marxism and the southern slav question

Marxism and the Southern Slav QuestionAuthor(s): Hermann Wendei and R. W. S. W.Reviewed work(s):Source: The Slavonic Review, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Dec., 1923), pp. 289-307Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4201731 .Accessed: 19/01/2012 00:18

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MARXISM AND THE SOUTHERN SLAV QUESTION.

Not in the interest of Germany, but in the interest of revolution." -Neue Rheinische Zeitung, i849.

THE founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, expressed themselves more than once with regard to the Slavs of Austria and in particular to the Southern Slavs, in terms which were both unfavourable and lacking in compre- hension: and this has been readily ascribed to their German birth and outlook. Thus Masaryk, in his Foundations of Marxism, refers to their " Liberal-German antipathies " towards the Slavs, and sought to prove that they were "' keenly German " in sentiment. Again, in his Spirit of Russia, he affirmed that " Marx, and his followers right up to the present day, are ' German National' in sentiment and hostile to the Slavs"; while the Serb Jovan Skerlic wrote of their " Slavophobe Chauvinism" and accused them of " almost German imperialistic ideas."

In reality they were far too clearheaded to be influenced by the German Philistine's prejudices against other nations, and they were throughout life hostile to the neo-German theory of force. In I848 they felt it to be nothing short of a personal disgrace that the Germans had so often in history played the part of oppressor towards others; and they ardently demanded that revolutionary Germany should, in its attitude to neighbouring peoples, break away from its whole past and should proclaim, not only its own freedom but that of all oppressed peoples. Three decades later the cause of a conquered Slav people, the Poles, started the movement which originated the International Workmen's Association-the " First International." In his famous inaugural address to this association Marx bade the workman proclaim for foreign policy " the simple laws of morality and right, which ought not only to regulate the relations of individuals, but also to form a supreme law for the intercourse of nations." In I870, by his uncompromising opposition to the forcible annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, he showed that his fundamental teaching differed from Bismarck's " blood and iron" policy like fire from water.

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290 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

Recent research has shown that most of the writings on the Southern Slav question, hitherto ascribed to Marx, were really written by Engels; but, as the two men were virtually a single brain, these articles contain the views of Marx also. Of the two, Engels was more predisposed to Slav matters. In I852 he studied Russian grammar, in order,as he wrote to Marx, that, when the next big crisis arose, he should know the languages, history and social conditions of the nations " with which we shall at once come into conflict ;" and he also regularly read Polish, and at the age of 74 began to study Bulgarian. He thus acquired a certain feeling for the spirit of Slavonic languages: for before the great work of Miklosich appeared, he played for a time with the bold idea of writing a comparative Slavonic Grammar!

The best proof, however, that Marx and Engels were not infected by " German " antipathy to the Slavs is to be found in their attitude to the 'Poles. When, in I848, the Polish question was raised in the National Assembly at Frankfurt, they made violent attacks in their Neue Rheinische Zeituing against all deputies who opposed Polish national aspirations; they painted Polish history in glowing colours, and advocated " the restoration of a Polish state capable of independent life-extending at least as far as in I772, with the mouths of its great rivers "-in other words with Danzig !-and " with a large stretch of coast on the Baltic." During the rising of I863, Engels hailed the Poles as " splendid fellows " (ganz famose Burschen). Meanwhile, however, in the early Fifties, he had called them a " nation fondue," which could only be used as an instrument until Russia herself was dragged into the agrarian revolution, and which would then lose every raison d'etre; and he advocated the brutal policy of " taking all one can from the Poles in the West, occupying their fortresses (especially Posen) with Germans under pretext of protection, leaving them to their own resources, driving them into the fire, draining the country dry, feeding them with hopes of Riga and Odessa, and, if the Russians can be brought into action, forming an alliance with the latter and forcing the Poles to give way.

These changes from hot to cold show that for Marx and Engels the Polish problem, like that of the smaller Slav peoples, was relative rather than absolute. The sun round which their world revolved was the social revolution in Germany, then in Europe, and eventually throughout the world; and they saw everything in sunlight or in shadow, according as it promoted or thwarted this idea. But of all counter-revolutionary powers

MARXISM AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS. 291

none seemed to them so dangerous as Russian Tsarism-not, of course, the Russian people as such. Tsardom, as the main pillar of reaction in Europe, and especially in Prussia-Germany, was the arch enemy and they impatiently watched for anv signs indicating its approaching collapse. The words which Engels wrote as an old man in i887-" if once things start in Russia, then hurrah ! "

-give the clue to their political activities for many decades. If only things might start in Russia--and whatever on earth or in heaven might seem to prevent or delay this event, was certain to arouse their keen hostilitv. Whoever hated, weakened or attacked Tsarist Russia, was certain of their praise; whoever loved, strengthened or defended Tsarist Russia, was their deadly foe. It was from this angle that Marx and Engels saw all Slav questions; and this, apart from other considerations, is enough to explain their attitude to the Southern Slavs.

II. When the March Revolution of I848 broke out, the one idea

of Marx and Engels was to transform the constitutional movement of the bourgeoisie into a social struggle of the working classes. With this end in view, in the Neue Rheiiiische Zeitung they beat the drum day and night for the revolutionary war of Germany against Russia, which was bound to bring more Radical politicians into power in place of the narrow March Liberals, and which they hoped would end with the real liberation and unity of a democratic Germany, on the ruins both of feudalism and of middle-class rule.

As this meant a " war of West against East, of civilisation against barbarism, of republic against autocracy," all Europe fell for them into two great camps-the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary peoples. To the former belonged, apart from the Germans, the Poles, not only because they were " the only Slav nation" which had hitherto made a revolution, but because they also belonged to what Louis Blanc called " les peuples ndcessaires." The share of Russia, Austria and Prussia in the dismembermelnt of Poland was, they realised, the chain that held the Holy Alliance together, and hence the restoration of a Polish state was the surest means of destroying the secret connection which still subsisted between the three Eastern Courts. But if the Nene Rheinische Zeitung praised the Poles for their " great political insight and generally revolutionary feeling," it reserved even greater praise for the Magyars, when, in i849, they proclaimed war to the knife against the Habsbturgs

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Engels compared Kossuth to Danton and Carnot, and discovered in his resistance the main features of the year I793. He cele- brated the Magyars as the " last heroes of the revolution of 1848," and prophesied a speedy revenge against " the Slav barbarians."

On the other side stood what Marx and Engels called " the childish and reactionary Panslavism," as a league of all the small Slav nations of Austria and to a lesser degree of Turkey, for defence against the Austrian Germans, the Magyars and of course the Turks. Their aim, Slavonic unity, seemed to Marx either pure sentiment or simply the Russian knout. Czech national enthusiasm had become a mere tool of the Vienna camarilla. The Southern Slavs, for petty national reasons, had betrayed the revolution to Petersburg and Olmiitz, and their national revival began " with a brutal onslaught on the Austrian and Magyar revolution," and with help to the Tsar. Engels, therefore, proclaimed that to the hatred of Russia felt by all German revolutionists, there would in future be added hatred of the Czechs and Croats. He even advocated " the most decided terrorism against these Slav peoples," and prophesied with a fierce satisfaction that the general war which was bound to break ouit after the first victorious rising of the French proletariat, would " annihilate the very name of all these little pigheaded nations." For, except the Russians, the Poles and at most the Slavs of Turkey, he denied to all Slav nations the capacity and right to live. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung treated the ruin of the Czechs as certain, and regarded " the Panslavistic Southern Slavs " as nothing better than " the racial dregs of a thousand years' confused development." To both alike he assigned the fate of " perishing in the storm of world-revolution."

This revolutionary perspective once accepted, the naked facts seemed to justify Marx and Engels. Tsarism, to which Frederick William IV., amid the depression of the March days, looked trustingly as to a colossus with feet of iron; which soon after offered Russian bayonets to the Prince of Prussia to suppress the German " farce of freedom " (Freiheitsschwindel), and which finallv sent its Cossacks to destroy Hungarian liberties, was undoubtedly the most dangerous enemy of the revolution; while the Austrian Slavs as a whole, by their resistance -to Austria's share in the Frankfurt National Assembly, weakened the force of the revolution,-and the Southern Slavs destroyed its last hopes by their resistance to the Magyars.

If the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was often strangely beside the


mark, its articles were, of course, not so much serious scientific studies, as sketches hurriedly written between the volleys; and at a later date Marx himself frankly admitted the " almost childish enthusiasm" and " delusions of spirit " with which he and Engels had greeted the revolution of I848. But they lacked any clear and svstematic view with regard to the Southern Slavs. It no doubt sounded like German national feeling when they pointed out that the Slovenes and Croats cut off Germany and Hungary from the Adriatic sea, and that neither country could allow this. But the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was certainly less influenced by Pan-German aims than by the desperate efforts of the Hungarian revolution to secure Fiume by an alliance with Sardinia, and thus, in its war with the Habsburgs, to win an important strategic outlet to the sea.

There can, however, be no question that these two pioneers of socialism were hampered by German limitations in their knowledge of South-eastern Europe. Their philosophic development was determined, not by the humanism of Herder, who assigned to the Slavs a high mission in the progress of humanity, but by the idealism of Hegel, who excluded the Slavs from his historical survey because they had not " hitherto appeared as an independent factor among the forms assumed by reason in the world " (in dey Reihe der Gestaltungen der Vernunft in der Welt). It is true that Marx and Engels had long ago thrown over Hegelianism, but its effect on their minds still unconsciously survived. When Engels, in a thoroughly un-Marxist manner, spoke of the Slavs as a people in the main suited to agriculture, he was repeating Hegel's emphasis upon the agricultural character of the Slavs; and when he dismissed the Southern Slavs as " racial dregs " (Vblkerab fall), he was re-echoing Hegel's de- scription of the Bulgars, Serbs and Albanians as " broken barbarian fragments."

Moreover, Marx and Engels, as Rhinelanders, belonged entirely to West Europe, and had never seen the problem of nationalities at close quarters. They had lived in France, where the German Alsatians had willingly submitted, and knew Belgium, where the Teutonic Fiemnings had no separatist feelings. If, then, such highly developed peoples threw in their lot with nations differing in language and habits, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung found it hard to appreciate the national griefs of the more backward Southern Slavs, the more so as only vague accounts of their movement reached Germany. In the dearth of German books upon Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Marx and


Engels resorted all the more freely to the mass of propagandist literature issued by the Magyars against them.

Thus the champions of a view of history which saw peoples as something not absolute, buit nmerely transitory, and, above all, not unitary but split up into classes, ended by dividing them into the two quite arbitrary categories of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. If the theory was false, the way in which it was applied was still more so. If Engels was right in seeing in the Slav movement a menace of the barbaric East against the civilised West, of the plain against the city, of the primitive agriculture of the Slav serfs against trade, industry and knowledge, then Poles and Magyars most certainly didI not belong to the side of the West. To speak of the Magyar wedge which had been driven into the " Slav barbarians " was a historical absurdity: for in those days civilisation was not on the side of the Magyar nomadic horsemen, but of the Slav agriculturists whom they displaced.1

Again, that Germans and Magyars in the Danubian basin had saved the Southern Slavs from becoming Turkish-" a service which the Austrian Southern Slavs would not pay too dearly even by exchanging their nationality for the German or MagyVar "-will not hold water. For not merely was it the Southern Slavs who, in 1389, bled at Kosovo for all Europe in their defence against the Ottomans, but in later centuries, under Habsburg leadership, they formed the strongest bulwarkl against Turkish inroads; while those of their kinsmen who had fallen under the yoke of the Porte preserved their national spirit un- impaired, until the XIXth century brought Serbia once more to the light of freedom. Yet again, Engels exaggerated the civilising role of the Germans in the South-East, where they merely smoothed the path for a feudal culture and stamped down che Slav peasant masses as manure. As the Middle Ages ended, the real bearers of the revolutionary tradition were the Slovenes and Croats who rose against their feudal oppressors, while the German knights who drowned these movements in blood stood for the counter-revolution. Still more akin to the counter-revolution was the rise of Magyar nationalism in the XVIIIth century, when medieval Hungary, with its feudalism and class privileges, resisted the enlightened despotism of Joseph II.

1 This argument is carried further by Mijo Radosevic in Marxizam, Panslavizam i Jugoslovensto (Zagreb, I921), who shows that in the Magyar language all the words for agricultural implements, showing a higher stage of development, are borrowed from the Slav. [This is not Radosevic's discovery, but has been well known since Miklosich's researches--ED.]


Engels' comparison of the France of I793 with Hungary, as a modern state fighting against " the almost nomadic barbarism of th.e Croats," is nothing short of grotesque. For Hungary and Croatia were both dependent upon agriculture and stock-raising had the same antiquated conditions of property and work, and were really twins in social structure and political constitution.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was quite wrong in asserting that the Croats were deaf to the call of 1848: for Zagreb, just like Budapest, had its March movement, its National Guard, its Academic Legion, its meetinigs clamouring for responsible government, its elected parliament, equality before the law and the abolition of all feudal rights. At the joint parliament the Croat delegates voted against serfdom, and the Croatian Sabor passed laws abolishing the nobles' immunity from taxation and the feudal jurisdiction of the landlord, and transforming the peasants into free owners of their land. The Croat and Magyar revolutions were the same in type. In such economically backward countries the lower and middle nobility made itself more heard than the bourgeoisie, whose role was quite subordinate; but this was not more so in Zagreb than in Budapest, where the March Cabinet was exclusively composed of nobles-including one prince, two counts and a baron. A few years later, in his London exile, Marx had quite shaker off his illusions as to Hungary when, through an open letter of his friend Ernest Jones, he made it clear to Kossuth that European revolutions meant a crusade of labour against capital, and could not be reduced to the intellectual and social level of a people like the Magyars, who were still living in the half-civilised conditions of the XVIth century..

But, true to the catchword proclaimed by Szalay, the Hungarian envoy to the Frankfurt National Assembly-" the Croatian revolution is the beginning of the counter-revolution," Engels boldly maintained that the Southern Slavs had risen simply to destroy the German and Magyar revolution. In realitv the movement among the Croats, Serbs and Slovenes was at first no moie friendlv to the dynasty than that of the Magyars; and, again, at the Slav Congress in Prague, which took a definite democratic turn against Russian Tsarism, the Austrian Slav current, which aimed at the preservation of the Habsburg Monarchy, was by no means predominant. But the prospect of finding themselves a hopeless minority in a united Germany inevitably forced the Slavs to oppose the inclusion of the non-German hereditary provinces in revolutionary Germany; while the frenzied nationalism of the Magyars, who denied the existence of the


Southern Slav Question and demanded a decision by the sword, forced Croats and Serbs to ally themnselves with the Habsburgs, who were equally threatened by the Magyars. That the Southern Slavs by their resistance injured the German revolution and assisted both the Habsburgs and Tsarism, is a historic fact for which they cannot be blamed. Of the Czechs who are in the same position, the Neute Rheinische Zeitung had quite impartially pointed out that " an unhappy fate " had forced them, in the great struggle between East and West, to side with Russian despotism; and for this it blamed their four centuries of oppression by the Germans. Engels might have as truly argued that Magyar repression had driven the Southern Slavs into the arms of the Habsburgs. He had a perfect right to argue that those who do not accept the revolution with all its consequences will one morning, perhaps quite " unwittingly and unwillingly," find themselves arm in arm with Windischgritz and Nicholas; but he had no right to assume that it was the bounden duty of the Southern Slavs to sacrifice themselves to the German and Magyar revolution, or to criticise their refusal to accept the historic mission of " perishing in the sea of world-revolution."

The ignorance which made Marx and Engels believe in the in- evitable ruin of the Southern Slavs was due to the lack of German sources on the subject. They might certainly have avoided the mis-statement that in none of these Slav peoples (Czechs and Serbs not excepted) did any national tradition survive, even such as rested upon purely local quarrels: for the songs of Marko Kraljevic, which are the common possession of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, were already known in the West, and, at least since 'ichlozer wrote, it was a sign of ignorance to treat the Czechs as Southern Slavs, as did the Nete Rheinische Zeitung. But that Engels should have quoted separatelv " Croats, Illyrians, Serbs, Bosnians," or again " Illyrians, Slovenes, Croats and Schokazen," 1 or again Morlachs and Carinthians, and should even have treated the Pandurs as a separate tribe, was not yet a crime at a period whenl not many even among the Southern Slavs themselves realised that their race stretched from the Adriatic to the Pontus. When the Slavonian looked upon the Croatian as a stranger, when the men of Carinthia and Carniola disagreed as to the language to be recognised by law, it was easv enough for German writers to

1 Sokci, Catholic Serbs who had fled from Turkish rule and settled in the Backa (S. Hungary), and whom Magyar statisticians, on the principle of divide et impera, persisted in classing as quite distinct from Serbs and Croats.--TR.


imagine that the Southern Slavs fell into ten or twelve nations, with as manv different dialects.

Out of these broken fragments, intermingled everywhere with German, Magvar and Italian elements, it seemed to Marx and Engels utterly impossible to construct a powerful independent nation. But when they insisted on a large and unified population as the first condition for separate national life, it was not because they were infected by German imperialist dreams, but because they not unjustly ascribed the wretched failure of the German revolution of I848, as compared with the English of I648 and the French of I789, to their country's division into a mass of petty states, in which there had been no German revolution, but a Prussian, a Bavarian, a Saxon, a Badensian, and a Schleiz-Ebers- dorf-lobensteinian ! They saw in these midget divisions an obstacle to progress, and, mistakenly assuming that the Southern Slavs were neither numerous nor lived in compact masses, and realising that their lack of a national bourgeoisie would make the Italian bourgeoisie predominant in Trieste, Fiume, and Zara, the German in Agram, Laibach, Karlstadt, Semlin, Pancsevo and Weisskirchen,1 they simply assumed that such a State could not and should not exist.

It is true that at Frankfurt in I848 there were some extreme nationalists who dreamt of including as vassals in the German system the lands of the Lower Danube and their peoples, whom they considered as yet unfitted for self-government. But (as Ryasanov points out in his notes to the collected edition of Marx and Engels2 in the Neute Rheinische Zeitung), when explaining the grounds of their opposition to Russia, they never referred to any special interests of Germany in the Balkans, nor to a " Teutonic Mission," nor to the need for protecting German trade at the Danube mouths, or setting free " the German Danube." In a word, Marxism in its early stages sinned against the Southern Slavs, not because it was nationalist, but because it was revolutionarv

III.

During the Eastern crisis of the Crimean War, Marx and Engels wrote regularly from London to the New York Tribune, and the Southern Slav Ouestion now swam once more into their ken. Their purpose was, of course, no longer to stir up revolution in Germany, but to inform an extra-European public upon a subject

1 Zagreb, Ljubljaina, Karlovac, Zemun, Pancova and Bela Crkva. 2 Gesammelte Schriften, I852-62. (Stuttgart, 19I7.)


fromn whichi it was far removed. But their root idea -U" for social revolution against Tsardom "!---remained the same, the more so as they regarded the growing possibility of Russia seizing Constantinople as an " unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause." 1

In these articles theyT describe the maintenance of Turkish independence, or in the case of a possible dissolution of the Ottoman Empire the arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation, as " a matter of the highest moment." But as revolutionary socialists, they envisaged the Turkish problem quite otherwise than the diplomats of Europe. For many years the view deli- beratelv put forward by Wilhelm Liebknecht, that Marx took his opinion on Turkish conditions and prospects ready made from the Turcophil Scotsman, David Urquhart, was generally accepted. In reality, Marx stood to Urquhart in what he himself called a " cartel relation." Hatred of Russia and dislike of Lord Palmerston wirere common to both, but the German had nothing of the Scot's romantic enthusiasmn for the Turks. In 1849 the Neute Rheinische Zeitung contemptuously dismissed the Turks as an " utterly decayed nation "; and now Marx and Engels declared that Turkey was bound to decay more and more, so long as the existing system of the European balance of power lasted. They recognised in Asiatic Turkey the source of such strength as the Empire still possessed, but the mass of the Turkish population in Europe, where I2,000,000 Christians were held in bondage by I,000,000 Ottomans, meant for them simply the mob of Constantinople. Both were convinced that the "presence of the Turks in Euiope is a real obstacle to the development of the resources of the Thrako-Illvrian Peninsula," and Engels poured scorn upon the statesmen of Europe and their wretched expedient, the maintenance of a Turkish status quto. This principle he treated as on a par with the attempt " to keep up the precise degree of putridity into which the car- case of a dead horse has passed at a given time, before dissolution is complete," and he rightly denounced it as perpetuating the oppression of the Porte's Christian subjects. As the latter were thus forced to look to the Tsar for protection, the statuis quto became the chief motive force of Russia in all her actions against Constantinople. But while the diplomacy and the press of Europe reduced the whole Eastern Question to the dilemma of a Russian occupation of Constantinople or the preservation of the status quo, Engels answered the question, What is to

1 Marx, The Eastern Question. (London, I897.)


become of European Turkey ? with the blunt conclusion " they nmust be got rid of "-a better answer than that of the old school of statesmen.

This answer came to him from his study of the oppressed nationalities in Turkey. He left the Albanians on one side, as insufficiently ripe for civilisation. Hle fancied the Greeks to be too few in numbers, too thinly scattered and lacking in national feeling. In the Roumanians he recognised a revolutionary spirit, and, therefore, assigned to them an important role in all decisions between the Lower Danube anct the Dniester. But he turned his main attention to the Slavs, that race which forms the great mass of the population, and whose blood predominates wherever races are crossed-" and more particularly that branch of it which is resumed under the name of Illyrian (Ilirski) or South Slavonian (Yugoslavyanski) . . . . These Southern Slavonians occupy not only the greater part of Turkey but also Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia and the south of Hungary. They all speak the same language, whiclh is . . . . the most musical of all Slavonic tongues." In the religious differences -between Catholic and Orthodox, and in the separation of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, Engels saw facts which had helped "to retard anv national development embracing the whole South Slavonian territory," and he emphasised that consequently, despite all the efforts of Pan-Slav enthusiasts in Zagreb, the Serb, the Bulgar, the Bosnian rayah and the Slav peasant of Macedonia and Thrace had more national sympathy, more points of contact, more means of spiritual intercourse with the Russians, than with the Catholic Southern Slavs who speak the same language.

Engels treated Montenegro with contempt, as a barren inaccessible mountain land, held by a band of robbers, who ravaged the plains and accumulated the plunder in their fast- nesses. But he pointed out that the Southern Slav none the less made up seven to twelve millions in European Turkey, and were in the interior the sole exponents of civilisation. He made it clear that as vet no nation had been formed, but that in Serbia there was already the kernel of a strong and relatively cultured nation. " The Serbs have a literature and a history of their own. Their present independence they owe to a struggle of eleven vears against an enemy far superior in numbers. In the last twenty years they have made great progress in culture, and the Christians of Thrace, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Bosnia regard them as the poinit in which all their future struggles for inde-

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pendence will centre." It was undeniable, Engels pointed out, " that the peninsula commonly called Turkey in Europe, is the natural inheritance of the Southern Slav race," and in the interests of the democratic idea in Europe he demanded " the formation of an independent Slav Kingdom, instead of favouring the senile and degenerate Sublime Porte." " The future peace and progress of mankind are closely dependent upon this."

That their attitude towards the Southern Slav Question was so much more positive in i853 than in I849 was due to fresh knowledge acquired in the interval. Marx, it is true, left to his friend most of the Tribune articles on the Eastern Question, because to him himself, Turkish affairs were " Spanish" ; and when he wrote without Engels' help in the Breslau Neue Oder Zeitung (April, I855) on Panslavism, he fell into all his old mistakes. He imagined the Southern Slavs of Austria to consist of about three million Slovenes-namely, " Carinthians and Croats! "-and Serbs, including scattered Bulgars. The Catholic Southern Slavs were to him merely an " annexe " either of the " German or the Hungarian nation." He exag- gerates the " Babel of tongues which pre-vails to the east of Bohe-, mia and Carinthia, as far as the Black Sea," and vet thought that the Slav dialects were, with few exceptions, mutually com- prehensible. Even Engels left out the Catholic Albanians, while Marx treated Arnauts and Albanians as two different peoples; and the English Historical Review once drew attention to similar howlers on their part. In I854 Engels was already planning a book on " Teuton and Slav," but he does not seem to have studied the authorities on the Southern Slavs till after i856, in which year Marx read through for him a number of books in the British Museum, and sent him short summaries.1 Apart from hints drawn from Urquhart's books and John MacNeil's Progress of Russia in the East, Engels had convinced himself of the true importance and linguistic unity of the Southern Slavs from Hammer's great History of the Turks and the writings of Fallmeraver.

Still more decisive for his attitude was the belief that, however much Russian agents might work among Southern Slavs, the latter, when once liberated, would be allies against Tsardom. He noted with satisfaction that in that stronghold of Russian influence, " Slav or Orthodox Serbia," an anti-Russian Pio- gressive party had been formed under the former Finance

1 E.g., Kapper's Gesdnge der Serben, Vuk Karadzic's German works, and various German pamphlets on the Slavs of Hungary.

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MARXISM AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS 30I

Minister Garakanin--" naturally very modest in its efforts at reform." Marx also mentioned Garasanin in connection with the national movement of I842, which swept away Prince Michael and his supporters, " mere tools in Russia's hands." And it is quite true that this revolution was so much against the Russian hegemony, that at first Petersburg objected to recognising Alexander Karagjorgjevic as Prince; and Garasanin was a man after Marx's heart, not merely because he looked westwards and showed his teeth to Russia, but also because he was in close contact with the Polish and Magyar emigre's. In order to find an economic basis for this new policy in Serbia, the New York Tribune explained that, despite racial kinship and a common faith, the liberated Southern Slavs had opposite interests to the Rus- sians, and in any case more common interests with Western Europe. It prophesied that with the extension of the railway system from Ostend, liavre and Hamburg through Budapest to Belgrade and Constantinople, the influence of Western civilisation and trade would be permanent in South-east Europe. It at least recognised that direct Russian influence on the Turkish Slavs diminished in proportion as contact with the West strengthened Serbian nationality. In the interval between this period and the Bosnian rising, which brought the Southern Slav Question to the front, Marx had come to regard the Turkish peasant as one of the best and most moral representatives of the peasant class. The Serbs, on the other hand, seemed to be disappointing the hopes set on them as opponents of Tsardom: for they had a Russian General at their head, and many Russian volunteers in their ranks. Above all, the prospect of social upheaval in Russia, and, therefore, on the whole Continent, had never seemed so promising to Marx and Engels as in those years. Woe then to any who should contribute to a victory of Tsarist arms and so postpone once more the internal catastrophe. So Marx sided with the " good Turks," and Engels was delighted with " the collapse of the Serbs," and said contemptuously: " Montenegro betrays them for private ends, Bosnia certainly won't revolt now that Serbia wants to free her, and the good Bulgars won't lift a finger." Again, during the rising in the Krivosije in i88i, Bernstein got a blunt answer from Engels, who argued that the Socialist millennium was close at hand, and that in it such trifles as the national problem of the Southern Slavs would find their solution. The main aim of a revolutionary socialist policy must be " to work for the delivery of the West European proletariat, and to subordinate all else to this."


"However interesting the Balkan Slavs, etc., might be, the moment their bid for freedom conflicts witlh the interests of the proletariat, I am done with them.." He urged the oppressed Slavs to patience, since a victory of the proletariat must neces- sarily bring them real freedom, not mere passing freedom like the Tsar's action. He alinost fell into the old depreciatorv phrases of i848, when he had spoken of " Croats, Pandurs, Czechs, Sereshans and- rift-raff (Lumpengesindel) of that sort." "Tools of Tsardom they are and remain," he now writes, "and in politics poetic sympathies are out of place. And if from the rising of these fellows a world-war is threatened, such as may spoil our whole revolutionary position, then they, and their right of cattle-thieving, must be pitilessly sacrificed to the interests of the European proletariat . . . . For the sake of a few Herzegovinians to evoke a world-war which would cost many thousand more lives than all the inhabitants o,f Herzegovina, that is not my idea of a proletarian policy."

If, then, the views of Marx and Engels on the Southern Slays follow a curve during these years, their attitude was never determined by German nationalism, but always bv international revolutionary feeling. Hence when he discovered the article of I853, which called the Balkans the natural inheritance of the Southern Slavs, jovan Skerli6 frankly confessed: " It is not true to call Marx an opponent of the Southern Slavs."

IV. But what were, in such profound thinkers as Marx and

Engels, errors in perspective, due to their concentration on a single point, became with their lesser followers veritable distor- tions. Wilhelm Liebknecht in particular, in discussing the Eastern crisis of I877-78, fell into Urquhartism in its extreme form. The discontent of the Christians in Turkey he treated as " 99 per cent. a Russian lie," and the remaining " one per cent. a Russian manufacture." 1 On the wretched tortured rayah, who, according to Socialist terminology, was an exploited and oppressed class, if ever there was such a thing, this Socialist poured out all his scorn. "But the oppressed nationalities! " he wrote, " 'the freedom-loving Southern Slavs,' 'the Christian brothers' ! bah! bird-lime for bullfinches! . . . the freedom-loving Southern Slavs are just as real as the South Russian villages which Potemkin decked up for the Empress Catherine. Hitherto not a single specimen could be found on the spot."

1 Zur orientalischen Frage, oder soll Europa Kosackisch werden ? (l,eipzig, I878.)


As Liebknecht passed in the socialist world as Marx's mouth- piece in this question also, and was editor of Vorwdrts, his wildly false views on the Southern Slav Ouestion took root in many quarters, even outside German Social Democracy. While Bebel's party fought for Germany's imperialist policy in the Near East, they had but little feeling for the struggle for freedonm of Tturkey's victims. They could never shake off the idea of the Southern Slavs as " tools of Tsardom," and so at every new crisis the social democratic press hesitated between Turks and Slays. Even in I9I2, at the outbreak of the Balkan war, in which pacific Social Deinocracy rightlv saw a prelude to world-war, the hiighly unhistorical view was put forward that the Balkan States were -not fighting to free their oppressed kinsmen, but were mere robbers and peace-breakers. All of a sudden the status quo was something respectable, not only for the diplomatists, but also for the Socialists, and after the decision, Jean Jaures lamented the expulsion of the Turks almost in the sentimental tones of a Pierre Loti. An echo from this period, when Marxism showed no understanding for the Southern Slav problem, may be found in the manifesto addressed by the Moscow Internationale in May, I920, to the Balkan peoples-in which Jugoslav national unity is deliberately ignored, and the Croats, Montenegrins and Slovenes are treated as nations distinct fronm, and held down bvl the Serbs.

There was, however, always a counter-current. Liebknecht's effusions did not pass unchallenged, and his pamphlet provoked a sharp replv from a Berlin bank official called JIowy, a member of the Socialist party.1 This appeared anon7mouslv, and as it defended the rights of the Southern Slavs, was attributed to a Serb or Bulgar author. In the eighties, Edward Bernstein as an exile in Zurich met many Serbian students, became acquainted with their problems, and confesses in his Memoirs that he had " far greater sympathy for the Serbian and Bulgarian national movements than most German Socialists." Meanwhile, Southern Slav socialists began to lay bare the social background of the Southern Slav Question even in the press of the West, and thus rendered the current socialist view untenable. As early as I896, Bernstein in the Neue Zeit proved that Turkey, instead of being a protection against Russia, was a plaything of Russian diplomacy, that to console enslaved nationalities with the prospect of a proletarian revolution was simply grotesque, and that the place of Social Democracy was at the side of all people fighting for

1 H. L., Zur orientalischen Frage, oder soll die sozialistische A rbeiter- partei Tfirkisch werden ? (Zurich, I878.)

304 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

their liberty. Rosa ]:uxemburg reached similar conclusions in the Sachsische Arbeiter-Zeitung.

In 1902 Dr. Franz Mehring, in editing the works of Marx and Engels, added a criticism of their. attitude to the Southern Slavs, and pointed out that they had always judged the revolts of these peoples " according to their possible effects upon world policy," and had thus originated the " objectionable method " of some of their pupils " of dismissing the complicated racial issues of the Eastern Question with a few catchwords about ' sheep- lifters ' and ' rolling roubles.' "

As no thinking man in Austria-Hungary could afford to ignore the bearings of the Southern Slav Question, it was the " Austro- Marxists" who first discussed it scientificallv. Karl Renner, in his famous bookl considered the social aspect of the racial question in the Habsburg dominions. By reviewing the various races from a class angle he stripped from the Magyars the romantic halo with which Marx and Engels had invested them in I848, and showed the Hungarian State to be " the brutal rule of one nation over six others." He made it clear that the success of a policy of Magyarisation meant for half the population of Hungary at least two generations of illiteracy and economic miisery. He assured the Slavs that if ever in a reformed Austrian parliament they should be confronted by a " Germanising majority," they would find the German workmen of Austria on their side. Not long after, Otto Bauer, in a book wvhose modest title concealed a brilliant sociological analysis,2 treated the awakening of the unhistoric nations as " one of the countless phenomena of capitalistic development." Both writers were eager to see Austria- Hungary transformed into a federal racial state, " a Switzerland on a grand scale," and proclaimed in the name of Social Democracy the clainm of freedom and self-determination even for the smallest nations. It is true that Bauer did not fully grasp the problem of Southern Slav unitv when he classed the Croats and Slovenes, in contrast to the Serbs, as ailmong the nations which had but few kinsinen outside the Monarchy and consequently had nothing to hope from a dissolution of the state. But in a brilliant pamphlet3 which he published during the Ballan war, and which advocated an understanding between Germany, France and Britain, he stated the problem very happily. He greeted the conquest of Macedonia by Serbia and Bulgaria as the equivalent of the

1 - Rudolf Springer," (pseud.) Grundlagen und Entwickelungsziele der Osterreichisch- Ungarischen MIonarchie. i9o6.

2 Die Nationalildtenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. 3 Der Balkankrieg und die deutsche Weltpolitih. (Berlin, 1912.)


bourgeois revolution of I789 or i848, and as a historic step forward, in that it released the peasantry from their Turkish feudal lords and removed the all too narrow frontiers which had hampered the development of the Christian Balkan States. This pamphlet contained a historical vindication of Serbia, to whom Austria-Hungary's policy of economic strangulation had left no alternative, save to secure an outlet to the sea bv force of arms.

During the Great War, to which the Southern Slav Question served as a match, the censorship in Germnany and Austria- Hungary rendered all criticism difficult, but there were some German Marxists who raised their voices. It is true that the well- known Marxist theorist, Heinrich Cunow, endorsed the official war policy of Berlin and Vienna, and advocated Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, with the subjection of Serbs to Bulgars, Croats to Magyars, and Slovenes to Germans. But Karl Kautskv wrote a pamphletl denouncing the criminal policy of the Ballplatz and supporting the Serbs. In it he utterly rejected the partition of Serbia between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, or her erection as an Austrian vassal state. He treated the union of all Serbs in a single state as an aim according with the needs of the population, and compatible with democratic and international principles. To have declared that there were no natural obstacles to the union of " the peoples of Serbian tongue " (he meant Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) in a single organism, was no small achievement at a time when there was a bayonet behind every inkpot. Thus Ernest Denis did Kautsky a great injustice in reproaching him for " un macquillage sous lequel se cache mal la concupiscence pangermaniste."2 For to have said any more would have brought on Kautsky the fate of the present writer, whose articles were suppressed by the military censor. But even Kautsky's pamphlet serves to underline the regrettable fact that no German Marxist has ever studied the Southern Slav Question on a basis of linguistic knowledge: for of the Slovenes, whose literary language dates from Dalmatin and Truber in the century of the Reformation and who possess a rich literature, he says that thev are only in process of forming a literary language. The first attemnpt to use Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian authorities for a scientific Marxist studv of the Southern Slav Question was made in the present writer's Siidosteuropaiische Fragen, which appeared in the last year of the war and foretold Southern Slav unity as a historic necessity.

But the clearest proof that Marxism in no way ruins counter I Serbien und Belgien in der Geschichte. (Stuttgart, 1917.) 2 Kautsky et la Serbie. (Paris, I9I8.)

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to a solution of the Southern Slav Question was provided by the Southern Slavs themselves. The first Serbian Socialist, Svetozar Markovi6, who without being unreservedly Marxist, had learnt much from Marx, was entirely under the spell of the Southern Slav idea: for not merely did he regard Serbs and Croats as one people, but realised that Serbs and Bulgars, wherever they overlapped, felt themselves to be one people rather than two. His great aim was not merely social upheaval at home, popular rule, and self-government in the commune, but also revolution in Turkey and federation of the liberated Balkan peoples. The idea of Serbian unity, which was bound to injure the structure of the Danubian Monarchy, was to hin the most revolutionary cry " in the whole Balkan peninsula between Vienna and Constantinople." A generation later-- early in the XXth century-Socialism gained a firmer footing in the Balkans, this time as unalloyed Marxism; and Serbian and Bulgarian socialists were equally convinced that the non- Moslem provinces of the Ottoman Empire must be liberated. One reason was that the refugees, emigrants and harvest workers from European Turkey served to bring down wages in Bulgaria and Serbia, checked the progress of the trade unions and upset the social equilibrium throughout the Balkans. In Bulgaria the socialists directly and indirectly encouraged recruiting for the risings in Macedonia, and were often members of the famous " Komitadji" bands. At the cradle of Serbian socialism stood a big, meeting at Belgrade in August, I903, which proclaimed as its goal a revolution in European Turkey and Macedonian autonomy, and summoned " all friends of progress and freedom" to support the Macedonian rising.

If the Southern Slav idea, as applied to the unredeemed provinces of Turkey, was for the Socialists a struggle against feudalism, it acquired, in its relation to Austria-Hungarv, an anti-capitalist character. To make it possible for the peoples of South-East Europe, through muitual understanding and co- operation to protect themselves " against the capitalistic policy of all the European Great Powers," was an idea not confined to the Serbian Social Democrats: for among the Croats and Slovenes also the Slav idea had taken on a socialist tinge. In I907,

Dr. Tuma, the deputy for Gorizia, argued that Social Democracy should be recognised "as a powerful factor in the Southern Slav idea." In Croatia the Socialists, who it is true were verv weak, were the first to sound the note of Serbo-Croat union. In Bosnia the Socialists were before the war the only party which


definitely fought for Southern Slav unity. In Noveinber I909 the Congress of the Southern Slav Social Democratic Party at Ljubljana (Laibach), which was attended by delegates from Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and by guests from Serbia, declared that the four Southern Slav peoples-Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars-were in reality one people. It advocated an agreement with regard to a common literary language and legal terminology, and for the first time in a political programme puit forward the idea of " complete nationa'l unity of all Southern Slavs, without regard to differences of name, confession, alphabet or dialect." A few weeks later the first Balkan Socialist Conference at Belgrade, at which Croatia-Slavonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Mace- donia and Bulgaria were represented, declared the movements and struggles of the Balkan peoples to be " the expression of an irresistible impulse towards economic and political liberation," and accepted this impulse as both necessary and justified alike against the " imperialist aims of Austria-Hungary and the influence of Russian Tsarism." As in the days of Svetozar Markovic, a Balkan federal Republic was the watchword. It is true that in the short time still left before the great European conflict the Southern Slav Socialists did not succeed in clearing up every point of difference among, them, and thus, at the decisive moment, found themselves, like the foolish virgins of the Bible, without oil for their lamps.

But when the year I9I4 let loose the real " storm of world revolution," which submerged not only the Southern Slavs, but also the Empires of the Romanovs and Habsburgs, and when the course of events brought national unity and state independence to the nation which Marx and Engels had been ready to wipe off the tables of history, the Southern Slav Marxists joyfully greeted the new situation. While Pan-Serbs and Pan- Croats were still making all kinds of mental reservations, the Belgrade Socialist organ, Radni6ke Novinie, wrote openly in its first number (2nd December, i9i8) " Serbs, Croats and Slovenes are one people, because they have one language. . . Besides they feel themselves to be one people and desire unity." The exponents of Marxism yield to no other party in their positive attitude towards the new State, and are ahead of all others in demanding the inclusion of the Bulgars as putting the crown upon Southern Slav unity. Thus Marxism and the Southern Slav idea may be said to supplement each other.

(Trans. R.W.S.W.) HERMANIN WENDEL.

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marxism and the southern slav question

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