>During the 1848 revolutions, Friedrich Engels designated several Slavic and non-German groups in the Habsburg Empire as "counter-revolutionary". In his writings for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he categorized the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Ukrainians (Ruthenians) as "non-historic" peoples. He believed they inherently opposed progressive bourgeois revolutions and would inevitably perish in future historical developments.
P.S. lol notice how AI called Ruthenians - Ukrainians.
>Engels contrasted these groups with "historic" nations like the Germans, Poles, and Magyars, which he viewed as motors of historical progress. Because many of these smaller Slavic groups opposed the Hungarian and German nationalist movements and allied with the Habsburg monarchy to preserve their own autonomy, Engels viewed them as tools of absolutist counter-revolution.For a deeper dive into these specific 1848-1849 essays, you can read Engels's theoretical framework in texts like "The Magyar Struggle" and "Democratic Pan-Slavism" available via the Marxists Internet Archive.
So I think he didn't meant ethnicities but nations right? So not exactly racist.
And he was kinda right until yugo and ussr got cooked.