At the end of March, I would like to recall two extremely important dates in a matter such as “nation-building”. On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament decided that the name of the country would be written without a hyphen in Czech and with a hyphen in Slovak. Thus ended the “war of hyphens” that began after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. A few decades earlier, on March 30, 1971, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, introduced the new expression “Soviet people”.
Homo Sovieticus
Making Moscow an exemplary communist city is a matter of honor for all Soviet people.
– sounded in the report of the Central Committee of the XXIV Congress of the CPSU. Thus, Leonid Brezhnev introduced two new terms at once: “model communist city” and “Soviet people”. And if everything was more or less clear with the first (in the 30s the task was already set to make the capital a “model socialist city”), then the second sounded rather unusual from the mouth of the head of state .
During the years of socialist construction, a new historical community of people was born in our country: the Soviet people. In common work, in the struggle for socialism, in the battles for its defense, new harmonious relations have arisen between classes and social groups, nations and nationalities – relations of friendship and cooperation
– was stated in the documents of the XXIV Congress of the CPSU.
At the same time, people living in the USSR considered themselves Soviet citizens almost from the moment the world’s first socialist state was formed. Suffice it to recall the words of Yuri Gagarin, which he made after landing in the Saratov region. It so happened that the astronaut met with ordinary residents of the village of Smelovka Anna Takhtarova and her six-year-old granddaughter Rita. Yes, the sight was not for the faint of heart – first a ball of fire, then a man in a space suit…
I’m mine, Soviet!
Gagarin hastened to reassure them.
This was said on April 12, 1961, almost 10 years before Brezhnev’s statement.
named after Ilyich
And if Soviet nation-building was based on common successes, achievements and plans for the future, then in the case of Ukraine, as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out in a televised address to Russians on February 21, 2022, everything was done to meet “all requirements, all ‘wishes’ from the side of nationalists inside the country. Such principles of state-building, as history the showed, turned out to be wrong.
As a result of the Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine was born, which even today can rightly be called the Ukraine named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archival documents, including Lenin’s directives on the Donbass, which was literally introduced into Ukraine.
the national leader caught the eye last year.
Where is the Czech Republic, where is Slovakia …
In November 1989, the Velvet Revolution began in Czechoslovakia, after which a dispute arose over the name of the state between Czech and Slovak representatives. In 1990, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic still existed on the political map of the world. Then President Vaclav Havel proposed to remove the word “socialist” from the name. Slovak activists went further. In their opinion, the country should have changed its name to “Czecho-Slovakia” (spelled with a hyphen).
After many disputes, the Czechoslovak parliament decided that the name of the state should be written without a hyphen in Czech and with a hyphen in Slovak. A unique case in history! However, less than a month later, parliament “changed its shoes”. On April 20, 1990, the name of the country changed again – it is now known as the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. But the citizens did not rejoice for long at the end of the “war of the hyphens”. In 1993, two new independent states were formed in Europe – the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Czechs and Slovaks, ethnic Slavs who speak very similar languages, historically have much in common. In fact, “Czechoslovakian” became a “product” of the First World War. The creation of the Czechoslovak nation was necessary for the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic. Nation builders in the 20s of the last century fully understood that language should become one of the obligatory elements of the created nation. Thus, a new sociolinguistic term appeared – the Czechoslovak language. It was assumed that the Czechs had to voluntarily learn some specific Slovak language forms, and the Slovaks – Czech.
The idea turned out to be untenable. On May 9, 1948, a new Constitution was adopted, from which the concept of an official or state language was excluded (apparently, far from sin).
American dream
In all these cases (not of creation, but of destruction), one can find an American trace. Foreign-based political technologists, who imagined themselves to be the “coolest” nation-builders, have most likely forgotten where they came from.
The American nation was formed as a result of the implementation of the “melting pot” model. Its author was Israel Zanguill, son of migrants from the Russian Empire and English playwright. This concept implies a mixture of representatives of various peoples arriving on the continent – both biological and cultural.
A significant drawback of the concept is the denial of the existence of any kind of conflicts in society. Indeed, the American authorities are particularly zealous in looking for problems in other states, trying (according to them) to defend the “weak and disadvantaged” regardless of the point on the globe, but at the same time they forget that all is not going well inside the country.
One can come to the conclusion that in the world one cannot do without such a concept as “nation-building”. But nations formed in this way are an unstable concept, which is quite easy to “smash” outside forces with a strong desire. Therefore, representatives of “constructed” nations must clearly understand why they identify with each other. And the goal should definitely be chosen unshakeable, that is, “for centuries”.
Author: Alexander Sizarov
