Eastern or Central Europe? [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 253-269]

EASTERN OR CENTRAL EUROPE?
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citing other theses or strata of Marxism-are trying to question. What is
even more important: this is perhaps the only principle that became
completely realized in practice, and precisely in Eastern European practice,
and the rest-the free, comprehensively developed individual, History with
a human countenance, the conquest of Nature, the Utopia of communism,
etc., etc.-surrounded and enveloped this basic idea that had become reality
only as a seductive aura. This aura seems particularly attractive for those,
for whom-since they are lacking national roots, and desire to assimilateadvancement was only possible through free individuality, that is to say,
for the Jewry. This is one of the decisive causes of the mutual affinity
between Jewry and Marxism.
The fact that Marxism was relocated in Eastern Europe has acquired
great significance from the point of view of the problem of nationalities.
For Marxism, born in Western Europe, where a developed national structure,
accepted by then as natural, existed, the problem of nationality hardly
emerged. This followed logically from the thesis that capitalism will be
succeeded by socialism in the most developed Western countries, and more
or less simultaneously. The executor of this change, the working class,
has little more to do than-according to the Communist Manifesto-to
"elevate itself to the status of national class," or even more unequivocally,
according to the 1888 English edition: "to the status of the leading class
of the nation,"52 meaning that the oppressed class, already superior in
numbers, has "merely" got to grasp the power. From the point of view
of transition from capitalism to socialism, Eastern Europe-where both
independent nation and working class existed only in heterogeneous,
rudimentary form-was not interesting. Marx and his colleagues maintained
that the transformation of society must follow after the creation of an
independent national existence. This is how they write, for example, on
the Polish problem: "Only after Poland succeeded in regaining her independence, after she as an independent nation can make decisions for herself,
can her internal development begin again, and only then can she act independently in the social reformation of Europe. A viable nation, while
enchained by a conqueror from outside, must of necessity turn all its power,
all its striving, all of its energy against the enemy from without; thus all
the while its internal life remains paralyzed, it is unable to work for the
emancipation of society." 3 It is the existence of the Russian national
framework that makes it understandable why Marxism gained foothold
in Russia, and not, let us say, in the industrially incomparably more
developed Czechoslovakia. However, Marxism, transplanted into Eastern
Europe, had to reverse the sequence of "national liberation-social liberation," it even had to purge from public consciousness the former, with
the aid of the latter. Lenin, addressing the Armenian social democrats
in 1903, stated that "it is not the business of the proletariat to proclaim
federalism and national autonomy, it is not the business of the proletariat