On Common Ground: Soviet Nationalities Policy and the Austro-Marxist Premise

Abstract

This article argues that nationalities policy under Lenin and Stalin, its commitment to territorial autonomy notwithstanding, effectively put into practice the Austro-Marxist vision of a socialist multinational state and party that patronised national culture to assuage separatist tendencies. Highlighting the ideological common ground between Habsburg remedies for imperial disintegration along national lines and Soviet policies for imperial integration along the same lines, it argues that the Bolsheviks’ Marxist premise of promoting national diversity and culture to defuse nationalism was prefigured and informed by the Austro-Marxist premise of making national cultural autonomy the hallmark rather than the antithesis of socialism.

On 17 January 1929 a certain V. Ya. Kasatkin, a history student at Moscow’s Institute of Red Professors, sent a letter to Stalin. Having previously tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the general secretary to act as his academic supervisor, Kasatkin introduced himself as a student of the national question desperately looking for guidance. He had so many questions: how to conceptualise nationhood? When did nations emerge and how long would they persist? If nations and national languages were a product of the capitalist past, would they be part of the socialist future? If so, which ones? ‘I openly admit that I do not understand’, he declared (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 609).

There is little doubt that Kasatkin was grappling with the complexities of his subject. That said, beneath his ostentatious display of confusion and subservience lurked an ambitious historian with impeccable proletarian credentials, who sought not so much to understand as to question the theoretical rationale behind Soviet nationalities policy. At age 24, Vasilii Yakovlevich Kasatkin¹ was on the verge of graduating from what has been described as ‘perhaps the most important centre of Marxist education for the cream of the USSR’s new socialist intelligentsia’ (Fox 1993, p. 20). Here was an aspiring ‘red professor’ who had the audacity to challenge Stalin on his views on nationhood: ‘You do not link the question of the nation with that of the state, making one independent from the other. But is that right? Why does bourgeois theory content itself with a “cultural” definition of the nation, whereas we do not?’. He went on to suggest, very boldly, that a nation’s ‘right to political independence’ and its natural propensity to strive for ‘separate statehood’ (gosudarstvennaya obosoblennost’) was perhaps a better indication of nationhood (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 609).

What might seem like academic pedantry at first sight was in fact a remarkably serious challenge to the Stalinist definition of the nation and the Soviet nationalities policy. Kasatkin compared Stalin’s failure to ‘link the question of the nation with that of the state’ to the Austro-Marxist understanding of the nation as a cultural entity separate from the inherently territorial state (Smith 2014, p. 21). While this was not made explicit in Kasatkin’s letter, it was what Stalin read between its lines. Responding to Kasatkin, Stalin contrasted the Soviet state’s ‘policy of support and patronage [politika podderzhki i pokrovitel’stva] of national cultures’ with the fallacy of ‘Otto-Bauerism [otto-bauerovshshina]’—a reference to the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, whose 1907 book The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy had envisaged a Habsburg Austria transformed into a socialist and multinational state where national cultures would flourish rather than wither away (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 613).²

Through a close and contextualised reading of the exchange between Kasatkin and Stalin, as published in Gatagova et al. (2005), this article uncovers the conceptual common ground between the Soviet and the Austro-Marxist approaches to reconciling national autonomy with imperial integrity. The Bolsheviks largely rejected the Austro-Marxist idea of non-territorial or national-cultural autonomy, opting instead for what Ronald Suny has described as the ‘territorialization of ethnicity’ (Suny 1993, p. 110).³ But this did not prevent them from putting into practice what had hitherto been Austro-Marxist theory: a socialist multinational state that sought to curb nationalist separatism by actively promoting national culture as a proletarian good, and that did so not apologetically and temporarily, but as a matter of principle and, in effect, permanently.

This article asks whether and in which aspects Soviet nationalities policy was influenced by Austro-Marxist ideas on the accommodation of national diversity within a socialist state. Using the correspondence between Stalin and Kasatkin on the Soviet definition of nationhood as a way into the subject, it looks at key texts by Karl Renner and Otto Bauer and their reception and critique by Stalin and Lenin as well as Karl Kautsky, seeking to uncover the conceptual common ground between Austro-Marxist design and Soviet practice.

In doing so, this article places the debate on Soviet nationalities policy in a wider context of inter-imperial exchanges of ideas between the Russian/Soviet and Habsburg empires. It highlights the fundamental kinship between ideas that had been designed to transform Habsburg Austria into a multinational socialist state and the thinking that informed Bolshevik attempts at building such a state; between Habsburg remedies for imperial disintegration along national lines and Soviet policies for imperial integration along these lines.

The Soviet state’s commitment to national diversity and culture has, of course, been widely acknowledged, and even termed ‘chronic ethnophilia’ by Yuri Slezkine (1994, p. 415). The extent to which this commitment drew on Austro-Marxist ideas, however, is much less recognised. Scholars such as Jeremy Smith, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Malte Rolf have noted different aspects of this ideological indebtedness.⁴ In particular, the Austro-Marxist undercurrent in Lenin’s and Stalin’s understanding of nations as cultural entities that persisted well into the future has not gone unnoticed.⁵ Gerhard Simon, for example, has pointed out that Stalin’s introduction of the concept of socialist nations ‘came close to the Austro-Marxism he had fought so strongly against in 1913’ (Simon 1986, p. 156). It is, however, precisely Stalin’s and Lenin’s well-known opposition to Austro-Marxist ideas that overshadows and obfuscates the influence of these ideas on the ideology that informed and helped to justify the Soviet commitment to national diversity and culture. There is an inkling of this influence in Terry Martin’s admission that Habsburg Austria ‘pioneered many of the strategies later adopted by the Soviet Union’ (Martin 2001, p. 1). But Martin contrasted the defensiveness of these strategies with the Bolsheviks’ ‘active, prophylactic strategy of promoting non-Russian nation-building to prevent the growth of nationalism’ (Martin 2001, p. 1). While this distinction can be made with regard to Habsburg political practice, it cannot be maintained in respect of Austro-Marxist theory, which in large parts envisaged and anticipated this affirmative action approach to intrastate nation-building.

Any argument about the Austro-Marxist influence on the rationale behind Soviet nationalities policy can only ever be a part of the puzzle. Other factors explaining the accommodation of national diversity in the Soviet Union abound. Adeeb Khalid (2015, p. 14) and Jeremy Smith (2019, p. 985) have argued that the decisive element in this regard was not Stalin’s stance on nationhood, a clear-cut nationalities policy or the input of Soviet policymakers and ethnographers but the ability of indigenous elites to negotiate over their status. The correspondence between Stalin and Kasatkin has little to say about this vital question of how national diversity was negotiated away from Moscow and in languages other than Russian. But it does shed light on a different type of elite contestation: one that questioned the central tenets and basic premises of Soviet nationalities policy and helped to shape the broader ideological framework within which it was possible and permissible to negotiate the politics of national diversity throughout the Soviet Union.

Some of what this article argues is to be expected. That the Bolsheviks disputed any Austro-Marxist influence on their nationalities policy is hardly surprising; neither is the fact that this policy did not fully match the pronouncements Lenin and Stalin had made in their anti-Austro-Marxist polemics before 1917. However, it is worth pointing out—especially against the backdrop of a scholarly debate that tends to see Soviet nationalities policy as having developed in opposition to Austro-Marxism—that the Bolsheviks’ Marxist premise of promoting national diversity and culture in order to overcome nationalism was both prefigured and informed by the Austro-Marxist proposition that making the nation and national culture socialist objectives would avert the danger of national separatism to a socialist multinational party and state.

The general secretary and the red professor

Kasatkin’s letter to Stalin needs to be seen in the context of a wider and growing concern among parts of the Soviet elite that the national question was not being solved but institutionalised by the state, in particular through its policy of ‘indigenisation’.⁶ While some of that opposition was long-standing, much of it was more recent.⁷ The political developments of the cultural revolution (a campaign to erase illiteracy and purge intellectual opponents) in the late 1920s led many Bolsheviks to believe that the end of indigenisation was nigh. Political priorities were shifting at the time: the New Economic Policy (NEP) was abandoned in 1928, spelling the end of the compromise with elements of the free market. In the same year, the first five-year plan was launched, which initiated a process of increased centralisation and political repression that stifled and, in some ways, contradicted the policies and logic of indigenisation. This raised the question of whether indigenisation would follow the fate of the NEP. Both policies had always been justified as transitional concessions on the path towards greater proletarian unity.⁸

As the 1920s drew to a close, indigenisation threatened to become a victim of its own success. As Jörg Baberowski has argued, increasing demands for more national autonomy within the Soviet Union and the appearance of alternative, non-socialist models of nation-building outside of it meant that the Bolsheviks ‘slid into conflict with the spirits they themselves had conjured up: national communists who dreamt of national self-determination rather than socialism’ (Baberowski 2012, p. 109). One contemporary observer and the author of Soviet Rule in Russia (1930) noted in 1928 that indigenisation had unleashed a dynamic of its own that threatened Moscow’s control and the primacy of class over nationalist ideology. He warned that ‘the further a movement in favor of a local language and culture is carried, the more difficult it becomes to take a backward step’ (Batsell 1928, p. 926). Some Bolsheviks clearly believed that indigenisation had gone too far. They began testing the limits of what Martin has described as the ‘affirmative action empire’ and criticising the notions of national culture and indigenisation at its heart. One way of doing so was to discredit these notions as too reminiscent of the sort of Austro-Marxist ideas that had gained traction in revolutionary Russia among rival political parties on the left, in particular the concept of non-territorial (or cultural) autonomy, which—as Bill Bowring has pointed out—had ‘found unexpected resonance first in the Jewish, then in the Muslim and Tatar, liberation movements in Russia’ (Bowring 2005, p. 162).

Kasatkin knew better than to suggest openly that the resolution of the national question in the Soviet Union drew on Austro-Marxist ideas. Still, this allegation was implicit in his argument that Soviet theory must refrain from conceptualising nationhood culturally and independently from statehood and should emphasise political and territorial sovereignty instead. Given that the separation of nation and state was the hallmark of the Austro-Marxist concept of national autonomy and nationhood, Kasatkin’s argumentation was hardly incidental (Stargardt 1995, p. 90).

The juxtaposition of the state as something territorial and the nation as something personal and cultural was at the heart of Karl Renner’s legal thinking, which would go on to inspire Otto Bauer (Renner 1899, 1902). Consequently, Bauer’s work made the same distinction. According to Michael Forman (1998, p. 107), Bauer rejected the ‘link between nationality, territory, and state’ on the basis that such a link followed a logic of ‘exclusivity, discrimination, and disintegration’ and instead ‘proposed constituting each nation as a voluntary association of persons within a larger federal state’. Presumably, this juxtaposition of state and nation in Bauer’s work prompted Stalin (1954, p. 330) in 1913 to liken it to ‘a version of Bakunin’s concept’, which had stressed the same opposition (Kasprzak 2012, pp. 585–606). Bauer (1907, p. 151) resisted the widespread assumption that ‘it [was] “natural” for every nation to want to become a state’.⁹ Instead, he called upon scholars ‘to ask why it seems “natural” and reasonable to people that every nation and always only one nation forms a political community’ (Bauer 1907, p. 151).

In contrast to Bauer, Kasatkin argued that the striving for the right of national independence and a separate nation-state was both ‘natural and necessary’ as well as ‘inherent to all nations’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 609). Although he qualified this view by conceding that ‘nations without separate statehood do exist’, he nonetheless insisted that such nations have historically tended to strive for a separate nation-state, and that this tendency has usually been ‘violently and unnaturally suppressed’. To lend credence to his argument, Kasatkin wrote that this view was also shared by Lenin, who had explicitly condoned Karl Kautsky’s assertion that multinational states (‘gosudarstva natsional’nostei’, translated from the German Nationalitätenstaat) were ‘abnormal and underdeveloped’ because they sought to suppress this supposedly natural tendency (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 610).

Kasatkin’s ostensibly academic letter raised a politically delicate question: ought a nation’s intrinsic striving for a state of its own not be more prominently acknowledged in Soviet scholarship lest the Soviet Union risked becoming an abnormal and underdeveloped nationalities state of the kind Otto Bauer and Karl Renner had envisaged? In effect, Kasatkin applied to the Soviet model of national autonomy the same criticism that Kautsky had levelled at Bauer in 1908, when he wrote that ‘Otto Bauer underestimates the strength of the striving for a nation-state. His love is directed at the multinational state’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 23).

To set the Soviet theory of the nation on an ideologically correct, non-Austro-Marxist path, Kasatkin proposed tightening the definition of nationhood. As early as 1913, Stalin had defined the nation as ‘a historical category of a certain epoch, namely that of assurgent capitalism’ (Stalin 1954, p. 303). Kasatkin dared to differ. While he agreed that national consciousness might be the product of the capitalist era, he suggested that nations themselves predated that era (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, pp. 609–10). Eager to find out whether Stalin was inclined to agree, he invited him to revise his views on the issue, emphasising that these views ‘were dating back to … the time of your first work’. To remedy this definitional imprecision, he proposed defining the nation not so much as the product of a certain (capitalist) period but rather as the result of a people’s political will to form a nation-state. He even suggested modifying Stalin’s authoritative definition of the nation¹⁰ to that effect by adding to it a further criterion for nationhood: the attainment of (or striving for) political independence and separate statehood (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 609).

There was a good reason for Kasatkin to expect his audacious proposal to be met with some understanding: it was essentially congruent with Stalin’s and Lenin’s own critiques of Renner and Bauer’s concept of national-cultural autonomy. By arguing that a cultural definition of nationhood was deficient because it disregarded a nation’s innate urge for a state of its own, Kasatkin effectively appropriated Lenin’s and Stalin’s arguments against national-cultural autonomy. Stalin’s (1954, p. 327) principal critique of it was that it provided only cultural rights rather than fully fledged political and territorial independence. In 1914 Lenin (1969, p. 282) had voiced the same view that the promise of cultural autonomy really meant the refusal of political autonomy. Kasatkin’s definition of nationhood as incipient or attained nation-statehood was derived from the same maximalist political stance, according to which genuine national autonomy had to be not merely cultural but territorial and political.

Kasatkin knew and cited Lenin’s ‘Remarks on the National Question’ (1913), a sharp critique of the bourgeois fascination with national culture in general and the ideas of Otto Bauer in particular. In it, Lenin (1973, p. 132) had warned Marxists not to be deceived by the Austro-Marxist ‘slogan of “national culture”’, and not to confuse the fight ‘against any kind of national oppression’ with a fight ‘for “national culture” in general’. A line must be drawn—Lenin insisted—between supporting the negative right of freedom from national oppression and ‘the “positive” (affirmative)¹¹ action of the bourgeoisie that seeks to strengthen nationalism’. Kasatkin’s letter—written at a time marked by an affirmative action policy aimed at raising the profile of non-Russian national cultures—raises the question of whether this line had been crossed.

Kasatkin’s proposed tightened definition of nationhood would have opened the door to a Soviet Union that was less multicultural, less multilingual, less Austro-Marxist, less ‘indigenising’ and more assimilationist. Aware of how controversial this was, Kasatkin conceded that his proposed additional criterion for nationhood was not universally applicable but ‘variable and relative’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, pp. 609–10). Eager to find out whether this tighter definition of the nation was politically acceptable, he was probing Stalin for signals as to whether the Soviet Union was poised to become a less multinational state: ‘Doesn’t the national question in bypassing capitalism continue to be an issue, even though it is solved?’ In the same letter, he asked Stalin about linguistic diversity: ‘You dispute the possibility of the development of many languages into a single common tongue. … [But] will there be many languages in future or only a few?’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, pp. 609–10).

Kasatkin knew very well that the nature of his questions was as much political as it was academic. He also understood that there was no better person to put them to than Stalin, the erstwhile commissar for nationalities and the party’s leading theorist (and, since Lenin’s death, the ultimate arbiter) on the national question.¹² Rather than shying away from the contradictory assumptions underlying the Soviet theory of the nation, Kasatkin repeatedly put his finger on them, seeking not so much clarification as confirmation of whether they continued to be valid.

A break with Marxism and a return to ‘Otto-Bauerism’

Stalin thoroughly rejected Kasatkin’s ideas in a letter dated 22 February 1929: ‘Your proposed new criterion for defining the nation (political independence, separate statehood) is entirely beside the point, both in terms of theory as well as practically and politically’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 611). According to Stalin, Kasatkin’s effective refusal to regard stateless peoples as nations played into the hands of imperialists and nationalists alike because it allowed the former to justify imperial rule over stateless peoples, while enabling nationalists to denounce the Soviet Union as just another empire unwilling to grant real independence (that is, separation) to its constituent republics.

Stalin’s insistence on national culture as a defining characteristic of nationhood shows how conscious he was of the political expediency of that idea, which reconciled two somewhat contradictory positions: that a stateless people living under the yoke of imperialism was in fact an oppressed nation; and that the cultural and language rights afforded to non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union allowed them to adequately express their national identity in day-to-day life despite the limitations on territorial and political autonomy imposed on them by a centralised and, in effect, unitary state.

Given that the notion of a socialist multinational state promoting national cultures was a key source of political legitimacy, Stalin carefully deflected any suggestion that it was somehow ideologically indebted to Austro-Marxism. He dispelled any illusions Kasatkin might have had regarding a possible toning-down of the state’s support for non-Russian cultures and languages. Stalin unequivocally rejected Kasatkin’s suggestion that he disputed the merging of languages in a future socialist society: ‘Where did you get this idea? It is completely incorrect’. He added, ‘what I do dispute is the commonly held opinion that the period of transition from capitalism to socialism … is supposedly a period of the liquidation of nations … national cultures and languages’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 613).

Rather than signalling that the state had possibly gone too far in its endorsement of national cultures and languages, Stalin defended the policy in his letter to Kasatkin: ‘You might find it strange … that we practice a policy of patronage [politika pokrovitel’stva] of the national cultures and languages of previously oppressed nations’. But this was merely a prophylactic policy, he added, designed to ensure that they would eventually exhaust themselves and merge into ‘one common socialist culture’. While this might seem paradoxical to the untrained eye, it was precisely ‘this contradiction that constitutes … Marxist dialectics’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 613).

While Stalin admitted that the erasure of national difference was a distant future prospect, he nonetheless insisted that it was inevitable: ‘Any other vision of the organisation of the future global socialist society amounts to a break with Marxism and a return to Otto-Bauerism’. Brandishing his anti-Austro-Marxist credentials, he added that he had battled against Bauer’s vision of ‘a socialist society … that dismembers humanity into nationally segregated societies’ as early as 1912 (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 613). It is not without irony that Stalin wrote this while he was overseeing an unprecedented institutionalisation of nationality in the Soviet state and society, ‘a period of flourishing … of national cultures and languages’, as he called it in his letter to Kasatkin on 22 February 1929 (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 613). Admittedly, he felt the need to qualify his endorsement of Soviet nationalism by adding that the national cultures he had in mind were ‘socialist in content and national in form’. But as I will show later, this distinction had already been made by Karl Kautsky, Bauer and Renner, making it a much less purely Stalinist or Leninist ideological innovation than Stalin would have liked to admit.

Perhaps Stalin’s vehement and unprovoked condemnation of Bauer’s vision of a multinational state organised on both socialist and nationalist principles sought to disguise the fact that the main difference between that vision and the Soviet Union of the 1920s was not the issue of non-territoriality (which figured more prominently in Bauer’s model), but the question of timescale: while Bauer saw ‘the autonomy of the national community of culture under socialism’ as an end in itself, Stalin justified the Soviet policy of patronage of national cultures as a temporary means towards the eventual demise of national cultures after the ultimate ‘worldwide victory of socialism’ (Bauer 1907, p. 94; Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 614).

What Bauer (1907, pp. 91–5) had regarded as a permanent solution, Stalin portrayed as a transitional stage. However, given how long that transition was projected to last, this difference was more or less negligible. Stalin forewarned Kasatkin that those who expected a quick fix to the national question had better brace themselves for ‘a long and contradictory period’ of flourishing Soviet national cultures. Invoking Lenin, he added that national differences ‘will persist for a very, very long time’ even after the global triumph of socialism (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 614).

Stalin’s message to Kasatkin was unambiguous: the policy of patronage of national cultures was not a soon-to-be-reversed Austro-Marxist deviation from the path of internationalism but part and parcel of Soviet rule. Much more dubious, however, was Stalin’s justification of this policy as temporary and prophylactic and hence fundamentally different from what Bauer and Renner had envisaged.

Judging by Stalin’s response, Kasatkin’s criticism had hit a nerve. Rather than simply brushing it aside, Stalin mounted a point-by-point repudiation. Given that Kasatkin had made no explicit mention of Bauer or his work, it is rather telling that Stalin pre-emptively repudiated the unspoken accusation that he practised what Bauer had preached.

As one of Bauer’s fiercest critics, Stalin understood perhaps better than anyone the intellectual affinity between the Soviet policy of patronising national cultures that he had helped to design and the Austro-Marxist concept of national autonomy that he sought to discredit. Despite his attempts to portray one as the antithesis of the other, both approaches premised that nations were predominantly cultural entities whose political demands could be met by providing predominantly cultural autonomy within a single socialist state.

This premise of nations as primarily cultural entities was acknowledged perhaps not explicitly enough by Renner and Bauer. But it was entirely unacknowledged in the Soviet Union, which upheld the constitutional fiction of each republic’s independence, including its ‘right to the voluntary exit from the Union’.¹³ Still, based on this premise, the Soviet state promoted national culture as one of the trappings of nationhood in order to conceal and compensate for the lack of a more wide-ranging political autonomy. Official rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, it privileged the promotion of titular republics’ national culture (and cadres) within an integrated union state over their national political autonomy and territorial sovereignty.¹⁴

Kasatkin’s call for a less cultural and more political and territorial understanding of nationhood clearly called into question the above-mentioned premise as well as its awkward kinship with Austro-Marxism. Unwilling to see Soviet nationalities policy undermined in such a way, Stalin refused to acknowledge the extent to which it drew on Austro-Marxist design in its provision of cultural over territorial and political autonomy. Instead, he defended the policy by arguing that the end of a distant utopia devoid of national differences justified the means of a policy that cultivated these very differences for the foreseeable future. His attempt to disguise this blatant contradiction as an exemplary case of Marxist dialectics notwithstanding, what distinguished Stalin’s idea of a socialist multinational state and society from those of Bauer and Renner was, above all, the unverifiable hypothesis that in some distant future nations would begin to wither away.

On common ground

Stalin’s attempt to nip Kasatkin’s proposal in the bud sparked a surprisingly unrepentant response from the aspiring red professor. In mid-March 1929, still hopeful of gaining Stalin as his academic supervisor, Kasatkin penned another letter to him. He continued to argue, quite assertively, that not so much national culture as national statehood ought to define nationhood: ‘I have tried to link the question of the emergence of the nation with that of the emergence of statehood, thereby countering any “cultural” definitions of that concept’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 616). Kasatkin thus continued to stand by the implicitly anti-Austro-Marxist crux of his critique of the Soviet conceptualisation of nationhood as wrongly privileging national culture over national statehood.

Although Kasatkin toned down the political implications of his criticism in favour of a greater emphasis on academic theory, he remained remarkably tenacious in his rebuttal of some of Stalin’s assertions. For instance, he refuted Stalin’s claim never to have disputed the future merging of languages into a single tongue by pointing out that he had done precisely that in a speech at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in May 1925, in which he rejected Karl Kautsky’s vision of a future global lingua franca supplanting other languages.¹⁵

Kasatkin’s concerns were symptomatic of a wider sense of impatience within the party as to when the Soviet constitution would finally make good on its internationalist promise to ‘push the working masses of the Soviet republics towards the path of unification into one socialist family’.¹⁶ In fact, he was not alone in suggesting a rebalancing of Stalin’s definition of nationhood away from national culture and towards national statehood. In March 1929, Stalin wrote an extensive and polemical letter, in which he responded—as he put it—to ‘a series of letters I have received on that subject [the national question] during recent months from … comrades’ criticising the Soviet definition of the nation for neglecting the issue of separate national statehood.¹⁷ Inadvertently, Stalin’s response to this further highlighted the striking similarities between the Soviet practice and the Austro-Marxist theory of a multinational socialist state.

Stalin’s letter was as much a critique of Kasatkin and those who shared his concerns as it was a defence of the theoretical rationale underpinning Soviet nationalities policy, which Stalin sought to legitimise as thoroughly Russian, Marxist and Leninist (Stalin 1949, p. 347). There could be no change to the ‘Russian Marxist theory of the nation’ and no alternative to the nationalities policy ‘that is [currently] being carried out in our country’, he declared (Stalin 1949, pp. 335, 355).

Ironically, in trying to prove the Leninist pedigree of Soviet nationalities policy, Stalin inadvertently highlighted its indebtedness to Austro-Marxism. His assertion of the viability of Soviet nations is a case in point. He had already stressed their longevity in his letter to Kasatkin from February 1929 (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, pp. 611–16). In his subsequent polemical letter from March 1929, in which he sought to refute the arguments of those in the party critical of his definition of the nation, Stalin postponed the arrival of a nationless society even further into the future by differentiating between bourgeois and socialist nations and prophesying a new lease of life for the latter (Stalin 1949, p. 353). Although he did not completely abandon the ideological fig leaf of a distant future in which ‘national differences and languages will begin to die off’, his vision of nations ‘transformed in the spirit of socialism’ left no doubt about their durability. He predicted that these ‘new, socialist nations’ would be ‘much more cohesive’, devoid of class contradictions and ‘much more popular [obshshenarodnye] than any bourgeois nation’ (Stalin 1949, p. 341).

Stalin’s vision of socialist nations was exactly the kind of Austro-Marxist utopia of nations transcending the class divide under socialism that he and Lenin had once condemned. In 1907, Bauer had envisaged the nation under socialism as ‘a community of culture’ that encompassed ‘the entire people [Volksgenossen]’ and ended ‘millennia of class division’ (Bauer 1907, p. 94). In 1913, Lenin (1973, p. 131) condemned that vision as the Austro-Marxist effort to reform nationalism by ‘cleansing it of violence and injustice’ and argued that it must be resisted as an insidious attempt to circumvent Marxism’s fundamental opposition to nationalism, ‘even of the most “just”, “untarnished”, subtle and civilised kind’. In the same vein and the same year, Stalin (1954, p. 329) branded Bauer’s and Renner’s ideas ‘a subtle form of nationalism’, an attempt to substitute ‘the socialist principle of class struggle with the bourgeois “principle of nationality”’. Anyone, he wrote, who was fooled by this Austro-Marxist fantasy of reconciling both principles would be ‘forsaking the class position and following the path of nationalism’; a path that led to absurdities such as ‘the national programme of the Austrian social democrats [which] calls for the “preservation and development of the national particularities of peoples”’. No self-respecting socialist could advocate such things, he suggested.

‘Since when have social democrats begun “organising” nations, “constituting” nations, “creating” nations?’ Stalin (1954, p. 329) asked rhetorically in 1913. In 1929, when Kasatkin and others were asking very similar questions, he admonished them to reconcile themselves with the party line of fostering rather than abolishing nationalism. As if socialist nations had always been part and parcel of Marxist eschatology, Stalin now insisted that the party was duty-bound not just to protect them from oppression but ‘to support the development and flourishing of the national cultures of the peoples of our country … [and] to foster the consolidation of our new socialist nations’ (Stalin 1949, p. 354). All of this goes to show that Stalin had come a long way since condemning the Austro-Marxists for calling for the ‘preservation and development of the national particularities of peoples’ (Stalin 1954, p. 329).

The useful dilettante

In contrast to his reply to Kasatkin, Stalin’s subsequent polemic against the critics of ‘the Russian Marxist theory of the nation’ from March 1929 did not mention Bauer or Austro-Marxism. It did, however, contain another example of Stalin’s pretentions to ideological purity betraying the hybridity of his views and policies on nationhood. This time, the target of Stalin’s denunciation was Karl Kautsky.

As mentioned earlier, Kasatkin had reminded Stalin about a speech he had given at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925, in which he had criticised Kautsky for prematurely predicting the demise of national languages and the rise of a socialist world language. ‘I have little faith in this theory of a single all-encompassing language’, Stalin had told students from what was then known as the ‘Soviet and non-Soviet East’. Kautsky’s trust in international culture supplanting national cultures under socialism was misplaced, Stalin had argued; only the Bolsheviks could ‘reconcile the creation of national culture … with the building of socialism and the creation of proletarian culture’ (Stalin 1952, p. 138).

In March 1929, Stalin (1949, p. 344) reiterated his criticism of Kautsky in his polemic against comrades critical of his definition of the nation. Rather than acknowledging the influence of this leading socialist thinker on his own understanding of the issue, Stalin branded Kautsky ‘a dilettante when it comes to the national question’. He dismissed Kautsky and, by implication, Kasatkin and likeminded comrades, as too dismissive of national aspirations. He argued that Kautsky had ‘no idea of the colossal power of resilience of nations and … believes that the merging of nations is possible long before the victory of socialism’. According to Stalin, the opposite was true: ‘The socialist revolution has not diminished but increased the number of languages. By stirring up the downtrodden masses of humanity … , it has awoken an array of previously unknown or little-known nations to a new life’ (Stalin 1949, p. 344).

Stalin’s analysis was clearly drawing on Kautsky’s concept of a ‘synthesis between nationalism and internationalism’, according to which Marxian dialectics resolved the apparent contradiction that both nationalism and internationalism were on the rise. It stated that even though national differences were being levelled by capitalist market expansion: ‘National sentiment is not diminishing but often increases, and one after the other … the backward nations leave their national unconsciousness behind and become nationally aware, creating their own national literature and consolidating their nationality’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 13). This also meant that Marxists could promote ‘the autonomy of nations for the purpose of written and spoken, political and trade unionist propaganda’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 35).

Kautsky did not underestimate ‘the colossal power of resilience of nations’; rather, he helped Stalin to understand and exploit this resilience. But rather than acknowledging this ideological indebtedness, Stalin (1949, p. 344) continued accusing him of misjudging the importance and viability of nations, particularly less-dominant ones, such as the Czechs. Again, in truth this was not Kautsky’s view but that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Kautsky had explicitly disagreed with it as early as 1896, when he dismissed Marx’s judgements on the subject as ‘today unfounded and merely a matter of history’.¹⁸ In other words, it was actually Kautsky’s alertness to the strength and persistence of national sentiment that allowed him to criticise Marx’s and Engels’ ‘position … on that question [as] untenable’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, pp. 2, 13).

Furthermore, Kautsky’s belief in the persistence of nationalism and in the nation-state as ‘the type of state most suited to modern conditions’ were at the heart of his disagreement with Bauer, whom he accused of ‘underestimat[ing] the strength of the striving for a nation state’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, pp. 2, 13). According to Kautsky (1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 22), Bauer’s vision of nations as communities of culture coexisting in a single nationalities state failed to take into account how ‘immensely important’ it is for ‘the modern state … to consist of one nationality … [and] for every nation to be organised in its own state’.

In contrast to Kautsky, Stalin appears to have shared this Bauerian and Austro-Marxist confidence in the viability of a socialist multinational state that valorised and patronised national culture to assuage separatist tendencies. Moreover, his justification of socialism leading to increased national diversity had clearly been prefigured by Kautsky’s thinking on the matter. Unsurprisingly, Stalin sought to conceal these parallels. After all, it was much more politically expedient (and self-flattering) for him to portray Kautsky as an anti-national left-deviationist, Bauer as an apologist of bourgeois nationalism on the right, and himself as heir to the only true Marxist–Leninist tradition capable of reconciling national and proletarian culture.¹⁹

‘Beating bourgeois nationalism on its own ground’

In accusing Kautsky of underrating the resilience of nations and national sentiment, Stalin (1949, p. 344) inadvertently found himself on common ground with the Austro-Marxists. Unlike Kautsky (but like Stalin), Renner and Bauer believed the nation to be more than merely a community of language, and ‘the national question’ to be more than simply a question of language. Renner’s seminal pamphlet State and Nation (1899, p. 8), for instance, described the nation as ‘an intellectual and cultural community’ and nationality as a question of conscious and voluntary belonging and commitment to such a community.

Renner (1899, p. 30) was primarily interested in legally defining the nation and its sovereign rights within the state in order to channel the ‘national struggle’ into a limited sphere of predominantly cultural affairs that was separate from the more general matters of state. This model of permanently institutionalising nationality in a limited sphere of predominantly cultural affairs was at odds with Kautsky’s idea of simply providing equal language rights in order to defuse conflicts around nationality and pave the way for its eventual demise. It was much more compatible, however, with the way nationality would be institutionalised in the Soviet Union, not least because it facilitated what scholars have described as the folklorisation of national demands and identity (Osipov 2013, pp. 7–26; Khalid ²⁰¹⁵, p. 288).

Building on Renner’s work, Otto Bauer, too, made the concept of a ‘community of culture’ (Kulturgemeinschaft) an integral part of his definition of the nation.²⁰ He explicitly dismissed as reductionist Kautsky’s view that nations were essentially communities of language vying for language rights (Bauer 1908, p. 800). According to Bauer, conflicts about languages were indicative of more complex underlying problems. Reducing the national question to a question of language meant belittling ‘bourgeois nationalism, whose power has already beguiled some comrades in our own camp’. He told his comrades that they ignored nationalism at their own peril. Warning not to leave that battlefield to the bourgeoisie, he called on them to ‘beat nationalism on its own ground’ (Bauer 1908, pp. 794, 802).

The lesson Bauer wanted to teach his fellow social democrats was one he himself had learned from Renner, namely that the nationalism of the workers was essentially internationalist and socialist in nature and hence perfectly compatible with the international class struggle. According to Renner (1899, p. 10), it was a struggle by workers around the world for ownership of national culture against their respective ruling classes, not against each other. Following this reasoning, Bauer (1908, p. 802) argued that for social democracy to stem the nationalist tide, it needed to demonstrate this correlation between national and social emancipation: ‘I believe that we can only beat bourgeois nationalism … if we reveal the national content of the international class struggle … and demonstrate to everyone that the battle in which the classes compete will also decide about the weal and woe … of nations’.

Bauer called on his comrades not to pit the national and class struggles against each other but rather to explain to the workers that national and proletarian emancipation were two sides of the same coin. He insisted that only ‘the class struggle of the proletariat will enable all nations to freely govern their own affairs’ (Bauer 1907, p. 495). In Bauer’s analysis, national and social demands and grievances were inextricably linked, and class and national identity often overlapped.²¹ ‘Revealing the national content of the international class struggle’ thus also meant recognising and harnessing the national sentiment of the workers as something potentially progressive and inherently socialist rather than leaving it for the bourgeoise to exploit.

Kautsky rejected the Austro-Marxist advice to social democrats not to count on the inevitable triumph of international over national culture and to instead position themselves as the guardians of nationhood and national culture. Whilst conceding that nationalism was not so easily overcome as some socialists assumed, he nonetheless thought that both Bauer and Renner had tipped the scale too much in its favour.²² Anticipating Lenin’s (1973, pp. 131–32) criticism that Renner and Bauer merely wished to cleanse ‘bourgeois nationalism … of coercion and injustice’, Kautsky (1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 17) warned Bauer not to confuse socialist internationalism with ‘a special kind of nationalism that differs from the bourgeois kind only in so far as it does not operate aggressively’. He insisted that the aim of socialism was not—as the Austro-Marxists suggested—the equality of nations and national difference, but the unity of nations and the gradual disappearance of national difference.

Betraying his intellectual kinship with Renner and Bauer, Stalin (1949, p. 344) rejected Kautsky’s endorsement of the vanishing of national cultures in the foreseeable future, condemning it as assimilationist in his 1929 letter to his critics. In terms that were more Austro-Marxist than he would have admitted, he declared the ‘policy of assimilation … categorically excluded from the arsenal of Marxism–Leninism’, and called instead for ‘the development and flourishing of the national cultures of the peoples of our country’ (Stalin 1949, p. 347).

‘Socialist in content, national in form’

Soviet nationalities policy is ideologically indebted to Austro-Marxism in yet another usually overlooked aspect. Renner and Bauer interpreted national conflicts, such as those about language, as manifestations of an underlying class struggle, which allowed them to portray an ostensibly non-Marxist concern for national culture as actually grounded in the class struggle and dialectical Marxism. Where there was ‘national content’ to be revealed in the class struggle, as Bauer (1907, p. 495) put it, nationalist demands could no longer be dismissed as purely nationalist. In the same vein, Renner had differentiated between the workers’ demand for national culture, which was directed against their own bourgeoisie, and ‘the other, exclusively national movement, [which is] directed against foreign nations’ (Renner 1899, p. 10).

From this Austro-Marxist proposition to ‘uncover the national content of the class struggle’ it was not too large a step to Lenin’s (1969, pp. 275–76) well-known principle that the nationalism of the oppressed ‘has a general democratic content … that we unconditionally support’. Bauer (1907, p. 265) had effectively made the same point when he called on social democrats not to rely on ‘naïve cosmopolitanism’—in other words, an internationalism that did not consider the national grievances of oppressed nations—but to channel nationalism for their own political ends.²³

Renner and Bauer were thus highly cognisant of the overlap of class and national identity and grievances. They had identified in the minds of workers—especially in what they variously called oppressed, small or non-historical nations—a conflation of class and nationality that the Bolsheviks could not afford to ignore if they hoped to exploit the synergy between the national and the colonial questions. As Ronnie Munck (1985, p. 91) has argued, Bauer’s ‘socialist principle of nationality’—namely, the idea that socialism equals national and class emancipation—‘was in some ways a forerunner of the Leninist principle of “the right of nations to self determination”’. By discerning proletarian and socialist concerns in national phenomena, Renner and Bauer helped pave the way for Lenin to speak of the democratic content of the nationalism of the oppressed.

Perhaps better known than the Leninist formula of the democratic content of the nationalism of the oppressed is its Stalinist derivative: the slogan of Soviet national cultures being ‘socialist in content and national in form’. It, too, had been anticipated in a debate between Kautsky and Bauer on the interplay between national and international culture.

Following the publication in 1907 of Bauer’s The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, Kautsky (1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 18) argued against Bauer and Renner’s preoccupation with national culture, which he dismissed as nothing more than international culture in ‘a national guise’. He believed that their Austro-Marxist insistence on conceptualising the nation as a community of culture rather than language blinded them to the need to differentiate between the linguistic and ostensibly national form of culture and its international content.²⁴

Kautsky developed this dichotomy of culture being international in content and national in form in opposition to Bauer’s thinking on the issue. According to Kautsky (1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 15), ever increasing levels of education, economic integration and multilingualism meant that ‘a purely national culture has never been less possible’. On the other hand, Bauer (1908, p. 797; ¹⁹⁰⁷, p. 92) did not believe that an increasing ‘internationalisation of culture’ would or should lead to the levelling of national differences. On the contrary, he argued that what he described as ‘national apperception’ (and what today might be called ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson 1992)) meant that new ideas and cultural innovations were never simply adopted by people but needed to be adapted to ‘the existing intellectual culture of [a given] nation’ (Bauer 1907, p. 93). Reversing Kautsky’s argument that ‘a purely national culture has never been less possible’, Bauer maintained that ‘there is no culture other than national culture’, with international culture merely being ‘the sum [Inbegriff] of what the various national cultures have in common’ (Bauer 1908, p. 798).

To sum up, what Kautsky understood as a simple act of translating international content into national (linguistic) form, and what Stalin further simplified as culture being ‘national in form and socialist in content’, Bauer (1907, p. 94) initially conceptualised as the perpetual international exchange of the ‘material contents of culture’ (intellectual, artistic, technological innovations), on the one hand, and their continuous and transformative adaptation as national culture, on the other.

There is further evidence of the influence of the above-mentioned debate between Kautsky and Bauer on not just the rationale but also the practice of Soviet nationalities policy. One particular piece of practical Austro-Marxist advice was heeded by Lenin, Stalin and even Kautsky. Stalin never tired of pointing out, including in his letter to Kasatkin from February 1929, that ‘the masses can succeed in their cultural development only in their native language’ (Gatagova et al. ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 614). This was also what Kautsky had taken from reading Bauer’s strategic advice to the Austrian social democrats. Austria’s multinational working class would only partake in international culture ‘if it is made accessible to them in their national languages’ (Kautsky 1907/¹⁹⁰⁸, p. 27). ‘Socialist propaganda and its organisation must become international in content but national in form’, he added, signalling his agreement with Bauer’s (1907, p. 464) proposal that the party ‘must speak to the workers of each nation in their own language during assembly, in the press and in its organisation’. These would later be Stalin’s words to Kasatkin almost exactly.

The (Austro-)Marxist premise

The Austro-Marxist insistence on speaking to workers in their own languages and on structuring the party and the state in a nationally specific way both anticipated the Bolshevik position on that issue and was indicative of a deeper, not just tactical but strategic, affinity between the Soviet and the Austro-Marxist approaches to managing national diversity. Renner’s and Bauer’s exhortation to defeat bourgeois nationalism by promoting an alternative, more inclusive vision of nationhood, one that ensured the ‘participation of the entire people in the nation’s culture’ (Bauer 1907, p. 88), was addressed to an Austrian social democracy struggling to make sense of national phenomena within the framework of Marxism. But it found an audience in Soviet Russia, and clearly prefigured what Martin has identified as ‘the Marxist premise’ at the heart of Bolshevik nationalities policy, namely Lenin and Stalin’s belief ‘that the above-class appeal of nationalism could be disarmed by granting the forms of nationhood’ (Martin 2001, p. 5).

In April 1918, Stalin (1947, p. 76) spelled out this Marxist premise in an article in Pravda, which defended the government’s decision to appease rather than crack down on demands for national autonomy emerging among ‘the Volga Tatars, Bashkirs, Kyrgyz [and in] the Turkestan region’. Refusing these demands would only boost the appeal of bourgeois nationalists as the ‘defenders of “the nation”’, Stalin wrote in a veiled attempt to denounce the recently defeated Kokand Autonomy as ‘bourgeois’, whilst condemning the harsh Bolshevik crackdown on this and other forms of autonomy.²⁵ In order to deprive these imposters of popular support, their ‘autonomy needs to be “taken away” from them … cleansed from bourgeois filth and converted … into Soviet autonomy’ (Stalin 1947, p. 75).

This Marxist premise of providing forms of nationhood by ‘taking away’ or co-opting calls for national autonomy was also an Austro-Marxist one. Both Renner and Bauer had explicitly called on socialists to fight fire with fire and undermine the bourgeoisie’s claim to speak for the nation by adopting and adapting nationalist demands. Bauer (1907, p. 88) had promoted a more populist and inclusive form of national autonomy that was based on a ‘democratic socialism … capable of including the entire population into the national community of culture’. Renner, too, had envisaged a national autonomy that would ‘ensure that the state … would encounter the citizen solely in his native language, and that even in multilingual regions its administrative organs would seem national to the individual’ (Renner 1899, pp. 27–8).

In his Pravda piece, Stalin (1947, p. 75) mirrored this Austro-Marxist image of a state that faced its citizens in their respective national guise. He explained that transforming bourgeois autonomy into Soviet autonomy required making the state appear ‘popular and familiar [narodnoi i rodnoi] to the masses’ and requiring it to speak to them in their native language. Later, when arguing with Kasatkin and those questioning the Soviet commitment to national culture, Stalin (1949, p. 355) again stressed the need for a concerted drive for the use of non-Russian languages and cadres in government and in ‘the press, theatres, cinemas and other cultural institutions’. Regardless of Stalin’s assurance that this was the hallmark of Leninist nationalities policy, the parallels to Austro-Marxist proposals are undeniable.

In order to deflect from these parallels, Stalin had made a point of distancing Soviet policy from Austro-Marxist practice in his letter to Kasatkin from 22 February 1929. He had done something similar in his 1918 Pravda article. Calling for the creation of ‘constituent assemblies for the Soviets … of the peoples in question [Volga Tatars, Bashkirs, Kyrgyz, among others]’, Stalin (1947, pp. 76–7) added that there was to be ‘no division of any kind into national curiae for national “minorities” or “majorities”, as some bourgeois-nationalist groups are demanding’. The ‘“demarcation” [razmezhevanie] of people according to national curiae’ had been one of Stalin’s (1954, p. 361) criticisms of Bauer’s and Renner’s models of national autonomy in 1913. To repeat this criticism in 1918 (and in 1929) served no purpose other than to highlight what distinguished the Soviet from the Austro-Marxist approach to national diversity so as to deflect from what bound these approaches together: a shared resolve to adopt and adapt demands for national autonomy and national culture so as to defuse their separatist potential.

Lenin, Stalin, Bauer and Renner all sought to ward off the nationalist threat to proletarian unity by providing forms of nationhood.²⁶ Lenin and Stalin accused Bauer of privileging national culture over national statehood. But, as Leszek Kołakowski has pointed out, ‘there was no essential theoretical difference between them’ (Kolakowski 1978, p. 290). Both sides cautioned the working class against national separatism. Moreover, both sides believed that making the nation and national culture socialist objectives would avert the danger of national separatism to a socialist multinational party and state.²⁷

There were significant differences, too, the most fundamental of which, according to Kołakowski, was that ‘to Lenin the national question was a tactical one of exploiting anti-Russian resentment … whereas Bauer regarded nations as valuable in themselves and enriching human culture by their differences’ (Kolakowski 1978, p. 290). In contrast to their Bolshevik detractors, Bauer and Renner believed that exploiting national sentiment was not merely politically expedient but a legitimate and intrinsically socialist thing to do. However, this difference in intent notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks’ Marxist premise that the provision of forms of nationhood and national culture would weaken the nationalist camp bore a close resemblance to the Austro-Marxist premise that socialists must ‘beat nationalism on its own ground’ by joining the class struggle for national autonomy and culture.

Conclusion

‘I do not understand!’ Kasatkin complained in his letter to Stalin in January 1929. Who could blame him? Those familiar with Stalin’s and Lenin’s writings on the national question could not fail to notice the gaping divide between their polemics against Bauer and Renner before the October Revolution and the actual Soviet nationalities policy that transpired during the 1920s. Writing in Vienna in 1913, Stalin had called on social democrats to reject the Austro-Marxist model of national-cultural autonomy as something that would only lead to ‘nationalism … the “delimitation” of people according to national curiae … the “organisation” of nations … the “preservation” and cultivation of “national particularities”’ (Stalin 1954, p. 361). Arguing that ‘Bauer’s prophesy of an “organised delimitation [razmezhevanie] of workers according to nationality” contradicted mankind’s entire historical progress’, Stalin (1954, p. 330) foresaw a future where ‘national barriers are not increasing but breaking down and crumbling’. He claimed that history was on the side of Marx and his Bolshevik followers, whereas Bauer’s idea of a ‘socialist principle of nationality’ was doomed to fail because it sought to substitute ‘the socialist principle of class struggle with the bourgeois “principle of nationality”’.

It is striking how much Stalin had changed his tune by 1929. By then, he was reprimanding Kasatkin and others who dared to criticise his volte-face for failing to understand that national difference would be a feature of the political landscape for the foreseeable future, and that it would in fact increase, not decrease, under the dictatorship of the proletariat. By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had overseen the heyday of the ‘affirmative action empire’, whose hallmark was precisely what he had accused Bauer of promoting in the ‘organisation’ of nations, the ‘preservation’ and cultivation of ‘national particularities’.

All of this suggests that Stalin had clearly come to appreciate the usefulness of the previously decried Bauerian ‘socialist principle of nationality’. He might have portrayed his own policy of supporting national particularity as merely a temporary truce between class and nation, but he effectively followed Renner’s and Bauer’s advice that the twin causes of class and national emancipation need not clash but could go hand-in-hand.

Biography

Matthias Battis, Institute for Eastern European History, University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna, Austria; Visiting Fellow, Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Email: matthias.battis@univie.ac.at

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).