In recent years, activists in the post-Soviet space have often quoted a phrase attributed to the German philosopher. We checked whether it really belongs to Karl Marx.
The full statement reads like this: “A guest, an idiot, or an occupier who is imposing his own language may not know the language of the country of residence.” In the 2010s and 2020s, it could often be found on protesters’ posters and even billboards in the states of the former USSR, where the language issue is especially acute: in Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, as well as in national republics RF. The quote is mentioned on the Internet and Kazakh activists. In the summer of 2023, the publication of the former vice-speaker of the Parliament of Moldova Alexandra Slusar with this phrase signed by Marx, it received almost 3,000 reposts on Facebook.
The problem of the status of the Russian language in the post-Soviet space arose immediately after the collapse of the USSR. It turned out to be especially relevant in those republics where a significant part of the population did not speak the language of the titular nation, for example, in the Baltic countries. The situation escalated after the start of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine - in particular, accepted In 2022, in Latvia, Russian citizens living in the country who were previously citizens or non-citizens of Latvia must pass a language exam in order to renew their permanent residence permit, unless they have done so before and do not fall under exceptions. Local ministries recently refuse from using the Russian language when communicating with citizens and on official websites. Although the policy of the Latvian authorities has sharply tightened relatively recently, language activists They have been calling for similar measures to be taken for many years and at one time they used a quote attributed to Marx at demonstrations.
The written legacy of Karl Marx has been well studied, primarily due to the iconic role of his personality in the USSR. "Verified" researched two publications complete collected works of the German philosopher (together with Friedrich Engels), published in the Soviet Union. However, neither there nor in the original German-language publications There are no similar thoughts by Marx. Moreover, translation options for the desired statement into German are not found on the Internet at all, that is, this language is not original for the viral phrase.
However, the language of its origin was hardly Russian. In its classic form, the quote appears on the Internet only around 2012, when it used one Ukrainian activist on his poster. But in the formulation “A person who does not speak the language of the people on whose land he lives is a guest, or an occupier, or a slave of this occupier” (also “...either a slave or an occupier”) the statement was quoted And earlier, in 2006. Moreover, each time these were Ukrainian users, who sometimes provided a translation of the phrase into Ukrainian - this version used and at a demonstration in 2010 in Kyiv. And it is in Ukrainian that it meets in printed publications of the first half of the 2000s: “Soul inside out"(2000), "History of the Ukrainian language in the notes of Yuri Kuzmenko"(2003), "Ukraine and communism"(2003), "Independent cultural magazine"(2004). Moreover, in some cases the name of Karl Marx is not mentioned nearby - for example, he is replaced by the French idealist philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier or poet Charles de Bernard, in whose works we, however, also did not find such a quote.
The oldest "Verified" mention of the quote in Ukrainian that was discovered dates back to 1997, when it appeared in book Anatoly Gorily "Easterners and Westerners: similarities and differences." It says: “Here it would be appropriate to cite very apt words allegedly belonging to the now unpopular K. Marx (I quote from the newspaper “Fleet of Ukraine” dated November 16, 1996): “A person living in a country and not knowing the state language is either a guest, or a slave, or an occupier.”
Currently, the archive of the newspaper "Ukrainian Navy”, published since 1992 in Sevastopol in Ukrainian, is not in the public domain. Nevertheless, judging by the quotation, this publication does not answer the question from which work of Marx the words we are looking for are taken. Already in the 1990s, the authorship of the quote was questioned, and before that it simply did not appear in well-known publications either in German or in Russian. Thus, most likely, it was attributed to the German philosopher many years after his death, and in another country.
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