Despite the necessary allusions to ‘communism’, the context of the article is overtly one of Great Russian nationalism that has repudiated all notions of ‘international solidarity’ and ‘universalism’ as corrosive to the ‘spiritual’ health of the people, nation, state and culture, regardless of the rhetoric used.
That traditional folk culture was the foundation of so-called ‘Soviet culture’ was explained by Chernov in referring to an episode in which the Central Committee of the party had condemned an opera, ‘The Great Friendship’, despite its focus on the traditional music and dances of the Caucasian folk. Stalin in particular was outraged at Muradeli for attempting ‘improvements’, Muradeli having composed one of the ‘traditional tunes’ himself.[114] According to Chernov the Central Committee resolution of 1948 had, ‘subjected to a scathing denunciation the direction of some composers who had neglected the great musical legacy of the brilliant Russian composers’. The ‘great Russian musical legacy’ is specifically not that of dialectical materialism, or any other such Marxist notion, but clearly that of traditional folk culture, and no ‘improvisations’, adaptations or new interpretations were going to be acceptable. What becomes clear is that the aim of ‘Soviet culture’ was to create ‘socialist realism’ in the arts uncompromisingly founded on a bedrock of traditional folk culture. As indicated by Trotsky’s art manifesto, Marxists along with liberals and globalists in the West saw something disturbingly similar between Soviet ‘socialist realism’ and ‘Fascist’ art.[115]
Chernov was predicting what would be a major and long-lasting offensive against the Soviet, at the same time (1949) that Sidney Hook, et al, in league with the CIA, Rockefeller and other such interests, were planning to launch a world cultural revolution founded on what Stalinism was condemning as ‘rootless’ or ‘bourgeois’ cosmopolitanism’. Chernov warned of what is today called the ‘cultural cold war’, stating that this would be part of the ‘ideological weapon’ for the encirclement of the USSR:
The most poisonous ideological weapon of the hostile capitalist encirclement is bourgeois cosmopolitanism. Consisting in part of cringing before foreign things and servility before bourgeois culture, rootless-cosmopolitanism produces special dangers, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological banner of militant international reaction, the ideal weapon in its hands for the struggle against socialism and democracy. Therefore the struggle with the ideology of cosmopolitanism, its total and definitive unmasking and overcoming acquires in the present time particular acuity and urgency.[116]
Chernov explained cosmopolitanism in terms that are thoroughly conservative and traditionalist:
Cosmopolitanism is the negation of patriotism, its opposite. It advocates absolute apathy towards the fate of the Motherland. Cosmopolitanism denies the existence of any moral or civil obligations of people to their nation and Motherland.[117]
At the foundation of this ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ is the rule of money; the worship of Mammon, and Chernov’s description is again prescient as to the present nature of international capitalism or what is today called ‘globalisation’:
The bourgeoisie preaches the principle that money does not have a homeland, and that, wherever one can ‘make money’, wherever one may ‘have a profitable business’, there is his homeland. Here is the villainy that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is called on to conceal, to disguise, ‘to ennoble’ the antipatriotic ideology of the rootless bourgeois-businessman, the huckster and the travelling salesman.
As of necessity, Chernov resorts to citing Marx in stating that ‘bourgeois patriotism… degenerated into a complete sham after its financial, commercial, and industrial activity acquired a cosmopolitanist character’. Yet the Stalinist critique and cultural manifesto of Chernov is as much a repudiation of the Marxian as the plutocratic-capitalist attitudes towards nation and nationality. Marx had seen this internationalisation of capital as part of the dialectical process that would lead to the internationalisation of the proletariat, paving the way to world socialism. Marx was for that reason◦– dialectically◦– a supporter of Free Trade:
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster…[118]
Of Free Trade Marx wrote:
Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.[119]
Contrary to Marx’s dialectics, Stalinist Russia held that nationalism and patriotism are the basis upon which their socialism must be constructed. It might be rationalised that this was itself a dialectical process for the eventual establishment of the world communist society in which all nations would disappear including the Russian. Yet the exhortation of the Stalinists for loyalty to the ‘Socialist Motherland’ was based on a nationalism which was stridently folkish and made the ‘Great Russians’ a unique nationality, not because they were citizens of the first ‘Socialist state’ or any other such nebulous ideological formulae, but due to what Chernov described in un-Marxian terms as their innate and superior characteristics.
Chernov cogently stated precisely the agenda of the ‘cultural cold warriors’ that was about to emerge from the USA: ‘In the era of imperialism the ideology of cosmopolitanism is a weapon in the struggle of imperialist plunderers seeking world domination’.[120] And so it remains, as will be outlined in the concluding paragraphs.
If any doubt remained as to what Chernov meant by nationalism as the bulwark against international capital, and that Stalinism was an explicit repudiation of Marxist notions of internationalism despite Chernov’s necessary ideological allusions to Lenin, Chernov makes it plain that it is precisely the type of nationalism condemned by Marx that was nonetheless the foundation of the Soviet State of the Great Russians:
National sovereignty, the struggle of oppressed nations for their liberation, the patriotic feelings of freedom-loving peoples and above all the mighty patriotism of the Soviet people◦– these still serve as a serious obstacle for predatory imperialistic aspirations, they prevent the imperialists’ accomplishing their plans of establishing world-wide domination. Seeking to crush the peoples’ will for resistance, the imperialist bourgeoisie and their agents in the camp of Right-wing socialists preach that national sovereignty purportedly became obsolete and a thing past its time, they proclaim the fiction of the very notion of nation and state independence.[121]
If Chernov and even Stalin had been free to express themselves outside the bounds of Marxism-Leninist rhetoric they could have added that Marx himself was among those who◦– like the ‘predatory imperialists’◦– preached that ‘national sovereignty was obsolete’. Those who did follow the Marxist line of ‘rootless cosmopolitism’, such as the Trotskyites, were then teaming up with the ‘predatory imperialists’ in the USA and elsewhere to launch their offensive against the USSR: ‘The ruling cliques of nations, being the objects of American expansion go all out so as to spit upon and fault the yearning of the masses for the preservation of their national sovereignty, thus rendering aid to American imperialism’.[122]
115
Actually, the art of Fascist Italy embraced Futurism and other modernist trends, existing side-by-side with a revival of Roman Classicism, and Italy was in this respect more tolerant of artistic innovations than Stalinist Russia. On ‘Futurism’ in Italy see: K R Bolton, Artists of the Right, ‘Marinetti’ (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2012). 32-52
118
Karl Marx, ‘Proletarians and Communists’, The Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 71-72.
119
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, ‘Speech on the question of free trade delivered to the Democratic Association of Brussels at it public meeting of January 9, 1848’, Collected Works, Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976).