Abstract
Russian politician Vladimir Medinsky’s criticisms of Marx turn out, on close inspection, to be poorly sourced and inaccurate; this is unsurprising, given their author’s ideological stance and his track record of falsifications. But examination of Marx and Engels’ writings does reveal alarming rhetoric about Slav peoples (in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions), along with inaccuracies of their own: a mistranslation from the Russian historian Karamzin, and repeated references to a fake document, the so-called “Will of Peter the Great.” Marx used these supposed citations to support his view that Russia was the most serious threat to the revolutionary movement in Europe, and to the wider world. While his concerns in his earlier years were understandable, the nature of the Russian regime had changed by the 1870s, requiring new policies and terminology. Meanwhile, Marx gained a closer acquaintance with Russian language and culture, allowing him to develop a more nuanced position; this led to his writing influential texts (in particular, letters addressing topics of historical inevitability and the existence of diverse paths for societal development).
Few individuals have had a greater influence on Russia’s history than Karl Marx, and his views on the country have long been the object of scholarly interest. 1 In a recent book, Vesa Oittinen characterizes them as a “hate-love” relationship (2023, 1). The “hate” element—or to describe it more accurately, his strong aversion to the Tsarist regime, particularly between the 1840s and 1860s—has led some critics to use the term “Russophobia” (Borowska 2002, 87). One of these is the influential Russian politician Vladimir Medinsky; but, as we shall see, his critique of Marx relies on incorrect attributions and specious claims. Later, though, we will also see that Marx himself was not immune from misattributions, in the form of an inaccurate translation and a forged document, references to both of which made their way into his pronouncements on Russia.
As for “love” of Russia, this (again an overstatement) refers to the years after 1870, which Oittinen and Ewa Borowska both identify as the last of three periods in Marx’s relationship with the country (Borowska 2002). This coincided with various developments. Firstly, Capital was translated into Russian, by Nikolai Danielson, which led to many Russians engaging with Marx’s ideas. Around the same time, Marx began learning Russian; he later explained that he had done so to allow him “to reach an informed judgment of the economic development of contemporary Russia,” as well as to correspond with Danielson on matters of translation (Angus 2022). This meant that he could read first-hand the works of radical writers including Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and engage critically with the ideas of “utopian socialists” such as Alexander Herzen. Marx corresponded with the Russian thinkers Vera Zasulich and Nikolai Mikhailovsky; his letters to them, and unsent drafts thereof, have assumed an important place in the canon (Eaton 1980, 110). Both these radicals sought to argue that their country could follow a distinct course towards socialism, building on institutions such as the peasant commune, which Chernyshevsky and Herzen had both seen as embodying rudiments of a cooperative society.
The idea that Russia might “leapfrog” the capitalist route ran counter to some deterministic readings of Marx’s works, which seemed to indicate that a socialist revolution could only occur in an advanced industrialized society, in which workers had been fully deprived of ownership in the means of production and could subsist only through selling their labor. In his replies, Marx sought to distance himself from strongly determinist interpretations, and instead to leave open the possibility of multiple paths of historical development (Shanin 1983). His arguments in these letters have been applied more widely, outside the Marxist tradition, to argue for a view of social change as being necessarily “uneven, interdependent, and multilinear” (Makki 2015, 482).
Earlier in life, though, Marx’s views on Russia were less developed. Oittinen states that “The young and partly yet the middle-aged Marx was, to use an expression today en vogue among the right-wing ‘patriotic’ circles in Russia, almost a russophobe” (2023, 1). Borowska argues that “His hatred for Russia even turns into obsession: in spite of his materialistic standpoint, he becomes an adherent of the conspiracy theory of history” (2002, 87–8). 2
Marx’s earlier views should be seen in the context of their time. Russia under Nicholas I had intervened to crush revolts in Poland and Hungary; for this reason, “European radicals of the age generally viewed Russia with a critical eye” (Oittinen 2023, 1). As Isaac Deutscher put it, “In those years Russia was to Marx still identical with Tsardom, and Tsardom was the hated ‘gendarme of European reaction’. His and Engels’ main preoccupation was to arouse Europe against that gendarme, for they believed that a European war against Russia would hasten the progress of the West towards socialism” (1969, 68–9). Nicholas I exercised influence over the Prussian authorities, and was even instrumental in causing them to close down a newspaper for which Marx wrote, although it appears that the latter was unaware of this (Marx and Ledbetter 2007, xii).
A second period can be identified after the Crimean War of 1854–56. It is characterized by Marx’s growing interest in Russia and the Slav world, but continuing suspicion towards the Tsarist regime. A case in point is his attitude to the proposed emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II’s government. In an 1858 letter to Engels, he expressed an optimistic view: The movement for the emancipation of the serfs in Russia strikes me as important in so far as it indicates the beginning of an internal development that might run counter to the country's traditional foreign policy. (Collected Works, volume 40, 310)
But in 1860, in his little-known book Herr Vogt, he took a far more cynical view, while also showing awareness of the agrarian communes: The emancipation of the serfs in the way intended by the Russian government would increase Russia’s aggressive power one hundredfold. Its purpose is simply to perfect the autocracy by tearing down the many barriers offered to the great autocrat by the many petty autocrats of the Russian nobility resting on serfdom, as well as by the self-governing peasant communities whose material basis, common ownership, is to be destroyed by the so-called emancipation. (Marx 1982, 76)
Misrepresentations of Marx
Some of Marx’s pronouncements from his earlier periods have been used against him by representatives of the nationalist Right in post-Soviet Russia. Vladimir Medinsky is a former Minister of Culture in the Putin government, who has gained prominence as the head of Russia’s team of negotiators in talks with Ukraine; he also oversees the production of textbooks for the national history curriculum in Russian schools. He has brought out a series of books on the theme of “Myths about Russia,” in one of which he targets Marx, calling him “one of the leading Russophobes of the nineteenth century” (2012, 94). Medinsky’s work has been translated into English and published under the title Myths about Russia. In this text, we read that Marx: … consistently held that Western civilization, its historical path, was a model that all other countries and peoples should follow. Marx saw the qualities peculiar to these civilizations mere deviations from the “norm,” a backwardness and “atavism” that prevented normal development [sic]. Considering the Russians to be a people “without a history,” Marx seriously claimed that “hatred of the Russians was, and still is, the first revolutionary passion,” and called for a decisive campaign of terror against the Slavic peoples. During the revolutions of 1848 he urged the German and Austrian militarists to “trample the delicate flower of Slavic independence” (Medinsky 2011, 66–7).
Unpacking some of the citations in this passage reveals serious inaccuracies. The supposed quotation “a people without a history” is not referenced. Marx did himself use this phrase, most famously in an article on India 3 ; but he seems never to have applied it to Russians. Engels also utilized the term “nonhistoric peoples” freely, but also not about Russians—in fact, he specifically excluded them from this category (Collected Works, volume 8, 367). Rather, he used it about “small nationalities,” in particular the Slav peoples of what in his day was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Czechs and Croats. He saw these ethnic groups as having “betrayed” the hopes of the 1848 revolutionaries, by siding with the forces of autocracy. He also cited Bretons, Basques, and Scottish Gaels as “ruins of people” (this is sometimes also translated as “remnants of people”) who were always “fanatic carriers of counterrevolution” (Marx and Engels 1952, 63).
Marx and Engels both derived the idea of “nonhistoric peoples” from Hegel (Oittinen 2023, 99). 4 Roman Rosdolsky, a Ukrainian Marxist, explicitly criticized its use in a 1948 book, and sought to blame the Hegelian legacy for it. “The concept of nonhistoricity offers as its ultima ratio the notion of ‘national viability’, which smacks of metaphysics,” he wrote, which “stood in contradiction to the materialist conception of history which Engels himself helped create” (Rosdolski, 1986, 128). Similarly, the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer argued that Engels’ contentions had been “definitively refuted by the history of the nineteenth century,” although he did retain the use of the term “nonhistorical nations” (2000, 159).
The relevant articles by Engels have been published under a couple of titles: The Magyar Struggle and Democratic Pan-Slavism.
5
They also contain Medinsky’s next quote (“hatred of the Russians was, and still is, the first revolutionary passion”), which he is clearly mistaken in attributing to Marx. It is actually an incomplete quote from Engels’ article in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of February 16, 1849: … we reply that hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution. (Marx and Engels 1952, 83)
The last supposed quotation is the supposed call to “trample the delicate flower of Slavic independence.” Medinsky presents this quotation as being from Marx, but the English edition of his work gives no reference; the Russian version includes a footnote pointing to Franz Mehring’s biography of Marx. Checking the pages referenced in that biography, we find that Mehring was in fact not quoting either Marx or Engels, but rather summarizing (critically) Engels’ writings during the 1848–49 revolutions: The historic right of the great cultural peoples to pursue their revolutionary development was more important than the struggle of these small, crippled and impotent nations and groups for independence, even if here and there some delicate national bud should be broken off at the stem (Mehring 1962, 164–5).
Medinsky’s sloppiness in his citations should come as no surprise: despite his high profile, he has dubious credibility as an academic historian, having apparently plagiarised his PhD dissertation (McGlynn 2023, 44; Times 2025). He has a track record of inventing historical quotes (Sauer 2025). His criticisms of Marx should be seen in the context of contemporary Russian politics, in which the Communists are still the largest opposition party in electoral terms. Medinsky, a member of Putin’s United Russia grouping, has a clear motivation to attack their intellectual forefathers. His wider point—that Marx held “that Western civilization, its historical path, was a model that all other countries and peoples should follow”—is also disproven by anything more than a cursory reading of Marx’s work. In particular, as we saw above, the letters to Mikhailovsky and Zasulich show the exact opposite to be true.
Attributing Engels’ articles to Marx is clearly an example of slipshod scholarship. However, we do know that the two men “wrote their newspaper articles in collaboration and copied freely from each other” (Oittinen 2023, 156). 6 Marx was editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, so his publication of the articles cited above was a form of endorsement; moreover, he expressed similar views elsewhere (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 55).
And we should admit that some of Engels’ assertions can appear quite hair-raising to a modern reader. In April 1855, in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, he wrote the article Pan-Slavism and the Crimean War, stating, “It leaves Europe only one alternative: submission to the Slavic yoke or destruction forever of the center of its offensive strength – Russia.”
7
Earlier, in 1849, he wrote an article which was later published under various titles (The Magyar Struggle and Hungary and Panslavism). This article contains repeated references to Slav people as “barbarians” and “ethnic trash,” and culminates thus: The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.
8
Reactions from within the Marxist tradition to these utterances have generally ranged from embarrassment to what Karl Kautsky described as his own “extreme amazement” (Rosdolski, 1986, 1, 86). Some critics have characterized them using phrases like “unmistakable Nazi-style rhetoric” (Mitchinson 1991, 226). Even the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party of the USSR criticized Engels’ “erroneous judgments on the past and future of the small Slav peoples incorporated into Austria” (Oittinen 2023, 100).
Some scholars have come to Engels’ defence. Hal Draper and Ernst Haberkern note that the “kinds of racial and ethnic terminology” he uses “were common in their day,” and situate the remarks in the context of disappointment at the failure of the 1848 uprisings, as “a product of thorough confusion—and of rage” (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 37, 134). The articles should also be seen against the backdrop of Marx and Engels’ dispute with Mikhail Bakunin, who was calling for revolutionaries to support independence movements amongst Slavs, sometimes resorting to Pan-Slavist arguments which had reactionary implications (Rosdolski, 1986, 133).
Paul Blackledge also offers a qualified defence of Engels. He admits that “the concept of nonhistoric peoples is idealistic and intellectually worthless,” calling it an “analytically useless conceptual architecture” which “essentializes what are in reality temporary and contingent national characteristics” (Blackledge 2019, 82–6). But he shows that in the case of the Czechs, Engels sympathized with them rather than condemning them, feeling they had been let down by Western democrats. Furthermore, later in life, Engels did make attempts to move beyond Hegelian terminology to articulate an approach which emphasized the value of national independence for progressive movements (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 54).
More generally, Blackledge stresses, as do Draper and Haberkern, that behind the “bad formulation” of the term “nonhistoric peoples,” there lay serious and intractable questions: “What is the solution when a national movement chooses to follow reactionary leaders and allow its interests to be used against equally valid claims of other nations and peoples? … And what do you do when nations with equally valid claims to the land assert their right to self-determination?” (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 141). For many in the Marxist tradition, Lenin’s answer—to insist on the right of self-determination of peoples, while distinguishing between that right and the question of its desirability in specific cases—provided the closest approximation to a solution to these dilemmas. However, it probably does not need to be emphasized that such questions, far from disappearing, continue to plague modern geopolitics.
Marx and Karamzin: a case of mistranslation
In various of Marx’s commentaries on Russia, he made reference to the Russian historian, novelist and poet Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826). In an 1854 article in the New York Tribune, Marx quoted Karamzin as stating that “nothing changes in our (Russian) external policy” (Marx and Engels 1952, 178). He repeated this citation in an 1867 speech, to support a claim that Russia was bent on dominating the world: In the first place the policy of Russia is changeless, according to the admission of its official historian, the Muscovite Karamsin. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy – world domination – is a fixed star (Marx and Engels 1952, 106).
9
Both these texts were later published in a 1952 English-language collection of Marx and Engels’ work entitled The Russian Menace to Europe. This anthology has been described as “an attempt to enroll Marx and Engels as Cold-War freedom fighters” (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 179). In the introduction, the editors drew a direct parallel with what they argued was the expansionist policy of the USSR under Stalin, citing then-recent events in Czechoslovakia and Korea: “The aims and methods of Czarist foreign policy as described by Marx and Engels have striking parallels in the objectives and methods of Soviet foreign policy of the last few years” (Marx and Engels 1952, 14).
The “changeless Russia” quote gained particularly wide circulation; it was cited in the House of Commons (by a Socialist MP), and in 1968, the Birmingham Daily Post published an article, “Changeless Russia – by Marx,” citing The Russian Menace, and stating that Marx’s assertion from a century earlier “seems out-of-tune with 1968 only in the reference to the Muscovite Karamsin” (Anonymous 1968). Marx’s words were also quoted in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, in an article about “damming the red tide” (Dobriansky 1963). Coming to the present day, a new book criticizing the Putin government’s foreign policy features the quote as its epigraph (Ó Beachain 2025, 1).
Karamzin Quote and Various Translations
Importantly, though, in making its way into Marx’s writings, the Karamzin quote was mistranslated. In the original (volume 11 of the Istoriia), it was a past-tense statement about Russia’s foreign policy at a specific point in time (roughly 1602, during the reign of Boris Godunov); nothing in the context indicates that Karamzin intended it to apply more widely. This is accurately reflected in the modern translation by Geoff Baldwin (see Table 1). In Marx’s hands, though, it becomes a present-tense sentence, asserting a “general truth” or “trope” about Russian expansionism. As Table 1 shows, this mistranslation seems to have originated with Urquhart, who used the altered quote in various publications, including a book arguing for war against Russia (1839, 90). Furthermore, there is no reference to “world domination” in the Karamzin quote, whereas Marx’s text could be read as attributing this assertion to Karamzin.
The Supposed Will of Peter the Great
Marx’s 1867 speech (quoted above) also includes an apparent reference to a document, the so-called “Testament of Peter the Great.” This purported to be the will of Tsar Peter I (1672–1725), in which he gave directions to his successors, urging them to conquer all of Europe, “Keep up continued wars with Turkey and with Persia,” “advance toward India,” and possess “the whole of the East” (Magruder 1878). In some later versions, this was extended to include a call for world domination.
Marx cited this document more than once. “On the Eastern Question,” a collection of Marx’s articles and editorials published later by Eleanor Marx and her husband, contains several references to it, including a leader in the New York Tribune in April 1853 which mentions “the moment when the principal paragraph of the will of Peter the Great—the conquest of the Bosphorus—will have become an accomplished fact” (Marx et al. 1897, 24). This unsigned article was jointly written by Marx and Engels (Lewitter 1961, 35). Similarly, Marx’s article “Traditional Policy of Russia,” published in the same paper on August 12, 1853, states, Politicians are wont to refer to the Testament of Peter I, in order to show the traditional policy of Russia in general, and particularly with regard to her views on Constantinople. (Marx et al. 1897, 79)
Marx was far from alone in referencing the Testament. A search of British newspaper archives of the time reveals many articles about it, including the London Standard opinion piece of February 1854 mentioned above. It was regularly quoted by Urquhart (1853, 244, 277, 414), and by his follower William Cargill (1841, 213–4). 14
However, “Historians have since proved irrefutably that the ‘Will’ was a complete forgery,” to quote the editors of the Marx-Engels Collected Works (Marx and Engels, 2010b, 644). The evidence for this includes anachronisms, such as a reference to “Germany, which being the nearest nation to you,” when no such nation-state existed in the early eighteenth century. Lucjan Lewitter, a Polish historian, described it as “a very imperfect piece of forgery” and persuasively argues that “Peter would never have spoken of any part of his army as ‘Asiatic hordes’ nor could he have used the modern word ‘Germany’” (1961, 36). More tellingly still, no original version of the document was ever found, despite open access to the archives of Tsarist Russia.
The Testament seems to have originated at the turn of the nineteenth century, and was first published in 1812 in a book entitled On the Progress of Russian Power, written by Charles Lesur, an employee of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was part of an anti-Russian propaganda drive undertaken during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the same year; many copies of the book were taken by French soldiers with them during this campaign, and abandoned by them during their retreat (Resis 1985, 684). It subsequently went through “many editions and versions,” with the addition of a preamble and of language referring to world domination (Resis 1985, 686).
Arguably, Marx can to some extent be forgiven because the inauthentic nature of the Testament had not been conclusively proven, at least at the time of his earlier writing: “Despite growing doubts about the authenticity of the ‘Testament’, no scholarly examination of the question was undertaken until 1859” (Resis 1985, 689). By 1879, though, the extant versions of the text had been shown to be fakes (Resis 1985, 690). In 1890, Engels expressed doubt that Peter had written the Testament (Marx and Engels 1952, 31). By the early twentieth century, scholars were agreed that it was inauthentic.
This has not stopped the Testament being exhumed at various points when propaganda required it as an illustration of Russian expansionist tendencies. It “received wide circulation both in England and in France during the Crimean War, and by order of Napoleon III many copies of the document were posted on buildings in Paris and throughout France” (Lehovich 1948, 119). German sources cited it during both world wars; Harry Truman referred to it as a genuine document in private letters and discussions (Clifford 1980). Time magazine quoted it in 1979 as a guide to Soviet policy in Afghanistan (Resis 1985, 681), and former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears to have referenced it (Aleksanyan 2018).
In 1969, Marx’s Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and Story of the life of Lord Palmerston were published in a single volume. These are two of Marx’s least-known, and most unusual, works. Both of them first appeared in Urquhart’s newspapers; the general focus of both is to argue that British policy since Peter I’s time had been motivated by excessive sympathy towards Russia. 15 Here, too, the myth of Peter’s will persisted: the 1969 volume’s editor, Lester Hutchinson, in his introduction, wrote that “India was one of the countries that Peter the Great had indicated in his will as an indispensable object of future acquisition by Russia, and plans for its conquest were a recurrent feature of long-term Russian strategy” (Marx and Hutchinson 1969, 36).
Conclusion
Even the most profound thinkers are fallible. Marx allowed a couple of dubious sources to enter into his writings and speeches on Russia; he probably picked these up from Urquhart, or from the London press. As John Gleason showed in a classic study, that press, and British elite opinion more generally, moved in a “Russophobic” direction in the years 1815–1841, despite the major foreign policy aims of the two countries being “basically harmonious” (1950, 3).
Marx’s readiness to incorporate these sources arguably reflects his general antipathy to Russia’s regime—a distrust which was understandable, especially in his earlier period. Referring to his writings on this topic, Draper and Haberkern warn that “If you simply take these quotes and string them together you get a picture of Marx as a war-mongering monomaniac” (2005, 57). This is easy to do from a Russian perspective, as Medinsky shows (although he relies on a series of false attributions).
Marx and Engels were not pacifists; in the 1840s, they saw war as a threat to an established order which they opposed. The enthusiasm with which they advocated that the revolutionary German democracy go to war against Russia (and even against Denmark) can be difficult to sympathize with for 21st-century readers, aware as we are of the horrors of total war which have disfigured the intervening years. Some of Marx’s articles on both the 1848 revolutions and the Crimean War have a “bellicose, ‘prowar’ tone” (Draper and Haberkern 2005, 14, 61); but we should note that he was simultaneously calling for revolution against the Western imperial powers, a position which Engels expressed in 1854: There is a sixth power in Europe, which at any given moment asserts its supremacy over the whole of the five so-called “great” powers [that is, England, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria] and makes them tremble, every one of them. That power is the revolution (Blackledge 2019, 121).
Draper and Haberkern also make the persuasive argument that Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War changed the nature of its regime, and therefore helps to explain the justified shift in Marx’s position: Marx and Engels did not consider the Crimean War to be a conflict between two equally reactionary powers. They clearly looked forward to a Russian defeat which they believed, rightly as it turned out, would have revolutionary consequences inside Russia… In 1848, Marx, Engels and radicals of all political shades looked forward to a war by revolutionary Germany, under the leadership of bourgeois democratic revolutionaries, against Tsarist Russia. Marx and Engels, after 1870, did not desire a war with Russia. They feared it. And they were adamant that they would not support any of the governments in such a war. They were for using the crisis of war to replace the governments in all countries be they republics or monarchies. (2005, 57, 114)
Rosa Luxemburg made a similar point in her “Junius pamphlet,” in which she sought to refute those Germans who used Marx’s anti-Russian statements as arguments for socialists to support the country’s role in World War One (1919, 66). Generally, a politics which made some sense in the late 1840s was clearly no longer valid in the 1870s; as we have seen, despite some “inertia”, both Marx and Engels decisively moved beyond their earlier positions and terminology.
As an afterword, we should note the existence, in regard to Peter’s “Will”, of what we might call a “fake but true” approach—a feeling that, while this supposed document is inauthentic, it nevertheless represents an element of truth about Russian behavior. Various historians have taken this approach. For example, Walter Kelly presented a summary of the Will in his History of Russia of 1854; he mentioned that “Doubts have been cast upon the authenticity” of the document, but continued, “Independently, however, of its authenticity, the will possesses great intrinsic interest, as embodying principles of action which have been notoriously followed out by Russia during the last hundred years” (1854, 373). Similarly, Henry Ketcham, in a “Note on the alleged will of Peter the Great” in a biography of that ruler in 1908, wrote that, “The subject is considered as closed. It is practically certain that Peter died without making a will. No Russian, either scholar or official, believes that he made one”; nonetheless, he went on to say that “the ideas of national expansion have been, without the aid of a written document, unchangeably fixed in the minds of all the Russian powers since Peter’s day … Nearly a century has passed since Napoleon ordered the writing of the will, and nearly two centuries since the death of Peter; but the Russian policy has not swerved, the same ideas are more persistent and urgent as the centuries pass” (Barrow and Ketcham 1908, 404–5).
Viewing the foreign policy of the Putin government, some readers may be tempted to reach a similar conclusion. They may feel the same way about the mistaken quotation from Karamzin; or, more generally, they may believe that there is something inherent in Russian culture which lends itself to militarism and imperial expansion.
I would argue that this is a dangerous approach, for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, a fake is a fake, and a mistranslation is a mistranslation. More profoundly, though, Russian culture—like that of other imperial powers—includes diverse strands: militaristic and pacifistic, expansionist and isolationist. “Essentialist” understandings of Russia fall foul of the same error which Engels ran into in some of his pronouncements on Slavs: an (uncharacteristic for him) fetishizing of the national, and its elevation above the social. By indulging in such fallacious reasoning, we also risk jettisoning a key insight associated with the Marxist tradition (and one which has always won it converts from a range of political backgrounds): its rejection of national stereotyping, in favor of a recognition that the causes of oppression, militarism and war are to be found in objective factors (usually those connected with class structure, often compounded by economics or geopolitics).
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.