The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (Extract)

Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party

Written 10 April 1917

Editor’s note: This pamphlet was written by Lenin in April 1917 in preparation for the April conference of the Bolsheviks where he waged a struggle for the rearming of the party. A few typed copies were circulated to delegates, and it served an important role in Lenin’s polemic, but it was not published for general circulation until September 1917 due to logistical chaos at the printing press in St. Petersburg. The pamphlet develops the arguments summarised in his ‘April Theses’. We publish here just the section dealing with the national question. We recommend reading the full text, published in Lenin Selected Writings Volume 2: The Revolutions of 1917, Wellred Books, 2024, pp. 77-113.

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The agrarian and national programmes

14. As regards the national question, the proletarian party first of all must advocate the proclamation and immediate realisation of complete freedom of secession from Russia for all the nations and peoples who were oppressed by tsarism, or who were forcibly joined to, or forcibly kept within the boundaries of, the state, i.e. annexed.

All statements, declarations and manifestos concerning renunciation of annexations that are not accompanied by the realisation of the right of secession in practice, are nothing but bourgeois deception of the people, or else pious petty-bourgeois wishes.

The proletarian party strives to create as large a state as possible, for this is to the advantage of the working people; it strives to draw nations closer together, and bring about their further fusion; but it desires to achieve this aim not by violence, but exclusively through a free fraternal union of the workers and the working people of all nations.

The more democratic the Russian Republic, and the more successfully it organises itself into a Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the more powerful will be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of all nations.

Complete freedom of secession, the broadest local (and national) autonomy, and elaborate guarantees of the rights of national minorities – this is the programme of the revolutionary proletariat.