The National Question¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter establishes that the Bolsheviks’ principled stance on the national question was not a peripheral concern but a strategic necessity for leading the working class to power in Russia, where 57 per cent of the population comprised oppressed non-Russian nationalities. The intensification of reaction between 1907 and 1910 is presented as the immediate context: Finnish autonomy was abolished, millions were disenfranchised on grounds of ‘citizenship’, and anti-Semitism erupted in the notorious Beylis case in Kiev, where Black Hundred elements accused Jews of ritual murder. The chapter argues that this racist poison originated not from popular prejudice but from the tsarist regime itself, deliberately encouraged by Nicholas II and his court as a tool of division and enslavement.
The core argument is that racism can only be fought by uniting workers across all national lines in a common revolutionary struggle against autocracy and capitalism. The Bolshevik response to the Beylis trial is offered as the model: they organised protest strikes in Petersburg, Kiev, Revel, Gomel, and other cities, issuing leaflets that declared Finns, Poles, Jews, Germans, and Armenians all brothers in struggle. The mass movement forced Beylis’s acquittal. The chapter contrasts this with petty-bourgeois nationalism, which by emphasising national differences plays into the hands of the racists. The Bund is singled out for its separatist line: demanding sole representation of Jewish workers, Saturday rest, Jewish language rights, and ‘cultural-national autonomy’—a policy that amounted to splitting the workers on national lines.
Lenin’s position is presented as the dialectical alternative to two opposing errors. On one side stood Great-Russian chauvinism, denounced not only in its Black Hundred form but also in the liberal bourgeoisie, who fought for the privileges of ‘their’ nation. On the other stood Rosa Luxemburg’s abstract internationalism, which denied the right of nations to self-determination. While Luxemburg was right to resist the petty-bourgeois Polish nationalists of the PSP, her refusal to recognise Polish self-determination would have been a gift to the nationalists and a catastrophe for the revolution. The chapter notes that the dispute was serious enough to split Polish Social Democracy, with an opposition group led by Hanyecki and Malecki breaking away. Lenin’s more profound approach, elaborated in numerous articles before and during the First World War, is illustrated by the practical unity of the Bolshevik Party itself: in the Caucasus, Georgians, Armenians, Tartars, and Russians worked together for over a decade; in Riga, Russians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were united—only the Bund organised apart. Stalin’s article The National Question and the Social Democracy, the chapter reveals, was in effect dictated by Lenin.