The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B)¶
Core Argument¶
At the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B) in 1917, Lenin delivered a forceful defence of the right of nations to self-determination, including secession, against opponents within the party who sought to abandon this longstanding programme. The core of his argument is that internationalism cannot be built by denying oppressed nations the right to break away; rather, it requires that Great Russian socialists champion freedom of secession, while socialists from formerly oppressed nations champion freedom to unite. Freedom to unite, Lenin insists, logically implies freedom to secede.
Lenin traces the controversy back to the Second Congress in 1903, when Polish social-democrats walked out over this very question. He identifies the root of their error in the peculiar position of Poland, where centuries of tsarist oppression had produced a “rabid and morbid nationalism” among the Polish bourgeoisie, making the Polish proletariat hostile to any slogan that seemed to feed nationalist illusions. The Polish comrades, including Dzerzhinsky, therefore argued that recognition of the right to secession strengthened chauvinism. Lenin counters that this is a “strange and monstrous error”: denying the right to secede does not weaken nationalism but perpetuates the Great Russian chauvinism of the tsars. He draws a sharp polemical contrast: the Polish social-democrats who maintained internationalism against bourgeois nationalism deserve credit, but those who now demand that Russians abandon self-determination are “Polish Plekhanovs”—patriots, not socialists.
Lenin’s principal theoretical opponent at the conference is Pyatakov, whose position he labels “Imperialist Economism”—a term Lenin had coined in an unpublished article. Pyatakov argued that under imperialism the national question was obsolete, and that the slogan “Down with frontiers” should replace the right to secession. Lenin demolishes this as a “meaningless phrase” and “the beginning of anarchy”. A state, even a Soviet state, presupposes frontiers; the question is who decides them. He accuses Pyatakov of self-contradiction: by opposing forcible retention of nations within frontiers, Pyatakov implicitly concedes the right to secession he denies in theory. Lenin further notes that Pyatakov’s argument confuses Western Europe, where national questions were largely settled, with Eastern Europe, where they remain explosive.
Lenin’s key evidence is contemporary: the crisis in Finland, where the Provisional Government’s envoy Rodichev haggled over autonomy while separatism grew. The Menshevik Rabochaya Gazeta had advised Finns to wait for the Constituent Assembly, a position Lenin denounces as chauvinist. He cites the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden as proof that recognising the right to separate can increase trust between peoples and strengthen the proletariat. The resolution he carries affirms that denial of the right to secession is “equivalent to supporting a policy of seizure or annexation”. It distinguishes sharply between the right to secede and the advisability of secession, which the party must decide case by case according to the interests of the class struggle. The resolution also rejects “national cultural autonomy” as a device to divide workers by bourgeois culture, demanding instead common proletarian organisations across national lines.