Prison of peoples

Prison of peoples or prison of nations () conveys the general idea of the Russian Empire as a backward authoritarian state. This definition was also sometimes used in relation to other multinational states that suppressed the desire of peoples for self-determination (Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and others).Никитин Н. Была ли Россия "тюрьмой народов"?. Дата обращения: 31 июля 2015.excellent case study on implementation of Czechoslovakism in a provincial Slovak town in Ondrej Ficeri, Czechoslovakism in Mentalities of Košice's Inhabitants and Its Implementation in the Public Space of the City in the Interwar Era, [in:] Mesto a dejiny 6 (2017), pp. 22-47"na slovenské straně se údajně pomýlený čechoslovakismus stal zbraní proti Československu", Masarykův čechoslovakismus se stal politickou zbraní, pragmatický byl vznik i zánik Československa, [in:] Radiozurnal service, available hereŠkodlivý čechoslovakizmus v dejinnej praxi, [in:] Czech Free Press service, available here

It was popularized by Vladimir Lenin in 1914. He applied it to Russia, describing the national policy of that time. According to the historian K.V. Dushenko, Lenin was probably inspired by Ukrainian and Polish journalism of the early 20th century.

Engels had used the phrase in his writing in related context. It is also associated with Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky's criticism of "Russia—prison of the peoples" and "Russia—international gendarmerie".

Before Lenin Marquis Adolphe de Custine

One of the first allusion to the concept is in Marquis Adolphe de Custine's book Russia in 1839 published in 1843. de Custine writes that:

The metaphor de Custine uses is indirect here, he states that Russia is a prison, and that the Tsar is a jailer of a third of the globe, but not that Russia is a prison of peoples.In an English addition to his book published in the same year called The Empire of the Czar; or, observations on the social, political, and religious state and prospects of Russia, however, he uses a similar phrase:

Dushenko argues that the phrase "prison of people" (singular) applies in a general sense to the population of the Empire, and more specifically to the Polish people, the only people that de Custines sees as more enlightened than the Russians. As de Custines elaborates:

Lajos Kossuth

The next use of the phrase is by Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the failed 1848 Hungarian revolution. Kossuth states the following in an 1852 speech in New York:

According to Dushenko the "tranquility of affairs" refers to the status quo after the Vienna congress, and the "nations" that Kossuth refers to are the Hungarians, the Polish, and the Austrians, the "great nations", as opposed to the "small nations" such as the Slovaks or the Ukrainians.

Engels

In 1860, Friedrich Engels writes an article called "Was Hat die Arbeitersklasse mit Polen zu tun?". According to Boris Meissner, Engels emphasizes the necessity of National Liberation in places with a civilisation, a historical development, and a strong bourgeoisie as a precursor to proletarian revolution. Engels distinguishes between the Geschichtslose Völker (peoples without history) and the people with a history. He explicitly talks about Polish liberation.

Marx

In 1870, Karl Marx fully changes his position on national liberation, writing in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt on the subject of Ireland, that:

According to Rodolsky, this is the start of a gradual shift of Marx and Engels abandoning the distinction between historic and non-historic peoples. This change in thinking eventually leads to the 2nd International making a declaration during its third conference in 1889 London on the national question:

Ukrainian-Polish journalism

According to Dushenko, in 1900, a USDP member, Yevgeny Kosevich, wrote an obituary for Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The USDP was a Ukrainian social-democratic party from Austrian Galicia. One of Liebknecht's main merits, Kosevich believed, was that "Russia, this 'prison of nations' (тюрма народів), was for him the embodiment of tyranny, and the struggle against Russia was the starting point of his views on foreign policy". Liebknecht was writing within the context of the German social-democratic dialogue on Poland started by Engels and Marx.

In 1902, Tadeusz Grużewski, a Polish National Democrat (the so-called Endecja), published an article “Former and Current Representations of Russia,”, which noted, in particular, that in the era of Romanticism “to our politicians... and not only to politicians, Tsarism was seen as a black abyss of reaction, as a huge prison of nations (więzienie ludów), and Siberia, penal battalions, and finally, whips were not merely a metaphor.”

According to Dushenko, this language became used in a limited fashion within the scene of Ukrainian and Polish nationalist journalism and poetry.

Finally, in June 1906, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian professor and nationalist from Lviv, wrote an article titled "Unity or Disintegration". To Dushenko, that is the most developed form of the "prison of nations" metaphor:

In 1912, the Ukrainian parties of Galicia called for a Ukrainian university in Lviv. By this point Gruschevsky's metaphor had become popular in Ukrainian and Polish journalism and poetry.

Lenin

From the summer of 1912 to the summer of 1914, Vladimir Lenin lived in Galicia. During that time, he was particularly interested in the national question, including the Ukrainian national movement, and the formula “prison of nations” can be assumed to have been borrowed by him from the Ukrainian or Polish journalism around him.

In December 1914, Lenin wrote “On the National Pride of the Great Russians” (based on a draft speech for the banning of Shevchenko celebrations in April 1914) in which he called for a Russian patriotism based around revolution and boted that patriotism could not go hand in hand with the oppression of other peoples:

Soviet historiography In "Russia as the Prison of Nations" (1930), Mikhail Pokrovsky wrote that direct coercion was applied most often by the Russian Empire in areas of expansion in the Far East, Caucasus, Central Asia, and Manchuria, as well as in western parts of the empire such as Poland, and "a great many Poles ended their lives in Siberia". Pokrovsky mentioned that Ukrainian, Belarusian and Georgian schools did not exist and that Polish schools penalised the speaking of the Polish language by depriving meals. Pokrovsky highlighted the history of the Jews as the most outcast in tsarist rule because the Pale of Settlement restricted where they could live. Pokrovsky cited Lenin's idea that "the dictatorship of the serf-holding landowners was not only a reflection of our country's economic backwardness, it was also one of the causes of this backwardness. As it rested on outmoded forms of economy, it did not let the economy move forward at the same time. As long as it was not overthrown, [the Russian Empire] had to remain a backward agrarian country."

Soviet historians traditionally criticized tsarist policies, which included some usage of the phrase "prison of the peoples" after Lenin. On the other hand, historians have debated how much Joseph Stalin was willing to acknowledge the existence of Lenin's and Pokrovsky's "prison of the peoples" idea. The "Observations" were a set of messages sent in August 1934 to Soviet editors providing an official interpretation of history of the Soviet Union, which became public with their publication to state organ Pravda in January 1936. The contents of the "Observations" have sometimes been seen by historians as a Stalinist willingness to acknowledge Lenin's observation. However, the historian David Brandenberger disagreed because of the context and time of the original private publications earlier in 1934. In July 1934, Stalin sent a letter to the Soviet Politburo that argued that Tsarist Russia should not be specifically criticized because all other European countries had also been reactionary in the 19th century. In the light of Stalin's narrowing of the historiography, Brandenberger argued the important takeaway from "Observations" is not that they included the phrase "tsarism—prison of the peoples" but that they replaced the word "Russia" in an earlier turn of phrase with "tsarism" to narrow the target of critique to a form of government. While Stalin used some remaining rubric of internationalism, this shift served a more "pragmatic" interpretation of history, from the Soviet Kremlin's perspective, which began to reuse more elements of Russian nationalism.

In January 1936, another history textbook commission was launched, chaired by Andrei Zhdanov and including a number of top Communist Party functionaries, including Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Yakov Yakovlev and Karl Bauman,.Brandenberger, "Politics Projected into the Past," pg. 204. In conjunction with the work of the bew commission, Bukharin authored a lengthy critique of Pokrovsky and his methodology that accused the deceased historian of mechanistic adherence to abstract sociological formulas, failure to understand and apply the dialectic method properly and a tendency to depict history as a crudely universal process.Brandenberger, "Politics Projected into the Past," pg. 205. The Zhdanov Commission, in consultation with Stalin, issued an influential communique which categorized historians of the Pokrovsky school as conduits of harmful ideas that were at root "anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist, essentially liquidatorist, and anti-scientific.""V Sovnarkome Soiuza SSSR is TsK VKP(b), RGASPI, fond 558, opis 1, delo 3156, listy 11-12; quoted in Brandenberger, "Politics Projected into the Past," pg. 207.

Pokrovsky's criticism of the old regime as a "prison of peoples" and "international gendarme" was henceforth deemed to be anti-patriotic "national nihilism," and a new Russian nationalist historical orthodoxy was established.Brandenberger, "Politics Projected into the Past," pg. 208. The new official orthodoxy remained in place for the duration of Stalin's life and to some extent until the end of the Soviet Union.

Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial Soviet Empire apply the "prison of nations" idea to the Soviets. Thomas Winderl wrote: "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."

Bibliography David Brandenberger, "Politics Projected into the Past: What Precipitated the Anti-Pokrovskii Campaign?" in Ian D. Thatcher (ed.), Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White. Houndmills, England: Palgrave, 2006; pp. 202–214. Russia as the Prison of Nations M. N. Pokrovskii, Russia as the Prison of Nations. 1930 Original Source: 1905 god (Moscow: OGIZ Moskovskii rabochii, 1930). Reprinted in M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow 1965–67), IV:129-35.

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