thesis of the so-called broadening of the social functions of the non-Russian languages. The second part of the quotation demonstrates the incredible weakness of the positions held by those Soviet scholars who expound the Soviet Communist party's national languages policy, including those who attempted to torpedo the symposium on the non-Russian languages of the USSR at the Brussels congress. As has already been noted, members of the Soviet delegation attempted to dispute the conclusion, quite naturally suggested by Perfecky's presentation, that the innumerable changes resulting from the displacement of inherent Ukrainian vocabulary and phraseology by Russian have brought about a qualitative change that, in essence, is an advanced stage in the russification process of the Ukrainian language. Thus, V. Neroznak, the most militant member of the Soviet delegation, apart from an unfounded attempt to call into question the symposium's title, sought also, with no regard for the truth, to argue that the data marshalled by Perfecky in his report relate to peripheral areas of the Ukrainian lexical system and play a very insignificant role in its development. Another member of the Soviet delegation, L. Nikolskii, did not refer, in his remarks, to the title of the symposium. And this was no oversight. In an article published in English, "On the Subject Matter

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

219

of Sociolinguistics/' Nikolskii wrote in the early 1970s that one of the specific qualities of language is that "it serves society in all spheres,” while in multinational societies "instead of the forms of existence of a single language, social-functional distribution is under¬ gone by different languages, which may have functional 'ranks' as a means of international, regional or local communication, or may be languages of the elite or broad social masses." For all the contradictions in Nikolskiis statements (in the sense that, for example, while "social-functional distribution by different languages is taking place in the USSR, only the Russian language "serves society in all spheres"), the fact that this process of distribution was mentioned by him evidently prompted him not to touch in his remarks upon the symposium's title regarding the non-Russian lan¬ guages. The reason for such restraint should be sought in the subject of his research—theoretical problems of the study of the language situation not only in the USSR, but also in the countries of Asia and Africa. In 1967, the Languages Division of the Asian Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences published The Language Situation in the Countries of Asia and Africa. The editorial board included Nikolskii.14 Later, in 1970, he edited another book on a similar theme.15 In the editors' foreword to the first of these publications, it is stated that the participation of foreign research scholars serves the cause of "closer cooperation among scholars of different countries, engaged in the study of the language situation" (1967, p. 3). It is possible to form an idea of the aims pursued by such cooperation from the following statement of M. Isaev contained in the second of the two publications mentioned above: "The developing countries of Asia and Africa have faced many problems, including the language problem. ... It is natural that the most progressive parties and governments of these countries focus their attention above all on the first socialist state in the world to have successfully resolved national and language prob¬ lems" (1970, p. 57). At the same time, as praising the way in which the language problem has been resolved in the USSR, Soviet specialists have sought, and still seek, to support those forces in the countries of Asia and Africa that espouse the replacement by local languages of the languages of the former parent states, whose languages had become official in those countries. Thus, pointing out, for example, that "in India English is still the only language of official competence," the orientalist, G. Serdyuchenko, indicated that, from the Soviet point of view, "such a situation seems entirely unacceptable and impossible." On the other

220

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

hand, he writes that "the question of replacing English in official functions by some other, local language" is perfectly legitimate and that "it is impossible to tolerate a situation where in order to complete his or her secondary or higher education an Indian must have a fluent command of English" (1967, pp. 16-17). It should be added that, "in taking into consideration commonly held views" in the USSR, Serdyuchenko did make reference in the closing section of his article to a thesis that accords in some measure with these views. According to this position, "the confusion or identification of the concepts 'nation' and 'state,' the recognition of a common official language in a [multinational] state as the only national language of the country is theoretically incorrect and in practice leads to outbursts of nationalism" (ibid., p. 33). At the same time, however, is this same concluding section of his article, he arrived at conclusions that were at total variance with "commonly held views" in the USSR. For example, the conclusion that "the proper resolution of the problem of official languages as a means of internation com¬ munication in the multilanguage and multinational states of Asia and Africa which have recently attained independence, is of the utmost significance (ibid.) M. Isaev's article "On the Soviet Experience in Resolving the Language Problem in a Multinational State," published in one of the books edited by Nikolskii, speaks of the harsh criticism to which "Lenin subjected those who contended for the declaration of Russian as an official language" (1970, p. 54) and quotes Lenin's words: "However you voice many beautiful phrases about 'culture,' an oblig¬ atory official language is concomitant with coercion."16 If one takes into consideration that not only Serdyuchenko, but the authors of the other articles in these books consider the declaration of one or another language in the African or Asian countries as an official language to be a perfectly natural and legitimate phenomenon (1967, pp. 12, 14, 23, 25, 82, 119, etc.; 1970, pp. 24-25, 130-131, 164, 172, etc.), then a very specific conclusion suggests itself. What emerges is that the evaluation in the books on language policy of any particular country edited by Nikolskii is based not only, or rather, not so much on "commonly held" Soviet "views," regarding ways and methods of resolving the national and language problem in multinational states, as on the relations between the government and ruling party of the USSR, on the one hand, and the governments and ruling parties of the countries in question, on the other, and frequently irrespective of the prevailing sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems in these countries.

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

221

Thus, in one of the above publications, it says that “under socialism the language policy is structured on a consideration of the manifold objective factors and trends of the developing language situation, as an instrument for the awakening of national self-awareness in general and awareness by individual ethnic groups of their own languages in particular” (1970, p. 30). Using the implementation of this kind of policy in the People's Republic of China as an example, the author of the above statement pointed out that it was carried out "in the first decade of its existence when the state's language policy was planned by taking into account objective factors of the language situation and by accelerating the development and dissemination of a broadly understood literary language, approximated as closely as possible to the spoken vernacular, ... at the same time it also contributed to the development of the languages of China's national minorities" (ibid.). The mention of the period when China was conducting a correct language policy, from the Soviet standpoint (in the first decade of its existence), goes far beyond the bounds of simple accuracy. Mention of this fact is connected with the sharp deterioration of relations between Moscow and Peking in the mid-1950s which led to a radical reversal in Moscow's position vis-a-vis the policies of China's ruling party, both in the international arena and in every sphere of activity within the Chinese state itself, including the area of language planning. Thus, in clarifying the question of the language policy carried out by Peking since the mid-1950s, E. Nadzhip, author of an article on the language situation in the Sinjian-Uigur Autonomous Region of China (1970, pp. 232-250), emphasizes in every way possible the negative influence of this policy, according to "commonly held views" in the USSR, on the development of the languages of China's national minorities. The Soviet author writes that Chinese words "are being introduced in a compulsory manner as a result of the official language policy and are dislodging words rooted in the living Uigur language or words of Arabic, Persian and Russian origin" (1970, p. 240). This article refers, on several occasions, to the fact that Chinese words are displacing "previously used Russian, Arabic or purely Uigur words" (ibid., p. 241), that "numerous Chinese words in the realm of sociopolitical, scientific-technological, and other terminology are infiltrating the language by dislodging Uigur, Arabic, Persian, and Russian words and collocations that are part of the living Uigur language, correspond to its laws and are understood by all the people (ibid., p. 248). He also emphasizes that, as a result of the new language policy being carried out by the authorities in Peking, the influence

222

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of Chinese on Uigur "is not limited to Chinese words and phrases/ but is "so great that the norms of word-formation are being destroyed in the Uigur language," which "in entirely new conditions of de¬ velopment is experiencing an abrupt change not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar and syntax" (ibid., pp. 243-245). The data given in the article on the language sitution in the SinjianUigur Autonomous Region and their interpretation are of exceptional interest for an understanding of the essence of the authorities' language policy and its influence on the language situation, not only in China, but in the Soviet Union itself. In this connection, it is necessary to touch on two of the problems surveyed in this article. First, there is the question of the alphabet used by the Uigurs in China. The author of the article reacted disapprovingly to the refusal of the Chinese authorities to confirm the decision of the conference of linguists that took place in 1956 in the town of Urunchi on the "advantages of transferring the Uigurs, Kazakhs and Kirghiz to the Russian alphabet" (ibid., p. 245). Fie emphasized, at the same time, that the Chinese state organs had proposed "going over from the old Arabic alphabet which the Uigurs had been using for more than a thousand years" and "adopting the Latin alphabet which served the Chinese for purposes of transcription" (ibid.). The question of the Uigur alphabet is elucidated in the article in such a way as to leave no doubt that, from the Soviet viewpoint, China's new language policy was directed at the sinification of the languages of the national minorities. Thus, the Soviet author points out, for example, that measures had been taken so that the Uigur alphabet would correspond in all aspects to the Chinese transcription alphabet, and that, according to guidelines worked out in China, "the unification of the alphabets of the national minorities and the orthography of common words will facilitate cultural exchange between the Chinese people and the national minorities, as well as the study of Chinese and, conversely, the study of the languages of the national minorities by the Chinese" (ibid., pp. 245-246). If one compares the negative statements in this article on the goal of unifying the alphabets of the national minorities of China on the basis of the Latin transcription alphabet with the positive pro¬ nouncements of Soviet authors on policy changes over the decades with regard to the alphabets of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR, then a very interesting and, at the same time, instructive picture emerges. For example, the Soviet Uigurs (92,000 in 1959, 173,000 in 1970, 211,000 in 1979) began using the Arabic script in the eleventh century.

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

223

In 1930, their language was transposed to the Latin script. This transition from one alphabet to another corresponded to the policy in those years of severing the Soviet East from the influence of the Muslim clergy within the country and the Muslim world beyond its borders. However, latinization, which Lenin referred to as "a revolution in the East, turned out in reality to be an interim stage in the Soviet Communist party's language policy.17 By the second half of the 1930s, the russification of the previously latinized alphabets began, and this process embraced the Uigur language in 1946. While praising the transition to the Russian alphabet, the exponents of the Soviet Communist party's language policy wrote that it had brought the country s non-Russian peoples closer “to the revolutionary culture of the great Russian people"18 and “had made it easier for the peoples of the USSR to acquire the Russian language, and, on the other hand, for representatives of the Russian people to master languages of other nationalities."19 The diametrically opposed evaluations of what are, in essence, analogous phenomena, namely, the sinification of the languages of Chinas national minorities, and the russification of the languages of the USSR's national minorities, go to prove that these evaluations are not the result of scientific conclusions, but political considerations. It is sufficient, by way of illustration, to say that, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Soviet Uigurs numbered less than 100,000, while in China the Uigurs comprised a population of more than three and a half millions, in order to understand how unfounded, from a scientific standpoint, the disapproving attitude of the Soviet authors is regarding the refusal of the Chinese authorities to ratify the proposal to transpose the alphabet of the Chinese Uigurs to Russian script. In connection with the questions of alphabets, the following facts are also very noteworthy. The language of the Soviet Dungan (21,000 in 1959, 39,000 in 1970, 59,000 in 1979), “being one of the dialects of Chinese, does not belong to any of the groups of native languages of the Soviet Union."20 More than 3 million people of the Huei Tzu nationality, who share the same territory as the Uigurs in China, speak this language. The writings of the Soviet Dungan "was first based on the Arabic alphabet, then on the Latin script, and since 1952 on the Russian script."12 Thus, the transposition of the Dungan alphabet to the Russian script was carried out "with considerable delay," if one considers that the process of russifying previously latinized alphabets began in the late 1930s and was completed by the mid-1940s. On the other hand, the replacement of the latinized alphabet of the Dungan by a russified version took place soon after

224

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

the accession of the Communists to power in China, i.e., in the years when, in official Soviet documents, mention of the Chinese people in “the community of socialist nations" was invariably accompanied by the epithet great, when Radio Moscow still used to play the song “Moscow-Peking," and when, according to Soviet sources, the language policy of the Chinese Communists “was being drawn up by taking into account objective factors and was contributing to the development of the languages of China's national minorities." The russification of the alphabet of the comparatively insignificant Chinese-speaking na¬ tional group of Soviet Dungan in the very first years after the accession to power of a “fraternal Communist party" in China serves as proof that Moscow's aim was, above all, to sever them from the Chinese Dungan. The handling of the question of the Chinese authorities' approach to terminology in the article on the language situation in the SinjianUigur Autonomous Region, published under Nikolskii's editorship, is also relevant for an understanding of the Soviet authors' two-faced attitude when evaluating the language policy and language situation in the USSR, on the one hand, and in foreign, including socialist countries, on the other. E. Nadzhip, author of the article, writes, with evident disapproval of the resolutions adopted at a conference held in November 1959 on problems of terminology and orthography that were aimed at the continued sinification of the languages of the national minorities. For example, the resolution stating that “socio¬ political terms, if they do not fully render the sense and content of the subject or concept, must be replaced by the Chinese terms, which in their spoken and written aspects must correspond completely to literary Chinese pronunciation"; or the resolution stating the “ter¬ minology in the natural sciences must be borrowed from Chinese, with the aforementioned stipulations being observed"; or the resolution stating that Chinese geographical place names and proper nouns must be rendered fully corresponding to Putunhua" (the contemporary Chinese literary language) (1970, p. 247). In this case too, criticism was leveled at a language policy that, in essence, coincides with the policy practiced in the USSR and on which praise was lavished by Soviet authors. Thus, six months before the Chinese conference on problems of terminology, the All-Union Conference "dedicated to problems of formulating sociopolitical, sci¬ entific-technical, educational-pedagogic and linguistic terminology" was held in Moscow.22 The Moscow conference not only resolved that the fundamental principle in the field of terminology should be "the principle of minimum divergence of corresponding terms among

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

225

the literary languages of the peoples of the USSR/' which "leads ... to unification on the basis of a single source," but also established that "the Russian language serves ... as [this] single source," and that there is a perceptible spread of trends towards approximating even orthoepic norms in the common terminological word stock of the languages of the peoples of the USSR."23 As early as the mid-1960s, at an all-union conference convened by the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Nikolskii gave a presentation entitled "Language Policy as Society's Way of Consciously Influencing Linguistic Development."24 Alluding to another Soviet author, he noted in his report that the development of languages "in the functional sense—meaning the change in the scope and nature of their social functions—is determined by the policy of the state in the realm of culture and the national question." At the same time, he emphasized that the functions of certain languages "are limited to communication in the family and village," while "others provide communication in all spheres of life and activity."25 Supported by these premises, Nikolskii proceeded to use the term "language formation" (yazykovoe obrazovanie), calling it "any language system that acts as a means of human communication." Dwelling on the subject matter of research into the language sitution in his report, he declared that "the primary goal of the study of the language situation is to establish the social functions carried out by language formations, to define the hierarchy of language formations, detect trends in the development of the language situation and, in doing so, identify prospective language formations."26 The term "language formation" is used in an article written by Nikolskii that opens the 1970 collection, published under his editorship. For the designation of the unequal reality, which, depending on the context, is what Nikolskii means when using this term, the authors of the other articles in the same book use sysnonyms like "form of speech" (forma rechi) and "language form" (yazykovaia forma). Thus, V. Chernyshev, author of the article "Factors in the Formation and Changing of the Language Situation," spoke of the bearers of "contacting forms of speech" (1970, p. 21), while G. Zograf, author of the article "The Language Situation and Language Classification," emphasized that, in order to define the place and role of any language in a particular political-administrative formation, administrative region, state or group of states, it is of paramount importance "to demarcate language forms: languages, dialects, patois"; that the problems of the language situation require such kinds of classification of language forms, "which would reflect the functions performed by one or another

226

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

language in society, and would establish a kind of language hierarchy: international, official, regional, etc. (1970, pp. 32-33). Even Nikolskii himself points out that “it is the social functions of language which are affected most by society: they are either expanded or reduced" (1970, p. 6), and that “language policy . . . mainly affects the social functions of language, either extending or narrowing their scope."27 With the exception of the category of official language formations, enumerated in the "language hierarchy," similar statements by Nikolskii and the authors of the articles in the books edited by him are entirely consistent with generally held views in the USSR.28 However, the editors of these publications and the authors of the articles in them emphasize that the effect of the language policy being implemented in some multinational states is to reduce the social functions of the languages of the national minorities and even to replace these languages by the language of the dominant people. For example, the article “Language Problems of Contemporary Iran" points out that “the national consolidation of the minority peoples is being hindered by the policy of persification being carried out by official circles," that “by virtue of the political and economic circumstances that have taken shape, the local languages are in the process of being weakened or disappearing" (1970, p. 131). In the article “The Language Situation in Nepal" it is noted that “the Nepali language not only exercises an influence on the other languages of the country, but is even, to some degree, displacing them by causing large numbers of non-Nepalispeakers to go over to the use of Nepali, in the first place as a second language, and in time, as the main language." (1967, p. 120). It should be noted in this respect that the 1970 collection of articles edited by Nikolskii includes one by M. Isaev entitled “On the Soviet Experience in Resolving the Language Problem in a Multinational State" (1970, pp. 47-57). The inclusion of this article in a book, entitled Problems of the Study of the Language Situation and the Language Question in the Countries of Asia and North Africa, demonstrates the intention of presenting the Soviet experience of language planning as proof that, in the USSR, “language policy is drawn up by taking into account the manifold objective factors and trends in a developing language situation (1970, p. 30). This is supported, moreover, by Isaevs aticle, which opens by stating: “A successful solution to the language problem [in the USSR—M.B.] became possible only after the victory of the October Socialist Revolution," and concludes by stating that "the most progressive parties and governments of these countries [Asia and Africa—M.B.] focus their attention above all on the first socialist state in the world to have successfully resolved

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

227

national and language problems" (1970, pp. 47, 57). The position on "the successful solution to the language problem" in the USSR figures in Soviet Communist party documents and has become dogma in Soviet writing that follows the official line. Evidence of this can be found in an article published in 1984 by M. Guboglo, which opens by stating that the Soviet Communist party is justly proud of its achievements in resolving the national-language problem, that "the experience of socialist construction and the consolidation of developed socialism have demonstrated the only possible path of a just and full solution of the national, together with its most important constituent element, the nation-language problem."29 By including Isaevs article in the 1970 collection, Nikolskii was paying his debt to the aforementioned dogma. In the meantime, as a specialist in the field of sociolinguistics, who sought not only to delineate the study of the language situation as a special discipline of applied linguistics, but also "to establish the mutual dependence of language policy and the language situation" (1970, p. 3), he undoubtedly was familiar with the real state of affairs in the Soviet state regarding the language situation and, especially, the language policy. In his article "The Study of the Language Situation as a Discipline of Applied Linguistics," Nikolskii pointed out that, in his "opinion, the solution to the problem of the social functions of languages [languages of education, of mass communication and political life, of social intercourse in the village and region, in the autonomous and Union republics, of internation communication], proposed by Iu. Desheriev and other Soviet linguists, are valid" (1970, p. 9). With respect to the "solution of the problem of the social functions of languages," mentioned by Nikolskii, the following should be noted. The work, in which Desheriev examines the question of the social functions of languages, lists the common characteristics, typical of most of the languages of the non-Russian peoples of tsarist Russia, including those peoples after whom today's Union republics in the USSR are named. The main reasons for each of these languages being prevented from fulfilling the functions of a literary language before the October 1917 Revolution were attributed by Desheriev to the fact that "the popular vernacular languages were broken down into local [territorial] dialects," which "not infrequently diverged significantly from the literary language"; that "the peculiarities of the living professional spoken language are reflected only weakly in the literary languages"; that "literature in the different branches of economy, industry, agriculture, manual trades, etc.," did not exist, and that "no

228

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

business correspondence was conducted in local institutions in the languages surveyed.30 Desheriev emphasized in particular that Rus¬ sian functioned in the national regions of tsarist Russia as an official language, the language of business correspondence," and for this reason various peculiarities of the written and spoken forms of the Russian literary language, which had emerged in connection with its function as the language of the bureaucracy "penetrated the spoken and written variants of other literary languages."31 If we discount the first years after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, when the language policy conducted by them in the outlying national regions of the former tsarist empire still reflected, to a significant degree, the tendencies of the language question that had been drawn up at their prerevolutionary congresses and laid down in the relevant party documents, then it must be stated that, already in 1922, when the transition from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet was initiated in Azerbaidjan, preparatory steps were being taken by Moscow for the russification of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples and nationalities. Already at that time, the ground was beginning to be prepared for severing these peoples and nationalities from centuriesold (frequently blood) ties with neighboring non-Soviet peoples and from the spiritual world, cultures, traditions, literatures, and languages of these peoples. The suspension of latinization by Moscow in the second half of the 1930s and the introduction of the Cyrillic script marked the beginning of an intensified process of russification of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples. Typical in this respect is Desheriev s statement that, from the standpoint of the social functions played by Russian in the life of the peoples of the Union republics, its role, in the sociological sense, amounts to "serving as a second language of communication and cooperation in all spheres of activity among the working people in these republics."32 And it is no less typical in this respect that, together with statements about the expansion of the social functions of the languages of the indigenous population of the Union and autonomous republics during the Soviet period, as opposed to the tsarist one, Desheriev is obliged to admit also that "within the Ukrainian SSR correspondence and office work are con¬ ducted, in the main, in Ukrainian and Russian," and that "in Armenia and Georgia Russian is widely used ... in those industries where there are members of different peoples," and that in the institutions of higher education of Kirgizia and Turkmenia, "many subjects are read in Russian," and also that, in the autonomous republics, regions, and national districts, "Russian fulfills the function of the language

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

229

of internation communication at sessions of republic-, regional-, and district-level conventions.''33 All this is evidence of an advanced process of the displacement by the language of internation communication of all the languages of non-Russian population of the USSR, without exception. However, in view of the fact that this process has not embraced these languages to the same extent and is not proceeding at an identical pace, Desheriev formulated his position on “the right of every people to use its own language within the confines of its vital interests," and on how the USSR supports "the development of national languages, the broadening of their social functions within the bounds of every people's vital needs and requirements."34 Even at the end of the 1950s, M. Isaev, one of the most active Soviet specialists in the field of language policy and planning, admitted that "in Ossetia the activity of government bodies, conventions, meetings, documentation, etc., the correspondence of public organi¬ zations, state and economic institutions, bureaucratic business at republic, district and even village level are all conducted in Russian" and that "the same can be said of the role of Russian in most of the autonomous republics and regions."35 In view of the ever-growing reduction in the social functions of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, theses were developed that stated that "the levels of development in the cultures of different peoples are continually evening out, while the levels of development of languages and their social functions cannot be evened out"; that "the second native language . . . fulfills different social functions with different peoples, and at times its functions may prevail over the functions of the native language."36 The emergence of such positions and theses demonstrates that, by the end of the 1950s and 1960s, the exponents of the Soviet Communist party's language policy were proceeding to lay the theoretical ground¬ work for the future encroachment of Russian on the non-Russian languages of the people's of the USSR and its continuing replacement of the latter from their most important social functions. At the same time, however, the cliche stating that all the conditions existed in the Soviet state for the flourishing growth of the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities figured, as before, in the works of Soviet linguists, literary scholars, and historians. For example, from the preceeding statements by Isaev from mid-1959, it follows that, in reality, Russian has ousted not only Ossetian, but also other national languages of the indigenous peoples and nation¬ alities of the autonomous republics and regions from the social functions

230

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

most important for the development of these languages. The same author, however, published in 1970 a book about the languages of the peoples of the USSR, one section of that he entitled “The Flourishing of the National Languages—The Basic Law of Their Development.''37 Moreover, while claiming that Ossetian is one of three "characteristic types of language development in the Soviet Union during the last half-century," Isaev tries on this occasion (in total contradiction to the statements of his, quoted above, regarding the social functions of Russian in the autonomous republics and regions) to persuade the reader that the Ossetian language has become "an important instrument of economic and cultural progress," and that "considerable economic, official government and sociopolitical activity is conducted" in it.38 Similar kinds of mutually exclusive pronouncements, formulations, and positions by Soviet authors are caused by the total antithesis between the ultimate aims of Moscow's language policy and the results already achieved in this respect, on the one hand, and considerations mainly of foreign policy, but also to a certain degree of domestic policy, which Moscow cannot ignore, on the other. In the program of the USSR's ruling party, adopted in October 1961, together with positions stating that "the building of communist society has become an immediate practical task for the Soviet people" and that "obliteration of distinctions between classes and the devel- i opment of communist social relations make for a greater social homogeneity of nations," it is written that "the obliteration of national distinctions, and especially of language distinctions, is a considerably longer process than the obliteration of class distinctions."39 However, although the obliteration of languge distinctions is considered in the Soviet Communist party program as "a considerably longer process than the obliteration of class distinctions, Moscow, even after its adoption, tried every way possible to speed up Russian-national (nonRussian) bilingualism, seeking to achieve the desired results as rapidly as possible, namely the transformation of Russian into the basic means of communication of ever greater masses of the population. By the second half of the 1960s, a position had already been drawn up in this connection, stating that it is without foundation "to proceed from the idea of a 'common language' (obshchnostii yazyk) as a mark of ethnicity," since to proceed from such an idea would mean that "many peoples automatically fall outside the category of nationality and nation."40 The Soviet author who formulated this position buttressed his argument with the following references to the language situation in the Soviet state: "Neither the Bashkirs [about half] . . . nor the Karelians, nor the Evenki have a common language," he notes. "A

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

231

'common language'—in the proper sense of this concept—is not to be found among Soviet Ukrainians: every eighth Ukrainian is Russianspeaking. This is characteristic also of the Armenians."41 The last few years have seen in the USSR an ever wider campaign to russify the non-Russian peoples and displace their languages from the social functions performed by them. K. Khanazarov, one of the most active exponents of the Soviet Communist party's nationallanguage policy, remarked that, in the USSR, "the number of those, whose own national language is not the same as the language in which they study, is increasing from year to year," that "a considerable number of schoolchildren do not study in the language of the nationality to which they belong."42 In an attempt, as it were, to pacify patriotically inclined members of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, who consider that the transition of studying in a language of another nation signifies a substantial step in the direction of assimilation, Khanazarov wrote at the same time that "the use of a language of another nation as a language of study served, as a rule, to strengthen the nation, nationality . . . and in no way to bring about assimilation."43 However, V. Kozlov, a renowned Moscow demographer, whose book Nationalities of the USSR received positive reviews in the USSR, emphasized that "groups of people that have changed language, generally also change ethnic affiliation in the long run."44 Kozlov noted, moreover, that the "processes ... of linguistic assimilation," which took place in the Russian Empire, "have continued and even intensified in the years of Soviet rule."45 Although he was cautious enough to add at the same time that, in the Soviet era, it was a question of "a natural, voluntary assimilation," it is possible to find in the Soviet literature on the subject considerable evidence of the reverse, i.e., that Russian is dislodging the non-Russian languages, and winning over their speakers. For this reason, the patriotically inclined members of the national intelligentsia in the non-Russian republics speak out in favor of restricting the social functions of Russian, "which they see as rivaling their own languages."46 The preoccupation of the national intelligentsia of the non-Russian republics with the steady expansion of the social functions of Russian, insofar as the latter's functions prevail over those of their own native languages, was fully justified. In the mid-1960s, the exponents of the Soviet Communist party's national-language policy were already pro¬ pounding the thesis that "the future development of social processes connected with the building of communism in the USSR, does not lead to an increase in the number of existing languages, but to their gradual reduction, to the steady replacement of some languages by

232

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

others.''47 Moreover, there were Soviet specialists who, even at that time, were demanding "the immediate transition to the language of the major nation, seeing in the language of the small nation or nationality ... a break in the development of the people's economy and culture."48 The fact that official documents of the CPSU and the works of exponents of its national-language policy reiterate until today the thesis that the extension of the social functions of the national languages in the non-Russian Union and autonomous republics is a continuing process can be attributed in the main to external reasons. Moscow could not ignore that an open admission that, in reality, it had long been conducting a policy not of extending, but of reducing the social functions of the languages of all non-Russian peoples and nationalities in the Soviet state, would be negatively received in the countries of Asia and Africa, especially in those that had recently attained political independence. Statistics in published Soviet sources attest to the real language situation in the USSR. For example, books and pamphlets were published in eighty-six languages of the peoples of the USSR from 1928 to 1934, and in sixty-three languages in 19 79.49 With regard to the non-Russian languages that have not yet been dislodged, it should be said that the ground is increasingly slipping away from under their feet. This can be seen in the rate of increase in the publication of literature in Russian, which has outstripped that of the national languages. It has to be borne in mind that, on the one hand, the aforementioned developments in the national languages, encouraged by the ruling Communist party in the USSR, can only repel the majority of peoples and nationalities of the multinational countries of Asia and Africa, and as Kulichenko admits, that, on the other hand, the stabilizing of national cultures and national awareness of these peoples and na¬ tionalities "exercises a definite influence on the life of the peoples of the USSR and their mutual relations." It is precisely for this reason, with Moscow's systematic prodding of the process of russifying the national non-Russian languges of the USSR and their speakers, that the thesis of the continuing flourishing of these languages and extension of their social functions is stubbornly defended by exponents of the CPSU's national-language policy. This is despite the fact that the extension of the social functions of the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, which indeed had begun after the October Revolution, was suspended in the mid-1930s, and the process of their

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

233

intensified russification and simultaneous displacement from their most important social functions has continued to this day. All that has been said so far has a direct bearing on the fact that Nikolskii, although appearing as a specialist in sociolinguists and a supporter of theses advocating that the study of the language situation should be a discipline of applied linguistics and that, "given the influence of society on language, its social functions are the first to change" (1970, p. 6). He did not, as was mentioned earlier, consider it necessary to refer, in his remarks at the symposium on the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples, to that part of the symposium's title that inferred that, in the USSR, a gradual reduction in the social functions of these languages can be observed. However, as a Soviet scholar he had to react to the presentations that survey the darker sides of the national-language policy pursued by the CPSU, as well as the language situation in the non-Russian republics of the USSR resulting from this policy. Therefore, he focused his remarks on the sources that formed the basis for the report on the status of Ukrainian, declaring that an analysis of dictionaries cannot serve as a sufficient basis for concluding that Ukrainian is undergoing intensive russification, since dictionaries frequently do not reflect the true state of affairs. In his words, the real language situation can only be established through direct observations in the field. Field research really does serve as a realiable method of defining a language situation. However, observations made in the field cannot in themselves provide an answer to the question of whether the position alluded to in the title of the symposium on the gradual reduction of the social functions of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples, including Ukrainian, is with or without foundation. The answer can only be had by comparing the language situation as established on the basis of results from field research in a given— recent—period of time, with the language situation as established on the basis of results from field research in the immediately preceding period or results obtained from field research in a number of previous periods. If one compares the contemporary language situation in the nonRussian Union, or even autonomous, republics of the USSR with the language situation in many other multinational countries, it emerges that the national minorities in the Soviet state find themselves, in this respect, in a better or even incomparably better position. For example, in all the Union republics in the USSR, without exception, newspapers, periodicals, and books are published and instruction is given in elementary and secondary schools, as well as at institutions

234

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of higher education faculties of philology, in the language of the indigenous population. At the same time, however, of one analyzes the changes in the relationship between Russian, on the one hand, and the non-Russian languages, on the other, that have taken place in different periods throughout the existence of the Soviet state, it becomes clear that, in the USSR, as has been pointed out, the period of the systematic reduction of the social functions of the non-Russian languages and their gradual displacement by Russian, which prevails in the country, set in long ago. Both bilingual and explanatory dictionaries do not, in truth, always reflect the language situation (although, ideally, they should reflect it), but they can serve as an indicator of trends in language planning, which are apparent at the time of their compilation. This is dem¬ onstrated in Perfecky's report, the conclusions of which are based primarily on an analysis of the bilingual Russian-Ukrainian dictionary and the eleven-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, which were compiled in different decades. Perfecky's data show that, although the russificatory tendencies of the compilers of the dictionaries analyzed by him have changed with time, becoming less pronounced, they have, nonetheless, been preserved and continue to be clearly felt. Thus, Perfecky points out in his presentation that M. Kalinovich's Russian-Ukrainian dictionary, published in 1962, "not only replaces age-old Ukrainian words with direct borrowings and loan-translations from Russian, but also brings about a reordering of equivalents, in which the form that is closer to Russian very often appears first and the true Ukrainian equivalent is relegated to second place and thus secondary status" (p. 1). Referring to the less clearly expressed—at first sight—russificatory tendencies found in the eleven-volume Explanatory Dictionary, pub¬ lished between 1970 and 1980, under the editorship of I. Beloded, Perfecky notes that these tendencies find expression in that the compiler "simultaneously russifies the Ukrainian language and preserves nonrussified Ukrainian 'dialectical' and 'archaic' words" (p. 19). Quite correctly pointing out in his report that Moscow would never have allowed "a mass well-organized effort ... to slow down the influx of Russian words and loan-translations into Ukrainian" (p. 18), Perfecky noted that such efforts are, rather, of a sporadic nature. In this connection, it should, however, be emphasized that one of the two examples, given in the report, of resistance by Soviet Ukrainians to the inundation of their language by Russian words, loan-translations, and collocations from Russian cannot be considered entirely convincing. The reference is to his definition not only of Antonenko-Davidovich's

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

235

book The Way We Speak (Yak my hovorymo), but also of the elevenvolume Explanatory Dictionary as an attempt "to counteract and slow down the linguistic russification" (ibid.). Perfecky emphasized in his report that, although many of the words that are taken from the classics of Ukrainian literature are presented in the Explanatory Dictionary as dialectisms and archaisms, they in fact "still 'live' in the language" (p. 19). It should be borne in mind that Ukrainian literature is studied in secondary schools and at the philological faculties of pedagogical institutes and universities in the Ukraine and, if only for this reason, it was simply impossible not to use the vocabulary and phraseology of the classics of this literature in an Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian language. What this means is that there are no grounds for "suspecting" the compilers and editors of the dictionary in question of an attempt to "counteract and slow down the linguistic russification" in the Ukraine. The fact that words that "still 'live' in the language" were presented by them as "dialectisms" and "anarchisms" demonstrates that the opposite is true. They attempted not to counteract, but to contribute to the continuing russification of Ukrainian. The publication of the first volume of Beloded's Explanatory Dic¬ tionary in 1970 coincided with the publication of Antonenko-Davidovich's book on the culture of speech, which really should be considered as an attempt by the patriotically inclined intelligentsia of the Ukraine to counteract the steadily intensifying russification of the Ukrainian language. In their attitude toward the Ukrainian language, I. Beloded and B. Antonenko-Davidovich belong to completely different categories of national figures. National men of culture, divided like these by a dissimilar approach to their own language and to the prospects of its future development, are to be found in every Soviet non-Russian republic. As a rule, the evolution of the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the former tsarist empire after the October 1917 overthrow by the Bolsheviks went through essentially uniform stages. Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, as a result of the language policy pursued by the authorities, puristic tendencies appeared in one form or another in the non-Russian republics. They corresponded to Moscow's goal of severing the non-Russian Soviet peoples and na¬ tionalities from the influence of cultures, literatures, and languages of kindred peoples beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. At the same time, Moscow closed its eyes, up to a certain point, to the fact that, along with the removal from these languages of foreign lexical

236

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

means and phraseologies, the conduct of such a policy also did not allow for the penetration of Russian borrowings. By the mid-1930s, however, when waves of mass repressions re¬ verberated throughout the Soviet Union, claiming as victims many cultural, literary, and scientific figures, both in the country's center as well as in the outlying national regions, the general offensive against the non-Russian languages and the systematic displacement from their most important social functions was already underway. One of the most important factors in this direction was the introduction of the Russian alphabet or the return to it in the non-Russian republics or national administrative-political formations of any other type whose alphabets had been converted to the Latin script in the 1920s and 1930s. Even before the replacement of the Latin script in those admin¬ istrative-political formations in the USSR where it was introduced, Moscow proceeded throughout the country, including the Ukraine, to remove national figures who complied with the officially unrevoked decisions of the Bolshevik party congresses and who continued to promote the development of science, culture, literature, and language of their peoples. The persecution of M. Skrypnik, M. Grushevskiy, M. Khvyleviy, and other prominent Ukrainians, the tragic end of many of them, which served as a prelude to those mass banishments and subsequent physical destruction of people dedicated to communist ideals, whose only crime was love for their people, its traditions, culture, literature, and language, proved to be a permanently active bugbear both for the surviving Ukrainian scientific, cultural, and literary workers, as well as for the new arrivals with whom the depopulated ranks of the national intelligentsia were replenished. This way, the ground was prepared for the denouement of a multistage offensive, the aim of which was the accelerated russification of the Ukraine. In the area of language policy, the displacement of Ukrainian (and other non-Russian languages of the USSR) from their most important social functions was pursued, and it was turned, in this way, into a second-class means of communication. A direct result of this policy was the massive inundation by russianisms of the vocabulary, phraseology, and syntax of educational, scientific, artistic, and other literature published in Ukrainian and the consequent destruction of its structure and system. After World War II, the exponents of the CPSU's language policy in the Ukraine were mainly those people who occupied authoritative positions in the field of linguistics, publishing, and the press: such people as I. Beloded, I. Bagmut, and others. The tangible results of

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

237

the efforts invested in the cause of russifying the Ukrainian language were M. Kalinovich's Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary (1948), the Ukrainian-Russian and Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of Proper Names (1954), Letter of the Ukrainian State Publishing House, Circulated to Translators for Discussion at the Board Meeting at the Republic's Union of Writers (1954), and many other works, similar in spirit, which appeared in those years. Despite the great risk of openly opposing the language situation created in the Ukraine as a result of the language policy conducted by the authorities and their sycophants, there were such expressions of opposition even in the years when Stalin's personality cult was at its height. If the appearance, for example, of the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary and the praise for it in the press by loyalist linguists like I. Beloded, I. Bagmut, etc.,50 were a consequence and reflection of russificatory tendencies in the Ukraine, encouraged by the authorities, then the works belonging primarily to writers, literary scholars, and translators such as O. Kundzich, S. Kovganyuk, and others attested to the fact that forces existed within the republic who opposed these tendencies. One of the boldest spokesmen for the profound anxiety felt by the patriotically inclined Ukrainian intelligentsia at the danger threatening to turn its national language into a russified jargon was, in those years, the writer Oleksii Kundzich. In 1945, in his journalistic piece "Musical Sharps," he fulminated against the debasing of the Ukrainian language with foreign vocabulary and phraseology. With the "Thaw" that set in after Stalins death, Kundzich's defense of his native language assumed incomparably more pronounced forms. The new trends blowing up in the country also influenced the development of Soviet literature. A wide-ranging campaign against the literal translation of literary works was launched, the basis of which was to be found in the reort of P. Antokolskii at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers held on 19 December, 1954.51 The wave of universal condemnation in the USSR (often very superficial and for mere form's sake)52 of the widespread method of the word-for-word, literal rendition, which had led not only to distortion of the real meaning of foreign works, but also to the crudest violation of norms and systems of the receiving languages, thereby destroying them, allowed Kundzich to rise to the defense of his native language all the more resolutely. Pointing to the pernicious effects of literalism in translation, he revealed and, at the same time, subjected to devastating criticism those factors that had contributed to its spread in the Ukraine. In this respect, it was particularly noteworthy that

238

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

Kundzich selected as the object of his critique of literalism not only, and not even its direct perpetrators and propagators, i.e., the translators. Under the guise of struggling against literalism in translation, he attacked, in reality, those who created the conditions for the conduct of a language policy that forced translators (and not only translators) to increasingly inundate the Ukrainian language with uncharacteristic vocabulary and syntax, and increasingly to make of it a UkrainianRussian jargon. In this connection, too, Kundzichs accusation of literalism, which he leveled in articles and speeches at the compilers of the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, as well as the authors of the letter circulated to Ukrainian translators, was in essence a eu¬ phemism, Aesopic language, to which patriotically inclined Soviet authors resort when trying to dot their i's, without calling things by their proper names. Kundzich spoke out primarily against those who occupy key positions in establishments that are governmental in name, but Party in spirit (according to the demands made of them), such as the Ukrainian Institute of Linguistics and Publishing Houses, which were the mouthpieces of the ruling Communist party and exponents of its russification policy. Following are some examples. In the years of the “Thaw,” when literal translations of works of literature were subjected to official censure, two of Kundzichs most virulent articles against literalism in translation, which appeared in Ukrainian,53 were published in Russian in books compiled by the translators' section of the Moscow organization of the USSR Union of Writers.54 In these articles, dealing with problems of translation, as in his other published articles and public appearances, Kundzich attached great importance to criticism both of the underlying principles in the compilation of Kalinovich's Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, and of the positions taken in the articles of I. Bagmut, N. Andrianova, M. Pilinskii and others. In this way, he emphasized that the main reason for the language situation in the Ukraine were the trends, the practitioners and exponents of which were those whom he criticized. In exposing the principles that guided the compilers of this dictionary, Kundzich wrote that it is based on the list of entries from Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language with a literal rendering in the Ukrainian part “of even those entries with specific characteristics of Russian, that do not correspond to Ukrainian; that there are many dictionary entries where a pure Russian word is given as the first equivalent of the Ukrainian: 'bryuki-bryuki,' while the Ukrainian 'shtani' is given only as the second equivalent"; that, in this dictionary, “many bilingual homonyms ... are not rendered according to their Ukrainian

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

239

meanings, but according to Ushakov's dictionary: udavit'sya (a Russian word with a single meaning: “to hang oneseU")-udavitisya (a Ukrainian word with a single meaning: “to choke").55 Kundzich openly attacked those who headed the Ukraine's State Publishing House for Literature (Goslitizdat), pointing out that, in their above-mentioned letter, the question was raised of keeping wholly Russian forms (such as 'Russian suffixes in personal names, famous Russian romances, Russian puns, Russian poetic practice of the heroes, . . . Russian idioms, the incorrect use of Russian by Georgians, Armenians and members of other nationalities . . . dialectisms,") when translating into Ukrainian.56 Kundzich's exceptional courage in defending his native language from the prevailing russificatory trends in the Ukraine is the more remarkable insofar as the Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of 1948 was issued under the editorship of three members of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR: M. Ya. Kalinovich (editor-in-chief), L. A. Bulakhovskii and M. F. Rylskii, one of whom (L. A. Bulakhovskii) was, in addition, not only the director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, but also a cor¬ responding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, while another (M. F. Rylskii) was a well-known Ukrainian poet. It has to be understood, all the same, that in his criticism, Kundzich did not mention the names of the dictionary's editors, most probably because he realized that Rylskii tried to write his own works in good Ukrainian, while Kalinovich and Bulakhovskii were highly qualified and erudite linguists, who, under the conditions of Stalin's personality cult, were forced to submit to the dominant tendencies in the country in the field of language planning. Thus, while pointing out that phraseological and lexical equivalents in the dictionary are in many cases adequate, Kundzich emphasized: “it does not take much to suppose that our linguistics has its experts and also people who are far from any proper understanding of the language's substance."57 In these latter, Kundzich saw the chief sponsors of the russifying of Ukrainian, who, in their loyalist zeal, frequently urged the heads of the Institute of Linguistics, the publishing houses, periodicals, and newspapers in the Ukraine to implement the USSR ruling party's language policy and to create appropriate conditions for the achieve¬ ment of its ultimate aims. One of the most active of these “coaxers" in the Ukraine in the postwar years was Iosif Bagmut. While heading the section of translating the classics of Marxism-Leninism at the Institute of Party History, he not only adhered to the principle that dominated the great majority of institutes of the history of communist

240

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

organizations in the national republics of the USSR, namely, that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin should be translated literally from one period to the next/ 58 but also attempted to establish a theoretical basis for this principle and to extend it to other kinds of translation, too, including literature.59 In his severe criticism of such “coaxers," Kundzich not only exposed the flippancy of their positions, but also proved that, in order to shore up their dogmas at any cost, they resort to the method of interpreting recognized authorities in the USSR in a way that contradicts their pronouncements in letter and spirit. For example, N. Andrianova, an editor of the Ukrainian Goslitizdat, when quoting Belinskii's words that “every language has its own, unique means, characteristics and qualities to such an extent that in order to render an image or phrase faithfully, they must sometimes be completely changed in translation, accompanied them with her own “refinement” that Belinskii wrote this "having in mind translations from foreign languages of very different structure," although Belinskii was talking of languages in general (every language), and not merely of structurally every different languages.60 Underlining his conclusions with numerous examples, Kundzich wrote that the more closely related Ukrainian and Russian languages are lumped together, which is the aim of the promoters of russification in the Ukraine, the more the specific national characteristics and structure of Ukrainian are destroyed. He also emphasized that, as a result of this, a language situation has been created in which, when translating from Russian, “the translator copies, the critic-editor de¬ mands legalization of 'translator's practice,' the academic assistant registers the translator's language in the dictionary, the translator copies, relying on the dictionary."61 Kundzich was not alone in criticizing this vicious circle, created under the impact of prevailing tendencies in the Ukraine, as the following facts show. The article published in 1954 by S. Kovganyuk against literalism in translation and his report to a Ukrainian translators' conference, held in February 1956 in Kiev, were also directed against russificatory tendencies in the development of the Ukrainian language.62 Also, I. Kashkin and R Toper, who had come from Moscow to deliver coreports at the February 1956 Ukrainian translators' confer¬ ence, repeatedly criticized the negative influence of literalism on the language of Russian translations and fully supported the positions of Kundzich, who delivered the main presentation at the conference.63 This was reflected also in the fact that Kundzich's address at the February 1956 conference was published not only in Ukrainian, but

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

241

also in the 1959 edition of the book The Art of Translation, the editorial board of which included I. Kashkin and P. Toper as well as V. Rossels, the compiler of the collection of articles Problems of Literary Translation, published in 1955 at the initiative of the Moscow organization of the USSR Writers' Union. It should be noted in this respect that Russian writers/translators, who in the years of the post-Stalin “Thaw" launched a campaign against literalism in the translation of literature, were struggling not so much for the purity and correctness of the Russian of works translated from other languages (although this question was also given every consideration) as for their rendering as works of art. In other words, they posed the question, like Gorkii in his time, of the translator's relationship to the foreign author, the Russian reader, and Russian language.64 Within the scope of Kundzich's interest, however, were not only literary translations (although he did attach paramount importance to them), but also translations in general, including sociopolitical works. Nor was he talking strictly about translations, but, first and foremost, about the Ukrainian literary language and Ukrainian lexi¬ cography. This was precisely the reason why Ukrainian translators of artistic, and other kinds of literature, as well as Ukrainian lexi¬ cographers and cultural activists writing in Ukrainian, had to reckon with his unsparing criticism of literalism, supported, as it was, by the well-known writers/translators from Moscow. Along with his sharp condemnation of those responsible for the dominant trends in language planning in the Ukraine—the compilers of the Russian-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Russian dictionaries, produced by the Institute of Linguistics, and also by those holding responsible positions in publishing houses, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television, theaters, etc., Kundzich's appearances in public and in print gave expression to a feeling of profound concern at the consequences of the implementation of these trends—of the language situation being created in the republic. Emphasizing that the condition of the Ukrainian literary language “is giving rise to concern," Kundzich pointed to the main causes of this alarming condition.65 Thus, in debunking literalism in translation, Kundzich, at the same time, turned his attention to the enormous weight of translations in all spheres of oral and printed communication in the republic. “All day long," he wrote, “from the first radio news bulletin until the late-night movies with synchronized translations, we read, hear and perceive life's echoes mainly through translations."66

242

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

It was in literalism, multiplied by the vast dissemination of translationese" in all spheres of life and activity in the Ukraine, that Kundzich saw the main reason for "translation in all its variations destroying the norms of the literary language of the indigenous population; that, in the republic, a paradoxical situation had come into being consisting of a "translator's jargon [that] had become a sickness of the original literature, of the literary language in general."67 These statements by Kundzich, based on the analysis of language planning trends, on the one hand, and, one could say, on field research" of the language situation that had evolved under their influence, on the other, glaringly contradicted the stereotyped positions of the loyalist exponents of the CPSU's national-language policy regarding the multilateral development and flowering of the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR under Soviet rule. For this very reason, Viktor Koptilov68 wrote that the arguments and ideas in Kundzich's articles, appeared to many at the time as heretical: "The fact that today's reader of Kundzich's articles written ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, agrees with almost all his arguments and with the ideas which in their time seemed to many people to be heretical is the best admission of the truth and established grounds of his theoretical principles."69 Koptilov s admission about the late 1960s and early 1970s, dem¬ onstrates that broad circles of the Ukrainian population approved of Kundzich's stand and shared his concern for the fate of their native language. This does not mean, however, that those forces in the Ukraine to whom Kundzich's arguments and ideas "seemed heretical" rejected the russificatory language policy. Thus, even after the harsh criticism of the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, sounded by Kund¬ zich in his appearances in public and in print, I. Bagmut and N. Pilinskii continued to extol its virtues. Pilinskii, for example, gave it very high praise in an article published in 1958,70 while Bagmut wrote in a book published by him in 1968 that this dictionary "played an exceptional role in the translation of sociopolitical literature into Ukrainian."71 Bagmut, moreover, as an active exponent of the policy of russifying the Ukrainian language, was the object of especially harsh criticism by Kundzich.72 Despite this, however, or rather because Bagmut continued to adhere to his former approach to the basic principles that guided the compilers and editors of the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, he was included among the editors of the three-volume Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, published in 1968 under the general editorship of I. Beloded.73 In addition, Bagmut was one of the two

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

243

preparers of the photographic reissue of the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, published in 1962. (Its editor-in-chief, M. Kalinovich, had died at the beginning of 1949.) It should be added, in this connection, that Beloded, the responsible editor of the 1968 dictionary, had held the post of vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR since 1963 and was the highest-ranking linguist among the exponents of the russificatory language policy in the Ukraine. He not only reiterated the definition, used by Soviet loyalist authors in all the national administrativepolitical formations in the USSR, stating that "the translation of the classics of Marxism-Leninism . . . broadens, enriches and refines . . . the vocabulary and phraseology, syntactical structure, expressive means of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples and nationalities, but also tried to bolster it by adopting the position that "the language of Ukrainian journalism, literature, various fields of science and art, the language of business correspondence and the living literary language find in the translation in question the scientific basis of linguistic facts which foster the continued development of the culture of the Ukrainian language/'74 As for Bagmut, he attempted in the above-mentioned book to find a theoretical basis for the penetration of linguistic usage in the Ukraine by "the principle of minimal divergence among corresponding terms in the literary languages of the peoples of the USSR,"75 formulated by the Institute of Linguistics of USSR Academy of Sciences, and to significantly extend its influence by its application also in the field of Ukrainian syntax.76 Bagmut contributed in many ways to the massive displacement of time-honored terms from Ukrainian and their replacement by direct loans from Russian or the closest possible orthographic, semantic, and orthoepic approximations. He lent this support by taking the position that "the supplementing of the sociopolitical vocabulary by words common to all East Slavic languages is an important factor in the continuing process of bringing the languages of socialist nations closer to one another, deepening the mutual understanding and the friendship of Soviet peoples."77 With regard to Ukrainian syntax, Bagmut's russificatory stand re¬ vealed itself even more clearly. For example, in his book, he defended the thesis that "when translating from closely related languages it is possible to preserve the syntactical structure of the original without doing violence to the grammatical structure of the language into which the work is being translated."78 In support of this thesis, Bagmut marshalled numerous examples from postwar translations into Ukrain-

244

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

ian from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. A comparison of the same passages from prewar and postwar translations can serve as evidence of trends in the postwar Ukraine to identify these translations syntactically with the language from which they were made, i.e., Russian. An important aid to translation is an acquaintance with existing translations in other languages. And, in this sense, the use by Ukrainian translators of Russian translations of Marx and Engels is perfectly natural. The improvement in the quality of the translations from one edition to the next must be considered equally natural. One example of this would be in cases where, in a new edition, a more adequate rendition of a work, in terms of its content and form, is based on the use of a more exact interpretation of that work in another language. In view of the fact that the language of a translation, as a rule, “ages" faster than the language of the original, there is nothing remarkable in one and the same foreign work appearing from time to time in different languages in successive translations. Not to mention that an unsatisfactory (from various points of view) or simply bad translation can eventually be replaced by another translator's rendering. Thus, for example, before the October Revolution and after it, until World War II, Marx and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party was published several times in Ukrainian, including on more than one occasion from the original German, as well as by different persons. After World War II, however, absolutely all Ukrainian republications of the Manifesto appeared solely in translation from the Russian translation. This even goes for the Ukrainian translation of the Manifesto, published in 1959, with the parallel German text. This can be seen in the lexical correspondences and syntactical identity of the following extracts from the Russian and Ukrainian translations:

Ukrainian Translation (1959)

Russian Translation

V takikh krainakh, iak Frantsia, de selianstvo stanovit' daleko bil'she polovini vs'ogo naselenia, prirodnoiu bula poiava pis'mennikiv iaki, staiuchi na storonu prole¬ tarian!

V takikh stranakh, kak Frantsia, gde krest'ianstvo sostavliaet gorazdo bolee poloviny vsego naselenia, estestvenno bylo poiavlenie pisatelei, kotorye, stanovias' na storonu proletariata kotorye, stanovias' na storonu proletariata protiv burzhuazii, v svoei kritike

iaki, staiuchi na storonu prole¬ tarian! proti burzhuazii, v svoii krititsi

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

245

burzhuaznogo ladu prikladali do n'ogo

burzhuaznogo stroia prikladyvali k nemu

dribnoburzhuaznu ta dribnoselians'ku mirku

melkoburzhuaznuiu i melkokrest'ianskuiu merku i zashchishchali delo rabochikh s melkoburzhuaznoi tochki zrenia.

i zakhishchali spravu robitnikiv z dribnoburzhuaznoi tochki zoru.

Meanwhile, if we take this same extract, this time from the German edition of the Manifesto and from the Ukrainian translation of 1932, rendered according to the original language, then we shall not discover any lexical closeness to the Russian version and most certainly no syntactical identity: Ukrainian Translation (1932)

German Text

U krainakh, iak ot Frantsia, de selians'kii klas skladae daleko bil'she polovini liudnosti,

In Landern Wie in Frankreich wo die Bauernklasse weit mehr als die Halfte der Bevolkerung ausmacht, war es naturlich, dass Schriftsteller, die fur das Proletariat

bulo prirodnim, shcho pis'menniki, kotori vystupali v oboroni pro¬ letariat proti burzhuazii, u svoii krititsii burzhuaznogo rezhimu prikladali d n'ogo dribnoburzhuaznii ta dribnoselians'kii masshtab i brali storonu robitnikiv, vikhodiachi z pogliadu dribnoi burzhuazi.

gegen die Bourgeoisie auftreten, und ihre Kritik des Bourgeoisregimes den kleinbiirgerlichen und kleinbaurlichen Masstab anlegten und die Partei der Arbeiter vom Standpunkt des Kleinburgertums ergriffen.

Neither the total syntactical identity of the language of the 1959 Ukrainian translation with that of the Russian translation, nor the appearance in the Ukrainian translation of lexical units, which either have no equivalent at all in the original German (takikh, vs'ogo, poiava), or are not direct, dictionary-based, but contextual equivalents (mirkuMasstab), or are directly connected with the displacement from the Soviet sociopolitical lexicon of the term peasant class (krest'ianskii klass) following the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in the period of collectivization (selianstvo-Bauernklasse), can be explained by the in¬ fluence of any one individual factor. It was a combination of the consequences of the principle, prevailing in the overwhelming majority

2 46

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

of Soviet republics, of translating the classics of Marxism-Leninism line by line (of tochki do tochki), adhering to the rule that states “better worse, but closer"; of the authorities' encouragement of russificatory trends in language planning, and also the efforts of loyalist repre¬ sentatives of the non-Russian intelligentsia in implementing the CPSU's national-language policy. In the above extract “vystupali v oboroni proletariat" is undoubtedly a less successful rendering of the German "die fur das Proletariat . . . auftreten" than "staiuchi na storonu proletariat." However, Russian translations of Marx and Engels' works are ranked higher than the original by the advocates of the CPSU's national-language policy in the non-Russian Soviet republics. This is the reason why, instead of correcting unsuccessful passages in the existing Ukrainian translation of the Manifesto from German, a new translation was made according to a more prestigious text—in their view—the Russian translation. Furthermore, this created and also consolidated a language situation that corresponded to their theoretical position arguing that, in Ukrainian, exists "a progressive trend of creating sociopolitical terms that have a common stem with Russian," "an activization of syntactical constructions analogous to Russian."79 In addition, this provides an opportunity to praise the classics of Marxism-Leninism, even using the translation of their works, which, in the words of the apologists, is "a very important factor in the enrichment of the Ukrainian literary language ... for the future development of its functional, stylistic and semantic diversity."80 And yet, the fact remains that, in the great majority of Soviet republics, the translation of the works of Marx and Engels based on their Russian rendition, in a certain sense, represents a sneer for these authors. To all this we must add that Beloded, under whose editorship work was begun in 1970 on the eleven-volume edition of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, wrote after the appearance of the first volumes that "the creative contribution of the Russian languge told of the formulation of diverse scientific and political terminology in all the national languages of the peoples in the USSR, the formation of a common basic lexical and phraseological stock of international socialist words and expressions, and of the syntactical development of these languages."81 The compilers of the eleven-volume Dictionary, as well as of the three-volume Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of 1968, selected material “with the intention of embracing as broad a range as possible of contemporary Ukrainian vocabulary and phraseology" and, at the same time, of employing "to the fullest extent ... the Ukrainian

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

247

literary heritage.”82 This two-pronged task that, under Beloded's guid¬ ance, the compilers of these two dictionaries set themselves, shows that they were obliged to take into consideration forces opposed to the russification policy in the Ukraine. At a colloquium organized in February 1952 by the republic's Institute of Linguistics, these same forces sharply criticized the Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of 1948. The use of the "Ukrainian literary heritage” by the compilers of the dictionaries edited by Beloded must not be regarded, therefore, as an attempt on their part "to counteract and slow down the linguistic russification,” but as an unavoidable concession to the patriotically inclined Ukrainians who actively rallied to the defense of their language against officially inspired russificatory tendencies at work in the Ukraine. That Beloded and other advocates of the authorities' language policy in the Ukraine made such a concession in no way signifies that they had given up the eventual russification of Ukrainian. That this "step backward,” as in other non-Russian Soviet republics in similar in¬ stances, was accompanied by "two steps forward” is demonstrated by the fact that a large number of the indigenous Ukrainian words retained in Beloded's eleven-volume Explanatory Dictionary are des¬ ignated as dialectisms and archaisms, and figure in second place after the russified words and collocations or direct borrowings from Russian, which, according to the compilers, belong to the "vocabulary and phraseology of the contemporary Ukrainian language.” Given the firmness of resolve with which Moscow pursues the ultimate goal of its language policy in the non-Russian Soviet republics, the ways and means taken to achieve this goal, and also the speed with which they are implemented, depend on the concrete conditions prevailing in the individual republics. However, even in those instances where the conduct of the regime's language policy encounters par¬ ticularly stubborn resistance from patriotically minded forces among certain non-Russian nations and nationalities, compelling the loyalist exponents of this policy to make specific concessions and to deviate from the CPSU's main line in language planning, they never lose signt of this line. All that we have said unmistakably emerges from the presentations of Professors Austin and Perfecky. It relates, in particular, to important elements of the CPSU's language planning such as the compilation of bilingual and explanatory dictionaries that appear in one form or another and at various levels in all non-Russian Soviet republics, including the Ukraine. The language situation in Soviet Karelia, reviewed in Austin's report, shows not only how the Karelians' idiom

248

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

is being deprived of some vitally important functions in the autonomous republic bearing their name (outside of its use by an ever-shrinking number of them as a means of communication in day-to-day family life), but also how the social functions of Finnish, which serves as the national language of the republic, even though the Finns constitute only 2.7 percent of its population, are being reduced to a minimum. This is the reason, it seems, that the Soviet scholars who attended the symposium on the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR, considered it the better part of wisdom, from their standpoint, not to allude in their remarks to the basic assumptions of Austin's report, even though it contains irrefutable data on the russification of the Karelian ASSR, and on the reduction to the very minimum of the social functions of those non-Russian languages analyzed in his report. With regard to their attempts, however, to reject the general conclusion of Perfecky's report concerning the intensified russification of Ukrainian by arguing that only an analysis of data from field research, and not data drawn from dictionaries, can serve as an adequate basis for conclusions of this kind, should be added the following. Earlier, we quoted the most authoritative specialists on the national question in the USSR, who in practice attest to the steady extension of the social functions of Russian and the equally steady reduction of the social functions of all the languages of the nonRussian peoples and nationalities.83 Generated by a desire to extol the role of Russian in Soviet society, such statements reveal at the same time, whether their authors wanted it or not, that the extension of the social functions of Russian in the non-Russian Soviet republics is taking place at the cost of gradually dislodging the languages of the latters' indigenous population. Meanwhile, the loyalist advocates of the CPSU's language policy never cease to write about the continuing flowering of the languages of the non-Russian peoples, which, in their words, finds expression in the elevation of their role as an instrument of social development and, accordingly, in the eventual enlargement of their social functions. Thus, for example, M. Guboglo's scheduled (but undelivered) address contains, as mentioned earlier, theses maintaining the position that "the increasing functional development of national languages is main¬ tained through the creation of specialized dictionaries which enrich the vocabulary of these languages.” This is accompanied by the following explanation: "They are of three types: (1) national languages/ Russian, (2) Russian/national languages, (3) national language/na¬ tional language.”84 The Soviet scholars had the opportunity to acquaint

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

249

themselves with Perfecky's report in Brussels, when they received the summarized theses of the reports to be delivered by all the congress's scheduled participants. In preparing to dispute his conclusions about the russification of Ukrainian, they decided, evidently, to alter the theme of Guboglo's report. Clearly, they could not, at one and the same time, base their positions on the fact that dictionaries are published, and then impugn the positions of others for being based on dictionary data and not field research. Furthermore, in an article published in 1984, Guboglo accused ideological foes of Soviet scholars, who advocate the CPSU's nationallanguage policy, of “expending considerable efforts on falsifying the processes of the functional development of national languages in the USSR, by trying to conceal the facts of their revival in the Soviet era."85 He supported his accusation not only by arguing that “one of the indicators of the level of development of national culture is the defining dictionaries in which words are accumulated, reflecting changes in the material and spiritual culture of a nation," but also by reference to “the eleven-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian national language . . . [which] provides an illustration of the intensive en¬ largement of social, cultural, scientific and other phenomena and concepts."86 Hence, there is every reason to suppose that this same eleven-volume Explanatory Dictionary, of which Perfecky's analysis had led him to his conclusion about the russification of Ukrainian, was referred to by Guboglo in his undelivered address at the Brussels congress as a factor in the enlargement of this language's social functions. In the meantime, as was pointed out earlier, the Soviet scholars, including Guboglo, at the symposium on the languages of the nonRussian peoples and nationalities of the USSR, instead of countering the linguistic data given in Perfecky's report by arguments refuting these data, tried to maintain that field research, and not dictionaries, serves as an indicator of the language situation. In attempting to document the enormous growth and development, to use his words, in the social functions of the USSR's non-Russian languages, Guboglo referred to such facts as the publication in translation of numerous works of foreign writers and, in general, to the unprecedented scale of book publishing in the non-Russian Soviet republics in the languages of their indigenous populations. At the same time, he countered the conclusion about the russification of Ukrainian, as well as the position on the reduction of the social functions of non-Russian languages, alluded to in the name of the symposium, with the stereotypical phrase about the total equality of all languages in the USSR, and by

250

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

way of proof gave the example of the emblem of fourteen Union republics with its slogan "Workers of the World, Unite!" rendered in Russian and the corresponding non-Russian languages. In his article, published in Soviet Ethnography, Guboglo also referred to these bilingual inscriptions on the emblems of the non-Russian Soviet republics, claiming that they express the "internationalist nature of nationalRussian bilingualism."87 In depicting this nature, Guboglo wrote in his article that "the internationalism of the Soviet model of bilingualism manifests itself in a broad range from the bilingualism of an individual to that of a whole people." And at this point, he also explained that "the individual's right to bilingualism is guaranteed by the USSR constitution and registered in the Soviet passport, . . . which is written, as a rule, in two languages, Russian and the language of the indigenous nationality of the Union or autonomous republic, where it is issued, "while the whole people's right to bilingualism is confirmed in the constitutions of the Union republics and represented in the official state emblem of the Soviet Union."88 The weakness of the arguments used by Guboglo to bolster the positions of the exponents of the CPSU's national-language policy, in general, and the remarks of the Soviet scholars at the symposium regarding translations into the languages of the non-Russian peoples, in particular, can be judged from the following facts. Guboglo's reference at the symposium to translations into languages of the non-Russian peoples is expressed in his article where he writes that "in the Union republics more than fifty series of books have been published to date, or are still being published, all of them works by writers of the peoples of the USSR," that, for example, in Azer¬ baijan "there are plans to issue in the Azerbaijani language a 100volume Library of World Literature and a fifty-volume Library of World Literature for Children.89 As was shown earlier, translations in the nonRussian republics are made in the great majority of cases either from Russian or through the medium of Russian, which leads, in the end, to intensive russification of the non-Russian languages of the USSR. It is significant in this respect that, in 1983, the Communist party Central Committee in Azerbaidjan adopted a resolution "on improving the work of translations in the republic."90 Mention of the adoption of this resolution in the context of Guboglo's article serves to illustrate the concern of Azerbaidjan's Communist party for an even greater "improvement of the work of translations in the republic." In reality, however, the fact adduced by Guboglo can serve to illustrate only that "there is something rotten" in this matter. Moreover, the adoption of this resolution in 1983 is indicative

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

251

of much else. In particular, it tells us that, although at the end of the 1950s, loyalist Azerbaidjani participants in a regional conference on questions of translation, held in the capital of Kazakhstan, AlmaAta, had outlined the enormous achievements in the field of translation in their republic, nevertheless, till this day it evokes the concern and dissatisfaction of the national intelligentsia to such an extent that the party organs are forced to adopt a special resolution on the need to improve the quality of translations.91 Even at the Alma-Ata regional conference on questions of translation more than a quarter-century ago, echoes of the real state of affairs in Azerbaidjan could be heard, along with praise for “enormous achievements" in the field of translation in the republic. The following statements from presentations delivered at the conference are significant in this connection: “We, Azerbaidjani translators, acquaint our readers with works of writers from other fraternal peoples of the Soviet Union, from the peoples democracies, from the West and the East with the aid of the Russian language";92 or “the principal reasons for the poor-quality translation of textbooks are to be found in the inadequate specialized and methodical training of translators and editors, in their inadequate knowledge of Russian and especially of their native language";93 or "often, in translation, a comma, semicolon, exclamation and question marks, colon, dash, etc. are placed where they are to be found in the original. They ... do not fulfill their proper function and sometimes even create confusion";94 or “our literary scholars and linguists ... do not want to recognize the correctness and necessity of using a particular word, term and form of expression, which have long since entered our translated literature and earned their place in our language; they label it artificial and fabricated, and, on this basis, dare to accuse translators of debasing the Azerbaidjani language."95 In tone and content, the last of these statements is not only a reaction to the dissatisfaction and concern of the patriotically inclined members of Azerbaidjan's national intelligentsia at the debasement of their language, but also attests to the gulf that exists between standard declarations by loyalist Soviet scholars on the flowering of the languages of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR and the real language situation in the non-Russian republics, including Azerbaidjan. Moreover, with all the persuasiveness of the quantative data marshalled by Soviet authors, Guboglo included, to prove the flourishing growth of the non-Russian languages, such as publication figures (including trans¬ lations), “the amount of publications," as M. Kulichenko admits, “in the non-Russian languages has been diminishing, and in Russian

252

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

increasing/' since the beginning of the 1970's.96 Thus, while persons of non-Russian nationality comprised, according to the 1979 census, almost half of the total population of the USSR (47.5 percent),97 the proportion of all books and pamphlets published in the non-Russian languages comprised, according to Kulichenko, only 18.6 percent of all books and pamphlets published in 1979.98 Kulichenko adheres, on the one hand, to the authorities' declared aim of further strengthening the position of Russian, and, on the other, he is aware that, in the foreseeable future, the displacement of the languages of the non-Russian Soviet peoples and nationalities would reach such proportions that it would be necessary somehow to introduce substantial changes into the standard phrase about the flourishing growth of these languages and the broadening of their social functions. Kulichenko is already interspersing more-or-less veiled admissions of the real language situation in the USSR in his statements. Thus, touching on the question of the development of national languages in the Soviet multinational state, he writes that their functions "are increasing among some of this peoples and in certain regions," and that "a partial and gradual redistribution of the social functions of international Russian and the national languages of the peoples of the USSR ... is taking place."99 Although the "redistribution" is presented as passing "quite naturally and on an entirely voluntary basis,"100 the very admission by one of the specialists in the theory of nations and national relations (and most closely associated with the CPSU Central Committee) to the fact is tantamount to corroborating the correctness of the position, assumed in the title of the symposium on the languages of the non-Russian peoples and nationalities of the USSR, which was so zealously disputed by Neroznak and Guboglo. Claims that there is an increase in the functions of national languages, when simultaneously modified to mean that this increase is occurring only among some of the peoples and only in certain regions, does not refute, but confirms the position that a reduction of social functions of national (non-Russian) languages is taking place in the USSR. In conclusion, we must touch on the question of the Aesopic language of Soviet authors. In the tsarist period of the history of the Russian Empire, opponents of the existing system employed this language to deceive the powers that were and their punitive organs as to the true meaning of their statements, intended for adherents, and through them, for the broad masses. In its Soviet period, however, not only opponents of the existing order in the country, but even the powers that be, as well as exponents of their policies, regularly resort to this language. They use it in order to deceive the broad masses

The Language Policy of the Soviet Communist Party

253

of their country, and also world public opinion with regard to unsightly aspects of Soviet life. The Aesopian vocabulary to which Guboglo, for example, resorted both in his comments at the Brussels symposium and in the above-mentioned article ("the flowering of the national languages of the USSR and the broadening of their social functions"; "equality of the languages of the peoples in the USSR"; "the right to bilingualism"; etc.), can serve as proof of this. Referring to the specific kind of Aesopianism of his time, the nineteenth-century Russian writer, M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, wrote that "not infrequently the Aesopian writer himself ceases to be conscious of the Aesop in himself." Of the Soviet authorities, however, and the advocates of their national-language policy, it should be said that they never forget their Aesopianism. For this reason they always try to rebuff utterances that shed light on the real nature of those events and phenomena, processes and facts, reflected in the distorted mirror of their Aesopian positions and theses. Clearly, as Soviet scholars, they are obliged to take their cue from the positions laid down in the CPSU program, in particular the directive, in that part of it that talks of "exposure of bourgeois ideology," which states that "peaceful coexistence among states with different social systems does not imply weakening of the ideological struggle."101 Significant in this respect is the criticism by Soviet authors of a Western scholar such as E. G. Lewis, whose book Multilingualism in the Soviet Union, published in 1972, is, in their words, "the most detailed and comprehensive study of the situation of languages" in the USSR.102 While Lewis's position that "compared to their past history, the non-Russian languages are now in a far more advantageous position and have gained in prestige and vitality" or that these languages "rival Russian at the present time" are debatable, similar positions are presented by Soviet authors as an admission even by bourgeois scholars "of how much the national languages have received for their development thanks to socialism."103 However, in the Soviet literature, it is possible to find considerable evidence that, in the past, there existed on the territory of what is now the Soviet state nonRussian languages (Turkic, for example) that used to have much broader social functions than Russian and whose influence on the latter "was essentially dominant."104 With respect to the "rivalry" between the non-Russian languages and Russian, there is, as was pointed out before, ample testimony, again in the Soviet literature, that nowadays the non-Russian languages are not exactly competing with Russian, but rather are being displaced by it from their most important social functions.

2 54

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

On the other hand, Soviet authors not only resort to their favorite method of covering the authors of uncomplimentary statements with standard epithets of disapproval, but also to the inadequate translation of such statements into Russian, tailored to their purpose of "un¬ masking" ideological opponents. Thus, E. G. Lewis writes quite prudently that "sociologically the 'national language' of the Union Republics have gained considerably over the last 50 years, though in relation to Russian they may still be underprivileged."105 The Western author, accordingly, is very circumspect in his choice of words. His statement is constructed so that it contains the assumption that, under Soviet circumstances, the development of non-Russian languages would lead to a change in the existing relations between Russian and the non-Russian languages, as a result of which their still underprivileged position in relation to Russian would ultimately be removed. However, the Soviet authors rendered the second part of Lewis' statement so that it would be easier to accuse him of anticommunism: "In relation to Russian the national languages are subject to discrimination [podvergaiutsia diskriminatsii]," although in Lewis' text "underprivileged" does not mean "subject to discrimination."106 Despite his care in the choice of expressive means to describe the language situation in the USSR, Lewis gives an accurate idea of the state of affairs. He not only notes that the situation of the nonRussian languages is less satisfactory in relation to Russian, but also emphasizes that "there are signs of the increasing encroachment of that language in domains of use which were, within their native territories, the prerogative of the 'national languages.' "107 Similar statements, coinciding in essence with the position assumed in the title of the Brussels symposium on the languages of the non-Russian peoples, regarding the gradual reduction of the social functions of these languages, cause annoyance to the exponents of the CPSU's national-language policy. And this is not surprising. As a reflection of the way in which Russian is displacing all the languages of the Soviet peoples, at a more or less rapid pace, such statements and positions reveal the true significance, concealed by Soviet authors through Aesopian mystification, of the language situation in the USSR.

Notes, Chapter 7 1. J. Den Haese, ]. Nivette, AILA Brussels 84. Proceedings, vol. 1: sections 1-18, pp. I-XXIV, 1-495; vol. 2: sections 19-25, pp. I—XXIII, 495-1006; vol. 3: sections 26-36, addendum, pp. I-XXIV, 1007-1482; vol. 4: symposia, index, pp. I-XVI, 1483-1762/AILA-84, Proceedings.

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2. P. Austin, Soviet Finnish: The End of a Dream. 3. G. Perfecky, The Status of the Ukrainian Language in the Ukrainian SSR. 4. Iu. Desheriev, I. Bagmut, E. Bokarev, N. Sukhov, eds., "Voprosy terminologii," Materialy vsesoiuznogo terminologicheskogo soveshchania (Moscow, 1961), pp. 221-222. 5. Literatura i zhizn’, 17 December 1961. 6. Ibid., 24 August 1962. 7. A. Baziev, M. Isaev, lazyk i natsia (Moscow, 1973), p. 86. 8. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR (Moscow, 1981), p. 211. 9. See AILA-84, Proceedings, vol. 1: sections 1-18, p. 153. 10. Ibid., p. 190. 11. M. Guboglo, "Ukreplenie edinstva natsional'nogo i internatsional'nogo v obraze zhizni sovetskogo naroda," Istoria SSSR, no. 6 (1983), pp. 3-21. 12. G. Blankoff-Scarr, "Main Tendencies in the Development of Language Life in the USSR," in AILA-84, vol. 1, p. 153. 13. See AILA-84, Proceedings, vol. 1, p. 190. 14. I. Vardul', L. Nikolskii, V. Chernyshev, eds., lazykovaia situatsia v stranakh Azii i Afriki (Moscow, 1967). 15. L. Nikolsky, ed., Problemy izuchenia iazykovoi situatsii i iazykovyi vopros v stranakh Azii i Severnoi Afriki (Moscow, 1970). 16. V. Lenin, "Nuzhen li obiazatel'nyi gosudarstvennyi iazyk," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, tom 24, p. 295. 17. I. Khansuvarov, Latinizatsia—orudie leninskoi natsional'noi politiki (Mos¬ cow, 1932), p. 21. 18. See "Kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo v Adygei," Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Maikop, 1958), p. 366. 19. K. Musaev, Alfavity iazykov narodov SSSR (Moscow, 1965), p. 19. 20. Ibid., p. 51. 21. M. Isaev, "Sto tridtsat' ravnopravnykh," O iazykakh narodov SSSR (Moscow, 1970), p. 178. 22. Iu. Desheriev, I. Bagmut, E. Bokarev, N. Sukhov, eds., Voprosy terminologii. 23. Ibid., pp. 10, 43-44. 24. F. Filin, Iu. Desheriev, V. Yartseva, M. Isaev, I. Protchenko, eds., Iazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), pp. 111-124. 25. Ibid., pp. 111-113. 26. Ibid., pp. 115, 11. 27. Ibid., p. 123. 28. Moreover, the non-Russian peoples and nationalities, i.e., the national minorities, defended the declaration of their languages as official languages in the non-Russian republics of the USSR. Contrary to the "generally accepted views," the Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaidjanis, and Abkhaz succeeded in including in the text of their 1978 constitutions an article, saying that their languages are the official languages within the boundaries of the respective

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

256

administrative-territorial formations. At the same time, the members of the Russian nation were interested in preventing the declaration of any language as official, since Russian prevails not only in the RSFSR, but also in all the non-Russian Union and autonomous republics. 29. M. Guboglo, "Leninskaia natsional'no-iazykovaia politika KPSS—internatsionalizm v deistvii,'' Sovetskaia etnografia, no. 1 (1984), p. 3. 30. lu. Desheriev, Zakonomernosti razvitia i vzaimodeistvia iazykov v sov-

etskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1966), pp. 78-79. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 83, 86-88. Ibid., pp. 20, 370. See Voprosy terminologii, pp. 30, 150. A. Agaev, "Funktsia iazyka kak etnicheskogo priznaka," in lazyk i

obshchestvo, pp. 126, 137. 37. M. Isaev, "Sto tridtsat' ravnopravnykh," pp. 24-34. 38. Ibid., pp. 27-29. 39. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973), pp. 62, 113. 40. A. Agaev, art. cit., p. 127. 41. Ibid. 42. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR, 2nd. ed. (Moscow, 1982), pp. 183-184. 43. Ibid. 44. V. Kozlov, op. cit., p. 234. 45. Ibid., p. 244. 46. A. Agayev, art. cit., p. 138. 47. Iu. Desheriev, op. cit., p. 361. 48. A. Agaev, art. cit. 49. See M. Kulichenko, Natsia i sotsial'nyi progress (Moscow, 1983), p. 166; K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 100. 50. See I. Beloded, "Mogutne dzherelo zbagachennia ukrains'koi literaturnoi movi," Leksikografichnii biuleten', no. 2 (Kiiv, 1952); I. Bagmut, "Rol' perevodov proizvedenii klassikov marksizma-leninizma v obogashchenii ukrainskogo literaturnogo iazyka," Izvestia AN SSSR, otd. literatury i iazyka, tom XIII, no. 4 (Moscow, 1954). Ibid., "Problemi perekladu suspil'no politichnoi literaturi ukrains'koiu movoiu" (Kiiv, 1968). 51. See P. Antokol'skii, M. Auezov, M. Rylskii, "Khudozhestvennye perevody literatur narodov SSSR," in Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda (Moscow, 1955), pp. 5-44. 52. The following facts are noteworthy in this respect. Pavel Antokol'skii presented his report on artistic translations at the congress of USSR writers as coauthored with Mukhtar Auezovand Maksim Rylskii. Some years after the publication of the report, however, M. Auezov declared, in total contra¬ diction to the spirit and letter of the report, at a regional conference on

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257

problems of translations from Russian held in the capital of the Kazakh SSR, that "artistic translation of prose requires the reproduction of the syntax, the sentence structure of the elevated language culture in which Russian artistic prose abounds." (See Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania po perevodu literatury s russkogo na iazyki narodov Srednei Azii, Kazakhstana i Azerbaidzhana (AlmaAta, 1960), p. 362.) This coincided completely with his foreword to the translation into Kazakh of Turgenev's Dvorianskoe gnezdo (A Nest of Gentlefolk), in which he wrote (again, in total contradiction to the contents of the abovementioned coauthored report on artistic translation) that "it is necessary to aim for a precise rendering of Turgenev through Turgenevian syntax, of Gogol' through Gogolian syntax, of Tolstoi through his characteristic complex terraced periods, exactly as of Sholokhov with all the particularities of his style." (See Aktual'nye problemy teorii khudozhestvennogo perevoda, tom 1 (Moscow, 1967), p. 113.) 53. "Perekladats'ka misl' i perekladats'kii nedomisel," Vitchizna, no. 1, 1955, pp. 138-164; "Stan khudozhn'ogo perekladu na Ukraini," in Pitannia perekladu (Kiiv, 1957), pp. 5-54. 54. "Perevodcheskaia mysT i perevodcheskoe nedomyslie," in Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda (Moscow, 1955), pp. 213-258; "Perevod i literaturnyi iazyk," in Masterstvo perevoda (Moscow, 1959), pp. 7-45. 55. Masterstvo perevoda, pp. 37-38, 40; Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda. 56. Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda, p. 224. 57. Masterstvo perevoda (1959), p. 40. 58. See Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania. . . .", p. 364. 59. See I. Bagmut, "Pitania perekladu z rossiis'koi movi na ukrains'ku," in Movoznavstvo, tom 12 (1953), pp. 51-57; Ibid., "O perevodakh khudozhestvennoi literatury s iazyka stran narodnoi demokratii," Movoznavstvo, tom 13 (1955), pp. 76-85; Ibid., "Voprosy perevoda na Ukraine za vremia Sovetskoi vlasti," in Doslidzhenia z movoznavstva v Ukr. SSR za 40 rokiv (Kiiv, 1957), pp. 122-147. 60. A. Kundzich, Perevodcheskaia mysT i perevodcheskoe nedomyslie, p. 227. 61. Ibid., p. 257. 62. S. Kovganiuk, "Bukvalizm u perekladu," Vitchizna, no. 7, 1954. The same: "Pereklad khudozhnoi rossiis'koi prozi na ukrains'ku movu," in Pitannia perekladu, pp. 55-75. 63. O. Kundzich, "Stan khudozhn'ogo perekladu na Ukraini," in Pitannia perekladu (Kiiv, 1957), pp. 5-54. 64. P. Toper, "Traditsii realizma (russkie pisateli XIX veka o khudozhestvennom perevode)," in Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda, p. 91. 65. O. Kundzich, "Perevod i literaturnyi iazyk," in Masterstvo perevoda (Moscow, 1959), p. 10. 66. O. Kundzich, Slovo i obraz (Kiiv, 1966), p. 202. 67. Ibid., p. 199. 68. Probably the same V. Koptilov, who at the official opening of the Brussels congress delivered greetings as the representative of UNESCO.

The Mouthpiece of the CPSU National Policy

258

69. V. Koptilov, "Oleksii Kundzich—teoretik i praktik," in Masterstvo

perevoda (1969), (Moscov, 1970), p. 283. 70. M. Pilinskyi, "Vikoristannia rossiis'ko-ukrains'kogo slovnika 1948 r. v praktitsi perekladu tvoriv klasikiv marksizmu-leninizmu na ukrainsku movu," in Leksikografichnii biuleten', no. 3 (Kiiv, 1958). 71. I. Bagmut, "Problemi perekladu suspil'no-politichnoi literaturi ukrains'koiu movoiu," p. 30. 72. See A. Kundzich, Perevod i literaturnyi iazyk, pp. 41-45. 73. Rossiis'ko-ukrains’kii slovnik, 1-3 (Kiiv, 1918). 74. See Leksikografichnii biuleten', no. 2 (Kiiv, 1952), p. 29. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

I. Bagmut, op. cit., pp. 191-259. Ibid., pp. 285-296. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., pp. 256, 288. I. Beloded, art. cit., p. 29. I. Beloded, Leninskaia teoria natsional’no-iazykovogo stroitel'stva v sotsialisticheskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1972), p. 178. 82. Rosiis'ko-ukrains'kii slovnik, vol. 1, p. V. 83. See M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR, p. 211. 84. M. Guboglo, "The Solution to the Problem of National Languages in Soviet Society Today," in AILA-84, Proceedings, vol. 1, p. 190. 85. Ibid., "Leninskaia natsional'no-iazykovaia politika KPSS—Internatsionalizm v deistvii," p. 6. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., p. 14. 88. Ibid., p. 13. 89. Ibid., p. 8. 90. Ibid. 91. Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania. . . , pp. 154, 256-257. 92. Dz. Mamedov, "Ob opyte perevoda khudozhestvennoi literatury s russkogo na azerbaidzhanskii iazyk," in Materialy regional’nogo soveshchania. . . , p. 267. 93. A. Efendiev, "Ob osnovnykh printsipakh perevoda uchebnoi literatury s russkogo na azerbaidzhanskii iazyk," in Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania. . . , p. 300. 94. D. Azimov, "Problema iazyka i terminologii v perevode," in Materialy regional'nogo soveshchania. . . , p. 94. 95. Ibid. 96. M. Kulichenko, Rastsvet i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR, p. 215-216. 97. Naselenie SSSR. Po dannym Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naselenia 1979 goda (Moscow, 1980), p. 23. 98. M. Kulichenko, op. cit., p. 216. 99. Ibid., p. 214-215. 100. Ibid.

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259

101. Programma kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, p. 122. 102. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 212. 103. Ibid., pp. 211-212. 104. N. Baskakov, "Dvuiazychie i problema vzaimoproniknovenia razlichnykh urovnei pri vzaimodeistvii iazykov. Na materiale tiurkskikh iazykov," in P. Azimov, Iu. Desheriev, F. Filin, eds., Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), p. 75. 105. E. G. Lewis, Multilingualism in the Soviet Union: Aspects of Language and its Implementation (The Hague, Paris, 1972), p. 14. 106. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., p. 212. 107. E. G. Lewis, op. cit., p. 15.

PART III

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

8 Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

The devices of insulting all those who dare to shed a ray of light on the realities in the USSR is not new. Half a century ago, Soviet specialists denigrated in every way all those who wrote about the monstrous crimes in Stalin's time. In fact, Khrushchev showed the whole world that the denigrators are those who should be defamed. It could be objected that the latter sincerely believed in Stalin and were convinced that he repressed with an iron hand the enemies of the people and of the Revolution. However, such objections would be inconsistent. The same Soviet specialists later denigrated the critics of Soviet realities in Khrushchev's time! And again, after his deposition, it was proven that they were those who should be stigmatized, because, under Khrushchev, they glorified his every initiative as based on principles of Marxism-Leninism; and, as soon as Brezhnev came to power, they qualified them as "voluntarism" and "subjectivism." Those specialists would also deserve to be exposed to public op¬ probrium for the unreserved praise they bestowed on all that was done under Brezhnev, including what is today so pathetically con¬ demned by his successors. In Brezhnev's time, they zealously fought the critics of Soviet realities, and now they themselves criticize those aspects of these realities that have been, and are now, denounced by the Kremlin's present leadership. The future will prove, in this respect (like in other aspects of Soviet realities, which the present Politburo not only does not condemn, but continues to support and develop with the same perseverance as in the past, when it was headed by Gorbachev's predecessors), that the truth is with the authors who expose the realities' essence and criticize them—and not with those Soviet specialists who denigrate and defame these critics, as they did in the past. 263

264

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Thus, for instance, also under Gorbachev, the promoters of the CPUS's nationalities policies, especially of its policies on the Soviet peoples' languages, continue to assert that, in the non-Russian Union and autonomous republics, a true flowering of the national cultures and languages takes place, finding its expression, among others, in widening of the social functions of those languages. In actual fact, however, the policies promoted by Soviet authorities lead to a gradual reduction of the non-Russian languages' social functions—and this relates to absolutely all such languages, although the pace of the reduction differ from language to language. It is more dynamic and its results are incomparably more devastating in the autonomous than in the Union republics. Thus, for example, it is more accentuated in the Ukraine and in (Soviet) Moldavia than in Armenia or Georgia. But, even in the latter, the above-mentioned phenomena manifest themselves as a general trend, proving that, in the USSR, a process of gradual elimination of ultimately all national languages in favor of the dominant Russian language takes place. This process is by now so advanced that the national languages cannot be considered any more as the main means of communication for the non-Russian Soviet nationalities. In One Step Back—Two Steps Forward (1982), as well at the symposium ''Languages of the Non-Russian Soviet Nationalities: A Gradual Re¬ duction of Social Functions" (Brussels 1984), I have shown that, even in the current Soviet literature, more than sufficient assertions and conclusions can be discerned fully confirming that the Russian language steadily extends in the non-Russian Soviet republics its sphere of use, to the detriment of the national languages. Programmed in the framework of the Seventh World Congress of Applied Linguistics, this symposium "enjoyed" the presence of some scholars from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (M. Guboglo, V. Neroznak, L. Nikolskii). In their responses, they declared that the symposium's theme was not scientific but propagandistic (V. Neroznak), that the languages of the autochthonous nationalities, not only in the Union but in the autonomous republics as well, are fully developing (M. Guboglo). In an extensive rendering of the work of the Brussels Congress, published in the Moscow review Sovetskaia etnografia (no. 5, 1985), M. Guboglo tried to assure his readers, on the one hand, that "to the question of which Soviet scholar, when and where, wrote on the reduction of non-Russian nationalities' languages functions, M. Bruchis could not give a straight answer" (p. 134), and, on the other hand, that "the objectives aimed at by the organizers of this symposium have nothing in common with scholarship," and that, "thanks to the

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

265

active participation of Soviet delegates in the symposium, the antiSoviet provocation ended in failure." An assessment of the paper submitted by M. Guboglo to the respective session of the congress and of his behavior at the symposium on the languages of non-Russian Soviet nationalities has been given in the previous chapter. Certain assertions by Guboglo, who claims, among other things, that in my speech at the Brussels symposium I brought "random quotations, detached from the context of works by Soviet authors," have been reproduced by V. Stati from Kishinev in an article published by the newspaper Sovetskaia Moldavia. Being a "specialist in unmasking falsifiers," V. Stati triples Guboglo's invectives and accuses me of "pathological anti-Sovietism and obvious incompletence," saying that I "resort to unscientific tricks," "falsify facts," etc. The epithets by which Stati honors me are, so he says, assessments he detected in reviews by "authors outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union." In fact, the only foreign author cited by him in this connection is the West German scholar Klaus Heitmann, whose study on the language and literature of Soviet Moldavia's autochthonous population was very much appreciated by the republic's patriotically minded intelligentsia in the mid-1960s in spite of this work having been kept "under seven locks" at the MSSR Academy of Science, and only a few of the workers of the Language and Literature Institute having access to it. However, in national policy public meetings specially organized by the advocates of the CPSU, the more acerbic the attacks on Heitmann's theses that the language of the autochthonous population of Soviet Moldavia is Romanian, the more the conviction grew in the republic's wide circles of national intellectuals (i.e., those who had no access to Heitmann's work) that the efforts to present the language of Bessarbian Moldavians as different from that of the Romanian people does not produce error in Western public opinion, which is sustained by works of renowned scholars. In the review referred to by Stati, Klaus Heitmann dwells on some deficiencies in my work. One Step Back—Two Steps Forward, but stresses that those are, as a matter of fact, the too numerous corrections of errors. Luckily, Klaus Heitmann, as did the majority of other reviewers, noticed that these deficiencies do not alter the book's essence. As to Heitmann's remark that, in certain instances, I used comparisons and fragments (from literary works) that appear in his work of twenty years ago and did not indicate the source, I feel bound to state the following. First, it does not speak well of my 1982 book that I did

266

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

not emphasize in it the role of a work by Heitmann ("Rumanische Sprache und Literatur in Bessarabien und Transnistrien die sogennante moldavische Sprache und Literatur") in Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie (1965), which in the 1960s had an encouraging influence upon the patriotic national intelligentsia in Soviet Moldavia, similar to that of the Romance linguist Carlo Tagliavini's presentation ("Una nuova lingua leteraria romanzza? II moldavo") at the Seventh Inter¬ national Congress of Romance Studies in 1956 at Florence. Second, in certain very rare instances, I indeed did not specify the sources of some of the examples I used. However, the following lines from Heitmann's review prove how far he was from considering them "antiscientific tricks" or attempts "to falsify facts":

Um den Ertrag von One Step Back . . . vorweg zu bewerten: Bruchis bietet sicherlich die . . . reichhaltigste, griindlichste und am besten documentierte Analyse einer Thematik, die letzten Endes der Romanistik. . . . Eine Fulle von Dokumenten wird verwertet, die zu einem erheblichen Teil nirgends ausserhalb der Sowjetunion greifbar sein durften. Niemand, der sich kiinftig mit dem fernen Osten der romanischen Sprachwelt beschaftigen wird, kann von der materialreichen, minutiosen Darstellung, die hier nun zur Verfugung steht, absehen.

Only a man of bad faith can interpret Heitmann's sayings as Stati did. And Stati had to have stretched things so much to assert (in another article) that, even if all sovietologists specializing in Moldavian studies would unite their efforts, they would never be able "to prove that the Moldavians are not . . . Moldavians."2 Stati knows too well that no "sovietologist specializing in Moldavian studies" does maintain that the Moldavians are not Moldavians. What they do maintain is that the Moldavians are Romanians. As Lenin considered them, as it says in the first edition (1927) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, as every foreigner familiar with the history of the Romanians and with the geography of their homeland knows—the indigenous inhabitants of Transylvania, Maramure§, Banat, Muntenia, Oltenia, Dobrogea, Moldavia (including those of the MSSR and the Ukrainian SSR), Bucovina (including those of the Chernovitz region of the Ukrainian SSR), are Romanians. The Moldavian Vasile Alecsandri (of whom Stati, in his notes on a tour with the Joe Dance Company in French cities, writes that he "gave a mighty impulse to the spiritual advancement of the Moldavian people in the second half of the past century") is a Romanian.3

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

267

Eminescu of Bucovina, Balcescu of Muntenia, Cosbuc of Transyl¬ vania, and Russo of Bessarabia are also Romanians. Stati knows all this too well. He knows that Alecsandri was aware of his being Romanian and that "he was the first among the Romanian elite—a fighter ... a bard."4 That's why he mentioned in his notes that the Montpellier intellectuals awarded Alecsandri "a high literary distinction as early as 1878."5 He does not say a word about the poet's having deserved such high distinction for his Hora unirii ("Unity Dance"). It would seem, then, that Stati's strong pronouncements "against the falsifiers of the Moldavian language" do not merit attention. The more so that the thesis on a gradual reduction of social functions of the non-Russian Soviet peoples' languages (formualted in One Step Back . . . and repeated in the title of the Brussels symposium), being reproduced to be disapproved, first by M. Guboglo and then by V. Stati, can have in the USSR but an opposite effect to that expected by them. In the sense that the national intelligentsia and the educated youth of the autochthonous population of Soviet Moldavia (as well as in most other non-Russian Union and autonomous republics) are perfectly aware that Russian dislodges the national languages from their most important social functions, and any attacks on those who describe the true state of affairs do not weaken but, on the contrary, strengthen the opposition by the patriotic to forces that constitute a peril to the very existence of their languages. Such an effect was produced in Soviet Moldavia by the attacks on Tagliavini and on Heitmann in the mid-1960s. And the same effect was produced by attacks on these renowned scholars in the following decades. Ultimately, this accelerated the rate of identification of the literary language of Soviet Moldavia's autochthonous population with the Romanian—a process started in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a reaction against the authorities' attempts to transform it into a Moldavian-RussianUkrainian jargon. However, the denigration by advocates of the CPSU policies of foreign authors who reflect the real sense of the trends in the de¬ velopment of the national languages of non-Russian Soviet peoples also has another aspect. And that aspect merits, really, full attention. Because of, on the one hand, the often virtual nonexistence of schools teaching in the national minorities' languages in noncommunist coun¬ tries and, on the other hand, the existence in Soviet republics (Union and even some autonomous) of secondary schools and pedagogical institutes teaching in the national languages, and of philological faculties with departments of national languages and literature, many scholars in noncommunist countries do not accept the thesis of the

268

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

deplorable state of the non-Russian Soviet peoples' languages, and subscribe to the slogan thesis on the flourishing of those languages. Moreover, in accusing the critics of Moscow's policies toward nonRussian languages of lack of objectivity in their appreciations, such scholars in noncommunist countries often stress some minor defi¬ ciencies in those critics' writings, thus rendering a really invaluable service to the policies of the Soviet authorities. Meanwhile, the scholars in question give a faulty appreciation to the above-mentioned dia¬ metrically opposite theses, and exaggerate some minor or even fictitious deficiencies in the writings of those who criticize the national policies of the CPSU in general, and its policies toward the languages of nonRussian Soviet peoples in particular. To the promoters of the CPSU's national policies, such erroneous appreciations and exaggerations by some foreign scholars are a godsend. The conclusions by certain Western authors, such as "increasing bilingualism among Soviet Muslims has very little to do with increasing russification,"6 or "the data on Moldavian language education and the press in Moldavia suggest that there is no concerted Soviet policy to encourage the spread of Russian language and culture at the expense of the national language of the republic,"7 do but play into the hands of the CPSU national policies advocates. Irina Livezeanu, for instance, who made the second of the above assertions, states that Romanian and Moldavian are the same language, according to some, and two languages according to others, but does not think it necessary to define her own position in this controversy. Still, she maintains that:

Despite the high rate of urbanization which characterized Moldavia's development in the 1950s and 1960s, by 1970 the Moldavian national language was not at all threatened with extinction. ... By maintaining a bilingual educational system in each of the union republics, and by publishing books and periodicals in at least two languages in each nonRussian republic, the Soviet government is helping to perpetuate linguistic diversity.8

According to Lenin, the evolution of nations and languages will lead to their fusion in the future. That's why even the most servile Soviet specialists will not subscribe to the assertion that "the Soviet government is helping to perpetuate linguistic diversity." But the promoters of the governing party's policies can certainly use, for example, the following confirmation by Livezeanu of their own as-

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

269

sertions: “An overwhelming majority of Moldavians still declared Moldavian to be their native tongue."9 Undoubtedly, they can also use the theses, cited by her of some other U.S. researchers, such as J. Pool, according to whom, If the observed trends and policies continue, the USSR will move in the direction of being a quindecanational and quindecalingual state. Russian will be the Russian national language, and—for those who need it—the Soviet link language, but not the universal, unique language of the Union. Fourteen other national languages will thrive under conscientious cultivation.10

Being based on Soviet statistical data or on impressions of some visitors to the USSR, such assertions and conclusions do not reflect the real state of affairs regarding the dominant trends in the development of the autochthonous peoples' languages in the non-Russian republics. And even the disclosures of events and policies of past years do not touch on foreign policy and on certain aspects of internal policies in the period of Gorbachev's predecessors and, among others, on the CPSU's policies on national relations in the USSR. Thus, the policy of the russification of non-Russian Soviet republics is being continued with no less, and even with more, energy than in Brezhnev's time. To slander those who wrote that a process of russification of nonRussian peoples and languages goes on in the USSR, Soviet specialists have resorted and still resort to reproducing assertions by some foreign authors who, in one way or another, strengthen Soviet slogans. Thus, for example, in 1972, after traveling to the Moldavian SSR (and to other Soviet republics), M. Morton wrote that "the Moldavian and the Russian languages are considered as the most important subjects of study in the schools providing general education." This assertion has been utilized in a collection of articles, entitled The Successes of Soviet Moldavia and the Myths of Anticommunism, published in Russian at Kishinev in 1976, to sustain that "if the study of the Russian language in schools and institutions of higher learning of the republic is not looked at from preconceived and speculative ideas, but objectively and honestly, it becomes obvious that no 'russification' exists, and that an advantageous mutual enrichment of the Moldavian and Russian languages is going on."11 But, in a book published in 1977, the director of the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Academy of Science of the Uzbek SSR, K. Khanazarov, wrote that "socialism does all that is possible for the development of the national languages, but cannot warrant their equal enrichment and develop-

270

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

merit."12 In the second edition of his book, in 1982, Khanazarov revealed (based on data of the school curriculum of education ministries of Soviet non-Russian republics) the following: "In the thirties, for the Russian language was reserved a total of 400-550 hours in ten years of study; today Russian has become the number one subject of study in national schools: for ten years, 1,600 to 1,850 hours, i.e., an average of 14 to 17% of the total time of study in secondary school, are reserved for the Russian language."13 In August 1986, the noted Soviet Kirghiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, one of the authors agreeable to the authorities, wrote on the devel¬ opment of national languages that it is far from normal. His statement is significant in this respect:

The number of Kirghiz schools in the city of Frunze does not increase, although hundreds of schools are being built there. The time has come, long since, for Kirghiz kindergartens to be established in the capital of the republic. Nobody forbids it, but nobody deals with this problem, albeit in present circumstances all these are of vital importance for the nation. Because what kind of national culture is a culture without its own foundation?14

Speaking of mechanical transplantations from Russian to the nonRussian languages, in particular into Kirghiz, of elements foreign to the nature of that language and giving as an illustration the titles of two regional Kirghiz newspapers—Isyk-Kol Pravdasy and Naryn Pravdasy—Aitmatov confessed that he is deeply offended by such transplantations, and expressed his feelings unequivocally: "What kind of a people with a millenial history is a people whose language lacks words like 'truth' [pravda], justice, equity?"15 Especially important is the following remark of the writer in connection with the above:

But when such excruciating thoughts are expressed, people immediately appear who consider them manifestatioins of nationalism and narrow¬ mindedness. Unfortunately, such an itch for vigilance, stemming mainly from careerism, does not meet with due response. It is worth mentioning in this connection that such trends generated in the republics a special type of demagogue—a humpbacked tribune [gorbun-tribunshchik] whose, so to speak, prestigious profession becomes the praising, with or without discernment, of the Russian language and ignoring one's own mother tongue.16

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

271

In the conclusion reached from the above Aitmatov says: "I maintain, however, that there should be many literary languages, having solid opportunities to exist and develop. Language is a warranty of a people's immortality. For every nation its language is great.”17 Certain conclusions can be drawn from the above quotations from Aitmatov, who writes most of his works in Russian. First of all, that even Soviet writers of non-Russian extraction, for whom Russian becomes the main means of creativity, express their deep concern with the russification process of the national republics and feel profoundly offended by the perversion of national languages through the introduction of elements foreign into their nature. Secondly, that any attempt to resist such processes and phenomena is immediately identified, by those who made the lauding of the Russian language their profession, as a manifestation of nationalism. Finally, in 1986 (the year of disclosures made at the Twenty-Seventh Congress) Aitmatov dared to declare, on the one hand, that non-Russian literary languages have, in fact, "no solid opportunities to exist and to develop" and, on the other, that such opportunities should be created. However, Soviet realities did not change in this respect, and they continue to develop in the traditional direction of praising the Russian language and strengthening its position in national non-Russian re¬ publics. Thus, for instance, at a December 1986 conference of Soviet Moldavian professors and lecturers specializing in social sciences, where two secretaries of th Party's Central Committee (S. Grossu and N. Bondarchuk) and the minister of higher and special secondary education (V. Kerdivarenko) spoke, it was stressed that "a certain proportion of students and pupils shows political shortsightedness and national narrow-mindedness, and makes immature declarations.” In order to uproot such phenomena, the authorities asked the social science specialists of Soviet Moldavia to "arrive at a deep understanding by students and pupils of the Russian language's role as a means of communication among Soviet nations and as an important means of strengthening the internationalist unity of the Soviet people.”18 There is no doubt that "a certain proportion is a euphemism used by the authorities with a double aim: on the one hand, not to hide from the Soviet Moldavian population that they are accusing the autochthonous students and pupils of 'political shortsightedness,'” etc.; on the other hand, to somehow disguise from strangers that the warning is directed just to that youth. And there is, also, no doubt that the authorities' efforts to mobilize specialists in social sciences to make the autochthonous student youth of Soviet Moldavia un-

272

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

derstand the "role of the Russian language" are generated by the resentment by that youth of the praising the Russian language and ignoring their mother tongue." The fact that, even after the Twenty-Seventh Congress, Soviet authorities attempt to counteract—by intimidation ( political short¬ sightedness," "national narrow-mindedness," etc.), as well as by "persuasion" (praising the role of the Russian language) such re¬ sentment speaks badly of the current leadership of the CPSU, and worse of those Western authors who in some way repeat slogans about the flourishing of national languages in the USSR. It is not fortuitous that those who raised the defamation of the authors whose conclusions deny these slogans to the status of "a prestigious profession" use abundantly statements by some Western authors who reiterate such slogans. Thus, in material published in Sovetskaia Moldavia on 23 July 1986, is reproduced a long passage from the above-mentioned article by Irina Livezeanu as proof that there are "Western scholars who objectively appreciate the experience of the USSR in solving problems relating to national languages. 1Q Especially significant are the last lines of the passage quoted by the Soviet author: "The Moldavian population conserves its original attachment to the Moldavian language, using at the same time with growing skill the Russian language where required, particularly at work and in higher education."20 The statement that the use of the Russian language by the au¬ tochthonous population of the Moldavian SSR "is required, particularly, at work and in higher education" proves, however, how inconsistent are the attempts of Soviet (and not only Soviet) authors to dispute and combat the thesis on the gradual reduction of social functions of the non-Russian national languages in the USSR. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of the population in Soviet Moldavia (as well as in other non-Russian national republics) is multinational, and its members use Russian at work. The Russian, not the Moldavian, language is predominant not only in Soviet Moldavia's enterprises, but also in all party and state institutions in the capital city, as well as in other localities of the republic. It is natural that in these circumstances the gap between the spoken and the literary language of the autochthonous population of Soviet Moldavia keeps growing and deepening. At a conference organized in 1964 by the Institute of Language and Literature of the MSSR Academy of Sciences, the linguist A. Darul stressed that, in the dialects of the autochthonous population of the republic, "the terminology in varied spheres of activity is borrowed in full from

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

273

the Russian language."21 The same researcher adds: "Not only nouns are widely used. . . . Even a large proportion of Russian verbs are given Moldavian terminations.... In most cases, these words constitute synonyms with their Moldavian counterparts. In view of the fact that a language does not suffer absolutely identical synonyms, the Mol¬ davian word is being forgotten [is transferred to the passive vocabulary], and only the borrowed word remains in use."22 The massive penetration by russianisms (as well as ukrainianisms) into Moldavian dialects in the MSSR is corroborated by the literature and also by other Soviet linguists. Thus, at a conference organized in 1969 by the Literature and Language Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences and by the Institute of Language and Literature of the MSSR Academy of Sciences, Prof. I. Chiornyi of the Kishinev University (whose field of study is Russian-Ukrainian borrowings in Moldavian dialects)23 also notes numerous borrowings of these kinds.23 In One Step Back . . . , I reproduced a whole series of assertions and conclusions by certain authors in the MSSR, which prove that language and literature teachers in Moldavian secondary schools "have no knowledge of the substance and form of the mother tongue," and graduates of those schools are unable to name a single work by Russo, Eminescu, Alexsandri, Creanga, etc.25 In 1968, a probe in School No. 1 at Calarasi and in secondary schools at Raciula and Sipoteni showed that, of 100 upper-grade students in these schools, no one had read Baltagul by M. Sadoveanu, only one had read Ballads of the Steppe by I. Drufa, and only two the Tale of the Red Cock by V. Vasilache.26 Also significant in this respect is the statement by the author of an article published in 1983 that "prestigious publications, worth all attention, have been offered at a reduced price, for a few kopeks," thus being "depreciated not only in price, but also losing their moral artistic value, because a haphazard reduction of price must be seen as a prejudice to the publication and to its author."27 The article says further that, in libraries, the stocks of books that appeared in the MSSR in 1979 through 1981 grew by comparison with previous years, and there were appeals to the teachers, librarians, lecturers, and propagandists to convince "today's pupils—tomorrow's specialists—to become ac¬ customed to systematic, varied reading, to acquire beginnings of personal libraries."28 Iu. Desheriev stressed in 1968 that, in autonomous republics, regions, and districts, sociopolitical and technical-scientific literature was being published in some instances without regard to the social functions of respective languages. As a result, "all this literature stays deposited

274

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

in libraries and stores/ 30 But this occurs also in non Russian Union republics, which is confirmed not only by the realities in Soviet Moldavia but also by those of other republics. M. Isaev, for example, states that "Tadjiks, Ossetians, and Kurds, like other nationalities of the USSR, use more and more in their day-to-day life the Russian language."30 But Desheriev, in contradiction to the linguistic situation in the USSR, formulates the following thesis: "The growth of the role and the broadening of the social functions of the Russian and the local languages in republics, autonomous regions, and national districts is a logical process developing on a large scale with the advancement on the road to communism."31 And the same Desheriev himself invalidates this thesis by the statement that even in the national nonRussian republic with the most numerous autochthonous population, In the higher schools is heard, together with the Ukrainian, also the Russian language, spoken not only by Russians or by members of other USSR nationalities studying in the Ukraine, but also by Ukrainian professors, lecturers and students. ... In public institutions the Russian literary speech is being used on a large scale. . . . Ukrainian students willingly [okhotno] hear a part of the courses in Russian.32 . . . [In the high schools] of Kirghizia and Turkmenia many subjects are taught in Russian.33 Again Desheriev, along with other Soviet specialists, states that, on the one hand, "an attentive scrutiny brings to light a kind of "division of labor, a division of social functions between the mother tongue and the Russian language;" on the other hand, "along with their national languages, all socialist Soviet nations use on an ever-growing scale the Russian language as a means of international [and often also intranational] communication."34 Also, the Soviet researcher A. Agaev comes to the conclusion that "Russian collaborates with the national mother tongue on the principle of division of labor, functioning in various spheres of the people's social life. For different peoples it performs different social functions, and sometimes surpasses the functions of the mother tongue."35 It follows that the proponents of the national policy of the governing party themselves offer, never mind all their euphemisms ("a part of the courses," instead of "most courses"; "many subjects," instead of "most subjects"; "sometimes exceeding," instead of "often exceeding"), more than sufficient proof that the social functions of these languages are being gradually taken over by the Russian language. Albeit the

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

275

development of this process in non-Russian national republics is uneven, it forms a general trend in all of them. That's why the advocates of Moscow's policies are compelled to acknowledge the fact that "some [Soviets—M. B.] linguists' opinion is that bilingualism will necessarily lead to the degradation of one of the two languages or to the assimilation of one of them,3b and that "the notion of 'a second mother tongue' irritates some [Soviet—M. B.] scholarly researchers. . . . Certain researchers draw the conclusions that it is necessary to limit the social functions of the second language, considered by them to be a rival of the mother tongue."37 In summing up, in order to refute such theses and assertions by Soviet researchers, proponents of Moscow's national policy offer us one more proof, on the one hand, that the above-described trend truly reflects the linguistic situation in the non-Russian republics and, on the other, that there are scholars who attempt to prevent, as far as possible, the deleterious effects of this trend on the non-Russian languages. Their reaction is absolutely natural, since the proponents of the CPSU policies toward national languages present the goals of these policies as the embodiment of aspirations of non-Russian Soviet peoples. M. Guboglos assertion in Sovetskaia etnografia, reproduced by V. Stati in Sovetskaia Moldavia, belongs to the half-truths of the proponents of the CPSU national policy used to defame foreign authors who reveal the national relations in the USSR as they are in reality. The first part of Guboglo's assertion, when at the Brussels symposium he asked "which Soviet scholar, when and where," wrote on the reduction of non-Russian peoples' languages functions, fits the reality. But the second part of Guboglo's statement is totally divorced from reality (when he says that "Bruchis could not give a straightforward answer" to that remark) because he was given an explicit answer that in the writings of the most noted Soviet authors—such as the linguist Iu. Desheriev, the historian M. Kulichenko, the philosopher K. Khanazarov, the demographer V. Kozlov—can be discerned more than enough proof that the theme of the symposium truly reflects the trend stimulated by the authorities in the development of the autochthonous populations' languges in Soviet national republics. In connection with all this should be emphasized the need for a critical appreciation of the data of official censuses under the tsarist, as well as the Soviet, regimes. Thus, for example, V. Zelenchuk, head of the Ethnography and Arts History section of the Soviet Moldavia's Academy of Sciences, stated, in 1979, that "before the 19th century the specific weight of other nationalities was not considerable in

276

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

comparison with the autochthonous population of the region [Bes¬ sarabia—M. B.], being at the most 10%"; "in 1816-1817 Moldavians made up 47.5% of the population in Hotin County/'; "in 1818 36.9% in Bujac," "in 1858 51% in all of Bessarabia";38 but that in 1861 Moldavians constituted 92% of Kishinev County s population, in 1907 93.7%, and the 1897 census obviously reduced their numbers to 62.9%—a 30.8% diminution; the same census reduced the Moldavian population by 2.4% in Orhei County, by 5.2% in Belts County. . . . At the same time, the numbers of Russians and Ukrainians in rural localities was arbitrarily increased.39

"Thus," writes Zelenchuk, "in totalizing the 1897 census data a considerable proportion of the Moldavian population were listed as Russians and Ukrainians: 18,500 in the towns and ca. 70,000 in villages. . . ."40 Based on certain documents preserved in the archives of the USSR Academy of Sciences and on some data published before the 1917 revolution, Zelenchuk compiled Table 8.1. The systematic relative decrease of the autochthonous population over the whole course of the nineteenth century (78.2 percent in 1817, 58.2 percent in 1835, 54.9 percent in 1859, 52.1 percent in 1897) gives evidence of the demographic policy of the authorities oriented to the transformation of Bessarabia from a preponderently national territory into a multinational one. This orientation also found expression in the official data of the 1897 census, according to which the region's autochthonous population was 920,919, or 47.6 pecent of the total population. However, Zelenchuk's calculations, based on archive data and Russian publications from the beginning of the nineteenth century, show that, in regard to the autochthonous population as well as the Ukrainians and Russians, the official data of the 1897 census do not veridically reflect their specific weight in Bessarabia's population. In a work published in 1973, Zelenchuk presents the 1897 census data, (see Table 8.2) along with his calculations of 1979.42 Zelenchuk's calculations show that Bessarabia's autochthonous pop¬ ulation, though decreasing relatively in the whole course of the nineteenth century, continued to form toward the beginning of the twentieth century the absolute majority in the region (52.1 percent, and not 47.6 percent). These calculations also prove that the specific weight of Russians and Ukrainians in Bessarabia's population, notwith¬ standing its absolute and relative growth over the same period of

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278

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Table 8.2 1897 Census Data

Official

Calculated by Zelenchuk

Moldavians

920,919-47.6%

1,009,400-52.1%

Ukrainians

389,698-19.6%

330,600-17.0%

Russians

155,744- 8.0%

123,100- 6.4%

time, “was arbitrarily inflated" in the official census data (8.0 percent and 19.6 percent respectively, as against 6.4 percent and 17.0 percent). Both official data and Zelenchuk's calculations show that, over the period 1812-1897 in Bessarabia, a consistent absolute numerical in¬ crease took place not only of the autochthonous population, but also of Russians and Ukrainians. Thus, even according to the 1897 official census data, the absolute growth of Moldavian population in this period amounted to 143.9 percent (920,919 in 1897 as against 377,200 in 1817). According to Zelenchuk's calculations, in which he adds to the autochthonous population its members whom the official data number among Russians or Ukrainians, the growth is more considerable: 1,009,400 in 1897 as against 377,200 in 1817. But even Zelenchuk's calculations (and after he deducted the numbers of Moldavians, passed in official data as Russians and Ukrainians) the relative increase of Russians and Ukrainians, as well as of other nationalities, especially Jews, was incomparably greater than that of the autochthonous pop¬ ulation. The Ukrainians grew from 60,000 in 1817 to 330,600 in 1897; the Russians from 10,000 in 1817 to 123,100 in 1897; the Jews from 6,000 in 1817 to 228,200 in 1897. With all the absolute numerical growth of the autochthonous population over the above period of time, it remained the only one among the more important nationalities of the region whose specific weight in total population of Bessarabia decreased: 78.2 percent in 1817; 52.1 percent (according to Zelenchuks' calculations) in 1897. In other words, the relative decrease of the autochthonous population was 33.5 percent). A relevant characteristic of this demographic processes is that the extraordinary growth, both absolute and relative, of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish populations is explained by the policy of colonizing the region started in 1812, whereas the absolute increase of the autochthonous population is due to natural growth. Summing up the data quoted, we can clearly see the tendency to transform Bessarabia into a multinational province of the Russian

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

279

Empire, with the aim of an easier russification of the autochthonous population. The fact that in 1913 there was not published in Bessarabia a single book in the language of the autochthonous population and that no magazines or newspapers appeared in that language is an eloquent manifestation of the said tendency, which is mentioned also by some of Soviet Moldavia's authors.43 Soviet specialists write, for instance, that the newspaper Bassarabia, which (after decades of prohibition of any publication in the Bessarabian Moldavian language) made its appearance in Kishinev in 1906, was suppressed by the authorities after a short time, because it vented the problem of national autodetermination and of national language and culture.44 However, contrary to such assertions truly reflecting the region's realities after 1812, the Moldavian Soviet Encyclopedia reiterates the theses elaborated in the tsarist period45 (“The historic import of the development of the bourgeois relations and in Bessarabia's drawing into the market orbit of all Russia, thus accelerating the economic development of the province. . . . Bessarabia's joining to Russia contributes to the consolidation of friendship of the Moldavian, Russian and other peoples of the country" and modernizes them in the Soviet spirit.46) “The primordial importance of the historic act of 1812 is specifically determined by the fact that the peoples of Bessarabia have been drawn into Russia's revolutionary movement, led by the MarxistLeninist party."47 The authors of the Outlines of the History of the Communist Party of Moldavia go further in this respect: "The joining to Russia," they say, "by laying foundations for an acceleration of the province's development, of its economy and culture, has had enormous importance also for the ethnic future of the Moldavians. The following process of shaping a bourgeois Moldavian nation, of development of Moldavian writing and culture took place under the ever-growing influence of Slav peoples and of ever closer economic and spiritual links with them."48 The objective reality reflected by the term "Marxist-Leninist party" goes back to 1903. Soviet sources often quote Lenin's words that "bolshevism as a current of political thinking and a political party exists since 1903."49 That's why the guidance of the Marxist-Leninist party cannot be considered as possessing primordial importance in support of the thesis of a progressive character of the "historic act of 1812." Also as inconsistent must be viewed the assertion that "the joining to, Russia . . . has had enormous importance for the ethnic future of the Moldavians," that the joining has been followed by a "process of shaping a bourgeois Moldavian nation, of development of Moldavian

2SO

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

writing and culture. . . ." The historian N. Mohov and the philosopher A. Babii, whose obedience is in no way less than that of the authors of the Outline of the History of the Communist Party of Moldavia, write in a paper published under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the MSSR that Bessarabia's joining to Russia stopped the process of shaping a Moldavian bourgeois nation.50 Although this thesis too does not truly reflect the objective reality, it is in accord with the tsarist authorities' political objectives for the autochthonous population of the territory conquered in 1812. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, a bourgeois nation is a historical category pertaining to the capitalist period of society s development. According to the Romanian historians C. Giurescu and D. Giurescu, "capitalism begins to penetrate into the principalities during the latter half of the Phanariot period," i.e., in the eighteenth century.51 And the same authors, while mentioning, inter alia, that "rural technical installations activated by running water substantially multiplied in Romanian lands in the course of the 18th century," emphasize that such installations were in existence "on the Olt, Mure§, Some§, Piret, Prut, Dniester, Danube, etc."52 They also note that, in that period, "the towns' population increases in general; new towns are created." The Romanian authors mention (beside localities in Muntenia, western Moldavia, Transylvania, and the Banat) "Lipcani, Belts, Falesti—called also Chele-Arsa, Panzareni-Onitscani, Vadul Rascu, Tuzora, Grecenii, etc.—all of them in eastern Moldavia, between the Prut and the Dniester."53 Although the Phanariot period is, in general, negatively appreciated as "being politically an obvious regression," these historians emphasize "also certain positive aspects" of that period. Among these, they count the fact that "princes were changed from the one country to the other (e.g., Constantin Mavrocordat ruled six times in Wallachia and four times in Moldavia). "But these changes," say the Giurescus, "also had an advantage: they made it easy for the two countries to rally closer, prepared their union; it became ever more and more obvious that it was a matter of one and the same people, language, pattern of organization, and customs."54 Thus, according to Romanian historians, capitalist relations began to develop in Moldavia (including the territory between the Prut and the Dniester), Muntenia, and Transylvania in the second half of the eighteenth century, and, during the same period too, the consciousness of the national unity of Romanians wherever they were became consolidated. All these deny the thesis of the authors of the Outline . . . that "the process of shaping a Moldavian bourgeois nation"

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

281

developed after the 1812 events. Neither does their thesis that, after these events, "the development of Moldavian writing and culture took place under the ever-growing influence of Slav peoples" reflect ob¬ jective reality. The writing and culture of Moldavians in eastern Moldavia, called by the Russians after 1812 "Bessarabia" (although that name, before the annexation to the Russian Empire, designated only the Bugeac), were not, under the conquerors' rule, in a process of development, but in degradation. Thus, S. Aftenius—one of the editors of the Moldavian Soviet Encyclopaedia and of the Outline. ■ ■ .—wrote in 1971 that, in tsarist Russia, the masses of Bessarabia (Afteniuc uses the term "Moldavia"—M. B.) "fought for the abolition of national oppression, for the right to teach their children in the mother tongue, to use the native language in the judiciary and in other institutions."55 The writing of a native language not used in schools and institutions, in which no newspapers, journals, books, and textbooks are published, as well as the culture of a community speaking such a language, cannot but degenerate and gradually disappear. And if the writing and culture of Bessarabian Moldavians actually continued to develop, the cause of it is not the influence of Slav peoples but their indestructible ties, preserved even under Russian domination, with their national language, developing with no hindrance in western Moldavia, on the other side of the Prut. In this respect, most relevant is the following assertion by Alecu Russo, presented by the Moldavian Soviet Ency¬ clopaedia as a "classic of Moldavian literature":56 "A language has its foundations," he wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, "where the people lived more freely, where the language took roots in laws, in institutions, in history, in written monuments, in daily movement, in collective spirit, in its customs."57 Historians from the MSSR, as well as historians from other Soviet republics, criticize, on the one hand, the tsarist autocracy, while, on the other, they glorify Russia. Thus, for instance, S. Afteniuc asserts that, under the tsars' domination in Bessarabia, a policy of systematic denationalization of the autochthonous population had been actually promoted. But the same author maintains that, on the annexation to Russia in 1812, "the Moldavian working masses were received into the family of the country's [Russia's—M. B.] peoples."58 While being in flagrant contradiction to Lenin's definition, according to which tsarist Russia was "a prison of nations," this assertion by the MSSR historian, borrowed from the store of Bessarabia's tsarist russifiers, is in full accord with his thesis that, in 1812, "Russia freed the province from the Turkish yoke and joined it with the family of its peoples."59

282

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Adopted by the russifiers of Soviet Moldavia, this thesis became one of the dogmas of the republic's historiography, repeated again and again by its communist leaders. Thus, I. Bodiul, who for two decades had been first secretary of Moldavia's Communist party, wrote in 1978 that "the liberation in 1812 of the territory between the Dniester and the Prut . . . was the beginning of the renaissance of the Moldavian people, of its culture and existence."60 The halving of Moldavian territory in 1812 by the incorporation of Bessarabia into the Russian Empire continues to be represented by Soviet specialists as a natural consequence "of the Russian, Ukrain¬ ian and Moldavian peoples' friendship," "of the centuries-long de¬ velopment of Moldavia's political, socioeconomic and cultural ties with Russia."61 But Alecu Russo, for instance, wrote in the mid-nineteenth century that "Romanians tormented by the loss of Bessarabia," were imbued with "a political hate of the Moscals."62 And this appreciation of the tragic denouement of the 1806-1812 Russian-Turkish war for Moldavian territory was shared by writers of all ancestral territories of the Romanian people, including those of Bessarabia. On the other hand, however, in spite of the russification policy promoted by tsarism in Bessarabia in the whole course of domination, the close spiritual ties of the Bessarabian Moldavians with their brothers beyond the Prut never stopped. And "the development of Moldvian writing and culture" has taken place predominantly in the western part of Moldavia, and not in the Russian-dominated eastern part. G. Asachi, C. Negruzzi, V. Alecsandri, I. Creanga, M. Eminescu, M. Kogalniceanu, A. Russo, A. Dinici, B.-P. Hasdeu wrote and published their works in western Moldavia or in Muntenia and considered their creation an integral part of Romanian national literature. C. Stamati also looked upon his writings in this way although, after 1812, he left western Moldavia and settled in Bessarabia, occupying important posts in the Russian administration of the province, published his Original Compositions and Imitations in Ia§i. The overwhelming majority of the most talented men of culture of Bessarabia were conscious that they were Romanians, and that their writings belong to the Romanian people. Even the authors of certain works published in the Russian Empire did not conceal the fact that the language in which they wrote was Romanian. Thus, §tefan Margela entitles his work, published in 1827 in St. Petersburg, Gramatica ruseasca §z rumaneasca inchipuita de §tefan Margela. The Romanian national consciousness also finds its expression in the titles of the works of I. Doncev, published in Bessarabia. The Moldavian Soviet Encyclopedia does not mention these works' titles in

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation its articles on Margela and Doncev. that Doncev s works were

and literature

This is to be able to maintain

the first textbooks of

in Bessarabia,

283

Moldavian language

63 and that Margela "wrote a grammar

[1827] which, as he states in the foreword, should help Moldavians learn the Russian language, and Russians the

Moldavian language."64

Such mysteries abound in all articles of that encyclopedia dealing with Soviet Moldavia's autochthonous population's culture and national literature.65 A number of Soviet authors in the central cities and in national republics have specialized in the defamation of Western scholars and publicists who, in analyzing Soviet realities or in describing some of their aspects,

draw conclusions or disclose

facts invalidating theses

elaborated and slogans disseminated in the USSR. Lacking plausible arguments,

Soviet

specialists

use

examples

(often

imaginary)

from

such writings to accuse their authors of anticommunism, anti-Sovie¬ tism, bad faith, scholarly incompetence, etc., etc. Thus, in support of his assertion that "in the capitalist press, in literary works, on the radio and television, in scholarly research and in informative publi¬ cations the facts of the domestic and foreign policiese of the Soviet Union are distorted," V. Stati writes,

Dictionary

inter alia,

Larousse Illustrated

the

(1973 edition) states that Soviet Moldavia is "a federated

[!] republic formed in

1940." By the USSR constitution and that of

the Moldavian SSR, it is truly not a

federated

republic, but a member

of a federated state (the USSR). The "example" flaunted by Stati by the

enclosed

exclamation

mark

would

be

incomparably

less

grave

than his own "inadvertant" commentary: "As the whole world knows, the Moldavian SSR has existed . . . not since 1940, as 'stated' by the

Larousse Illustrated Dictionary,

but since more than half a century of

development on the road of socialism."66 Before analyzing this remark by Stati, a few words on the exclamation mark. want

By its intercalation in to

stress

not

so much

the text from

Larousse,

the bad

of the

faith

Stati seems to

compilers

of the

dictionary, but, rather, their complete "scholarly incompetence." Be¬ cause, "as the whole world knows," Soviet Moldavia is

not

a

federated

republic. But this exclamation mark boomerangs and hits the launcher. Because the adjective corresponds

to

the

federee

("Moldavie, republique federee de l'URSS")

Russian

adjective

soiuznaia,

"union,"

and

not

"federated." That this only is the true meaning of the French word

federee, in this context,

can be seen from the following formulations

in the same dictionary: "Bielorussie [Republique socialiste sovietique de] ou Russie Blanche, en russe Bielorusskaia S.S.R., une des quinze republiques

federes

de

l'URSS";67

"Georgie

(Republique

socialiste

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

284

federative sovietique de), en russe Grouzia ou Grouzinskaia

S.S.R.,

republique federee de l'URSS, englobant des republiques autonomes d'Abkhazie et d'Adjarie."68 By his remark,

Stati attempted to

demonstrate not only the in¬

competence of the dictionary's compilers, but also their anti-Sovietism, which since

made 1940

them (and

“state"

not

that

since

the

Moldavian

1924—“more

SSR

than

existed

half

a

merely

century

of

develoment on the road of socialism"). He displays his said appreciation by putting the word

states

between inverted commas. However, the

formula reproved by Stati has been reproduced by the compilers of the

verbatim

dictionary

from

most prestigious

USSR. Thus, we read in the second edition of the “The Moldavian SSR—one of the the

USSR.

.

.

union

16

formed [obrazovana]

.

on

publications

in—the

Big Soviet Encyclopedia:

republics, being part of

the

2nd

of

August

1940.

. . ,“69 So do the compilers of a Soviet geographic encyclopedia also use the same formula: “Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic—one of the

union

republics, being part of the USSR,

formed

on the 2nd August

1940 . . . .“70 The terms of

Encyyclopedia

Larousse

coincide, then, with those of the

Geographical Encyclopaedia

and of the

Big Soviet

published in the

USSR. Given this, how does it happen that V. Stati counts the

Larousse

among Western publications in which “the facts of the domestic and foreign policy of the Soviet Union are distorted?" As it follows from the above, text

Stati cannot be charged with

Larousse

of the

in

order

to

prove,

deliberately distorting the

at

any

price,

its

compilers'

incompetence. But in regard to the inverted commas, around the word

states,

he just fancied something.

it cannot be said that

The following

explains why. On the 2 August 1940, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR promulgated a law on the

formation

of the

Union

Moldavian

SSR,

and

the

first

article of that law is formulated in just those terms: “to form a Union

The letter and the spirit of that Big Soviet Encyclopedia and Geographical Encyclopedia.73 Therefore, the Larousse's

Socialist Soviet Moldavian Republic."71

law guided the authors and editors of the those

of

formula that law,

the is

in

as

full

accord with

formulated by

the

Supreme

Moscow,

has

Soviet's

law.

created serious

However, difficulties

for Soviet Moldavia's historiography, and not only the formulation of that law, but also the terms of the June 1940 Soviet ultimatum forcing Romania to retreat from Bessarabia. After an bank,

administrative-political

named

the

Moldavian

(MASSR) was shaped in

formation

Autonomous

October

1924,

on

the

Socialist

Dniester's

left

Soviet Republic

the basic watchword of its

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation authorities

and

of the

Bessarabian

communist

285

underground—orga¬

nized, inspired, and sustained by Moscow—had been the union of Bessarabia and the MASSR. Thus, in materials published by

Pravda

and connected with the creation of an autonomous Moldavian republic within

the

framework

of the

Ukraine,

it

was

said,

inter alia,

that

"Bessarabia must become an indissoluble part of the MASSR."73 And leaflets of the communist underground in 1918-1940

often

ended

with

the

words

Bessarabia in the period "Long

live

the

union

of

Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR!"74 However, in the text of the ultimatum of 26 June 1940, the MASSR is not even mentioned, and there are no terms like "the Moldavian people," "unification of the Moldavian nation," etc. Instead, the following is maintained in that ultimatum:

In 1918 Romania, profiting from Russia's military weakness, tore off by force a part of the Soviet Union's [Russia's] territory—Bessarabia, thus infringed upon the centuries-long unity of Bessarabia, inhabited mainly by Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.75

This first paragraph of the ultimatum, being the only one in which Moscow asserted its rights to Bessarabia, is never cited in the works of Soviet Moldavian authors. No wonder, if we take into account that this paragraph, by its multiple connotations and significances, does not leave a stone standing in many of their theses, especially in that of the

establishment of Soviet rule in Bessarabia in late 1917-early 1918. if it were true that Soviet rule was then established in

Because,

Bessarabia, those who composed the ultimatum's text would certainly invoke this proof of the

Soviet Union's

rights to Bessarabia and would

have no need to base their pretences on the "centuries-long unity of Bessarabia with the Ukrainian Soviet Republic."

Moreover, by pro¬

claiming in 1940 that Bessarabia "is inhabited mainly by Ukrainians," Moscow only repeated an argument of the Ukrainian Central Rada, which so maintained in 1917. A. Lazarev, one of the most fervent defenders of Moscow's policies in the "Bessarabian question," referred to this mystery of the Central Rada saying that the Rada considered "the majority of Bessarabia's inhabitants to be Ukrainians," because Ukrainian bourgeois "chau¬ vinists," viewing Moldavian lands as an "ancestral Ukrainian" territory, intended to extend the Great Ukraine's western boundaries up to the Prut, and even to the Eastern Carpathians."76 But the same Lazarev, who

seems

somehow

to

be

the

comment

on

only the

one first

who lines

in

Soviet

of

the

Moldavia ultimatum

dared

to

(without

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

286

reproducing them), sponsible

for

the

attempted

to

make

"inadvertence"

that

historians into a difficult position,

the

discredited Molotov re¬

forced

contemporary

Soviet

and not the Soviet government.

"It is regretable," says Lazarev, "that even in the note addressed by V. M. Molotov to the government of the Romanian kingdom on 26 June

1940,

Bessarabia

is

termed

a

territory,

inhabited

mainly

by

Ukrainians, but it in no way reflects the true state of affairs in regard to the national composition of the province's population."77 The way in which the first lines of the 26 June Soviet ultimatum is

formulated

Bessarabia, why,

in

spells

in

the

out

one way

text

of the

Moscow's or another, ultimatum,

initial into

intention

the

there

is,

Soviet on

the

to

incorporate

Ukraine. one

That's

hand,

no

mention of the Moldavian ASSR, and, on the other, the "centurieslong unity of Bessarabia and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic" is invoked. But, after the retreat of Romanian troops (and administration) from the

territory between

northern

part

the

Dniester

of Bukovina)

Bessarabia ceased to be

and

its

and

Prut

(as

occupation

well

by

as

the

from

the

Red

Army,

for the USSR a problem of foreign

policy

and became a problem of domestic policy. In other words, the definition of its status within the USSR's framework of newly acquired territories went past the Soviet state's foreign policy bodies' (who prepared the text of the ultimatum) definitions. It was provided for the legislative bodies' reference. The latter followed, of course, when preparing the corresponding law—the rules established by Stalin. According to these rules, the state formation of an autochthonous Soviet population numbering more than a million and whose territory borders on a foreign country should be that of a

Union

republic, not

of an autonomous one.78 The communique by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (CPC-USSR) and by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party of the Bolsheviks (CC AUCPJb]) published in

Pravda

on 11 July 1940, was conceived on the basis of

these rules.

Following the liberation of Bessarabia from occupation by Romanian boyars and its joining with the Soviet Union, the Moldavian population in the USSR increased considerably and now numbers approximately two million. In connection with this circumstances, the Council of Peoples Commissars [CPC] of the MASSR and the Moldavian Regional Committee of the Ukrainian CP[b] submitted to the CPC USSR and CC AUCP[b] a suggestion regarding the unification of Bessarabia's Moldavian population with the Moldavian population of the Autonomous Moldavian Republic, and the formation of a Union Moldavian Soviet

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

287

Socialist Republic. The CPC USSR and CC AU CP[b] supported the Moldavian organizations' request and decided to submit a respective proposal to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.79

The communique (quoted here in its entirety) not only confirms all the above-said, but also has other significance of great importance to the clarification of Soviet position in the "Bessarabian question" and of theses elaborated in its support. In the first place, there is the thesis saying that, by the adoption of the law of 2 August 1940, "the Supreme Soviet of the USSR unanimously satisfied the request of the Moldavian people."80 On the occupation of Bessarabia by Soviet troops, the CC of the Ukrainian CP created there, in

the spirit

of the ultimatum of 28 June,

volost committees," Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR "created provisional county, town and volost executive committees."81

"nine party county committees, as well as town and and the

The

entire

staff of the

party

committees

and

the

overwhelming

majority of the executive committees' officials were part of the "over five thousand individuals then sent to Bessarabia from the Ukraine and RSFSR."82 These arbitrarily created bodies were subordinate to the

Moldavian regional committee of the

Ukrainian CP(b) and the

CPC of the MASSR, which were not "Moldavian organizations" in the sense that they were not elected and empowered by Bessarabia's autochthonous population to present to the USSR's superior bodies a motion regarding the formation of the said motion

was,

bodies themselves,

Union

Moldavian SSR. Moreover,

in all probability, initiated by those superior

and

not by "Moldavian

organizations."

Such

a

conclusion may be drawn from the fact that the 10 July communique (published

on

11

July)

speaks

of

the

"unification

of

Bessarabia's

Moldavian population with the Moldavian population of the Moldavian Autonomous Republic." If the formulations of that communique were conceived by "Moldavian organizations," we would have to expect to find in it the usual slogan of Soviet propaganda

after the

1924

creation of the autonomous republic, speaking of "Bessarabia's union with the MASSR." Here lies the reason why the communique's formula ("Unification of Bessarabia's Moldavian population with the Moldavian population of the Autonomous Republic") suggests that its text was edited by functionaries of the superior legislative bodies of the USSR, and not by those of the legislative bodies of "Moldavian organizations." As a matter of fact, the formula of the 10 July communique is one of compromise, meant to somehow correct the

26 June ultimatum,

which maintained that Bessarabia is "populated mainly by Ukrainians.

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

288

i.e., conform to the letter and spirit of the ultimatum that Bessarabia should become part of the Ukraine. That's the reason that Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Ukrainian CP's CC, came to Kishinev on 28 June.83 If the compromise formula were elaborated by the legislative bodies

of

"Moldavian

organizations,"

they

would

know

that

its

objective was to pave the way for the promulgation of the 2 August 1940 law as it was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. But, in the whole course of the twenty-three days from the pub¬ lication of the

10 July communique until the 2 August law, neither

the "Moldavian organizations" nor the factors closest to the USSR's highest

instances

had

the

slightest

idea

of

the

true

intent

compromise formula. On the very day of the publication in

of

the

Pravda

of the communique the newspaper printed a leader entitled "Long Live the United and Free Moldavian People,"

and mentioned in it

that "the area of the Union Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic will be over 50 thousand km2, and its population over 3,700," that the future Moldavian SSR would, thus, be a state with a bigger territory than some European states, "like the Netherlands or Switzerland."84 In other words, and

free

Pravda

Moldavian

considered, on 11 July 1940, that the "united

people's"

Union

republic

would

comprise

the

entire territory of Bessarabia and of the autonomous republic, together with their whole populations. For three weeks,

Pravda

reported that Bessarabia's unification with

the autonomous republic "is being supported unanimously" by the working people,

including

the

inhabitants

ultimately were incorporated into

the

of those

Ukraine.

counties

For instance,

which on

12

July 1940, the newspaper wrote that the working people of Ackerman (Cetatea Alba) unanimously adopted, in connection with the forth¬ coming creation

of the

Union

republic,

a

resolution

that promised

"to transform their republic into a prosperous and powerful republic within the the

law

Soviet Union."85

of

2

August

has

On

been

3

August

1940,

promulgated,

the next day after

Pravda

published

an

article by S. Zelenchuk, "The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic." Zelenchuk, regional

who

signed

committee

of

the the

article

as

Ukrainian

secretary CP,

wrote:

of

the

"The

Moldavian republic

is

composed, on the one hand, of the Moldavian ASSR, which has been transformed,

under the leadership

of the

Communist

party

and

in

the course of Soviet rule, into a prosperous country, and on the other hand, of Bessarabia—a poor, destitute province, which for 22 years was under the yoke of capitalist slavery."86 It follows that, up to the last minute, even Zelenchuk, a member of the

Bureau

of the

Moldavian Regional

who was

Committee of

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

2 89

the Ukrainian CP and the second secretary of that committee, knew

Union

nothing about the intent that, with the creation of the

MSSR,

Bessarabia would be dismembered and that the autonomous republic would be liquidated

in fact.

This is one more proof that the communique

had been concocted by USSR supreme bodies, without the knowledge of the "Moldavian organizations." To extricate themselves from the difficulties created by Moscow's juggling

in

compiling

the

above-scrutinized

acts,

Soviet

Moldavia's

historians could find one way only: the well-trodden way of mysti¬ fication.

This

is

the reason

why the

theses elaborated by them

to

justify Moscow's position in mid-1940 (as well as its position in the Bessarabian question in general) remains vulnerable, despite of their continuing efforts to perfect them. Thus, in 1968, the authors of the

Outlines . . .

second edition of the

wrote as follows:

At the 7th session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, at the beginning of August 1940, a delegation of working people from Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR assisted. The delegation expressed to the Com¬ munist party and to the Soviet government the sincere gratitude of the Moldavian people for the liberation of Bessarabia and voiced the working people's desiderata regarding the formation of a Union Moldavian republic.87

In the third edition, in

1981,

of that work have been added the

empowered ("assisted an empowered delegation of working people") and Central Committee ("expressed to the Central Committee

words

of the Communist party. . . ."88 The second addition is not substantial.89 The

first,

on

scrutinized

the

below,

formulation of the

contrary,

has

a

special

because

the

objective

importance reality,

and

distorted

will

be

by

the

1968 edition, has been further distorted by that

addition. Although the 2 August 1940 law's article by which the Supreme Soviet proclaimed the

formation of a Union Moldavian Outline. . . , the republic's

reproduced faithfully in the

as in the instance of the first lines of the 26 June to

construe

it

in

every

'formation,'" wrote A.

possible

Lazarev in

way. 1974,

"It

SSR has been historians try,

1940 ultimatum,

appears

that

the

term

"does not reflect precisely

the process which took place. It would be more correct to say that after June 1940 the task was to transform the Moldavian ASSR into a Union republic."90 And the authors of certain articles in a collection edited by

the same Lazarev and entitled "The Successes of Soviet

Moldavia and the Myths of Anticommunism" write in 1976, this time

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

290

the working

without any reserve whatever: “Satisfying the wishes of

people of all Moldavia, USSR transformed on

the 7th session of the Supreme Soviet of the 2 August

1940

the Moldavian ASSR into the

in which has been also included the greater part of the territory on the Dniester's right bank [Pravobereja]."91 "At the request of the masses of all Moldavia the Autonomous Moldavian SSR was transformed in August 1940 into the Union Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic"92 “The transformation of the MASSR into the Union Union Moldavian SSR,

Moldavian SSR constituted the concluding stage of the historic process of the creation and consolidation of the Moldavian people's Soviet statehood."93 All

the above quotations prove that

the

Soviet authors,

in

their

efforts to justify Moscow's policies in the Bessarabian question and to combat and reprove those whom they accuse of falsifying those policies,

are

compelled

to

"adjust"

now

and

again

terms

used

in

certain documents of capital importance. Not only the term "trans¬ formed"

("transformation"),

but

also

other

formulae

in

those

quo¬

tations, do not truthfully reflect the factors that initiated the law of the 2 August 1940, or the letter and spirit of that law, or the exact territorial delimitation established by it. An analysis of these formulae shows

that

they

have

been

concocted

possible, by their implications,

in

such

a

way

as

documents of mid-1940 in the spirit of the thesis that the Moldaviana republic (created in October 1924) had been on 2 August 1940 into a the latter "had

also

Union

to

make

the interpretation of the events and

autonomous transformed

republic. Thus, by specifying that in

been included the greater part of the territory

on the right bank of the

Dniester," meaning Bessarabia,

it implies

that the territory on the Dniester's left bank (meaning the autonomous republic) had been included in its entirety into the Union republic. Just that is why the use of the word "also" one thing only, namely

cannot be considered a simple inadvertence.

Its appearance in

context shows that the authors of the article were

aware

this

of the ambiguity

they put on their assertion. The quotations are anchored not only in the past, but also in the present. It means that the assertions have been formulated in a way that

enables

elaborated

them

by

to

Soviet

be

used

also

specialists

in

as

an

attestation

support

of

the

the

theses

national

policy

pursued by Moscow in Soviet Moldavia in our days.

to

The formulae

working people of all Moldavia," "at the masses of all Moldavia" are slightly different in form

"to satisfy the wishes of the request of the

and identical in content. But they do not reflect the letter and spirit either of the ultimatum of 26 June 1940 (which claimed that Bessarabia

291

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

"is inhabited mostly by Ukrainians" and did not contain such terms as "Moldavia," "Moldavians"), or of the communique of 10 July 1940 (which spoke of the "Moldavian autochthonous population"), or of the law of August 1940 in whose preamble it is said: "Satisfying the wishes of the working people of Bessarabia and the working people of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic regarding the unification of Bessarabia's Moldavian population and the Moldavian population of the MASSR."94 The text of the preamble, despite the law

"by the

Soviet principle of free

development of nationalities,"

represents by its significations an attempt to proceed from the obvious mystifications in texts of the ultimatum and the communique to the veiled

mystification

in

the

terms

of the

law.95

For,

up

to

the

last

moment, as has been shown above, it was mentioned in all materials published in the Soviet press about the unification of Bessarabia and the

autonomous

republic

into

a

single

political

and

administrative

formation, having the status of a Union republic within the framework of

the

USSR,

population

and

and not of the unification of Bessarabia's Moldavian the Moldavian population of the MASSR.

Some authors of the collection reproduced from the preamble of the law of 2 August 1940 use the terminological collocation "working people" itself,

(the use

the

of which

historical

truth);

does

not render,

others

used

even in

its

the law's text

synonym

("masses").

Moreover, they distorted the text of the law not only by the specification of all Moldavia, but by omitting the term "Moldavian population," which appears twice in that text.

By maintaining that the Supreme

Soviet was guided by the wishes ("requests") of the "working people

all

("masses") of

Moldavia," the said Soviet authors have distorted

the law's text, because

all

Moldavia in their assertion is not synonymous

with Bessarabia or the AMSSR, but with Soviet Moldavia formed by the law of 2 August 1940, i.e., the present-day Soviet Moldavia. To this substitution of notions, by which the authors sought to "retouch," in

the

spirit

documents of

of

contemporary

Soviet

historiography's

the formation of the Union republic,

theses,

the

is added the omission

in the enunciations we saw of the term "Moldavian population.

This

omission is by no means accidental. It reflects the systematic russi¬ fication trends that found their expression, for example, in the con¬ stitutional formula saying that "the people of the Moldavian (and

not

"the

Moldavian

people")

adopted

and

SSR'

promulgated

the

republic's constitution.96 The second, 1968, edition of the

Outline . . .

says that "in numerous

meetings of working people of liberated Bessarabia and the MASSR, resolutions on the formation of a Moldavian SSR within the framework

292

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

of the USSR have been adopted."97 But the third, 1981, edition of this work maintains, in the spirit of the above-examined "retouchings" and "specifyings," that merely "in most territories of Bessarabia and the MASSR ... in numerous meetings, working people inhabiting those lands have adopted resolutions requesting the formation of a Union Moldavian SSR within the framework of the USSR."98 In the entire period from late June 1940 to early August 1940, such resolutions were, as shown above, adopted in the whole territory of Bessarabia and of the MASSR, and not merely in the most of these territories. As a most relevant example of the metamorphoses under¬ gone by Soviet Moldavian historiography's interpretations not only of the mid-1940 events but also of the people who, in one way or another, took part in those events, but also of the people who, in one way or another, took part in those events, it can serve the socalled delegation of working people of Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR, rechristened by the editors of the 1981 version of the Outline . . . the "empowered delegation." But what contemporary Soviet Moldavian historiography defines as "delegation" or the more so, "empowered delegation," is only a concoction generated by the efforts to fabricate at all costs documentary material that would justify Moscow's position in the Bessarabian question. As shown by docu¬ ments, no such delegation had existed in reality. Thus, the official information on the joint meeting on 2 August 1940 of the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities says that following the speeches by deputies (of the Supreme Soviet) the chairman, N. Shvernik, announced that "a delegation, come on behalf of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, asks for the floor to greet the Supreme Soviet of the USSR."99 The information further says: "The delegation's members—working people representatives from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina—entered.”100 This delegation was designated at the time by the Soviet press as "a delegation from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina," or "Bessarabia's and Northern Bukovina's del¬ egates," or "working people representatives from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina," or "representatives of Bessarabia's and Northern Bukovinas peoples," and never as "a delegation from Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR," or "a delegatioan of the working people of Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR," or, even more, "an empowered delegation of the working people of Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR."101 There were also in Moscow, on the occasion of the Supreme Soviet session, delegations from the Baltic countries. Not to consider the essence of those delegations composition and whether their members

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

2 93

really were elected representatives of the respective peoples, the fact should be emphasized that, in no written material and in no official information on their arrival in Moscow and participation in the session, were they qualified as a delegation from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, but each of them separately, as the delegation of its own republic or as the empowered delegation of that republic.102 The fact that the "delegation of working people of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina" was admitted to greet the Supreme Soviet of the USSR after the Soviet's deputies L. Korniets (representing the Ukrainian SSR) and T. Konstantinov (representing the Moldavian ASSR) proposed the dismemberment of Bessarabia, as well as of the MASSR—i.e., after the dismemberment was decided by Moscow—proves that the delegation neither took part in the debate on promulgating the law forming the Union Moldavian SSR nor voted for that law. The empowered delegates of the Moldavian ASSR (the USSR's Supreme Soviet deputies R Borodin, T. Konstantinov, R Brovco, and others) were not members of the "delegatioan of working people of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina," the same as the empowered delegates of the Ukrainian SSR (USSR's Supreme Soviet deputies N. Khrushchev, L. Korniets, K. Studinski, and others). Moreover, if there really were an "empowered delegation of working people of Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR" or "a delegation of Bessarabia's and Northern Bukovina's peoples," we should conclude that the Supreme Soviet of the USSR promulgated the law of 2 August 1940 contrary to the Bessarabians' will. Because the sole Bessarabian representative in this delegation who was permitted to greet the Supreme Soviet was Z. Craciunescu, an elementary school teacher from Orhei. She delcared, inter alia: "In sending us, the lucky ones, to Moscow Bessarabia's working people asked us to tell you that we all, as one, have but one wish: a possibly early brotherly reunion with the Moldavian people. We request the Supreme Soviet, in the name of Bessarabia's people, to form a Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic."103 The "negligence" of Soviet bodies who at times edited primary documents before and immediately after the annexation of Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina caused serious difficulties to Soviet authors who refer in their writings to the events of mid-1940 or analyze their essence. Their efforts to represent in a favorable light Moscow's position in the Bessarabian question generate interpretations that not only collide head-on, but also diverge from historic truth. This is confirmed by innumerable examples in Soviet sources. Here follow some.

2 94

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In 1972 K. Iliashenko, at the time chairman of the Moldavian SSR's Supreme Soviet, wrote: "After the liberation of Bessarabia in June 1940 the working people of the Moldavian ASSR and of the reunited [vossoedinennogo] province unanimously expressed their wish that a Union Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic be formed within the framework of the USSR."104 In 1976, in the first volume of the History of the Foreign Policy of the USSR edited by A. Gromyko and B. Ponomarev, it was asserted that "liberated Bessarabia reunited [vossoedinilas'J with Soviet Moldavia, which on 2 August 1940 was proclaimed the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic."105 In 1983 K. Stratievschi, head of the chair of the party's history at the Kishinev Polytechnic Institute, in his own version's foreword, wrote: "In 1940, following the liberation of Bessarabia from its occupation by the Romanian bourgeoisie and landowners and its reunion with the mother country, the autonomous republic was trans¬ formed into the Union Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic."106 The same year, 1983, in its leading article on the day of 2 August 1940, Sovetskaia Moldavia relates, on the one hand, that the school¬ teacher from Orhei, Z. Craciunescu, "thanked the Communist party in the name of all the Moldavian people and its delegation," and, on the other hand, reproduces from her speech at the USSR Supreme Soviet session the following passage:

We request the Supreme Soviet to form a Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic. In the name of millions of liberated working people we assure you, comrade deputies, that we shall quickly learn to live in Soviet way and to work in a stakhanovite way,

and the newspaper concludes: "The session satisfied this require¬ ment."107 In 1985 V. Craciunescu-Remenko tells the correspondent of the Literatura §z arta weekly:

One evening, mother came late from work and told us with joy that the toilers of Orhei County elected her as a delegate to the session of the country's Supreme Soviet. She said: "The day after tomorrow, I'm going to Kishinev, and from there, together with all delegates from Bessarabia—to Moscow. . . ." On the 2 August, mother spoke at the session on behalf of the Bessarabian delegation.108

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

2 95

In 1986, the authors of a History of the International Relations and Foreign Policy of the USSR, published under the auspices of the Moscow Institute of International Relations, “adjusted" the law of 2 August 1940 as follows: The 7th session of the USSR Supreme Soviet promulgated on 2 August 1940 a law on the formation of a Moldavian SSR incorporating the Moldavian ASSR and those counties of Bessarabia in which the Moldavian population formed a majority.109

We saw above that theses developed on the basis of events of crucial importance in Soviet Moldavia's history and adapted by that republic's scholars to Moscow's position on the Bessarabian question do not truthfully reflect the objective reality. Moscow's national policy, and especially in respect of Soviet people's languages, also generate theses not reflecting the true state of affairs in non-Russian arepublics of the USSR. The fate of a mother tongue has been compared by a Western researcher to a barometer defining the very growth or decline of the idea of nation.110 The systematic strengthening in the USSR of the Russian language's status and the gradual weakening of the nonRussian languages' status leads, on the one hand, to the growth of the idea of a Russian nation, and, on the other, to the decline of the idea of non-Russian nations. The authorities' goal in this is to prepare the ground for the acceleration, as far as possible, of an ethnic-linguistic transformation of non-Russian nations, to ultimately bring about their fusion into one nation—the Russian nation, having one language: Russian. In order to somehow draw a veil over the harmful consequences of these policies to the normal development of national languages, which had already ceased to be the principal means of communication for the overwhelming majority of non-Russian peoples, the proponents of Moscow's national policy continue to profusely propound the stereo¬ typed thesis on the flourishing of national languages in the USSR, although the Russian language gradually dislodges, at a relatively rapid albeit uneven pace, all the languages of non-Russian Soviet peoples from social functions vital for their existence as developed and viable literary languages. The yearners after this thesis invoke its support not only the use of non-Russian peoples' languages in teaching, in governmental and public organizations, in the press and science, but especially the data of Soviet censuses, according to which the overwhelming majority of

296

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

the autochthonous population of each Union republic declares their mother tongue the language of the people whose name the republic bears. These arguments in support of the thesis on the flourishing of non-Russian Soviet peoples' languages has been examined in One Step Back . . . and in other works, including Nations—Nationalities— People.m Some of these arguments appear also, as mentioned above, in the works of certain Western authors as a would-be proof that, for instance, in Soviet Moldavia, "The Moldavian national language was not at all threatened with extinction. An overwhelming majority of Moldavians still declared Moldavian to be their native tongue." But Soviet census data cannot serve as trustworthy sources from which categorical conclusions can be drawn. The same is true about such incontestable facts as the maintenance of a "bilingual educational system in each of the Union republics" and the publication of "books and periodicals in at least two languages in each non-Russian republic." They do not suffice to draw the conclusion that "the Soviet government is helping to perpetuate linguistic diversity." By stimulating migrations from one republic to another, nationally mixed marriages, extension of the Russian languages social functions in non-Russian national republics—in a word, by permanent inter¬ nationalization of the latter—the Soviet government does not help to perpetuate, but gradually to obliterate linguistic diversity. To a greater or less extent, and at a quicker or slower pace, this phenomenon proves to be a trend in all non-Russian national republics. The much inferior quality of training in national (non-Russian) language-medium schools as compared with Russian-medium schools, the status of Russian as the main subject of study in national-languagemedium schools, etc., have been brought forward by me repeatedly.112 Regarding "publication of books and periodicals," e.g., in Soviet Moldavia, a Western author, going on the data in Soviet statistics, concluded, as it has been mentioned, that "the Soviet government is helping to perpetuate linguistic diversity." In this connection, the following assertion should be cited: "No matter what justification is invoked or attempts be made to put the blame on others, the fact remains a fact: from the first issue in the new format in 1977, and up to its current issue, the circulation of the weekly Literatura §z arta fell to less than half."113 Gheorghe Malaraciuc, the author of this statement, emphasizes that the circulation of the magazines Nistru and Kodry of the Soviet Moldavian Writers' Union, have also considerably fallen in the course of years.

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

297

The fact that the circulation of the Russian-language magazine Kodry has fallen cannot serve as a proof that processes leading to a diminution of social functions of the Russian language are going on in the republic—and not only because a provincial review like Kodry cannot compete with literary magazines published in important cultural centers of the USSR and distributed in all non-Russian Soviet republics, Soviet Moldavia included. Being, as a matter of fact, the official language of party and governmental institutions of Soviet Moldavia, the Russian language steadily enlarges its social function, following Moscow s denationalization policies in all non-Russian Soviet republics under the slogan of their "internationalization." As to the, one might say, catastrophic decrease over the decades in the circulation of the leading press organs of the Moldavian Writers' Union in the national language of the republic's autochthonous population, it is a clear indication of processes leading to a reduction of that language's social functions. Trying to explain the reduction in the circulation of Literatura §i arta by the low quality of its contents, Malarciuc says: "No matter how much the editorial staff complains of village libraries, schools, district authorities, etc., and how they should ask for assistance from everywhere and from everyone, there is but one solution: to improve the contents of the weekly."114 However, this explanation, albeit very convenient for an obedient proponent of CPSU's policies in the field of literature and art, does not reflect the true state of affairs. The main cause of the circulation decrease of Literatura §z arta, as well as of Nistrul, is by no means that suggested by Malarciuc. Following the events of mid-1940, the proponents of Moscow's national policy,—the so-called §anti§ti, i.e., Moldavians from the Dniester's left (Ukrainian) bank, whose representatives held key po¬ sitions in scientific and cultural institutions, took steps to impose the trans-Dniester Moldavians' dialect, interspersed with ukrainianisms and russianisms, as the literary language of the autochthonous pop¬ ulation of the Union republic formed by the law of 2 August. A first step in that direction was the replacement, also in Bessarabian counties of the republic, of the Latin by the Cyrillic alphabet. The war interrupted this process. In the period 1942-1944, the Bessarabian writers E. Bucov, D. Deleanu, B. Istru, and others col¬ laborated with Moscow radio and the newspaper Moldova socialista, which began its appearance in Moscow in late 1942. Although they made efforts to avoid certain neologisms and to use instead words accessible to uneducated readers and listeners, their language continued to be Romanian.115 In the postwar years, after coming back to Kishinev,

2 98

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

the §anti§ti launched a defamation campaign against Bessarabian people of culture who defended the literary languge from the attempts to transform it into a Moldavian-Russian-Ukrainian jargon. But, in the 1950s, the §anti§ti suffered a total defeat. In the republic, the publication of works of classics in the national literature of Bessarabian, Western Moldavian, and Bukovinian origin started. These were the beginnings of a process of identification of the Soviet Moldavian autochthonous population's idiom in its literary with the national language of the Romanian people.116 During the following years, this process grew and resulted in a total identification with the Romanian language. The "one step back" in the title of the book One Step Back, Two Steps Forward reflects this process of identification going on in Soviet Moldavia in contradiction to Moscow's policies toward the national languages of non-Russian Soviet peoples. Being compelled by reasons of foreign and domestic policy to close their eyes to identifying the literary form of the population's idiom with the Romanian language, Soviet authorities intensified, at the same time, the "internationali¬ zation" of the republic and launched a parallel process. It was a process of uninterrupted growth and deepening of the cleavage between the language spoken by the mass of the population and the literary language used by writers, literary specialists, linguists, and publicists. The growing transformation of the idiom in its form spoken by the masses into a Russian-Moldavian jargon found its expression in the second part of the above-mentioned book's title because this trans¬ formation has led, and inevitably continues to lead, to narrowing of the use in Soviet Moldavia of this idiom's literary form. No wonder that political and administrative bodies are being requested (as a result of works published by Malarciuc in Literaturnaia gazeta) to further the spreading of the main Moldavian Writers Union's publi¬ cations, whose circulation drops steadily. Soviet authorities, inspired by Moscow's political objectives, keep on maintaining national institutions and publications in non-Russian republics, and, in certain cases, even to broaden and somehow to multiply them; but, at the same time, they take care to strengthen and expand the influence of the Russian language and culture at the expense of national languages and cultures. In this connection, the fact is worth emphasizing, and in Soviet Moldavia, as in the over¬ whelming majority of other non-Russian Soviet republics, worthy publications remain stored in libraries and warehouses until eventually being offered at reduced prices. Iu. Desheriev, one of the proponents of the CPSU's language policy, propounded a thesis that languages and their social functions cannot

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

299

reach the same level of development.11' Although Desheriev and other proponents of this policy systematically emphasize that there is a flourishing of non-Russian peoples' languages, the above proves that Soviet specialists prepare the ground for adopting, in a more or less distant future, a new formula: namely, that the overwhelming majority of non-Russian national languages ceased to constitute the main means of communication of the respective peoples and ceded this vital function to the Russian language. M. Guboglo maintained in 1984 at Brussels, and reiterated in 1985, in an article published in Sovetskaia etnografia that the national languages of autochthonous peoples of non-Russian Union and au¬ tonomous republics keep enlarging their social functions. But the same Guboglo wrote twelve years ago, based on the 1970 census, that, in the development process of bilingualism, a cardinal role "is to be attributed to the large-scale spreading among non-Russian peoples of the Russian language and expanding of its social functions."118 Another Soviet demographer, basing his ideas on materials from the same 1970 census, and mentioning that 13 million members of the non-Russian populations have named Russian as their native language and 41.9 million more have declared it to be their second and fluently (svobodno) mastered, language, adds the following: "But, in practice, many more persons of different nations and nationalities in the USSR use it in various fields of activity [in sociopolitical life, in production, in family, in the field of culture]."119 These assertions not only show that the Russian language broadens its social functions at the expense of non-Russian languages in the USSR, but also prove that the census data, and those of Soviet statistics in general, cannot be sources for such conclusions as: In Moldavia, urbanization has not generally resulted in the substitution of Russian for Moldavian as the language Moldavians define as their native one. . . . Russian linguistic and cultural hegemony seems to be in decline rather than ascendancy in Moldavia.120

However, neither the census data—according to which the over¬ whelming majority of indigenous population in Union republics declare their national languages to be their mother tongue—suffice to draw conclusions such as those cited above. Soviet demographer N. Kozlov wrote that, in non-Russian republics, "language becomes a national affiliation symbol, a support of social advancement, and as such is frequently declared as the native language even when people mastering it are able, basically, to use another

300

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

language, especially the language of international communication (mezhnationalnogo obshchenia).”121 But there are also other reasons for the overwhelming majority of the republic's autochthonous populations to declare their national languages to be their mother tongues. The main reason is that "internationalization” stimulated by the authorities of Soviet republics generates ethnolinguistic transformations in ever¬ growing masses of non-Russian peoples. Those masses use the Russian language as their main means of communication not only in their professional and public activity, but often also in the family. Although many persons belonging to this category know their national languages only in their spoken, russianism-interspersed form, they preserve ties with their less denationalized relatives and keep declaring in censuses their own languages as their mother tongues. Although aware that such declarations do not truly reflect the objective reality, the pro¬ ponents of CPSU national policy use them as a proof of the truthfulness of its slogans on the flourishing of the non-Russian languages and cultures. But, as already mentioned, they simultaneously elaborate theses to be used when Moscow considers the time suitable to switch from "internationalization” of non-Russian national republics to their transformation into the country's ordinary administrative territories. With a view to such an eventuality, the store of the proponents of the CPSU language policy has been long since replenished with theses like the following: "The languages of the . . . peoples have equal rights but not equal possibilities to serve different fields of human activity. . . . An objective trend toward ever deeper differentiation of the national languages according to the extent of their sphere of application and toward the deepness of their use in various fields of activity is crystallizing";122 or "The social functions of a language change in direct dependence upon social changes.”123 "In regard to the broadening of the social functions of those languages, one cannot speak of leveling. One must consider the vital necessities of each people, . . . the right of every people to use its mother tongue within the limits of its vital interests . . . .”124 "A native language is the language a person or a collective [group] uses best and more actively in all circumstances of life, the language in which, especially—and this is most significant—they most [often] and most easily express their thoughts, i.e., the language in which they usually think."125 K. Khanazarov, from whom comes the first of the above statements, also formulated the thesis that "in conditions of socialism, take place profound and many-sided processes of 'sifting' (proseivania) of lan¬ guages on the basis of the social practices, of selection and promotion

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

301

of national languages whose use allows a rational organization of education."126 The above apply to not only the languages of USSR's less numerous nationalities, as K. Khanazarov and all other proponents of the CPSU's national policy try to assure us every now and then. Desheriev is one of the most fervent proponents of this policy. But those languages, as the words preceding the quoted passage show, are the languages of USSR Union republics' autochthonous peoples. The above-cited formula, suggested for a definition of a native language, belongs to the Soviet scholar V. Avronin. Should this formula be applied to the 1979 census, its result would be that the data of that census—in this respect—are by far exaggerated, that, in reality, the percentage of the non-Russian Union and autonomous republics' populations for whom their national languages are still their mother tongues, is much less than that indicated in the latest Soviet census. One of the phenomena generated by Soviet realities examined by us was the vertiginous circulation decline of the Soviet Moldavia's Writers Union publications in the national language and, in general, the storing in libraries and warehouses of worthwhile editions in the language of that republic's autochthonous population. A linguist from Kishinev, M. Gabinschi, wrote in an article published in 1972 that, in the Dniester's left-bank districts of Soviet Moldavia, "the prestige of the Russian language is much greater than that of the Moldavian language."12. This state of affairs is characteristic not only of the leftbank districts of the Dniester, but also those of the right, Bessarabian, bank, i.e., of the whole of Soviet Moldavia. A confirmation of this can be found in a work by Guboglo on the development of bilingualism in the Moldavian SSR. While emphasizing that "the Gagauz, Bul¬ garians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Tatars, and Poles living in Moldavia can educate their children as well in the Russian language as in Moldavian," Guboglo states that "starting from the second half of the school year 1960/61, schools of the republic's southern districts switched to teaching in Russian."128 Trying to explain this phenomenon, Gubuglo alleges that, for example, parents insistently requested that the teaching languge in schools be Russian, and not Gagauz."129 Without examining here additional causes of this phenomenon, it can be said also that in Soviet Moldavia's Bessarabian districts (the "southern districts of the republic") the prestige of the Russian language is incomparably greater than that of the Moldavian language. In another work, published in 1984, the same Guboglo, while declaring, in tune with Soviet slogans, that "the development of social functions of a language at the expense of another is inadmissible in

302

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

socialist conditions," and that a language of intranational commu¬ nication develops naturally, without compulsion," the development of the language of intranational communication occurs in the conditions of further development of national languages in accord with their speakers' needs."130 The underlined words are, as already mentioned, a formula meant to prepare the ground in view of an eventual switch, in the more or less near future, from the slogan of the development and flourishing of non-Russian peoples' languages to unveiling the truth that they have ceased to be the main means of communication. What this clarification by Guboglo actually means is shown by his following assertions, based on census data, on the one hand, and on certain ethnosociological enquiries, on the other. They appear in a 1984 work by Guboglo, in which he says:

Ethnosociological research has revealed that there are conscious and deep tendencies among Uzbeks to educate their children in Russian: this was expressed by 28.6% of Uzbek city dwellers and by each fifth villager of Uzbek nationality. The trend of extension of the Russian language's functions in the villages and towns of autonomous republics is a phenomenon of great prospects and it appears that one can expect a deepening of this process in the near future. In the Kabardin-Balker ASSR, even in the villages, the main mass of Kabardins and Balkars (ca. 90%) rather read newspapers and magazines in Russians or [rarely] in two languages. In Soviet Moldavia's towns, 45.8% of Moldavian men and 37.2% of Moldavian women mastered the Russian language to the same degree as the Moldavian languages, and sometimes better. In the late sixties and early seventies, a basically developed bilingualism prevailed among urban Moldavians: 6.0% [75.3% men and 57.6% women] spoke Russian fluently, and in some instances, according to their own statements, even thought in that language. Thinking in Russian has characterized every third man and every fourth woman among the town Moldavians. In Moldavian villages with over 5,000 inhabitants, nearly every third Moldavian speaks in two languages at work, and nearly every fifth one speaks two languages at home. Among Moldavian villagers educated in Moldavian-medium schools, 38.2% read newspapers in the national language, as compared with 40.3% in Russian; 25.7% read literature in the national language and 28.1% in Russian; 20.2% Moldavian villagers educated in Russianmedium schools read newspapers in the national language, and 52.0%

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

303

in Russian; 4.8% read literature in the national language, as compared with 55.4% in Russian. In the present conditions, the need for the country's non-Russian population to know well the international language of communication grows steadily, . . . beside high qualifications and professionals skills, for intellectual, physical and aesthetic aptitude a thorough knowledge of the Russian language is required. The results of the development of interacting ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic processes manifest themselves in three forms [connected with one another organically] of existence and functioning of USSR peoples' cultures: first, developing in the languages of the USSR peoples; second, functioning parallelly [or alternatively] in two languages [the national one and the Russian]; third, national cultures functioning in the Russian language.131

No wonder that, in interspersing his work with such assertions, Guboglo also mentions that, in non-Russian Soviet republics, there emerges a trend toward weakening the language's function as an ethnic identification factor, a weakening that led the Moldavians “to a re¬ consideration of values, in the wake of which the psychological factor imposed itself as one of first importance in the ethnic consciousness of creative workers in towns.”132 All Guboglo's reticences—e.g., that a merely relative weakening of the languages' function as a factor of ethnic identification, or merely in Moldavian towns is that weakening manifest, or even only in a certain part of the latter (“creative workers")—may be explained by the double objective of the CPSU national policy at the present stage of Soviet society's development: to keep alive the slogan on the development and flourishing of non-Russian cultures and languages; but, to prepare the ground for a switch to a stage when the truth will be revealed—that the non-Russian languages ceased to be the main means of communication for those peoples. In view of all the above, it is worth touching once more on the question of defamations resorted to by Soviet authors. This, because the duplicity proper to their analyses and assertions somehow affects works by certain Western authors. Thus, V. Stati quotes from N. Dima's book Bessarabia and Bukovina, The Soviet-Romanian Territorial Dispute, the following: “The Orthodox Romanian cathedral in Kishinev, partially burned down by the Russians during the war, has been transformed into an exhibition hall." We saw above that Stati, who lately donned the garb of a fighter against the “falsifiers of the Moldavian people's history and culture," does not always accurately reproduce the true meaning of words he cites in translation. But, even

304

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

if he accurately reproduced Dima's words, he was not justified in declaring that those lines wholly characterize his (Dima's) work as a "model of ideological deversion," and that they, as it were, "prove Doctor Dima's staggering ignorance of facts."133 It is true that Kishinev Cathedral has been transformed by Soviet authorities into an exhibition hall. And this fact, the main one in the assertion reproduced from Dima's book, Stati does not contest being evident not only to the readers of the newspaper in which he published his philippic against the Western author, but also to many foreign tourists visiting Soviet Moldavia's capital. But only relatively few of even Kishinev's inhabitants know that, in the last days preceding the retreat from the city, in mid-July 1941, the "fighter battalions" (istrebitelnye bataliony) set fire to many objectives, including the whole length of today's Lenin Boulevard (formerly Alexandru cel Bun Street) between the streets Pushkin and Gogol. The part where (prior to the mid-1940 events) stood the Metropolitan Building and some buildings of the Faculty of Theology was burned to the ground. Opposite these stood the cathedral, now transformed in an exhibition hall. While emphasizing that the cathedral "was designed by the Russian architect A. Melnikov in 1830-1836 . . . when Bessarabia, following its joining Russia [1812], developed for many years in new economic and more favorable conditions," Stati adds that "as everybody knows, Kishinev was one of the first cities to be barbarously bombed by fascist air forces, and it is a sacrilege to blame the occupants' actions on the liberating Russian people."135 To implement Moscow's directives of 27 and 29 June 1941, and especially those issued by Stalin on the 3 July 1941, the Central Committee of the party organization and the government of Soviet Moldavia adopted a series of decisions. The compilers and editors of the first volume, published in 1975, of a collection of documents and materials. The Moldavian SSR in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945, while publishing some of these directives and decisions, omitted certain important points. Thus, for instance, the 4 July 1941 decision of the Moldavian SSR CPC and Moldavia's CP(b) CC is published without its first article, which, as the compilers indicated in a footnote, speaks of evacuating to the rear all men of conscription age.135 The omission of this article by the republic's historians is by no means accidental. Bessarabians were not at the time mobilized into the fighting army but into work units only, because Moscow, which only a year earlier severed Bes¬ sarabia's Moldavians from the Romanian people, knew very well that it could not send them to fight against their brothers. That is why, on the 1 January 1943, there were in Soviet infantry divisions merely

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

305

0.03 percent Moldavians, although at the beginning of the war their specific weight in USSR's population was 1.04 percent.136 These facts are mentioned here because they prove that those who maintain that Moldavians are not Romanians serve Moscow's interests and the national policy of the CPSU in Soviet Moldavia. In conformance with the 29 June 1941 directives by the CPC of the USSR and the CC of AU CP(b), in the enemy-occupied territories units and detachments had to be created to "blow up bridges, destroy roads and telecommunications, set fire to depots and storehouses, etc. 137 Earlier still, on the 25 June, the CC Bureau of the Moldavian CP(b) and the CPC of the MSSR decided to create in all cities and district centers of the republic combat battalions to organize "the fight against parachuted-in enemy detachments and diversionists."138 In their 4 October 1941 report, these bodies informed the CC of AU CP(b) that "in conformance with Comrade Stalin's instruction of 3 July 1941, in cities and districts of Moldavia have been created 63 combat battalions of 100 to 200 men each."139 On the day before Stalin's speech of 3 July, when Red Army units still withstood the enemy on Soviet Moldavian territory, the republic's party organization CC Bureau adopted a special decision regarding the activity of the battalions created on the 25 June 1941. The decision, as the footnote indicates, has been published without its article 4. The fact that the document was not published integrally in 1941 and, the more so, after thirty-five years, in 1975, proves that Soviet authorities and their historians are still wary of revealing the contents of that article. In this connection, the following details should be mentioned: article 1 of the document speaks of an "immediate completion of combat battalions"; article 2 of the utilization of these battalions' personnel "in strict conformity with their mission"; article 3 of "strengthening the combat battalions' fighting capacity"; article 5 of "transport facilities needed by combat battalions."140 One can assume from the decision's context that the omitted article contains details of the battalions' mission in conditions of an imminent retreat from the republic's territory. These battalions were attached to the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) district and city sections and led by "experienced executives" of those bodies. To them were recruited people "wholly verified," chosen from most active Party and Komsomol members. The command of the battalions thus created was entrusted to the "people's commissar for internal affairs of the MSSR, Dmitrienko."141 In Kishinev was created a regiment commanded by P. Orlov, deputy chief of republican militia, with la. Mukhin as commissar. Composed of 480 Communists, it is also called in Soviet sources the "Kishinev

306

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Communist Regiment."142 In other words, nobody from the old-time population of Kishinev was enrolled in the "combat regiment" (Bes¬ sarabians began to be accepted into the Soviet Communist party only after the war.) It was this regiment, composed of people who, prior to the mid-1940 events, had nothing in common with Bessarabia, when retreating burned many of the city's important sites, including the portion of Alexandru cel Bun steet—its most beautiful part. Those who set fire to it were guided by the 11 July 1941 directives of Soviet Moldavia's party and state authorities: that when Red Army units retreated from the republic's towns and villages, all precious goods that could not be evacuated "must be destroyed."143 In the collection of documents and materials. The Moldavian SSR in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, was included an article by la. Mukhin, published in Sovetskaia Moldavia in 1965. In the article, printed by the collection's compilers in its first section, covering the period from the start of the war to the Red Army's complete retreat from the territory of Soviet Moldavia, the commissar of the "Kishinev Combat Regiment" says: 16 July [1941] was the hardest day in the life of the regiment's Communists. We saw tens of buildings on Lenin and Kiev streets burning. Flights of enemy planes unceasingly bombed the city. Fascist tanks drew nearer and nearer. The regiment was ordered to retreat toward Bendery. Eyes full of tears, we left behind our native city, many kissed the sidewalks or took into their handkerchiefs a handful of native soil.144

As mentioned earlier, Kishinev was for not one of the 480 persons enrolled in the "communist regiment" a "native city" or "native soil." The way in which the article was concocted not only shows that Mukhin sought to put the blame for burning Kishinev's main street on the enemy air force, but also proves that this is exactly the reason why the compilers have included the article in their collection as "documentary material." Thus, Mukhin writes that "on 3 July [1941], a fascist bomb struck an overcrowded tram car on the Lenin corner of Pushkin street."145 But he does not say that the tens of buildings burning on 16 July 1941 in Lenin and Kiev streets were struck by enemy bombs. Stressing further on that "enemy planes unceasingly bombed the city," the commissar of the "communist regiment" tried to camouflage the historical truth that, although from the first days of war and until mid-July of 1941, the Fascists repeatedly bombed Kishinev, the buildings in the city's center and other objectives were

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

307

burned down by the Soviets themselves when they were compelled to retreat. A 'classical” example of methods resorted to by fighters against "falsifiers of Moldavian people's history and culture" is offered by V. Stati and by the denigration of N. Dima for his following assertions: Young Romanian intellectuals of Soviet Moldavia appear to be proud whenever they can produce something relating to their Romanian past, and there are plenty of such examples. The Moldavian Drama Theater staged during the 1970s Ovidiu and Sinziana and Pepelea by Vasile Alecsandri and Soacra cu Trei Nurori [The Mother-in law . . . ] by Ion Creanga. All these plays are purely Romanian in themes and names. Ovidiu, for example, was a Roman poet exiled to Dacia during the Roman times, while Sinziana and Pepelea are among the most popular Romanian folk heroes. The Moldavian Opera also staged Barbu Lautaru by Gheorghe Neaga, Luceafarul by Eugen Doga, and Pe un Picior de Plai by Ion Podoleanu. All of them have a profound and exclusive Romanian character. Barbu Lautaru, for example, was the most famous folk music player of Romania during the 19th century. Luceafarul is the name of one of the most loved poems by Eminescu, himself the greatest Romanian poet. Pe un Picior de Plai ... is the first verse of Miorita, the most popular Romanian ballad.146

Reproducing Dimas words that "the Moldavian Opera also staged the "shows (italics mine—M. B.) Barbu Lautaru by G. Neaga, Luceafarul by E. Doga, Pe un Picior de Plai by I. Podoleanu," Stati remarks sarcastically: "In N. Dima's opinion, the ballet Luceafarul became an 'opera show.' And this is a trifle when compared with the noted playwright I. Podoleanu's suddenly becoming a . . . composer, and his play—an opera too."147 The Moldavian Theater of Opera and Ballet was, until 1957, a component part of the Moldavian Theater of Opera, Ballet, and Drama, "A. S. Pushkin." Even after the separation of the opera and ballet company from the drama company and the creation of an independent group of the opera and ballet theater, that group continued to perform in the dramatic theater's building for many years. Thus, the inadvertence in Dima's text, "The Moldavian Opera staged . . . , Pe un Picior de Plai by I. Podoleanu" is infinitely less grave that the invectives based on substitutions resorted to by Stati. In the first place, the opera Barbu Lautaru, as well as the ballet Luceafarul, is "an opera show." In the second place, Dima does not maintain that I. Podoleanu is a composer, nor that his play Pe un Picior de Plai is an opera. What he does maintain is that "young Romanian intellectuals of Soviet

308

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Moldavia appear to be proud whenever they can produce something relating to their Romanian past." To substantiate this assertion, Dima enumerates a series of shows staged, on the one hand, after works of some classic writers of the national literature (V. Alecsandri, I. Creanga), and, on the other hand, after works of certain contemporary authors (G. Neaga, E. Doga, I. Podoleanu) which have, in their themes and names, "a profound and exclusive Romanian character." It is obvious that the enumeration was done in relation to the period during which the works staged in Soviet Moldavia were created, and not in relation to the place where they were represented. Moreover, by "the Moldavian Drama Theater" and "the Moldavian Opera" Dima refers, actually, to the same theater (and in this sense one could speak of an inadvertence, the cause of which has been mentioned earlier). This is shown by the use of the adverb also ("the Moldavian Opera also staged Barbu Lantaru . . ."). As mentioned already, not only the slogans of the proponents of CPSU national policy, but also their methods influence the writings of certain Western authors. Impressed by Soviet slogans, comparing the linguistic situation in many countries of the world with the actual linguistic situation in the USSR and ignoring the objective trends of the non-Russian languges' development under the influence of CPSU's policies, such authors often resort even to the favorite method of Soviet specialists—to denigrate and defame those in the West who write on the russification of non-Russian Soviet peoples. Thus, G. Blankoff-Scarr based her paper, presented to the section on "Multiculturalism" of the Seventh World Congress of Applied Linguistics at Brussels, on Soviet statistical data and Soviet authors' slogans regarding "the main tendencies of bilingual and multilingual evolution in the USSR at the present time."149 On the other hand, she supported Soviet specialists' attempts to torpedo the symposium on the gradual reduction of social functions of the non-Russian Soviet peoples' languages. Another Western researcher, S. Akiner, takes the position of an author who maintains that the evolution process of Turkic languages in the USSR cannot be qualified as russification. She also characterizes that author's work as "a well-balanced review of bilingualism among Soviet Muslims." At the same time, Akiner emphasizes what she calls "gross oversimplifications and sheer inaccuracies, e.g., the ArabIranian roots of the Turkish languages!" in a work claiming, on the contrary, that russification affects to a certain measure all languages of Soviet peoples, including the Turkic ones.150 Thus, although she does not say so explicitly, the thesis on the russification of non-Russian

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

309

languages is based, according to Akiner, on "gross oversimplifications." To stress that the second work generally lacks any worth, Akiner adds that it is interspersed with "sheer inaccuracies." To validate this evaluation, the researcher brings an example: "the Arab-Iranian roots of the Turkic languages!" The exclamation mark shows how grave, according to Akiner, the mistake is imputed by her to the author of the paper. But, as a matter of fact, we have here an inadvertence in the translation. The original (written in Russian) spoke of "ArabIranian words having struck roots (ukorenivshiesia)" in the Turkic languages, and not of Arab-Iranian roots of those languages. Foreign lexical elements have penetrated, in the course of its history and continue to penetrate into any developed language. Some of these foreign elements "settle down" well in the receiving languages, strike roots in them in the course of time, and become naturalized. Thus, for example, numerous slavisms penetrated for centuries into the Romanian language, struck roots in it, and became integral parts. A massive removal of these lexical loans and their replacement by other lexical elements would lead to a change of the physiognomy of the Romanian language, to its transformation into another language. In this sense one could speak of "Slavic roots" of the Romanian language. And, in this sense, the passage "Arab-Iranian words having struck roots in the Turkic languages" was reproduced in translation as "ArabIranian roots of the Turkic languages." The figurative use of a term was thus transformed into a "capital proof" of sheer inaccuracies. It follows that not only the proponents of CPSU national policy, but also certain Western researchers who seek to denigrate the authors of theses or concepts unacceptable to them, resort to the kind of criticism based on inadvertences (often imagined) presented as mistakes (or misrepresentations) of the gravest kind. To prove the "scientific inconsistency" of certain concepts and theses incompatible with their own assertions and conclusions, such researchers sometimes honor their opponents by epithets not differing too much from those used in such cases by the proponents of CPSU national policy. To characterize the book Nations—Nationalities—People and its author, I. Livezeanu uses such epithets as "Bruchis ignores open-ended historical pro¬ cesses," "his lack of logical reasoning," "intellectual carelessness," "his obsession with Moscow's unrelenting manipulations," "desultory annotations," "sloppiness in the use of sources."151 The epithets by which Livezeanu "honours" me are, to a certain measure, consonant with the following invectives against me by V. Stati: "scholarly incompetence," "pathological anti-Sovietism," "fals¬ ification of facts," "researchers equilibristic," etc.

310

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

This relative consonance stems from the complete consonance with Soviet slogans in the Western researchers' position which, adopting officially published statistical data, concludes that "the Soviet gov¬ ernment is helping to perpetuate linguistic diversity, or that Russian linguistic and cultural hegemony seems to be in decline rather than ascendancy in Moldavia." We showed above certain premeditated digressions from actual facts in works by proponents of the CPSU national policy in the MSSR. Similar digressions, though unpremeditated, can also be found in the article in which Livezeanu draws conclusions mentioned here. Thus, for instance, she maintains that "until that date [1812], most of the territory now included in the MSSR formed the eastern part of the Moldavian principality and was known by the geographical name of Bessarabia"; or that (in 1940) "the MSSR was formed out of most of the seized territory with most of the three southern districts going to the Ukrainian SSR"; or that "with the German defeat in 1944, Bessarabia reverted to Soviet rule, again bearing the name of Mol¬ davia."152 In everyone of the above propositions Livezeanu makes two mis¬ takes. Before 1812 "most of the territory now included in the MSSR" had not formed "the eastern part of the Moldavian Principality" but merely a part of the eastern part of that principality. That part was not then called Bessarabia. Before 1812, only the southern counties of the territory between the Prut and the Dniester bore that name. The MSSR was formed in 1940 from the greatest part of Bessarabia and a smaller part of the autonomous republic. In the Ukrainian SSR were included at the time two southern counties of Bessarabia (Cetatea Alba and Ismail) and one northern county (Hotin). Before the 1941 war and after the 1944 restoration of the Soviet rule in Bessarabia, only a part of that Romanian province had been included in Soviet Moldavia. Not only the presentation of the language situation in Soviet Moldavia, but also the tracing of Bessarabia's historic destiny were made by Livezeanu from Soviet sources. Moreover, in Soviet sources, as already mentioned, are not truthfully reflected either the 1912 events or those of mid-1940. And I. Livezeanu does not render truthfully even those untruthful sources. Thus, the Soviet work referred to by Livezeanu says, for instance, that, in 1940, "northern and southern Bessarabian districts [most of the Ismail and Hotin counties, the Akkerman county] . . . have been included in the Ukrainian SSR."153 Several conclusions can be drawn from this chapter. First of all, insofar as works revealing the purposes of the CPSU national policy

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

322

are published in the West, the proponents of those policies strive to denigrate at any cost such works and their authors. Second, that some Western authors, using official statistics published in the USSR, adopt not only the CPSU slogans, but also methods used by the proponents of the CPSU national policy. Third, Soviet specialists represent as premeditated distortions the (often imagined) inadvertences of those who reveal the gloomy aspects of USSR realities. Thus, because lacking plausible arguments, they avoid an objective analysis of the main theses and assertions of CPSU national policy's critics. Answering his ideological opponents who seized on a translation error of the work Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin wrote:

In translating Engels, I made a mistake in the first edition by taking the word buttermilch to be not a proper noun but a common noun. This mistake naturally . . . afforded an excellent pretext to slur over the question of the two tendencies in the working-class movement of 1848 in Germany. ... To take advantage of the mistake of an opponent, even if it concerns Born's name, is more than natural. But to use a correction to a translation to slur over the substance of the question of the two tactics is to dodge the real issue.154

The CPSU nationalities policies proponents and those who adopt their methods seem to ignore such a statement.

Notes, Chapter 8 1. K. Heitmann, "Bruchis, Michael: One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: On the Language Policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the National Republics. Moldavian: A Look Back, a Survey and Perspectives, 1924-1980." In Sudost-Forschungen, Bank XLIV, 1985, S.419. V. Stati, "Lozh' v 'nauchnoi' upakovke," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 13 March 1986. 2. V. Stati, "Franta pe care am vazut-o . . ." Nistru, no. 2 (1983), p. 23. 3. M. Sadoveanu, Evocari (Bucharest, 1954), p. 59. 4. V. Stati, art. cit., p. 39. 5. P.-B. Henze, "The Significance of Increasing Bilingualism Among Soviet Muslims. In Y. Ro'i, ed.. The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy (London, 1984), p. 127. 6. I. Livezeanu, "Urbanization in a Low Key and Linguistic Change in Soviet Moldavia," Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, no. 4 (1981), p. 584. 7. Ibid., pp. 575, 582. 8. Ibid., p. 575.

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

312

9. J. Pool, "Soviet Language Planning: Goals, Results, Opinions," in J.-R. Azrael, ed„ Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York, 1978), p. 240. 10. "Vysokoe prizvanie obshchestvovedov," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 12 De¬ cember 1986. 11. A. Lazarev, M. Sytnik, E. Certan, eds., Uspekhi Sovetskoi Moldavii i mify antikommunizma (Kishinev, 1976), p. 24-25. the cited book: M. Morton, The Arts and the Soviet Child: The Esthetic Education of Children in the USSR (London, 1972). 12. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional'no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR (Moscow, 1977), p. 24. 13. Ibid., 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1982), p. 176. 14. Ch. Aitmatov, "Tsena—zhian'," Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 August 1986. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. "Vysokoe prizvanie obshchestvovedov," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 5 De¬

cember 1986. 19. F. Angheli, "Narody SSSR za dvuiazychie: pri chem tut russifikatsia'?" Sovetskaia Moldavia, 23 July 1986. 20. Ibid. 21. A. Darul, "Unele observatii privind influenta limbii ruse asupra limbii moldovenesti la etapa actuala," in S. Berejan, M. Gabinschi, N. Pecec, R. Udler, eds., Vostochnoslaviano-moldavskie iazykovye vzaimootnoshenia, vol. 2, (Kishinev, 1967), p. 69. 22. Ibid. 23. I. Ciornai, "Functia imprumuturilor ruso-ucrainene in graiurile mol¬ dovenesti, in Tezele referatelor la sesia consacrata problemei: Limba literara si limba scriitorului (Balti, 1959), p. 7-8; The same: "Functia stilistica a impru¬ muturilor lexicale ruso-ucrainene in graiurile moldovenesti," in Vostochno¬ slaviano-moldavskie iazykovye vzaimootnoshenia (Kishinev, 1961), pp. 64-69. 24. "Natsional'noe i internatsional'noe v literature i iazyke," Tezisy dokladov i soobshchenii (Kishinev, 1969), p. 84. 25. M. Bruchis, One Step Back, Two Steps Forward, p. 294-295. 26. S. Nuca, "O ancheta desprecum citesc elevii," Cultura, 14 December 1968. 27. L. Botnaru, "Carti uitate," Literatura §i arta, no. 32, 11 August 1983, p. 7. 28. Ibid. 29. Iu. Desheriev, Problema funktsional'nogo razvitia iazykov i zadachi sotsiolingvistiki," in F. Filin et al., eds., lazyk i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), p. 61. 30. M. Isaev, "Iazykovoe stroitel'stvo kak odin iz vazhneishikh ekstralingvisticheskikh faktorov razvitia iazyka," in F. Filin et al., eds., lazyk i obshchestvo, p. 93. 31. Iu. Desheriev, Zakonomernosti razvitia i vzaimodeistvia iazykov v sovetskom obshchestve (Moscow, 1966), p. 89.

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

313

32. Ibid., p. 86-87. 33. Ibid., p. 83. 34. I. Beloded, Iu. Desheriev, M. Isaev, N. Corlateanu, "Voprosy vzaimodeistvia i vzaimoobogashchenia iazykov narodov SSSR," in S. Berejan et al., eds., Vostochnoslaviano-moldavskie vzaimootnoshenia, vol. 2 (1967), pp. 12 35. A. Agaev, "Funktsii iazyka kak etnicheskogo faktora," in F. Filin et al., eds., Iazyk i obshchestvo, p. 137. 36. T. Bertagaev, "Bilingvism i ego raznovidnosti v sisteme upotreblenia," in P. Azimov, Iu. Desheriev, F. Filin, eds., (Moscow, 1972), p. 86.

Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia '

5

*

37. A. Agaev, art. cit., pp. 136, 138. 38. V. Zelenchuk,

Naselenie Bessarabii i Podnestrovia v XIX v. (Etnicheskie

i sotsial’no-demograficheskie protsessy) (Kishinev, 1979), pp. 150

153.

39. Ibid., p. 155-156. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 158. 42. V. Zelenchuk, Naselenie Moldavii (Kishinev, 1973), p. 49.

(Demograficheskie protsessy i etnicheskii

sostav)

43. V. Stiuca, Sotsial’nye problemy sel'skogo byta (Kishinev, 1971), K. Iliasenco, V Sem’e edinoi (Kishinev, 1972), p. 52.

p.

142;

44. H. Corbu, S. Cibotaru, Cuvint inainte," in Dreptate voie si pamint. Creatii artistice basarabene din anii 1905-1907 (Chi§inau, 1957), p. 7. 45. N. Lascov, Prazdnovanie stoletniago iubileia prisoedinenia Bessarabii k Rossii (1812-1912) (Kishinev, 1914). 46. Enciclopedia 47. Ibid.

sovetica moldoveneasca,

vol. 8. (Chi§inau, 1981)

p

86

48. I. Calin et al„ Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii. Izdanie tret'e, pererabotannoe i dopolnennoe (Kishinev, 1981), p. 13. 49. V. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 41, p. 6. 50. A. Babii, N. Mokhov,

Leninskie idei o sushchnosti natsii i nekotorye

Leninskie printsipy internatsional'nogo vospitania trudiashchikhsia (Kishinev, 1969), p. 10. 51. C. Giurescu, D. Giurescu, Istoria romanilor din cele mai vechi timpuri pina astazi, ed. a 2-a. (Bucure§ti, 1975), p. 508. voprosy formirovania moldavskoi burzhuaznoi natsii," in

52. Ibid., p. 504-505. 53. Ibid., p. 511. 54. Ibid., pp. 492, 495-496. 55. S. Afteniuc, Leninskaia natsional'naia politika kommunisticheskoi partii i obrazovanie sovetskoi gosudarstvennosti moldavskogo naroda (Kishinev 1971) p. 13. 56.

Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. Opere alese (Chi§inau, 1955),

57. A. Russo,

58. S. Afteniuc, op. cit., p. 6-7. 59. N. Lascov, op. cit., p. 48.

6. (Chi§inau, 1976), p. 284.

p.

31.

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

314

60. I. Bodiul, Sovetskaia Moldavia (Moscow, 1978), p. 7. 61. V. Mocreac, A. Morar, A.

Heistver, Sredstva

massovoi informatsii i

ideologicheskaia bor'ba na sovremennom etape. Kritika burzhuaznogo

moldavo-

vedenia" (Kishinev, 1983), p. 78. 62. A. Russo, op. cit., pp. 227, 298. 63. Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 2 (1971), p. 358. 64. Ibid., vol. 4 (1974), pp. 208-209. 65. M. Bruchis, Nations—Nationalities—People: A Study of the Nationalities

Policy of the Communist Party in Soviet Moldavia (New York, 1984), pp. 111140.

66.

V. Stati, Atitudini (Chisinau, 1976), pp. 151, 153.

67. Earousse: Trois volumes en couleurs, tome I (Paris, 1970), p. 363.

68.

Ibid., p. 330.

69. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopedia, tom 28 (Moscow, 1954), p. 82. 70. Kratkaia geograficheskaia entsiklopedia, tom 3. (Moscow, 1962), p. 305. 71. "VII sessia Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. Stenograficheskii otchet

(Mos¬

cow, 1940), p. 183. 72. Only partially because that formula ("Moldavian Socialist Soviet Re¬ public—one of the Union republics of the USSR formed 2 August 1940 after the reunion of Bessarabia with the Moldavian Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic") is incorrect. In fact, Bessarabia was dismembered, and the RASSM was liquidated by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. 73. Pravda, 28 October 1924. 74. "Listovki kommunisticheskogo podpol'ia Bessarabii,"

Sbornik doku-

mentov (Kishinev, 1960). 75. Pravda, June 29, 1940. 76. A. Lazarev, Moldavskaia sovetskaia gosudarstvennost’ i bessarabskii vopros (Kishinev, 1974), p. 121. 77. Ibid., p. 126. 78. I. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, ed. 11. (Moscow, 1945), p. 529. 79. Pravda, 11 July 1940. 80. A. Grecul, Rastsvet moldavskoi sotsialisticheskoi natsii (Kishinev, 1974), p. 103. 81. Ibid., p. 102. 82. Ocherki kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii, 2nd ed. (Kishinev, 1968), p. 248. 83. Ibid., p. 245. 84. Pravda, July 11 1940. 85. Ibid., 12 July 1940.

86.

Ibid., 3 August 1940.

87. Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii, 2nd ed., loc. cit.

88.

Ibid., 3rd ed. (Kishinev, 1981), p. 256.

89. In Soviet sociopolitical literature the term "Communist party" in the collocation "Communist party and Soviet government" is used as a synonym

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation

315

of the term Central Committee of the CPSU," as the term "Soviet government" is used as a synonym of the term the "government of the USSR." 90. A. Lazarev, op. cit., p. 570. 91. I. Garaz, A. Morar, "Kritika nekotorykh antikommunisticheskikh kontseptsii natsional nyhk otnoshenii v SSSR," in A. Lazarev, M. Sytnik, E. Certan, eds., Uspekhi Sovetskoi Moldavii i mifu antikommunizma (Kishinev 1976), p. 37. 92. S. Afteniuc, "Istina i vymysly ob obrazovanii Moldavskoi SSR," ibid p. 62. 93. V. Mocreac, Kritika burzhuaznykh izvrashchenii gosudarstvennogo suvereniteta Moldavskoi SSR," ibid., p. 67. 94. 183.

VII sessia Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. Stenograficheskii otchet," p.

95. Ibid. 96. "Konstitutsia (Osnovnoi zakon) Moldavskoi Sovetskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki, Sovetskaia Moldavia, 16 April 1978; M. Bruchis, Nations—Na¬ tionalities—People . . . , pp. 59-70. 97. Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii, 2nd ed., p. 248. 98. Ibid., 3rd ed., p. 255. 99. Pravda, 3 August 1940. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 11, 13, 14 August 1940. 102. Ibid., 11 August 1940. 103. Ibid., 3 August 1940. 104. K. Iliasenco, V sem'e edinoi, p. 51. 105. Istoria vneshnei politiki SSSR. 1917-1975, tom 1 (Moscow, 1976), p

411. 106. K. Stratievschi, "Triumful principiilor leniniste ale internationalismului proletar," Comunistul moldovei, no. 11 (1983), p. 14. 107. "Pod solntsem bratstva," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 2 August 1983. 108. Literatura §z arta, no. 31 (2087), 1 August 1985. 109. Istoria mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii i vneshnei politiki SSSR v trekh tomakh 1917-1987, tom pervyi, 1917-1945 (Moscow, 1986), p. 243. 110. E. Gudman, World State and World Language: Readings in the Sociology of Language (Mouton: The Hague, 1968), p. 285. 111. See Notes 1 and 68; M. Bruchis, "The Language Policy of the CPSU and the Linguistic Situation in Soviet Moldavia," Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVI, no. 1 (January 1984), pp. 108-126. 112. Ibid. 113. G. Malarciuc, "Po prezhnemu s reveransami," Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 August 1986. 114. Ibid. 115. M. Bruchis, One Step Back . . . , p. 80. 116. Ibid., pp. 97-145.

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

316

117. Iu. Desheriev, Sotsiologicheskaia kharakteristika obshchestvennykh funktsii

iazykov narodov SSSR. Materialy vsesoiuznogo koordinationnogo soveshchania po probleme: "Razvitie natsional'nykh otnoshenii v usloviakh perekhoda ot sotsializma k kommunizmu," vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1963), p. 78. 118. S. Bruk, M. Guboglo, "Dvuiazychie i sblizhenie natsii v SSSR (po materialam perepisi naselenia 1970 goda)," Sovetskaia etnografia, no. 5 (1975), p. 21. 119. S. Nesterova, “Dvuiazychie i kultura naselenia Moldavii. Po mater¬ ialam etnosotsiologicheskogo issledovania v Moldavskoi SSSR,

Sovetskaia

etnografia, no. 5 (1975), p. 71. 120. I. Livezeanu, art. cit., Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, no. 3 (1981), pp. 328, 338. 121. V. Kozlov, Natsional'nosti SSSR. Etnodemograficheskii obzor, 2nd. ed„ p. 244 122. K. Khanazarov, Reshenie natsional’no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR, 2nd ed,, pp. 59, 115. 123. F. Filin, “Sovremennoe obshchestvennoe razvitie i problemy dvuiazychia," in P. Azimov, Iu. Deshereiev, F. Filin et al., eds., Problemy dvuiazychia

i mnogoiazychia (Moscow, 1972), p. 15. 124. Iu. Desheriev, Zakonomernosti razvitia i vzaimodeistvia iazykov . . . , pp. 369-370; in Desheriev's text, “The Languages of the Indigenous Peoples of the Union Non-Russian Republics." 125. V. Avronin, “Dvuiazychie i shkola," Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoia¬

zychia, p. 52. 126. K. Khanazarov, op. cit., 1st ed. (Moscow, 1977), p. 29. 127. M. Gabinschi, “Sud'by balkanizmov v svete russko-moldavskogo dvuiazychia," in Problemy dvuiazychia i mnogoiazychia, p. 207. 128. M. Guboglo, Razvitie dvuiazychia v Moldavskoi SSR (Kishinev, 1979), pp. 65, 86. 129. Ibid., p. 65. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid.; Sovremennye etnoiazykovye protsessy v SSSR. Osnovnye faktory i tendentsii razvitia natsional'no-russkogo dvuiazychia (Moscow, 1984), p. 72. 132. Ibid., pp. 95, 111, 124, 201, 203, 261. 133. Ibid., p. 271-272. 134. V. Stati, “Lozh' v 'nauchnoi' upakovke," Sovetskaia Moldavia,

13

March 1986. 135. Ibid. 136. S. Afteniuc, A. Korenev, 1. Levit, I. Terekhina, eds., Moldavskaia SSSR

v velikoi otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza. 1941-1945. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov v dvukh tomakh, tom 1 (Kishinev, 1975), p. 113. 137. A. Artemev, "Iz istorii boevogo sodruzhestva narodov SSSR v velikoi otechestvennoi voine," in Bratskoe sodruzhestvo sovetskikh respublik v khoziast-

vennom i kul'turnom stroitel’stve (Moscow, 1971), p. 85. 138. S. Afteniuc et al., op. cit., p. 85.

Insults and Calumnies Instead of Argumentation 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

317

Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 61, doc. 66; la; 2; 3; 8. Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 5 (1975), p. 449. S. Afteniuc et al„ op. cit., p. 136. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., 150.

147. N. Dima, "Bessarabia and Bukovina: The Soviet-Romanian Territorial Dispute," East European Monographs (Boulder, New York, 1982), p. 126. 148. V. Stati, loc. cit. 149. Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 6 (1976), p. 360-361. 150. J. Den Haese, J. Nivette, eds., AILA Brussels 84, Proceedings, vol. 1. sections 1-18 (Brussels, 1984), p. 153. 151. The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (1985), p. 631. 152. Slavic Review, vol. 44, no. 4, p. 741-742. 153. I. Livezeanu, art. cit., Soviet Studies, vol. XXXIII, no. 3 (1981), pp 328-329. 154. Ia. Grosul, M. Radul, eds., Moldavia (Moscow, 1970), p. 79.

9 Outlines of the History of the Moldavian Communist Party: From Edition to Edition

The first edition of the Outline of the History of the Communist Party of Moldavia appeared in 1964 and was distributed for several months until Khrushchev's dismissal. The second edition was released in 1968 and third in 1981.1 All three editions of this work were prepared under the direction and through the direct involvement of the secretary for agitation and propaganda in the Central Committee of the Com¬ munist party of Moldavia (CPM) at the time of publication. The individuals who occupied this post were E. S. Postovoi (1964), D. S. Kornovan (1968), and I. P. Kalin (1981). Their deputy managing editors, who were also responsible for coordinating the work of the authors of the Outline were directors of the Institute of Party History; they were V. K. Barbulat (1964), S. Ya. Afteniuc (1968), and A. A. Korenev (1981). In addition, the editorial board of the first and second editions included the head of the Central Committee's agitation and propaganda department, A. I. Medvedev, and the editorial boards of the third edition included P. V. Voronin, a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee. The participation of these public figures gave the Outline the prestigious stamp of an official document of the country's ruling party. Others who collaborated with the Outline, either by serving on the editorial board or by participating in the joint authorship, included the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR, Ya. S. Grosul, the director of the Institute of Economics, N. P. Frolov, the director of the Institute of History V. I. Tsaranov, heads of the department of CPSU history, D. E. Shemiakov (from the University of Kishinev), K. V. Stratievschi (from the Polytechnic Institute), M. F. Rotaru (from the Medical Institute), teachers from higher educational 319

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

institutions, and scientific workers from research institutes: N. K. Bibileishvili, I. M. Bobeico, S. K. Brysiakin, A. V. Grecul, 1.1. Dovgopoly, A. S. Esaulenko, A. M. Lisetskii, A. V. Repida, and others. This list shows that the Central Committee of the CPM and its Institute of History very carefully selected the members of the editorial board and the collective pool of the writers for the Outline in order to ensure that the publication would be regarded as a highly authoritative scientific work and not merely as an approved official history of the republic's communist organization. All the foregoing notwithstanding, many of the facts conveyed in the first, second (“amended and enlarged"), and third (“revised and enlarged") editions of the Outline do not manifest overwhelming scientific accuracy. The changes effected to the heading of the first chapter illustrate this points. These headings for the three editions are as follows: a. First edition, 1964: the social democratic organizations of Mol¬ davia during the struggle of the party of the Bolsheviks to overthrow tsarism at the end of the nineteenth century to February 1917 (p. 7); b. Second edition, 1968: the origins and activities of social dem¬ ocratic organizations in Moldavia during the struggle to over¬ throw tsarism (p. 5); c. Third edition, 1981: the start of the workers' movement. The foundation and activity of the Russian Social Democratic Workers party (RSDRP) organizations in Moldavia during the struggle to overthrow tsarism (p. 12). The wording of the first edition, according to which, at the end of the nineteenth century, the party of the Bolsheviks (which did not then exist) was struggling to overthrow tsarism, was corrected in the second edition. In addition, the second edition mentions social dem¬ ocratic organizations in Moldavia, not of Moldavia as the first edition asserts. This change was necessary because, in the territory called Moldavia in the Outline, there were no independent social democratic organizations that had been created by the population of that territory. These organizations were established by political exiles from the four corners of Russia, as was noted in the text of the Outline (1964, p.

12). The heading of the first chapter of all three editions includes the term “Moldavia," but the words “social democratic organizations of Moldavia (1964) were changed to “social demographic organizations in Moldavia (1968), and then to “organization of the RSDRP in

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

321

Moldavia" (1981). The authors found it necessary for the third edition to explain in a footnote that the current territory of Soviet Moldavia did not then constitute "a unified entity in administrative terms," that the lands on the left bank of the Dniester were part of the Balta and OTgopol' counties of Podolsk Province and Tiraspol' County of Kherson province," and that "the province of Bessarabia included the counties of Khotin, Belts, Soroka, Orgeev, and Kishinev" (p. 13). Explanations such as these serve merely to confirm the lack of any scientific basis behind the use in the Outline of the term "Moldavia" in such passages as following. "At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Moldavia was liberated from the centuries-old Turkish yoke and was reunited with Russia" (1964, p. 7). The entry of Bessarabia into the Russian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century had a progressive significance. . . . After the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, the development of capitalist relations was accelerated, also in the outlying national areas, one of which was Moldavia" (1968, pp. 5, 6). "In 1812, the territory between the Dniester and the Prut [Bessarabia] was joined to Russia. This territory became part of the Russian Empire when it escaped from the dominion of Turkey which, according to Karl Marx, 'stood at the lowest and most barbaric level of feudalism.' " "The entry of that area into the Russian state had a progressive significance. Close access to a more highly developed economic and cultural environment led to the enrichment of the material and spiritual life of the population of Moldavia" (1981, pp. 12-13). The wording, "Moldavia . . ." was reunited [vossoedinena] with Russia," used in the first edition was changed in the second edition to "the entry of Bessarabia into Russia," and, finally, in the third edition to the joining of that area to Russia, in an effort to avoid the statement in the first edition, which obviously contradicted the his¬ torical facts. The term used by the third edition ("joining"-prisoedinenie) also does not fully reflect the annexation of the territory between the rivers Prut and Dniester in 1812 and the forceful seizure of this area from the country to which it belonged, the Moldavian principality. Keeping to the traditions of Soviet historiography, the authors of all three editions made frequent use of the term "Moldavia" when referring to various territories that were actually constituent parts of diverse administrative-political and state formations.2 Thus, in the 1981 edition, when the authors wrote, "capitalist relations developed . . . in agriculture in Moldavia" (p. 14), they are referring to Bessarabia. In the passage on page 19 of that edition, "Moldavia was part of

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the organizational-territorial structure of the union [the South Russian Union of Workers], ... its leader, E. O. Zaslavskii stayed in the Tiraspol' County," "Moldavia" includes the territory on the left, Ukrainian, bank of the Dniester, as well as Bessarabia. On page 160 of the same edition, in the passage "a group of Communists was sent from several regions of the Ukraine for regular work in Moldavia [in 1930]," the authors are referring only to the Moldavian Autonomous SSR, which was established on the east of the Dniester in 1924. In the chapters on the postwar period, and also the year preceding the war, the authors use "Moldavia" to describe the territory of the Union Moldavian SSR, which includes the smaller part of the former au¬ tonomous republic and the greater part of the area between the rivers Prut and Dniester (Bessarabia). The authors used the term "Moldavia" in all three editions in order to designate various historical-geographical realities. They adopted this expedient because they describe the facts and events in conformity with Moscow's policies as they vacillated through the years. Thus, after the Moldavian People's Republic was proclaimed at the end of 1917 on the territory of Bessarabia, its highest legislative body, the Sfatul Jarii (Council of the Country), decided to join Bessarabia to Romania. Making efforts to seize Bessarabia from Romanian control, Moscow ordered its subordinate party organizations in the Ukraine to form a Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Bessarabia. The "government in exile" thus formed proclaimed the "Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic."3 In those years, Moscow took no account of the awakening national consciousness of the indigenous population of Bessarabia, the east Prutian Moldavians, which arose after the February Revolution. A book published in 1971 by one of the authors of all three editions alludes to this "shortsightedness": "The Bolsheviks did not take in time the initiative for the concrete formulation of the demand of the masses for an autonomy of Moldavia and the establishment of its higher governmental and administrative bodies."4 The Bolsheviks corrected their "omission" after the failure of the 1924 Soviet-Romanian conference on the Bessarabian question" by calling the administrativepolitical formation they had created on the Ukrainian bank of the Dniester the Moldavian Autonomous Republic. In subsequent years, advocates of Moscow's policies have repeatedly used the slogan that "Bessarabia should become an indivisible part of the Moldavian Autonomous Republic" (1968, p. 123). All three editions stressed that the revolutionary forces of Bessarabia had often acted under the slogan, "Long live liberated Bessarabia united with

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

323

the Moldavian Autonomous SSR" (1964, p. 178; 1968, p. 189; 1981, p. 214). In August 1940, Moscow did not act in accordance with its frequently repeated former declaration that "Bessarabia shall become an indivisible part of the Moldavian Autonomous SSR," but dismantled both the Moldavian Autonomous Republic and Bessarabia when it formed the Moldavian Union SSR.5 That fact forces all Soviet historians to lump various historicalgeographical realities under the designation of "Moldavia." All three editions uniformly use "Moldavia" to designate various historical-geographical realities. They differ from each other, however, and frequently contradict each other over the presentation and in¬ terpretation of various facts and events and also in their appraisals of individuals who were involved in the revolutionary movement in Bessarabia. This chapter analyzes and explains the causes of certain specific differences between the three editions. All three refer to the Frontotdel (the Front Section), which was sent from Odessa to Kishinev at the end of December 1917 by the Rumcherod (Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of the Romanian Front, the Black Sea Fleet, and the Odessa region). The first edition states that on 1 January 1918, the Frontoldel gave an order "which declared that all authority and the command over military forces both at the front and in the rear war zone had passed into its hands" (p. 77). The second edition repeats the same statement verbatim (p. 79), together with part of the first edition's quotation from the order of the Frontotdel of 2 January, which stated that the revolutionary soldiers had been called "to help the Moldavian people to save and preserve the achievements of the revolution, and to deliver them from the predatory hands of the foul bourgeoisie" (1964, p. 77; 1968, p. 79). But the third edition fails to mention the FrontotdeTs order of 1 January 1918, and reproduces the order of 2 January in the shorter form used in the second edition ("to help the Moldavian people to save and preserve the achievements of the revolution"). The inconsistencies in these statements can be explained by the fact that both the first and second editions disclose the FrontotdeTs declaration in Kishinev on 1 January 1918 that "all authority ... in the rear war zone had passed into its hands." Since the Frontotdel was a military body dispatched from the outside, the mentioned statements contradicts Soviet Moldavian historians' stated positions that "Soviet power was established on 1 January 1918 in the provincial center of Kishinev" (1964, p. 77) and that "1 [14] January 1918 went down in history as the day when Soviet power was established in

324

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

Moldavia” (1968, p. 79). For this reason the authors of the third edition chose utterly to ignore the Frontotdel's order of 1 January 1918, whereas they pronounced that, in the principal town of Bes¬ sarabia, "power was then in the hands of the Kishinev Soviet which, like other soviets in Moldavia, had become the instrument of the authentic power of the working people,” and that the Kishinev Soviet "fulfilled its functions together with the Frontotdel which represented the executive committee of the Rumcherod, in the election of which . . . also participated delegates of soviets of workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies from Moldavia” (p. 85). The assertion that there "also participated delegates of soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants from Moldavia in the election of the executive committee of the Rumcherod,” does not reflect truthfully the real state of affairs in this respect. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the sixty-one representatives of these Soviets were not Bessarabians but soldiers from units of the Russian army on the Romanian front, in Bessarabia. Furthermore, these "delegates of soviets from Moldavia” included no representatives of the indigenous pop¬ ulation of the area, the Bessarabian Moldavians. The authors attempted in the third edition to represent events in a foreshortened manner in order to create the impression that the Kishinev Soviet, "like other soviets in Moldavia" and not the Frontotdel of the Rumcherod, became "the instrument of authentic power of the people" in Bessarabia on 1 January 1918. This effort is not supported by historical facts. Moreover, neither the Frontotdel nor the soviets succeeded in seizing power in Bessarabia either before or after January 1918. The Bolsheviks intended to accomplish the seizure of power at the congress of the Bessarabian soviets, "the date of which was determined at the end of January 1918.”6 On 21 January 1918, the publication of the soviets of Moscow city and the Moscow region included the following report: "A special session of the local Bessarabian democratic organizations was convened on the sixth of January to which Inculets, chairman of the provincial organ Sfatul Tarn, and Erhan, chairman of the General Directorate of the Moldavian Republic, were invited.”7 The fact that Inculets and Erhan "were invited” reveals that the Sfatul Jarii and its executive body, the Soviet of General Directors, were the legal authority in Bessarabia at the beginning of 1918, as well as at the end of 1917. Attempts by the authors of the Outline, as well as by other Soviet Moldavian historians, to prove at all costs that Soviet power triumphed in Bessarabia at the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, form an

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

325

integral part of their efforts to work out the position, very important for them, that Bessarabia was reunited with the Soviet Union at the end of June 1940. The lack of any objective basis for such a position is demonstrated by the contradictions that abound in the Outline and other works published in Soviet Moldavia. The explanation of how the Moldavian autonomous republic was established on the Ukrainian side of the River Dniester in 1924 varies considerably between each edition. The 1964 edition states that "by 1924, the necessary economic and political conditions had been created to allow party and Soviet bodies to resolve in practice the question of establishing Soviet autonomy for the working people of Moldavia" (pp. 115, 116). The corresponding context in the 1968 edition differs: "The Communist party, acting according to the wishes of the broad masses of the people for forming a republic, conducted extensive preparatory work (p. 118). The 1981 edition states however, that the movement for the establishment of a Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, born in the wake of the successful October Revolution, began to enlist the masses of the area after the formation of the USSR" (p. 128). But no one in the USSR in the early 1920s was able to define the administrative-political borders of the entities expressed in the editions of the Outline by the terms "Moldavia" or krai ("area, region"). However, the quotations second and third editions needed to refute the statement contained in the first edition that the establishment of an autonomous Moldavian republic in 1924 was, to all intents and purposes, the work of "party and Soviet bodies." The fact that none of the editions refers to a single document that could prove that there existed a "movement among the masses of the area for the establishment of a Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic" either before the Vienna Conference on the Bessarabian question (27 March-2 April 1924) or in the first months afterward, shows that no such movement existed. Historical facts reveal that, not long before the failure of the Vienna Conference, the idea of creating a Moldavian republic on Ukrainian territory was born among Communists who fled from Bessarabia after it came under Romanian rule, not among the east Dniester Moldavian population. These Communists initiated and inspired this action, and approached the Central Committee of the RCP(b) with a letter on the subject in early February 1924. Proof that the republic was established with the aim of constituting a permanent threat against the Romanian state is contained in the third edition. This edition mentions M. V. Frunze's conclusions on 25 July 1924 that "the establishment of even a small Moldavian republic or region would

326

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

be a powerful instrument in our hands to influence the mood of the workers' and peasants' masses of Bessarabia in the sense of strength¬ ening their hopes for deliverance from the Romanian yoke (pp. 130— 131). The title page of the 1981 edition contains the notice, “Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged.” But, in addition to being revised and enlarged, the text was also abridged in various places. These places reveal significant changes in the authors' attitude toward a wide range of facts and events, and also toward certain individuals. Thus, compared to the preceding editions, the authors of the third edition curtailed their accounts of the factional struggle that arose in the Romanian Communist party in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, leading to a split in March 1930. The third edition minimizes the essence of the struggle and makes no mention of the names of the individuals in the communist underground who led this factional struggle. The corresponding text, identical in the first and second editions, reads: “The criminal factional struggle . . . arose on the fertile soil of the bureaucratic-sectarian operational methods and opportunist errors of the Party's leadership" (1964, pp. 193, 194; 1968, pp. 204, 205). The third edition changed it to read: “The factional struggle, senseless to the point of being criminal [bessmyslennaia do prestupnosti] began in the central bodies of the Romanian Communist party" (p. 227). The circumstances described below explain both the reason for the change in that part of the text in the third edition that interprets the factional struggle, and also the reason why the first and second editions mention that this struggle “flared up between the Barbu and Luksimin groups." “I. Badeev and V. Kholostenko, representatives of the Moldavian regional committee of the Communist party of the Ukraine, partici¬ pated" in the work of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Romania, which convened in late June and early July 1928 in Kharkov in the Ukraine (1968, p. 192). Although the 1981 edition mentions the proceedings of the congress, it omits this detail (p. 217), because V. Kholostenko, in conformity with the Comintern's policy, was "elected" by the congress in Kharkov to the post of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist party despite the fact that he was not a member of that party. For this reason, the 1968 edition mentions the surname (Barbu) under which V. Kholostenko acted as leader of the Romanian Communist party, but does not mention his real name. For the same reason, the 1981 edition, while describing on the work of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Romania, as well as the factional struggle that arose shortly after the congress, fails to mention either Kholostenko's pseudonym

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

327

or his real name. This reason required the third edition to change the wording of the first two editions about "the criminal factional struggle" and the manner in which the struggle flared up "on the fertile soil of the bureaucratic-sectarian operational methods and opportunist errors of the party's leadership." Since the authors of the 1981 edition had inserted a photograph of Kholostenko, with a caption describing him as a prominent leader of the Moldavian Autonomous Republic (p. 134), they could hardly write openly that he was also the chief culprit behind the factional struggle in the Romanian Com¬ munist party. They also changed the wording from "party's leadership" to "central bodies of the Communist party," and from "criminal factional struggle" to "factional struggle, senseless to the point of being criminal." The third edition's omissions and changes in the description of the factional struggle within the Romanian Communist party, are also explained by the fact that, after Kholostenko's failure as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Romania, he became a responsible official on the staff of the CC of the AUCP(b) (VKP[b]).8 Omissions and changes like those above were precipitated by the preoccupation of the authors of the third edition with correcting blatantly contradictory statements and unfortunate omissions in the earlier editions, and also to conceal issues relating to facts and events that throw light on unsavory practices and policies of the communist authorities and their administrative bodies. The following example reveals this preoccupation. In the 1964 edition, the authors wrote:

When it brought to light the failings and defined the direction for the development of Soviet Moldavian literature and art, the Party led, at the same time, a struggle against a nonparty-style tendency in literary criticism. The 1948 resolutions of the CC of the VKP(b) and the Bureau of the CC of the Communist party of Moldavia, revealed that the newspaper Sovetskaia Moldavia had begun to deviate from the bolshevik principle of educating the creative intelligentsia. Instead of constructive and comradely criticism, it subjected certain Moldavian writers to unfounded attacks, making negative appraisals of their work and accusing them of bourgeois nationalism without any basis for so doing (p. 352).

This entire extract was abridged and altered in the second edition (p. 373), and vanished completely from the third edition. The following incident provides the reason for these changes: the Bessarabian writers

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

E. Bucov, A. Lupan, B. Istru, and G. Meniuc were excoriated by the newspaper Sovetskaia Moldavia. This attack was instigated by members of the Bureau of the CP of Moldavia CC (the left-bankers N. Cova, S. Tsaranov, P. Tereshchenko, S. Zelenchuk), which included not one Bessarabian. The scathing articles that appeared in Sovietskaia Moldavia, accusing the Bessarabian writers of bourgeois nationalism, could not have appeared without the knowledge and agreement of party officials. For this reason the VKP(b)'s decree of 4 October 1948 criticized not so much the newspaper Sovetskaia Moldavia, which published the articles attacking the Bessarabian writers, as the leaders of the CC of the republic's Communist party who allowed these articles to appear.9 For the same reason, the aforementioned extract from the first edition dwindled in the second edition and disappeared entirely from the third edition. In this way, the authors attempted to avoid any mention of the campaign unleashed against Bessarabian persons of culture in the postwar years by left-bank leaders of the Communist party of Soviet Moldavia. Other passages in the 1981 edition were abridged and altered in the same way, but for reasons that were quite different. The first two editions, for example, mention that on 1 October 1931, the Bessarabian Communist organization comprised “40 percent Moldavians, 35 per¬ cent Russians and Ukrainians, and 25 percent Jews and members of other nationalities" (1964, p. 194; 1968, p. 206). As I mentioned in a previous work, if the assertion that 40 percent of the Communists of Bessarabia were Moldavians contained a grain of truth, they would not have been placed in the overwhelming majority of instances, in the category of “others" in Soviet historians' listings of the surnames of activists from the Bessarabian communist movement.10 I also noted that, by including Jews under the category of “others" (“25 percent Jews and members of other nationalities"), the authors minimized their role in the communist movements of Bessarabia.11 In the 1981 edition, the authors went even further and completely removed any reference to Jews from the text, which then read: “On 1 October 1931, the Bessarabian party organization comprised, by nationality, 40 percent Moldavians, and 35 percent of Russians and Ukrainians" (p. 227). The authors' tendency to minimize the role of Jews in the revo¬ lutionary and communist movement of Bessarabia, a tendency apparent in all three editions became decidedly more pronounced in the 1981 edition, as the following examples reveal.

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

329

The 1964 edition stated that "the first underground printing press of Iskra (in Russia) was organized by L. I. Goldman in April 1901 in Kishinev," and that "the professional Leninist revolutionary I. I. Radchenko also played an important role in its establishment," while M. L. Ginzburg, G. A. Korsunskaia, G. B. Elkin and others worked the printing press" (p. 16). The authors exaggerated the role of I. I. Radchenko and did not mention the name of all those who worked the printing press, among whom there was not a single gentile. In the second edition, except for Goldman, they did not mention any of the permanent staff of the printing press of Iskra in Kishinev. Even Goldman received scant mention. The 1968 edition stated merely that L. I. Goldman organized the first underground printing press of Iskra in Russia, in Kishinev" (p. 12). The same authors who produced the 'revised and enlarged" 1981 edition published a book in 1976 under the aegis of the Institute of Party History in which they wrote, completely contrary to fact, that "its active organizer was the profes¬ sional revolutionary I. I. Radchenko," and that Goldman worked on the staff of the printing press.12 Apparently, realizing that they had distorted history too much, in the 1981 edition, the same authors reduced Radchenkos role from "active organizer" of the Iskra press into "an active participant in its organization." The full statement is, "the professional Leninist revolutionary, I. I. Radchenko, took an active part in the organization of the press" (p. 25). At the same time, they failed entirely to mention either the staff of the Kishinev press of Iskra or its real organizer, L. I. Goldman.13 The authors treated in a similar manner the personnel of the Party Center, which was formed in September 1941 by the Bureau of the CP of Moldavia CC, then located in the town of Donetsk in the Ukraine. According to the 1964 edition, it was sent "to the enemy's rear ... in order to lead the working peoples struggle against the occupiers" (p. 268). They acknowledged that the "secretary of the Slobodzeia District Committee of the CP(b) of Moldavia, A. M. Tereshchenko, was head of the Party Center," and also mentioned that the latter comprised the secretary of the Tiraspol' city committee of the Komsomol, P. Y. Muntyan, and a group of former active participants of the revolutionary movement in Bessarabia, including M. Ya. Skvortsov, I. M. Morgenshtern, Ya. T. Boguslavskii, and others who were greatly experienced in underground activity" (ibid). The authors of the 1964 edition then revealed that "all members of the Party Center were rounded up and perished in the fight against the enemy" (ibid).

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

The 1968 edition names only Tereshchenko, Muntyan, and Skvortsov as belonging to the Party Center (p. 278). The enlarged 1981 edition reveals the names of only two members: "In September 1941, the Bureau of the CP of Moldavia CC sent to the enemy's rear a Party Center in order to lead the communist underground. It was composed of A. M. Tereshchenko, the secretary of the Center, M. Ya. Skvortsov, his deputy, and seven members" (pp. 299-300). In fact, six of the nine members of the Party Center were Bessarabian Jews: M. Ya. Skvortsov, Ya. T. Boguslavskii, S. P. Brukhis, E. S. Grinberg, I. I. Grinman, and I. M. Morgenshtern; until the events of mid-1940, they were all active participants in the communist under¬ ground in Bessarabia.13 This fact constitutes the most probable reason that the authors of the 1981 edition revealed minimal information about the Party Center and name only two of its members. One of them was Leibovich, but only his underground surname of Skvortsov was given. The above-mentioned abridgments in the enlarged editions of 1968 and 1981 are closely connected with the authors' efforts to draw even tighter the veil they had begun to draw in the first edition over the fact that the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population of Moldavia did not participate in the communist underground movement when Bessarabia was part of Romania. Thus, the 1964 edition stated that "under the conditions where Leninist party norms were grossly flouted during the period of Stalin's personality cult, the question of their partinost' [the party membership of the participants in the communist underground movement] remained unresolved for many years, up to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU" (p. 235). The 1968 edition significantly altered this wording, not only by toning down the expressions concerning "the personality cult," but also by inserting the following: "Communists of the Bessarabian party organization were being transferred from the Communist party of Romania into the VKP(b). On 31 May 1941, the Bureau of the CP(b) of Moldavia CC transferred ten people into the VKP(b) and asked the latter's CC to confirm this decision. At the same time, efforts were underway to transfer the other Communists into the VKP(b). These efforts were interrupted by the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Under the conditions of the personality cult, the question of accepting into the VKP(b) Communists from the former Bessarabian party organization was prolonged up to the 1950s" (p. 250). In the 1981 edition, immediately after stating that "toward the end of 1940, the party organization of Moldavia comprised more than 8,600 party members and candidates," the authors summed up the

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

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question under consideration as follows: "In a short time, Bessarabian Communists were being transferred from the Communist party of Romania to the VKP(b). On 7 May 1941, the Politburo of the VKP(b) CC adopted the decree 'On the Procedure for Transferring Members of the Communist Party of Romania Who Remained in the Territory of the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSR, into the VKP(b).' In May 1941, the Bureau of the CP(b) of Moldavia CC, implementing that decree, transferred a group of Bessarabian Communists from the Communist party of Romania into the VKP(b). This process was completed after the war" (pp. 257, 258). Thus, the second and third editions omitted any mention of Stalin or of "the gross flouting of Leninist party norms." With regard to transferring Bessarabian Communists into the VKP(b), the second edition still alluded to the "personality cult" as a reason for the question being "prolonged up to the 1950s." Moreover, the second edition stated that, at the end of May 1941, the Bureau of the CP(b) of Moldavia CC "transferred" ten people into the VKP(b), but then hastened to add that the decision to do so was subject to Moscow's confirmation: they "asked the VKP(b) CC to confirm this decision." Therefore, the second edition admits that even these ten Bessarabian Communists in fact remained outside the ranks of the Communist party after the events of mid-1940. It is not a surprise that the inaccurate representation in the 1968 edition of the fate of Bessarabian Communists was followed by an outright distortion of that fate in the works of Soviet Moldavian historians after 1968. The authors of a work published in 1970 wrote that, after the events of mid-1940, the Communist party of Moldavia embraced "the Communists from all over the republic."14 A book published in 1974, on the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power in Moldavia, stated that the election of the CC by the First Congress of the Communist Party of Moldavia (6-8 February, 1941) "completed the organizational transformation of the two regional party organi¬ zations of Moldavia into the Communist party [Bolsheviks] of Mol¬ davia."15 By these crude means the Soviet historian transformed the Bes¬ sarabian communist organization into one of two Moldavian regional party organizations that were then transformed into the Communist party of Moldavia in February 1941. Meanwhile, at this time, the abovementioned decree of the Politburo of the VKP(b) CC on the transferring Bessarabian members of the Communist party of Romania into the VKP(b) did not yet exist. It was issued on 7 May 1941 (1981, p. 257). The title of the decree is proof that Moscow was not about to recognize

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

the Bessarabian communist organization as part of the Communist party of Moldavia. Evidence in support of this statement is provided by the fact that "on 14 August [1940], the VKP(b) CC transformed the Moldavian regional organization of the CP(b) of Ukraine into the Communist party (b) of Moldavia" (ibid.). In addition, none of the three editions do not name even one person among "the ten people" (1968), or among "the group of Bessarabian Communists" (1981) who supposedly were transferred from the Com¬ munist party of Romania to the VKP(b). This omission is explained by the fact that not one member of the indigenous population of Bessarabia, which was seized from Romania in mid-1940, was included either in the "group of nine" in the Party Center, or in "the group of ten" who supposedly entered the ranks of the VKP(b). The careful reader will note that the 8,994 (according to Outline, 8,600) members of the Communist party of Moldavia on 1 January 1941, included not one representative of the Bessarabians or Bessarabian Moldavians.16 Since this composition of the Communist party of Moldavia did not change until the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, it is apparent that, in the last prewar year, Moscow was suspicious of the Bessarabian population, especially of the Bessarabian Molda¬ vians. This suspicion was also shown after the war began. Instead of being sent to the army in the field, conscripted Bessarabians were sent to labor divisions. This reason compelled the authors to change their wording from one edition to another when they described the events during the first phase of the war. Thus, according to the 1964 edition, "The Moldavian people, most of whom had been living under the Soviet system for only one year, evinced a deep understanding of where their duty lay. In the first days of the war, tens of thousands of the sons of the Moldavian people flocked to the ranks of the army in the field" (p. 260). But the term "Moldavian people" disappeared from the respective ref¬ erences in the second and third editions. Instead, the 1968 edition declared that "the workers, the toiling peasants, and the intelligentsia of Moldavia expressed their readiness to do everything for the defense of their beloved motherland." (p. 275). The 1981 edition repeated the statement almost verbatim (p. 290). It also asserted that "the republic gave the Red Army many tens of thousands of reinforcements" (p. 291). In 1983, the authors of a book published under the aegis of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR reiterated the assertion of the 1964 edition. "In the years of the Great Patriotic War," they wrote, "the Moldavian people fought courageously, shoulder to shoul-

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

333

der with representatives of the sister republics for the liberation of the Soviet country."17 The statement that only tens of thousands (1964) or even many tens of thousands (1981) "flocked to the ranks of the army in the field" demonstrates that the vast majority of the population of Soviet Moldavia was not mobilized into the Soviet army during the first phase of the war. This point is stated explicitly in a book published in Moscow under the aegis of the Academy of Social Sciences of the CPSU CC. It reveals that, on 1 January 1943, the proportion of Moldavian soldiers in the Soviet Unions infantry divisions was 0.03 percent.18 But when the war began, Moldavians comprised 1.04 percent of the population of the USSR.19 The vast majority of the republics population could not have reinforced the ranks of the Soviet army, since Moscow, as already mentioned, had not then placed Bessarabian enlisted men in the army in the field, in spite of the fact that "on the first day of the war, the mobilization of fourteen age groups was proclaimed in several military districts, including district of Odessa which included the Moldavian SSR" (1981, pp. 285, 286.) By sometimes selecting genuine facts and sometimes resorting to exaggeration and pure fabrication, the authors of the third, 1981, edition provided Soviet Moldavian historians and propaganda cadres with appropriate material for distorting the history of Bessarabia and its inhabitants. Thus, the authors of all three editions fail entirely to mention that the Khotin uprising in northern Bessarabia in January 1919 began as an attack launched across the Dniester from Ukrainian territory (1964, p. 89; 1968, p. 93; 1981, p. 100). Similarly, an attack by a Red Army detachment across the Dniester on the Bessarabian town of Bender in May 1919 is portrayed as an armed uprising by the workers of Bender: "High fighting morale and a fervent desire to drive out the hated invaders characterized the Bender workers' armed uprising on 27 May 1919. Rebels supported by armed detachments of peasants from the surrounding villages and partisans who had crossed the Dniester, seized the fortress. . . ." (1968, p. 98); "On 27 May 1919, the workers of Bender rose up in arms against the invaders. . . ." (1981, pp. 106, 107). Documents published in the Soviet Union, however, reveal that on 27 May 1919, what occurred was not an uprising by the workers of Bender but an attack by 150 Red Army soldiers, an attack which was immediately repulsed. This attack was criticized by the command of the Red Army (it occurred without its consent), and by Bessarabian Communists at their conference in Odessa, which took place soon after the events in Bender.20

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

I mentioned previously that the authors attempt to persuade the reader that, at the outbreak of war, the working people of Soviet Moldavia "displayed in deeds . . . their resolution to defend the socialist motherland" (1981, p. 290). This effort is not isolated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kishinev Cartea moldoveneasca published a series of memoirs of people who fought against Nazi Germany; the series was entitled V boiakh za Moldaviu ("In the Battles for Moldavia").21 Conspicuous throughout the entire series is that not one Bessarabian Moldavian is mentioned in connection with the battles for Moldavia. The introduction to the first volume of the series of memoirs insists that "the Moldavian people who had tested the fruits of a bright, happy existence did not accept the occupying regime and rose up in arms against it," but the contents of this volume, like those of the entire series, serve not to corroborate but to refute that and similar statements.22 Material in the series of the first, as well as the last, phase of the war on the territory of Soviet Moldavia, and material on the Moldavian partisans, also refute such statements. The series and the corresponding chapter in the Outlines (1981, pp. 284-335) show that Bessarabian Moldavians as a whole did not participate in the battles for Moldavia, neither in the so-called Moldavian partisan detachments nor in the ranks of the Soviet army. Both the authors of the series of memoirs and the authors of the Outline declared that the Moldavian people participated in the war. But they then reveal that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Moldavians did not fight in the battles for Moldavia, especially not the Bessarabian Moldavians. Russians and members of other nationalities of the USSR are rep¬ resented as the main participants in these battles. This assertion is reinforced by the fact that the material entitled "Heroes of Moldavian Land," which is inserted in the fourth volume of the war memoirs published in Kishinev (1976), mentions not one Moldavian name in connection with the last phase in the battles for Moldavia. Those mentioned by name are N. P. Matveev, V. U. Netesov, N. D. Shalimov, V. V. Zavalin, P. N. Grankin, I. P. Denichenko, P. N. Dubina, etc.23 A. Korenev, the author of both this and of the corresponding chapter in the Outline is the director of the Institute of Party History in Moldavia. The underlying idea that he communicated in the section on the war period in the history of the republic's Communist party, is that it was primarily Russians, as well as members of other nationalities of the USSR, who shed their blood in fighting for Soviet Moldavia, and they have even more right to the territory than has its indigenous population. This idea is expressed by implication in all of the other chapters of the Outline. It achieved legality in the

History of the Moldavian Communist Party

335

republics constitution adopted in 1978, which uses the expression "the people of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic," not "the Moldavian people."

Notes, Chapter 9 1. Ocherki istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii (Kishinev, 1964), pp. 512; 2nd ed., 1968, pp. 506; 3rd ed., 1981, pp. 654. 2. See Istoria Moldavskoi SSR (Kishinev, vol. 1, 1965; vol. 2, 1968); Letopis' vazhneishikh sobytii istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii (Kishinev, 1976); la. Grosul et al, eds., Moldavia. Ocherki istorii, etnografii, iskusstvovedenia (Kishinev, 1977), etc. 3. N. Berezniakov et al., eds., "Bor'ba trudiashchikhsia Moldavii protiv interventov i vnutrennei kontrrevoliutsii v 1917-1920," Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Kishinev, 1967), pp. 291-295. 4. S. Afteniuc, Leninskaia natsional’naia politika kommunisticheskoi partii i obrazovanie sovetskoi gosudarstvennosti moldavskogo naroda (Kishinev, 1971), pp. 125-126. 5. Pravda, 28 October 1924; 11 July 1940. 6. A. Lazarev, "Velikii oktiabr' i natsional'noe samoopredelenie moldav¬ skogo naroda" Sovetskaia Moldavia, 12 October 1975. 7. Izvestia sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh i krestianskikh deputatov goroda Moskvy i Moskovskoi oblasti, 21 January 1918. 8. See Enciclopedia Sovetica Moldoveneasca, vol. 7 (Kishinev 1977), p. 327. 9. See Letopis’ vazhneishikh sobytii istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Mooldavii, p. 355. 10. M. Bruchis, Rossia, Rumynia i Bessarabia. 1812 * 1918 * 1924 * 1940. (Tel-Aviv, 1979), p. 165. 11. Ibid., p. 166. 12. Letopis' vazhneishikh sobytii istorii kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii, p.

19. 13. See A. A. Korenev, "Na zemle moldavskoi," in Geroi podpol’a, vypusk vtoroi, vtoroe ispravlennoe i dopolnennoe izdanie (Moscow, 1970), p. 411; I. Levit et al., "Moldavskaia SSR v Velikoi otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza. 1941-1945," Sbornik dokumentov i materialov v dvukh tomakh, tom 2 (Kishinev, 1976), p. 579. 14. S. Afteniuc et al., Moldavskaia SSR v Velikoi otechestvennoi voine Sov¬ etskogo Soiuza (Kishinev, 1970), p. 29. 15. A. Lazarev, Moldavskaia sovetskaia gosudarstvennost' i bessarabskii vopros (Kishinev, 1974), p. 606. 16. N. Biblieishvili, G. Dygai, A. Zavtur, A. Pasikovskii, eds., "Rost i organizatsionnoe ukreplenie kommunisticheskoi partii Moldavii. 1924-1974," Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Kishinev, 1976), supplement.

336

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

17. V. Mocreac, A. Morar, A. Kheistver, Sredstva massovoi informatsii i ideologicheskaia bor'ba na sovremennom etape. Kritika burzhuaznogo "moldavovedenia" (Kishinev, 1983), p. 13. 18. Bratskoe sodruzhestvo sovetskikh respublik v khoziastvennom i kul'turnom stroitel'stve (Moscow, 1971), p. 85. 19. Pravda, 10 July 1940. 20. N. Berezniakov et al., “Bor'ba trudiashchikhsia Moldavii . . ." pp. 98-165. 21. V boiakh za Moldaviu. 1941-1944 (Kishinev, 1964); ibid., tom 2, 1968; ibid., tom 3, 1970; ibid., tom 4, 1976. 22. Ibid., tom 1, 1964, p. 5. 23. A. Korenev, “Geroi moldavskoi zemli/' in V boiakh za Moldaviu, tom 4, 1976, pp. 142-145.

10 The Concept of Homeland in Ion Druja's Writings

From the first half of the 1950s, Ion Drufa has become prominent in the literature of Soviet Moldavia. His collections of stories. In Our Village (1953) and Tale of Love (1954), from the beginning won him the appreciation of the readers, for whom they were "a true revelation."1 Numerous articles and studies dealing with the writer's work stress that his writings "spring from a profoundly popular mentality and vision, are structured on a foundation and from stuff of a pronouncedly national texture,"2 that the protagonists in these writings "embody a life experience of thousands of years, the objective ways of feeling and thinking of the people,"3 that Drufa "loves his heroes and shares with them wholeheartedly their emotions and aspirations."4 But, at the same time, "Druja's writings . . . have been disputed at length and contradicted."5 Thus, for instance, along with unreserved praise by some critics of his remarkable work Leaves of Sadness6 (whose first edition appeared in 1957), others have insisted that this novel is "up to our day held at a distance, under accusing eyes."7 Or, for example, the story "Old Age Is No Joy" (1959), appraised by some as a "masterpiece attacking . . . grave problems of the ethical order," as "one of the most brilliant stories of the contemporary Moldavian prose,"8 nevertheless elicited serious objections from others who accused the author of apprehending its hero's experiences "only and par excellence" in regard to his frivolous flirtation.9 Some noted the merits of the writer, stating that "having put aside the dogmatic scheme of a positive hero and of prearranged conflicts" (from the Republic's 1950-1955 prose), he sought "to discover the depths of the popular soul and the ways it reveals itself in the new historical conditions,"10 whereas others accused him of isolating his protagonists "from all that is new, from all that is a demand of the 337

338

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

epoch/'11 that he "romanticizes backwardness and outmoded tradi¬ tions" of people.12 Vasile Coroban, a Moldavian specialist in literature, stresses in his monograph "The Contemporary Moldavian Novel" that "from the different opinions about the Leaves of Sadness, one could infer that Drufa is an artist when describing human sentiments and a very poor writer when mirroring significant social and political aspects of reality."13 Yet he concedes that Leaves of Sadness is "a significant turning point in Moldavian artistic prose," in which Drufa "succeeded, for the first time in Soviet Moldavian literature, to present esthetically and in its fullness a human sentiment, without imitating anybody and while being deeply original, plastic and expressive."14 Coroban quotes a critic of Leaves of Sadness who maintains that the novel contains nothing but "quarrels and unmotivated actions," that, for a writer, love must be "something more than a pleasant sensation," and that it must become "a powerful means enabling him to discover unsuspected depths in the social psychology of people."15 Coroban then comments that "there are some extremely outrageous commentaries on this wonderful novel."16 Analysis of the commentaries on Drufas work produces a general conclusion that may help to clarify the sources and causes of either a pronouncedly negative or superlatively positive attitude on the part of the authors of these commentaries. On the one hand, even the outright "outrageous" commentaries stress "the depth and precision of the talented authors language in describing "general human char¬ acters,"17 whereas, on the other, even the most eulogistic of these commentaries mention certain "subjective and archaizing notes" in some of Drufas works,18 in which he sees "rather in black than in white the spiritual life of the village."19 Thus, all students of Drufas work, entirely without exception, unanimously recognize that his writings are talented creations, but, at the same time, they take diametrically opposite positions regarding all other considerations,20 especially those relating to the authors conceptions, and to the ideological orientation and the "lower depths" and "subterranean currents" of his writings.21 The main reason for the difference of opinion engendered by his work stems from meanings read "between the lines" and from "symbolic projections of realities" in this work.22 An article on prose writings in the Moldavian Republic declared that "after years of contradictory debate," some of Drufa's books should be reappraised."23 The author of the article, the writer I. C. Ciobanu, mentions in this respect the novel Leaves of Sadness. But

The Concept of Homeland in Ion Dru{a's Writings

339

even in connection with writings for which Drufa was awarded in 1967 the State Prize of Soviet Moldavia (the play Casa mare, the novel Ballads of the Steppe, and the novelette The Last Month of Autumn) “contradictory debate" raged for many years. Casa mare has finally asserted itself as a true “artistic revelation," a “remarkable original phenomenon in the literary and theatrical processes of the entire Soviet Union."24 But, after the publication in 1968 of the two-part novel Burden of Our Kindness (for the first part of which. Ballads of the Steppe, Drufa was awarded the State Prize), heated debate arose anew. The literary historian I. Racul, in an article published in the Moldavian Communist party organ, complained that “in appraising certain important social phenomena," Drufa failed “to remain at the level of the Ballads of the Steppe, that he “poetizes the old times," and did not grasp that the collectivization of the agriculture in Bessarabia “was realized not against the will of the working masses, but with their support." Racul stressed in this context that "the writer should not belabor himself with an artistic fixation of 'an isolated fact,' but instead must penetrate artistically the main trends of the reality," and that “the truth of life cannot be reduced merely to 'the truth of the fact.'"25 Thus, he actually reiterated the thesis of an author as it was presented in an article published in Moscow.26 But, at the same time, the Russian author A. Borshagovskii, in an encomiastic article in Literaturnaia gazeta on the novel Burden of Our Kindness, proffered a diametrically opposite opinion, declaring this work to be an expression of Soviet realities.27 Although the twin novel has been praised also by other authors outside the republic, its disparagement by Racul obtained the support of the Soviet Mol¬ davia's Party leadership.28 At the Thirteenth Congress of the Republic Party Organization (26-28 February 1971), V. Canicovschi, first sec¬ retary of the Kishinev City Committee, declared that the author of Burden of Our Kindness "lost the sense of measure and of Party, and of social approach to reality."29 Rallying the party leadership's stand, the poet P. Bofu, head of Moldavian Writers' Union, asserted that “for the sake of truth in isolated facts," Drula “treats erroneously the great truth of history and loses sometimes the real perspective. . . “30 And Ivan Bodiul, first secretary of the Central Committee of the communist organization of Soviet Moldavia, apparently alluded especially to the same twin novel by Drufa, when he stressed in his speech at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU (30 March-9 April 1971) that there still exists an infiltration into literature and art works presenting a distorted image of socialist reality, that some

340

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

creative people “propagate, basically, the idea of a classless noncritical understanding of the past"; they poetize in their writings customs and traditions that became obsolete long ago and oppose them to the Soviet reality which they describe tendentiously, discerning in it only negative aspects, thereby creating a favorable ground for the penetration into people's consciousness of concepts and moods alien to the Communist party.31 Attacks by the republic's party leadership could not, of course, be disregarded by those who analyzed Drufa's work. However, remem¬ bering the failure of previous denigrations of some of his writings, his admirers, while acknowledging some of their deficiencies, continued to stress their great artistic worth and to accord high appreciation to the writer's unequaled talent. Thus, after the assault on the second part of the twin novel had already been launched, Coroban maintained that “from the artistic viewpoint. Ballads of the Steppe are weaker than the Burden of Our Kindness." He thereby seems to contest Racul's assertion that Drufa failed to remain at the level of the Ballads of the Steppe, and emphasizes that, in Burden of Our Kindness “the extent of the events' objectivity has increased."32 In April 1973, Kodry, the Russian-language magazine published by the Writers' Union of Moldavia, carried an article entitled “Contin¬ uation of Merits," a review of the Burden of Our Kindness. Right at the beginning, the author of the article, V. Kravchenko, declared that the earth represented by Drufa for his readers “inspires the first love, which remains the last as well."33 Extolling Drufa's twin novel, Kravchenko concludes that the merits of the author's work are in¬ contestable, whereas its deficiencies are disputable. But when he analyzes the disputable deficiencies, the critic thereupon contradicts his own thesis and presents them as incontestable even from his standpoint. (He apparently was influenced by the hostile attitude of the authorities to the second part of Drufa's novel, and sought to comply with that attitude.) Kravchenko's emphasis in appreciating the incontestable merits of the two-part novel, as well as of Drug's work as a whole, while minimizing, diluting, and attenuating, as far as possible, the defi¬ ciencies, could not, of course, please the authorities and those literary critics who unreservedly rallied behind them. Thus, a mere two months after the publication of the literary analysis signed by Kravchenko, Kodry magazine printed another article dealing with the two-part novel. This time, in full compliance with the authorities' attitude, M. Novokhatskii, the author of the article, emphasizes those aspects of Burden of Our Kindness that he thinks denote a “purposefully objectivist.

The Concept of Homeland in Ion Druid's Writings

341

purposefully 'classless' position of the two-part novel's author,"34 and the critic adds that it is not that Drufa "does not portray social processes profoundly enough, but that he often does not even un¬ derstand them" and "sees the ideal in the patriarchal past."35 The general significance of two key points, the symbolism in Drufa's two-part novel (the image of Bulgare, Nuta's vision in the reconciliation episode of Mircea and Nica, etc.), and the depiction in its second part of the dreary existence of the Bessarabian village in the postwar years (hunger, "loyalty lists," etc.), especially drew the attention of all of the critics of the Burden of Our Kindness who participated in the 1973 debate initiated by Kodry magazine: not only V. Kravchenko and M. Novokhatskii, but also O. Semenovskii and G. Skvirenko.36 The symbolism of the novel and the ways in which Drufa depicted the existence of the Bessarabian village were also criticized in an editorial that summarized the debate.37 The magazine's editorial board adopted Novokhatskii's position both in connection with episode of Mircea's and Nica's reconciliation ("not class enemies are they, but brethren in Christ")38 and with the depiction by Drufa, for instance, of the resentment of the Ciutura villagers against the "representatives of Soviet power" ("they can come at night, remove everything from your house, and at the same time remove you yourself").39 Novokhatskii concluded that the "novel needs not only, even not so much praise . . . but an earnest and impartial criticism. Yes, the author's talent is a talent, but no less important is in what direction is it oriented and whom does it serve?"40 At the same time, the editorial board rejected as "very relative and unconvincing"47 Skvirenko's thesis that, by the "reconciliation of Mircea and Nica," "I. Drufa condemns the narrowmindedness of such a position," declaring that "certain facts are reflected by the writer not through the prism of the position's truth, but rather of its untruth."42 Although basically it shared the opinions expressed in the article by Novokhatskii, who, as the board says, "succeeded in discerning the position of the author's abstract humanitarianism in describing certain events and images," the editorial board dissociated itself from the logical conclusion implied in Novokhatskii's article, that Drufa's talent is not "oriented" in the novel "in the direction of serving" Soviet interests.43 In obvious contradiction to this conclusion, which can be drawn from Novokhatskii's article, and to its own analysis of the novel ("subjectivist positions did not allow him [Drufa] to penetrate sufficiently the sphere of class struggle," etc.),44 the editorial board of Kodry concluded that "Ion Drufa's talent is generally recognized;

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

it is original and picturesque. And by his work, permeated by poetry, the artist serves the people."45 Thus, in summing up the debate, the editorial board condemned the "classless, subjectivist position," the "idealization of the patriarchal past" in Burden of Our Kindness, while, at the same time, reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to this negative attitude toward the twin novel, maintaining that Drufa "serves the people" by his work. It is no wonder that not only the editorial board, but also the majority of the participants in the 1973 debate, despite the obviously negative stance of the republic's party leadership to the Burden of Our Kindness, resorted to ambivalent assertions in evaluating the novel, and diluted their criticism with praise. What matters here above all is the fact that, when the debate was initiated, Drufa's talent had long before been generally recognized by readers of prose and spectators of plays not only in the Moldavian Republic, but throughout the Soviet Union. Thus, Ion Constantin Ciobanu expressed, as far back as 1965, the republic's readers' appreciation of Drufa's prose. "For the understanding of this prose," he wrote, "the appraisal of Mihail Sadoveanu by George Calinescu can serve: because Ion Drufa too creates his own romantic world, built from the poetry of the reality. And it is beautiful, and is dear to us."46 At the beginning of 1973, Andrei Popov, director of the Central Theater of the Army in Moscow, classed Drufa in the first place among the playwrights and writers he considered the best in the USSR, ahead of such authors as V. Rozov, A. Arbuzov, et al.47 Several months later, in July 1973, E. Zaitsev, first deputy of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR, mentioned Drufa as one of those writers "without whom one cannot imagine contemporary Soviet drama."48 Ion Drufa is the sole Moldavian writer having earned such appre¬ ciation not only within the Moldavian Republic, but also, and especially, in other Soviet republics; not only of spectators and readers, but, and especially, of people of culture and of literary and theatrical criticism in the whole of the Soviet Union. In an interview given to a reporter of the Moscow magazine Theater, in August 1971, Valeriu Cupcea, director of the Moldavian theater "Pushkin" in Kishinev, mentioned Drufa's play, Birds of Our Youth, which he intended to produce, and said that "most of the Moldavian directors" saw it "with great appetite."49 And the leading article in the same magazine of August 1973 states that Drufa's plays "attract by their high literary qualities."50

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The poetic images, the metaphors, the mythological-popular coloring of Birds of Our Youth, have also been noted in an article published at the beginning of 1973 in Pravda, the central newspaper of the CPSU.51 By the poetic charm of his plays, Druja impressed all of their critics in all of the Soviet Union.52 The leadership of the Moldavian republic could therefore not ostracize and totally put into the shadows a writer of Drufa's stature without running the risk of being accused by the higher echelons of the CPSU that it did not do enough to “reeducate" him in the spirit of the respective demands for literature. Just such an attempt to "reeducate" the author of the Burden of Our Kindness, to force him to follow the path laid down by the Party for Soviet writers, was the debate initiated in 1973 by Kodry. By his ambivalent formulations in the article summarizing this debate, A. Nanev, the chief editor of the magazine conformed to the position of the Central Committee of the republic's Communist party, from whose staff he had been transferred to head Kodry. And the concluding lines of this article, in which the editorial board, led by the party activist A. Nanev, maintained that "the fate of every true artist is indissolubly tied to the problems of contemporaneity of the people's life and achievements, of confidence in the triumph of the people's glorified future," constituted less an encouragement than a serious warning for Drufa.53 Neither direct attacks nor camouflaged warnings succeeded in moving Dru^a from his convictions. As if in response to the debate in the Kodry, Druja expounded his creed in a story published in Russian in 1974, as follows: "The hardship of our profession is bound to our duty to base each of our lines on the gold of veracity, if we want our buildings to last."54 Also as a retort to his critics, Drufa even emphasized precisely those aspects of his work on which were concentrated all of the attacks inspired by the Party's republic lead¬ ership, headed by its first secretary Ivan Bodiul. Concomitant with the criticism of Burden of Our Kindness voiced at the Twelfth Congress of the Moldavian Communist party, the Moscow magazine Theater prepared for typesetting its May 1971 issue, containing Drufa's play Doina.55 The Moldavian version of this play, submitted by the author to the magazine Nistru, had been rejected by its editorial board (headed by the poet E. Bucov), for basically the same reasons for which the party leadership launched its attack against the two-part novel. Then, in the February 1972 issue of the Moscow magazine Druzhba narodov, Drufa published the story "Return to One's Own Circuits" ("Vozvrashchenie na krugi svoia"), dedicated to Lev Tolstoi. In this

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story, the echoes of Drufa's creed also resound. Thus, the hero, speaking of the knowledge that can prevent errors, stresses that "the mercenaries of the hangmen and those who hold for them the rope sense by their instinct of self-preservation that knowledge . . . would make it impossible to maintain the position they are afraid to lose, and therefore they not only are reluctant to acquire such knowledge but, by all means in their power, by violence, by perfidy and cruelty, they try to keep it from people, to distort it, harassing and persecuting in every way those who attempt to disseminate it."56 Finally, in July 1973, in the midst of the debate over the twin novel initiated by Kodry, the Moscow magazine Iunost ordered the typesetting of the novelette Smell of Ripened Quince,57 in which Drufa again "walks on the knife's edge," in the sense that he amplifies and deepens those motifs of his previous works that provoked the wrath of Soviet Moldavia's party leadership. The Smell of Ripened Quince, like Leaves of Sadness, Casa mare, the second part of the novel Burden of Our Kindness, etc., also aroused heated contradictory discussion. Thus, the Russian critic L. Iakimenko published in December 1973 an article in Literaturnaia Rossia, in which he complained that Drufa "does not try hard enough to motivate and explain" the actions and behavior of the protagonists of his new novelette.58 And the critic F. Kuznetsov stated, in the February 1974 issue of Literaturnoe obozrenie, that the theme of Drufa's new novelette is "the same sentiment of homeland," and that Smell of Ripened Quince is a poetic story of respect for the ancestral past, of admiration for popular traditions, of noble and bright sentiments." But, on the other hand, he maintained that Drufa's "polemic pathos" in connection with the condition and protection of ancient Moldavian monuments is strained and unnatural" because, he asks, "who attempts in our days history as a positive experience of the people and a moral factor for bringing up youth, if it interprets the past from social, class-oriented positions?" Asserting further that, if the writer's social positions are not sufficiently clear, "emotional alarm can sometimes be transformed into nostalgia for the past," Kuznetsov concluded that the essence of this problem for the Smell of Ripened Quince consists in a "contradiction between the realistic initial bases of Drufa's poetic prose and his polemic sermons, having become romantic tendentiousness ... a certain complex of moral a priori ideas."59 Two months after Kuznetsov's article appeared in Literaturnoe obozrenie, the magazine Druzhba narodov, published an article by V. Osotskii dealing with the same novelette. As if contesting Kuznetsov's thesis of a "contradiction between the realistic bases of Dru{a's poetic

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345

prose and ... a certain complex of moral a priori ideas" in the Smell of Ripened Quince, this author asserts, on the contrary, that the novelette "intertwines in the structure of its images history with contempor¬ aneity," that it "poetically affirms the tie between epochs and gen¬ erations."60 The means by which Drufa realized the main theme of Smell of Ripened Quince (the attitude toward the historic past of Bessarabian Moldavians) and in which he portrayed the realities of the contem¬ porary Bessarabian countryside in the play Doina, could by no means please the party leadership of the Moldavian republic. Nevertheless, the serious objections raised by Moscow critics of the conflict (con¬ sidered "strained and unnatural") in the Smell of Ripened Quince were not immediately developed by literary critics in Kishinev. As early as 1972, after the publication of Doina by a Moscow magazine and before the Smell of Ripened Quince appeared, the specialist in literature Haralambie Corbu, complying with party policies and evidently referring especially to Drufa, declared that "there are works with grave ideological deficiencies ... in which an attempt is being made to represent the historic past from a classless position, in which bygone times are pictured in idyllic colors and the importance of the national moment is exaggerated."67 The formal (and temporary) silence regarding the grave deficiencies (from the viewpoint of the governing party leadership) of Doina and Smell of Ripened Quince by the republic's press organs is not accidental, and it has several reasons. One of these reasons is the resounding success of the play Birds of Our Youth, which was produced not only at "some Moldavian and Russian theaters in Soviet Moldavia," but also at many theaters in other Soviet republics, including two of the most renowned in Moscow.62 Like the extraordinary success of the Casa mare at the beginning of the previous decade, which cut short the contradictory discussions on the Leaves of Sadness and other writings, so the inclusion of Birds of Our Youth in the repertory of theaters in many cities of the Soviet Union (Moscow, Riga, Tallin, Vilnius, Odessa, Kazan', Kostroma, Minsk, Moghilev, etc.), and numerous extremely flattering reviews by theater critics, all of whom emphasized the playwright's exceptional talent temporarily prevented open criticism of Doina and Smell of Ripened Quince in Soviet Moldavia.63 Another reason that temporarily silenced the criticism by Moscow reviewers of the Smell of Ripened Quince was that Soviet Moldavia's party leadership had been compelled to acknowledge the lamentable condition of the historic and cultural monuments of the Moldavians,

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and even their complete ruin, often due to the fault of the authorities. Thus, in December 1974, at the Twelfth Plenary Session of the CP of Moldavia's Central Committee, P. Lucinschi, the propaganda sec¬ retary of the CC, admitted that “many of these monuments are in a deplorable condition."64 It is significant that the party secretary did not resort to the term of diminution usual in official pronouncements on negative aspects of Soviet realities ("some of these monuments"); this is a sure indication that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of the Moldavian historical and cultural monuments were intended. Thus, despite all the doubt expressed by the critic F. Kuznetsov in connection with the topic of the Smell of Ripened Quince, which in his words has "too little veracity," the problem raised by Drufa in that novelette was not only a very serious one but also absolutely true, as was actually confirmed by the republic party leadership itself.65 All these reasons, together with the great success of the Birds of Our Youth, which enjoyed great success in the theaters and in 1972 was awarded the first prize at the all-union competition on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Union, temporarily silenced the public criticism in Soviet Moldavia.66 More and more articles and reviews overlooked the "sins" ("classless position," "idealization of the patriarchal past") imputed to Drufa by the authorities either in closed meetings or covertly in the press; instead they mentioned and stressed his talent and art. Thus, in March 1974, Ion Ciocanu, apparently aiming especially at those of Drufa's writings that could not please the republic's party leadership, for¬ mulated a thesis: to become a true guide for the reader, the literary critic should avoid the "ridiculous glorification" of authors who describe "very actual, but ephemeral" things, and should appreciate for their true value those works that, for certain reasons, do not enjoy support at the present moment, despite their aesthetic worth.67 The late director of the Institute of Language and Literature, Simion Cibotaru, contested Ciocanu's thesis because he had in view writings "very real" from the standpoint of the authorities but weak in their aesthetic value, and those of real artistic worth but unacceptable, for considered reasons, to these authorities and therefore condemned by them.68 Ion Ciocanu repeated his thesis on the prime importance of a literary work's aesthetic value in an article published in October 1975.69 The acknowledgment by the Communist party leadership of the deplorable condition of the historical and cultural monuments allowed S. Rybak, a Kishinev Russian-language literary critic, to contest the negative evaluations of Smell of Ripened Quince in the aforementioned

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review by F. Kuznetsov. In his article of March 1976, Rybak stressed that Kuznetsov "evinced a total ignorance of the real basis of the novelette's conflict," that the Smell of Ripened Quince "deals with the not-too-distant past, when monuments of the greatest worth not only were not protected, but were inconsiderately demolished."70 However, Rybak wrote his article with one eye on the party leadership's attitude toward Drufa and with his other eye on the reading public's high estimation of his work. This ambivalence by the critic found its expression in the following assertion: Where he reconstructs lovingly, in romantic hues, the life of the Moldavian village and of its inhabitants, where he penetrates the charming soul of the working people in the villages, the writer unveils the unknown and is a poet of Moldavia. But where the exaltation and the overpowering sadness connected with some manifestations of reality require not only emotional ardor, but also a disinterested artistic search in the spirit of epic realities, Ion Drufa blunders.71 Still, at the beginning of the second half of the 1970s, the aesthetic value of Drufa's work was again emphasized. Thus, the poet Bogdan Istru, in a report presented in September 1976 at a meeting of Soviet writers and literary critics in Kishinev, said that Drufa tended in his writings to preserve and amplify "the ethical and moral qualities acquired and maintained by the Moldavian peasantry in the course of time," that he "discovers and unveils the artistic values of the simple life of working people in the villages," and that "such images as Vasiluta (Casa mare), Onache Carabus (Burden of Our Kindness), and Rusu (Birds of Our Youth), entrance us by their soulful charm and their humaneness."72 Furthermore, in April 1976, the poet Andrei Lupan said that Drufa's acute sensitivity "has something from Esenin,"73 and the critic D. Tampei wrote a few months later, in July 1976, that Drufa "unveils in village matters social and moral problems, the strength of mind of his contemporaries, as determined by Soviet ideals and the Soviet way of life."74 It can therefore easily be seen that all these stand in obvious contradiction to the attitude of the authorities of Soviet Moldavia toward Doina, Smell of Ripened Quince, and other writings of the 1970s. It was especially Drufa at whom Ivan Bodiul aimed when he stated in his report to the Fourteenth Congress of the Moldavian Communist party in January 1976 that "some authors commit sins against truth, meddling with unimportant archaic things and current troubles."75

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And the article “The Duty to Base on the Gold of Veracity," published in the official Russian-language newspaper of the Moldavian Com¬ munist party CC in February 1977, is to be considered a call to order by the authorities addressed both to literary critics as well as to the leadership of the Moldavian Writers' Union, who began to overlook and to attenuate aspects of Drufa's works, which from their point of view were unacceptable and even outright damaging. The article shows that its author, A. Mereuta, was well versed both in the analytical methods used by Soviet literary criticism, and in the governing party's criteria in judging artistic writings. However, none of the works, reviews, and studies counted in the bibliographic index of the republic's literary criticism and history of literature for the years 1966-1970 or in its sequel for the years 1971-1976 is signed by this name.76 We can therefore infer that it is a pen name used by the author to hide his conformism and obedience to the Party's position on literary problems. This article makes the following assertions:

Drufa's faulty prerequisites exclude objective analyzing of and re¬ flecting on the processes and phenomena of contemporary Moldavian spiritual life, dealt with in Smell of Ripened Quince. Drufa's thesis is preconceived and obviously insulting to hundreds of simple people. At the base of the novelette is the problem of the attitude toward the spiritual and cultural heritage, and Dru{a maintains that, in this respect, ignorance overwhelms knowledge, and the blind power of destruction overwhelms the elementary duty to preserve the monuments of the past. The relation of the past to the contemporaneity outlined in the Smell of Ripened Quince is obviously to the disfavor of contemporaneity; the past appears as a standard of the true values of human life. Drufa's assertions, obviously tendentious and lacking foundation, his estrangement from the deep sociopolitical and cultural transformation of the republic's life. . . ,77

These examples show that A. Mereuta expresses the party leadership's attitude toward those of Drufa's works in which, apart from other “failings" from the point of view of this leadership, “the patriarchal past has been identified with the true essence of the people's char¬ acter."78 But they also show that this leadership has decided to give a serious warning not only to Drufa, but also to those writers and critics who unreservedly praised his work.

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On Drug's fiftieth birthday, H. Corbu (in an article in Moldova socialista) and S. Cibotaru (in Sovetskaia Moldavia) therefore took pains to stress what is usually avoided on an anniversary: the "deficiencies” of the work of the person being honored. H. Corbu, after listing the merits of Drufa's work, complained. Things are different with the other aspects of Ion Drufa's creation. The social and psychological transformations having occurred in the souls and the mentality of the republic's people in the immediate postwar years do not always find a true embodiment. Literary criticism on some occasions has partly mentioned the subjectivist note in the representation of the hard drought years 1946-1947, the tendentiousness in depicting Mircea's image in the novel Burden of Our Kindness, and in the inter¬ pretation of the concept of values and spiritual traditions in the novelette Smell of Ripened Quince, et al.79

S. Cibotaru parroted the same theme, emphasizing in his article that the "negative phenomena" that characterize "some of I. Drufa's writings have been subjected to an objective criticism."80 That even articles paying homage to Drufa have emphasized that some of his writings are not free of certain deficiencies, proves that these deficiencies are considered extremely grave. Drufa's talent and aesthetic value and peculiar charm of his writings, are generally recognized both in Soviet Moldavia and in the whole of the Soviet Union. However, with regard to deficiencies attributed to some of his writings, no such unanimity can be discerned, not even within Soviet Moldavia. Therefore, I shall concentrate on an analysis of just these "deficiencies." *

*

*

Serious objections used to be raised by the authorities and the promoters of their policies in the domain of literature on the publication of each new work by Drufa. In the course of time, however, the reservations were gradually dispelled, and today writings like, for instance. Leaves of Sadness (1957), Casa mare (1962), The Last Month of Autumn (1965), etc., are unreservedly praised in the republic. Today there is no more talk of the writer's classless position in these works or of the idealization in them of the patriarchal past, etc. Naturally, the question arises whether the same will not happen also to such writings by Drufa as the second part of the twin novel Burden of Our Kindness (1968), or the play Doina (1971), or the novelette Smell of Ripened Quince (1973). They too may be reappraised in time, the initial

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objections may vanish, the charm emanated by these works may prevail as it did with Drug's previous writings, and they may be judged above all through the prism of their aesthetic standards. Such an eventuallity would occur if the point were merely that Drufa portrays in these writings things that (to use Ion Ciocanu's terminology) are of no actuality and therefore, "all their merits notwithstanding," they "do not enjoy support at the present moment," i.e., at their publication.81 That the topic of the Smell of Ripened Quince, for instance, possessed actuality in Soviet Moldavia has been confirmed not only by P. Lucinschi, the secretary for propaganda of the Central Committee. The literary critic S. Rybak, in order to prove the inconsistencies of F. Kuznetsov's assertions, mentioned (in March 1976) the deplorable condition of such monuments of the past as the Dormition Church at Causani (beginning of the eighteenth century) or the fortress of Soroca (end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries).82 And the poet B. Istru wrote (in April 1976) that, whereas the authorities previously declared that they had no time to occupy themselves with monuments of history and culture, then they began to pay attention to them.83 Finally, the removal of the linguist N. Corlateanu from the post of chairman of the Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture, and the appointment of G. Afteniuc to this post, to hold it concurrently with his duties as deputy chairman of the Presidium of the republic's Supreme Soviet, is also to be seen as a definite indication that the problem of protection of monuments of history and culture was very actual in Soviet Moldavia. P. Lucinschi's abovementioned report of December 1974 proves that one of the crucial problems in Drufa's play Doina (conformism, wheeling-dealing, corruption of Soviet cadres) also was of acute actuality and "based on the gold of veracity." P. Lucinschi unveiled not only the foul dealings of a chairman of a district soviet and of his deputy, but also contraventions and delinquencies of commercial employees who, according to him, "went even to the extreme of initiating a kind of offensive against representatives of the militia, the press, and public opinion."84 Consequently, Drufa was not exposed to the opprobrium of the Soviet Moldavian authorities because the Burden of Our Kindness, Doina, and the Smell of Ripened Quince were "of no actuality" "at the present moment," i.e., at their publication. Nor was he so criticized for "singing the praises of patriarchal customs and mores."85 Ivan Bodiul, at the Fourth Congress of Soviet Moldavian Writers in April 1971, condemned this fault, inadmissible

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from the standpoint of the governing party; he declared that "the writers should regard as their main role the portraying of the variegated creative life in Soviet Moldavia, of its striking socialist achievements."86 But the basic reason for the authorities' negative attitude toward Drufa does not lie in his "singing the praises of patriarchal customs and mores." In support of this assertion, the following fact could be cited: Ruta, the protagonist of the play Birds of Our Youth, appears as an idealized embodiment of the patriarchal past, and Drufa revealed, in an interview with the writer Serafim Saca, his boundless sympathy for Ruta in the following words: "Ruta is what I loved, what I was obsessed with, what has been and remains holy for me on our soil";87 but this play was never disapproved by the republic's authorities and is considered by their literary sycophants as one of Drufa's successes.88 Thus, the real reason for the unfavorable appraisal of the writings of Dru(a is different. It is recorded not in the lines of the official pronouncements, but between the lines. In this respect, one could say that the objections to these works have their between-the-lines significance; like the writings themselves, they have two aspects, two totally distinct levels, which for the authorities the surface level is less important than the hidden level. Because, in fact, Drufa is criticized by the party leadership of Soviet Moldavia not for "singing the praises of patriarchal customs and mores" nor for his "classless position" (such labels are used to disorient public opinion by the surface aspect of the party leaderships' objections to some of Druta's writings). Rather, Drufa is criticized for his national position. The national motif occurs frequently in his writing. And the motif is not merely national. Nor is it even only a Soviet Moldavian national motif, whose exaggeration (like any exaggeration of national specificity of the life of non-Russian Soviet peoples) is damnable in the eyes of the governing party leadership. Throughout the imagery of these writings, the national motif continually recurs as a Romanian national motif, an incomparably graver fault from the viewpoint of the Soviet Moldavian party leadership. In his story dedicated to Tolstoi (1972), Drula writes that the great novelist "waited patiently, at length, for the first sentence to be born— that key, that tonality, that rhythm necessary for the entire work."89 This evaluation of the first sentence of a work could also be applied to the Burden of Our Kindness, for the key to that novel is located in the very first pages of its first part, the Ballads of the Steppe. M. Novokhatskii, one of the most outspoken critics of the two-part novel, insists that its opening episode, in which Drufa depicts the crossing of the Dniester by Onache Carabus from the left (Soviet) bank to the

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right (Romanian) bank at the end of the civil war in Russia, when the Dniester became the state border of the “Soviet land with the Romanian kingdom," "determines the whole tonality of the novel." It is a kind of key unveiling the author's purposefully objectivist, purposefully “classless" position, the position of an abstract humanist, of a man who does not portray social processes profoundly enough, and "often does not even understand them."90 The episode analyzed by Novokhatskii indeed reveals Drufa's po¬ sition, but by no means as “classless." The very way in which Novokhatskii reproduces this episode, and especially that moment in which, in his words, “on the Romanian bank of the Dniester appears Bulgare and entreats the soldiers remaining on other side to return to the homeland," proves it.91 By the name “Bulgare" given to this character in the twin novel, Drufa associates him with the land, the ancestral soil of his people. And Bulgare's call from the right, Bessarabian, bank to the Bessarabian Moldavians (former soldiers in the tsar's army), that they should return from the left, Ukrainian, bank of the Dniester to their homeland, is the voice of the people calling its sons to return to the ancestral hearth. Throughout the twin novel, Bulgare appears as a symbol of the Bessarabian Moldavians' national consciousness. The homeland in this national consciousness (with which the author identifies himself) spreads eastward up to the Dniester. Bulgare, as a symbol, as well as Onache Carabus and other heroes of the novel, consider the territory named by the Soviet authorities Moldavia of the left bank of the Dniester as lying outside their homeland's boundaries. That consideration is the main cause of the attacks made by the republic's party leadership and the promoters of its policies in the sphere of literature upon Drufa. No less offensive from the viewpoint of the Soviet Moldavian authorities is the explicit or implied allusion in the novel to the west Prutian territory as part of the homeland concept of Bessarabian Moldavians. The endless wanderings of Bulgare from the Dniester to the Prut and from the Prut back to the Dniester are an expression of the people's consciousness that Bessarabia was severed from the living body of the fatherland, which spreads beyond the Prut and ends in the east, on the banks of the Dniester. The concept of homeland as circumscribed by the borders of the Romanian state unified in 1918, and not as the counties detached from Bessarabia in the middle of 1940 and artificially joined with the narrow strip of land on the left, Ukrainian, side of the Dniester,

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finds expression on many pages in Drufa's twin novel: on those recounting how Paraschifa's husband left in 1940 for the Donbas and was lost in those foreign lands; and on those in which Drufa describes the emotional state of Onache Carabus (whose two sons fell in the Crimea in the ranks of the Romanian army), when he fearfully expects the Soviet militiamen to deport him to cold foreign lands, i.e., to Siberia. Especially significant in this respect is the episode of the recon¬ ciliation of Mircea and Nica, and Nuta's consequent vision, one point of the episode is the working together, under the spell of the earths vigor, of the two former rivals in love and adversaries in war: of Nica, an officer in the Romanian army, and Mircea, a sergeant in the Soviet army. Another point is Nuta's vision; fascinated by their reconciliation, she thinks that it would be good to charm all of them, to turn them into stone figures, so that they would remain for many centuries, and only when everything in the world is finally settled will the charmer bring them to life again to finish loading the sunflower seeds and to return together to the village. A third point is especially Druta's remark that the wise earth seemed to know that wherever fate might throw them, they eventually will come together again and settle down together; that the earth, meaning the fatherland, will bring them back to their beliefs. These three points aroused vehement criticism, as the "apotheosis of nonacceptance of the laws of real life, with its class struggle."92 As in other criticisms of this kind, the national position of Druja's heroes, with whom he identifies himself, is qualified as classless. The proponents of official policies in the sphere of literature thereby seek to camouflage the authorities' desire not to disclose the true implications of Drufa's novel. For it symbolizes a complete nonacceptance not of the class struggle, but of Russia's rule in Bessarabia, a propagation of the idea that the territory of the latter is an integral part of the Romanian state and that the Bessarabian Moldavians are an inseparable part of the Romanian people. This point is plain in the reconciliation episode, after which Mircea helps Nica to cross the Prut to its Romanian bank, and Drufa expresses his conviction that the earth, meaning the fatherland, will eventually reunite them, and Nica will return to his native village. Drufa truly sings hymns to labor and forms images like Uncle Mihail in the novella Sleigh, or Ichim in the story "Stone Bank" who "had kneaded, toil-hardened hands, two honest hands of a stonemason, but somehow he was ashamed of them when facing others, and whenever there were too many people around him he sought to hide them in his pockets. . . ." ; or Uncle Cires from the story "Old Age

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Is No Joy" in whose hands the "space wept with big tears," those "two hands who for so long fed the village," or finally, Tolstoi's image from the "Return to One's Own Circuits," whose hand on the third day after the departure of the soul was still at work, still wanted to say something in those moments of separation, but what—we do not know and never will." It is significant in this respect that the reconciliation of Mircea and Nica in the Burden of Our Kindness took place during work in the fields; this symbol constitutes another proof that Dru{a sympathizes with those who toil, and that his position is obviously a class position, and not classless. However, this position is not at the same time unnational. On the contrary, his assertion that Nica, who went beyond the Prut, will eventually return and reunited with Mircea, who remained with Nuta in Bessarabia, confirms this point. The vision of the future, when Nica, Mircea, and Nuta will get together in their native village, as part of Drug's overall vision of the fate of his people and homeland, is also reflected in writings published after the Burden of Our Kindness e.g., the Smell of Ripened Quince.93 The recurring use of the term "little homeland" in this novelette constitutes a leitmotiv, as a direct continuation of the symbol of homeland in the Burden of Our Kindness. In portraying the heroes of the Smell of Ripened Quince in the spellbinding atmosphere of the dawn, Drufa writes: "The holy land of our forefathers, the land of our parents, the land of our children— how else could we express the thrilling sentiment grasping a person at each encounter with the little homeland. . . ?" (p. 14). The "little homelands" are one's childhood lands. One of them is the Bukovina of Horia Holban, the novelette's hero. Another is the northern Bessarabia of the girl whom Horia loved and who invited him to visit her native village. These two "little homelands" are but parts of that homeland in its entirety to which that morning the whoops of the lovers' joy "went coupled, hand in hand, far to the west, beyond the Prut" (p. 14). Thus, Drula's homeland in its entirety is not separately Bukovina, or northern Bessarabia, or Kishinev from where, after Horia's discharge from the hospital, the train takes him "to the north, where his two little homelands are, where his love is, where his great pain lies" (p. 14). In the imagery of the Smell of Ripened Quince not even "beyond the Prut," where the lovers' whoops of joy echo becomes lost, restricts this homeland. The symbol of homeland in Horia's memorable history lecture (p. 30) is not only the whole of Moldavia of Stephen the Great, including Valea Alba beyond the waters of the Siret where, in

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1476, a battle with the Turks occurred. Also mentioned in this lecture as a symbol of the people's heroism are the peasants' rebellions of 1907 (p. 30), which, as is well known, began with troubles in the village Flaminzi in Botosani County spread over all west Prutian Moldavia, and then reached Muntenia and Oltenia.94 The authors and editors of the Soviet Moldavian Encyclopedia describe these rebellions as having occurred in Romania.95 When examining the Smell of Ripened Quince from the aspect of Drufa's concept of homeland, worthy of mention is the subtle antithesis of the names Horia, the history teacher symbolizing the east Prutian Moldavians' national Romanian consciousness and Balta, the school director symbolizing the tendency of the authorities to denationalize Bessarabia's native population. The name of the hero, the Bukovinian Horia, creates an association with the national martyr, the Transyl¬ vanian Horia who led in 1784 "the mightiest manifestation of the Romanian peasants' fight against their exploitation by the nobility"; it serves in the imagery of Drufa's novelette as an important detail of the concept of homeland "from the Dniester to the Tisa."96 On the other hand, the name of the school director, the transDnieper Balta, symbolizes those semiliterate russified Moldavians who, after the events of the mid-1940s, were sent to Bessarabia from the Autonomous Moldavian Republic (created by Moscow in 1924 on the left bank of the Dniester, with the town of Balta as its capital) and utilized by the Soviet authorities to further their policies of dena¬ tionalizing the Bessarabian Moldavians, of rooting out their historic memory and consciousness of being a component part of the Romanian people. "Before the war [Balta] finished a seven-year school, . . . enrolled in an off-campus section of a pedagogical technicum, . . . and no one knows whether he finished it at all" (p. 29); then, in the postwar years, this semiliterate Balta became "a school inspector at the republic's Education Ministry and inspected schools he himself did not finish. ..." (p. 29). Then Balta was promoted to school director; "if a teacher used, in order to illustrate an idea, examples not from the textbook, [Balta] required a report indicating the source, the exact pages and respective passages" (p. 29). Balta also did all he could to destroy the tocsin (the Moldavian published version of the novelette is entitled Clopotnita, Tocsin) built half a millenium ago in memory of Daniil the Hermit (pp. 30-31). Balta is thus the symbol by which Drufa stigmatizes the trans-Dnieper promoters of official policies who, on the one hand, attempted to wipe from the memory of the Bessarabian Moldavians their historic past, and, on the other, organized conferences on "the origins of the

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Moldavian language" (pp. 26-27), aiming at its transformation into a Moldavian-Russian-Ukrainian jargon in order to tear it away from the Romanian language. But not only trans-Dnieper russifiers, symbolized by Balta, are stigmatized in the Smell of Ripened Quince. Drufa treats in the same way the conformists from among the Bessarabians, typified by the university lecturer Rotaru who "had one dream only: to have a good life, to wear new clothes, to row, to lecture—and to hell with the rest" (p. 23). Depicting machinations by Balta, who says to himself (in connection with a newspaper item on the book Cultural Monuments of Moldavia, being written by Horia) that "historical tracts, as is well known, can be written from a correct position and can be written from a wrong position" (p. 29), Drufa anticipates criticism of his own writings generally and especially of the Smell of Ripened Quince, which is written from a wrong position in the eyes of people like the left-banker Balta, or of the Bessarabian Rotaru, who makes every effort to conform to the "correct position," and succeeds so well that, although he is but a mere candidate of sciences, he is elected on his "merits" associate member of the Academy, ahead of many doctors eager for this title (p. 40). In the Smell of Ripened Quince, Drufa stigmatizes conformism in all domains of spiritual life. Indignant, for instance, that the republic studio turns out poor films, that the press (notwithstanding the public's indifference toward the films) praises them, that their viewings by students are organized, Dru(a, identifying himself with his hero, remarks: "The hall was large, the spectators few, and they were advised to sit dispersed like chessmen on a board, to create the impression, in case the pro-rector appeared, that the hall was full. On the screen, artificial people performed, their acts as unnatural as their sayings. Horia sat bent over: he felt gravely injured in his national dignity." (p. 11). The author expresses through the novelette's hero his own sentiments toward the authorities' policy in the sphere of national cinematography in Soviet Moldavia, as is proven by an interview given by Drufa to Literaturnaia gazeta in September 1966. Speaking about the filming of the story "Last Month of Autumn," he says that, when the filming was completed and success seemed to be certain, and "all our odyssey was over, we suffered a sudden blow. The film 'Last Month of Autumn' was scheduled for showing in March, but "appeared on the screens— for mysterious reasons—only during summer vacation, in July, when there are more operators of children's scooters in the theaters than adult viewers."97 It is quite clear from the whole context of Drufa's

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work and public statements, that the powers that promote poor films, at all costs, while delivering "sudden" blows in order to minimize as much as possible the effect of films that they find unacceptable, are Soviet Moldavia's authorities. These authorities were discontented with the fact that the producers of the film made no effort to portray any great progress in the republics agriculture; instead, in the sole instance where kolkhoz fields are shown, their image does not create the slightest impression of prosperity or suggest a highly mechanized agriculture. Later, when Drufa was nominated in May 1968 to the State Prize of the USSR for the script of the film these authorities were the "mysterious reasons" that prevented conferring this honor upon him.98 A true national writer who sees his mission as being the voice of the Bessarabian Moldavians' consciousness and aspirations, Drufa seeks to mold his every writing, the whole as well as its details, from that gold of veracity that assures its durability. In an interview given in 1973 to the writer Serafim Saca and then reprinted in Kodry in 1976, Drufa declared that "the writer thinks and in general participates in the transformation of the world in a way somewhat different from that of the scientists, the theorists, the political leaders," that "a literary image is a cipher in color and simile, or in many colors and many similes, of one idea out of many," and that "to dissect a literary image to expose its heart is, I think, a vain effort."99 We thus have here first-hand testimony that Drufa's aim in his writings is to contribute, by the specific means of literary art, to the transformation of the world. Although, in the same course of reasoning, the writer spoke simultaneously of the complexity of literary images that does not allow dissecting them to expose the heart, their message reaches the reader through the throbbing of that heart. We cannot, of course, tell exactly which of the Soviet Moldavian scientists served for Drufa as the pattern for the university lecturer Rotaru. But we can confidently say that it was one or more Bessarabian scientists who, in conforming to the policies of the republic's party leadership, acted to the detriment of the national interests of their own people. Rotaru's "heart throbbings," together with such details as his professional training and his election to the academy, although he was a mere candidate of sciences, demonstrate that his prototype was the linguist Nicolae Corlateanu, or the literary historian Eugeniu Russev, or even both of them together and others like them ("a cipher in color and simile, or in many colors and many similes").

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Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

To complete his portrayal of a conformist Bessarabian scientist, Drufa uses the name of a street on which Rotaru used to do his "weight-losing cure." Rotaru "began to put on weight, and in order to lose some of it he started to walk for some two hours a day, and he preferred to do it on 28 June Street (p. 23). Insisting that the utilization of the name of that street, which actually exists in the center of Kishinev, is not admissible in the context, the literary critic S. Rybak wrote that "although the Moscow editors [the editorial board of the magazine Iunost and the publishing house Molodaia gvardia who published the novelette] were not apt to notice that the name of the street was mentioned twice, the author could not ignore the significance that this date has for Soviet Moldavia! Was it strictly necessary to choose just this street for the promenade of the fat philistine?"100 It is true that Drufa could not ignore the significance of the date of 28 June for Soviet Moldavia. It is equally true that his attitude to this date coincides in no way with that of the authorities, which the critic tries to impose upon him. As in the system of Drufa's images in the Smell of Ripened Quince, this detail forms an integral part of the cipher of that "one idea out of many," which lies at the basis of the author's national position toward the historic event of the 28 June 1940, when Romania was forced to cede Bessarabia to Moscow. In the same vein, S. Rybak cites another detail taken from objective reality: the insertion into the book published by Molodaia gvardia of a passage missing from the novelette's variant in the magazine Iunost. It is true that for the Molodaia gvardia version, Drufa added to the passage mentioning the monument of Stephen the Great at the entrance of Pushkin Park in Kishinev the following lines: "A year ago this monument was relocated deep inside the park. Its pedestal was replaced and engraved with Karamzins words: 'Brave on the battlefield, modest in happiness, he aroused the admiration of rulers and of peoples by accomplishing great deeds with little means.' Unfortunately, said Horia to himself, it's our entire history." In connection with this addition, the critic complains: "Take the whole novelette line by line, and you will not find any artistic task or supertask that could explain the charades of the passage here reproduced, avoiding that which is generally known, for the monument was not moved deep inside the park, but was displaced by merely a few meters, together with the fence at the entrance to Pushkin Park."101 But the critic's complaint is by no means justified. It is quite true that the monument was moved by merely a few meters, and not "deep inside the part" (v glub' parka). But the gold

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of veracity (based on the novelette's "artistic task and supertask"), as the cipher in color and simile ... of one idea out of many," was in no way altered by the writer, as the critic tries to persuade us. Moving Stephen the Great's monument "a few meters" had no connection with a more rational arrangement of the park or with aesthetic considerations. The reasons for this removal were purely political. The statue of Stephen the Great standing at the entrance from Cathedral Place (renamed Victory Place) to the public garden, did not "harmonize," in the eyes of the authorities, with Lenin's monument in front of the government building on the place. Because, in the deteriorating state of Romanian-Soviet relations in the mid-1960s, the voivode (duke) of Moldavia, with one hand on his sword's sheath and with the other raising a cross (as he was represented by the sculptor A. Plamadeala of Kishinev long before the events of 1940), only a few score meters from the statue of the founder of the Soviet state, appeared as a symbol of the aspirations to freedom of the Bessarabian Moldavians. One expression of these aspirations was also the bunches of fresh flowers always renewed on the pedestal of the legendary voivode by anonymous persons and competing by their freshness with the bouquets and wreaths laid at state expense at Lenin's monument. Thus, in the political circumstances of the second half of the 1960s, the moving by "a few meters" of the statue of Stephen the Great, its "pushing" back together with the fence of the public garden, so that the wing of the government building across the street would obstruct the "visual contact" between the voivode and the founder of the Soviet state, had a great and profound significance. Even more, after the "strategic operation" of displacing the monument, the au¬ thorities took care to grow grass and flowers all around the pedestal and to surround it by a brick fence. In this way they killed two birds with one stone. While seeming to show attention to the historic monuments of the native population, they in fact impeded that population's free access to the pedestal in order to lay flowers on it. Since Drufa, as an artist, offers not a photograph but a picture in colors of the reality, he had every right to present the displacement of the monument by only "a few meters" as a removal "deep inside the park," because the significance of this displacement was deeply rooted in the national policy promoted by the authorities and tightly connected with Drufa's novelette theme. The details used by Drufa in the Smell of Ripened Quince, Doina, and the Burden of Our Kindness are based on the gold of veracity and reflect in color and in simile the realities of Soviet Moldavia. Thus,

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Drufa describes, in the Burden of Our Kindness, the party in Mirceas house, and writes that, after the guests sang Russian and Ukrainian songs, they then started to sing a Moldavian song, The Leaves Turned Yellow in the Vineyards," but could not finish it, having forgotten the words. Drufa thereby faithfully mirrors reality. Because the nu¬ merous amateur song and dance companies with their folk or quasi¬ folk repertory in the republic, are actually but a palliative serving to camouflage the unrelenting process of the native populations system¬ atic denationalization. Personifying the homeland profaned for the sake of petty interests is the image of Doina in the play of the same name. The protagonist, Tudor Mocanu, calls Doina "our beautiful, ancient and forever young one" (p. 141); of Doina, another character says that "maybe once there existed doinas in these places and they used to visit peoples' homes, but now, after all those wars and perturbations, they went away and now only their names can be seen, displayed on a pack of cigarettes or on a bottle of brandy." "All those . . . perturbations" aim at the between-the-lines inferences of the play and at that date that became the name of the street on which the conformist Rotaru from the Smell of Ripened Quince used to take his walk. Doina, a symbol of a profaned homeland, offered to strangers (agricultural products collector Ivan Francovici) by Tudor Mocanu, banalized by having her name given to various brands of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks (details based on actual facts), the mythical Doina, whose preferred song is a Bukovinian ballad (p. 156), also fulfills in Drug's play (like Horia in the Smell of Ripened Quince) the task of personifying the idea of the people's unity. The idea of national unity of the Romanians wherever they may be is also expressed in Drufa's public statements. One example is an article published by him on the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mihail Eminescu.102 Drufa calls Eminescu "our national poet," and declares that he "traveled all over Romania." Dru(a adds that "today the fate of the national poets has become our fate," and that "learning to know them we know ourselves." Tie observes that "in Kishinev, at the poet's monument on the classic writers' way, live flowers can always be seen, and in the National Theater for more than ten years the most stable, the most popular show had been Eminescu [staging of the play by the Romanian playwright M. Stefanescu], He concludes that "in Bucharest at the Bellu Cemetery, the leaves of the old linden tree rustle the verses of the poet's last poem T have only one more wish. . . .'" Dru(a, by those statements, as well as in the whole of his work, maintains the unity of the Romanian people.

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Taken as a whole. Drug's writings, by their textual, contextual, and especially subtextual significances, are an expression of the author's and his heroes' attitude not only toward the events of June 1940, when Moscow forced Bucharest to cede Bessarabia, but also toward the policy and practice of the denationalization of Bessarabian Mol¬ davians, as promoted by Soviet authorities. Both the overt, obvious and the hidden, profound motifs of the greater part of Drufa's fiction and dramaturgy had their roots to a greater or lesser degree in the two-part Burden of Our Kindness, the concluding portion of which sharpened the symbols and images of the first part. Only those works that have no bearing on Soviet Moldavia—the sketch "The Smiling Chekhov" ("Ulybaiushchiisia Chekhov"),103 the novelette about Lev Tolstoi (Vozvrashchnie na krugi svoia) and the book Birches, Bread, and Valor (Berezy, khleb i muzhestvo about the Baltic republics—contain no direct echoes of the motifs of Burden of Our Kindness.104 On the other hand, the novelette Smell of Ripened Quince and the play Holy of Holies (Sviataia sviatykh), produced in 1977 at the Central Soviet Army Theater and afterward by many other theaters outside Moldavia, are linked through image and symbol to the dilogy, just as Doina and Birds of Our Youth are. While it was possible to read positive reviews in the Moldavian press about the works that have no direct relationship to Soviet Moldavia, the others, with the exception of Birds of Our Youth, are either not mentioned at all or are subjected to criticism. But, paradoxically, at the same time, outside Moldavia, in Moscow, and other major cities of Russia proper, as well as many of the capitals of the Soviet national republics, literary and theater critics continued to write enthusiastically about Drug's talent and unique creative world. They referred to him as a great master who responds sensitively to the traditions of his people and who gives sophisticated analyses of the spiritual life and actions of his heroes. The resonance that Drufa's works have for the readers and viewers in his native land is totally different from the resonance it has for readers and viewers outside the Moldavian milieu. The works are understood incompletely by those ignorant of or superficially ac¬ quainted with Moldavia's ancient history, its traditions, customs, mores and by those who have no clear notion of the national consciousness of the creative intelligentsia and the student population of the republic. While these works maintain their poetic quality, color, and humanism, even when read outside Moldavia, in a non-Moldavian atmosphere they lose completely or keep in significant measure the profound

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symbols woven into the text. The interpretation of the director pro¬ ducing Drufa's plays on the Russian stage outside Soviet Moldavia has often led to an unmistakable shift of stress of the values of the play and to an inevitable emasculation of the authors intent. In the production of Birds of Our Youth, for example, this may be seen in the displacement of the background of the character intended by the author to be the main personage, the poetic figure of Aunt Ruga, the personification of folk wisdom, the keeper of traditions and legends of the Moldavians. The symbolic significance of the figure of Aunt Ruga, accordingly, is diminished in these productions. On the other hand, the kolkhoz chairman, the Communist Pavel Russu, due to directors' interpretations, assumes a position more elevated than the author had intended for him by accenting the dark sides of this figure. According to such directors' interpretations, the figure of the at times unprincipled, at times cowardly and unattractive Pavel may be seen as a "symbol of the broad pace of the time," and the majestic and rounded character of Ruga represents "vestiges of the past, which still accompany the pace of the time."105 A similar change in emphasis in the interpretation of Drufa's dramatic works may be seen also in the production of In the Name of the Earth and Sun (Imenem zemli i solntsa), based on the novelette Smell of Ripened Quince. Here, the figure of Balta personifies a retrograde newcomer from the left bank of the Dniester who attempts to extirpate the historical allegiances of the Bessarabian Moldavians. Balta appears, albeit indirectly, to be the direct opposite of the Transylvanian teacher Miculescu from Burden of Our Kindness who, when Bessarabia was joined to Romania (1918), came to the Soroca Steppe to inculcate in the younger generation a love for their national history and literature. Miculescu (despite of his personal weaknesses) is filled with feelings of national pride at the sight of the obelisk in northern Bessarabia erected to commemorate the victory of Stephen the Great over the Tatars, while Balta, a russianized Moldavian from the left (Ukrainian) bank of the Dniester, does all he can to destroy another ancient monument, erected by this same medieval voivode in memory of the hermit who helped him pluck up his courage and deliver a devastating blow to the Turks. In the dramatization of the novelette, however, the underlying associations linked to the figure of Balta evaporate, and there appears before the spectator an ordinary "careerist who is striving to assure himself a soft berth by any means whatever."106 Long before the current Soviet leaders' disclosures at the TwentySeventh Congress of the CPSU, Drufa attacked in Doina such vices and shortcomings as drunkeness, profiteering, and bribery, which

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became deeply entrenched in Soviet life in the Moldavian village and beyond, in the party and state institutions, in the organs of justice and the prosecutors office, and in the higher educational institutions of the republic. The same in Holy of Holies (1977). Through its high moral tone and dramatic tension. Holy of Holies quickly won acclaim in theaters outside Soviet Moldavia, and has run for years in Moscow and other cities with great success. At the same time, the associations evoked by the play's images transform it into a passionate denunciation of the forces responsible for the ugly state of affairs that leads to the demise of Calin Ababi, the plays main character. Drufa's national position finds a most significant embodiment also in his historical novel The White Church (Belaya tserkovr), published in 1982.10' The events described in this work encompass the period between the treaties of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) and Ia§i (1792). In the first pages of his novel, Drufa repeatedly uses the terms “Moldavian state," “Moldavian country," the “Moldavian capital Ia§i.“ He writes also that “the whole upper part of Moldavia, the so-called Bukovina, has been ceded by Turkey to Austria," and that “thousands and thousands of refugees came from Bukovina to put themselves under the protection of their state [Moldavia]." Drufa remarks that, in 1787, when a new Russo-Turkish war broke out, and Russian troops were ready to cross the Dniester, their commander. Field Marshal Rumiantsev thought: “There, on the other bank, begins Moldavia, but since it is a vassal country subjected to the Porte, there, on the other side, for every soldier begins the war" (vol. 6, p. 32). It should be added that, at the very end of the novel The White Church, Drufa writes in connection with the Treaty of Ia§i: “Just in those days, after the conclusion of peace, Russian troops returned [from Moldavia—M. B.j to their territory." (vol. 7, p. 146). In other words, in Drufa's concept of homeland, the Dniester was the eastern boundary of his people's territory at the end of the eighteenth century as it was in 1918, when Bulgare, the hero symbol of Burden of Our Kindness called the Bes¬ sarabian Moldavians to return from the left, Ukrainian, bank of the Dniester, to their homeland. Thus, Drufa weaves into the text of his writings the idea of the Prut-Dniester interfluvial territory being a severed by Russia from the body of the Romanian people's historical land and of the presentday northern Bukovina also being a severed territory of the body of that land (“the whole upper part of Moldavia"). Moreover, that idea is interlaced in Drufa's drama and prose with the idea of the national unity of Romanians from all over their historical territories. One of the heroes of The White Church, who built the church on the Dniester's

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riverside, is the priest loan, a Transylvanian Romanian. loan partic¬ ipated in Transylvania in Horia's popular uprising and, after its suppression, found refuge in west Prutian Moldavia. He settled later on in an east Prutian Moldavian village on the Dniester. Like the Bessarabian Bulgare and the Transylvanian Miculescu in Burden of Our Kindness, the Bukovinian Horia in Smell of Ripened Quince, and the mythical Doina in the play of the same name, loan is also a hero symbol who embodies the idea of national unity of the Romanians. His Romanian national consciousness and feelings found expression in the following assertion made before the very beginning on the west Dniester territory of the Russo-Turkish War in 1787: "The war will be on our land and there will no be end to the people's sufferings" (vol. 6, p. 27); or in such an utterance made at the end of the war when the Russian troops left Moldavia: "Today we are not simply a village on the Dniester. Today we are a people living on its own earth, having its own church and, therefore, its own destiny" (vol. 7, p. 145). In the "confrontation" between I. Bodiul, who for almost twenty years headed the party organization of Soviet Moldavia, personally stimulating in it fraudulent methods of management, and I. Drufa, who in his fiction and dramaturgy denounced the ugly state of affairs in the republic (as a result of such methods of management), the latter based himself "on the gold of veracity." Bodiuls downfall shows that "the truth of life" was reflected by the writer's works, and not by the slogans of the authorities and the exponents of their policies in the years of Bodiul's leadership. When Bodiul left Moldavia, the question was raised of staging in Kishinev not only the plays Return to One's Own Circuits and Holy of Holies, but also the dramatization of the novelette The Smell of Ripened Quince, which had been attacked in the Kishinev press. Evidence of this is contained in a report at the Sixth Congress of Writers of Soviet Moldavia in mid-1981, in which it was stated that recent attempts had been made once more to improve the relationship of Drufa with the theater, and that it was vital to produce his recent plays in the Moldavian Republic.108 The point is, however, that even today, under the circumstances of re¬ structuring, democratization, and glasnost', when Bodiul was openly exposed by the republic's authorities themselves, it is undoubted that the latter will not tolerate the national motifs of Drufa's writings. Those motifs that find expression, for example, in the writer's treating of both the Turks and the Russians as strangers on the Prut-Dniester interfluvial, which caused much suffering to the indigenous population in those times (The White Church). A supposed agreement by the

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leadership of Soviet Moldavia with the publication or the staging of the author's Doina, Smell of Ripened Quince, or The White Church can be expected only if their author will deprive them of their national motifs. It is improbable, however, that Drufa would retreat from his chosen path.

Notes, Chapter 10 1. Profiluri literare (Kishinev, 1972), p. 196. 2. H. Corbu, "Tendinte §i valori in dramaturgie," in Maturitate (Kishinev, 1967), p. 48. 3. Profiluri literare, p. 201. 4. I. Pitliar, "Poeticheskaia proza," Novyi mir (Moskva, no. 5, 1963), p.

257. 5. V. Coroban, Romanul moldovenesc contemporan. (Estetica genului) (Kish¬ inev, 1974), p. 127. 6. See M. Cimpoi, "Un univers artistic," in Maturitate, pp. 299-314. 7. A. Lupan, Scrieri (Kishinev, 1973), vol. 3, p. 191. 8. V. Coroban, op. cit., p. 128; Profiluri literare, p. 198. 9. R. Portnoi, "Actualitate ideologica §i actualitate psihologica," Nistrul, no. 7 (1959), p. 132. 10. Profiluri literare, p. 197. 11. Z. Sapunaru, Articole de criticd, (Kishinev, 1959), p. 79. 12. A. Lebedev, "Tvoe pervoe imia," Druzhba narodov, no. 3, 1960, pp. 234-243. 13. V. Coroban, op. cit., p. 167. 14. Ibid., pp. 166-168. 15. L. Aninsky, "Un element esential al prozei," Nistrul, no. 4, 1959, p.

129. 16. V. Coroban, op. cit., p. 166. 17. M. Novokhatskii, "Na urovni vremeni," Kodry, no. 6, 1973, p. 143. 18. Enciclopedia sovietica moldoveneasca, vol. 2, 1971, p. 379. 19. Profiluri literare, p. 206. 20. G. Skvirenko, "Nasledstvo onakia Karabusha," Kodry, no. 11, 1973, p. 127. 21. M. Novokhatskii, art. cit., pp. 142-143. 22. M. Cimpoi, art. cit., p. 313. 23. I. Ciobanu, "Aspecte ale prozei," Cultura, no. 31 (30 October 1965). 24. A. Volkov, "«Casa mare» kak iavlenie obshchesoiuznoi literatury," in Moldavsko-russko-ukrainskie literaturnye i fol'klornye sviazi (Kishinev, 1967), p.

75. 25. I. Racul, "Pravda zhizni i pozitsia pisatelia," Sovetskaia Moldavia (25 June 1969). 26. Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 May 1968.

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27. A. Borshagovskii, "Zavershenie zamysla," Literaturnaia gazeta, 17 April 1968. 28. A. Adamovici, "Prekrasnoe vremia chelovechnosti," Neman, no. 9, pp. 167-170. 29. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 28 February 1971. 30. Ibid., 2 March 1971. 31. "XXIV s'ezd KPSS." 30.III-9.IV 1971 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet".I. (Moscow, 1971), pp. 374-375. 32. V. Coroban, Ion Druta, Cultura, no. 1 (1 January 1970), p. 9. 33. V. Kravchenko, "Prodolzheni dostoinstv," Kodry, no. 4 (1973), p. 116. 34. M. Novokhatskii, art. cit., pp. 144-145. 35. Ibid., p. 149. 36. See O. Semenovskii, "Talant pisatelia i pozitsia kritika, Kodry, no. 11 (1973), pp. 120-126; G. Skvirenko, art. cit., pp. 127-134. 37. "Vernost' zhiznennoi pravde, vernost' sotsialisticheskomu realizmu, Kodry, no. 11 (1973), pp. 135-144. 38. M. Novokhatskii, art. cit., p. 146. 39. Ibid., p. 148. 40. Ibid., p. 141. 41. "Vernost' zhiznennoi pravde. . p. 139. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., p. 142. 44. Ibid., p. 136. 45. Ibid., p. 144. 46. I. Ciobanu, art. cit. 47. Teatr, no. 1 (1973), pp. 48-49. 48. E. Zaitsev, "Edinstvo i mnogoobrazie," Teatr, no. 7 (1973), p. 73. 49. Teatr, no. 8 (1971), p. 9. 50. Ibid., no. 8, 197, p. 4. 51. N. Velekhova, "Zemlia liudei," Pravda 31 January 1973. 52. G. Iurieva, "Mezhdu nebom i zemlei," Teatr, no. 6 (1973), p. 41. 53. "Vernost' zhiznennoi pravde. . .", p. 144. 54. I. Druja, "Vozvrashchenie na krugi svoia," (Moscow, 1974), p. 85. 55. I. Dru(a, Doina, Teatr, no. 5 (1971), pp. 135-165. 56. Druzhba narodov, no. 2 (1972), p. 203. 57. I. Dru(a, "Zapakh speloi aivy" (Clopotni(a), lunost, no. 9 (1973), pp. 4-44. 58. L. Iakimenko, "Konflikty i kharaktery," Literaturnaia Rossia. 7 December 1973, p. 9. 59. F. Kuznetsov, "Pravda chuvstv i romanticheskie puanty," Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 2 (1974), pp. 14-15. 60. V. Osotskii, "Uroki Horii Flolbana," Druzhba narodov, no. 4 (1974), p. 273. 61. H. Corbu, "Aktual'nye problemy moldavskoi literaturnoi kritiki," Kodry, no. 7 (1972), p. 135.

The Concept of Homeland in Ion Druid's Writings

367

62. R. Suveica, "Novye imena, novye nazvania," Teatr, no. 8 (1973), pp. 6-7. 63. See KuTtura i zhitia, 25 March 1973; Sovetskaia Estonia, 1 March 1973; Sovetskaia zhenshina, no. 8 (1973), p. 35; etc. 64. P. Lucinschi, "Sarcinile organizatiei republicane de partid in vederea sporirii in continuare a eficientei muncii ideologice/' Sovetskaia Moldavia, 13 December 1974. 65. K. Kuznetsov, art. cit., p. 15. 66. P. Botu, "Problemy i puti razvitia moldavskoi sovetskoi literatury mezhdu dvumia s'ezdami," Kodry, no. 6 (1976), p. 97. 67. Tinerimea Moldovei, 10 March 1974. 68. S. Cibotaru, "Literaturnaia kritika i velenie vremeni," Kodry, no. 1 (1976), p. 113. 69. I. Ciocanu, "Critica literara si perceptia ei," Tinerimea Moldovei, 26 October 1975. 70. S. Rybak, "Vybor puti," Kodry, no. 3 (1976), pp. 112-113. 71. Ibid. 72. B. Istru, "Sotsial'naia aktivnost' geroia sovremennoi sovetskoi litera¬ tury," Kodry, no. 11 (1976), p. 144. 73. Al. Gorlovskii, "Vechnaia poezia zhivykh," Kodry, no. 4 (1976), pp. 45-46. 74. D. Tampei, "Dukhovnye resursy geroia," Kodry, no. 7 (1976), p. 137. 75. Kommunist Moldavii, no. 2 (1976), p. 52. 76. Critica §i istoria literara din Moldova in anii 1966-1970 (Kishinev, 1971); Critica §i stiinta literara in Moldova. 1971-1975 (Kishinev, 1976). 77. A. Mereuta, "Podderzhat' zolotom dostovernosti. . . ," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 19 February 1977. 78. Ibid. 79. H. Corbu, "Izvor de inspiratie," Moldova socialista, 3 September 1978. 80. S. Cibotaru, "Na puti tvorcheskikh iskanii," Sovetskaia Moldavia, 3 September 1978. 81. Tinerimea moldovei, 10 March 1974. 82. S. Rybak, art. cit., pp. 111-113. 83. B. Istru, "Okrylennost'," Kodry, no. 4 (1976), p. 16. 84. P. Lucinschi, "Sarcinile organizatiei republicane de partid. . . ." 85. Literaturnaia gazeta, 12 May 1971, p. 3. 86. Ibid. 87. S. Saca, "Khorosho napisannaia kniga—vyigrannoe srazhenie," Kodry, no. 4 (1976), p. 52. 88. See S. Cibotaru, art. cit.; H. Corbu, art. cit. 89. Druzhba narodov, no. 2 (1972), p. 181. 90. M. Novokhatskii, art. cit., pp. 144-145. 91. Ibid. 92. "Vernost' zhiznennoi pravde. . .", p. 139. 93. I. Dru(a, "Zapakh speloi aivy," lunost, no. 9 (1973), pp. 4-44.

368

Obedience Versus National-Ethnic Consciousness

94. C. Giurescu, D. Giurescu, Istoria romanilor din cele mai vechi timpuri pina astazi (Bucharest, 1975), pp. 656-657. 95. "Rascoala taraneasca din Romania (1907)," Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 6, (1976), p. 52. 96. C. Giurescu, D. Giurescu, op. cit., p. 541. 97. Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 September 1966. 98. Ibid., 8 May 1968. 99. S. Saca, "Khorosho napisannaia kniga. . . p. 52. 100. S. Rybak, art. cit., p. 118. 101. Ibid. 102. I. Dru(a, "Eminescu—narodnyi poet," Druzhba narodov, no. 1 (1975), pp. 194-195. 103. Voprosy literatury, no. 2 (1971). 104. I. Dru(a, Berezy, khleb, i muzhestvo (Moscow, 1974). 105. Kodry, no. 12 (1976). 106. Teatr, no. 14 (1978). 107. Novyi mir, no. 6 (1982), pp. 15-64; no. 7 (1982), pp. 42-146. 108. Nistru, no. 12 (1981).

PART IV

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

In Lieu of a Conclusion

This book was written in the post-Brezhnev period. With Gorbachev's coming to power, many changes come to the USSR; the new CPSU leadership proclaims their significance to be revolutionary. "Restruc¬ turing,” "acceleration," "intensification," "openness" (glasnost'), "de¬ mocratization," "more socialism," "new thinking" (novoe myshlenie), etc. these days become fashionable terms in the Soviet vocabulary. Materials of the Twenty-Seventh Congress, of the plenums of April 1985 and January and June 1987 show that Gorbachev tries to create favorable preconditions for the progress of Soviet science and tech¬ nology, the improvement of industry and agriculture, and the bettering of living standards of the USSR's population. Reforms initiated with a view to upgrading the management of different fields of activity are accompanied by drastic steps to eradicate such vices as falsifying of results obtained in production, voluntarism and servility, subjec¬ tivism and nepotism, embezzlement, alcoholism, etc. But, notwith¬ standing all the impressive disclosures of the current CPSU leadership and the spectacular changes that took place in the USSR after Brezhnev's, and especially Chernenko's, death, there are numerous indications that, in the last instance, Moscow's long-term objective in domestic and foreign policies remained the same as under all Gor¬ bachev's predecessors. In an interview on Soviet television, P. Fedoseev, vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences spoke of the conformism that had contaminated Soviet humanities prior to the April 1985 plenary session of the CPSU CC. He too admitted that, instead of being guided by objective truth, conformist scholars "present certain realities as the absolute." Fedoseev, who joined the Communist party in 1939, himself gave proof of political opportunism, being one of the active party line promoters under Stalin as well as under absolutely his successors. 371

372

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

He propagated Stalin's personality cult in 1941 through 1953 while working in the CPSU CC apparatus and editing Bolshevik magazine (1945-1949). He propagated the 1954-1964 changes (declared there¬ after as having been generated by ignorance of the Soviet economic development's objective economic laws) while editing Partiinaia zhizn' magazine (1954-1955) and heading the Philosophy Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1955-1962). And he also propagated the domestic and foreign policies in Brezhnev's period when heading the Marxism-Leninism Institute of the CPSU CC (1967-1971) and be¬ coming afterwards a vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1971). The authors of a monograph on Marxist-Leninist teaching on socialism and its practical implementation write that "the state sov¬ ereignty of socialist countries cannot be viewed from classless po¬ sitions."1 In the same monograph, prepared under P. Fedoseyev's direction and published in 1975, is claimed that "in the sixties, on the base of a matured socialist mode of production, a high level of maturity in all other fields—social, political and spiritual—had been secured," and what characterizes developed socialism is "the socialist democratism of the whole people, a democratism encompassing all fields of society's life, and active participation of the large masses of the working people in the management of society's affairs."2 The formula according to which the state sovereignty of socialist countries is subordinated to class interests ("cannot be viewed from classless positions") reflects the interests of Moscow as the dominant power among those countries. Moscow's actions in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s is wholeheartedly sup¬ ported by the current leadership of the CPSU, as it was formerly supported and is now being justified by the members of the CPSU CC Politburo and their specialists in the humanities. This formula, extended to a nonsocialist country (with a view to establishing a socialist regime), is being used right up to now by Soviet leaders and specialists to represent Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan as a fulfillment by the USSR of its internationalist duty. According to Soviet specialists, in the collaboration of socialist countries the general, internationalist interests of world socialism must be "in first place."1 A most relevant example of this thesis' application in real life is offered by the Bessarabian question and its implications in Romanian-Soviet relations in general and in Soviet Moldavia's scholarship and public life in particular. Thus, efforts are being made in Romania to educate the population in the spirit of the historic right to Bessarabia, a region severed by the USSR from the national

In Lieu of a Conclusion

373

territory of the Romanian people. But, after the establishment in Romania of the communist regime, and up to this day, there has not appeared in that country a single study exclusively dedicated to Bessarabia and to Romanian-Soviet relations connected with that historic Romanian province. The Bessarabian question is touched upon only sporadically and tangentially in some works by contemporary Romania authors. Although they persist in revealing, in the spirit of traditional Romanian historiography, the historic truth on the Bessarabian question, that truth is presented by them not only schematically but, one could say, in a muted fashion. Notwithstanding the perseverance of certain contemporary Romanian authors in defining the essence of the crucial moments in the history of Bessarabia (and the northern part of Bukovina), they do not resort, as a rule, to open attacks against Soviet historical figures or contemporary Soviet scholars who distort these provinces' history. The position of Soviet scholars in this respect is different. Authors from the Moldavian SSR not only contest but also defame renowned scholars from socialist Romania who subscribe to the position of traditional Romanian historiography on the Bessarabian question. They defame or denigrate the Romanian people's most prominent historic figures. Aspersions (chauvinism, cynicism, colonialist tendencies, etc.) are cast in Soviet writings on A. Xenopol, A. Philippide, N. Iorga, O. Ghibu, C. Giurescu, etc.4 N. Titulescu, for example, is counted among the "lackey historians" who "grossly distort the essence of the Bessarabian question,"5 and is accused of "impudent falsification of facts and diplomatic juggling."6 Moreover, a work published in Kishinev states that "an intervention by Western powers prevented [in 1812] the entry of all Moldavia into Russia."7 The author of this work asserts also that "western Moldavia remained under Phanariot rule and continued to fight for its entry into Russia and for the reunion (vossoedinenie) of Moldavian lands."8 This thesis collides head-on with another important thesis elaborated in Soviet Moldavia's historiography, namely that by the creation in 1940 of a Union Moldavian republic "an end was put to the nation's dismemberment and a territorial, economic and cultural unity of the Moldavian nation was reestablished."9 Nevertheless, the assertion that after 1818 "western Moldavia . . . continued to fight for its entry into Russia and the reunion of Moldavian lands" was not disputed in Soviet scholarly literature and publicity. For the work in which that thesis was formulated the author was even awarded the republic's prize in 1979.10

374

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

Formulation of theses like this one prepares the ground for a new dismemberment of the Romanian peoples historic territory. That is why such theses are not disputed in Soviet publications. The "peaceful coexistence" (in Soviet Moldavia's historiography) of the thesis on the "reestablishment after 1812 of Western Moldavia's struggle for the "entry" into Russia and the "reunion of Moldavian lands" reflects Moscow's policy of duplicity toward non-Russian peoples of the USSR as well as toward socialist countries. The peroration, continuing also under Gorbachev, of traditional Soviet slogans in domestic national relations and in the relations of the USSR with socialist, as well as with nonsocialist, countries shows that, nowadays, the leadership of the CPSU promotes its predecessors' policies. The steps taken by the current leadership of the CPSU to freshen Soviet society's stagnant atmosphere, spectacular as they be, are not initiated with a view to radical, revolutionary changes in the social and state system of the USSR. In a report to the meeting on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution, E. Ligachev declared that the restructuring taking place in the USSR does not aim for "a change in the social system," and that the CPSU expresses the profound essence of the restructuring by an exact formula, namely, "more socialism."11 For decades, hundreds and thousands of monographs and books on the completion of the building in the USSR of a developed, mature socialism were published. A quarter of a century ago, the CPSU program adopted under Khrushchev proclaimed that "the Soviet people have built socialism." This formula is reiterated in the new version of the program, adopted in 1986. At the January 1987 plenary session of the CPSU CC, maintaining that "on the road to building socialism, the Soviet Union attained really historic successes in political, economic, social and spiritual development," Gorbachev added that "the Soviet people have built socialism."12 But, at the same time, Gorbachev keeps emphasizing that, before his coming to power, Soviet society had been undermined by a profound stagnation process in all domains of life. He sometimes maintains that that process began to develop in the USSR merely "in the last years preceding the CPSU CC April [1985] plenum, at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s."13 But, on other occasions, he admits that the said processes manifested themselves "during the last five-year plans," "in the course of decades."14 In other words, "distortions in the domain of planning," "elements of social corrosion," "grave functional lacks of the socialist democracy institutions," "ideology and psychology of stagnation,"

In Lieu of a Conclusion

375

and “the ever-increasing gap between day-to-day realities and apparent prosperity” referred to by Gorbachev in his report to the January 1987 plenary session were, as a matter of fact, attributed to the Brezhnev period in its totality (manifesting themselves in the course of decades). At the same plenary session, Gorbachev emphasized that "instead of objectively studying real phenomena in the sphere of national relations, instead of analyzing the true socioeconomic and spiritual processes, . . . certain [Soviet] sociologists for a long time preferred to produce 'festive' tracts which often seemed rather to be sentimental toasts than serious scholarly studies."15 But Gorbachev also formulated theses contradicting all his disclo¬ sures and his innumerable declarations that the changes initiated by the current leadership of the CPSU have, as it were, a true revolutionary character, and that their aim is "to revive as fully as possible the spirit of Leninism."16 (This formula—"a revival of the spirit of Leninism"—actually signifies an open disapproval of the practices of former CPSU leaders, beginning with Stalin.) For instance, "the essence of the policy proclaimed at the April [1985] plenary session and the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress in order to deepen the people's socialist self-management" does not mean "a radical transformation [lomka] of the political system" in the USSR.7 The consequences of the changes initiated by the current CPSU leadership for the "political system" now existing in the USSR lay in the future and cannot be foreseen with precision. It is not impossible that they will ultimately lead to a radical transformation of this political system. But Gorbachev's report to the January 1987 plenary session and other Soviet sources clearly show that the new CPSU leadership really has no intention of radically changing the Soviet political system. Thus, in speaking to the January 1987 plenary session of the need for a "wider de¬ mocratization of Soviet society," Gorbachev stresses that the entire historical experience has convincingly proved that the socialist system actually ensured political and socioeconomic rights of the citizens, their personal liberties, and has revealed the advantages of Soviet democracy," but that one must (a) "improve the formation mechanism of the party s leading bodies," (b) "deepen the democratism of the electoral system," (c) "further democratize the formation and functioning of the state's bodies," and (d) "democratize the formation of the leading cadres in enterprises," etc.18 But the letter and the spirit of such theses and assertions abounding in Gorbachev's speeches contradict his other statements. For instance, he made the assertion that the new CPSU leadership "had the courage

376

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

to appreciate the situation, to recognize the necessity of radical changes in politics, in economics, in the social and spiritual sphere, and to orient the country toward transformations.''19 Anyone familiar with the USSR's historical experience knows that the socialist system, as embodied in Soviet realities, has not ensured the citizens either “political rights" or their “personal liberties." In this respect, the above quote from Gorbachev's speech does not at all reflect the truth and cannot even be regarded as a half-truth. Certain decisions by the present USSR leadership do not fit the formula of “more socialism," proclaimed to be the direct objective of the restructuring. Thus, Soviet government's decision of 13 January 1987 to legalize the creation on USSR territory of common enterprises, with the participation of Soviet organizations and capitalist firms, means, actually, “less socialism," although the Soviet share of capital will be no less than 51 percent.20 Less socialism will also be generated by the individual labor activity law signed by A. Gromyko on 19 November 1986.21 Also the encouragement, in rural localities, to keep a land plot and a cow as individual property by each family separately means less, not more, socialism. “More socialism" does not actually mean either the “deepening the democratism of the electoral system," or the “improvement of the formation mechanism of the party's leading bodies," or the other steps for “a democratization of Soviet society" proclaimed by the new CPSU leadership. Gorbachev contradicts himself when, on the one hand, he maintains that elected Soviet bodies “reflect the diversity of interests of the entire population" and are “a tremendous realization of socialist democratism," and asserts, on the other, that one must “deepen the democratism of the electoral system" by a “more effective and real participation by voters in all stages of the election campaign."22 But the Soviet electoral system has nothing in common with de¬ mocratism. Soviets, from the local ones and up to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, are totally subordinate to their respective CPSU bodies. The last word in the selection of candidates and their placement on the ballot belongs not to the voters, but to the district party committees at the level of local soviet elections; to the regional and provincial party committees at the level of regional, provincial, and autonomous republic soviet elections; to republic party organizations' central com¬ mittees at the level of soviet elections for Supreme Soviets of Union republics; to the CPSU CC at the level of soviet elections for the USSR's Supreme Soviet. Competition by several candidates for every deputy position seems to be indeed a radical change in the electoral system. But, actually.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

377

the decision in the selection of candidates will belong to the Com¬ munists of the respective organizations. This means that the new election procedure is merely a change of form, while the essence remains unchanged. Soviets thus elected will not be in any way different from the former ones, still being totally subordinate to the Communist party; and their decisions will continue to be adopted, as a rule, "unanimously.'' On 15 April 1987, Gorbachev met a group of U.S. parliamentarians in Moscow and urged them to militate in the United States Congress for nuclear disarmament in the way in which, in his words, the Supreme Soviet influences the restructuring taking place in the USSR.23 The attempt to thus liken the role and influence of the Supreme Soviet in the USSR to the role and influence of Congress in the United States is one more proof of the duplicity of the CPSU leaders because Gorbachev knows very well—as the entire population of the USSR knows it—that even high-ranking deputies of the USSR Supreme Soviet in the state and party bodies wouldn't dare to criticize the Politburo's policies. In a speech in the Latvian republic's capital on 19 February 1987, Gorbachev presented as a great achievement of the democratization initiated under his leadership the fact that, for the position of first secretary of a district party organization of the Kemerovo region, two candidates were proposed, but also the fact that a Siberian from Oms was elected manager of a big industrial plant in Riga.24 At the January 1987 plenary session, Gorbachev stated that one must modify the election system for party secretaries, including first secretaries of party committees, so that absolutely all secretaries of the district, regional, and provincial party committees and of the Union republics' party central committees be elected by secret voting. In this instance too, the democratization is but seeming: first of all, because it does not extend to Politburo members, CPSU CC secretaries, and the secretary-general, second, because Gorbachev added at the same time that "the principles of democratic centralism continue to be valid and that the principle of the party rules, according to which decisions by the Party's superior bodies are mandatory for all its inferior committees, including decisions on cadres problems, remain unshakable."25 The meaning of all this can be grasped from the dismissal of D. Kunaev from the post of first secretary of the Kazakhstan CP CC. The dismissal caused troubles in the Kazakh SSR capital. In this connection, Gorbachev declared at the January 1987 plenary session that "there appear from time to time manifestations of localism, tendencies to national isolation to national arrogance, and even in¬ cidents like those having recently happened at Alma Ata."26 And he

378

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

added that what happened in Alma Ata “obliged not only Kazakhstan Communists but all party organizations to concentrate their attention on the problems of national relations' further development and on strengthening internationalist education.” At the same time, he stressed that “it is especially important to safeguard the young generation from the pernicious influence of nationalism."27 There exists in the Soviet vocabulary a long series of terms that have, depending on the context, a positive or negative sense. One of them is the term “nationalism." As a reflection of aspirations, trends, and actions of social strata or of peoples in the nonsocialist countries, caused by their domination—real or apparent—by social strata or peoples from other nonsocialist countries, nationalism is considered by Soviet specialists to be a positive phenomenon. However, on the contrary, when reflecting aspirations, trends, actions of social strata or peoples in socialist countries or in non-Russian Soviet republics provoked by CPSU policies toward those peoples, nationalism is an extremely negative phenomenon. Kunaev's dismissal (whatever the reasons) and the appointment in his place of a Russian brought to Kazakhstan from the RSFSR caused an outbreak of indigantion among the Kazakh population. They could not view Moscow's action as other than arbitrary, a new step on the road to their transformation into a minority in their national republic, and to their subordination to a leadership having at its top a rep¬ resentative of the dominant nation in the USSR. In countries not belonging to the so-called socialist community, such outbreaks by the autochthonous populations are defined in common language as “pa¬ triotic." But in Soviet literature, all such terms as “Ukrainian,'' ‘''Kazakh," or “Moldavian patriotism," etc. are not used. Only “Soviet patriotism" is met in that literature, and, as matter of fact, it is used in the sense of Russian patriotism. Any manifestation by non-Russian Soviet peoples of aspirations, trends, or feelings contradicting this "patriotism" is vehemently fought against as “nationalism" by the CPSU leadership. It was thus under Lenin and under all other Gorbachev's predecessors. This line is being pursued now too. At the same time, local cadres in non-Russian republics who prefer the general interests of the USSR (as understood by the CPSU leadership) to the national interests of their respective peoples, used to be and are now considered promoters of Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism. Thus, in defining the present leadership's national policy, Gorbachev resorts to the usual formulae of all his predecessors. On the one hand, he vehemently condemns any manifestations “of localism, of

In Lieu of a Conclusion

379

national isolation, of national arrogance," etc.; on the other hand, he unreservedly supports "feelings of internationalism and Soviet pa¬ triotism." Dwelling on the Alma Ata events, Gorbachev repeated at the January 1987 plenary session the Soviet leaders' stereotyped thesis that "in each ton of wheat, in each gram of gold, in each ton of cotton, coal, petrol, in each machine . . . exists a particle of work of the entire Soviet people, of the whole country."28 On 21 February 1987, he went even further. Speaking in Tallin at a meeting with Estonian SSR party activists, Gorbachev stated that "Estonia's con¬ tribution [to the USSR economic complex—M. B.] is evaluated at ca. 2.5 milliard rubles yearly," but that "Estonia gets from union resources [those of the entire Soviet Union—M. B.J many kinds of fuel, laminae, engineering industry products, chemical products, fertilizers, wheat, textile fibers . . . worth ca. 3.0 milliard rubles."29 Such statements, in the spirit of the traditional CPSU national policy, raise among nonRussian peoples resentment against Moscow. In non-Russian republics, such education in the spirit of "internationalism" has generated in the past, as it will also generate from now on, manifestations of national patriotism, called by the promoters of CPSU policies "lo¬ calism," "national arrogance," etc. As a matter of fact, the present Soviet leader, as did his predecessors, propounds the thesis that what any non-Russian people gets from total Soviet resources by far surpasses its contribution to the accu¬ mulation of those resourses. As mentioned above, Gorbachev declared at the January 1987 plenary session that certain Soviet scholars in the social sciences have not for a long time objectively analyzed national relations or real socioeconomic and spiritual processes in the USSR. But, himself being guided by the common Soviet criteria of evaluating national mani¬ festations in non-Russian republics, Gorbachev in fact stimulates the continuation of his predecessors' national policy and its glorification by Soviet specialists. From the analysis of current Soviet sources and, first of all, from Gorbachev's numerous speeches certain conclusions can be drawn, contributing to the elucidation of the true meaning of the Soviet leaders' promises and actions: 1. In the period 1985-1987, as in the whole course of Soviet regimes, whoever reveals the substratum of the CPSU's domestic and foreign policy and its objectives is accused in the USSR (and often not only in USSR) of scientific incompetence or

380

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

falsification, reformism (dogmatism, opportunism) or anticom¬ munism (anti-Sovietism), nationalism, chauvinism, etc. Materials from the Twenty-Seventh Congress and current CPSU CC plenary sessions, as those of previous congresses and plenary sessions, prove that current Soviet leaders kept their high position in the Soviet hierarchy thanks only to their servility and glorification of the preceding rulers of the USSR, as well as to camouflaging Soviet reality's lacks and vices, which they themselves criticize now. 2. Gorbachev and the huge CPSU propaganda apparatus make great efforts to convince the Western world, on the one hand, that Soviet foreign policy stems from sincerity and from the best intentions to save the entire human race from the danger of a thermonuclear conflagration; on the other hand, that the current Soviet leaders' domestic policy carries a revolutionary character and strives to restructure the Soviet economy, intensify and accelerate its development, and democratize the whole country's social and spiritual life. But the reality is that, all the spectacle of his steps notwithstanding—steps whose far-reaching effects are not foreseeable—Gorbachev's true intentions in his domestic and foreign policies do not substantially and principally differ from the intentions of his predecessors: like them, he strives to develop by all means the personality cult of the CPSU secretary-general and Russian domination in the framework of the USSR, to ever strengthen the position of the USSR in countries subjugated by his precursors, and to prepare conditions for a future consolidation of Soviet expansion. Thus, Gorbachev maintains that there exists a parity of forces between the NATO countries and those of the Warsaw Pact, and that the USSR will never allow the damaging of this equilibrium in the favor of the United States and its allies. But actually the USSR now possesses a tremendous superiority over the United States in con¬ ventional armed forces, and, to maintain this superiority, the current Soviet leadership is interested in achieving a substantial reduction of both military blocs' thermonuclear forces. Speaking of parity in the sphere of armed forces Gorbachev, like his predecessors, seeks to mislead the Western leaders and the world public opinion. There are plenty of indications that the Soviet leaders' utterances do not cor¬ respond to their actions and intentions. On 12 October 1986, after the failure of his attempts to convince President Reagan to renounce the Strategic Defence Initiative (''star wars") in the cosmos, Gorbachev

In Lien of a Conclusion

381

called a press conference at Reykjavik, where he said the U.S. ad¬ ministration “came to the table empty-handed/' that it “is of one mind with the American military-industrial complex" (u nee na ume to, chto na ume u amerikanskogo voenno-promyshlennogo kompleksa), that it “is completely in the latter's power" (ona v ego vlasti), that "the president is not at liberty to reach a decision to sign an agreement, and that the USSR has to deal with the Americans' imperial am¬ bitions."30 However, Gorbachev sought to assure the participants at the press conference, and through them world public opinion, that "all suggestions submitted to the president" of the United States at Reykjavik by the Soviet delegation “are in agreement with the American peoples interests, as well as with the peoples' interests in all countries," and that they reflect “the requests of the American people, the Soviet people, all peoples."31 The Soviet leader declared that at Reykjavik the Soviet delegation made serious concessions, . . . big concessions, . . . very big concessions, . . . especially important concessions." At the same time he emphasized that steps must be taken that, as long as the armaments reduction process goes on, neither side should be able to achieve concealed military superiority."32 Coming home from Iceland, Gorbachev spoke on Soviet television. On that occasion he tried to instill into the minds of the USSR population the idea that the Soviet delegation, in order to save humankind from the danger of thermonuclear war, he made big concessions to the Americans at Reykjavik, on the condition that the United States should not try, after signing an agreement, to infringe on strategic stability and parity.33 In accusing the Americans, as he did at the Reykjavik press conference, of the talks' failure, Gorbachev even resorted to direct abuse. He declared that "in the course of the discussions, the president tried to touch on the ideological problem, giving proof, to say no more, of complete ignorance and lack of understanding of what the socialist world represents and what goes on within it," that “the United States wants to create various difficulties for the Soviet leadership, to bring its plans to nought, including those for the improvement of the people's living conditions, and thus to provoke the [Soviet—M. B.] people's dissatisfaction with its leadership, the leadership of the country."34 The Soviet thesis on the parity in armaments and Gorbachev's jabbering about concessions made to the United States collide headon: should such a parity really exist, not only "serious concessions," but any concessions in this field made by the USSR would mean a disruption, in favor of the United States, of the balance of forces. As soon as he came home from Iceland, Gorbachev assured the population

382

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

of the USSR that the Soviet delegation “did everything possible" to avoid a failure of the American-Soviet talks.35 But half a year later, in Prague, Gorbachev made one more “concession. In order to facilitate the immediate conclusion of an agreement on medium-range missiles in Europe," he stated, "we propose that an examination be started of the reduction and eventual abolition on the European continent of 500 to 1,000 km-range rockets, without connecting this with discussing and solving the problem of medium-range missiles."36 In connection with this new Soviet "initiative, Gorbachev told U.S. Secretary of State Shultz on 14 April 1987 that the USSR's leaders "are looking for compromise solutions, [to] make . . . last efforts."37 The context in which appear the above assertions, as well as many other declarations of Gorbachev, show that the utterances of present Soviet leaders do not reflect their true intentions and that in this respect they are no different from their predecessors. In discussing the foreign policy problems of the CPSU and Soviet government, Gorbachev appeals for a world without nuclear arms and for humane international relations. Thus, at the Reykjavik press conference he said that, in the age of nuclear missiles, "the first priority is to safeguard peace, to protect man from nuclear danger."38 And on 16 February 1987, speaking at the forum "for a world without nuclear weapons for the survival of mankind," Gorbachev declared that "a future nuclear conflagration will annihilate both socialists and capi¬ talists," and that to avoid the collapse of the whole world in the hellfire of a nuclear conflagration "statesmen must stand above narrowly understood interests."39 At the press conference, Gorbachev declared that the Soviet-American talks failed (provalilis') and put the blame for the failure on the Americans, but at the later forum, four months later in Moscow, he changed his estimation and maintained that what happened at Reyk¬ javik "was not a failure, but a breakthrough [ne proval, a proryv]."40 This because, acting in the spirit of the traditional Soviet policy, the current Soviet leaders do all that's possible, on the one hand, to undermine the authority of governments that oppose Moscow's ex¬ pansionist tendencies, and, on the other hand, to pose as fighters for peace, justice, and truth. At the Reykjavik press conference Gorbachev already traced ways of undermining the U.S. (and not only the U.S.) governments position, stating that "all realistic forces in the world must act now, that world public opinion must weigh the situation that arose [after the failure of the talks—M. B.] in the main problem worrying peoples of all countries," that "the last word belongs to the people of each country, including the American people," that

In Lieu of a Conclusion

383

"now comes the time for active deeds by all forces," and that "it is an insult to accuse peoples or movements who act for peace of lobbying in favor of Soviet Union."41 Gambling on the fears of a possible new thermonuclear confron¬ tation, which are felt by large masses in all countries of the world, by accusing the U.S. administration of imperial ambitions and "of unwillingness to remove the nuclear threat hanging over mankind," Gorbachev has in fact prepared the ground for launching in the Western countries a new anti-American campaign and for supporting antigovernment forces within the United States.42 The forum "for a world without nuclear weapons, for the survival of mankind," or¬ ganized by the Soviet government in Moscow marked an important stage in that campaign. At that forum, Gorbachev emphasized that the European continent is "the home of all Europeans," that mankind is one whole that should unite forces to avoid the danger of nuclear self-destruction, and that neither the USSR nor the United States should strive toward military superiority. On 14 April 1987, Gorbachev declared to Secretary Shultz: "We reject actions that remind us of an interference with internal affairs of other countries, especially when those actions are done by highranking persons."43 And, only two months prior to Gorbachev's conversations with Shultz, Moscow summoned the forum "for a world without nuclear weapons," defined by the Soviet leader as an "em¬ bodiment of world public opinion." There can be no doubt that the forum, in which numerous representatives from Western countries took part, was "an act of interference in the internal affairs of other countries" by—Soviet high-ranking officials. What else can Gorbach¬ ev's appeal mean that "it is of the utmost import that this forum's ideas and its very spirit reach the widest public and political circles, and it is even more important that they find an expression in the activity of those at the helm of state."44 Gorbachev's Reykjavik statement that Soviet proposals "are in agreement with the American people's interests as well as with the peoples' interests in all countries," that "whoever has another opinion should lend an ear to what the American people, the Soviet people, all peoples request," that "Americans . . . believe that through outer space they will achieve superiority over us," that "America has nostalgia for the old days, when she was militarily superior to us,"45 and his above-mentioned appeal are indissolubly bound together, being an integral part of the propaganda offensive launched by the present Soviet leadership. Also significant in this respect is Gorbachev's assertion at the forum that "aggression by means of information

384

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

[informationnaia agressia] practiced by certain countries not only leads to spiritual decay, but also interferes with normal communication between people from different countries."46 There is no doubt whatever that, in the context of the above assertion, "certain countries" means Western countries, and in the first place the United States. But the reality is that the USSR continues under its new leadership to interfere, incomparably more than those countries hinted at by Gorbachev, "with normal communication be¬ tween people from different countries." Thus, during the 14 April 1987 conversation with Shultz, Gorbachev said: "We'll see to it that those [in the USSR—M. B.] who are not content with their country become content with it." Dissatisfied "with their country" are not only those who desire to emigrate from the USSR (the above remark was uttered by Gorbachev in connection with the question on the right to emigrate broached by Shultz), but also patriotic national elements in the non-Russian Soviet republics who do not intend to emigrate—those elements who are being accused under Gorbachev too (especially following the Alma Ata events), as they were under all his predecessors, of nationalism. There is no question that, if U.S. authorities (or those of any other Western country) would attempt to convene in Washington (or in any other Western capital) people dissatisfied with the national policy of the CPSU in non-Russian Soviet republics (as did the Soviet authorities in convening at Moscow citizens of Western countries who disagree with their governments policies in the nuclear weapons problem), that the huge Soviet propaganda machine would call such actions anti-Soviet, anticom¬ munist, etc., provocations. And, generally speaking, would the present leaders of the USSR allow Soviet citizens dissatisfied with the CPSU national policy to participate in such gatherings abroad? The more time passes, the more it becomes evident that the CPSU leadership's foreign policy does not basically differ from those of its predecessors. Soviet leaders assure the world public opinion that "in the cosmic nuclear age there is no more important task than the struggle against the danger of a nuclear catastrophe," and that the USSR makes tremendous efforts to protect the world from wars, from "threats of recourse to force in whatever sphere of international life— military, political, economic and humanitarian," while "the American administration blocks" these efforts."47 Being integral parts of the "new nuclear age thinking" blared by the CPSU leadership, these assurances are a continuation with sophisticated means by the USSR's propaganda machine to supply both ideological nourishment to com-

In Lieu of a Conclusion

385

munist parties outside the USSR who are under the influence of the CPSU, and misleading people of good faith in Western countries by exploiting their fears of a nuclear war. All this is done with the aim of turning large numbers in Western countries against their own governments and of undermining the position of governments who unmask the implications of Soviet policy and take steps to counteract it. When and where they think it fits, Soviet leaders do not forget to emphasize that "as long as international reaction incites the armaments race . . . the CPSU and Soviet state will do all necessary to maintain the country's [and] the socialist community's defence force at a proper level," and that the Soviet population may rest assured that they will never and in no circumstances' allow "imperialism to achieve military superiority. 4cS The double objective of such emphasis is, actually, to intimidate nonsocialist and socialist countries and to educate the Russian people (dominant in the USSR and in the "community" of socialist countries) in the spirit of its military superiority over the "forces of imperialism" and of absolute subordination to Soviet interventionist actions everywhere in the world. Thus, when Gorbachev, declared on 10 April 1987 in Prague that "the socialist community's successes are not possible without every party and every country taking care not only of their own interests, but also of general interests," the population of Czechoslovakia and that country's leadership under¬ stood very well the relation of his words to the 1968 events.49 It means that, in a similar situation, the USSR under Gorbachev would proceed exactly as it had under Brezhnev. The Soviet-Polish declaration, signed by Gorbachev and Jaruzelski on 21 April 1987, is worded in the same spirit and says, inter alia, that "history should not constitute an object of ideological speculations and occasion the stirring up of nationalist passions."50 At a meeting with A. Fava (Secretary General of the Argentinian Communist party), however, Gorbachev dwelt on such problems as "combining the struggle for the survival of mankind with the struggle for the immediate interests of working people" and "interaction and wide contacts on an intrastate and international level between different political class and ideological forces."51 Problems connected with the class interests of working people have always been considered pri¬ mordial by Soviet Communists, and Gorbachev appreciates them in that sense when talking to communist leaders from capitalist countries. But, in talks in which non-Communists also take part—e.g., talking with a group of intellectuals from different countries—he declared:

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

386

Early in this century, V. I. Lenin already expressed a tremendously profound idea concerning the priority of general human values over tasks of one or another class. In our time that idea prevails still more acutely. It is most desirable that, in the other part of the world, the thesis on the priority of general human values over all other values to which different people are dedicated should be understood and ac¬ cepted.52

Before Gorbachev took power, his predecessors also juggled with contradictory theses and formulae, and to substantiate them quoted Lenin. At that time, to hold his position and to advance in the party hierarchy, Gorbachev reiterated such theses and formulae. In promising today that the present CPSU leadership will make efforts to "oppose to dogmatism a creative development of Marxist-Leninist theory, Gorbachev not only indulges in self-flagellation but also carries on his juggling.53 When talking, for example, to people of culture from various, mostly nonsocialist, countries, Gorbachev urges them to protect "man¬ kind's common house from the nuclear danger."54 But, at the Soviet Trade Union Congress, for instance, he said, "We did and will do all the necessary to ensure our security and that of our friends and allies,"55 and at the Soviet Komsomol Congress he maintained that, in Afghanistan, Soviet soldiers fought not only as "true internationalists helping a brotherly people to defend its revolutionary conquests," but also as "true patriots defending the fatherland s southern frontiers security."56 Thus, to undermine from the inside the position of foreign governments who oppose Soviet expansion, Gorbachev intersperses his vocabulary with formulae such as "the priority of general human values over tasks of one or another class," "the home of all Europeans," "mankind's" common home," "new thinking of the nuclear age," etc. On the other hand, to educate the Soviet population in the spirit of traditional Soviet territorial and political expansion, he uses phrases like that of Soviet troops in Afghanistan doing "their internationalist duty," etc. While mentioning at the Twentieth Komsomol Congress the need for "a history of the fatherland, of the Party, to be written," Gorbachev emphasized that such history

must be an honest, courageous, interesting book describing in all its greatness the heroic pioneering way of the country and the Party; a book that should not overlook the drama of events and of human destinies, a book with no white pages, subjective preferences and

In Lieu of a Conclusion

387

antipathies and whose value would not depend on fluctuations of conjuncture.57

If these words would reflect the Soviet leadership's true intentions, if an honest and courageous history of the USSR and CPSU were to be written, a history without white pages, it would prove that the Soviet system should be called into question." For it was Gorbachev himself who, in addressing persons of culture from the United States, Britain, France and other Western countries, stated that "if the progress in one sphere or another is accompanied by human losses—not only spiritual and political, but physical too—the system inspiring them should be called into question."58 The entire real history of the USSR and the CPSU teems with human victims within the borders of the USSR, and outside its borders caused by Soviet leaders (in the name of progress, the proletariat's class interests, peoples' friendship, the USSR's and its allies' security, etc.). When Gorbachev urges at the Komsomol Congress that Soviet youth should be guided "by firm political convictions and moral principles even in most unfavorable circumstances," not to take the road "of everyday opportunism" (zhiteiskogo opportunizma), "of com¬ promise with one's conscience," he is dissembling his own behavior, because his quick rise was due to the very fact that he himself in no way followed such principles.59 At the same congress, Gorbachev declared that "man is not born with genes of an internationalist or nationalist" and that "each new generation of Soviet people must now and again master anew the sense of internationalism in intran¬ ational communication (v mezhnatsional'nom obshchenii), in coeducation and in joint work."60 The Soviet leader attempts thus to explain not only all manifestations and outbreaks of dissatisfaction and indignation by non-Russian populations in the Soviet national republics, but also those that will happen there in the future. The cause of these mani¬ festations and outbreaks is not, however, that pointed at by Gorbachev, but the policy of russification, of systematic denationalization of the non-Russian peoples to keep them from their seizing power and the impact to which every new generation of the Soviet national republics' autochthonous populations is subjected. There are innumerable phenomena reflecting the russification policy promoted, as before, by the current CPSU leaders, although, following the Alma Ata events, Gorbachev took to mentioning from time to time that the USSR "is a multinational country."61

388

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

Thus, speaking at a festive gathering to commemorate the 117th anniversary of Lenin's birth, N. Ryzhkov, the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, said: "Socialism has transformed our fatherland into an indestructible brotherly union of peoples."62 A terminological analysis shows that this is the only time when the term peoples is used in that address in the meaning of peoples of the USSR. The chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had not mentioned in the entire text of his address even one of the non-Russian Soviet republics and not one of those republics' autochthonous populations. The terms "country," "state, homeland, "people," "society," appearing in the text 12, 6, 6, 19, and 13 times respectively, are used by Ryzhkov exclusively as synonyms for the USSR or of the USSR population in its entirety. Such terms as "party" (including combinations "party and state," "Communist party and Soviet state," "party and government," etc.) and "Central Committee" (CC) appear 37 and 6 times respectively, and are used solely as synonyms for for the CPSU or of the CPSU Central Committee. Although Ryzhkov, as shown above, uses in his address one time the term "republics" and one time the terminological collocation "Union republics," he does not treat the Soviet Union republics as sovereign states, as they are proclaimed to be by the USSR constitution and by the constitutions of the republics themselves, but as the vast Soviet empire's administrative territories. The systematic denationalization of non-Russian peoples, the actual transformation of the republics bearing those peoples' names into common administrative units, the support within them by obedient autochthonous cadres who distort national history and deteriorate the national culture in the spirit of Moscow's interests, etc., generate resentment against Russians and CPSU policies. A whole row of indicators point to the fact that the famous glasnost', as a distinctive sign of the Gorbachev leadership's initial period, has already begun to stagnate and give ground to the old ways in Soviet life. Two articles published in Pravda in April 1987 are extremely significant in this respect. The first article is, basically, an appeal for reintroducing in Soviet theatrical art ("the question is not of a specific performance") "self¬ censorship," a factor that under Gorbachev's predecessors, was no less effective than Glavlit. "The theater," says the article, "struggled a long time and with much ardor against that 'forbidden' by official cultural bodies, until it unlearned how to say 'forbidden' to itself."63 The author of the other article says that "it is especially worrisome" that for a long time, one can notice in [Soviet] literature a trend

In Lieu of a Conclusion

389

toward gradual disappearance of a creative, constructive hero.” And he adds that "taking into account the two-decades-long stagnation of thought, this had to happen.”64 In considering the critical-negative [presentation] as a natural phenomenon, as "a reaction to those long years during which many facets of reality were taboo,” and stating that the writers' generation of those years "proved to be a generation with deeply concealed reflexes," the author seeks to suggest that "the people . . . longs for a healthy stability, for a desire to rise higher and to look further.”65 That is why, asserts the author, "the publication of works of the last decades, which for some reasons were not published [in the USSR—M. B.] or were printed in the West, . . . the attempts to frame them in the living and uninterrupted literary process, in the context of contemporaneity . . . not only slow down this process, but also instills in it a kind of rut of literary necrophilia.”66 Mentioning thereafter several works that, as he says, "have heralded a new wave of a healthy, robust realism in attitude,” he concludes that their authors "came near to creating remarkable images of socially active heroes . . . upon whom depends today the difficult task of restructuring."67 The publication in Pravda, at an interval of a few days, of these articles marks a turn in the attitude toward literature and art in the direction of their reorientation, of a renewal of the traditional self-censorship by creative people. It has been emphasized above that the national policy and the foreign policy of the CPSU leadership's predecessors have not been criticized or unmasked. In regard to the national policy, the dena¬ tionalization and russification of non-Russian Soviet peoples goes on at an even more intense pace than before. In foreign policy, the traditional campaign of misleading world public opinion about the real purposes and intentions of the USSR continues not only at an accelerated rate, but also by new means, such as "space bridges,” i.e., intercontinental discussion by Soviet and U.S. parliamentarians, scientists, journalists, etc., whereby Soviet participants try to convince their American interlocutors that the new CPSU leadership's words wholly correspond to their deeds, that glasnost' and democratization are indissolubly tied to the USSR's domestic policy, just as the struggle for a world without nuclear weapons reflects its peaceful foreign policy. But certain answers to the Americans do not reflect Soviet realities, and uncover the insincerity of Soviet organizers of such discussions. Soviet television broadcast on 13, 16, and 23 May 1987 three intercontinental U.S.-Soviet talks on understanding between the two peoples. Soviet participants suggested that: (a) the stereotyped negative

390

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

presentation of Russians in the United States and Americans in USSR be renounced (13 May); (b) stress not be put in bilateral relations upon aspects dividing the two nations but on those drawing them together, in order to prevent ecologic catastrophe and nuclear annih¬ ilation of all mankind (16 May); (c) through personal contacts by parliamentarians from the two countries, a more favorable atmosphere in U.S.-Soviet relations should be created (23 May). Soviet journalists stressed (13 May) the role of the press in the circumstances when glasnost' allows them to unveil deficiencies in every sphere and to criticize even the most high-ranked persons. But when asked, in this connection, whether they are now allowed to express critical opinions on the foreign policy of the USSR, they gave an evasive answer and could not conceal the fact of that sphere being taboo in the USSR, meaning that journalists are permitted (and obliged) only to praise (and by all means not to criticize) the foreign policy and its promoters. However, the CPSU program adopted under Khrushchev in 1961 had already proclaimed glasnost’ to be a most important tool in perfecting the principles of socialist democracy and their rigid observance.68 Moreover, Khrushchev's revelation of the lawlessness and arbitrariness of Stalin's times was incomparably more spectacular and startling than Gorbachev's criticism of the stagnation and corruption in the times of his predecessors. The program adopted under Khrushchev speaks also of the need to promote the democratic principles of the Soviet electoral system.69 Now, after more than a quarter of a century, current CPSU leadership also promises to democratize the electoral system, even to ''revolu¬ tionize'' it by enabling several candidates to compete for each deputy seat. Introducing himself at the 23 May 1987 intercontinental discussion, V. Zagladin, the highest-ranked in the Soviet party hierarchy at that discussion, said that he was born in Moscow, has been working for many years in the CPSU CC, and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from the Turkmen SSR. A U.S. parliamentarian asked him if he had any apprehension that with the new electoral system he would be defeated in Turkmenia by a local candidate in future elections for the USSR Supreme Soviet. Zagladin's evasive answer— that he uses to meet his electors—cannot conceal the fact that he does not represent at the USSR Supreme Soviet their interests, but those of Moscow only. The circumstance that he is one of the chiefs of CPSU CC International Section and is active in the Supreme Soviet in the framework of the Foreign Affairs Commission give a very distinct picture in this respect.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

391

The question whether, under the new electoral law, any Soviet citizen will be able to offer his candidacy in the election of deputies was answered by G. Arbatov. Invoking differing political cultures, historically developed in the USSR and in the United States, Arbatov declared that, for purely ethical reasons, no Soviet citizen would think of proposing his own candidacy (even it were his wish to be elected as deputy). However, the question of the U.S. parliamentarian was about the right to propose one's own candidacy (in other words, whether the electoral law due to be promulgated in the USSR will stipulate that every citizen may offer his own candidacy in elections to the soviets), and not the ethical and moral feelings generated by the political culture of the Soviet people. The juggling by Soviet participants in Soviet-U.S. discussions and at different recent propagandists meetings proves that the current CPSU leaders are no less hypocritical than their predecessors. Gor¬ bachev's purges did not take in the promoters of Soviet national policy and foreign policy; all those scholars and publicists who glorified his predecessors, now glorify "restructuring,” glasnost', "democratization," "new political thinking," and other slogans now fashionable in the USSR. The same scholars and publicists continue today to abuse and insult those who shed light on somber aspects of the national policy and foreign policy promoted by the USSR current leadership's pre¬ decessors. There is no doubt also that from now on they'll have recourse to the same methods toward those who will dwell upon the discrepancies between the words and deeds of the Soviet leaders in their domestic policy as well as in their foreign policy.

Notes, Chapter 11 1. P. Fedoseev et al., eds., Marksistsko-leninskoe uchenie o sotsializme i sovremennosti (Moscow, 1975), p. 348. 2. Ibid., pp. 256-257, 260. 3. Ibid., p. 334. 4. A. Lazarev, Moldavskaia sovetskaia gosudarstvennost'. . . , pp. 38, 4850, 64, 155, 254 etc. 5. Ia. Kopanskii, Internatsional'naia solidarnost' s bor'boi trudiashchikhsia Bessarabii za vossoedinenie s sovetskoi rodinoi. 1918-1940 (Kishinev, 1974), p. 13. 6. A. Lazarev, op. cit., pp. 219-213. 7. A. Grecul, Rastsvet moldavskoi sotsialisticheskoi natsii (Kishinev, 1974), p. 18. 8. Ibid. 9. Enciclopedia sovetica moldoveneasca, vol. 5 (1975), p. 498.

392

Discrepancies Between Words and Deeds

10. Sovetskaia Moldavia, 12 October 1979. 11. Pravda, 7 November 1986. 12. Ibid., 28 January 1987. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 27 January 1987. 21. Ibid., 21 November 1986. 22. Ibid., 28 January 1987. 23. Moscow TV, Channel 1, 15 April 1987. 24. Pravda, 20 February 1987. 25. Ibid., 28 January 1987. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 22 February 1987. 30. Ibid., 14 October 1986. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 15 October 1986. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 11 April 1987. 37. Ibid., 15 April 1987. 38. Ibid., 14 October 1986. 39. M. Gorbachev, "Za bez'iadernyi mir, za gumanizm mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii," Pravda, 17 February 1987. 40. Ibid. 41. Pravda, 14 October 1986. 42. Ibid., 15 October 1986. 43. Ibid., 15 April 1987. 44. M. Gorbachev, "Za beziadernyi mir. . . 45. Pravda, 14 October 1986. 46. M. Gorbachev, "Za beziadernyi mir. . . 47. N. Ryzhkov, Leninizm—osnova teorii i politiki perestroiki," Pravda 23 April 1987. 48. "K sovetskomu narodu. Obrashchenie TsK CPSS," Pravda, 14 March 1987. 49. "Miting Chekhoslovatsko-sovetskoi druzhby," Pravda, 11 April 1987. 50. M. Gorbachev, V. Jaruzelski, "Deklaratsia o sovetsko-pol'skom sotrudnichestve v oblasti ideologii, nauki i kul'tury, Pravda, 22 April 1987.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

393

51. Pravda, 4 March 1987. 52. "Beseda M. S. Gorbacheva s gruppoi deiatelei mirovoi kul'tury, Pravda, 21 October 1986. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Pravda, 11 April 1987. Ibid., 21 October 1986. Ibid., 26 February 1987. Ibid., 17 April 1987. Ibid. Ibid., 21 October 1986. Ibid., 17 April 1987. Ibid. Ibid. N. Ryzhkov, loc. cit.

63. N. Agisheva, "O chem krichit 'Chaika,'" Pravda, 22 April 1987. 64. R Proskurin, "Vechnoe pole. Zametki o sovremennoi proze," Pravda, 26 April 1987. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Programrna kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1973), p. 103. 69. Ibid., p. 102.