The following is an excerpt from V. Kozlov’s 1954 pamphlet Bourgeois Nations and Socialist Nations.
The experience of the Soviet Union shows that with the victory of socialism, national distinctions, national languages and the culture and customs of people do not disappear and are not abolished. Socialism does not force national features to follow a single, established model, as has been asserted by the enemies of socialism, the enemies of Marxism.
On the contrary, in the epoch of socialism all the conditions are created for the rapid, all-round development of all nations, the flourishing of their culture, the development and enrichment of their languages. But since, in this case, the interests of one nation do not conflict with the interests of the others, since the interests of all nations wholly coincide and merge into one single whole, an unbreakable, fraternal union of the socialist nations arises in the epoch of socialism. Socialism does not divide nations but brings them closer together. It gradually prepares also the conditions for the future merging of nations, their culture and their languages.
The distinctions which exist among socialist nations are not eternal. In the end they will disappear. But that is a matter of the far distant future.
In the period of the victory of socialism in one country, the conditions necessary for the merging of nations and national languages do not yet exist. Moreover, nations, national distinctions and languages will continue to exist for a long time after communism has become victorious throughout the world.
Under communism, humanity will reach the time when national distinctions and national languages will disappear, and a merging of the nations will come about. But humanity will reach it through the all-round flourishing of all nations and national languages in the world, through the abolition of mutual national distrust and the establishment of equality among nations, through the establishment and strengthening of friendly relations among all the nations of the world.
To give a picture of the development of nations along the road to their merging, V.I. Lenin and J.V. Stalin pointed out that the abolition of national distinctions and the dying away of national languages would not come about immediately after the defeat of world imperialism. And, of course, it will not be carried out by measures of compulsion. To try to carry out the merging of nations by compulsory means would mean ruining the work of organizing cooperation and fraternity among nations.
After the abolition of capitalism throughout the world, there will first take place an unprecedented flourishing of the previously oppressed nations and national languages. That will be the period of the establishment of equality of nations, the stage of the elimination of mutual distrust among nations, the period of the establishment and strengthening of friendly relations among all the peoples of the world.
Only considerably later will a common language gradually begin to take shape. Obviously, no one will impose it on peoples by force. People will themselves feel the need to have, besides their own national languages, one common international language for convenience of intercourse and close cooperation with one another. This necessity will arise when all the nations of the world are united by a single communist economy, when close economic relations are established among the separate parts of the world.
At first the national languages and the common international language will exist side by side. It is fully possible that at first there will be set up not one world economic centre for all nations, with one common language, but several economic centres for separate groups of nations, with a common language for each group. The languages of these groups of nations will be a step towards mankind’s transition to one common world language. They will be richer languages than each separate national language. And this is understandable, for hundreds of nations will take part in the creation of these common languages. Each nation, big and small, will make its own contribution to world culture, to the creation of a world language.
Humanity will arrive at the world language common to all when the world communist system of economy has become sufficiently strong and communism has entered into the life of all the peoples of the world, when nations themselves are convinced in practice of the advantages of one common language over the national languages.
The merging of nations and the transition to a world language common to all will come about in a natural way. The national languages will die of themselves and give place to the international language common to all. The appearance of a world language will be called forth by the requirements of a single world communist economy.
There are people who may ask the following question: Which of the modern languages will become the future world language? The reply to this question is: none of them. The common language for the whole of humanity after the victory of communism in the whole world will not be one or other of the modern languages, but a new language which will arise as a result of the merging of the existing modern languages into one common language, as a result of prolonged intercourse among peoples on the basis of one single world communist economy.