1Internationalism: hardly any other term in Soviet history is as crucial and yet so unclear in its definition.  [1] Virtually every work on the Soviet Union acknowledges the centrality of “internationalism” to Soviet politics and society, yet there have been few attempts to clarify what exactly “internationalism” meant and how its meaning changed through the Soviet experience as a whole.

2The elusiveness of the concept of “internationalism” lies in its multi-dimensional nature: as Peter Friedemann and Lucian Hölscher point out, “internationalism” is a term both descriptive and normative in alluding to institutions and processes on the one hand and to values and ideology on the other (deskriptiver Prozeß - und normativer Gesinnungsbegriff).  [2] That is to say, internationalism is not to be limited to its meaning in international relations theory, where it evokes mechanisms and interactions aimed at creating and sustaining an inter-state if not a supra-state order,  [3] but has rather to be understood as “the idea that we both are and should be part of a broader community than that of the nation or the state”.  [4]

3The fact that internationalism has to be seen as a concept of both ideology and realpolitik is even more crucial when it comes to Soviet history. Both before and after taking power, the Bolsheviks laid claim to the ideological heritage of the socialist workers’ movement, for which revolutionary internationalism—a belief in the international nature of class struggle and thus of the necessity of international class solidarity—was a key principle of both its ideology and (within limits) its political practice.  [5] Although Marx and Engels offered a justification for proletarian internationalism in socio-economic theory, notably in the Communist Manifesto, Werner Sombart—one of the earliest students of socialism—observed that “the internationalism of the labour movement… does not appeal to the intellect alone, it also appeals to the heart”.  [6]

4What then is the relationship between the affective, class-based and overwhelmingly “a-national” internationalism of the labour movement and “Soviet” or “proletarian internationalism” as it was understood in Stalin’s Soviet Union? This was described by Pål Kolstø as signifying “solidarity within socialist states […] populated by more than one nationality, such as the Soviet Union”. Kolstø argued that this definition, though “very special and narrow”, was nevertheless “the correct one when encountered in practical-pedagogical Soviet literature”.  [7] This is just as true when it comes to historiography. Yet while post-Stalin Soviet historians frequently use the term “internationalism” in the sense of “friendship of the peoples” within the Soviet Union,  [8] their Western counterparts have never really raised the question of what “internationalism” could mean at different stages of Soviet history, nor have they considered how exactly the concept of class-based revolutionary internationalism—a notion intrinsically related to the idea of “world revolution”—could later develop into a domestic, inter-ethnic project under Stalin.  [9] We know a great deal about how, in the late 1920s, the Bolshevik politics of world revolution were replaced by Stalin’s doctrine of “Socialism in one country”, and how this led in turn to the dominance of “Soviet patriotism” in the agitprop of the 1930s.  [10] However, we know far less about, firstly, what “internationalism” meant in Soviet political discourse before Stalin’s ascendancy, and secondly, how and why it came to be transformed in meaning. While the idea that world revolution was too “abstract” a concept to serve as a means of cohesion for the majority of the population is not wrong,  [11] it only shows part of the picture.

5Although a conceptual history of Soviet “internationalism” is much needed, this is not what this short essay sets out to offer. Rather, it aims to briefly show how the transformation of “internationalism” was connected to the fate of the European revolutionary wave of the years after the First World War and how this affected the deployment of the term in the Soviet context.

The three faces of “internationalism”

6First of all it is necessary to map the meanings assigned to the terms “internationalism” and “internationalist” in the political discourse of post-Tsarist Russia and the early Soviet years. The Soviet Political Dictionary, published in 1922, when an explicitly Communist political discourse was still in the process of formation, defined internationalism (“Internatsionalizm”) as follows: “Internationalness [mezhdunarodnost’], the struggle for fraternisation of the peoples. This found expression during the War in the activity of the Left Socialists, who became today’s Communists”.  [12] Three years earlier, in 1919, the Bolshevik journalist Aleksandr Voronskii had invoked internationalism as one of three “pillars” of Bolshevism. The party, he wrote,

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“declared war on false, bourgeois patriotism while the majority of socialists were infected with patriotism and supported their governments—that was at the beginning of the war. A consequent internationalism, the battle against any kind of chauvinist smoke-screen—this is […] what distinguishes the Bolshevik party”.  [13]

8Both definitions hint at the three senses in which the concept of “internationalism” was used by Russian socialists during the First World War and the revolutionary period. First, to be an internationalist was to reject “imperialist war” and the national consensus enforced by the wartime authorities. Such an attitude was characteristic of the left and anti-war factions within international social democracy,  [14] but in Russia “internationalist” was probably even more prevalent a self-description. It wasn’t only the Bolsheviks who defined themselves as a “party of internationalism”; the anti-war factions within the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries did so too, in their names and their everyday political language. For the Bolsheviks, and indeed all anti-war socialists, the whole socialist movement was essentially divided into two camps: “internationalists” and “social-chauvinists”.  [15]

9The second meaning of “internationalism” derived from classical Marxism and its belief that the struggle for social revolution was necessarily international. With their belief in the imminence of world revolution, nourished by Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution, the Bolsheviks, however, took the Marxist concept to a new level in their political practice.  [16] The belief in world revolution operated within the Bolshevik movement as a “charismatic idea” in the Weberian sense, and it was important not just for the party elite but for rank and file activists as well.  [17]

10The third sense of being “internationalist” in the revolutionary period was the rejection of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ethnic superiority in general. “Fraternisation of the peoples” had to happen not just between the inhabitants of different nation states, but also between the “nationalities” within multiethnic Russia (and later the Soviet Union). In his memoirs, Lev Trotsky meant just this kind of internationalism when he wrote that he was immune to national prejudices because through exile in different countries he had “absorb[ed] that internationalism into [his] very flesh and blood”.  [18] While in practice there were a fair number of xenophobes and anti-Semites in the party’s rank and file, the party’s agitprop maintained a staunch anti-xenophobic stance during the years of revolution and civil war, often by arguing that the “internationalist” nature of Bolshevism was incompatible with racist attitudes.  [19]

11Each of these three facets of “internationalism” were present in the socialist political discourse of the Russian revolution, and they undergirded the concept of “internationalism” in the early Soviet period. The three meanings, however, were not separate but intrinsically connected. In propagating their belief in world revolution, the Bolsheviks believed that they were helping combat xenophobia as well. In a 1923 party brochure directed against national prejudices, the author points to the Comintern’s world congresses, attended by the “British, French, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, Negroes and many others”, as vivid examples of practical action against such narrow-mindedness. The more these delegates intensify their cooperation, the author continues, the sooner a time will come when hatred between different nationalities will be unthinkable.  [20] Even in a 1926 children’s book, the Comintern is depicted as a muscular figure intervening to prevent small children with evident “ethnic” traits from fighting among themselves, thus functioning as an arbiter between warring ethnicities.  [21]

Illustration 1. Title page of Nikolai Agnivtsev’s O shesterykh vot etikh [“About These Six Guys”)], drawings Konstantin Rudakov, Kniga, Moscow, 1926.
Cf. http://www.raruss.ru/childrens-books/page-child3/3006-agnivtsev-rudakov-6childs.html (consulté en septembre 2016).

12However, towards the end of the 1920s the meaning of “internationalism” narrowed radically. While the anti-war meaning had become irrelevant, the “world-revolutionary” meaning underwent an inversion, leaving “internationalism” to signify only inter-ethnic relations within the Soviet Union. This shift can’t be explained solely by the “turn eastward and inward” (Wallerstein) taken by Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s, or the “orientalisation” of Soviet culture that took place during the same period.  [22] To explain the disappearance of the “world-revolutionary” sense of internationalism, one has also to consider the relations between international revolution and domestic Soviet propaganda.

World revolution and early Soviet society

13The crucial importance attached by the Bolshevik leadership to revolutionary events abroad has often either been related to a supposed thirst for power or marginalized as a form of “fanaticism” that played no role at all in everyday domestic politics.  [23] And while other researchers have indeed acknowledged the centrality of world revolution to early Soviet politics, they have done so only in passing.  [24] It is beyond question that international revolutionary affairs shaped the decision-making of Soviet leaders, from the first takeover of power in 1917 onward.  [25] Global revolutionary events in the first years after the war lent credibility to the belief that world revolution was just around the corner.  [26] Furthermore, that belief was important not only for the Bolsheviks’ decision-making but also for their political communication with the party’s rank and file and the population in general. The expectation that the “advanced” countries of the West would turn communist and thus become allies of Soviet Russia served to justify and rationalize the hardships the Bolsheviks imposed on the population.  [27] Repeatedly proclaimed by Bolshevik leaders during the first years after October, these expectations were enthusiastically taken up by party activists across the Soviet republics, being particularly evident in regional agitprop such as the special newspaper issued to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution in 1920 in Shuia, a city located in Central Russia:

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“Yes! The vast masses of Russian workers and peasants are not alone. Their brothers in Europe and Asia are with them, their brothers in toil, suffering and common struggle. Millions are with us. […] From the hands of the victorious proletarians of the West we will receive everything we need to overcome hunger, cold and poverty once and for all”.  [28]

15It would be wrong to think of such forecasts as mere smokescreens cynically intended to deceive the populace. Such rays of hope were vital for the regime’s earnest rank and file supporters inside and outside the Party. Especially in the grim conditions of the first years after 1917, the prospect of receiving revolutionary aid from the outside world was a potent motivation for enduring both material hardship and hostility from the non-Bolshevik majority of the population. Such hopes, omnipresent in rank and file activists’ diaries and correspondence, are illustrated by a letter from a Siberian communist to the Central Committee in Moscow in mid-1918:

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“We are waiting for news from the West. It’s impossible that our older comrades, more mature in revolutionary experience, should abandon their little brothers, the Russian proletariat […]. No! I believe so strongly that our comrades from the West will come to our aid that I am already counting the hours…”  [29]

17Here it is not even of importance to know how much of this letter is honest conviction and how much an early exercise in “speaking Bolshevik” (though the omnipresence of such sentiments among activists in these years would tend to suggest the former). What is striking is the apparent consensus, between author and addressees, on the hierarchical relationship between the Soviet and the Western proletariat. Very clearly, the revolutionary workers of foreign countries had the role of “elder brothers” who would help the “backward” Soviet workers to reach full communism.  [30] This accorded entirely with the hierarchy envisioned by the Bolshevik leaders in those years. Already in responding to the February Revolution, Lenin had written that while the Russian proletariat had “the great honour of beginning the series of revolutions”, it was “not its special qualities, but rather the special conjuncture of historical circumstances that for a certain, very short time had made the proletariat of Russia the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world”.  [31] In late 1918, he maintained that the “complete victory of socialism in one country is inconceivable and demands the most active co-operation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include Russia”.  [32] The hierarchical relationship within the “world proletariat” was thus the subject of a consensus shared both by party leadership and, to a large extent, rank and file activists.  [33]

18Such hopes of deliverance by foreign revolutions were focussed first and foremost on the German working class. Not only was Germany the fatherland of “scientific socialism”, but it was also home to the world’s oldest and largest organised workers’ movement, and even the SPD’s “treason” of August 1914 could not destroy the Bolsheviks’ fascination with Germany’s revolutionary movement.  [34] When the German Revolution finally occurred in November 1918, toppling the Kaiser in symbolic near-coincidence with the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Bolshevik world-revolutionary enthusiasm permeated broad layers of society, including even former sceptics of the new regime.  [35] The results of the November Revolution, however, did not live up to the Bolshevik hopes of a socialist revolution, and the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and the brutal overthrow of the short-lived Soviet republics in Bavaria and Hungary brought a first wave of disappointment. The Bolshevik world-revolutionary message had received a blow in the eyes of the Party’s rank and file, causing the Bolshevik leadership to turn for the first time to the East as a more likely arena for international revolution. The path to world revolution, Trotsky wrote in a confidential intra-party communication of August 1919, now led through India rather than Hungary.  [36]

19The ultimate failure of world-revolutionary hopes, however, came with the “German October” of 1923. Given the growing radicalisation and polarisation of German society following the occupation of the Ruhr, the Bolsheviks and the German Communist Party were convinced of the imminence of social revolution in Germany, so much so that they planned an insurrection.  [37] Soviet society was so thoroughly permeated by anticipation of revolutionary events in Germany that German communists visiting Moscow were shocked by the omnipresence of Germany-related revolutionary slogans and posters.  [38] Such expectations were not just limited to propaganda, but were shared by a large part of the Soviet party’s activist rank and file, some of whom even joined the Red Army in the hope of fighting for (and in) a Soviet Germany.  [39] The hopes projected onto the German revolution and the subsequent German-Soviet communist future were shaped by a vision of mutual cooperation between the two proletarian states, with the industrialised German working class taking the lead.  [40] All these imaginations were vain, however, as the revolutionary mood had subsided by the time they came to launch their initiative, forcing them to call off the uprising. The impact of this on the Bolshevik party and its rank and file was comparable to a “psychological depression”, as Nikolai Bukharin put it;  [41] only the death of Lenin in January 1924 would distract attention from the failure of the “German October”.  [42]

20The dashing of Bolshevik hopes for Germany not only paved the way for Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, it also radically changed the relationship between the Soviet Union and the “world proletariat”. Before late 1923, the revolutionary workers of the industrialised countries were believed to be role models for their Soviet comrades and the primary agents of world revolution. Now they had failed to fulfil Bolshevik expectations, they were downgraded to objects of solidarity on the part of the Soviet “toilers”. This change was reflected in the ways that the party dealt with international solidarity after 1923-1924. While before the defeat of the German October internationalism had been one of the main pillars of the party’s agitprop work, by late 1923 it had been “outsourced” to the Soviet section of International Red Aid, known as the MOPR (Mezhdunarodnaia organizatsiia pomoshchi bortsam revoliutsii).  [43] The primary focus of this Soviet “mass organisation” was to raise awareness and funds for imprisoned revolutionaries around the world—its internationalist goal not being to support mass struggles abroad or to learn from foreign revolutionary experience but to provide support for foreign revolutionaries as victims.  [44] Soviet world-revolutionary internationalism was turned on its head: the Soviet “toilers” who had been the would-be objects of international solidarity now had the upper hand, as it were, while the foreign comrades, the erstwhile true revolutionary agents, became the needy, pitiable objects of care. This inversion of the relationship fitted perfectly with Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country”, in which world revolution took a back seat and the aim of the “world working class” was reduced to protecting the Soviet Union as a “global proletarian fatherland”. Not only that, it also foreshadowed the hierarchical quality of Soviet inter-ethnic internationalism, in which the non-Russian ethnicities were treated as the objects of care extended by the “advanced”, ethnically Russian working class.

Soviet minorities and world revolution

21The shift of meaning in the 1920s, from the world-revolutionary internationalism that had been a key element of Soviet agitprop to a domestic, multi-ethnic “inter-nationalism”, raises the question of the place of non-Russian ethnicities in the Soviet world-revolutionary project. The 1920s were, in fact, the heyday of the korenizatsiia (“indigenisation”) policy that promoted the cultural empowerment of non-Russian ethnicities.  [45] How were korenizatsiia and world-revolutionary internationalism connected?

22From the beginning of their political activity in the aftermath of March 1917, the Bolsheviks positioned themselves as the party of both revolutionary internationalism and radical anti-imperialism and anti-chauvinism. Thus, non-Russian ethnicities within the Russian state were explicitly included in Bolshevik attempts to connect the Russian “toilers” to the “world working class”. This found symbolic expression in the appeal in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, in May 1917, to all “comrades—poets of all nationalities” to submit their translations of the “Internationale” to be printed in a future issue.  [46] Later, in the early Soviet period, the Bolsheviks made efforts to print materials relating to their world-revolutionary agitprop campaigns in minority languages.  [47] This was part of the Bolsheviks’ general agitprop strategy among non-European ethnicities on Soviet territory. For example, a circular letter from the Central Committee in early 1920 stressed that the “backwardness” of the “peoples of the East” did not relieve Bolshevik agitators of the duty to do work among them.  [48] The MOPR, too, in its internal communications, constantly reminded its functionaries of the necessity of world-revolutionary propaganda among national minorities.  [49]

23However, the Bolsheviks did not assume that members of non-European national minorities would automatically feel solidarity with all “toilers” around the world. Rather, they assumed that non-European Soviet nationalities would be more likely to identify with the struggles of those who were similarly “Eastern”. It is no coincidence that Pavel Lepeshinskii, head of the MOPR, imagined the following kind of international solidarity between Soviet and foreign citizens emerging under the auspices of his organisation:

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“The muzhik from Arkhangel’sk finds in his heart the warmest feelings for the prisoners in Barcelona. The mountain-dweller of Dagestan develops a moral attachment to the victims of imperialist reaction in far-away India”.  [50]

25The Bolsheviks thus tended to take the “backwardness” of non-Europeans as a given,  [51] denying their ability to experience universal internationalist solidarity. In Lepeshinskii’s words, while even the Russian peasant from Arkhangel’sk was able to feel solidarity with any other toiler in the world, the Caucasian mountain-dweller was assumed not to be capable of such universalism—his solidarity had to be assigned to a similarly “Oriental” target.

26This assumption of “backwardness” marked the MOPR’s work with “Eastern” Soviet nationalities. In its press, the organisation made sure that reports on repression in the colonial world were contrasted with and at the same time contextualised by reports on solidarity in Soviet Asia.  [52] This “orientalisation” of non-European ethnicities’ international solidarity manifested itself in the instructions for the organisation of a “MOPR in the Soviet East Week” in mid-1925, one of whose suggestions was to produce “wall newspapers in colourful Eastern style [stengazety v iarkom Vostochnom stile]”.  [53]

27It is symptomatic, however, that the “Week” was cancelled shortly afterwards, due to the absence of any earlier systematic MOPR agitation in Soviet Asia.  [54] World-revolutionary agitprop among non-Russian ethnicities was beset by the same problems as this kind of agitprop in general: lack of interest from the local population and a lack of suitable cadre. Central Asia was the MOPR’s weakest region in terms of membership, providing a mere 0.3 % of the organisation’s members in 1925.  [55] And the ethnic composition of its meagre membership in the “non-Russian” regions was telling: of the 25,600 MOPR members in Tatarstan in 1927, 16,756 were defined as “Russian”, while only 7,562 were “Tatar”.  [56]

28It was not only practical difficulties that hindered the Russian Bolsheviks in conducting world-revolutionary internationalist agitprop among non-Russian minorities. Issues connected with language and assumed cultural superiority were obstacles as well. Emblematic of this is a MOPR poster from the second half of the 1920s, with its call to the reader: “Toiler of the East, don’t forget the suffering of your foreign brothers! Join the MOPR!” The appeal, however, is in Russian.  [57] It is possible that native-language versions were produced, but the idea of such a poster at all—addressing the “toilers of the East”, but in Russian—correlates with a tendency of the Soviet regime to view the Russian language as a privileged vehicle of culture. While the languages of the national minorities were theoretically the equals of Russian and were supported under the korenizatsiia policy, the Russian language was seen as something that the non-Russian nationalities needed to master to play their part in the Federation and to gain access to Soviet culture.  [58] There was more to this than practical considerations regarding Russian as the lingua franca of the empire: mastery of the Russian language was supposed to bring non-Russian nationalities closer to the “international proletariat”.  [59] When local Bolsheviks discussed in a provincial party journal the question of whether to use Tatar or Russian in party education, the following arguments were raised:

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“The Russian language is rich in literature. It has become the international language of revolutionary workers. To master this language means entering into the sphere of international revolution. Thus, even though at the beginning of [party school] education the language has to remain Tatar, by the end of the course Russian has to prevail, and the graduate must master this language”.  [60]

30National minorities could thus not enter the “sphere of international revolution” through their own cultures only—they needed Russian culture and language as mediators. It is noteworthy, too, that this article appeared not in the late 1920s or early 1930s, when the korenizatsiia policy was being de facto abandoned, but as early as 1921.

31This stance echoes the Bolsheviks’—and particularly Lenin’s—assumption that the Russian revolution would serve as trailblazer for the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples. While in 1917-1918 Lenin had explicitly warned against setting the Russian revolution up as an example for the revolutions expected in other countries, he gradually but steadily revised his standpoint in the years that followed, not only declaring the Bolshevik party to be an example to revolutionary parties worldwide but also identifying the Russian soviet or council model as particularly appropriate to “Eastern” revolutions.  [61] Even though Lenin never explicitly prescribed Russian culture to “Eastern” peoples, in practice it was held that Russian language and culture were valuable to non-Russian ethnicities because they opened to them the doors of world culture in general and the culture of the international proletariat in particular. In their “backwardness”, “Eastern” minorities were perceived as needing the “Russian proletariat” as a mediator to connect them to the “world-revolutionary family”.  [62] This can be seen as a precursor to the later, Stalinist assumption of the Russians’ cultural superiority over the other peoples of the Soviet Union.

Internationalism turned inwards

32The discussion above suggests some correlation at least between the inequality within Stalinist intra-Soviet internationalism (as expressed in the assumption of non-Russian peoples’ need for guidance by the Russians) and the transformation of the relation between Soviet society and the world revolution—and with that the transformation of the Soviet concept of “internationalism” itself. In the earliest years after 1917, the “international proletariat” was believed to be superior to the Soviet working class—the “advanced” Western proletarians were to deliver Soviet Russia from its backwardness by their victorious uprising, and in the end, all would fuse together in a global Communist commonwealth. The korenizatsiia concept was likewise geared to the levelling of inequalities in a not-too-distant future: non-Russian nationalities were to be supported by “affirmative action” so that they could become “advanced” and thus the equals of the Russian industrial proletariat in a Communist state.  [63] After 1923, however, the relationship of subject and object in world-revolutionary internationalism underwent the inversion described above. As the agent of the international solidarity proclaimed by the MOPR, the “Soviet toiler” was more “advanced” than the incarcerated revolutionary fighter in the West, for the first represented the nation of “victorious socialism” while the second stood for revolutionary failure. And as the revolution in the West continued to keep the Bolsheviks waiting, this new configuration became permanent.

33However, following the victory of Stalin’s faction in the inner-party struggle, and the subsequent dominance of his doctrine of “Socialism in one country”, those objects of solidarity became increasingly irrelevant to the Soviet project. The Soviet Union became the imagined centre of the world not only in Stalin-era political geography  [64] but also in visual representations of revolutionary internationalism, a good example being Gustav Klutsis’s poster “The USSR—the Shock Workers’ Brigade of the Proletariat of the Whole World” (1931).

Ill. 2. Gustav Klutsis, “SSSR- Udarnaia brigada proletariata vsego mira”, “The USSR—the Shock Workers’ Brigade of the Proletar iat of the Whole World”, Izogiz, Leningrad, Moscou, 1931, 143 x103, 30 000 ex.
http://redavantgarde.com/collection/show-collection/818-the-ussr-is-the-shock-brigade-for-the-proletariat-of-the-entire-world.html (consulté en septembre 2016).

34While the world proletariat as a whole remains the theme, with the images organised around a schematic globe, it is a gigantic (and presumably Russian) Soviet worker who plants the red flag on top. All other characters are confined to the lower left-hand corner, with three stereotypical heads of an “Indian”, a “Negro”, and a “Chinese” in the foreground while the formerly advanced workers of the Western countries, represented by a march of the German Rotfrontkämpferbund, are relegated to a distant background.  [65]

35With the vanishing of the foreign objects of international solidarity, it was only natural that “internationalism” should turn inward. The term was now almost exclusively used to refer to the relation between Soviet “nationalities”—a vestige of the third of the three senses of internationalism outlined earlier, the anti-chauvinist notion of inter-ethnic fraternity. However, given the privileged position accorded to the Russians in the Stalinist domestic order, this “internationalism” could now only be chauvinist. As Boris Groys points out, Stalinist Soviet internationalism “did not mean a one-sided universalism that would overcome and efface ethnic differences. To the contrary … none of its citizens were allowed ever to forget where they came from”.  [66] It is enough to recall the infamous “section five” of the Soviet passport, which permanently fixed its holder’s ethnicity (national’nost’). This inequality, however, was not simply a consequence of the chauvinist nature of the Stalinist regime itself, for it was already inscribed in the inversion of the relation of subject and object, agency and dependence, in the domain of “world-revolutionary” internationalism. Just as foreign revolutionaries had been permanently redefined as victims and objects of care, so were the non-Russian “peoples” of the Soviet Union made permanently inferior to their Russian “brothers”. It is not only, then, that the concept of “internationalism” migrated from the domain of world revolution to that of inter-ethnic affairs; late in its “world revolution” phase, the concept had already been redefined in such a way as to anticipate the later inequality.