Intro­duc­tion: Marx­ism and Nation­al­ism Revisited

In The Wretched of the Earth, from 1961, Frantz Fanon argued that

Marx­ist analy­ses should always be slightly stretched every time we have to con­front the colo­nial prob­lem.¹

This notion is an excel­lent start­ing point for reex­am­in­ing the post­colo­nial prob­lem­atic of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “provin­cial­iz­ing” of Europe. Within sub­al­tern, post­colo­nial, and decolo­nial stud­ies, there are two het­ero­ge­neous and com­pet­ing con­cep­tions of this provin­cial­iza­tion of Europe, whose entan­gle­ment remains a source of ambi­gu­i­ties. There is, on the one hand, a con­cep­tion that holds provin­cial­iza­tion to be syn­ony­mous with the par­tic­u­lar­iza­tion, and thus rel­a­tiviza­tion, of “Eurocentric-European thought,” and Marx­ist thought in par­tic­u­lar. There is, on the other hand, an under­stand­ing of provin­cial­iza­tion as a stretch­ing that under­lines the need for an exten­sion and dis­place­ment of the bor­ders of the­ory beyond Europe, as a con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity of an authen­tic uni­ver­sal­iza­tion. The oppo­nents of post­colo­nial cri­tique have until now almost exclu­sively seemed to resist the first of these two forms of provin­cial­iza­tion, rel­a­tiviza­tion, in that they really per­ceived it to be a break with anti-colonial thought and strug­gles for emancipation. But they seemed to be a bit less atten­tive to the sec­ond form–stretch­ing or exten­sion–where they would have seen that this indeed draws on deep roots in anti-colonial thought, and anti-colonial Marx­ism in particular.

There are many ways to retrace this geneal­ogy, that is, to elu­ci­date the con­ti­nu­ities as well as the rup­tures that are foun­da­tional to the historical-epistemological tran­si­tion and divi­sion from anti-colonialism to post­colo­nial cri­tique. I look to con­sider here the prob­lem of the nation­al­iza­tion of Marx­ism. Usu­ally, this is under­stood as a sim­ple ques­tion of the “adap­ta­tion of Marx­ism to sin­gu­lar con­di­tions”; this does not account for the com­plex­ity of the way in which, as Gram­sci and C.L.R. James have shown, such a nation­al­iza­tion engages in a process of the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal trans­la­tions. The most famous exam­ple remains the “sini­fi­ca­tion” of Marx­ism led by Mao Zedong. As Arif Dir­lik writes, in what is oth­er­wise an unre­lent­ing cri­tique of post­colo­nial stud­ies: “One of Mao’s great­est strengths as a leader was his abil­ity to trans­late Marx­ist con­cepts into a Chi­nese idiom”; in other words, he artic­u­lated a “ver­nac­u­lar­iza­tion of Marx­ism.”² Here, one can already see that the process of the nation­al­iza­tion of Marx­ism is not reducible to Stalin’s for­mula of “national in form, social­ist in con­tent.”³

I am inter­ested in an expe­ri­ence that is less well-known, that of “Mus­lim national com­mu­nism” as it was devel­oped in Soviet Rus­sia, then in the USSR, from 1917 to the end of the 1920s. It seems impor­tant to shed light on this expe­ri­ence for at least three reasons:

1. First, as the name indi­cates, Mus­lim com­mu­nism raises the ques­tion – more rel­e­vant than ever – of the rela­tions between, on the one hand, eman­ci­pa­tory move­ments with “white ori­gins” (as in the Soviet exam­ple) and, on the other hand, Islam and the groups that inte­grate it in mul­ti­ple ways into their own polit­i­cal claims.
2. Sec­ond, one is con­fronted with an anti-imperialist eman­ci­pa­tory move­ment that devel­oped in con­cert with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary process in the very heart of the (Russ­ian) empire, a his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion whose most famous prece­dent is the con­nec­tion between the French and Hait­ian Rev­o­lu­tions at the tran­si­tion of the 18th to the 19th century.
3. The third rea­son con­cerns a “colo­nial rev­o­lu­tion” that unfolds from within the ter­ri­to­r­ial bor­ders of the “metro­pole,” its con­fines. But it is not a mat­ter of an excep­tion so much as a limit-situation that dis­closes the fact that, in a global impe­ri­al­ist con­text, extra-European nation­al­ism never forms an “out­side” to empire; rather, it is its per­ma­nent limit. To think the nation­al­iza­tion of Marx­ism, and more specif­i­cally, of Bol­she­vism, as the provin­cial­iza­tion of Europe, means to there­fore not to imag­ine an rad­i­cal alter­ity opposed to Marxist-Leninism, and could not alter or rel­a­tivize the lat­ter; it is to con­cep­tu­al­ize the the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal mar­gins of Bol­she­vism–itself the the prod­uct of a prior trans­la­tion of Marx­ism into Rus­sia–or in other words, to stretch it. This entails as well the elu­ci­da­tion of the modes through which Bol­she­vism was rethought from the mar­gins of the empire.

Not hav­ing any pre­ten­sions of giv­ing an overview of all of Mus­lim national com­mu­nism, I am inter­ested here in some­one who remains its major fig­ure, the Tar­tar Bol­she­vik intel­lec­tual and mil­i­tant Mir­said Sultan-Galiev, whose first arrest was remarked upon by Trot­sky in 1923, when he cited Kamenev’s words:

Do you remem­ber the arrest of Sultan-Galiev? […] This was the first arrest of a promi­nent Party mem­ber made upon the ini­tia­tive of Stalin […] That was Stalin’s first taste of blood.⁴

But let’s take things up from the begin­ning.⁵

Sultan-Galiev and the Devel­op­ment of Mus­lim National Communism

Sultan-Galiev was born in Bashkiria in 1892 into a poor fam­ily. In 1907, he enters the teacher-training school of Kazan, which is also a meet­ing place of nation­al­ist and rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas. Over the sub­se­quent years, he engages exten­sively in jour­nal­ism and joins the Mus­lim nation­al­ist move­ment. Few months after the Feb­ru­ary Rev­o­lu­tion, he attends the All-Muslim Con­fer­ence in Moscow and is elected Sec­re­tary of the All-Russia Mus­lim Coun­cil. He joins the Bol­she­vik Party in June 1917. In Octo­ber, he takes part in the Kazan mil­i­tary rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mit­tee and is des­ig­nated head of the Mus­lim Mil­i­tary Col­lege, among other respon­si­bil­i­ties. Then begins a period of active col­lab­o­ra­tion with Stalin in the People’s Com­mis­sariat of Nation­al­i­ties. Three pri­mary strate­gic ori­en­ta­tions or direc­tions emerge from Sultan-Galiev’s work dur­ing these years:

1. The first one con­cerns the for­ma­tion of a Mus­lim Red Army or, as he puts it, an “Ori­en­tal Pro­le­tar­ian Red Army.”⁶ As argued by Ben­nigsen and Quelque­jay, Sultan-Galiev, years before Mao, con­ceives of such an army as “a gen­uine orga­nized, hier­ar­chi­cal and highly politi­cized ‘social class’, capa­ble of replac­ing the miss­ing indige­nous pro­le­tariat as the dri­ving rev­o­lu­tion­ary force.”⁷
2. The sec­ond strate­gic ori­en­ta­tion con­sists in the devel­op­ment of a Russ­ian Mus­lims’ Com­mu­nist Party to be able to pre­serve the auton­omy of the Mus­lim rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment, which would be jeop­ar­dized if it was incor­po­rated in orga­ni­za­tions led by Rus­sians, all the more so given the long tra­di­tion of Russ­ian chauvinism.
3. The third ori­en­ta­tion, whose roots go far deeper than the Soviet Rev­o­lu­tion, strives for the cre­ation of a large Tatar-Bashkir Repub­lic within the bound­aries of Soviet Russia.

Dur­ing the same period, Sultan-Galiev also lays the the­o­ret­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tions of Mus­lim com­mu­nism, which can also be syn­the­sized into three main points:

1. First, the rela­tions between social classes and, relat­edly, between social rev­o­lu­tion and national rev­o­lu­tion. Sultan-Galiev insists on the homo­gene­ity of the Mus­lim social struc­ture and the absence of a Tatar pro­le­tariat. He argues that dur­ing the first stages of the rev­o­lu­tion the lead­er­ship of the move­ment should be assumed by rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies of a petty bour­geois back­ground. By recast­ing Lenin’s oppo­si­tion between oppress­ing and oppressed nations, he calls for a “revenge of the oppressed over the oppres­sors,” and declares that “all the col­o­nized Mus­lim peo­ples are pro­le­tar­ian peo­ples.”⁸
2. The sec­ond point refers to the rela­tions between the social­ist rev­o­lu­tion and Islam. Sultan-Galiev  argues that, “like all the other reli­gions in the world,” Islam “is doomed to dis­ap­pear.”⁹ But he also says that “among the ‘great reli­gions’ of the world, [it] is the youngest, thus the most endur­ing and strongest in terms of the influ­ence it exerts.” He asserts that Islamic law con­tains some “pos­i­tive” pre­scrip­tions such as the “manda­tory nature of education…the oblig­a­tion to work and trade,” and “the absence of pri­vate prop­erty rights to lands, waters and forests.” In addi­tion, Islam’s sin­gu­lar­ity relies on the fact that “dur­ing the last cen­tury, the whole Mus­lim world has been exploited by West­ern Europe’s impe­ri­al­ism.” Islam was and is still “an oppressed reli­gion forced to be on the defen­sive.”¹⁰ Such a per­ma­nent oppres­sion is the source of a deep “feel­ing of sol­i­dar­ity” among Mus­lims as well as of a pow­er­ful desire for eman­ci­pa­tion. Accord­ing to Sultan-Galiev, Com­mu­nists should not strive to elim­i­nate Islam, but rather work at its de-spiritualization, its “Marxization.”
3. The third and last point con­cerns the expor­ta­tion of the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion or, in Sultan-Galiev’s terms, the trans­porta­tion of the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary energy” beyond the bor­ders of Rus­sia. Rev­o­lu­tion, he says, “must expand and become deeper, both in its inter­nal con­tent and its exter­nal man­i­fes­ta­tions.”¹¹ But the ques­tion is: in which direc­tion? Like other non-European Marx­ists, such as M.N Roy from India, Sultan-Galiev rec­om­mends to reverse the order of rev­o­lu­tion­ary pri­or­i­ties and to give the pri­macy to the rev­o­lu­tion in the East. Not only isn’t this lat­ter con­di­tioned by the prior suc­cess of the rev­o­lu­tion in the West, it is likely to over­come the decrease of rev­o­lu­tion­ary energy in West­ern Europe. For Sultan-Galiev, the anti-colonial rev­o­lu­tion in the East has to be con­ceived of as the pre­con­di­tion of Euro­pean and world rev­o­lu­tion, and not the reverse: “Deprived of the East, and cut off from India, Afghanistan, Per­sia and the other Asian and African colonies, West­ern impe­ri­al­ism will wither and die a nat­ural death.”¹² Sultan-Galiev’s tour-de-force con­sists in argu­ing that Russ­ian Mus­lim com­mu­nists are the best qual­i­fied to prop­a­gate the Soviet rev­o­lu­tion in the East. He calls for a decen­ter­ing of rev­o­lu­tion­ary ini­tia­tive and urges the Bol­she­vik lead­ers to estab­lish the mar­gins of Rus­sia as the cen­tral source of the rev­o­lu­tion in the East. In other words, for Sultan-Galiev, nation­al­ism at the periph­ery of the empires is noth­ing but the con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity of a needed renewal of inter­na­tion­al­ism on a global scale.

How­ever, the alliance between Mus­lim com­mu­nists and Soviet lead­ers, closely linked to the demands of the civil war, dete­ri­o­rated rapidly. After 1918, the Mus­lim Com­mu­nist Party is trans­formed into the Mus­lim sec­tion of the Bol­she­vik Party; the promise of the cre­ation of a Tartar-Bashkir repub­lic grad­u­ally evap­o­rated. Sultan-Galiev become a per­sona non grata and does not attend Con­gress of the Peo­ple of the East held in Baku in 1920, which he has helped to orga­nize. It is often said that this Con­gress rep­re­sented the high point of the “brief romance” between Soviet power and the anti-imperialist move­ments for eman­ci­pa­tion in the East; a moment, how­ever ephemeral, of hope, sym­bol­ized by Zinoviev’s call for a “holy war against Eng­lish and French cap­i­tal­ists.”¹³

How­ever, things at least went dif­fer­ently for the Mus­lim com­mu­nists in Rus­sia who saw their hopes to spread rev­o­lu­tion in the East destroyed by. on the one hand, the affir­ma­tion of the con­tem­po­rane­ity of the social rev­o­lu­tion and the national rev­o­lu­tion, whose lead­er­ship should not be incum­bent to the “rad­i­cal bour­geoisie, but the poor peas­antry”; and on the other hand, the empha­sis on “the absolute pri­macy of the pro­le­tar­ian rev­o­lu­tion in the West over the colo­nial rev­o­lu­tion.”¹⁴ For Sultan-Galiev, these rejec­tions did not so much sig­nal the vic­tory of one con­cep­tion of the global rev­o­lu­tion against another–his own–as the vic­tory of the Grand-Russian chau­vin­ism that he was always dis­trust­ful and fear­ful of, con­stantly fight­ing against its hold on the Russ­ian com­mu­nists whose colo­nial men­tal­i­ties and prac­tices were inher­ited from the Tsarist empire. These lat­ter were also crit­i­cized by Giorgi Safarov in a work pub­lished in 1921, The Colo­nial Rev­o­lu­tion.¹⁵

Con­spir­a­cies and Re-Articulations

Sultan-Galiev’s down­fall came in 1921. A few weeks after the XIIth Party Con­gress, he is arrested in Moscow and excluded from the Party. He is accused of “con­spir­acy” for hav­ing attempted to orga­nize a rev­o­lu­tion in the East through under­ground work with com­mu­nists and non-communists in Rus­sia and out­side Rus­sia. Chief among these were rebel nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions and lead­ers, such as Ahmed Zeki Vali­dov and the Bas­matchi move­ment in Cen­tral Asia.¹⁶ This con­dem­na­tion was the begin­ning of a vast cam­paign of repres­sion against those asso­ci­ated with “Sultan-Galievism.”

Between May 1923 until around the end of 1924, when his last hopes to be rein­stated into the Party are dashed, Sultan-Galiev finds him­self in a mar­ginal posi­tion, already more “inside” but not yet on the “out­side” of Soviet rev­o­lu­tion­ary affairs. It is in prison, where he would remains for a few more months, that he com­pletes an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal let­ter, addressed to Stalin and Trot­sky, and in which he elab­o­rates his the­ses on world revolution:

I thought that the lib­er­a­tion move­ment in the colonies and the semi-colonies and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment of the work­ers in the metro­pole were inti­mately and inex­tri­ca­bly linked, and that only a har­mo­nious com­bi­na­tion of them could guar­an­tee real suc­cess of the inter­na­tional social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.¹⁷

For Sultan-Galiev, the con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity of world rev­o­lu­tion is the com­bi­na­tion and com­po­si­tion, the cir­cu­la­tion and mutual inten­si­fi­ca­tion, of social rev­o­lu­tions in Europe and anti-colonial rev­o­lu­tions in the East—with both nev­er­the­less remain­ing autonomous from each other. Yet this is the sit­u­a­tion that, accord­ing to him, is pro­duced within the bor­ders of Rus­sia itself:

The suc­cess of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion is rightly explained by the har­mo­nious alliance between the inter­ests of the Russ­ian pro­le­tariat, on the one hand, and the move­ments for  national and class lib­er­a­tion on its colo­nial mar­gins, on the other. In this sense, Rus­sia shows all the traits of a great field of exper­i­men­ta­tion for the world rev­o­lu­tion.¹⁸

This is a strik­ingly orig­i­nal the­sis, and echoes what C.L.R. James will later argue in The Black Jacobins, a work in which (to cite Edward Said) the “events in France and in Haiti criss­cross and refer to one another like voices in a fugue.”¹⁹

In a let­ter to the Cen­tral Con­trol Com­mis­sion dated Sep­tem­ber 8, 1924, Sultan-Galiev requests to be rein­stated into the Party. He con­fesses his “crime” but argues that it was noth­ing but “a reac­tion, even if maybe a patho­log­i­cal one, to Great Power chau­vin­ism.” He also insists on the obsta­cles to rev­o­lu­tion­ary work among “back­ward nation­al­i­ties” in regions where com­mu­nist ideas were almost totally unknown before the Rev­o­lu­tion. Finally, he puts for­ward a truly orig­i­nal anti-historicist con­cep­tion of the rev­o­lu­tion in the East:

From my per­sonal work expe­ri­ence among back­ward nation­al­i­ties dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion, I con­cluded that the devel­op­ment of the rev­o­lu­tion on our East­ern mar­gins will cer­tainly hap­pen in a non-linear way, not even fol­low­ing curved lines, but fol­low­ing bro­ken lines.²⁰

In these mar­ginal spaces of the empire, rev­o­lu­tion­ary tem­po­ral­ity can only be a bro­ken tem­po­ral­ity, com­posed of leaps and rup­tures, peri­ods of latency and sud­den unrest. This is an under­stand­ing of rev­o­lu­tion that imme­di­ately calls to mind how C.L.R. James will later come to describe the his­tor­i­cal process in the Antilles, as con­sist­ing of a “series of unco­or­di­nated peri­ods of drift, punc­tu­ated by spurts, leaps and cat­a­stro­phes.”²¹

Death and Post­colo­nial Legacies

Unsur­pris­ingly, Sultan-Galiev’s request fails. He was never to be rein­stated in the Party. After­wards, he begins to adopt a wholly new strat­egy, break­ing com­pletely with Soviet power; thus from a cer­tain point of view, this is a “coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ary” strat­egy. From now on, the enemy is not only the bour­geoisies of impe­ri­al­ist coun­tries, but the “indus­trial soci­ety” as a whole, Soviet Union included. While this period of his life–between 1923 and 1928–remains largely unknown, we know he did author a pro­gram, writ­ten in Tar­tar, enti­tled Con­sid­er­a­tions on the Socio-political, Eco­nomic, and Cul­tural Bases of Devel­op­ment of the Turk­ish Peo­ple.²² It has since been lost but is cited in sev­eral Soviet stud­ies. Sultan’s-Galiev break with Soviet power and Bol­she­vism is expressed through his attempt to tear dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ism from its Euro­pean ori­gins, and his renam­ing it as “ener­getic mate­ri­al­ism,” draw­ing from East­ern sources, in par­tic­u­lar the Mon­gols. This epis­temic decen­ter­ing is only mean­ing­ful inso­far as it is part of an more gen­eral ide­o­log­i­cal and strate­gic rup­ture. Sultan-Galiev advances the idea of a “com­mon front of the oppressed” unit­ing “all classes of Mus­lim soci­ety, with the exclu­sion of only the big bour­geoisie and feu­dal landown­ers” and join­ing this front with the “tra­di­tional idea of the Ummah–com­mu­nity of believ­ers.”²³ In an even more rad­i­cal man­ner, he sub­sti­tutes the oppo­si­tion “under­de­vel­oped indus­try” for “exploited-capitalist” and declares that the enemy is not only the “bour­geoisie of the impe­ri­al­ist pow­ers, but all of indus­trial soci­ety,” includ­ing the Soviet Union.²⁴ Accord­ing to Sultan-Galiev, the “liq­ui­da­tion of the social­ist rev­o­lu­tion in Rus­sia” was thus beyond recov­ery, and was nec­es­sar­ily accom­pa­nied by the inten­si­fi­ca­tion of Great-Russian chau­vin­ism and, more gen­er­ally, the oppres­sion of Mus­lim peo­ples by the West. To be able to avoid this sit­u­a­tion, there is only one solu­tion: “the hege­mony of the under­de­vel­oped colo­nial world over the ‘Euro­pean pow­ers,’”²⁵ or, in his terms, “the dic­ta­tor­ship of the semi-colonial and colo­nial coun­tries over the indus­trial metrop­o­les.”²⁶ This is why it is nec­es­sary to work towards the cre­ation of a Colo­nial Inter­na­tional, which, he says, will be “com­mu­nist, but inde­pen­dent from the Third Inter­na­tional, and even opposed to it.” The heart of this Inter­na­tional will be an immense Turk­ish state within Rus­sia, the Repub­lic of Turan, led by a “Social­ist Party of the East.”²⁷

Sultan-Galiev devotes his clan­des­tine efforts to these tasks until his sec­ond arrest in 1928. He is sen­tenced to death on July 28th, 1930, and but then this sen­tence is com­muted to ten years in exile at the begin­ning of 1931. He is then freed in 1934, only to be arrested again in 1937, and sen­tenced to death in 1939. His is finally shot on the 28th of Jan­u­ary, 1940.²⁸ This marked the end of tremen­dous expe­ri­ence of co-genesis of a social­ist rev­o­lu­tion in the “metro­pole” and an anti-colonial rev­o­lu­tion at the mar­gins of the empire. But Sultan-Galiev also left behind a legacy that can be traced through a num­ber of rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who attempted to think the con­nec­tion between social­ism and the process of decol­o­niza­tion in the Mus­lim world and espe­cially Alge­ria; this is a legacy that demands care­ful study and recon­struc­tion today, not only in the colonies and for­mer colonies, but above all in the post­colo­nial ex-metropoles.²⁹

This arti­cle was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Péri­ode.

– Trans­lated by Patrick King