The Ukraine

Published 15 June 1917

Editor’s note: In the aftermath of the overthrow of the tsarist regime in the February Revolution, the Ukrainian Central Rada, a bourgeois-nationalist government, was founded in April 1917. The Rada proclaimed its ‘First Universal’, an act which declared the autonomy of Ukraine. Lenin criticises the position of the bourgeois liberals of the Russian Provisional Government, which opposed the declaration, and explains how Russian revolutionary democrats had to defend Ukraine’s rights in order to achieve the unity of the working class.

* * *

The new, coalition Provisional Government’s policy failure is becoming more and more obvious. The Universal Act on the organisation of the Ukraine, issued by the Ukrainian Central Rada and adopted on 11 June 1917, by the All-Ukraine Army Congress, plainly exposes that policy and furnishes documentary proof of its failure.

Without seceding from Russia, without breaking away from the Russian state, [reads the Act] let the Ukrainian people have the right to shape their own life on their own soil […] All laws by which order is to be established here in the Ukraine shall be passed solely by this Ukrainian Assembly. And laws establishing order throughout the Russian State must be passed by the All-Russia Parliament.

These are perfectly clear words. They state very specifically that the Ukrainian people do not wish to secede from Russia at present. They demand autonomy without denying the need for the supreme authority of the ‘All-Russia Parliament’. No democrat, let alone a socialist, will venture to deny the complete legitimacy of the Ukraine’s demands. And no democrat can deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. 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. Only unqualified recognition of this right can actually break completely and irrevocably with the accursed tsarist past, when everything was done to bring about a mutual estrangement of the two peoples so close to each other in language, territory, character and history. 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.

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. This cannot be done without full recognition of the Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession.

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. 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.

* * *

Rech, the paper of the embittered bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, who are half demented with rage, savagely attacks the Ukrainians for their ‘unauthorised’ decision. “That act by the Ukrainians”, it says, “is a downright crime under the law, and calls for the immediate application of severe legitimate punitive measures.” There is nothing to add to this attack by the savage bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. Down with the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie! Long live the free union of free peasants and workers of a free Ukraine with the workers and peasants of revolutionary Russia!