Appeal of the Council of People’s Commissars to the Moslems of Russia and the East¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter reproduces the full text of the Appeal of the Council of People’s Commissars to the Moslems of Russia and the East, dated 3 December 1917. Its core argument is that the October Revolution has inaugurated a new epoch in which the toiling masses of the entire world, and especially the colonised peoples of the East, can and must throw off the yoke of imperialist oppression. The appeal is at once a declaration of principles, a call to action, and a repudiation of the foreign policies of both the Tsarist regime and the Provisional Government.
The document makes several key claims. First, it asserts that the Russian Revolution is not an isolated national event but the vanguard of a global upheaval: the workers and soldiers of the West are already rallying under socialism, and even India, ‘oppressed by the “enlightened” European robbers for so many centuries’, has raised the standard of revolt. Second, it declares that the new Soviet government will guarantee the religious and cultural freedom of Moslem peoples within Russia—mosques, shrines, faith, customs, and national institutions are ‘declared free and inviolable’. Third, it announces the unilateral abrogation of several secret treaties: the Tsar’s agreement regarding the annexation of Constantinople, the treaty for the partition of Persia, and the treaty for the partition of Turkey (which was to despoil it of Armenia). In each case, the appeal specifies that the peoples concerned—Moslems in Constantinople, Persians, and Armenians—will be guaranteed the right freely to determine their own destiny. The text also promises the withdrawal of Russian troops from Persia after the cessation of military operations.
The historical context is the final year of the First World War, the collapse of the Tsarist autocracy, and the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. The appeal is addressed directly to specific national groups—Tatars, Kyrghyz, Sarts, Turks, Chechens, Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Hindus—and is designed to win their support for the Soviet government while simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of the Entente powers and their colonial projects. The polemical thrust is directed against ‘European imperialist robbers’, ‘capitalist plunder’, and the ‘secret treaties’ of the old regime. The appeal also implicitly argues against the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary line that the revolution should confine itself to bourgeois-democratic tasks; here, the revolution is presented as immediately and necessarily anti-imperialist. The tone is urgent and millenarian: ‘the ancient citadel of slavery and serfdom is crumbling’, and the toilers of the East are called upon to ‘lose no time in throwing off the yoke’.