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The Ukraine

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

Lenin's central thesis is that the Russian revolutionary movement must unconditionally recognise the right of nations to self-determination — including the right to secede — precisely in order to build a voluntary union of peoples capable of sustaining the struggle for socialism. The article argues that the Ukrainian Central Rada's demand for autonomy within a federal Russia is both legitimate and moderate, and that the Provisional Government's hostility to it reveals the counter-revolutionary character of the bourgeois coalition. For Lenin, the test of revolutionary democracy is not whether one favours small states — he explicitly does not — but whether one recognises that only the unqualified right to secession can create the conditions for genuine, fraternal unity between workers and peasants of different nations.

Theoretical Grounding

The article sits within Lenin's sustained theoretical work on the national question, developed most fully in his 1913–14 writings against the Bund and the Austro-Marxists. The key conceptual move is the distinction between the right to secession and the desirability of secession. Lenin insists that Marxists must advocate the former while opposing the latter in most concrete circumstances, because the economic and political logic of capitalism drives towards larger markets and closer integration. However, this integration must be won through trust and equality, not coercion. The argument draws on the classical Marxist position that national oppression is a tool of the ruling class, and that the working class must break decisively with the chauvinism inherited from the old regime. There is also an implicit polemic against those who would subordinate the national question to abstract internationalism — Lenin is arguing that genuine internationalism requires taking national grievances seriously, not dismissing them.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in June 1917, between the February and October Revolutions. The Provisional Government, a coalition of liberal and moderate socialist parties, was attempting to hold the Russian Empire together while pursuing the war. The Ukrainian Central Rada — a body Lenin describes as "counter-revolutionary bourgeois nationalist" in his note — had issued its First Universal on 10 June, declaring Ukrainian autonomy within a federal Russia. The Kadet-led government responded with threats of repression. Lenin seizes on this confrontation to demonstrate that the coalition government is incapable of solving the national question, and that only a government of workers and peasants can offer a genuine solution. The article is thus both an analysis of a specific political crisis and a strategic intervention: it aims to win Ukrainian workers and peasants to the Bolshevik position by showing that the Bolsheviks alone recognise their rights.

Where the Argument Continues

Lenin's position on the national question is developed at greater length in his 1914 article "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination" and in his 1916 "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up". The question of Ukraine specifically recurs throughout 1917–18 in Lenin's writings on the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and the struggle against the Ukrainian Rada after October. The broader theoretical tradition continues in the work of the Communist International on the national and colonial question, particularly the 1920 theses drafted by Lenin. Within the contemporary Marxist tradition, the RCI has addressed the national question in relation to Scotland, Catalonia, and Palestine, applying the same distinction between the right to secession and the political assessment of particular secessionist movements.

Connections

  • Rosa Luxemburg, "The National Question and Autonomy" (1908–09) — The principal Marxist opponent of the right to national self-determination within the pre-war SPD. Lenin's article is an implicit polemic against Luxemburg's position that national self-determination is a bourgeois demand irrelevant to socialism.
  • Karl Kautsky, "The National Question" (1887) and "The Liberation of Nations" (1917) — Kautsky's earlier work influenced Lenin, but his centrist position during the war made him an object of criticism.
  • Stalin, "Marxism and the National Question" (1913) — Written under Lenin's direction, this text provides the theoretical framework Lenin assumes here.
  • Vladimir Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination" (1914) — The fullest statement of the theoretical position underlying this article.

Key Quotes

  1. "Only unqualified recognition of this right makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one state."

  2. "Accursed tsarism made the Great Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people, and fomented in them a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in their native tongue."

  3. "Russia's revolutionary democrats, if they want to be truly revolutionary and truly democratic, must break with that past, must regain for themselves, for the workers and peasants of Russia, the brotherly trust of the Ukrainian workers and peasants."

  4. "We do not favour the existence of small states. We stand for the closest union of the workers of the world against 'their own' capitalists and those of all other countries."

  5. "But for this union to be voluntary, the Russian worker, who does not for a moment trust the Russian or the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in anything, now stands for the right of the Ukrainians to secede, without imposing his friendship upon them, but striving to win their friendship by treating them as an equal, as an ally and brother in the struggle for socialism."