Yemelyan Yaroslavsky 1941
Author: Yemelyan Yaroslavsky;
Written: 1941;
First published: 18 November 1941 in Pravda
Translated by: Anton P.
Hitler raised a bloody hand on Russian culture, which is part of world culture. Fascists hate world culture. Hitler proclaimed and is carrying out a most reactionary program. “The lower the cultural level of the working class and the entire people, the more chances we have of retaining power”, such is the program of the Hitlerite pogromists. Therefore, the Nazis are closing not only universities in the occupied countries, but also lower schools, cynically declaring: why do you need schools? You can dig in the ground, grow potatoes, and feed pigs for us Germans without schools.
Thousands of honest, talented writers and scientists were driven into the grave and concentration camps by the Nazis, thousands fled to America, England and other countries. We are not talking about the Jews, in relation to whom the Nazis surpassed the most cruel executioners of the Middle Ages, the most vile Black Hundred pogromists of Tsarism. The Nazis disgraced the culture of Germany. The years of the domination of fascism in Germany are the darkest years in its history, throwing it back a century culturally. With shame and sorrow, future generations of Germany will remember the years when the executioner Hitler was at the head of the country.
Before the fascists came to power, Germany could be proud of its scientists, writers and artists. Suffice it to mention the names of Marx and Engels, Hegel and Feuerbach, Goethe and Schiller, Heine, Boerne, Lessing, Mehring, Liebig and Einstein, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. But what do the fascists have in common with this culture? Did they not burn the greatest works of human thought at the stake? What need do they have of the poetry and satire of Young Germany, of Heine and Boerne, when they have a tavern song by Horst Wessel? Why would they need Goethe and Schiller when they have the liar Goebbels? Why care about Hegel and Feuerbach when they have the cretin Rosenberg?
Nazis teach children to sing:
Let the whole world lie in ruins,
To the devil, we do not care!
We will still march on,
Today Germany belongs to us
And tomorrow the whole world!
(From the Hitler Youth song Es zitten die morschen Knochen)
So there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Nazis especially hate Russian culture, an expression of great strength, deep thought, and wisdom of our people! The Nazis, in bestial hatred, in contempt for Russian culture, instill in German soldiers an idiotic fantasy that the Russian state itself was being built by the Germans. However, it is known that the fascist falsifier of history von Wendrip stated in 1935 that no Romans ever existed, that the Romans were Jews, and Rome was founded by the Germans, who supposedly always lived and ruled in Rome. According to the fascists, the first human was a German!
But everyone knows that the Slavs in Russia, and in the Ukraine, and in Belarus, and in Poland, and on the Danube, and in the Baltic States built their states in the struggle against the Germans. It is worth remembering how Alexander Nevsky smashed and drowned the German scoundrels, dogs-knights of the Teutonic order, how the German knights of the Baltic were filled with blood, plundering, raping, enslaving, killing the peoples of the Baltic. It is worth remembering the Battle of Grunwald on July 15, 1410, where the Lithuanian and Russian troops defeated the Teutons, laying down about 50 thousand and taking prisoners about the same number of knights. Tsar Ivan III also beat the Germans.
In 1501, the Russians inflicted a terrible defeat on the Germans in Livonia: “And there are nasty Germans for 10 versts, and they did not leave anything to them, and not saber light, butchering them and their pack of pigs.” They did not even want to dirty their light sabers on this trash, but beat them with clubs with sharp hexagonal tips. Tsar Ivan IV finally defeated these invaders, occupying Narva, Dorpat, Marienburg and Fellin. What measures did the rulers of Germany not resort to in order to prevent the penetration of new discoveries and inventions into Russia! But the Russian people have broken a “window to Europe” for themselves. The talented reformer Tsar Peter was not ashamed, with an ax in his hands, to adopt the shipbuilding art from the Dutch shipbuilders, to learn navigation, military science, to adopt crafts, to introduce new technology. The Russians were not ashamed to learn from the Dutch, the Germans, the French, and the British. This science was not in vain for us. Russia has firmly and confidently occupied its rightful place in world history.
The Nazis know that the Russians beat them more than once in 1918 and in 1920 (the defeat by the Red Army of the Baltic Freikorps sent from Germany to the Baltic countries against the revolution), they know that Russian troops took the German cities of Tilsit and Koenigsberg in 1757-1758, inflicting a terrible defeat on the Germans at Zorndorf. The Prussian king Frederick II, who considered himself a great commander, said that “it is not enough to be able to kill a Russian soldier, after that one must still be able to knock him down.” With the victory at Kunersdorf, the Russians opened their way to the Baltic, and on October 8, 1760, Russian troops entered Berlin. The glorious Russian commander Aleksandr Suvorov, then still a young officer, took part in this campaign to Berlin! The Russians beat the Germans again and again. We will drive them out of our land. If in 1760 Russia defeated the Prussians, if in the most difficult year of 1918 the young Soviet country found the strength to defeat and expel the German interventionists, the filthy hordes of Kaiser Wilhelm, then in the Great Patriotic War the peoples of our country in alliance with the greatest democratic powers, England and the United States, will surely defeat Hitler’s Germany.
As for the nonsense of the fascists about the special role of the Germans in Russia, the working people of our country know that the Germans really played the most disgusting role more than once. The Russian people remember how the Germans ruled when they got hold of power in Russia. The history of Russia knows a whole gallery of German rulers hated by our people. The word Bironovshchina entered the history of Russia as a black page, when the Courland German Biron, the favorite of Tsarina Anna, with a whole pack of German courtiers, terrorized Russia and plundered it. All these chiefs of gendarmes, like Benckendorff, Tsarist ministers like von Plehve, Lidval, Sturmer, Frederiks, executioners-governors like von Wahl, punitive generals Stackelberg, Minn, Riemann, Rennenkampf and others were remembered by the Russian people as the worst enemies. The last Russian queen was a German woman, Alix of Hesse. The Russian people called her the Hessian fly, which harms the crops:
And again the Hessian fly
Inhabited the Russian bread.
These are some of the historical facts about the “special” role of the Germans in the life of Russia.
Only fascists devoid of honor, conscience and shame can deny the enormous world significance of Russian science, Russian culture, Russian art! Is it possible to imagine chemistry without Mendeleev’s periodic system, higher mathematics without Lobachevsky, biology and physiology without Mechnikov, Timiryazev, Sechenov and Pavlov, geology without Karpinsky, music without Tchaikovsky and Glinka, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky? Just as one cannot imagine world literature without Shakespeare and Dante, without Goethe and Ibsen, without Calderon and Hugo, so one cannot imagine world literature without Pushkin and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky, Lermontov and Mayakovsky. About Tolstoy, the German critic Franz Mehring wrote: “In the same way as French history of the 18th century is studied from the writings of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, and German history of the same time from the writings of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, so Russian history of the 19th century can be studied from the writings of Belinsky, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.” Another famous critic, Georg Brandes, calls Tolstoy Ilya Muromets, resurrected from the dead, to plow the Russian land again. Gorky wrote that Tolstoy embodies in his soul all the features of the complex Russian psyche with amazing completeness. Tolstoy is the whole world. Just as it is impossible to imagine the modern science of society without Marx and Engels, so it is impossible to imagine the science of society and world history without the two greatest figures of our era, Lenin and Stalin, nominated by the peoples of Russia. The Nazis ignore, despise and destroy the culture of not only the Russian people, but all other peoples of the USSR. What do they care about the works of Taras Shevchenko! What do they care about Shota Rustaveli, Ali-Shir Navai, the majestic folk epics of David of Sassoun, of Manas, of Jangar! In the Soviet state, the folk art of dozens of nationalities of the USSR sparkled with all colors, precious diamonds. Many of these peoples have a long-standing culture dating back millennia. This is the culture of Tajikistan and other republics of Central Asia. This is the culture of Georgians and Armenia. Music, painting, culture, architecture, theaters of the USSR – have these arts not grown tremendously in twenty-four years of Soviet power, of socialist revival?
And on this multifaceted, rich, fruitful Soviet culture, the fascist forces raised an ax. To cut off this criminal hand, to destroy without a trace these monsters of mankind, these orangutans who have climbed into tanks – this is the task of freedom-loving peoples, if they do not want to fall into slavery, to lose their age-old culture. Sometimes they ask: can fascism do without science and culture? Does not all modern military technology in Germany require a high culture, the development of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, mathematics and other sciences? It is fascism who turns science into evil. The greatest scientific discoveries that should have made humanity happy, made it more powerful, richer, the fascists completely turned into evil for humanity, completely turned into agents of the extermination of humanity. And what does not serve these purposes, burn, break, kill, destroy!
This is the fascist “culture”. Instead of the science of biology: vile racial, misanthropic nonsense. Instead of history: falsifying nonsense. Instead of poetry and art that deeply excites humanity: pornography and obscenities. Instead of a family hearth, there are breeding centers where, without pause, fascist scoundrels rape women. Instead of a school, there is a concentration camp, a Jewish ghetto. Indeed, in Hitlerite Germany, reason has become madness, benevolence has become torment.
Against this greatest danger for all progressive mankind, for all human culture and science accumulated over centuries, we are fighting and will fight until the complete defeat of the Hitlerite hordes. We do not want to be and will not be the slaves of the Germans. We will never be anyone’s slaves. In three revolutions, in the greatest suffering, the peoples of the USSR won the opportunity to build a happy, free life, independent of anyone, to develop all the forces of the people, to put at their service the forces of nature, the wealth of the bowels of the earth, the greatest achievements of science and art. The fascists attacked us to raze, enslave, throw us to the bottom of poverty and barbarism. This will not happen! A German will not spit in our faces. Our children will not be lost!
In the difficult trials of the Great Patriotic War, the will and courage of our people are strengthened, their strength of resistance is growing, and hatred of the enemy is growing. An avalanche of popular anger is growing against the Nazi executioners, who are swallowing our land, flooding it with blood. As our great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin said: “sThe same hammer that shatters glass, forges steel.” And this strong steel, reforged into tanks, airplanes, cannons, machine guns, rifles, mortars, we will bring down on the head of the Nazis and no one will be given mercy.
We are fighting for a great goal: for the life, freedom and honor of the Russian people and all Soviet peoples, for the life, freedom and honor of all, progressive humanity. We are fighting for Russian, Soviet and world culture against fascist barbarism.