Prison of peoples
Prison of peoples or prison of nations is a phrase popularized by Vladimir Lenin in 1914. He applied it to Russia, describing the national policy of that time. According to the historian K.V. Dushenko, Lenin was probably inspired by Ukrainian and Polish journalism of the early 20th century.
Engels had used the phrase in his writing in related context. It is also associated with Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky's criticism of "Russia—prison of the peoples" and "Russia—international gendarmerie".
The main meaning of the phrase was the general idea of the Russian Empire as a backward authoritarian state. This definition was also sometimes used in relation to other multinational states that suppressed the desire of peoples for self-determination.
Before Lenin
Marquis Adolphe de CustineOne of the first allusion to the concept is in Marquis Adolphe de Custine's book Russia in 1839 published in 1843. de Custine writes that:
The metaphor de Custine uses is indirect here, he states that Russia is a prison, and that the Tsar is a jailer of a third of the globe, but not that Russia is a prison of peoples.In an English addition to his book published in the same year called The Empire of the Czar; or, observations on the social, political, and religious state and prospects of Russia, however, he uses a similar phrase:
Dushenko argues that the phrase "prison of people" applies in a general sense to the population of the Empire, and more specifically to the Polish people, the only people that de Custines sees as more enlightened than the Russians. As de Custines elaborates:
Lajos Kossuth
The next use of the phrase is by Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the failed 1848 Hungarian revolution. Kossuth states the following in an 1852 speech in New York:
According to Dushenko the "tranquility of affairs" refers to the status quo after the Vienna congress, and the "nations" that Kossuth refers to are the Hungarians, the Polish, and the Austrians, the "great nations", as opposed to the "small nations" such as the Slovaks or the Ukrainians.
Engels
In 1860, Friedrich Engels writes an article called "Was Hat die Arbeitersklasse mit Polen zu tun?". According to Boris Meissner, Engels emphasizes the necessity of National Liberation in places with a civilisation, a historical development, and a strong bourgeoisie as a precursor to proletarian revolution. Engels distinguishes between the Geschichtslose Völker and the people with a history. He explicitly talks about Polish liberation.
Marx
In 1870, Marx fully changes his position on national liberation, writing in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt on the subject of Ireland, that:
According to Rodolsky, this is the start of a gradual shift of Marx and Engels abandoning the distinction between historic and non-historic peoples. This change in thinking eventually leads to the 2nd International making a declaration during its third conference in 1889 London on the national question:
Ukrainian-Polish journalism
According to Dushenko, in 1900, a USDP member, Yevgeny Kosevich, wrote an obituary for Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the Social [Democratic Party of Germany|SPD]. The USDP was a Ukrainian Social-democratic party from Austrian Galicia. One of Liebknecht's main, merits, Kosevich believed, was that "Russia, this 'prison of nations', was for him the embodiment of tyranny, and the struggle against Russia was the starting point of his views on foreign policy". Liebknecht was writing within the context of the German Social-democratic dialogue on Poland started by Engels and Marx.
In 1902,Tadeusz Grużewski, belonging to the Polish national-democratic camp, published an article “Former and Current Representations of Russia,” where, in particular, it was noted that in the era of Romanticism “to our politicians... and not only to politicians, Tsarism was seen as a black abyss of reaction, as a huge prison of nations, and Siberia, penal battalions, and finally, whips were not merely a metaphor.”
According to Dushenko, this language became used in a limited fashion within the scene of Ukrainian and Polish nationalist journalism and poetry.
Finally in June 1906, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian professor and nationalist from Lviv wrote an article titled "Unity or Disintegration". To Dushenko, this is the most developed form of the "prison of nations" metaphor:
In 1912, the Ukrainian parties of Galicia called for a Ukrainian university in Lviv. By this point Gruschevsky's metaphor had become popular in Ukrainian and Polish journalism and poetry.
Lenin
From the summer of 1912 to the summer of 1914, Lenin lived in Galicia. During this time, he was particularly interested in the national question, including the Ukrainian national movement, and it can be assumed that the formula “prison of nations” was borrowed by him from the Ukrainian or Polish journalism around him.
In December 1914 Lenin writes “On the National Pride of the Great Russians”, where Lenin calls for a Russian patriotism based around revolution, and says that patriotism cannot go hand in hand with the oppression of other peoples.
Soviet historiography
In "Russia as the Prison of Nations", Mikhail Pokrovsky wrote that direct coercion was applied most often by the Russian Empire in areas of expansion in the Far East, Caucasus, Central Asia, and Manchuria, as well as in western parts of the empire such as Poland, and "a great many Polesended their lives in Siberia". Pokrovsky mentioned that Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Georgian schools did not exist and that in Polish schools the speaking of Polish language was penalized by depriving meals. Pokrovsky highlighted the history of the Jews as the most outcast in tsarist rule, due to the Pale of Settlement restricting where to live. Pokrovsky cited Lenin's idea that "the dictatorship of the serf-holding landowners was not only a reflection of our country's economic backwardness, it was also one of the causes of this backwardness. As it rested on outmoded forms of economy, it did not let the economy move forward at the same time. As long as it was not overthrown, had to remain a backward agrarian country."
Soviet historians traditionally criticized tsarist policies, which included some usage of the phrase "prison of the peoples" after Lenin. On the other hand, historians have debated how much Stalin was willing to acknowledge the existence of Lenin's and Pokrovsky's "prison of the peoples" idea. The "Observations" were a set of messages sent in August 1934 to Soviet editors providing an official interpretation of history of the USSR, which became public with their publication to state organ Pravda in January 1936. The contents of these "Observations" have sometimes been seen by historians as a Stalinist willingness to acknowledge Lenin's observation. However, historian David Brandenberger disagreed based on the context and time of the original private publications earlier in 1934. In July 1934, Stalin sent a letter to the Soviet Politburo, arguing that Tsarist Russia should not be specifically criticized, because all European countries had been reactionary in the nineteenth century, rather than the Russian Empire alone. In light of Stalin's narrowing of the historiography, Brandenberger argued the important takeaway from "Observations" is not that they included the phrase "tsarism—prison of the peoples", but rather that they replaced the word "Russia" in an earlier turn of phrase with "tsarism" to narrow the target of critique to a form of government. While Stalin used some remaining rubric of internationalism, this shift served a more "pragmatic" interpretation of history, from the Soviet Kremlin's perspective, that began to reuse more elements of nationalism.
In January 1936, another history textbook commission was launched, this chaired by Andrei Zhdanov and including a number of top Communist Party functionaries, including Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Yakov Yakovlev, and Karl Bauman, among others. In conjunction with the work of this commission, Bukharin authored a lengthy critique of Pokrovsky and his methodology, accusing the deceased historian of mechanistic adherence to abstract sociological formulas, failure to properly understand and apply the dialectic method, and a tendency to depict history as a crudely universal process. The Zhdanov Commission, in consultation with Stalin, issued an influential communique which categorized historians of the Pokrovsky school as conduits of harmful ideas that were at root "anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist, essentially liquidatorist, and anti-scientific."
Pokrovsky's criticism of the old regime as a "prison of peoples" and "international gendarme" was henceforth deemed to be anti-patriotic "national nihilism" and a new Russian nationalist historical orthodoxy was established. This new official orthodoxy remained in place for the duration of Stalin's life and to some extent until the USSR's collapse.
Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial empire, applied the "prison of nations" idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote: "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."