j_richter_scale
2011-12-17 07:31:48 UTC
It is only about a week before the twentieth anniversary of what Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite other aspects of his politics, aptly called "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century," whose negative impacts are still felt by workers the world over even today. It is also about a week or two before the eighty-ninth anniversary of what could be considered one of the unsung geopolitical tragedies of the 20th century. The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was a historical mistake.
In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his People's Commissar of Nationalities mostly in the right. The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and "positive discrimination" in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the "affirmative action empire" may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet Air and Air Defense Forces. However, too ethnic minority concessions were made. Today's Quebecois intercultural policies demonstrate in hindsight that the cultural diversity positives could have been achieved with neither linguistic korenizatsiya (Quebec's Bill 101 makes French the only official language in Quebec) nor fragmented geopolitical identiti
es past reasonable autonomy; the entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged RSFSR.
Another criticism that should be levelled at the left-nationalism of much of the Russian Left (from the Left Front to well-meaning leftist activists within the RCWP-RPC and within the CPRF cesspool), then, is that their nostalgia for the *Soviet Union* is misplaced.
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In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his People's Commissar of Nationalities mostly in the right. The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and "positive discrimination" in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the "affirmative action empire" may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet Air and Air Defense Forces. However, too ethnic minority concessions were made. Today's Quebecois intercultural policies demonstrate in hindsight that the cultural diversity positives could have been achieved with neither linguistic korenizatsiya (Quebec's Bill 101 makes French the only official language in Quebec) nor fragmented geopolitical identiti
es past reasonable autonomy; the entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged RSFSR.
Another criticism that should be levelled at the left-nationalism of much of the Russian Left (from the Left Front to well-meaning leftist activists within the RCWP-RPC and within the CPRF cesspool), then, is that their nostalgia for the *Soviet Union* is misplaced.
------------------------------------
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