On Common Ground: Soviet Nationalities Policy and the Austro-Marxist Premise

This article argues that nationalities policy under Lenin and Stalin, its commitment to territorial autonomy notwithstanding, effectively put into practice the Austro-Marxist vision of a socialist multinational state and party that patronised national culture to assuage separatist tendencies. Highlighting the ideological common ground between Habsburg remedies for imperial disintegration along national lines and Soviet policies for imperial integration along the same lines, it argues that the Bolsheviks’ Marxist premise of promoting national diversity and culture to defuse nationalism was prefigured and informed by the Austro-Marxist premise of making national cultural autonomy the hallmark rather than the antithesis of socialism.