In the USSR, the Soviet people were clearly divided by nationality
Lenin's Internationalism
Soviet people owed the "nationality" column to comrades from the RSDLP. As early as the Third Party Congress in 1905, non-systemic opposition figures, filling out questionnaires, first encountered the question of "nationality." Interestingly, in the then Russian Empire, which, according to the Bolsheviks' definition, was a "prison of nations," the imperial government was completely unconcerned with nationality, i.e., an individual's belonging to a specific ethnic group. And indeed, in prison, everyone is equal.
Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. And without nuances. Especially since Emperor Nicholas II was Orthodox, but alas, not a Great Russian. Meticulous historians calculated: Russian blood in the last Russian autocrat was only 1/128. But he was still a Russian tsar. The Scot Barclay and the Georgian Bagration were also Russian commanders, the German Fonvizin (descendant of knights) was a Russian writer, the Jew Levitan was a Russian artist. What can I say, the joke "scratch any Russian and you'll find a Tatar" has only a grain of humor.
When before the revolution it was necessary to emphasize nationality, they said "Great Russian." Lenin wrote exactly that in his party questionnaire. And the fact that among his ancestors there were Germans and Jews did not bother the leader of the world proletariat.
Even in the census form of the first Russian census of 1897, only the eleventh item was "religion" and the twelfth was "native language." There was no "nationality" in the passports of Tsarist Russia. They indicated the owner's surname, first name and patronymic, marital status, children, special features, and place of residence.
The Bolsheviks transferred the "nationality" column to party questionnaires from Europe, where it had been in use since the nineteenth century. However, there "nationality" primarily meant belonging to a specific state. Today, in the era of "they've all come here," the national question has arisen. It is no coincidence, for example, that Boris Berezovsky or Roman Abramovich are traditionally referred to in Western European press as Russian entrepreneurs, meaning they come from Russia.
Incidentally, it was the communists, who supposedly profess internationalism, who were initially extremely concerned about the national question. Why Lenin considered the introduction of the "nationality" column for party comrades justified can be seen from his creative legacy. In particular, in the pre-revolutionary work "On the National Pride of the Great Russians," the future leader, emphasizing "the role of the Great Russian proletariat as the main driver of the communist revolution," insisted on "the long-term education of workers in the spirit of complete national equality and brotherhood," on "full equality and the right to self-determination of all nations oppressed by the Great Russians."
In other words, the "nationality" column was of paramount importance precisely for non-indigenous peoples, "oppressed" by the tsarist regime. Hence, in fact, the Bolsheviks established the People's Commissariat for Nationalities in 1917.
Lenin resolutely suppressed attempts to revive "Great Russian nationalist" sentiments in the USSR, arguing that "it is better to overdo it in the direction of concessions and softness towards national minorities than to underdo it." Thus, in 1922, Vladimir Ilyich, in one of his letters, reproached the first People's Commissar for Nationalities, Joseph Stalin, for "rudeness and injustice towards our own non-Russian peoples." Materials with Lenin's criticism of the "nationalist" Joseph Vissarionovich were allowed for publication only in 1956.
And rightly so: utter nonsense results. The Russian Vladimir Ulyanov reproaches the Georgian Joseph Dzhugashvili for Great Russian nationalism. And yet, this dispute was quite substantive. Having seized power, Stalin completely reinterpreted the original meaning of the "fifth point."
Stalin's Nationalism
Formally, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, who proposed returning the "nationality" column to passports, stands on Lenin's position, arguing that "without friendship among peoples, without respect for their traditions and culture, it is impossible to develop successfully and look to the future with confidence." In reality, the demand for the rehabilitation of the "fifth point" fully corresponds precisely to Stalin's national policy, the essence of which is to pit different nations against each other.
In Russian historiography, there is a quite plausible version of why the "father of nations" needed to introduce the "nationality" column in the passport. Well, there would have been one "new historical community – the Soviet people," and they would have stopped there. The fact is that Lenin's internationalism had completely evaporated from Stalin's mind by the early 1930s. From that time, nationalism and the construction of a socialist empire in a single country came into political fashion.
In 1932, by the decree "On Establishing a Unified Passport System in the USSR and Mandatory Residence Registration of Passports," the "nationality" column first appeared in the only document identifying the builder of communism. Citizens of the USSR aged sixteen and older, permanently residing in cities, workers' settlements, working in transport, state farms, and new construction sites, were required to have passports.
In effect, the country was divided in two. In the first part lived "passportized" citizens, in the second – collective farmers and other "disenfranchised". Why the "nationality" line appeared in the passport was not entirely clear to most people at the time. But the repressive meaning of introducing the internal passport was obvious. In the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of November 15, 1932, for example, it clearly spoke of "clearing cities of superfluous elements". It just so happened that the list of "superfluous elements" kept expanding as socialism was built in the USSR. At first they were "former people" and kulaks, and then it came to entire "unreliable" peoples. Then the "nationality" line became more relevant than ever.
In 1937, at the March plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Stalin unexpectedly spoke not about the "fifth point", but about the "fifth column". Spies, saboteurs and diversants were counted quite numerous at that time. Stalin's plan to fight suspicious peoples with the help of the "fifth point" began to take effect. The grounds for execution or sending to camp during the years of mass repression could be not only an unsuitable pre-revolutionary past, participation in the Civil War on the side of the Whites, but also a "suspicious" nationality – German, Polish, Finnish, and others.
In 1938, the NKVD sent a secret circular to all departments of civil registry – the current registry offices. The document, in particular, stated: "If the parents are Germans, Poles, etc., regardless of their place of birth, length of residence in the USSR or change of citizenship, the registrant cannot be recorded as Russian, Belarusian, etc... the nationality line is not filled in until the applicants provide documentary proof."
Persecution of ethnic minorities using the "fifth point" continued after the war. In 1948, a campaign against cosmopolitanism began in the USSR, ending with the Doctors' plot (in the investigation materials – "The Case of the Zionist Conspiracy in the MGB"). "Rootless cosmopolitans" were, as a rule, Jews, and from that time on, unspoken instructions appeared in the country not to allow them into responsible positions.
At the same time, it cannot be said in any way that Stalin was precisely a Russian nationalist and his national policy somehow created preferences for the most numerous ethnic group of the country. Although this point of view is very popular today among Russian leftists and nationalists. Russians suffered repression in the Stalin years no less than representatives of all other nationalities. And this despite the leader's toasts to the "great Russian people".
Zyuganov's pragmatism
Against this gloomy historical background, the CPRF's call to return the principle of establishing a child's nationality by the nationality of its parents, which was in effect in Soviet times, and to restore the "fifth point" in the passport, looks rather clunky. It is not easy to understand why Gennady Zyuganov and his comrades needed to drag the Soviet legacy into the light of day. Surely not to implement in practice the fifth (!) point of the CPRF's appeal, which says about taking "emergency measures to eliminate ethnic gangs"? In our country, if anything, they still hit you in the face, not in the passport.
Perhaps the "nationality" line will help realize another idea of the communists, according to which "the right of Russians and other indigenous peoples of Russia to receive natural resource rents will be ensured" (from the CPRF's election address). And how to become "indigenous" if there is no entry in the passport? A problem...
Seriously, from a legal point of view, the desire to restore the "fifth point" is a road to nowhere, an empty political slogan. On the one hand, the Constitution states that "everyone has the right to determine and indicate their nationality", but at the same time, the Constitutional Court recently ruled that "the absence of a "nationality" line in Russian passports does not contradict the Constitution of the Russian Federation". By the way, in the heat of the struggle for the votes of Russian nationalists, the communists themselves, when publishing biographical information of candidates for deputies, for some reason forgot to indicate the nationality of the future elected officials. Somehow it turned out illogical...
So the idea of today's communists has nothing to do with either Lenin's internationalism or Stalin's nationalism. For example, in United Russia they were suspected of banal election PR. Deputy Secretary of the Presidium of the General Council of United Russia Yuri Shuvalov stated that the CPRF's proposals to return the "nationality" line are only an attempt by the communists to "pretend to be defenders of the majority". There is a significant grain of truth in such a diagnosis.
Today, the struggle for the return of the "fifth point" in official identity documents is political in nature. Moreover, it is not only the communists who are guilty of this. Most participants in the current Duma race are playing the nationalist card one way or another.
The practical meaning of fixing ethnic identity has long been lost. The last document where the "nationality" line remained was the military ID. Which is not surprising: the army is one of the most conservative institutions. The generals were the last to stop dividing soldiers by nationality. For several years now, this line has been filled in at will. By and large, the "fifth point" has become a matter exclusively for sociologists and demographers.
And if someone wants to document the fact that Russians constitute an absolute majority of the population of the Russian Federation, then there is no need to look far. The data of the 2002 population census have long been published (in 2010, during the last census, questions about nationality were not asked). So, at that time out of more than 145 million Russians, about 116 million were Russian – that is 80 percent of the population. If we add to this citizens who considered themselves to be such exotic nationalities as, for example, Pomors or Cossacks, as well as ethnically very close Ukrainians and Belarusians, then the number of the "titular" nation will approach 85 percent.
Such dominance, of course, does not mean that the rights of Russians or any other peoples should not be protected at all. But it is clearly not worth doing this using the methods of Leninist-Stalinist national policy. Especially considering what this policy did to the Soviet Union.
Denis BABICHENKO.
