Introduction

To understand the national question in Soviet history ultimately means to know the scholarship that informed it. Among the most important of the scholars, perhaps surprisingly, was I.V. Dzhugashvili, also known by his underground name as Koba Stalin. His first major article on the subject, “Social Democracy and the National Question” (1913), was not just a crafty polemic against the Austrian Marxists, as most scholars have proposed. Written for the party academic journal, Enlightenment (Prosveshchenie), it was also a well-read piece on the subject of nations and nationalism. One of the last major publications before his death, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” (1950), recapitulated the themes. Originally published in Pravda in serial parts, it was a polemic to be sure, but framed within the rather dry analysis of linguistics. In between came a host of speeches, articles, pamphlets and discussions on language and national issues. Some were more academic than others. All were political. All confronted, to one degree or another, language as a constituent “form” of the nation. Or, as Karl Marx intimated in the quote above, language as a privileged field within which we humans move and act and think.