Sociologists view nationalism as an intellectually ambiguous and politically powerful movement that can be combined with a wide range of ideologies. This article, by comparing the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revolutionaries over the making of their national identities, challenges this assumption, arguing that the inclusiveness of nationalism varies across contexts. The variation does not stem from the intellectual character of nationalism. Nor can it be explained by structural ethnic homogeneity and macro geopolitical dynamics. Rather, the inclusiveness of nationalism depends on its social strength, which means (a) there is a penetrative national culture that socializes the potential radical elites into one nation; (b) the nationalist movement is institutionally open to broad social strata; (c) the anti-colonial revolution is widely viewed as geopolitically feasible. Where nationalism bears these social strengths, communists became part of nationalist movement. Otherwise, communists were more likely to frame themselves as anti-nationalist universalists to preserve empire.
Drawing on biographical data of the leading Bolshevik and CCP leaders as well as their respective domestic rivalries, this article demonstrates that nationalism was stronger in post-imperial China than in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Chinese nationalism was not only congruent with a homogeneous Han culture, but was also a progressive and amorphous movement open to broad social strata. Moreover, it was undergirded by a strengthening belief that the huge size of its territory and population enabled China to be free of all colonial rule by foreign powers. Such a strong nationalism, thus, came to be engaged in both the CCP and the Kuomintang of China (KMT). In comparison, the social bases of nationalism in Russia were much weaker. Many non-Russian groups were not socialized into their native culture and viewed nationalist separation as unnecessary. Although there was an intensifying Russian nationalism, it was confined within narrow social groups, mainly officers, state bureaucrats, and elite literati, while most lower-class Russians either loathed or could not participate in it. Anti-colonialism did not have appeal either. Peripheral nations tended to think of separation as unfeasible given the overwhelming superiority of the core in both military and economic realms.
This article makes three contributions. First, it challenges the widely accepted opinion that nationalism, for its intellectual amorphousness and organicity, is compatible with any well-designed ideology. Second, this article develops a comparative biographical method, which addresses the question of how a society’s macro structure (linguistic conditions, statehood, economy, geopolitics, etc.) interact with agency. By comparing communists with liberals, nationalists, and conservatives, this method shows how a strong nationalism can penetrate most social groups while a weak one can only reach some and block the rest. Third, compiling a huge biographical dataset that draws materials from original Russian and Chinese sources, this article bridges a gap of comparative historical sociology by analyzing Russia and China with the original source materials.
The article is made up of five parts. The first section reviews sociological discussion of the varied inclusiveness of nationalism. The second provides an outline of the theory of the social strength of nationalism. The third part is a note of method and data. The fourth section is the empirical core, elaborating how Russia and China differed along the three dimensions. The fifth part is a conclusion summarizing the major arguments, and discussing the generalizability to other communist states.
Potency of Nationalism
Sociologists have widely argued that nationalism is a potent trend that has fundamentally reshaped the modern world. “Potency” means transcendency––any movements, either liberal, socialist, or conservative, fascist, have to present themselves through nationalism. Nationalism can be either eastern or western, good or bad, civic or ethnic, liberal or authoritarian, but these are all nationalism [see Todorova Reference Subtelny2015].
There are multiple explanations for the potency of nationalism. Classic sociological accounts focus on the social bases that allow nationalism to dominate, such as the level of industrialization [Gellner Reference Gassenschmidt1983], mass literacy and communication [Anderson Reference Anderson1991], state capacity [Breuilly Reference Breuilly1994], and the world cultural template [Meyer et al. Reference Mann1997]. A more cultural explanation differently argues that nationalism has unique intellectual characters. Unlike liberalism and socialism, nationalism does not have complex theoretical systems. Nor has it produced great thinkers like Hobbes, Tocqueville, Marx, or Weber [Anderson Reference Anderson1991: 5]. Such intellectual vagueness, thus, enables nationalism to evade empirical testing and retain resilience. In this sense, it resembles religion, serving as the base of transition from one ideology to another [Kemp Reference Johnson1999: 209-211]. In terms of form, nationalism is an “operative ideology” [Malešević 2006: 93-94]. It does not offer normative blueprints, but rather engages in natural and transcendent components that individuals must use regardless of ideological positions, such as language, folk culture, or traditional symbols. This feature allows nationalism to succeed religion in becoming a secure ontological base in a secularized world [Haugaard Reference Graziosi, Pons and Smith2002: 126-127, 133-134].
These theses, either social or intellectual, are complicated when nationalism encounters communism. While, intellectually, communism was designed to counter nationalism, politically (unlike anarchism and cosmopolitanism), it achieved state power over a vast territory of the earth, across which its compatibility with nationalism varied greatly. These distinctions make communism a valid indicator in testing the inclusiveness of nationalism.
Scholars of nationalism have noted that the relationship between nationalism and communism varies. In some contexts, nationalism remained as the master frame, with communism included as an organizational model for national economic development [Szporluk Reference Sohrabi1991]. Nationalists have also borrowed the class language of communism to access and mobilize the masses, as illustrated by many anti-colonial movements [Katznelson Reference Jiang1986: 65; Lipset Reference Liao1972: 77]. Given the conceptual ambiguity of nation, an inclusive nationality can also be cultivated in the name of the common class interests of multiple ethnic groups [Liu Reference Lipset2014: 122-125]. However, in other contexts, nationalism came to be subordinate to communism. In these situations, the communist movements and states tactically tap nationalist sentiment but, in principle, position it in secondary status. Although territory may be demarcated alongside national lines, the real ruling apparatus is centralized, never allowing any national fragmentation [Connor Reference Connor1984: 534-545]. Brutal repression is used against nationalism, both among majority and minority groups [Dunlop Reference Dunlop1985; Graziosi Reference Goriachev2017; Martin Reference Malešević2001: 456, 478, 469].
This disparity raises questions about most sociological explanations. The existence of variation shows that the intellectual character of nationalism does not guarantee inclusiveness or, to put it more precisely, the intellectual character needs some social preconditions to function. Nor do most classic social explanations, which highlight modernity, fit the communist world—a somewhat homogeneous domain characterized by common underdevelopment.
The only explanations that seem to hold with the internal variation within the communist world are multiethnicity, institution, and geopolitics. There are accounts that in multiethnic regions nationalism is weaker and more likely to be subordinate to class universalism [Gellner Reference Gatagova, Kosheleva and Pogovaia1997: 56-58; Riga Reference Qiang and Li2008 and Reference Quinn-Judge, Naimark, Pons and Quinn-Judge2012; Seton-Watson Reference Riga1964: 3-12, 25-28]. In terms of institution, it is argued that nation-states that exclude significant ethnic groups are mostly likely to suffer civil wars [Wimmer Reference Voroshilov2013 and Reference Wan2018]. There are also theses that geopolitical conflicts tend to intensify nationalism by delineating out-groups [Hall and Malešević Reference Granat2013; Hutchinson Reference Haupt and Marie2017: 50; Tilly Reference Stanciu1994]. These theories are relevant to three significant variations within the communist world: revolution spreading from ethnically heterogenous regions to homogeneous ones, from dynastic empires to post-dynastic polities, and from a former imperialist center to colonial societies.
Yet, these accounts are also deficient in that they do not explain why, within the same society, certain groups are more nationalistic than others, why the nationalist movement of one society might be more inclusive than another, and why the same groups may become more nationalistic or less nationalistic overtime. They thus cannot explain why ethnic heterogeneity does not propel political groups to bear more aggressive assimilative positions, why nationalism can also exclude ethnic natives, and why geopolitical threats frighten people to abandon nationalist resistance. To bridge these gaps, one must move beyond structure and diffused cultural patterns to consider agency. An agency-based perspective is entailed.
Case Selection, Method, and Data
The Bolshevik and Chinese communist revolutions are a suitable pair of cases to compare the inclusiveness of nationalism. Both occurred in late-developing societies with limited industrialization, mass education, and state capacity [Bianco 2018: 3-7]. Both revolutions carried Marxist ideology. Both started in the aftermath of dynastic empires when nationalism was growing as part of a worldwide trend—in Russia the Russian Whites/Monarchist as well as non-Russian separatist ones, while in China the anti-Qing revolution of 1911 and its extension in the 1910s-1920s, followed by the war with Japan (1931-1945). However, the relationship of the two parties to nationalism was rather different. The Bolshevik aspired to establish a socialist empire wherein nations’ rights were recognized but restrained. This “empire of nations” negated core Russian nationalism and did not carry an inclusive Greater Russian (Rossiiskii) connotation. Nor were its non-Russian republics entitled to real self-governance. By contrast, the CCP started with and adhered to Chinese nationalism. It sought to establish a Chinese socialist nation-state and viewed communist ideology as an instrument to hasten this process. With an intense identity with Chinese nationalism, it came to interpret all ethnic groups as part of an inclusive “Chinese Nation” [Brudny Reference Brudny1998: 7; Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald, Unger and Barmé1996; Johnson Reference Hutchinson1962; Martin Reference Malešević2001; Riga Reference Quinn-Judge, Naimark, Pons and Quinn-Judge2012; Slezkine Reference Shelokhaev1994: 434-435; Wright Reference Wang1961]. In other words, nationalism caged the CCP but failed to include the Bolshevik.
As demonstrated in the preceding section, macro-level structure and diffused cultural patterns cannot explain the diversity of political groups within a society, demonstrating the differentiated levels of coverage and penetration of nationalism. Therefore, this analysis breaks down “society” into competing groups to see how each could or could not resist nationalism. Explanations are drawn from the individual information of group members which, in aggregation with the information of other groups, commonly reflect the general differences of the two polities. Put briefly, viewing leftism as the most likely resistant to nationalism, this article compares two societies to see in each how far nationalist movement can extend toward the left-end of a society’s ideological spectrum.
This article undertakes an agency-based approach by using biographical analysis for two reasons. First, ideology was largely a design of the leading elites of revolutionary movements, rather than based on the vote or consent of the rank-and-file. Second, so far as the Bolshevik and the CCP cases are concerned, biographical data for the leading elites are quite complete, allowing for numerical testing and deep interpretative analysis.
Alongside the article’s conceptualization of nationalism—cultural socialization, institutional participation, and geopolitical thinking of revolution—this analysis looks into very specific aspects of the communists’ biographies: their exposure to national cultures and competing ideological options, their confrontation with or engagement in nationalist movements, and their estimations and analyses of the prospect of ongoing nationalist revolutions. Such analysis, thus, entails a comprehensive investigation, encompassing not only individuals’ static social backgrounds such as ethnicity, family, and education, but also their dynamic experiences, including travel, radical writings, military conscription, war command, and mobilization toward the masses. In this sense, the article is not a traditional prosopography that merely aggregates demographical information.
This article narrows its focus to the leading communist elites, the level of central committee members of 1917-1923 and 1945-1956. In total, 94 Bolsheviks and 77 CCP leadersFootnote 1 are analyzed, the real makers of revolutions and socialist states. The biographical analysis includes two parts. Where data is detailed, analysis focuses on detailed internal working. This analysis offers causal mechanisms, for example, weak attachment to native language and culture yields vulnerability to the socialist idea. Where data is brief, biographical information is aggregated to test the mechanisms seen in certain individuals. Such a combination of interpretative and numerical description helps overcome the brevity of biographical information on certain communists to access “common characteristics of a historic group” [Verboven, Carlier and Dumolyn Reference Tang2007: 39-41].
In terms of non-communist elites, this article compares the contemporaries to communist power seizure, including nationalists, rightists, liberals, and conservatives for their central committee members or equivalents. Such aggregation has several methodological functions. First, the data of non-communist elites, especially that reflecting their ideas, help correct the collective bias concealed in communists’ narratives. Second, aggregating individuals’ backgrounds helps us understand why the communists saw Marxism as a solution either to containing or cultivating nationalism.
Most data are drawn from primary sources, including memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, chronicles, correspondences, and anthologies, as well as archives. Secondary biographies such as dictionaries and encyclopedias are cited only when primary sources are unavailable. Yet, there is also a special note that secondary biographies are not less useful than primary ones. As archives in the Soviet Union and China are not widely open, the authors of officially edited biographies (usually writing teams) are often the only scholars who can access certain primary sources, and their works do contain many informative details lacking in available autobiographical works. Most materials are in original Russian and Chinese. Such a comparison of Russian and Chinese revolutions based on original materials has not yet been attempted by sociologists in this area, although there is fine research on both sides [Riga Reference Qiang and Li2008; Xu Reference Wright2013].
Finally, this article compares the Bolshevik and the CCP revolutions in a somewhat unsymmetrical manner. Although both empires were multiethnic, Russia was far more integrated than China. No major ethnic group existed that could be long left isolated to pursue its separate political agenda, including Transcaucasia and Central Asia. Very differently, the CCP revolution unfolded in a much more homogeneous political space. Once the Qing empire collapsed, peripheries entered de facto independence and remained so for nearly four decades, while China proper became an enclosed theatre until 1949. Therefore, my analysis of the CCP revolution focuses on its relationship with Chinese nationalism, while the Bolshevik part must consider all consisting nationalities.
The Bolshevik Revolution: Alienation from Nationalism
The Bolshevik movement precisely embodied its social setting—a modern empire where multiple ethnic groups with underdeveloped nationhood lived together. The 94 Bolshevik elites came from more than 14 different nationalities, with up to a half (46) being ethnically non-Russian, primarily Jews, Ukrainians, Baltics, and Transcaucasians [Goriachev Reference Gilberg2005]. Mainly students and industrial workers, this group had extensive experiences of imperial diversity. Nearly 39% were working or studying in St Petersburg or Moscow, while another 40% had similar lives at multiethnic cities like Kazan, Kiev, Kharkov, Vilno, and Tiflis (see Table A1). A few, such as Grigorii Zinov’ev, Lenin’s oldest disciple since 1903, grew up in small towns, but lived for a long time in the multiethnic Russian émigré communities of Western Europe [Granat Reference Gleijeses and Naimark1989: 143-144].
Table A1– Bolshevik travel
Sources: Coding from biographical data.
Note: This table considers the largest city in which the Bolsheviks had been working or studying before his or her conversion to socialism. Given that many had stayed in more than one, I consider only the first city he or she visited.
Cultural Exclusion
Being a modern empire, Tsarist Russia actively sought to integrate the territories it had conquered. The policy of Russification encountered resistance in many regions, and was thus enforced in an inconsistent and inadequate manner. Among certain groupings, Russification did gain success in preventing non-Russians from being socialized into their own national cultures [see Wimmer Reference Wan2018: 113-155]. Still discriminated, these people aspired for a “good empire”, where ethnicity was defined as irrelevant. This consideration led them to affiliate with the universal socialist movement while, at the same time, view the nationalists of their own nations as a foe.
Ukraine was a major theatre here, wherein the Russification policy had blocked a large social group outside of the growth of Ukrainian nationalism. Unlike Austro-Hungary which ruled Western Ukraine with the strategy of “making Ukrainians”, in Eastern Ukraine the Tsarist state conducted a harsh policy of Russification [Miller Reference Mao2004: 10-11; 17-18]. St Petersburg banned nationalist associations and publications, but also forbade the use of Ukrainian language in education (the earliest Ukrainian elementary schools came into being only in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks had seized power) [Pauly Reference Montefiore2014: 66-67].
These policies successfully kept elite nationalist movements and mass social unrests isolated from one another. Before 1917, peasant rebellions and worker riots were frequent in Ukraine, but few carried nationalistic characters [Kuromiya Reference Kramarov1998: 65; Subtelny Reference Slezkine2000: 233]. Nationalist movement was confined to a narrow circle of literati with a gentry-priest background. In other words, only people who possessed cultural capital were capable of pursuing nationalism, while those from lower backgrounds simply assimilated into Russian culture.
The Ukrainian Bolsheviks came from the latter category: Grigorii Petrovskii had only two years of formal schooling. Both Dmitrii Lebed’ and Vlas Chubar’ completed technical schools (uchilishche). Matvei Muranov stopped at an even lower level [Granat: 491; Haupt and Marie Reference Grechko1974: 172; Kol’iak Reference Kirilina1981: 5-6]. As to those with longer periods of schooling, they turned to Bolshevism much earlier. Nikolai Krestinskii did possess a bachelor’s degree, but he grew up in a Russified family with a tradition of admiring Russian revolutionary heroes [Granat: 462]. Similarly, Dmitrii Manuil’skii turned to socialism at the gymnasium stage [Granat: 793].
For these individuals, Russification was easy and natural. As Petrovskii’s case showed, a laboring migration to industrial centers easily transformed a Ukrainian into a Russian [Kliuchnik and Zav’ialov Reference Katznelson, Katznelson and Zolberg1970: 4-5]. In terms of reading, Ukrainian cultural materials, such as Shevchenko’s collections, were hard to find. Even when available, people who lacked cultural sophistication were not able to recognize its finesse, unless they were fortunate enough to encounter advanced instructors [Kaganovich Reference Iaroslavskii1996: 27; 46-47]. The only exception was Nikolai Skrypnik, who overtly proclaimed himself a national communist. Although he lacked a high level of formal education, Skrypnik had informal mentors: a knowledgeable veteran of the Polish uprising and a former Decembrist who generously opened up his private library [Granat: 668].
On the contrary, the Russification policy had much more limited effect on well-educated people. Out of the 19 leading Ukrainian rightwing separatist leaders of the 1917-1918 periods, at least 14 obtained bachelors or higher levels of degrees. Two were graduates of advanced seminaries. Others, despite a lower education, were either literati or cultural activistsFootnote 2. The intellectual background of the nationalists was also different. The leading ideologue, Dmytro Dontsov, was educated in many countries. The icon of Ukrainian literature, Oleha Teliha, was the daughter of a nationalistic-minded Tsarist minister who rushed back to Ukraine soon after the fall of the empire [Shkandrij Reference Sanetō2015: 80-82, 176-177].
The incompleteness of Russification manifested in a different way in Latvia, where the unevenness of linguistic Russification unfolded not across strata but over generations. Unlike Ukraine, Latvia had been given free rein to complete an early wave of cultural nation-building. Local intellectuals’ efforts to modernize and spread the Latvian language began in the 1840s and bore initial fruit in the 1870s [Raun and Plakans Reference Podgornyi1990: 134; Zake 2007: 313-318]. In the 1880s, however, this process was terminated, replaced by the state-led linguistic Russification, which penetrated the elementary education system in the 1890s [Plakans Reference Pesic1981: 208-209; 245-246].
The seven Latvian Bolsheviks belonged to the younger generation. Six (Ian Berzin, Karl Danishevskii, Ivan Lepse, Ian Rudzutak, Ivar Smilga, and Ivan Tuntul) were born around 1887 [Goriachev Reference Gilberg2005], received elementary education in the 1890s, and were socialized into Russian. The sole exception was Petr Stuchka, born in 1865. His pre-university experiences were unclear [Granat: 677], but he migrated at an early age to St Petersburg, where he developed a firm friendship with Lenin.
On the contrary, the leaders who led the Latvian separation during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) came from an older generation. Insofar as the generals, ministers and major party activists of the 1918 Republic are concerned, the majority was born prior to 1880. As in the Ukrainian case, many were cultural professionals such as writers, journalists and historiansFootnote 3. Although most spoke Russian, their Latvian identities had been forged before their linguistic Russification.
Differently, the unevenness of Russification among the Jewish population was more of an outcome of their families’ self-selection. While many Jews sought to assimilate into Russian culture in exchange for security, jobs, and political rights, certain families stubbornly maintained their own religion and languages [Gassenschmidt 1995; Karlip 2013].
The Jewish nationalists in Tsarist Russia, from Bundists to leftist Zionists, came from the segment that actively resisted the encroachment of Russification. The leading socialist-Zionists, for example, had received a traditional education. Some studied in heder, special schools teaching Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish history. Others, usually sons of rabbis, came from families that professed Orthodox JudaismFootnote 4. There was an issue of stratification—such intellectual strands were then at the very moment of taking shape, and engagement in such a fashion thus entailed decent cultural capital.
The Jewish Bolsheviks, on the contrary, came from the families that failed to resist Russification. Very few of the 15 Jewish Bolsheviks were sons of intellectuals. The three exceptions were not assimilated to Jewish either. Seigei Gusev had a teacher-father but grew up with his worker-aunt [Granat: 398-399]. Radek’s parents, living in Austrian Western Ukraine, made every effort to Germanize their son. Emel’ian Iaroslavskii’s father was a feverish admirer of the Russian populist tradition [Fateev and Korolev Reference Fateev and Korolev1988: 15-16; Tuck Reference Szporluk1988: 5-7]. In some other cases, parents did have the will of maintaining Jewish traditions, but lacked the capacity. Lazar’ Kaganovich was first sent by his father to a Jewish school, but soon transferred to a Russian one, as the former’s quality proved poor [Kaganovich Reference Iaroslavskii1996: 38]. Moisei Uritskii’s mother, a busy merchant, wanted her son to maintain religiosity, but lacked the time to achieve this [Skriabin and Gavrilov Reference Shaumian1987: 6-7].
Institutional Exclusion
The infusion of nationalism with communism was precluded in the second place by the exclusiveness of the majority nationalist movement. In this situation, Russians, who spoke Russian well and were familiar with Russian folk culture, could not or did not want to be accepted into state-led Russian nationalism. That exclusion propelled these Russians to seek “rule not in the name of Russians”.
The Tsarist state, during its final two decades, became increasingly determined to create an “imperial ethnicity”. However, this move was conducted as a way of reverting to boost the icons of absolutist monarchy. Influenced by Slavophile thought, the last Tsar also attributed the empire’s decline to the diminishing of the Orthodox spirit [Freeze Reference Freeze1996; Lieven Reference Li2015].
Such a state-led nationalism affected limited segments of Russian society. It somewhat echoed cultural Russian nationalism, an intellectual fashion emerging among elite literati such as the Eurasianist thinkers, Silver-Age writers, and Neo-Slav scholars [Shlapentokh Reference Seton-Watson2007: 22-24; Tolz Reference Suny2015]. Another group of supporters, who were more overt, were the Russian rightist parties. They envisioned a Russian national state where the misery of lower-class Russians could be relieved through an increasing exploitation of non-Russians [Rawson Reference Porter1995]. A third stronghold of official Russian nationalism, as is well-known, was the officer corps.
The majority of the Russian population was excluded, including the Bolsheviks. The Russian Bolsheviks had a materialistic notion of Russia. They viewed the unity of Russia as necessary, in that the peripheries—Don, Baku, Turkestan, Siberia—bore natural resources, industrial bases, agricultural and fishing fields, which were vital to the proletariat regimes inside and outside of Russia [Bukharin and Preobrazhensky (Reference Bukharin and Preobrazhensky1922) 1966: 195; IMTsK Reference Huang and Jiang1960: 49]. The Bolsheviks also justified their pursuit of a unified Russia by asserting that the populations in these peripheries needed the “culturally modernized” Russia to render their resources usable [OGIZ 1944: 11].
However, the Bolsheviks loathed the cultural and institutional bases of Russian nationalism. They considered that the only role of cultural idioms was to allow abuse and oppression to function [Bukharin and Preobrazhensky Reference Bukharin and Preobrazhensky1966 [1922]: 193-194]. As argued by Lenin, the old Russian statehood, which the Bolsheviks had somewhat picked up, should be suspended so as not to contaminate the proletarian revolution [Fyson Reference Fyson1995: 194].
Such negative attitudes were more visible in these people’s artistic tastes. They were obsessed with the dissident Russian writers of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dmitrii Pisarev [Kirilina Reference Kaganovich2001: 16-17; Kramarov Reference Kirov1974: 5; Kubiak and Usova Reference Kliuchnik and Zav’ialov1982: 18; Kuibyshev Reference Kohut, Nebesio and Yukevich1988: 10-11; Levidova and Salita Reference Kuibyshev1969: 20; Loginov Reference Liu2005: 80-81, 90-91]. These authors commonly despised the Russian culture as politically reactionary and intellectually irrational. It is well-known that Vladimir Lenin was a fan of Chernyshevsky’s novelFootnote 5 [Lenin Reference Kubiak and Usova1971: 11-12; 51-54], while Nikolai Bukharin had been an admirer of Dmitrii Pisarev [Cohen Reference Cohen1973: 10-11] since his childhood, a writer who scorned that Russia’s soil could only breed “evil Asiatic despotism”.
The Bolsheviks’ resistance to Russian nationalism reflected their social origins. First of all, they had a generally low level of education, which prevented them from engaging in the then emerging intellectual fashions. While most leading elites of cultural Russian nationalism were professionals such as historians, philosophers, anthropologists, ethnographers, archeologists, and theologists, the Bolsheviks received relatively little education (see the second column of Table A2, I list the backgrounds of Kadets, to show the relative location of the Bolsheviks’ education).
Table A2– Education
Sources: The data of the Kadets was drawn from Bolobuev Reference Bolobuev1993 and Shelokhaev Reference Rychlík and Musil1996. The name list of the leading Kadets of the 1916-1918 was obtained from Pavlov Reference Motyl1994. The volume does not provide a complete name list, but specifies the names of attendees for each conference. I collected these names and found their biographies in Shelokhaev’s dictionary. The same method was used to collect data on the Russian rightists. The names of the most active leading elites can be seen in the document collection GASRF 1998.
The antipathy toward Tsarist monarchy was also a matter of generation. Russian society underwent a profound reconstruction of political value in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, when the massacre smashed the Tsar’s image of “little father”. Yet, the psychological impact varied across groups. The Russian Bolsheviks, then young, were more likely to accept the rapidly spreading anti-monarchist thought, in contrast to Russian rightists and constitutional liberals, of the “father” generation (see Table A3).
Table A3– Age
Sources: See the notes to Table A2.
Note: The total number of Russian Bolsheviks is 48 out of 94. Clear information regarding their year of birth is only available for 33 Russian rightist leaders.
Religiosity also prevented a large population from embracing state-led Russian nationalism. From Alexander III onwards, the Romanov House had been working on retrieving Orthodoxy as the basis for the unity of state [Wortman Reference Wang and Benton2006: 285-286], but this reversion went against the growing trend of rapid secularization among the working class and urban intellectuals. Many western works, such as Darwin and Buffon, had been translated into Russian. With the help of radical students committed to mobilization in the factories, these works were given an atheistic interpretation and taught to workers in Sunday Schools, Evening Schools, and other self-educational groups [Pipes Reference Persson1963]. Massive migration to cities driven by rapid industrialization (also see Table A1) also promoted secularization. To the young workers who had experienced material entertainment, religion was reminiscent of the rigid moral control they endured in their home villages [Lieven Reference Levidova and Salita1983: 13].
The Russian Bolsheviks were part of the iconoclastic population. Many were factory workers who were exposed to atheist agitation and overtly expressed their hatred for religious education and rituals [Frunze Reference Frunze1977: 25-26; Kliuchnik and Zav’ialov Reference Katznelson, Katznelson and Zolberg1970: 16; Kol’iak Reference Kirilina1981: 7]. The rapid expansion of linguistic Russification also created a sharp shortage of qualified teachers. The state had to lower its standard of selection, which allowed many radically-minded intellectuals to flow into the teaching corps [Eklof and Peterson Reference Eklof and Peterson2010]. Many young Bolsheviks started their secularization with these teachers. For example, Aleksei Badaev recalled that his chemistry teachers talked of Lavoisier’s political ideas, and a geography teacher digressed to Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England [Pochebut and Malkin Reference Petrescu1962: 12-14]. It was thus not surprising that most Russian Bolsheviks abandoned religious faith at the early age of middle school or elementary school, including Nikolai Bukharin, Evgenii Preobrazhensky, Aleksandr Tsiurupa, Kliment Voroshilov, and Aleksandr Shliapnikov. Their biographies contain rich examples of conflicts with clerks, skipping religious rituals, destroying Orthodox icons, and refusing to swear oath [Allen Reference Allen2015: 17-23; Davidov Reference Davidov1961: 8; Day, Gorinov and Preobrazhenskii Reference Day, Gorinov and Preobrazhenskii2014: 31; Granat: 26, 399, 437; Voroshilov Reference Tilly1968: 69-74].
The reassertion of religion also aroused a backlash among the female socialists. Unlike their male comrades, the most prominent Bolshevik women, such as Aleksandra Kollontai, Varvara Iakovleva, and Elena Stasova, came from wealthier families. The intense exposure to western culture endowed these women with a modern feminist mindset, which made them less tolerant of the patriarchal thought enshrined in the religious doctrines [Clements Reference Clements1997: 22-23; Granat: 784-85; Levidova and Salita Reference Kuibyshev1969: 10-20; Porter Reference Pipes2013].
In addition to political and cultural alienation, the most institutionalized exclusion was to be found in the realm of the military. The Tsarist army intensified its monarchist and theological teaching after the war with Japan [Wright Reference Wang2005]. Military academies espoused political education in parallel to professional teaching and drilling. Nonetheless, this did not reach the socialists. Only 5 of the 46 Russian Bolsheviks had served in the army, mostly as soldiers, including Andrei Andreev, Grigorii Eudokimov, Daniil Sulimov, and Nikolai Uglanov [Andreev Reference Andreev1985: 280; Granat: 727; Grechko 1976 12: 592; 25: 226]. The sole exception was Valerian Kuibyshev, founder of the Soviet Army’s commissar system, who previously studied in the military corps, but left the army after graduation [Kuibyshev Reference Kohut, Nebesio and Yukevich1988: 11-13].
A few factors may explain the absence of the Bolsheviks in the Tsarist military. Since the Russo-Turkish War, a middle-school education or equivalent was required for admission to military academies [Persson 2010: 28-43]. This excluded many Bolsheviks who, as shown above, were poorly educated. Ethnicity also had an impact here. After the Russo-Japanese War, anti-Semitic discrimination became aggressive [Lohr Reference Liu2003: 17-23]. “Jewish” was now defined in racial rather than ethnic terms, which blocked the way of assimilation through religious conversion [Petrovskiĭ;-Shtern 2009: 242-248]. Jews were forbidden to enter certain military schools, and they were also deterred by escalated physical abuse in the barracks [Haupt and Marie Reference Grechko1974: 259]. In addition, the intensifying instillation of religious-loyalism excluded many latent atheist-socialists. Escaping conscription [Granat: 785] and refusing to swear oath [Allen Reference Allen2015: 33-34; Podgornyi Reference Petrovskiĭ-Shtern1966: 10] was not uncommon among the Bolsheviks. This anti-military culture was so salient that failing to pass the conscription test was celebrated as a huge victory.
Finally, a brief comparison of the Bolsheviks’, Kadets’, and rightists’ social origins shows that Russian official nationalism was confined within a narrow social group that consisted of aged, non-professional people from the upper level of hereditary aristocracy (see Table A4). The Kadets were mainly middle-class, professionals, and intellectuals, pursuing a transnational federation within which all nationalities possessed equal status. This party was vigilant of Russian “patriotism” on the ground and was concerned that a geopolitical crisis would distract society from the pathway of democratization. To demonstrate its transnational position, the Kadets even attempted to avoid using “Russia” in its most inclusive form (Rossiia) (GARF 2000: 62]. For the Bolsheviks, their collectively low social origins account for their affinity to the ideology of warfare as a way of reorganizing the empire not in the name of Russian.
Table A4– Class backgrounds
Note: A fully convincing comparison should be drawn to the liberals in Transcaucasian and Polish-Lithuanian regions, but the biographical data of the Kadets rarely contains information regarding ethnicity. Clear information regarding class background is available for only 43 of the 68 Kadets .
Weak Legitimacy
A third factor unfavorable to nationalism was the technical integration of the Tsarist Empire. This was a landed empire, which allowed the core to rapidly deliver military forces to the peripheries in order to repress separatist movements. It was also believed that peripheries, due to their late-development, depended on the core for modernization, through a common market and homogeneous linguistic system. There was a wide understanding among non-Russian intellectuals that separation from Russia would propel their home nations back to their “medieval, Asiatic, and superstitious” past.
A major case in point here was Transcaucasia. Unlike in Baltic and Eastern Ukraine, nationalism in this area had a solid cultural base. Transcaucasian nationalism turned against Russia after the 1860s. The emancipation of 1861 led to the massive bankruptcy of Georgian nobles, leading the upper and lower classes to coalesce into a united Georgian national movement. In Armenia, Russia’s coerced revision of religious doctrines and subsequent confiscation of the Orthodox Church aroused a fierce nationalist surge [Suny Reference Snyder and Lieven1993: 62-63]. Armed insurrections followed in reaction. However, these rebellions were immediately repressed. The repression period following the 1905 Revolution further demoralized Transcaucasian separatism. Seeing no chance of success, even the most radical nationalist “Dashnaktsutiun” removed the quest for independence from its program. The Iranian and Turkish Revolution of 1908 offered new lessons: the resistance of small nations against despotism had to be based on transnational cooperation, especially cooperation with the majority nations [Minassian Reference Martin1996: 184-185].
The nine Transcaucasian Bolsheviks were self-conscious nationalists. Anastas Mikoyan secretly joined the Tsarist army at the outset of the Great War, believing that he was defending the fatherland against the Ottomans [Mikoyan and Mikoyan Reference Mao1988: 37-38]. Joseph Stalin, a poetry enthusiast, often voiced national nostalgia and homesickness in his works [Stalin 2013: 17-29]. He also demonstrated against his seminary teachers, because the latter forbade students to write in Georgian and even likened Georgians to dogs [Montefiore Reference Mikoyan and Mikoyan2007: 46]. Grigorii Ordzhonikidze grew up reading the Georgian patriotic literature that glorified the ancient slave heroes who rebelled against alien rulers [Ordzhonikidze Reference Minoru and Si-Yun1967: 11]. When he studied at the St Petersburg Military Medical Academy, Ivan Orakhelashevili led protests against the army’s rigid schedule and physical abuse against minorities [Hoover 1986: 11]. Aleksandr Miasnikov, albeit with few details, admitted his great affection for Armenian nationalism [Granat: 558]. Safarov may have inherited nationalism from his Polish mother who harbored Russophobe sentiment [Goriachev Reference Gilberg2005: 358].
Nevertheless, Transcaucasian Bolsheviks questioned separation. Stepan Shaumian was an Armenian nationalist but shifted to Bolshevism while he was studying in a Russian-language university [Granat: 765]. Shaumian argued that the nationalism of small nations had no future because brutal cultural repression encouraged harsh self-censorship on part of the Armenian writers. As such, they were impelled to evade any public topics and focus on apolitical romance. He deemed that such writings, although in national languages and widely spread, would be useless in forging mass nationalist consciousness [Shaumian Reference Roszkowski and Kofman1978:17-28].
Shaumian’s opinion was echoed by Nariman Narimanov, the founder of the first modern Azerbaijan nationalist party. Before October 1917, Narimanov was an active cultural worker engaged in a wide range of occupations, including composing dramas, translating literature, founding libraries, managing theatres and teaching at elementary schools. He believed that continuous cultural activities would create an enlightened Azerbaijan nation immune to Islamic “superstitions”. Yet, year after year his efforts met with ruthless repression, leading him to conclude that cultural work within a single nation could not continue. Narimanov was also concerned that separation from Russia would drive Azerbaijan toward Islam which, in his mind, was opposed to modernization [Akhmedov Reference Akhmedov1988: 22-24, 42-49,62-69, 75-77].
A similar idea can be found in Stalin’s debate with Lenin. In a letter, he suggested that the autonomy that had been given to Transcaucasia should be abolished on the grounds that, due to the region’s general underdevelopment, local Transcaucasian staff lacked the expertise needed to manage the economy and safeguard its borders. Stalin also claimed that the nationalist sentiment of local cadres would create difficulties for Russian experts [Gatagova, Kosheleva and Pogovaia 2005: 61-62].
Nationalism was also contained in Poland. The Russophobia that had been active for centuries saw its moderation in the first half of the 1800s. The failure of the 1831 uprising convinced many nationalists that armed insurrection had no future. Deterred by Russia’s overwhelming military power, most Polish elites lapsed into pessimism, arguing that Russia should not be openly challenged [Blejwas Reference Blejwas1984]. Pessimism further deepened after 1861, when the Poland Question became considered as being an internal Russian affair. Prussia and Austria, two other players in Poland’s partition, stood with Russia during the 1863 Uprising [Snyder Reference Shkandrij2006: 173-80], and became St Petersburg’s allies in the Great War. Neither France nor Britain were willing to offer substantial aid. In 1905, with no reliable friends in Europe, the desperate Polish patriot, Jozef Pilsudski, attempted to conspire with the remote Japanese [ibid.: 182].
Polish-Lithuanian Bolsheviks were nationalists by identity. Felix Dzerzhinskii, the prominent founder of the Soviet secret police, grew up in a noble Russophobe family. However, his education in the Russian language did not quell his Polish identity; rather, it further led him to join the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, a leading Polish nationalist organization. However, he eventually came to view the separatist program as unrealistic [Granat: 407-409], on the grounds that Polish nationalism would not only solicit an immediate state crackdown but would also arouse aversion among the Jewish and German populaces. According to Dzerzhinskii, Poland’s liberation could only be based on the replacement of the Tsardom by a federalist state, which would require an empire-wide revolution in the name of internationalism. Dzerzhinskii’s posture fit well with the experience of the other Polish-Lithuanian Bolshevik, Vincas Kapsukas, who was expelled from school for taking part in the Lithuanian nationalist movement. He then escaped to Switzerland, where he met socialists from other countries and became an internationalist [Granat: 545-546].
In sum, in Tsarist Russia, nationalism, either Russian or non-Russian, lacked social strength. Nationalism was influential among elites with access to cultural capital through family tradition, linguistic training, class inheritance, and military conscription. Beyond these narrow circles it remained weak. The Bolsheviks, due to experiences stemming from their ethnic roots, tended to restrain from nationalist movements and identities to varied extents: some Bolsheviks (Jews, Eastern Ukrainians, and Latvians) completely lost their cultural identities, whereas others (Transcaucasians and Poles) retained an intense attachment. Similarly, while Russian Bolsheviks sought to preserve their dominance in a more concealed manner, non-Russians were more likely to use socialism to found a less ethnopolitical state. Despite these internal variations, various groups of the Bolsheviks achieved a thin consensus of keeping nationalism at arm’s length, which distinguished them significantly from the CCP.
CCP: Caged into Nationalism
Unlike the Bolshevik revolution, the CCP movement had a better base to infuse with nationalism. It grew in a homogeneous ethnic space, China proper, where the population was mainly Han Chinese and ethnopolitics was not as central to politics as it was in Russia [Liu, X. 2004]. (It was only in the 1950s that the CCP fully entered into former imperial peripheries, defeated the KMT, and obtained Moscow’s support to easily disarm the tiny groups of non-Chinese nationalists in these regions.) Growing up in this environment, the CCP leadership was overwhelmingly Han Chinese. There was no practical need to interpret Marxism as a universal ideology to transcend nationality or ethnicity. Beyond this, it was through cultural education, political participation, and geopolitical dynamics that the CCP was incorporated into nationalism. The following three sections will demonstrate how these mechanisms captured both the CCP and the KMT, China’s the two major, shaping a broad Chinese nationalist movement in which all forces engaged.
Cultural Inclusion
Unlike Tsarist Russia, the core of the Chinese empire was a culturally well-established entity where the construction of a common language and psychology had been going on for millenniums. The common written script was first created and promoted in the 3rd century BC, which allowed elites speaking various dialects to communicate with each other rather than build alliances along regional boundaries [Wimmer Reference Wan2018]. The Confucian-legal system formed a strong psychology among literati that viewed unification as orthodox [Zhao Reference Yu2015]. Moreover, since th2e late 19th century, an enlightened cultural nationalism had been rapidly growing, boosting the republic and Chinese nation. This nationalism, thanks to China’s political disunity after the Qing Empire, was transcendent and not monopolized by any specific regime [Zhao, Reference Zake2006].
The CCP leadership took shape in this historical legacy. The communists, together with their KMT rivals, were part of a community that used the common written conscript. Most communists had an elementary- or intermediate-level Chinese education and barely qualified as petty-intellectuals by the generally low standard of the 1920s-1930s. Although the CCP leadership as an entity was less educated than its KMT counterpart (see Table B1)Footnote 6, there were no CCP equivalents to the Bolsheviks who lost their own mother tongues. It is true that within the CCP leadership there were several pro-Soviet “internationalists”, such as Wang Ming, Li Lisan and Bo Gu, but these were by no means figures like Karl Radek, Felix Dzerzhinsky, or the Baltic Bolsheviks. The CCP internationalists mastered Mandarin well for polemical writing, poetry and prose [Wu, Li and Zhu Reference Wimmer1997: 1-10, 350-355; Zhou and Guo Reference Zhang1991: 1-6]. Their pro-Soviet stances were more of a rationally calculated strategy adopted to reinforce their status [Yu Reference Xie1997].
Table B1– Education levels
Sources: Coding from biographies; KMTs’ data is drawn from Li 2011 and Liu G. 2005.
Note: Education information is not available for 18 KMT elites.
Nor was the CCP leadership caged in any parochial psychology. Even before taking part in the all-China revolutionary war, most of these future communists had traveled extensively around China proper; they were educated and working in large cities, regional capitals, or overseas student communities (see Table B2). Moreover, the Bolsheviks generally moved throughout the empire’s ethnic mosaic, which obscured their national identities. In contrast, very few CCP leaders had any trans-ethnic experiences, except for Ulanhu who grew up in Inner Mongolia (but was educated in Beijing), and Chen Tanqiu and Li Xiannian, who were briefly in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s for technical reasons.
Unlike the Bolsheviks who completed socialization under the intact Tsarist Empire, Chinese communists grew up in the post-imperial period when a republican, non-dynastic, and anti-Confucian sentiment had been growing—the Imperial Civil Service Exam (Keju) was abolished in 1905 and the Dynastic state ended in 1912. Toward the end of the 1910s, a radical anti-traditional movement had been culminating, which discredited the whole of Chinese history as a total mistake.
While the KMT leaders had deeper memories of the imperial culture and recurrently expressed sympathy to the Confucian past [Jiang Reference Huang1943: 49], the CCP leadership took shape when the transition from imperial Confucianism to Chinese nationalism was close to completion (see Table B3). More than one third of the communists were born after the Imperial Civil Service Exam had been abolished, and completed education at schools where teaching was modelled on Western-style education.
Table B3– Age
Sources: See the notes to Table B1.
Note: Information on the year of birth is not available for 5 KMT elites.
The CCP had little nostalgia for the defunct empire. Zhou Enlai, a fan of modern drama, criticized the traditional arts for romanticizing patriarchy, despotism and patrimonialism [PDRO 1979: 24-27]. Zhang Wentian, a translator of English literature, argued that schools should not offer any courses on Chinese history, as such courses would “poison” the youth and hence reproduce “Asiatic despotism” [Zhang Reference Xu1990b 1: 106-107]. He also suggested that research institutions hire faculties exclusively from people who “had the background of modern scientific training” [ibid.: 12-13]. This tendency to evade any restoration of the past would continue. During the 1940s War with Japan, Mao, then the CCP’s supreme leader, was asked to provide a definition of “Chineseness”. He invoked only the most general, enlightened terms such as science, democracy, and mass [Mao Reference Lohr1993 2: 697-709].
To the CCP, nationalism was almost given. What they sought was a better version of the prevailing Chinese nationalism, which was seen as inadequate. Theirs was a generally progressive slogan without concrete political and social programs [PDRO 2000 1: 19-26], only occasionally invoked to demonstrate patriotic and heroic sentiment [Yang Reference Wu, Li and Zhu1998: 42-43]. It was also a coarse improvisation that attempted to incorporate all “good values” without developing intellectual coherence [Xu Reference Wright and Steinberg1987 1: 33-35]. Often invoked by warlords, the old military, and KMT bureaucrats, nationalism was a floating idea that offered little in terms of reorganizing everyday life. Having been repeated too often by too many, it was unable to serve as the intellectual engine to drive discipline, diligence, and austerity [Bo Reference Bo2008: 32-40; Dai and Zhao Reference Dai and Zhao2011: 8-10; PDRO Reference Pavlov2005, 1: 33-34; PDRO 2012, l: 1, 11-13; Qiang and Li Reference Pipes1990: 1-5; Sitao Reference Setzekorn2010: 1-4].
Institutional Inclusion
In contrast to Tsarist Empire, where Russian nationalism was a campaign that only involved the state apparatus and its closest associates, Chinese nationalism, in its post-imperial period, was an inclusive movement open to broad social strata. The revolution of 1911, largely a reaction to the recentralization of the Manchurian state, was based on consensus among Han elites. After the fall of the dynastic state, political disunity promoted instrumental rationality. Warlord states competed in the name of establishing a unified Chinese national republic. As the old patriarchy broke down, each side sought to absorb broad social strata, which included the future CCP leaders. Interference by the Soviet Union in the 1920s also strengthened institutional openness, by forcing nationalists to incorporate communists, and forcing communists to join the nationalists [Connor Reference Connor1984: 77-78].
Because of this institutional openness, the CCP’s connections with non-communist nationalists were extensive and deep. Among the senior CCP elites, over 29 had held official positions in the KMT or with warlords. (This number increases to 60 if we consider the high-ranking commanders of the CCP army, see the prosopography Jiefangjunjianglingzhuan, Xinghuoliaoyuan 1995.) These positions ranged from high-ranking ones (division- and army-level commanders, secretaries of KMT headquarters) to intermediate ones (representatives of special departments, political commissars and staff officers at regiment- and battalion-levels).
Most connections were forged during the mid-1920s when the KMT was massively recruiting youths to fight warlords in North China under the supervision of the Soviet Union; other inclusions occurred earlier in the anti-Qing revolution or later during the Sino-Japanese War. Almost all the CCP leaders who joined the party by 1928 identified their starting points of radicalization as the time they became nationalists. At the level of high-ranking officers, there were wide-ranging personal friendships between the CCP, the KMT, and non-KMT warlords, which would be recurrently invoked to facilitate a “united front” and cultivate nostalgia for the “heroic struggle for national unification” [Wang (Reference Tolz, Bassin, Glebov and Laruelle1973) 2015; Zhao Reference Yang2012]. This contrasted with Russia where the Reds and Whites had never met before 1917 and were cast into brutal armed antagonism in 1918.
The inclusiveness of the Chinese nationalist movement was strikingly broad, in that the incorporated and incorporating came from very different backgrounds. Compared to Russian nationalism, which was an enterprise of the top echelon, the Chinese nationalist movement had much looser requirements for people’s family backgrounds. The CCP and the KMT stood at almost two poles of society (see Table B4). Unlike the KMT who came from upper class families, the CCP leaders were overwhelmingly sons of peasants, rural teachers, and artisans. Another indicator was any overseas experience. Some senior CCP leaders had briefly studied abroad without ever obtaining any formal degrees; their KMT counterparts had a more solid record (see Table B5).
Table B4– Class Backgrounds
Sources: See the notes to Table B1.
Note: The data available on the family backgrounds of the KMTs was very incomplete. Information is available for only 90 of the 218 Central Executive Committee (CEC) members, and the available information is very brief. A similar issue is found with KMTs whose fathers were businessmen. This is partially offset by data on education levels, which reflect family backgrounds.
The CCP’s conversion to communism partly stemmed from the inclusiveness of Chinese nationalist movement. Because anyone could join without the need to confirm to any uniformly stipulated discipline or ideology, the movement was very loose in nature. Factionalism existed along many types of lines, such as professional backgrounds, school friendships, and experiences of overseas travel. The CCP’s criticism of such fragmentation can be seen widely in their biographies. Senior officers such as Zhu De, Liu Bocheng, Dong Biwu, and Wang Weizhou lamented that many military units that had performed heroically in overthrowing the Qing became paralyzed after 1912 due to infighting for territory and financial resources [EBCE 2010: 339-345; EBCES 1984: 233-234; NDU Reference Minassian and Suny2007: Chapter 2]. Other participants of the nationalist revolution, like Liao Chengzhi, Lin Boqu, Wu Yuzhang, and Zhang Yunyi, criticized factionalism as creating dysfunction in coordination, and causing well-planned expeditions to abort, often with intrigues and assassination [EBCE 2010: 172-80; Li Reference Kuromiya1978: 31-103; Liao Reference Lenin1990 1: 2-3; Lin Reference Li1984: 194-196]. Latecomers, such as He Long, Lv Zhengcao, and Wan Yi found that the lack of a coherent ideology meant that they could not discipline their troops without resorting to banditry rule and parochial bonds [Li Reference Kunicki1996: 62-64; Lv Reference Liu1987: 75-76; Wan Reference Todorova1998: 54-55]. Finally, younger CCP elites cultivated antipathy to localism in the devastation caused by the warlords’ anarchy [Chen Reference Chen1982b: 229; Mao Reference Lv2002: 33; PDRO Reference Pauly2004: 9-10; Tang Reference Stalin1999: 9-10] as well as discrimination within the school system [DCHTU 1979: 723-37; Mao Reference Lv2002: 17-18; Sanetō 1983: 423-437].
High Legitimacy
A third factor distinguished the CCP from the non-Russian Bolshevik as well as most anti-colonialist movements: there was a pervasive belief among Chinese nationalists that a successful liberation was possible and thus deserved their efforts. This collective psychology held during the war with Japan, a most precarious and pessimistic period. It was argued that China, despite its low level of modernization and many military defeats, could not be fully conquered by any foreign powers, because of its huge territorial size as well as the competition among “imperialists”. Such optimism was articulated into popular strategic concepts like Mao’s “protracted war” [2002: 94-103], Jiang Baili’s “comprehensive national power” [Setzekorn Reference Rosenberg2015: 151-152], and Jiang Jieshi’s “sacrificing space to win time” [Huang Reference Hall and Malešević1978]. There was never a moment in China tantamount to the desperate early 20th century in Poland or Transcaucasia where the entire elite abandoned any hope for armed resistance.
In real politics the CCP, the KMT, and local strongmen competed to make the nationalist revolution a beneficial business. As Japan’s inability to occupy China became obvious after 1939, most nationalists eventually switched to devote their major forces to continuing civil war. Boosting nationalist slogans, they could either push domestic rivals to confront the Japanese offensive or discredit these rivals by accusing them of not forcefully fighting national enemies [Minoru and Si-Yun Reference Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez2014: Ch. 2].
The experiences of combat with Japan further convinced the CCP elite that the war could persist. Such observations occurred very early and extended to the end of war in 1945. In September 1938 Zhu De pointed out that as the war moved deeper into China’s inland, Japan’s offensive was attenuating, with previous tactics replaced by more conservative ones, and with local maintenance falling into the hands of Chinese collaborator armies [Wang Reference Verboven, Carlier, Dumolyn and Keats-Rohan2006: 198]. In a working report of 1940, Liu Shaoqi noted that, after the initial panic of 1938, both the KMT and CCP found that they could survive in the occupied areas and continue to exert rule and extract resources, as there were vast territories the Japanese did not have the forces to control [PDRO Reference Ordzhonikidze2003: 119]. In a speech in August 1942, Nie Rongzhen stated that, while Japanese soldiers fought actively, they had to leave most military spots to weaker collaborators and even bandits, from whom the CCP partisans could easily seize weapons and supplies [GPD 2001 6: 99]. In May 1945, Huang Kecheng commented that thanks to the learning and seizures during battles, the CCP army’s combat skills had significantly improved over the past three years, completing a transition from guerrilla battles to regular warfare [GPD 2001 7: 99].
The CCP actively used nationalism to expand the party’s social base beyond the restriction of class-struggle ideology. As Tan Zheng stated in 1940, anti-Japanese nationalism could help overcome the skepticism against petty-intellectuals who were viewed as part of the bourgeoisie by peasant-origin cadres [GPD 2001 5: 3]. A similar comment came from Luo Ruiqing, who reported that the alienation between peasant-background revolutionaries and intellectuals was ubiquitous and could only be resolved by invoking solidarity under anti-Japanese nationalism [GPD 2001 5: 112].
To be compatible with a nationalist framework, the CCP’s understanding of class was ambiguous, broad, and unorthodox in comparison with the Bolsheviks’. “Class” equated more with the misery of the poor, rather than a strictly-defined industrial proletariat. As Zhou Enlai and Zhang Wentian argued, nationalism as an emerging ideology was not as familiar to the masses as the old ideas of dynasty and emperor [PDRO 1979: 351-352; Zhang Reference Xu1990b:108-109]. It was therefore necessary to have an ideology relevant to the real demands of the lower classes such as food, safety, and education. That was the only way to effectively attract the masses [Zhang Reference Xu1990b: 108-109], allowing them see a clear link between their everyday lives and the more grandiose nationalist ideal [Zhang Reference Xu1990a: 1-3].
Class also conveyed a norm of “grouping and ranking”, which could be invoked to create pressure to discipline the army by privileging the “active” and shaming the “inactive”. This understanding of class was developed by CCP leaders with military backgrounds in managing the rank-and-file. They found that discipline in the name of the masses with a sophisticated tactic of pressuring people was much more effective than traditional disciplinary formats such as clandestine soldier freemasonry and regular military ethics, which had fallen in the aftermath of imperial demise [Chen Reference Chen1982a; Peng 2002: 31-49; Zhu Reference Zhang1946: 5-13].
In sum, nationalism was stronger in China, which made its infusion with communist revolution easier. Both the CCP and the KMT were ethnically Hans who identified with post-dynastic values. There were no equivalents to the Bolsheviks who had lost their native language or culture due to assimilation. Meanwhile, Chinese nationalism, both as a movement and an institution, was open to broad social strata. By participating in nationalism, the CCP not only further strengthened its identification with nationalism but also developed extensive personal and organizational connections with the KMT. That was unimaginable between the Bolsheviks and the Whites. Moreover, nationalism was widely viewed as a geopolitically feasible movement in China. The CCP, in its competition with the KMT, actively engaged in this movement both to gain political legitimacy and resolve its own organizational and ideological tensions. This differed fundamentally from the pessimism of small nations at the peripheries of the Russian Empire where nationalists unanimously thought of armed resistance as unfeasible. Finally, being caged within such a hegemony-like nationalist framework, the CCP understood class in an unorthodox manner vis-à-vis its Bolshevik teacher. It invoked class, instead of transcending ethnic politics, to overcome the fragmentation within nationalism.
Conclusion
This article identifies three social conditions that strengthen the inclusiveness of nationalism: complete cultural coverage over a population, widely open institutional access to lower classes, and high legitimacy based on an optimistic estimation of the feasibility of anti-colonial separation. Under strong nationalism, communists had to become nationalists to seize power; under weak nationalism, large social groups were either unwilling or unable to engage in the nationalist movement, becoming instead the foes of nationalism. By comparing the Bolsheviks and the CCP, this article argues that there was no intellectual incompatibility between nationalism and Marxism.
Although this article uses biographical data, it by no means asserts that the stances of individuals remained static. Rather, there were clear changes over time, across which the theses of this article still hold. Some factors saw fluctuations in the short term. For example, institutional openness varied. It diminished in the KMT’s China of 1927-1937, which promoted the CCP in order to boost an internationalist support for minorities’ separation from China. However, such divergence did not go as far as the Bolsheviks of 1917 [Connor Reference Connor1984: 69-76]. Geopolitics was volatile too. As the Bolsheviks eventually settled down after seizing power, they came to believe that the allies’ intervention would be limited. That led them to tap popular Russian nationalist sentiment so as to win the support of the middle classes, intellectuals, and former officers [Agursky Reference Agursky1987: 238-264]. The congruence between ethnicity and political identities was more complicated. The CCP made its concept of the Chinese nation vaguer in the 1940s as its guerrilla zones expanded to incorporate many minorities [Huang Reference Haugaard, Malesevic and Haugaard2017: 179-80, 205-11]. As for the USSR, the process took longer. The 1930s would see a nationalist surge in Ukraine, where local language had been developed for years and political national consciousness was taking shape [Graziosi Reference Goriachev2017: 457-458, 463]. In general, the non-Russians would gain in national languages and identities thanks to the Affirmative Action Empire in the 1920s and 1930s [Martin Reference Malešević2001]. Such efforts of making “national” were to pave way for the rise of nationalism in the 1980s [Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996: 13-22]. They also partly explain why the Soviet Union did not end up with a new empire.
The three mechanisms also apply beyond Russia and China to the broader communist world, although these countries were more affected by external power dynamics. In general, Eastern Europe was closer to Russia. Because of the massive ethnic dislocation originating in the Versailles rearrangement, interwar Eastern Europe was still at the very beginning stage of nation-building. The notions of “patriotic nations” [for patriotism and ethnonationalism, see Connor Reference Connor and Conversi2003], such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and even Romania and Albania, were somewhat artificial, and thus remained contested by more organic identities such as religion and ethnonationalism [Bartlová 1995: 168; Pesic 1996: 5-6]. To avoid ethnopolitics tearing apart the revolution, it was thus not uncommon for communist organizations of the interwar period to carry anti-nationalist tones, even at the expense of alienating themselves from the public [Gilberg Reference Gellner1990: 45-46].
Institutional openness saw a change over time. While they were not yet seized by fascist movements as in Germany and Italy, most interwar Eastern European states refused to incorporate communists, viewing the latter as Jewish conspirators or Moscow’s fifth column [Mann Reference Loginov2004: 241-244, 270]. This partly justified the Comintern’s insistence on banning communist parties from any form of collaboration with nationalists, a situation that differed from the KMT’s China of the early 1920s and 1940s. This landscape fundamentally changed in the aftermath of World War II. To penetrate and control those multiparty coalitional governments, communist parties actively made themselves seem nationalistic so that they could attain legitimacy and popularity, although such efforts would later put them into conflict with Moscow and neighboring countries after complete takeover [Rychlík Reference Rawson1995: 192-193]. This is part of the reason why there was not a second universal “union” in the Eastern European bloc.
Geopolitics also mattered here. One common concern of the Eastern European nations was the encroachment of adjacent powers [Sohrabi Reference Shlapentokh2018: 848-849]. This concern had driven nationalists to restrain themselves so that they could build alliances with other “oppressed people” [Bartlová 1995: 168-171]. After communist takeover, such anxiety transitioned into fear of the Soviet Union. Fearful of provoking Moscow, Eastern European regimes such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria discreetly suppressed nationalist expressions from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. They not only denounced history, but also minimized the use of terms that connoted independence, such as “national economy” and “national culture” [Petrescu 2009]. It was not until after the death of Stalin that they started to develop a patriotism that involved substantial native cultural idioms, albeit still in a moderate manner [Kunicki Reference Kol’iak2012; Stanciu Reference Skriabin and Gavrilov2013].
The situation in East Asia was quite different, and generally similar to that of China. Both North Korea and Vietnam were ethnically homogeneous societies, reinforced by long histories of political statehood. It was thus unlikely that any significant section of the population would manage to escape from the caging of native culture. Institutional openness was narrow in the past, as colonial repression was harsh. This changed after World War II, when both communist parties were supported by their patrons and competed with nationalists for popularity, reframing themselves as nationalists [Armstrong Reference Armstrong, Pons and Smith2017: 443-48; Quinn-Judge Reference Plakans, Thaden and Haltzel2017: 415-424]. Unlike most Eastern European countries that fell into the unilateral dominance by Russia, the two East Asian nations were an “intermediate belt”, giving them a card to play between Moscow and Beijing. Since the two “big brothers” had been lapsing to antagonism, North Korea and Vietnam gained resources from both while at the same time retaining considerable autonomy [Armstrong Reference Armstrong, Pons and Smith2017: 457-460; Quinn-Judge Reference Plakans, Thaden and Haltzel2017: 430-434].
The case of Cuba is similar to that of East Asia. The communist leadership was homogeneous, taking shape after independence from Spain. The nationalist regimes before 1959 were more inclusive than in interwar Eastern Europe. Communists were initially persecuted but were eventually incorporated in the 1930s and 1940s, a process shaped by the alliance between Washington and Moscow. This continued after the revolution. When anti-American nationalists overthrew the pro-US Batista regime, the communists integrated and self-reorganized into a communist party. In terms of geopolitics, like Vietnam, Korea, and to some extent Romania and Albania, Cuba made good use of its geographical proximity to the US and its political proximity to the Soviet Union, which allowed it to avoid being a satellite of either country [Gleijeses Reference Gellner2017: 381-382].
