No More Learning

This was part of the so-called Old-Guard Com-
munist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a
new regime based on a pro-German policy. President
Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find
out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless,
but perhaps not needless, military and political purge
in Soviet Russia and the series of trials in January, 1937,
in which Vishinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part. "6
To see the Soviet picture clearly we must also recog-
nize that history shows that far-reaching revolutions have
usually given rise to the most unscrupulous conduct and
to bitter, throat-cutting dissension among the revolu-
tionaries themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb give
us the historical perspective: "Even England and Scot-
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort. . . .
"The French Revolution of 1789-95 ushered in a
similar period of conspiracy and struggle, leading to a
whole succession of counter-revolutions, not reaching the
stability of a democratic republic, with its large measure
of personal security and social equality, for nearly a
century. . . . In Russia [which was in 1900 in the matter
of morals and civilization very much where Britain and
France stood in 1700] the pattern of behavior of the
revolutionary conspirators culminated in a bitterness
and mutual antagonism more acute and all-pervading
than in any other example. "7
Especially since the end of World War II reckless
charges have been made that the Soviet Union is a hor-
rible slave state keeping from ten to twenty million
people at forced labor in concentration camps situated
in Siberia and other places. While there is no question
that the Soviet authorities have isolated political prisoners
and ordinary criminals in special work camps, the num-
bers involved have steadily declined in recent years and
have at no time reached the huge totals conjured up in
the lurid imaginations of anti-Soviet propagandists.
The Soviet Government has from its earliest years
prided itself on its method of retraining and rehabilitat-
ing prisoners of whatever variety for a normal life in the
community by giving them useful work to do while im-
prisoned. One of the chief aims of this procedure is to
ensure a good job for the prisoner when he is finally re-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
leased and to make certain that society does not perma-
nently boycott him for his original offense. Prior to the
Second World War penologists from foreign countries
had frequently praised this Soviet system of curative
work as highly intelligent and effective. Now, with
malice aforethought, the same thing is stigmatized as
"slave labor" as part of an endeavor to indict the total-
ity of Soviet civilization.
These remarks are not intended to negate the fact
that the administration of justice in the Soviet Union
has been biased and harsh towards those considered
enemies of the socialist state; that the Soviet authorities,
relying on an omnipresent secret police, have jailed tens
of thousands of blameless individuals in their periodic
purges; and that Soviet prisons and labor camps have
frequently failed to maintain decent and healthy condi-
tions. In a country where general standards of living have
remained comparatively low, the life of political and
other prisoners is likely to be on a correspondingly low
plane. We can accept as true many of the bitter experi-
ences related by escaped Soviet prisoners without gener-
alizing their reports into a condemnation of the entire
Soviet system of penology.
In 1949 the Soviet Government expelled an American
writer, Miss Anna Louise Strong, as a foreign agent and
a spy without giving her a proper opportunity for legal
defense or even explaining what precisely were the
charges against her. I am glad to say that later, during
1950, my wife and I organized a group of American writ-
ers and intellectuals who sent a vigorous letter on the
Strong case to Mr. Alexander S. Panyushkin, Soviet Am-
bassador to the United States from 1947 to 1952. This
communication urged the Soviet Government "to review
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? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
carefully the case of Anna Louise Strong and to see
whether some mistake was not made regarding her by
the Soviet Security police or other officials in immediate
charge. "8 Nothing ever came of this protest.
Persons like myself, who believe firmly in the Western
ideals of individual liberty and the toleration of dissent,
often as these ideals have been thwarted or betrayed in
the West, have the obligation to continue our criticism of
Soviet institutions insofar as they do not measure up
to true democratic standards.
It would be possible to write a book of considerable
length concerning the violation of civil liberties and
political democracy in Soviet Russia. In fact author
after author has done this very thing, as if the repressive
aspects of the Soviet dictatorship were the complete story
about the U. S. S. R. Yet despite all the legitimate quali-
fications about Soviet political life, the Soviet Consti-
tution itself clearly belongs on the positive side of the
ledger. It is a document that does great credit to its
framers and that presents a grand design of human living
of which the Soviet people can well be proud.
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? CHAPTER III SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
1. Soviet National and Racial Minorities
Take the map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics and identify, each with a distinct color, the homeland
of each of the 577 Soviet races, nationalities or tribesT
and you will have an incomparable crazy-quilt of gay
and gaudy hue. For within the sprawling boundaries of
the U. S. S. R. and amongst its population of 210,000,000
there are scattered a greater number of different ethnic
groups, both large and small, maintaining their separate
territories and cultures, than in any other country on
earth. (They speak over 125 different languages and dia-
lects and practice as many as forty different religions! /
Most people outside the Soviet Union still refer to
that country as "Russia. " This is incorrect, since the
Russian Republic is only one of the sixteen main repub-
lics of the U. S. S. R. and the Russians themselves come to
only a little more than half of the total Soviet popula-
tion. A prime reason for Lenin and his associates choos-
ing the official title, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
for the new state was to try to make sure that none of the
minority races and nationalities of the former Russian
Empire would feel subordinate, as in pre-revolutionary
days, to the large Russian majority. The idea implied
in the very name was that all the racial and national
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
groups in the confederation would stand on a plane of
freedom and equality.
The Soviet policy toward minorities goes back to the
earliest period of the 1917 Revolution. On November
15, nine days after it came into power, the Soviet Gov-
ernment issued, under the signatures of Lenin as Premier
and Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, a revolutionary
document entitled, \HThe Declaration of the Rights of
the Peoples of Russia. " This emancipation proclama-
tion for ethnic minorities, unique in the annals of state-
craft up to that time, pledged the Communist regime
to support the following four basic principles: (1) "The
equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; (2) the
right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination,
even to the extent of separation and the formation of
independent states; (3) the abolition of all national and
national-religious privileges and restrictions; and (4) the
free development of the national minorities and ethnic
groups inhabiting Russia. "1"!
Before many weeks had passed the Soviet Govern-
ment made another significant pronouncement directed
to the Moslem peoples of the former Tsarist Empire.
"Moslems of Russia," it began, "Tatars of the Volga and
Crimea, Kirgiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks
and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain-
eers of the Caucasus -- all those whose mosques and
chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled under foot by the Tsars and oppres-
sors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs,
your national and cultural institutions are free and in-
violable. Build your national life free and unhindered.
You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well
as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the
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? SOVIET CtVILlZATIOH
Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. "2
This second declaration indicates to some extent the
complex ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union.
The i largest single ethnic division, which includes
three chief nationalities, is the Slay^ which totals about
150,000,000 or approximately three-fourths of the entire
Soviet population. * The Slavs consist mainly of the Great
Russians, the Russians proper, who number almost 105,-
000,000 and who have settled in all parts of the U. S. S. R. ;
the 37,000,000 Ukrainians, sometimes known as "Little
Russians," whose republic of rich agricultural and in-
dustrial regions borders the Black Sea and Poland in the
southwest and is about as large and populous as France;
and the Belorussians, numbering a little under 9,000,000,
who live in the western zone just north of the Ukraine
and whose name means "White Russian" in the Russian
language. They should not be confused with the anti-
Soviet exiles and emigres who left the Soviet Union dur-
ing the Revolution and Civil War and who are also called
White Russians. The Ukrainian and Belorussian Re-
publics bore the brunt of the Nazi invasion in 1941-42,
were completely overrun by the German armies and
suffered terrible devastation.
The Slavs have for centuries been predominantly
members of the Orthodox Eastern Church, which, like
the Protestant, has consistently refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Catholic Pope. The Soviet or eastern
Slavs are closely related, racially and linguistically, to the
western Slavs (the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks) and to the
southern or Balkan Slavs (the Bulgarians, Croats, Mace-
? AH population figures for Soviet ethnic groups in this chapter are
estimated as of January 1, 1949; and are based on the last national census
of 1939, together with estimates of the natural increase since that time and
of the appalling number of deaths during World War II. Allowance must
be made for some margin of error.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
donians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). The U. S.
S. R. contains small minorities of Bulgarians, Czechoslo-
vaks and Poles.
Next to the Slav the most prevalent racial strain in
the Soviet confederation of peoples is the [Turco-Tatar^
some 21,000,000 strong and largely Mohammedan in reli-
gion. The Turco-Tatars, dark-visaged and oblique-eyed,
are mostly the mixed descendants of fierce Asiatic war-
riors led to far-ranging conquest in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries by the mighty Eastern emperors:
Genghis Khan, he who said that "as there is one ruler
in heaven, so there should be but one on earth"; and
Tamerlane, "the Earth-Shaker. " Tamerlane's victorious
sweep into Europe reached as far north and west as the
Volga River and left along its banks settlements which
centuries later developed into the thriving, present-day
Bashkir, Chuvash and Kazan Tatars of the great Volga
basin.
Several Soviet peoples of the mountainous Caucasus
and Transcaucasus are also Turco-Tatar in origin, pre-
eminent among them being the Azerbaidzhanians, over
3,000,000 in number, who form one of the sixteen consti-
tuent Union Republics of the U. S. S. R. The Azerbaid-
zhan Republic, bordering the Caspian Sea and Iran, has
traditionally been known as the "Land of Fire," because
of its easily combustible oil and gas deposits. (Azer
means fire. ) In the early nineteenth century fire-wor-
shippers of the cult of Zoroaster still carried out their
rites before the flames of their sacred temple in Baku.
This internationally famous city is the capital of Azer-
baidzhan and the greatest center of oil production in
Soviet Russia.
However, the heart of Turco-Tatar strength in the
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
U. S. S. R. lies east across the Caspian Sea in the warm, rich
domain of Soviet Central Asia. Here the Kazakhs, the
Kirgiz, the Turkmenians and the Uzbeks, all of Turco-
Tatar stock and possessing their own Union Republics,
dwell in what is historically one of the most interesting
and romantic parts of the Soviet Union. It was in this
land that there rose the famous and fabulously wealthy
cities of Holy Bukhara and Golden Samarkand, their
many mosques, minarets and other structures combining
to create an architectural splendor unsurpassed in the
Moslem world. Here met and merged the trade, the art,
the civilization of the ancient and medieval East, with
Persian, Turkish, Indian and Chinese influences all play-
ing their role.
The hot, arid climate of Soviet Central Asia has been
a major factor in bringing a large proportion of the land
under the sway of soil-destroying sands. For instance, in
the Turkmenian Republic 80 percent of the territory
consists of desert wastes. Since earliest times, the pros-
perity of Central Asia has depended primarily upon the
proper utilization of water and the efficient maintenance
of the irrigation system. And the Soviets, with their tire-
less energy and scientific techniques, have made enor-
mous strides in the battle to extend fertility to one of the
world's driest and most barren plains. *
The Uzbek S. S. R. , containing the cities of Bukhara,
Samarkand and Tashkent, its capital, is the most prosper-
ous and populous of the Central Asiatic Republics. It
is the great cotton state of the Soviet Union and also
excels in the growing of silk. But since 1917 it has also
become highly industrialized. In Tsarist times the Uz-
beks were called "Sarts" from the old Turkish for "wan-
? See pp. 204-207.
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
der. " Their country, comparable to the American south-
west, has an over-abundance of sunshine. "The men of
Uzbekistan wear white clothing open to the waist, expos-
ing their sunburned chests, and black skull caps embroid-
ered in white. The women are dressed in brightly
colored gowns of radiant pale yellows and reds. The
girls' black hair is braided in innumerable thin plaits;
old men in colored turbans ride along on donkeys. "3
East of Uzbekistan is the Kirgiz Republic, situated
in a high and mountainous region contiguous to China's
Sinkiang Province. There is a widely held belief that
the birthplace of the human race was in what is now
Kirgizia. The Kirgiz people were poverty-stricken nom-
ads under the Tsar, but have since developed a fairly
stable and prosperous agricultural life. To the north of
Uzbekistan lies the huge Kazakh Republic, in itself alone
one-third as large as the United States. In its climate,
expanse and great business of stock-breeding northern
Kazakhstan is much like Montana, Wyoming, Colorado
and Utah; while the southern portion of the Republic is
reminiscent of New Mexico and Arizona. In mineral
resources the Kazakh S. S. R. is even richer than America's
Rocky Mountain region.
The Kazakhs are generally of medium build, black
hair and/swarthy complexion.
Until the Soviets took
over, this people were roving herdsmen wandering with
their big flocks and herds over the unending steppe and
desert, living the major part of their lives in the saddle,
and moving their tents and scanty possessions from place
to place on the backs of camels. They have shared in the
vast industrial and agricultural progress that has come
to Central Asia during the last third of a century; and
their nomadic life is now mainly a thing of the past.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Generalizing again about Soviet Central Asia, we can
say that in no section of Soviet Russia is the contrast of
old and new more marked. For this entire region has
leaped, in but a moment of history, from a stagnant semi-
feudalism, characterized by Asiatic tyranny of the most
barbarous type, to a progressive, modern, dynamic stage
of society in the form of Marxist socialism. This revolu-
tionary advance is apparent wherever one goes in Cen-
tral Asia, whether in the city districts where the old build-
ings and the new stand side by side, in the rural areas
where the native population in their traditional garb
operate tractors and combines, or in the remote valleys
and mountain ranges where isolated peoples have for the
first time been brought into contact with twentieth-
century civilization.
The third largest ethnic group in the U. S. S. R. con-
sists of the olive-skinned Japhetic peoples living for the
most part in the highlands and mountains of the Caucasus
and Transcaucasus. These are the picturesque Armeni-
ans, Adzharians, Abkhazians, Georgians, Kurds, Kabar-
dinians and others, numbering about 7,000,000 alto-
gether. These nationalities are rather mixed in their
religious faith, some being followers of Allah, others
regular Orthodox, and the Armenians adhering to their
own particular and independent brand of Christianity.
Armenia, on the crossroads between Europe and Asia,
has a long and turbulent history going back to the times
of ancient Greece and Rome. The freedom-loving Arme-
nians, often temporarily conquered but never ethnically
absorbed, today maintain one of the constituent Union
Republics of the U. S. S. R. and are noted for their energy
and enterprise. Predominantly agrarian under Tsarist
Russia, Armenia has undergone considerable manufac-
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
turing development under the Soviets and has put its
agriculture on a modernized basis, with cotton fields,
vineyards, orchards, tobacco plantations and cattle-rais-
ing all collectivized. It is successfully exploiting its high
mountain lakes and rivers in ambitious water-power and
irrigation projects. The best-known contemporary Ar-
menians are Aram I. Khachaturian, a first-rate symphonic
composer, and Anastas I. Mikoyan, a Deputy Chairman
of the Soviet Council of Ministers.
The gay, wine-drinking Georgians, their Union Re-
public adjoining Armenia, are an ancient Japhetic people
who were converted to Christianity in 345 A. D. , three
centuries before the Anglo-Saxons. It was to the Black
Sea shores of Georgia that Jason and his Argonauts, ac-
cording to Greek mythology, sailed in quest of the Gold-
en Fleece. Legend also tells us that Prometheus was
chained to a wild precipice of Georgia's Mt. Kazbek and
eternally devoured by vultures for having made known
to mankind the magic of fire. Georgia boasts of an
amazing diversity of agricultural and mineral wealth,
possessing some of the largest manganese deposits in the
world. The most famous of all Georgians is Premier and
Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, born in 1879 near the capi-
tal, Tbilisi. The Georgians were severely oppressed by
the Tsars; and the fact that Stalin has risen to the highest
positions of leadership in the U. S. S. R. fittingly symbol-
izes the genuineness of Soviet equalitarian policy towards
minorities.
Two closely related Japhetic peoples, the Adzharians
and the Abkhazians, minorities within a minority, have
their own Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics within
- Georgia. This sort of set-up is typical of the ethnic com-
plexity that we find in the U. S. S. R. Moreover, in the
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
Abkhazian Republic and speaking the Abkhazian tongue,
is a minority within a minority within a minority, namely
several hundred of the Soviet Union's few indigenous
Negroes, chiefly descendants of African slaves originally
brought into this vicinity by native Turkish landowners.
Another striking ethnic group in the Georgian Republic
is the primitive tribe of Khevsurs, who, hemmed in and
isolated for centuries by the towering peaks of the Trans-
caucasus, are reputed to be descended from a wandering
band of Crusaders who became stranded in this region.
On occasion the Khevsurs still put on medieval helmets,
chain armor and white Frankish crosses which have been
handed down from generation to generation.
Another major ethnic stock in the U. S. S. R. is the
approximately 5,000,000 Finno-Ugrians, who are closely
related to the Hungarians, and who are concentrated in
the northwestern part of Soviet Russia. They consist of
the Finns and Karelians of the Karelo-Finnish Union
Republic; their Estonian cousins just south across the
Gulf of Finland in the Estonian Union Republic; and
a related patchwork of peoples like the Mari along the
middle Volga River and the Komi scattered as far east
as the northern Ural Mountains. The Finno-Ugrians are
in general Russian Orthodox in religion, except for the
Finns and Estonians, who are mainly Protestant.
A fifth pervasive ethnic strain is the Jewish^ totaling
around 5,000,000 in 1941, but reduced during World
War II to about 3,000,000 by the monstrous mass mur-
ders and genocide of the Nazi invaders in the occupied
territories. While most of the Jews in both Tsarist and
Soviet Russia have lived in the western parts of the coun-
try, Jews in considerable numbers are to be found in each
of the sixteen constituent Republics of the U. S. S. R.
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
In 1928 the Soviet Government established a special
district in the Far East where Jews from all over the
Soviet Union could go and settle if they so desired. This
region, almost three times as big as the state of Israel, is
situated along the Manchurian frontier and centers upon
the Amur River and two of its tributaries, the Bira and
Bidzhan. Hence the territory is usually known as Biro-
bidzhan, although since 1934 its official name has been
the Jewish Autonomous Region. This thriving Auto-
nomous Region has an estimated population (1949) of
185,000, of whom about 50 percent are Jewish. Like
other Autonomous Regions in Soviet Russia, it enjoys
self-government in regard to purely local affairs and
elects five deputies to the Soviet of Nationalities. The
official language of the Jewish A. R. is Yiddish.
Even more important, in my judgment, than the set-
ting up of this Jewish Autonomous Region is the fact
that the Soviets have virtually eliminated throughout the
U. S. S. R. the virulent and often violent anti-Semitic dis-
crimination and persecution that prevailed in Tsarist
days. The Soviet Government is sometimes accused of
hostility toward Jews because it opposes Judaism, their
religion, and Zionism, their characteristic national move-
ment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the
Soviet Government, controlled as it is by the Communist
Party, discourages all religions in the U. S. S. R. (while
protecting their freedom of functioning) and is against
Zionism as a bourgeois nationalist manifestation. The
truth remains that the Jews of the Soviet Union enjoy
a fully rounded racial democracy that no other nation on
earth except the newly founded Republic of Israel at
present makes possible for the Jewish people.
Scores of other racial and national minorities dwell
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
in the U. S. S. R. besides the ones which I have already
mentioned. For example, theCLatvians^nd the^Lithuani-
ans of the Baltic littoral are both organized into Union
Republics. The Moldavians, too, of the Black Sea region
in the southwest have their own Union Republic. In the
mountainous uplands of Soviet Central Asia the Tad-
zhiks, of old Iranian (Persian) stock, maintain one of the
Union Republics, bordering Afghanistan and near to
India. Tall, straight-nosed and blue-eyed, the (Tadzhiks\>
are probably more closely related to the so-called Aryans
than the Germans or any other alleged "Nordics" in the
West. ?
Then there is a minority of almost 1,500,000 Ger-
mans, many of whom are descendants of those who emi-
grated to Russia as skilled workers during the eighteenth
century. For eighteen years starting in 1923 a sizeable
group of these Germans had an Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic on the lower Volga about 150 miles
above Stalingrad. In the fall of 1941, when the Nazi
armies were rapidly advancing, the Soviet Government
abolished this Volga German Republic on the grounds
that a dangerous proportion of its citizens were fifth-
columnists for Adolf Hitler; and moved all of its German
inhabitants to a remote, though fertile, region in south
central Siberia.
Siberia in general, that place of exile and evil repute
under the Tsars, the Soviet regime has transformed into
a flourishing empire of industrial and agricultural pro-
ductivity. Many of the indigenous peoples of this largest
section of Soviet Asia are [Mongols^in origin and are
of the same ethnic stock as the Mongols to the south in
China. (The word Mongol is derived from mong, mean-
ing brave. ) Prominent among the Soviet Mongolian
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? SOVIET ETHHIC DEMOCRACY
groups are the Buryat-Mongols who have their own
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in southeastern
Siberia. Nomadic for centuries past, the Buryats are
yellow-skinned and slant-eyed, with broad noses and high
cheek-bones.
They are one of the several Siberian peoples who re-
semble the American Indian in facial and physical char-
acteristics, in certain customs, songs and religious cere-
monies, and in basic living habits such as the use of tents
or wigwams constructed from a framework of poles
covered with skins or bark. All this is not surprising
when we consider that, according to the best scientific
opinion, distant ancestors of the Indians migrated from
Asia across Bering Strait, which is only fifty-six miles wide
and interspersed with islands, or across a vanished land
bridge in that vicinity. The noted anthropologist, the
late Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University, states:
"The physical relationship of the American native to the
east Asiatic is closer than that to any other race. Straight,
dark hair; wide, rather flat face; heavy nose; tendency to
a Mongoloid eye are common to both of them. Locally,
types are found that are so much alike that it would be
rather difficult to say whether an individual is an Asiatic
or an American. "4
Small Siberian tribes clearly akin to the American
Indiansjare the Evenkis and Nenets up north near the
Arctic Circle and the Far Eastern Luoravetlans of the
Bering Strait region. Each of these peoples is organized
into a National Area, the smallest nationalities subdivi-
sion mentioned in the Soviet Constitution. National
Areas are represented by one deputy apiece in the Soviet
of Nationalities. The few Soviet Eskimos are also ethni-
cally close to the American Indian and are racial brothers
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
of the North American and Greenland Eskimos. Eskimos
today live on both sides of Bering Strait and are nearly
identical in physique, customs and language.
The Soviet North and the Soviet Far East, both fasci-
nating subjects of study in themselves, contain a number
of other small peoples whom I shall not try to treat of
here. For further details of this kind I must refer the
reader to my earlier book, The Peoples of the Soviet
Union. Some of the smaller tribal groupings in the U. S.
S. R. number but a few thousands, like those of the
Dagestan Autonomous Republic in the Caucasus, or even
a few hundred, like the Aleuts living on the bleak Ko-
mandorskie Islands of the Pacific. \Of the 177 ethnic
groups that make up the Soviet population only ninety-
It is important to realize, too, that all of the main
ethnic territorial divisions have within their borders a
minority or minorities other than the predominant one.
Thus in the Ukrainian Republic there are some 3,000,000
Russians, and several hundred thousand each of Belorus-
sians, Bulgarians and Greeks. At the same time, several
million Ukrainians live outside the borders of the Ukrai-
nian S. S. R. in other Union Republics. Practically every
Union Republic, Autonomous Republic and Autonom-
ous Region includes substantial numbers of Russians.
The policy of the Soviet regime toward national and
racial minorities constitutes a direct antithesis to the
Tsarist attitude, which won for pre-revolutionary Russia
the label "prison of nations. " The old Russian Empire
contained practically all of the same peoples who live
today in the Soviet Union, although its minorities of
2. The Soviet Minorities Policy
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? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
Finns and Poles were much larger. |__The absolutistic
Russian monarchy functioned frankly under the twin
slogans of "One Tsar, one religion, one language" and
"Autocracy, orthodoxy, nationalism. " For the minority
groups in general this meant political oppression, eco-
nomic exploitation and enforced (if superficial) Russifi-
cation.
TheTsarist Government filled official positions in the
minority territories almost exclusively with Russians and
made every effort to suppress and destroy the indigenous
cultures and languages of non-Russian peoples. Through-
out the Empire the Russian language became the sole
medium of the courts, the government schools and official
business, the use of other tongues being severely discour-
aged or forbidden. For example, "A Kalmyk boy caught
speaking his own dialect in class or school had to wear
round his neck the sign, 'It is forbidden to speak Kal-
myk,' and go without dinner. "
The ruling class of Russians viewed with open con-
tempt the subject peoples, who hated them bitterly in
return. The relation existing between the imperial
government and the Kazakhs was quite typical. As one
Tsarist official put it, "There is no other way to manage
the Kazakhs except through massacres. " The Kazakhs, on
the other hand, had a well-known proverb, "If a Russian
travel with you, hold an ax in readiness. " The Tsars
followed the well-established imperialist policy of "divide
and rule," stirring up inter-racial animosities whenever
and wherever possible: Poles against Ukrainians, Ar-
menians against Georgians, everyone against the Jews.
Indicative of the Minorities policy of the Tsars was
their ferocious anti-Semitism,^ which became a scandal
throughout the civilized world. I have already called
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