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People community on the nation life culture sustainable. Marxism and the national question. Stalin's definition of the term "nation"

“What is a nation?

A nation is, first of all, a community, a certain community of people.

This community is not racial or tribal. The current Italian nation was formed from the Romans, Germans, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, etc. The French nation was made up of Gauls, Romans, Britons, Germans, and so on. The same must be said of the English, Germans, and others who have formed into a nation from people of various races and tribes.

So, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically established community of people.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the great states of Cyrus or Alexander could not be called nations, although they were formed historically, formed from different tribes and races. These were not nations, but random and loosely connected conglomerates of groups that broke up and united depending on the success or defeat of one or another conqueror.

Thus, a nation is not a random or ephemeral conglomerate, but a stable community of people.

But not every stable community creates a nation. Austria and Russia are also stable communities, however, no one calls them nations

So - common language as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

This, of course, does not mean that different nations always and everywhere speak different languages, or that all speakers of the same language necessarily constitute one nation. Common language for each nation, but not necessarily different languages for different nations! There is no nation that speaks different languages at once, but this does not mean that there cannot be two nations speaking the same language! The English and North Americans speak the same language, and yet they do not constitute one nation. The same must be said of Norwegians and Danes, English and Irish,

But why, for example, the British and North Americans do not constitute one nation, despite the common language?

First of all, because they do not live together, but in different territories. A nation is formed only as a result of long and regular communication, as a result of the joint life of people from generation to generation. A long life together is impossible without a common territory. The British and Americans used to inhabit the same territory, England, and constituted one nation. Then one part of the English moved out of England to a new territory, to America, and here, in the new territory, over time, formed a new North American nation.

So, community of territory as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

But that's not all. The commonality of a territory does not in itself constitute a nation. This requires, in addition, an internal economic connection, uniting the individual parts of the nation into a single whole. There is no such connection between England and North America, and therefore they constitute two distinct nations. But the North Americans themselves would not deserve the name of a nation if the individual corners of North America were not interconnected into an economic whole through the division of labor.

Take at least the Georgians. Georgians of pre-reform times lived on a common territory and spoke the same language, however, they did not, strictly speaking, one nation, because they, divided into a number of principalities torn apart from each other, could not live a common economic life, waged wars among themselves for centuries and ruined each other, setting Persians and Turks against each other. The ephemeral and accidental unification of the principalities, which some successful king sometimes managed to carry out, at best captured only the superficial administrative sphere, quickly breaking up against the whims of the princes and the indifference of the peasants. Yes, it could not be otherwise with the economic fragmentation of Georgia ... Georgia, as a nation, appeared only in the second half of the 19th century, when the fall of serfdom and the growth of the economic life of the country, the development of communications and the emergence of capitalism established the division of labor between the regions of Georgia, completely shook economic isolation of the principalities and tied them into one whole.

The same must be said about other nations that have passed the stage of feudalism and developed capitalism.

So, community of economic life, economic coherence, as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

But that's not all. In addition to all that has been said, it is also necessary to take into account the peculiarities of the spiritual appearance of people united in a nation. Nations differ from each other not only in terms of their living conditions, but also in their spiritual appearance, which is expressed in the peculiarities of national culture. If England, North America and Ireland, who speak the same language, nevertheless constitute three different nations, then the peculiar mental warehouse that has been developed in them from generation to generation as a result of unequal conditions of existence plays a significant role in this.

Of course, the psychic warehouse itself, or, as it is otherwise called, “national character”, is something elusive for the observer, but since it is expressed in the uniqueness of culture, of a common nation, it is perceptible and cannot be ignored.

Needless to say, the “national character” does not represent something given once and for all, but changes along with the conditions of life, but, insofar as it exists at every given moment, it leaves its mark on the physiognomy of the nation.

So, community of mind, affecting the community of culture, as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

Thus, we have exhausted all the signs of a nation.

A nation is a historically established, stable community of people that has arisen on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and mental make-up, manifested in a common culture.

At the same time, it goes without saying that a nation, like any historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its own history, beginning and end.

It must be emphasized that none of these signs, taken separately, is sufficient to define a nation. Moreover, the absence of at least one of these signs is enough for a nation to cease to be a nation.

It is possible to imagine people with a common “national character” and yet it cannot be said that they constitute one nation if they are economically divided, live in different territories, speak different languages, etc. These are, for example, Russian, Galician, American, Georgian and mountain jews, not constituting, in our opinion, a single nation.

One can imagine people with a common territory and economic life, and yet they will not constitute one nation without a common language and "national character". Such, for example, are the Germans and Latvians in the Baltic region.

Finally, Norwegians and Danes speak the same language, but they do not constitute one nation due to the absence of other signs.

Only the presence of all the signs taken together gives us a nation.

It may seem that "national character" is not one of the signs, but only essential feature of the nation, and all other features are, in fact, terms development of the nation, and not its signs. This point of view is supported, for example, by the well-known Social-Democrats in Austria. theorists of the national question R. Springer and, especially, O. Bauer

Consider their theory of the nation.

According to Springer, “a nation is a union of people who think alike and speak alike.” It is “a cultural commonality of a group of modern people, n e connected with "earth"

So - a "union" of people who think and speak the same way, no matter how disunited they are from each other, no matter where they live.

Bauer goes even further.

“What is a nation? he asks. Is there a common language that unites people into a nation? But the English and the Irish ... speak the same language, without, however, representing a single people; Jews do not have a common language at all and nevertheless constitute a nation”

So what is a nation?

“A nation is a relative community of character”

But what is character, in this case, national character?

National character is “the sum of features that distinguish people of one nationality from people of another nationality, a complex of physical and spiritual qualities that distinguishes one nation from another”

Bauer, of course, knows that the national character does not fall from the sky, and therefore he adds:

“The character of people is determined by nothing else than their fate”, which ... “a nation is nothing but a community of fate”, which in turn is determined by “the conditions in which people produce the means of their life and distribute the products of their labor”

Thus, we have arrived at the most "complete", as Bauer puts it, definition of a nation.

“A nation is the totality of people connected in a common character on the basis of a common fate”

So, a community of national character on the basis of a community of fate, taken without the obligatory connection with a community of territory, language, and economic life.

But what then remains of the nation? What kind of national community can be discussed among people who are economically separated from each other, living in different territories and speaking different languages from generation to generation?

Bauer speaks of the Jews as a nation, although "they do not have a common language at all"

The mentioned Jews, no doubt, live a common economic and political life with Georgians, Dagestanis, Russians and Americans, in a common cultural atmosphere with them; this cannot but impose its stamp on their national character; if they have anything in common, it is religion, a common origin, and some vestiges of a national character. All this is certain. But how can one seriously say that the ossified religious rites and weathered psychological remnants influence the “fate” of the said Jews more than the living socio-economic and cultural environment surrounding them? But only under such an assumption can one speak of the Jews in general as a single nation.

How then does Bauer's nation differ from the mystical and self-sufficing "national spirit"

Bauer draws an impenetrable line between the "distinguishing feature" of the nation (national character) and the "conditions" of their life, tearing them apart. But what is a national character if not a reflection of the conditions of life, if not a bunch of impressions received from the environment? How can one confine oneself to a single national character, isolating and separating it from the soil that gave birth to it?

Then, how, in fact, did the English nation differ from the North American one at the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century, when North America was still called “New England”? Certainly not a national character: for the North Americans came from England, they took with them to America, in addition to the English language, also the English national character.

Obviously, “New England”, as a nation, differed then from England, as a nation, not in a special national character, or not so much in a national character, as in a special environment from England, living conditions.

Thus, it is clear that in reality there is no single distinguishing feature of a nation. There is only a sum of signs, of which, when comparing nations, one sign (national character), then another (language), then a third (territory, economic conditions) stands out more clearly. A nation is a combination of all the features taken together.

Bauer's point of view, identifying the nation with the national character, tears the nation from the soil and turns it into some kind of invisible, self-sufficient force. It turns out not a nation, alive and active, but something mystical, elusive and beyond the grave. For, I repeat, what kind of a Jewish nation is this, for example, consisting of Georgian, Dagestan, Russian, American and other Jews, whose members do not understand each other (they speak different languages), live in different parts of the globe, never meet each other they will see, they will never act together, neither in peacetime, nor in wartime ?!

No, it is not for such paper "nations" that the Social-Democrats draw up their national program. It can reckon only with real nations, acting and moving, and therefore forcing them to reckon with themselves.

Bauer obviously confuses the nation, which is a historical category, with the tribe, which is an ethnographic category.

However, Bauer himself seems to feel the weakness of his position. Declaring emphatically at the beginning of his book about the Jews as a nation

Reasoning in this way, Bauer wanted to prove that national autonomy could not be the demand of the Jewish workers.

But Bauer goes further. At the beginning of his book, he emphatically states that “the Jews do not have a common language at all and nevertheless constitute a nation”

Bauer here wanted to prove that “language is the most important instrument of human communication”

This is how the theory sewn with idealistic threads refutes itself” (I.V. Stalin. Works, vol. 2, M., 1946, pp. 292 - 303).

In the full text of the above section of the article the definition of a nation given by I.V. Stalin appears as having a basis in the historical process, and not just as a declarative definition of a term in which this or that subjectivism is expressed. This is its merit, and this is what distinguishes it from the definitions of the term "nation" given by others.

Stalin's definition of a nation was an official scientific definition in the USSR and in post-Stalin times, although, citing this definition, J.V. Stalin's work "Marxism and the National Question" after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in most cases was not referred to. In fact, the very same signs of a nation that I.V. Stalin gives in his definition are also given in the modern school textbook "social science"4 edited by L.N. Bogolyubov (vol. 2, "Man and Society"5 - a textbook for - 11 classes, M., "Prosveshchenie", ed. 8, 2003), although they are not summarized in a strict definition of the term "nation": the historical nature of the formation of nations (p. 316, paragraph 2), language ( ibid., p. 316, para. 3), common territory and economic cohesion (ibid., p. 316, para. 5), common culture (ibid., p. 316, 317), in which the national character is expressed and reproduced in the continuity of generations (although the textbook leaves the question of the national character and national psychology in silence).

In the work of I.V. Stalin “Marxism and the national question”, due to various objective and subjective reasons, topics an adequate understanding of which is necessary for the harmonization of national relations in multinational societies:

What is culture in general and national culture specifically;

Formation of national cultures;

The interaction of nations, the emergence and development of diasporas and their impact on the life of the indigenous population in the areas where the diasporas penetrated;

Implementation of the full function of management in the life of peoples, as an aggregate of the national population in the area of the formation of its culture and diasporas outside this area;

Separation of diasporas from the region of formation of ethnic cultures and replacement of the population that once gave rise to diasporas with an ethnically different population belonging to other nations and diasporas;

The formation of a universal culture, which will have to integrate into itself all the multinational humanity in its historical past;

The problems of the biological basis of national cultures, the genetic core of the nation and its originality, which distinguishes peoples in a statistical sense from each other according to purely biological characteristics;

Nation and Civilization;

Egregorial processes in the life of nations, diasporas and in national interaction.

Along with this, it should be noted that the definition of a nation as a social, historically conditioned phenomenon, given by I.V. Stalin, distinguishes the nation from the people as a social organism, passing throughout history through various forms of organizing the life of a culturally unique (national) society in one or another regional civilization. This difference between the phenomena “nation” and “people” can also be seen in the text of the work, in particular, when in the above fragment I.V. in the sense that this term was defined by I.V. Stalin. But I.V. Stalin does not give a definition of how a nation differs from a tribe or a people, as a result of which a nation, a people, an ethnos, even in the scientific lexicon, are perceived as synonyms - almost complete equivalents, not to mention the everyday understanding of these words in wide sections of society .

The lack of adequate coverage of the problems mentioned above by the sociological science of the USSR is one of the reasons why the process of the formation of a new historical community, called the "Soviet people", was interrupted, and national conflicts in the purposeful destruction of the USSR by foreign political forces played a significant role. And this is one of the threats to the territorial integrity of post-Soviet Russia.

Nations, diasporas, individuals, multinational culture - multinational society

Stalin's definition of the term "nation"

The definition that has become practically generally accepted in the science of the USSR and the post-Soviet Russian Federation nation as a social phenomenon gave I.V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question. Let us give the full section I of the named work, entitled "Nation", and not just the very wording of the Stalinist definition of this term, since the wording is the result - imprinted in the text-dialectical procedure of cognition: asking questions and finding answers to them in real life , and everyone needs to master dialectics in order to become free.

“What is a nation?

A nation is, first of all, a community, a certain community of people.

So, the nation is not racial or tribal, but historical community of people.

So, the nation is not a random and ephemeral conglomerate, but stable community of people.

But not every stable community creates a nation. Austria and Russia are also stable communities, however, no one calls them nations. What is the difference between a national community and a state community? By the way, by the fact that a national community is inconceivable without a common language, while a common language is not necessary for a state. The Czech nation in Austria and the Polish nation in Russia would be impossible without a common language for each of them, while the integrity of Russia and Austria is not hindered by the existence within them of a number of languages. We are talking, of course, about vernacular languages, and not about official clerical ones.

So - common language as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

But why, for example, the British and North Americans do not constitute one nation, despite the common language?

So, community of territory as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

But that's not all. The commonality of a territory does not in itself constitute a nation. This requires, in addition, an internal economic connection, uniting the individual parts of the nation into a single whole. There is no such connection between England and North America, and therefore they constitute two distinct nations. But the North Americans themselves would not deserve the name of a nation if the individual corners of North America were not linked together into an economic whole through the division of labor between them, the development of communications, and so on.

Take at least the Georgians. Georgians of pre-reform times lived on a common territory and spoke the same language, however, they did not, strictly speaking, constitute one nation, for they, divided into a number of principalities torn apart from each other, could not live a common economic life, for centuries they led among themselves wars and ruined each other, setting Persians and Turks against each other. The ephemeral and accidental unification of the principalities, which some successful king sometimes managed to carry out, at best captured only the superficial administrative sphere, quickly breaking up against the whims of the princes and the indifference of the peasants. Yes, it could not be otherwise with the economic fragmentation of Georgia ... Georgia, as a nation, appeared only in the second half of the 19th century, when the fall of serfdom and the growth of the economic life of the country, the development of communications and the emergence of capitalism established the division of labor between the regions of Georgia, completely shattered economic isolation principalities and tied them into one.

The same must be said about other nations that have passed the stage of feudalism and developed capitalism.

So, community of economic life, economic coherence, as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

Of course, the psychic warehouse itself, or - as it is otherwise called - “national character”, is something elusive for the observer, but since it is expressed in the uniqueness of culture, a common nation, it is perceptible and cannot be ignored.

Needless to say, the “national character” does not represent something given once and for all, but changes along with the conditions of life, but, since it exists at every given moment, it leaves its stamp on the physiognomy of the nation.

So, community of mind, affecting the community of culture, as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

Thus, we have exhausted all the signs of a nation.

The period of counter-revolution in Russia brought not only "thunder and lightning", but also disappointment in the movement, disbelief in the common forces. They believed in a "bright future" - and people fought together, regardless of nationality: common questions come first! Doubt crept into the soul - and people began to disperse to national apartments: let everyone count only on himself! “National problem” first of all!

At the same time, a serious breakdown of economic life was taking place in the country. The year 1905 was not in vain: the remnants of the feudal system in the countryside received another blow. A series of harvests after the famines and the industrial upswing that followed, propelled capitalism forward. Differentiation in the countryside and the growth of cities, the development of trade and communications took a major step forward. This is especially true of the outskirts. But this could not but accelerate the process of economic consolidation of the nationalities of Russia, the latter had to set in motion...

The “constitutional regime” that had been established during that time acted in the same direction of awakening the nationalities. The growth of newspapers and literature in general, a certain freedom of the press and cultural institutions, the growth of popular theaters, etc., no doubt contributed to the strengthening of "national feelings". The Duma, with its electoral campaign and political groups, provided new opportunities for the revival of nations, a new wide arena for the mobilization of the latter.

And the wave of militant nationalism that rose from above, a whole series of repressions by the "those in power" who took revenge on the border regions for their "love of freedom" - caused a response wave of nationalism from below, sometimes turning into crude chauvinism. The strengthening of Zionism among the Jews, the growing chauvinism in Poland, pan-Islamism among the Tatars, the strengthening of nationalism among the Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians, the general bias of the layman in the direction of anti-Semitism - all these are well-known facts.

The wave of nationalism was rising ever stronger, threatening to overwhelm the working masses. And the more the liberation movement declined, the more magnificently the flowers of nationalism blossomed.

At this difficult moment, a high mission fell on the Social Democracy - to repulse nationalism, to protect the masses from the general "craze". For the Social Democracy, and only it, could do this by countering nationalism with the tried and tested weapon of internationalism, the unity and indivisibility of the class struggle. And the stronger the wave of nationalism approached, the louder the voice of the Social Democracy for the brotherhood and unity of the proletarians of all nationalities in Russia had to be heard. At the same time, special stamina was required from the marginal Social Democrats, who directly collided with the nationalist movement.

But not all Social-Democrats were up to the task, and above all, the Social-Democrats in the border regions. The Bund, which had previously emphasized common tasks, now began to put its special, purely nationalistic goals in the foreground: things went so far that it declared “celebration of the Sabbath” and “recognition of jargon” as the fighting point of its electoral campaign. The Caucasus followed the Bund; “cultural-national autonomy” is now being put forward as another demand. We are not talking about the liquidators' conference, which diplomatically sanctioned nationalist vacillations.

But it follows from this that the views of the Russian Social-Democrats on the national question are not yet for all Social-Democrats. clear.

Obviously, a serious and comprehensive discussion of the national question is necessary. We need the united and tireless work of consistent Social-Democrats against the nationalist fog, no matter where it comes from.

What nation?

A nation is, first of all, a community, a certain community of people.

This community is not racial or tribal. The present Italian nation was formed from Romans, Germans, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, etc. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Germans, etc. The same must be said about the English * Germans and others who have developed into a nation from people of different races and tribes.

So, a nation is not racial or tribal, but a historically established community of people.

So, a nation is not a random and ephemeral conglomerate, but a stable community of people.

So - common language

But why, for example, the British and North Americans do not constitute one nation, despite the common language?

So, community of territory as one of the characteristic features of the nation.

Joseph Stalin: “A nation is…”

1913
“A nation is a historically stable community of language, territory, economic life and a mental make-up, manifested in a common culture ... It must be emphasized that none of these signs, taken separately, is sufficient to define a nation. Moreover, the absence of at least one of these signs is enough for a nation to cease to be a nation ... Only the presence of all signs taken together gives us a nation. Stalin I.V. Marxism and the national-colonial question. - M., 1934, p.6.

1934
“A nation is a historically established, stable community of people that has arisen on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and mental make-up, manifested in a common culture ... Only the presence of all signs taken together gives us a nation. Stalin I.V. ". Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1st ed., vol. 31, M., 1934.

1946
“A nation is a historically established, stable community of people that has arisen on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and mental make-up, manifested in a common culture.” Only the unity of all four features makes up the concept of a nation; has ceased to be a nation… A nation is a combination of all features taken together.” Stalin, I. Marxism and the National Question, Soch., v.2, M., 1946, p.296-297.

1949
“According to the Marxist theory of the nation, which has received general recognition in all communist parties as the only correct one, “a nation is a historically established, stable community of people that has arisen on the basis of a commonality of four main features, namely: on the basis of a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common mental warehouse, manifested in the commonality of the specific features of the national culture. Stalin I. The national question and Leninism (March 1929) - Soch., v.11, M., 1949, p.333.

1954
“NATION (from Latin natio - tribe, people) is a historically established stable community of people, which is characterized by the following features: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common mental warehouse, manifested in a common culture. If there is no combination of all these four signs, there is no nation. This scientific definition of the Nation was formulated by I.V. Stalin, who creatively developed the views of Marxism-Leninism on the national question. Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. v. 29, M., 1954, p.307.

"Father of Nations" and his definition of a nation.
(On the history of philosophical discussions in the 60-80s of the twentieth century).

In history, the apparent has always played a more important role than the real, and the unreal always prevails over the real in it. G. Lebon. The psychology of crowds.

Yes, few of the philosophical concepts in the USSR were as lucky as the concept of the nation.
None of the most pressing issues for the life of the Soviet people was argued as much as about the definition of the nation, which at the dawn of the century - in 1913 - a man of the age of Christ with the strange nickname Koba printed in an illegal magazine that came out in a meager circulation, in a small work, first called, like the work of his predecessors Stepan Shaumyan and Otto Bauer, "The National Question and Social Democracy", and then renamed by the author - first into "The National Question and Marxism", and then into "Marxism and the National Question".
Although the author's intellectual baggage by that time amounted to three and a half courses of the theological seminary, the history of the creation of the Stalinist definition and its scientific analysis could well become the subject of a special study in themselves.

It can be proved without much difficulty that the formula of a nation given by the future leader of a party that called itself Marxist had nothing in common with Marxism.

Moreover, its scientific consistency is extremely doubtful. After all, none of the signs listed by Stalin is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of a nation.

For each of them, in history there will definitely be a nation that refutes the presence of this particular feature.
Well, for a nation to have all four features at the same time, an exceptional combination of circumstances is required.

It can even be assumed that none of the existing and possible definitions is capable of approaching the concept of a nation, since this concept is an empty set.

As a matter of fact, this was exactly what more than a hundred academicians and doctors of various sciences discussed for a decade and a half, that is, from 1964 to 1982.
Dozens of publications in many magazines and newspapers have been devoted to this topic.

However, although it is said that truth is born in debate, this was clearly not the case.
Although the definition of the leader, to which the entire Stalinist theory of the nation was reduced, was the same element of the communist faith, like many other myths created in those years, but it had to be confessed, despite the absurdity of the phrase once written by this “father of many nations” (Gen. 17:5).

The formulation created by Stalin was called in the USSR for decades a "classic model of definition". Vinogradov S.N. and Kuzmin A.F. Logic, textbook for high school. Ed. 7th. M., 1953, p.35.
The authors of a school textbook on logic argued this as follows: "This definition contains all the necessary signs of a nation." The closest genus in this definition is “a community of people”, and all other features that distinguish a nation from a collective, public organizations, class, etc., are a specific difference. All these properties express the fundamental properties of the nation.

Anyone who dares to doubt the above...
However, since the beginning of the 1930s, it was impossible to find such eccentrics in the USSR.

In those years, the great contribution of the leader to philosophy was supposed to be written like this:
"Tov. Stalin created the Marxist theory of the nation, comprehensively developed the program and theory of the party in the national question, discovered the most expedient forms of uniting the national Soviet republics into a single union state. Kammari M.D. The USSR is a great community of socialist nations. - M. 1950, p.14.

And the work “Marxism and the National Question”, according to the author’s modest remark, became “the largest performance of Bolshevism on the national question in the international arena before the war. It was the theory and programmatic declaration of Bolshevism on the national question. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Short biography. - M., 1948, p.54.

True, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, after reading the "programmatic declaration of Bolshevism" composed by the "wonderful Georgian", soon gave birth to "Critical Notes on the National Question" and erased all Stalin's arguments about the unity of the nation, but ... after the death of the old critic, few could dare to engage in malice.
The general course was now laid by the general secretary.

In general, as the Father of Nations himself summed it up: “One thing remains: to recognize that the Russian Marxist theory of the nation is the only correct theory.” Stalin I.V. Works, vol. 11, p.334.

Only 3 years after his death, at a closed meeting of the XX Congress, February 25, 1956, N.S. Khrushchev dared to oppose the tyrant.

Everything secret, which was previously only spoken about in a whisper, everything that wandered in terrible rumors and conjectures, in Khrushchev's report was generalized on the scale of the USSR and called criminal.
This secret report was read everywhere at Party and Komsomol meetings.
The Party and the country have at last heard the truth about the deaths of millions of innocent people, about torture and concentration camps, about crimes against the ideals of communism and humanity.

And on October 17-31, 1961, the XXII Congress of the CPSU was held in Moscow, where the personality cult of Stalin, despite the resistance of his associates, was again condemned by Khrushchev. Stalin's deeds have already been publicly, from the highest rostrum in the country, been called a monstrous atrocity.
Nikita Khrushchev ordered not only to remove the great criminal from the Mausoleum, but also to erase all traces of his activities in the life of society, to cross out the name of Stalin from the map of the country, from the history of the state and the theory of communism.

But Stalin's contribution to the "field of social sciences" consisted in the definition of the nation, which for almost half a century was considered scientific and consistent with all Marxist canons.
Therefore, scientists were obliged to urgently give a new scientific definition of the nation, at the same time - sustained in the spirit of Leninist history.

The theoretical basis was brought under a special party order to the Academician-Secretary of the Historical Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the editor-in-chief of the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia and the editor of the World History magazine Yevgeny Zhukov, which he did by publishing an editorial in Questions of History.

Zhukov's arguments boiled down to this:
“Nation is a historical category. The list of four characteristics of a nation given by Stalin in his time, in our opinion, cannot be applied to the present-day socialist nations of the Soviet Union without significant reservations.
Such features as common territory, economic community in this case have almost lost their significance.
The commonality of the mental make-up, which is manifested in the commonality of culture, has also undergone a serious modification.
Among the contemporary nations of the Soviet Union, only a common national language is fully preserved, which will undoubtedly exist for a very long time.
Thus, only one of the four signs obligatory according to Stalin has permanent significance, while the rest gradually fade away. But nations continue to exist.
This means that the time has come to revise the formula that if there is no set of all these features, then there is no nation. In the new historical conditions, it is no longer applicable. Zhukov E.M. XXII Congress of the CPSU and the tasks of Soviet historians. - Questions of history. 1961, No. 12.

Indeed, if signs disappear, but nations persist, it means that for this reason alone the former definition should be considered at least inaccurate.

However, if, according to I. Stalin, essential features arise before the nation (“a nation is a community that has developed on the basis of a community of features”, and according to I. Arsky, the very concept of a nation arose before the birth of nations), then according to Zhukov, the phenomenon can exist and after the disappearance of their own specific distinctive features. Arsky I.V. The question of the formation of nationalities in Western Europe. - Scientific notes of Leningrad State University, series Ist. science, v.12. L, 1941.

Thus, the logical absurdity associated with the concept of the nation continued to intensify, and the Stalinist brainchild remained inviolable.

In December 1962, Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU B.N. Ponomarev at the All-Union Conference of Historians again noted "Stalin's services to the party":
“Historians, for their part, cannot deny certain positive actions of Stalin in historical science, in particular, in working out some problems of the origin and essence of the nation, in defending correct views on certain questions of the history of Bolshevism against Trotskyist attacks in the first years after Lenin’s death.” Ponomarev B.N. The tasks of historical science in the training of scientific and pedagogical personnel in the field of history. - M., 1962, p.16.
Only two years later, these words about Stalin's merits in developing the theory of the nation were deleted from Ponomarev's report. See All-Union Conference of Historians. - M., 1964, p. 21, 28.

But more than a decade has passed since the death of the Great fighter against Trotskyism.
Therefore, the emboldened Academician and Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences P.N. Fedoseev, in the years of Stalin - the editor-in-chief of the magazines "Bolshevik" and "Party Life", showed courageous adherence to principles: "It is necessary to completely eliminate the consequences of Stalin's personality cult in the field of social sciences." Questions of History, 1964, No. 3, p.4.

Nevertheless, according to Stalin's definition, the first shot was fired not from the philosophical side, but from the ethnographic side.

In 1964, the ethnographer Sergei Tokarev stated that although peoples (ethnic communities) may differ in such features as “language, territory, common origin, cultural characteristics, religion, etc.,” none of the listed features is mandatory (essential) to determine an ethnic community. ) is not.
In his opinion, “a common language cannot be a distinguishing feature: the same language is often spoken by several different nations. The commonality of the territory is also not a sign - nations without territory have been known for a long time. As for the commonality of economic life, there are no clear economic boundaries between peoples. And the idea of a common mental make-up contributes nothing but fog to the definition of a nation.”

And then S.A. Tokarev proposed the definition of an ethnic community: "An ethnic community is such a community of people, which is based on one or more of the following types of social ties: common origin, language, territory, nationality, economic ties, cultural structure, religion (if the latter is preserved)." Tokarev S.A. Problems of types of ethnic communities (to the methodological problems of ethnography). - Questions of Philosophy, 1964, No. 11.

The very idea that a nation can be defined only on one basis was, in those days, a desperate audacity.

Then the Avar Akhed Agayev dealt a blow to the Stalinist stronghold in his work on the theory of nationality: “The scientific definition of a nation, formulated in 1913 by I. Stalin, needs serious adjustments. In the edition in which it exists in the literature to this day, this definition is more suitable for characterizing the ethnic community of people in general, and not one of the specific historical forms of this community. All four features are inherent in the clan-tribe, and the nationality, and the nation, and not just the last one. Agaev A.G. To the question of the theory of nationality. - Makhachkala, 1965, p.37.

Agayev's remark was to the point.

Although then it turned out that the totality of these signs is nothing more than a multi-local generic sign of an ethnic community, and a “stable community” is a specific one, which follows from his arguments expressed later.
“The concept of ethnic community refers to all ethnic units. What are the concrete specific forms of manifestation of this ethnic community in a nation? Stalin answered this question by introducing into the concept of "nation" the sign of "a stable community of people." This was already enough to distinguish it in the system of types of ethnic communities. Agaev A.G. Nation, its essence and self-consciousness. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 7, p.88.

However, Khrushchev left, Brezhnev came.
Philosophers decided to wait with innovations, to wait in order to understand which way the wind is blowing.

And they waited - delegate Ion Bodiul, the future first secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova, spoke at the XXIII Congress of the CPSU, who reproached social scientists from a high rostrum: “It cannot be considered normal that in educational literature published recently, conflicting definitions of a nation are given, for the universities "Fundamentals of Marxist Philosophy" the section "Marxist-Leninist doctrine of nations" was completely omitted. In the teaching of philosophy in universities and technical schools, confusion is allowed. True, 3/4/1966.

I had to roll up my sleeves, damn it, to start a scientific, there it is, search. And so the famous philosophical discussion about the concept of a nation began, which was conducted by the largest specialists of the USSR on the pages of the journal Questions of History in 1966-1968.

It was a very strange discussion.

Like in a song about a ballroom dancing school,
two steps to the left
two steps to the right
step forward,
vice versa".

On the one hand, the participants in the discussion demonstrated their excellent knowledge of the classics of Marxism, diligently choosing from various works of K. Marx and F. Engels those fragments of quotations that supported their attempts at analysis.
In the speeches of the majority of the debaters, there was a sober understanding of the inconsistency of Stalin's formula, which was subjected to the most severe criticism, various considerations were expressed that are relevant to this day.
But as soon as it came to the need to give an independent definition, all the ardor seemed to evaporate, and although several dozen new definitions were proposed, in almost all variations on a given topic, the old approach was preserved: “a nation is a community that” ...

This paradox Yu.I. Semenov explained the natural dogmatism of the participants in the discussion: “Stalin’s approach to this issue has become so self-evident that even many scientists who take part in the ongoing discussion and who consider it necessary to revise this I.V. Stalin does not see the definition of a nation, they see no other way to solve the problem.” Semenov Yu.I. From the history of the theoretical development of V.I. Lenin of the national question. - Peoples of Asia and Africa, 1966, No. 4, p.124.

Shared her doubts and S.I. Yakubovskaya (Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences). “It seems that any scientific general definition does not fit all cases of life. The dialectic of historical development excludes this. The definition given by I. V. Stalin, being scientific, is correct in general terms, but at the same time it allows for a number of deviations. For example, according to this definition, the signs of a nation are a common language, a common territory. But it is common knowledge that the Belgian nation is bilingual; Americans and English are different nations, although they speak the same language; Arabs are a nation based in various territories. It seems to me that the task of the discussion should not be to revise the definition given by I. V. Stalin, but to fight for it not to be treated dogmatically. After all, the trouble is not that the proposition was wrong, but that this proposition, which is generally correct, was treated dogmatically, applied to all cases of life, trying to fit the definition of any nation to four signs. This gave rise to a certain stiffness in the development of the problems of the theory of the nation.

A M.N. Rosenko found the following answer to this question:
“We believe that the scientific concept of any social phenomenon is imperishable. It exists as long as the phenomenon exists. If it (in this case, the nation) changed radically in its content, then it would no longer be about it, but about another social phenomenon. If nations have existed for centuries, then no matter how social conditions change, they do not cease to be nations. It is possible to improve and develop the concept of "nation" in relation to a certain stage of social development, but one cannot speak of a radical change in the concept itself. Rosenko M.N. Modern epoch and some questions of the theory of nations. - Questions of History, 1968, No. 7, pp. 85-101.

Thus, in the understanding of the participants in the discussion, the matter was reduced only to the need to adapt the existing definition to the new, socialist, stage in the development of the concept.
Therefore, many of the proposed "new" definitions were most often a modification of the old formula.

P.M., who opened the discussion Rogachev and M. A. Sverdlin, as a seed for discussion, proposed the following definition:
“A nation is a historically formed community of people, characterized by a stable commonality of economic life (in the presence of a working class), territory (within one state), language (especially literary), self-awareness of ethnicity, as well as some features of psychology, traditions of life, culture and liberation struggle." (The text in brackets was shortened before publication). Rogachev P.M., Sverdlin M.A. About the concept of “nation”. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 1, pp. 33-48.

N.P. Ananchenko put it intricately: “A nation as a comprehensive concrete historical community of people, replacing the nationality and preceding the international society, which appears and develops in connection with the spread of capitalist relations, the creation of large-scale machine production, the expansion of territorial boundaries within the borders of the nation’s predecessors, kindred peoples or tribes or other neighboring ethnic communities, the concentration of the population speaking mainly one language, fixed in the literature, the creation of national statehood, the growing role of socio-political relations, etc.” Ananchenko N.P. From nations to an international community of people. - Questions of History, 1968, No. 3, pp. 82-96.

Throughout the dispute, the key question was a simple one: can the nation be considered the ethnic successor of the nationality, or in relation to pre-capitalist communities, this continuity does not exist, and the nation, based not on kinship, but on economic community, is in fact a social negation of the previous development?

In fact, in those years there was an ideological choice between ethnic nationalism and civil nationalism.
It is characteristic that the majority of social scientists living in the national republics, brushing aside the priority of the economic criterion, recognized the nation as an ethnic phenomenon.
The same motive is seen in the repeated demands to put in the first place in the definition of a nation not the economy, but the language, “the most striking sign that distinguishes one nation from others.”

"Two steps to the right"...

Starting from the article by M.S. Dzhunusov, who offered several definitions to choose from, in the discussion persistently sounds the idea of a nation not as a historically established community, but precisely as an ethnic community: “A nation is the highest form of an ethnic community of people that has developed on the basis of a community of both bourgeois and socialist social relations . From the point of view of its social function, the nation is a form of social development inherent in capitalist and socialist society, representing an integral socio-ethnic organism. Dzhunusov M.S. Nation as a socio-ethnic community. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 4, pp. 16-30.

Although many colleagues objected with restraint (for example, M.N. Rosenko, who recalled that “ethnicity implies a common origin, way of life and culture”, and “nations, with rare exceptions, cannot be characterized by a common origin.” Rosenko M.N. Ibid. ), but national social scientists defended the opposite thesis.

One of the oldest experts on the nation in the USSR, Professor I.P. Tsamerian (his articles on the nation and nationality were published in the Bolshevik magazine back in 1951) at first stated that he saw no need to change anything in the definition.
“The current definition is “basically scientific, Marxist. There are no grounds, in our opinion, for a radical revision of this definition, only some clarifications are required.
Then he attacked the article "Types of Ethnic Communities" by S.A. Tokarev, who “leads readers to the idea that we have neither a scientific theory of the nation, nor a definition of the concept of a nation”, but then he himself made a significant revision of the generic feature of the Stalinist formula: “A nation is the historically highest form of the ethnic community of people of the era of capitalism and socialism, characterized by community of economic life, territory, language and national character, manifested in the specific features of its culture. Tsameryan I.P. Topical issues of the Marxist-Leninist theory of nations. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 6.

A.G. also turned out to be an ardent supporter of the view of the nation as an ethnic entity. Agaev.
“The formula of the historically formed community of people essentially breaks the ethnic connection of the nation with those ethnic formations that formed the basis of the nation, giving it its own territory, language, character, and ethnic characteristics. In the interests of limiting the concept of a nation, it is advisable to characterize it as a historical form of an ethnic community of people, the highest form of an ethnic community of people, or an ethnic community of people typical of capitalism and socialism. Agayev’s definition absorbed the nation as a special case of an ethnic community characterized by 4 features: “Territory and language, economy and culture - these are the four forms in which an ethnic community is formed, polished, concentrated and modified ... A nation is an ethnic community of capitalist and socialist formations, awakened to independent national life and sovereignty. Agaev A.G. Nation, its essence and self-consciousness. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 7, pp. 87-104.

ON THE. Tavakelyan presented a rare example of pseudo-philosophical idle talk: “A nation is a complex, highly developed homogeneous socio-ethnic stable dynamic community of people, historically formed in the era of capitalism and socialism, closely connected with each other by deep ties of language, territory, economic life, self-awareness of ethnicity and national character, manifested in all spheres of public life, mainly and more perceptibly in various types and forms of material and spiritual culture, in everyday life and traditions, in mores and customs. Tavakelyan N.A. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 2, p.118.

The same echo of gradually smoldering nationalism, but attacking from the other side and criticizing Stalin for ... underestimating the social specifics of the nation, can be considered the attempts to recognize statehood as the leading sign of the nation.

So, M.O. Mnatsakanyan tried to get rid of the Stalinist "psychic warehouse" and replace it with a sign of statehood: "A nation is a historically established community of people who have a common language, a common territory, common economic ties and a common state structure." Mnatsakanyan M.O. Nation and national statehood. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 9, pp. 27-36.
He also pointed out that the sign of the commonality of the national language, as the sum of its various forms, is not correct, it is more correct to speak of the commonality of the literary language.

"Two steps to the left"...

At the same time, a number of speakers rejected the traditional generic feature.
So, they began to talk not about the nation as a community, but about the nation as a group of people.
In the same article M.S. Dzhunusov said: "A nation is a large group of people distinguished by a stable commonality of language, ethnic territory, national identity and specific national cultural features that develop in the course of the formation of both capitalist and socialist economic relations." Dzhunusov M.S. Nation as a socio-ethnic community. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 4, p.20.

A.I. also spoke about the nation as a group. Goryachev "A nation is a group of people connected by a common economic life, territory, language, and mental makeup." Goryacheva A.I. Is mental warehouse a sign of a nation? - Questions of History, 1967, No. 8, pp. 91-104.
However, having made a revision of the generic trait, she left inviolable, like other "freethinkers", all 4 Stalinist traits, and expressed disagreement "with those definitions that highlight the features characteristic of nations in a particular period of their development, because these will already be particular and not general definitions.

In other words, according to these "Stalinists", the definition of a capitalist and a socialist nation should contain the same features.

However, among the proposed definitions there were also curiosities.

So, according to S.I. Novikov, one of the distinguishing features of a nation should be the presence of its own currency, as well as its own system of measures and weights: “A nation is a large socio-ethnic group bound by the unity of the written language and oral speech, enshrined in literature, by the political unity of the territory with the population speaking in one language, the presence of a unified system of money, measures and weights and customs borders. Questions of History, 1968, No. 6, p.99.

A.V. Santsevich advanced a revolutionary thesis: "A nation is a historically formed community of people in economic, political and cultural life on a common territory with an active role of the working class in the revolutionary struggle and socialist transformations, a community of historical traditions." Santsevich A.V. Questions of History, 1966, No. 12, p.116.

Some have tried to see the nation as a form of social bond.
For example, M.S. Rosenko offered a tricky definition:
“A nation is a form of material and spiritual relations between people under capitalism and socialism, which has relative independence in its development, but is largely (if not decisively) determined by the essence of the socio-economic formation. The nation is a historically defined form of social relations of people, leading humanity to a non-national unity. Rosenko M.N. Modern epoch and some questions of the theory of nations. - Questions of History, 1968, No. 7, pp. 85-101.

S.T. Kaltakhchyan questioned the very need for discussion.
Demonstrating a brilliant mastery of the art of sophistry and declaring that "in their essence, the nations of one social system are very different from the nations of another system" and that there are no rules without exceptions, he criticized the formal-logical approach as such.
“Unfortunately, the selection of common features is often carried out formally and logically, by comparing various tables, comparing examples of the phenomenon under study, selecting cases that contradict the generalization. (I personally do not know of any attempt to carry out a formal-logical analysis of the definitions of the concept of nation. - S.Sh.).
In a similar way, it is always possible to single out and combine certain common features of a particular phenomenon, but the essence of the phenomenon is not limited to this. And the point is not only that exceptions are possible and always occur, but also that the anatomy of a phenomenon, destroying living connections and not clarifying the basis of the vital functions of this phenomenon, does not allow one to get to its true essence. Kaltakhchyan S.T. Questions of History, 1966, No. 6, pp. 24-44.
Appealing to the authority of Lenin, who objected to the eclectic pursuit of a complete list of signs, Kaltakhchyan reduced everything to the fact that it was necessary to find out one main sign. This sign, in his opinion, again reinforced by a reference to the old work of Lenin (“the concept of “nation” is built here on an artificial abstraction of the contradictions between the classes that form this nation.” Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 2, p. 221) , is the presence of a class division in a nation. The whole national question does not boil down to the existence of nations, but to the contradiction between labor and capital.

A special place in the discussion was occupied by the topic of ethnic communities in third world countries, in which, according to B.V. Andrianova, E.A. Simonia, P.I. Puchkov, the processes of national consolidation do not fit into the theory.
For example, in Mali and Indonesia, the creation of a nation occurs in the absence of a single national language, the leading factor in the emergence of nations from multilingual tribes is the state.
Is it possible in this case to speak of nations as such?

Having analyzed all the four signs of a nation proposed by Stalin, the participants in the discussion convincingly showed that they cannot be considered distinctive signs, putting forward strong arguments against each individually and all together.

"Ladies, don't blow your nose into the curtains,
It's indecent, they tell you!"

For example, T.Yu. Burmistrova reasonably noted that in Stalin's definition, "the signs are called the 'base' on which a nation arises, and the concept of 'national community' remains undisclosed." Burmistrova T.Yu. Some questions of the theory of nation. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 12, p.102.

Often in the statements of the participants in the discussion, the idea arose of the subjectivity of these so-called essential features.

A.G. drew attention to a very important detail. Agaev:
“Upon closer examination, it turns out that one ethnic community may differ mainly in terms of language, another - in territorial, third - in religious, etc. As soon as this basic feature weakens or disappears altogether, the entire ethnic community collapses. It dissolves in the surrounding ethnic environment.” Agaev A.G. Nation, its essence and self-consciousness. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 7.
By the way, Akhed Gadzhimuradovich wrote back in 1965 about “the real existence of separate ethnic communities, including nationalities and nations, without a common territory, a common language, etc.” Agaev A.G. Nationality as a social community. - Questions of Philosophy, 1965, No. 11.
“In our opinion,” he noted, “the concept of a nation must meet at least three requirements.
Firstly, it should reflect the specific difference of the nation as an ethnic community in the general system of historical forms of community of people, such as state, racial, class, international, etc.
Secondly, to represent the nation as the highest and last stage of the ethnic community.
And, thirdly, to identify the specifics of the nation among other types of ethnic communities. Agaev A.G. Nation, its essence and self-consciousness. - Questions of History, 1967, No. 7.

Is it an essential feature, and if it is, then for which class that makes up the nation, is the common territory? - asked V. Zaichenko and K. Sabirov. “The entire territory of the state is at the disposal of the ruling classes. For the lower ones, the limits of such a territory are limited to several hundred meters or several kilometers, beyond which their activities do not extend. Zaichenko V.M. Sabirov K. The commonality of the mental warehouse is one of the essential features of the nation. - Questions of History, 1968, No. 5, pp. 75-81.

"This is a school,
ballroom dance school,
ballroom dancing school
they tell you...

An interesting attempt to discard the definition of a nation altogether (of course, with reference to the authority of Lenin) was made by Yu. Semenov.
In his opinion, it is necessary to study not nations, but national movements, as Vladimir Ilyich did, but to engage in the creation of definitions is unnecessary scholasticism.
“No definition of a nation, which boils down to a simple enumeration of any of its features, can be successful ... We know what the linguistic, territorial, economic, cultural communities of people, taken separately, are. What do they represent taken together? When they are superimposed on each other, do they together form something unified whole, does a qualitatively new phenomenon arise in this case, which cannot be reduced to the sum of its components? In the case of a negative answer, it makes no sense to talk about the emergence of a new community of people - a national one; in the case of a positive one, the same question again arises: what is the essence of this phenomenon, what kind of phenomena it belongs to, what is its place among social phenomena. Semenov Yu.I. From the history of the theoretical development of V.I. Lenin of the national question. - Peoples of Asia and Africa, 1966, No. 4, p.122.
Stalin's definitions are eclectic, - he declared, - without expressing the essence of nations, they do not make it possible to separate this phenomenon from the rest, to draw a qualitative line between this and all the others.

Having reported that “concise definitions are always imperfect by the fact that they cannot cover the comprehensive connections of a phenomenon in its full development”, V.I. Kozlov noted that one should speak of a nation not as a group of people, but as a large group of people.
Although it was obvious that small nationalities cannot be called a nation by the word and there is clearly some pattern between the quantitative growth of a nation and economic development, the emergence of cities, the emergence of national movements and, accordingly, the nation's claims to create its own statehood, no one has formulated this pattern. tried to.

Kozlov explained:
“The average size of a tribe is several hundred or thousand people. Nations are hundreds of thousands, millions of people. Only such dimensions can ensure the internal division of labor corresponding to the developed mode of production. Of particular importance in this is the creation of a national intelligentsia. To proceed from concrete material - this call will find sympathy among all researchers who are faced with the difficulty, and sometimes the impossibility, of applying a rigid definition of a nation based on 4 features, the content of which has not yet been fully disclosed, to the really existing peoples of the world. Ethnographers wrote about a thousand articles about different peoples of the world for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. But they are not able to determine which of these peoples is a nation and which is a nationality.

It is difficult even to name the criteria by which it is possible to identify a person's belonging to a particular nation.
They say that at one time Ben-Gurion, instead of answering the question “Who is a Jew?” asked him, shrugged his shoulders and answered: “A Jew is ... a Jew!”
In any case, the principle elevated to the status of law, according to which the son of a Jewish woman should be considered a Jew, often fails. The annals of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University included the romantic story of a student who managed to become a mother three times during her studies in the 60s. Her first child was the son of a Chinese revolutionary who died during the Cultural Revolution. She gave birth to the second from a Cuban who arrived from the island of Freedom, the third from a French communist. Since she herself was Jewish, all her half-born sons - a Negro, a Chinese and a child from a French pope - should be considered Jews ...

IN AND. Kozlov also reasonably rejected the commonality of economic life as a specific characteristic of a nation. “An analysis of the concept of economic community shows that this community is characteristic not so much of a nation as of a state, and its scope is determined not by ethnic, but by political boundaries. The factor of statehood has a significant influence on the formation of a linguistic and cultural community and a decisive influence on the formation of an economic community, which is considered the main feature of a nation ... In practice, when we are dealing with the presence of state formations or national political movements in which the main classes of a given people are involved and which aim at territorial autonomization, this is usually a sign that we are dealing with an emerging or already formed nation. Kozlov V.I. On the development of the theoretical foundations of the national question. - Peoples of Asia and Africa, 1967, No. 4.

In total, during the discussion, about 50 articles were published on many aspects of the concept of a nation.
It was attended by 23 historians, 16 philosophers, 5 ethnographers, 3 lawyers, 2 linguists and one economist.
Similar discussions in the same years took place in the journals "Questions of Philosophy", "State and Law", "Peoples of Africa and Asia", "Friendship of Peoples" (A literary hero and his national character - 1966-1967) and "Literary newspaper" (National originality of literature and art), as well as on the pages of the Polish magazine ("Nation and State", 1966, No. 3), a number of Hungarian publications.
In 1969, the All-Union scientific-theoretical conference on the same topic was even held in Frunze.

Then the stupid argument was stopped for a long time.
The country was already slipping into years of stagnation.
The denial of Stalin's role in the history of the USSR was considered a voluntarist mistake.

But only more than a year and a half after the publication of the last material of the discussion, an article appeared in Questions of History, where the results of the discussion were summed up and all the national i's were dotted.

Then, disregarding the authority of academician E.M. Zhukov, slashed backhand: “Socialist nations have the same features as the bourgeois ones. None of them disappears during the transition from capitalism to socialism, but the content of these features changes radically. Consequently, the existing Marxist definition of a nation includes the main, defining features of all types of nations. However, this definition does not and cannot reflect the development of this or that type of nation, and even more so of individual nations.

What about ballroom dancing?

"Zhenya, Zhenya, don't turn your back,
it's not a propeller
you are not a plane...

Now it was necessary to distribute earrings to all the sisters, which the author did with virtuosity, indicating a fair amount of experience.
“In the course of the discussion, some participants expressed the opinion that as nations develop, they do not have stable, stable features, that the mandatory features turn a nation into something metaphysically immutable. However, these views were not supported. Since the nation exists in reality, its scientific definition should include the most important features, stable, revealing the essence of the nation. If we consider that such signs do not exist, then the nation is something amorphous, indefinite, constantly changing its essence and appearance. This is the opinion of the majority (!) and one cannot but agree with this.”

Also, referring to the opinion of the majority, which is always right, the author recognized it necessary, in addition to the two already known types of nation - bourgeois and socialist - "to single out a new type to designate nations that arise in countries liberated from colonial oppression."

The author categorically refused to include "self-consciousness" among the signs of a nation.
“Self-consciousness of ethnicity”, just like “national self-consciousness”, cannot serve as one of the main features of a nation, since it is a subjective reflection in the mind of a person of the objective fact of the existence of a nation. Questions of History, 1970, No. 8, p.95.

Whether the protocol of the voting results was drawn up, this scientific issue was resolved by a simple or qualified majority, the author of the article did not say, but moved on to the most important thing:
“The well-known definition of a nation, formulated by I.V. Stalin, is a generalization of everything that was said by K. Marx, F. Engels and V.I. Lenin on the issue of the essence and main features of the nation. It is known that the work of I.V. Stalin, in which this definition is given, was positively assessed by Lenin. The above definition of the nation, as rightly noted during the discussion, is a scientific, Marxist definition, it is part of the Marxist theory of the nation. Questions of History, 1970, No. 8, pp. 90-94.

On this, all theoretical disputes about the concept of a nation, in fact, ended in the USSR.

"Cavaliers, do not keep the ladies,
below the waist, they tell you!

From now on, scientific research and journalistic materials about national relations in the USSR sounded like a song about a gullible marquise. And how could it be otherwise, because “the national question, in the form in which it was inherited from the past, has been completely and finally resolved. Relations of genuine equality and fraternity, the Leninist friendship of peoples, have firmly established themselves in the country. Ponomarev B.N. Report at the All-Union Scientific and Practical Conference. - In the book. To educate convinced patriotic internationalists. Materials of the conference “Development of national relations in the conditions of mature socialism. Experience and Problems of International Communist Education” in Riga. - M., 1982, p.13.

…However, once the veil of silence was nevertheless broken through.

At the end of 1972, an article “Against anti-historicism” appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta, placed on a spread signed by Doctor of Historical Sciences A.N. Yakovlev. It was dedicated to the national question in the USSR, or rather, the growth of Russophile sentiments in the country.
Its author at that time was the head of a department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and pointed to the dangerous intensification of nationalist, clearly separating the concepts of "Russian" and "Soviet", speeches in literature and journalism in recent years.

Yakovlev wrote that "the revival of Russian nationalism awakens the nationalism of other peoples that make up the USSR."
It is impossible to play with nationalism in the USSR; in a socialist multinational country, ideologists must understand that the rejection of the class historical approach, regardless of which side it is proclaimed, inevitably leads to a symmetrical rejection on the other side.

“When the past is deliberately idealized, and even with fuzzy social positions, an absurd dispute arises, whose king is better ...”

Russians idealize Russian commanders and tsars - in response, Georgians begin to write about the bright personality of Queen Tamar, Ukrainians - about the fabulous Kiev prince Bogdan Gatilo, under whose name the leader of the Huns Attila was hiding, Kazakhs - about the movement of Kenesary Kasymov, Uzbeks - about Timur, Moldovans - about their cultural figures of the last century, etc.
“Attempts are being made to embellish, whitewash some representatives of bourgeois nationalism, which was revealed in a number of publications about Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, about Georgian Mensheviks, social federalists, about Armenian Dashnaks.”

The party cried out: State of emergency!

"Ladies, ladies, help Sasha,
Help Sasha, they tell you!
He made a puddle in the corridor "...

Article comrade. Yakovleva about Russian nationalism was honored to be spat upon at a meeting of the Politburo.
The speaker, head of the department of culture of the Central Committee, Vasily Shauro, by the way, a native of Belarus, was deeply indignant at the immature, fundamentally incorrect speech of his colleague, discrediting the great Russian people, pouring water on someone else's mill, etc., in general, approached the printed word on principle .
To learn respect for the Russian people, Yakovlev was sent to Canada, where he stayed as an ambassador for more than 10 years, until Gorbachev took him from there to first appoint him as an ideologist, and then in charge of foreign policy and the gray cardinal of perestroika.

But by creating the illusion of general well-being at the request of the nomenklatura bureaucracy and theoretically justifying the existence of the administrative-command system, the creators of the fictitious idyll demonstrated their devotion to the principles of Stalin's national policy, which they renamed Lenin's.
Familiar verbal formulas reliably closed gaping gaps in theoretical constructions for a long time and satisfied customers - why bother trying to find a definition of a phenomenon that will no longer exist in the coming bright future? All nations will eventually dissolve into a single people.

However, in connection with the doctrine of the emergence of a single Soviet people, other political and economic oddities arose.

Everyone knew that the Russian, Turkmen, Georgian, Estonian and other peoples are equally part of the Soviet people, but they live and live on their own, many have their own statehood, culture and literature.
At the same time, the rights of a citizen of a national republic usually turned out to be greater than those of the inhabitants of Russia.
For example, much more money was spent on his education and upbringing from the all-Soviet budget than on the same purposes for a native of a Central Russian village.
Many republics were considered subsidized, that is, they received funds for their economic, cultural, medical and other purposes directly from the federal budget, that is, they did not earn money themselves.

It turned out that the Soviet people were some kind of amazing construction, a federation of ethnic groups, something like a huge matryoshka doll, which includes many nesting dolls of smaller peoples.
Some of these peoples had their own national republics, regions and districts, someone simply lived in the USSR, not bothering with paradoxes and not upset that he was part of the single Soviet people directly, without an intermediary state.
An inhabitant of the national autonomy, which is part of the national republic, had exactly the same Soviet citizenship as an inhabitant of Moscow.
The only thing he could not, by definition, was to become the general secretary of the CPSU.

However, social scientists later made a number of attempts to define the nation.

Among the innovators was, for example, Doctor of Sciences M.I. Kulichenko, who proposed this option: “A nation is a historically formed, stable historical community, the basis for the existence of which is the social ties inherent in a certain formation, primarily the unity of economic life and, in varying degrees of maturity, political cohesion, which have developed in an inseparable unity with ethnic ties, acting in the form commonality of the national territory, literary language, national traditions and customs, national culture in general (class contradictory under capitalism), moreover, the national ties of people in a significant way and in class refraction are also reflected in the public consciousness (national consciousness) and in social psychology (national psychology) ” . Kulichenko M.I. National relations in the USSR and trends in their development. - M., 1972, p.29.

But, if a nation is a historical product of the development of society, then socio-historical development, being a decisive factor in "the emergence and deepening, and under certain circumstances, in softening and erasing mental differences between individual ethnic communities" (Methodological problems of social psychology. - M ., 1975, p. 215) contributes to the constant reassessment of established values. This process goes on constantly, and under relatively identical initial conditions, different peoples come to a certain similarity in their own ways. Humanity, once having arisen, “turned into a society in which the social environment from the very beginning began to influence people to the extent that people, an individual, must fulfill the duties assigned to them, thus the socialization of the individual represents a constant pressure on a person, natural relationship, changing its essence as a result. (Ibid.).

Therefore, the common and particular in national cultures must be sought not in ethnic communities, but above all in the historical experience of people, which determines all socio-psychological processes that take shape in the course of the historical development of peoples.

Of the foreign Marxists, the most interesting definition was offered by the German philosopher Alfred Kosing:
“A nation is a structural form and form of development of human society, naturally arising with the formation of the socio-economic formation of capitalism, as a result of the process of economic development, as well as the processes of socio-political and ideological development based on it and historical class battles ... The nation appears and becomes historically active as a collection of large groups of people, but as long as there are classes - as a collection of classes. The nation as a naturally emerging structural form and form of development of society is characterized by the following common distinctive features: the historical nature of its emergence and formation, its economic foundations that determine the essence of the nation, the language as the most important means of communication, and the territory on which the national regions are united and the national identity is formed. states". Kozing A. Nation in history and modernity. - M., 1978, p.119.

M.I. Kulichenko, singling out the political sign as characteristic of the definition, contrasts the social, class side of the nation with the ethnic one, linking language, territory, traditions and culture with ethnicity. At the same time, public consciousness in his understanding has not an ethnic, but a national coloring.

A. Kosing, refusing to understand the nation as a community and considering it a large set of people, and in class societies - a set of classes, focuses on the structural features of the nation as a form of development of society, while decisively omitting all references to the psychological and cultural, as well as ethnic component.

However, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to correct some of the most obvious absurdities in the old formula and leave everything as it is.
In general, it turned out like this (for some reason, they decided to throw out the mention of sustainability): “A nation is a historical community of people that develops in the course of the formation of a community of their territory, economic ties, literary language, and some features of culture and character.” Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary - M., 1983, p.417.

"Where the brooch is -
there's a pie...

In the "Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary" (1985), the definition from the "Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary" was torn word for word:
"A nation is a historical community of people that develops in the course of the formation of a community of their territory, economic ties, literary language, and certain features of culture and character." The difference is that it is added: “a historically new social and international community has developed in the USSR - the Soviet people. The community of socialist states is getting stronger.” Soviet encyclopedic dictionary. - Moscow, 1985.

Since it was indecent to refer to Stalin, it was decided to attribute his definitions to the classics, to cover up with quotes from Marx and Lenin what was invented by the Father of Nations.
His “theory of the nation” was renamed Leninist, and the Stalinist national policy, carried out in the USSR until the early 1970s, also turned out to be Leninist.
Defending the theory of the luminary of all sciences, Soviet social scientists built strong fortifications around its provisions, trying to reinforce their efforts with references to the classics, most often distorting their views, and often, in their desire to find Stalinist approaches in the works of Marx or Lenin, they did not disdain even an ordinary fake.

Here is a typical example.
S.T. Kaltakhchyan, in his work “The Marxist-Leninist Theory of the Nation and Modernity”, with reference to the “Lenin Collection” (vol. XXX, p. 53), writes: “V.I. Lenin considered the determinants of the nation: “Language and territory. Main (Economic sign). historical character. He singled out in this way those determinants of the nation, without which it cannot exist. Kaltakhchyan S.T. The history of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the nation and the present. - M., 1983, p.68.
Hence, the conclusion naturally followed: “V.I. Lenin comprehensively worked out and developed the materialistic, historical-economic theory of the nation.

But if you take the 30th volume of Lenin's Collection in your hands and open it on the indicated page, it turns out that the quote cited by Kaltakhchyan looks a little different: “Kautsky. language and territory. Main (Economic sign). historical character.
But this text is ... Lenin's synopsis of Kautsky's views on the nation, whose historical and economic theory Lenin, by the way, criticized.
Having omitted from the chosen quotation the reference to the direct author of this point of view, Kaltakhchyan simply made a substitution: he attributed Kautsky's views to Lenin. And he did so because it was precisely in Kautsky that all these signs of a nation - language, territory, economic sign - were copied by Stalin.

So they wrote, as Doctor of Historical Sciences M.I. Kulichenko, not shunning lies: “K. Marx, F. Engels and V.I. Lenin substantiated in their writings the position that the nation is a stable community of people of the era of capitalism and the formation of communism. Kulichenko M.I. The rise and rapprochement of nations in the USSR. - M., 1981, p.45.

Or like the candidate of philosophical sciences P.A. Korchagin: “Considering the approach of K. Marx and F. Engels to the problem of understanding the nation, we can draw the following conclusion. A nation is a socio-ethnic community that has historically developed in the era of capitalism, characterized by a common economic life, language, territory, a large number of people who have common features and characteristics in their social psychology. Korchagin P.A. K. Marx and F. Engels on nations and national relations in the works of 1840. - Scientific Communism, 1980, No. 4, p.104.

What can you say?
"Step forward"...

However, in the USSR there was another micro-discussion about the concept of a nation in the journal Scientific Communism in 1980.
They called her, firstly, who appeared at the suggestion of M.S. Dzhunusov's statements about the ethno-social nature of the nation, about its social and ethnic aspects, and secondly, the freshly baked theory of Yu.V. Bromley about ethnic groups, and for a specific reason - the statements of the same S.T. Kaltakhchyan that nationality is an ethnic characteristic of a nation.

It turned out that the old guard was vigilantly watching the carried away youth.

Having thoroughly prepared the attack, the faithful Stalinist Ivan Tsamerian dealt a powerful blow to the revisionists by publishing a very convincing article in the genre of political denunciation in Scientific Communism. Tsameryan I.P. Some topical issues in the theory of nations and national relations. - Scientific communism. 1979, No. 2, pp. 27-43.

He stated that "the mechanical interpretation of the nation as a combination of two autonomous parts - ethnic and social" by individual authors (namely, Yu.V. Bromley with his ethnicities and ethno-social organisms) fundamentally contradicts Marxism.

"All kinds of views that interpret the nation as a community of two autonomous sides (or parts) - ethnic and social, can serve as a convenient form of substantiating the eternity of the nation," the old demagogue denounced the revisionists. - “According to these authors, nationality characterizes the ethnic side of the nation and nationality, that is, their ethnic characteristics. We know that nationalities existed long before the emergence of the nation. Consequently, nationality as the ethnic side of the nation arises long before the appearance of the nation, but is something almost given from the century. Moreover, contrary to the well-known Leninist thesis that in social class terms, the nation of bourgeois society does not represent one nation, but consists of two nations, some (M.S. Dzhunusov clearly meant here) declare that “a nation, having a different socio-political and moral character, ethnically - a common territory, language, national specifics, culture, way of life, customs, tastes, traditions and psychology - represents one nation. Dzhunusov M.S. Two tendencies of socialism in national relations. - Tashkent. 1975, p.33.

Thus, the ethnic turned out to be more important than the social, which finally drove Ivan Petrovich into righteous anger.
“There are no such ethnic characteristics that would not have a social character. A nation in the aggregate of all its features, traits and characteristics is a social phenomenon. A nation is a social or socio-historical community of people,” wrote Tsamerian, as if forgetting that relatively recently, in a discussion of 1966-1968, he himself called the nation “the highest form of an ethnic community.”

Bromley and Kaltakhchyan had to compose a refutation, but, in fact, Tsameryan had nothing to object to. (Bromley Yu.V. Kaltakhchyan ST. Actual problems of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the nation and national relations and the struggle of ideas. - Scientific Communism. 1980, No. 1).
According to Stalin, in the USSR the nation was considered a purely social phenomenon, without any autonomous ethnic parts.

"Fima, Sonya, stop talking,
What kind of balabolki, they tell you!

But in the future, attempts to encroach on the heritage of the mustachioed leader were met with hostility by those who worked for a long time in the field of the theory of the nation - this became the specificity of their little world.

In addition to the above, there were discussions “Nationality and Mass Character” in the Literary Gazette in 1982; “On the definition of the concept of “ethnos”” - in the journal Soviet Ethnography 1986-1987; discussion about the problems of typology and historical types of ethnic communities in the yearbook "Races and Peoples": No. 18 - M., 1988, pp. 5-65; No. 19 - M., 1989. See also Articles of the early 1990s. in the journal Ethnographic Review.

With what metal in his voice 10 years later, Suren Kaltakhchyan himself rebuffed the impudent perestroika at a round table in the editorial office of Questions of Philosophy: “The whole world knows the outstanding results of the Leninist national policy. Those who like to see everything compromised, who, instead of correcting their distortions, deviations from the Leninist theory of the nation and national relations, should especially think about this, devaluing what has been done in the development of this theory and trying to suggest starting everything from scratch. Philosophical problems of the theory and practice of national relations under socialism. Round table materials. - Questions of philosophy. 1988, No. 9, p.33.

How hot it will collapse - already in the year 2000! - Viktor Kozlov to the apostate Vladimir Tishkov, who dared to declare that the nation is “essentially an empty, but emotionally influential word”, that all the theoretical constructions of Russian philosophers and ethnographers about nations and ethnic groups are parascientific chimeras created by the imagination of ideologues! Kozlov V.I. Ethnos. Nation. Nationalism. - M., 2000, p.19-20.

"It's unethical
unhygienic
and unsympathetic
they tell you...

Many years have passed since Stalin's death. The USSR - along with the communist doctrine - also remained in the past, but the creation of the leader is still published in encyclopedias and dictionaries as a classic, although without attribution.

Alexander Melnikov from Barnaul is absolutely right when he bitterly writes that “Stalin’s understanding of the nation, loudly proclaimed from thousands of stands, replicated in millions of copies, canonized during his lifetime, lives on in textbooks and works of social scientists even after his death.” Melnikov A.N. Reflections on nations. The experience of restructuring national thinking. Barnaul. 1989, p.65.

There is no longer on the map the country created by the Secretary General, nor the camps built by him, the communist dream has remained in the past, but the theory of the nation of the leader has overcome all obstacles.
What is different from the Stalinist definition of what Muscovite Valentina Torukalo gave in her Ph.D. thesis: “A nation is a social community of real residence, communication, language, life, work, thinking, feelings, culture, etc. It is also clear that nations arise at a certain stage of social development. Torukalo V.N. Nation and national relations: origins, theory, modernity. - M., 1997, p.23.

Slyly linking the emergence of nations with a “certain stage of social development” and calling the nation a “community”, although not historically stable, but only social, replacing the community of economic ties with the community of life and work, the community of territory with the community of real living, deciphering the community of the mental warehouse as a community communication, thinking and feeling, of course, not forgetting about the commonality of culture, etc., - Valentina Ivanovna turned the old song into a new way. Before us is the same, but cunningly disguised, the definition of a leader.

In recent years, figures of the Orthodox Church have been increasingly taking up the charitable cause of determining the nation and the people, of course, emphasizing their own, Orthodox significance for the Russian nation with all their might and proving that every nation seeks "religious unity - otherwise it will not take place."

"Russian Identity and the Future of the Orthodox World in the Age of Globalization" - this is how, in the spirit of the times, Priest Sergei Karamyshev titled the report he delivered on October 6, 2011 at St. Petersburg State University at a historical and political science conference.
To begin with, the pastor, like, indeed, many of his predecessors, dissociated himself from a bad legacy, attributing Stalin's words to another author, although the "churched Nazi scholar" clearly did not fit the shelves with the works of the classic of scientific communism.

“We are not close to Marx's definition of a nation as a community formed from separate nationalities only under the “capitalist” mode of production,” said the bearer of the spirit of God. - Such an understanding of the nation is contrary to Holy Scripture, which speaks of "peoples" without regard to any "capitalisms" or "feudalisms". We propose a genetic definition of the concept of "nation". It has the advantage of being based on Holy Scripture....

Although it is difficult to substantiate the words of the Lord with genetics, Father Sergius is not embarrassed by such trifles. He theorizes out of ignorance, as God put it on his soul.

“Here is the definition we propose,” exclaims the theoretician from Christ.
Nation (people) - 1) naturally, organically formed in accordance with the divine economy of our salvation in time and continuing to exist in eternity, a community of people united by 2) origin (common history), 3) religion, 4) language, 5) state- legal norms, 6) culture and 7) territory.
The totality of points from the 2nd to the 6th inform the representatives of the nation of a kind of worldview (mentality).
Of the listed signs, two, in our opinion, are not mandatory: these are biological origin and territory.
Having formed, a nation can relatively painlessly absorb people who are alien by blood, assimilating them - in the process of assimilation, they acquire other features that are already mandatory for the nation. Having been formed, a nation, or, as a rule, parts of it, can continue to exist, being deprived of territory.
And further...
“It seems extremely necessary to introduce into the current political and legal field the DEFINITION OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE, confirmed by scientific developments. As a working definition for the first time, we could offer our own, based on the general definition of the nation: the Russian people - naturally, organically formed in accordance with the divine economy of our salvation in time, namely, in the X-XI centuries from the Nativity of Christ and continuing to exist in eternity, a community of people united by origin and a common history, the Orthodox faith, the Russian and (used for prayer) Church Slavonic language, adherence to a monarchical form of government, Russian Orthodox culture and territory.

Here, however, the holy father, obviously realizing that he had hinted at the national territory, he blurted out something not too ecclesiastical, makes an awkward curtsy:
“The latter corresponds to the borders of the Russian Empire by 1904, including also part of the territory of the former Austrian Empire, where Orthodox Rusyns lived. This does not mean that the Russians are asserting their territorial claims against a number of modern states. This only means the territory of our ethno-cultural space, where we can act without conflicting with the existing laws of these states.”
So, historical community, language, territory, mentality…

"Step forward"...

The Holy Father only needs to add economics, and everything will turn out exactly like Comrade Stalin's.

Let's open the Concise Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1997: "A nation is a historically stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, as well as a common national form of material and spiritual culture." Brief philosophical dictionary. Ed. Alekseeva A.P. - M., Progress. 1997, p.202.

Let's take a look at the thick volume of the Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Modern Russian Language, published in 1999, authored by P.Ya. Chernykh: “A nation,” he writes, “is a historically established form of a community of people, characterized by a common language, territory, economic life, and mental make-up, manifested in a common culture.” Chernykh P.Ya. Historical and etymological dictionary of the modern Russian language. In 2 volumes - 3rd ed., v.1. - M., Russian language. 1999.

How luxuriously published is the New Illustrated Encyclopedia, the twelfth volume of which with the word "Nation" came out at the beginning of the millennium.
What is there?
“Nation (from Latin natio tribe, people) is a historical community of people based on a common territory, historical, economic and political ties, literary language and other cultural features. New illustrated encyclopedia. - M., Great Russian Encyclopedia. 2001, v.12, p.169.

And so it wanders from the dictionary to the encyclopedia, from the textbook to the reference book, usually without reference to the author, the Stalinist legacy.

Sometimes, when compiling publications, they get out of an absurd position, indicating that there is a different point of view on the nation, or they simply list several options for definitions that allegedly exist in science, but which one is more correct, they are silent.

So, in the “Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary” of the 2000 edition, we find a hybrid definition containing as many as three different decodings of the poor concept, but in the first place, of course, the one given by Joseph Vissarionovich is put: “Nation - (from Latin natio - tribe, people) - a historical community of people based on a common territory, historical, economic and political ties, literary language and other cultural features. Often seen as a form of ethnic community. In modern practice, the concept of a nation is more common as the totality of all citizens of a certain state, regardless of their ethnicity. Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary in 2 volumes, v.2, - M., Big Russian Encyclopedia Publishing House, 2000, Art. 1030.

In modern literature, one can sometimes find attempts to defend the ethnic understanding of the nation that existed in the USSR, and to define the nation as the highest historical type of ethnic group that arises on the basis of the development of bourgeois relations: “A nation (from Latin - tribe, people) is a historical type of ethnic group that arises in the era of the formation and development of capitalism. Nations are formed, as a rule, on the basis of nationality, while 2 or more nationalities, usually related, participate in the consolidation of nations. The ethnos turns into a more integral social system - the nation. The nation-state plays a prominent role in this process. The nation can be considered as a special historical type of socio-political organization of the ethnos. Avksentiev A.V. Avksentiev V.A. Brief ethno-sociological dictionary-reference book. - Stavropol. 1994., p.50.

In the "Political Dictionary" edited by A.A. Migolatiev, published in 1994, the nation is also interpreted as an ethnic community: "A nation is a socio-ethnic community that has historically developed in a certain territory, which is characterized by a stable unity of economic life, language, stable features of culture and psychology." Political dictionary in 2 hours, ed. Migolatieva A.A. part 1. - M., Luch. 1994, p.440.

According to the same dictionary, “an ethnos, an ethnic community is a stable set of people (tribe, nationality, nation, people) that has historically developed in a certain territory, possessing common features and stable features of the language, psychological make-up, as well as awareness of their interests and goals, their unity , differences from other similar formations in self-consciousness and historical memory. Po-lithological dictionary in 2 hours, ed. Migolatieva A.A. part 2. - M., Luch. 1994, p.508.

What are the arguments in support of this concept?

“In the Russian language, the interpretation of the concept of a nation as a historical type of ethnos has developed mainly under the influence of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the nation and, in this sense, has firmly entered the Russian language. In recent years, some Russian scholars have declared the concept of "nation" to be meaningless, far-fetched and only meeting the needs of the ideology of the 18th-19th centuries. This point of view, however, seems controversial and unconvincing. There are many discrepancies in scientific terminology in all languages and even in different scientific disciplines in the same language. This, of course, complicates scientific communication, but is not a reason to consider the interpretation of a particular term in any language or scientific discipline as meaningless. If for ethnology and ethnography the differences between the historical types of ethnic groups as historical ways of organizing ethnic life are not fundamental, then for sociology, political science and other social science disciplines these differences are significant and the concept of a nation in these disciplines is filled in these disciplines with specific content. Avksentiev A.V. Avksentiev V.A. Ibid., p.51.

Thus, the main of these arguments is habit, in other words, the unwillingness to look at things not as taught, but objectively.

What kind of "content" was "filled" with the concept of the nation in the Soviet social science disciplines, much has already been said.
In fact, all categories of the so-called theory of nations - nation, nationality, people, nationality, ethnos, ethnic community were not scientific terms, but ideological polysemantic constructions, their meanings overlapped each other, so it is impossible to use them as tools of knowledge.

It is sad, gentlemen, comrades, to follow the torments of the same V.A. Tishkov, who is trying to explain to his contemporaries how confused everything was in that heap of concepts and words that was proudly called the Stalinist theory of the nation.
Here he is trying in the encyclopedia "Peoples and Religions of the World" to give modern definitions of a nation, a people, an ethnic group:
“Nation (from Latin natio - people) is a term denoting a set of citizens of one state, a political nation. Previously, there was an understanding of the nation as an ethnic group, that is, a cultural or ethnonation, that is, the idea of it as a historically stable socio-economic and cultural community of people. The concept of an ethnic nation has roots in Austro-Marxism and Eastern European social democracy. In the USSR, ethnic communities (peoples) were called socialist nations, while the actually existing political nation was called the Soviet people (p. 892). A people - in the ethnic sense - is the same as an ethnic group (p. 891). For the existence of an ethnic group, the myth of a common origin is important, as well as the presence of ethnic identity, name, culture. Ethnic groups are characterized by the presence of a language, a certain territory and economy. At present, there are 2-3 thousand ethnic groups (p. 901).” Peoples and religions of the world. Encyclopedia. M., 1999. 928 p.

Clever Tishkov - alas! - right in everything, but the reader experiences a slight closure of the brain.
If we briefly state what is said in the encyclopedia, we get the following: what were previously called nations are actually peoples; what used to be called a people is a nation; moreover, although in the USSR the nation was considered an ethnic group, in fact it is a people.
What actually constitutes a nation or people, such explanations do not add clarity.
But, trying to find the objective signs that characterize a nation, we continue to move along the same methodological labyrinth into which the insidious thought of the Father and Teacher of all peoples led us: a nation is a community that ...

"Two steps to the left,
two steps to the right
step forward,
vice versa".

“Considerations of the logic and methodology of history require, first of all, to define the nation in all its breadth, i.e. identify the features that are always to some extent inherent in any nation as a specific form of community. Rogachev P.M. Sverdlin M.A. About the concept of nation. - Questions of History, 1966, No. 1, p.34.

In a word, Stalin - and now he is more alive than all the living.

Review of "The Father of Nations and His Definition" (Sergey Shramko).

Before turning to the consideration of the problems that social science was obliged to elucidate after the publication of the cited work of I.V. Stalin, but did not elucidate for almost 100 years, let us turn to the Stalinist definition of a nation in order to clarify some of the silences hidden in it. This is necessary so that the ambiguity of their understanding ceases to be an obstacle to the harmonization of national relations in the country and in the world.

First of all, the question of community of economic life, economic coherence of the nation.

I.V. Stalin gave the definition of a nation in that historical period of the development of global civilization, when all the nations historically formed by that time were characterized by the quality of economic self-sufficiency in the sense that the products produced by the nation itself prevailed in the spectrum of products consumed by them. The volume of interethnic product exchange was insignificant in relation to the volume of the gross national product produced by the nation itself, and interethnic product exchange played any significant role in shaping the quality of life of only national "elites" (the ruling and richest layer of national crowd-"elitist" societies) and not the vast majority of the people who make up the nation. In other words, not only territorial and linguistic, but organizational and technological (economic) separation of nations from each other took place.

Due to the fact that the nation was at that time self-sufficient in terms of production and consumption of products and interethnic product exchange did not have any noticeable effect on the quality of life of the vast majority of its representatives, behind the words of Stalin's definition of the commonality of economic life, the economic connectivity of the nation is the fact that the nation, at the expense of its own human resources, supported the entire range of professions necessary for the development of its gross national product at the level of organizational and technological development it had achieved.

Today, the vast majority of nations that existed in the historical period when I.V. Stalin defined this phenomenon have lost the quality of economic self-sufficiency in the above sense: a fair share of their product is intended for export, and at the heart of their own production and consumption there is a fair share of imports of those types of products that are not produced in the national economy either at all, or are not produced in the required quantities; along with this, national economies participate in a number of projects carried out by the joint efforts of several nations, the fruits of which their participants share (examples of such projects are the production of European Airbus airliners, programs of the European Space Agency, the international space station, etc.).

The foregoing concerns the production and consumption of both intermediate and investment products consumed in technological processes, and the final product - products intended for consumption outside the sphere of commodity production - in households, the state and public organizations. Those. the quality of life of the vast majority of the population, at least in developed countries, is now determined by the participation of their economies in the world economy of mankind, both in terms of production, and in terms of consumption of intermediate, investment and final products.

As a consequence, nations ceased to support the full range of professions required to produce products according to their spectrum of consumption.

The economic isolation of nations is a thing of the past. Due to this circumstance, the essence of the phenomenon of the community of the economic life of the nation, its economic coherence has changed. This does not mean that:

nations, in the sense that this term was defined by I.V. Stalin, ceased to exist and bourgeois liberalism is right, according to the ideas of which “national identity” is a private matter of every individual, which does not have any significance for organizing the life of society in a state under provided that all adult individuals are brought up in the spirit of the notorious "tolerance" and "political correctness" and the only problem is how to instill this “tolerance” and “political correctness” in every individual in a “multicultural society”;

Or the Stalinist definition can be given to oblivion, as it has not stood the test of time, and in the national policy of the state - to rely on the definitions of the nation by O. Bauer, R. Springer, T. Herzl, on the "ethnos" of L.N. Gumilyov, on some either other definitions or, abandoning definitions and disputes in essence solvency each of them, to build a national policy on the basis of vague feelings of difference and originality of both people and cultures.

In fact, the global economic changes that took place in the 20th century mean that the Stalinist definition of a nation was not entirely accurate from the very beginning, and this is a consequence of the fact that it expresses a Marxist worldview, which is characterized by:

· in life to see only matter in various “forms of its movement”, but not to see the objectivity of information and the algorithms of its transformation in natural and social processes (and, accordingly, not to have a terminological apparatus for an adequate description of this component of life);

Distinguish between "mental labor" and "physical labor", but do not distinguish managerial labor and labor is directly productive, subordinated to some external control in relation to it(and, accordingly, not to have an adequate theory of control behind the soul - quite general in the sense of the universality of its application);

interpret all social phenomena on the basis of the statement about the determining role of the class struggle over the realization in society of the right of ownership of the means of production and the product produced in public association of labor(i.e. the class struggle is the locomotive of history, and everything else in the life of society is its expression and consequences; violence is the “midwife of history”, helping to give birth to something new in the life of society, when the old, which previously dominated without alternative, opposes its birth) .

In addition, let's pay attention: Stalin's definition of the nation refers to the process - to the sustainable existence of the nation in the continuity of generations, but not to the period of the formation of the nation as a historically stable community of people, and not to the period of degradation of the nation under the influence of various reasons, which can end with the disappearance of the nation, its division into several related nations or nationalities that have not formed into a nation, the revival of the nation in some new quality.

The stable existence of a nation in the succession of generations means that it - as a whole - is in some way self-governing. The self-government of society (management of it) is multifaceted, and only one of its aspects is the economic life of the established nation, which can proceed either in the mode of more or less pronounced economic isolation from other nations (as it was at the time of writing by I.V. Stalin work "Marxism and the national question"), or in the absence of economic isolation from other nations (as is the case now in most cases). Wherein:

The self-government of human society in its development implies that the satisfaction of the physiological and everyday needs of people is not the meaning of their existence (this limits the circle of interests only of the lumpen), but a means of translating the common meaning of life (ideals) for a group of people into real life.

And this semantic community, if it exists, is expressed in the self-government of the nation as a single social organism, regardless of the intensity of communication between the representatives of the nation living at opposite ends of the territory occupied by it, and regardless of the product exchange between remote regions.

If this the meaning of life, which goes beyond the satisfaction of physiological and everyday needs, there is, that is, a nation - even under the condition that people living in different parts of the territory occupied by it, only know about the existence of each other and do not have any economic or other visible ties with each other.

· If this meaning is absent, then in the presence of all other signs of a nation, there is a collection of individuals who speak the same language, have (still) a common territory, the same customs and other elements of culture, but there is no nation. In this case, there is a pseudo-national lumpen who is doomed either to acquire this kind of meaning in life, or perish into historical non-existence, becoming "ethnographic raw material" for the formation of other nations or dying out in the process of degradation. During periods of social crises, the proportion of lumpen in the population increases, and this poses a great danger to society and its prospects.

The presence of this kind of meaning of life (ideals), in the presence of other signs of a nation, preserves the nation even in modern conditions, when not only the economic isolation of nations from each other is a thing of the past, but the general cultural isolation of a nation from each other is gradually becoming a thing of the past in the process of forming a single culture. humanity: “The measure of a people is not what it is, but what<он> considers beautiful and true, about which<он>sighs"(F.M. Dostoevsky).

Those. the community of the economic life of the nation, its economic coherence is only one of the faces commonality for the established nation its sphere of government, in which a certain meaning of the life of many people who make up a nation is realized, and objectively common to all of them, even if they cannot express it; it is enough that they feel its presence in life, and one way or another, contribute to its implementation (that is, that they are actively involved in its implementation in terms of information and algorithms).

The sphere of management differs from other spheres of the life of society in that it localizes professional managerial work in relation to all other spheres of activity of the society (although the boundaries of the spheres of activity are subjectively determined to some extent, but they still exist, since they are based on the objectivity of social statistics of employment population by certain activities). That is:

One of the signs of a nation is not the commonality of economic life (as I.V. Stalin realized), but the commonality for the historically established nation of the meaning of life, which goes beyond the satisfaction of the physiological and everyday needs of the people that make up the nation, which is expressed in the unity for the nation of the sphere of governance carried out on a professional basis, and in particular - generates the economic coherence of the nation.

This professional managerial work can cover both some particulars in the life of a national society, and the management of affairs of public importance as a whole, locally and on a scale of the whole society. In the presence of other signs of a nation, given in the Stalinist definition, and the understanding that the commonality of economic life is only one of the expressions of the commonality of the sphere of government for the nation, isolation and development in management a field that includes the management on a professional basis of affairs of public importance as a whole, locally and throughout the national society, leads to the emergence of statehood.

Statehood it's a management subculture on a professional basis matters of general public importance locally and throughout society.

Those. statehood is only one of the components of the sphere of management, but not the sphere of management as a whole, since the sphere of management also includes the management of product exchange (i.e. trade), the management of collective production and other activities outside the state apparatus and its bodies.

State it is statehood in the indicated sense, plus the territory and water area to which the jurisdiction of this statehood extends, plus the population living in the territory subject to statehood.

The formation of statehood on a homogeneous national basis leads to a widespread identification of the nation and its national state, which is typical for Western sociology, which was formed on the historical experience of Europe.

The influence of this sociology on political life in the Russian Federation is expressed in the stupid transfer of its terminology by “scientists” and politicians to Russian reality, which also manifested itself at the State Council on December 27, 2010, from whose materials we began this work by quoting. As a result of such a stupid imitation of "advanced countries" in a multinational RF, "politicians" call Russia a "nation", they want someone to express a "national idea", and when someone expresses a certain "national idea", then his accused of nationalism, xenophobia, separatism; “politicians” want to get their hands on a “national security strategy”, “national development strategy”, but do not think about the need for Russia strategies for the safe development of a multinational society; Russians become in their opinion a “multinational Russian nation”, and the official science of the Russian Federation “unscientificizes” this and other nonsense, neglecting the norms of expressing meaning through the Russian language and thereby stupefying both themselves and those who rely on the opinions of such “scientists”.

But contrary to this nonsense, statehood can also develop on a multinational basis, serving the life of many nations that either have not developed their own national statehood, or those whose national statehood has to some extent limited sovereignty, since a number of tasks in the life of such a national society are solved common to several nations statehood, multinational in terms of the composition of the people working in it, whose power extends to the regions of formation and dominance of several national cultures.

The statehood of Russia is a multinational statehood common to all peoples living in it. And in this capacity, it has been developing for several centuries: at least, starting from the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible and the entry of Tatarstan into Russia. It is clear that to identify such a multinational state with a nation-state, which type of state prevails in Europe, is stupidity or malicious intent. Moreover, it is stupidity or malicious intent to try to manage social life in such a state on the basis of social patterns identified in the life of nation-states.

And in relation to such statehood, on the territory subject to it, there are no “national minorities” oppressed by the statehood of a certain “titular nation” or the statehood of a corporation of “titular nations”, since access to work in it is determined not by origin from representatives of this or that people, but by business qualities and political intentions of the applicants.

According to this understanding of statehood and the state, a historically established stable nation can have a common sphere of government, which includes those of its representatives who manage collective activities in the field of production, trade, etc., but not have their own statehood.

original language and cultural in general a community that has developed in any territory, if there are several separate areas of management carried out on a professional basis in the regions of this territory, this is:

either the process of becoming a nation from several nationalities, each of which has its own somewhat specific sphere of government(in the case of erasing the boundaries that separate regions in the sphere of public self-government on the basis of the meaning of life that unites people, which goes beyond the satisfaction of their physiological and everyday needs, and a linguistic community that ensures mutual understanding without translators);

either a process of national disunity leading to:

Ø to the formation of several kindred nations;

Ø either to the assimilation of failed nations or seceded nationalities by other established nations;

Ø either to ethnic cleansing in the territory developed for their own needs by any established nations.

In all other respects, the Stalinist definition of the social phenomenon "nation" satisfies the needs of understanding national relationships. on condition, that there is an adequate vision of those phenomena that stand behind the words “culture” and “national character” (or “mental warehouse”) included in it. In view of the foregoing, we can give the following definition of the social phenomenon "nation":

Nation there is a historically established stable community of people that has arisen on the basis of a commonality: 1) language, 2) territory, 3) the meaning of life, expressed in the unity and integrity of the sphere of public self-government, carried out on a professional basis, 4) a mental warehouse (national character), manifested 5 ) in a culture that unites people and is reproduced on its basis in the continuity of generations. Only the presence of all the signs taken together gives us a nation.

A people is more than a nation.

People this is a nation living in the area of domination of its national culture (or culturally close peoples that have not formed into a nation), plus national diasporas, i.e. carriers of the corresponding national culture living in areas dominated by other national cultures. At the same time, diasporas may lose their linguistic commonality with the population of the area of dominance of their national culture, while retaining cultural identity with them in other aspects.

But history knows more generalities than national ones. If the same meaning of life is the ideal of different peoples with linguistic and cultural originality, and they somehow work to ensure that these ideals are put into practice, then there is a community of peoples of a supranational order. This is a civilizational community. It informally unites many peoples, even if their ideals have not yet become a reality in life. Let's repeat it again: "The measure of a people is not what it is, but what it considers beautiful and true"(F.M. Dostoevsky), i.e. essence of the people - its ideals.

With this view, the foreseeable history of mankind is the history of regional civilizations, each of which is characterized by certain life ideals that distinguish it from other regional civilizations. The West (Europe outside the borders of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine; North America, Australia) is a set of nation-states belonging to one of the regional civilizations of the planet. Russia-Rus is another regional civilization of many nations, living in a common state for them all. According to the 2002 census, about 85% of Russians identified themselves as Russians, and the Russian language in this regional civilization is one of its backbone factors.

The latter has been reflected in the language itself since ancient times. The word "Russian" in ancient texts is in most cases the definition of the land (Russian land), and not the people living on this land. As an ethnonym, it began to be used only in the last few centuries. And grammatically, it is an adjective, which distinguishes it from other ethnonyms, which, without exception, in Russian are nouns. Those. the word "Russian" characterizes not a national community, but a civilizational one. And therefore it is organically applicable to the Slavs, and to the Tatars, and to the Georgians, and to the Kalmyks, and to representatives of other peoples of our regional civilization, as well as to many representatives of other regional civilizations who came to Russia. We distinguish between our nationalities while we remain within Russia, but as soon as we go abroad, then for foreigners we are all Russians; even Ukrainians and Belarusians living in separate states after the collapse of the USSR have not ceased to be part of the Russian civilizational multinational community and are perceived outside the territory of the USSR as Russians.

Accordingly, in terms of the development of supranational public institutions, civilization-the West lags behind civilization-Russia by 400 years, since the creation of the European Union, which marked the beginning of the formation of a common supranational statehood with a unified credit and financial system and legislation, with a common system of educational and other standards, etc. , this is a repetition of what was started in Russia back in the days of Ivan the Terrible.

And because of this objective historical civilizational difference, philosophy (and above all, political philosophy), born on the ideals and life experience of Western nation-states, is inevitably doomed to mistakes when the recipes generated by it are tried to be applied to identifying and resolving problems in Russia. An example of this is the attempt to build socialism on the ideological basis of "ghostism". An example of this is the liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia.

And from the difference in the meaning of life of the regional civilizations of the West and Russia, the well-known words of F.I. Tyutchev, a poet-philosopher, a diplomat, who received an education of a pan-European character (i.e. Western), and expressing the Russian spirit through feelings and unconscious levels of the psyche, which is characterized by ideas that are not always expressible in the terminology of Western science: “One cannot understand Russia with the mind, / One cannot measure it with a common yardstick, / She has become special-/ One can only believe in Russia.” For the same reason, the overwhelming majority of assessments of Russia and its prospects by the West (as well as by the East) are absurd, since they come from other civilizational ideals elevated to the rank of an uncontested absolute.

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