Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
In his introduction to the national question, Lenin characterised the Russian Empire as a prison house of nations, where Great Russians constituted a bare 43 per cent of the population. Oppressed nationalities, concentrated in the borderlands, existed at sharply different levels of economic and national development; some, such as the Finns and Poles, were more advanced than their Russian oppressors. The national question was further complicated by migration, industrialisation, and the mixing of national groups within the working class. Trotsky later argued that the Bolsheviks’ correct policy on this question was decisive in guaranteeing their victory.
Lenin’s approach rested on six pillars: defence of the democratic right to self-determination, including secession; using this right to guarantee working-class unity and dissolve national animosity; strict party unity, opposing any federal organisation; a clear distinction between the nationalism of oppressor and oppressed nations; working-class independence from petty-bourgeois nationalists; and the subordination of the national question to the class question. At the 1903 RSDLP Congress, Clause 9 recognised the right of nations to self-determination, and Lenin insisted on a single, centralised party, defeating the Bund’s demand for federal status based on ‘cultural-national autonomy’.
Lenin engaged in sharp polemics with Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected the slogan of self-determination as utopian under imperialism. Lenin countered that Great Russian social-democrats must defend this right to demonstrate solidarity with oppressed nations. Later, Bukharin’s Baugy Group argued that democratic demands were impossible under capitalism and useless under socialism; Lenin insisted that the struggle for such demands was essential to winning workers to the revolutionary perspective. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, recognising the right to secession, and five independent republics were recognised, including Finland, alongside seventeen autonomous republics within the RSFSR.
Lenin argued that denying national freedom by force would be seen as a continuation of tsarist Great Russian chauvinism. Granting national democratic rights allowed the Bolsheviks to unite workers and poor peasants against bourgeois nationalists. In Ukraine, the Bolsheviks recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s right to secede but issued an ultimatum over its collaboration with counter-revolutionaries. Lenin insisted on equal unification into a new Union, accusing Stalin of a quasi-imperialist, Great-Russian chauvinist attitude in the ‘Georgian affair’. After Lenin’s death, the bureaucracy reversed his policy; Stalin’s purges hit nationalities hardest, and Great-Russian nationalism returned, contributing to the USSR’s eventual breakup.