Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Volume 11)

by Alexandre Bennigsen, S. Enders Wimbush

In this study, Bennigsen and Wimbush trace the development of the doctrine of national communism in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the heart of this doctrine—as elaborated by the Volga Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev—was the concept of "proletarian nations," as opposed to the traditional notion of a working class. With such ideological innovations, Sultan Galiev and his contemporaries were able to reconcile Marxist nationalisms and Islam and devise an "Eastern strategy" whereby the national revolution was to be spread.

The authors show that the ideas of Muslim national communism persist in the land of their birth and have spread to such developing societies as China, Algeria, and Indonesia. This doctrine is an important factor in the ideological split and increasing tensions between industrial and nonindustrial nations, East and West, and now North and South, which grip the world communist movement.

Genres: Islam, Russia, History, Nonfiction, Politics

290 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 1980

Reviews

[Mirza Sultan-Galiev]

A solid book on a rather obscure but important subject.
My interest in this area was first piqued by reading scattered references to attempts at a synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism in early Soviet Buryatia.
Sultan Galiev deserves recognition for both rapidly adapting a realistically pessimistic view of the future of the state apparatus which developed out of the October Revolution ("state capitalism" and "Russian chauvinism"), and for understanding that the revolutionary struggles of the 20th Century would center on the super-exploited colonial and semi-colonial world (at a time when most Marxists insisted that the metropolitan working class was still the key link).
The author seems to rather unfairly imply that his Marxism was more or less a mere cloak for some kind of fascistic national populism, which is easy enough to claim in hindsight, considering the uniformly bourgeois-capitalist development of the anti-colonial liberation movements.
However one can also view his thought as standing in the same tradition as the left elements of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party and Cabral's work in Guinea-Bissau, as a creative attempt to develop a non-dogmatic and practical socialist theory free from the deterministic "stage theory" which Marx also came to oppose in his later years.

[Mike]

2.5 I greatly appreciated the rare English translations of some important works from Sultan Galiev in the appendix (though I wish works from other *significant* Muslim National Communists like Ryskulov, Narimanov, or Ibragimov were included as well) but the write-up from Bennigsen and Wimbush is quite poor. Factual errors, glaring omissions (zero mention of Safarov’s stand against Great Russian Chauvinism in Turkestan?), and a quite un-nuanced portrayal of both the broad spectrum of post-revolution Bolshevism and Muslim National Communism itself. It’s quite a shame given the lack of Anglophone scholarship on the topic.