The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’¶
Core Argument¶
In these notes, dictated on 30–31 December 1922 and later suppressed until 1956, Lenin delivers a devastating intervention against the proposal for ‘autonomisation’ — Stalin’s plan to absorb the independent Soviet republics into the RSFSR — and against the Great-Russian chauvinism he saw infecting the Bolshevik leadership. The core argument is that the entire approach to the national question had been radically wrong and badly timed, driven not by proletarian internationalism but by the bureaucratic reflexes of a state apparatus still fundamentally bourgeois and tsarist in character. Lenin insists that the apparatus the Party inherited from tsarism, only “slightly anointed with Soviet oil,” could not be trusted to administer a union of nations without crushing the smaller nationalities. The formal right of secession, he argues, would remain a “mere scrap of paper” against the reality of Great-Russian chauvinism, which he describes as a tide in which the tiny minority of Sovietised workers would “drown like a fly in milk.”
The immediate occasion is the Georgian incident, in which Ordzhonikidze had resorted to physical violence against Georgian communists accused of ‘nationalist-socialism’. Lenin draws on Dzerzhinsky’s report as head of the investigating commission, but turns the accusation back on the accusers: Dzerzhinsky, he charges, displayed a “truly Russian frame of mind” — the Russified non-Russian often overdoing it — and his commission’s impartiality was typified by its light-hearted attitude to Ordzhonikidze’s manhandling. The political responsibility, Lenin insists, must fall on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.
Lenin then develops a principled distinction between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation. For the proletarian of a great nation, internationalism requires not merely formal equality but active compensation for past violence and insult — an “inequality of the oppressor nation” to make up for actual inequality. Those who fail to grasp this, he argues, descend to a bourgeois standpoint. The polemic is directed squarely at Stalin, whom Lenin accuses of haste, infatuation with pure administration, and spite — “in politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”
The practical measures Lenin proposes are striking: retain the union for diplomatic and military purposes, but restore full independence to the individual People’s Commissariats in all other respects if necessary; inflict exemplary punishment on Ordzhonikidze; and lay political responsibility on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. He warns that crudity or injustice towards non-Russian nationalities would undermine Bolshevik prestige precisely as the awakening peoples of Asia prepare to enter history — an unpardonable opportunism on the eve of their debut. The notes thus constitute both a theoretical reassertion of the oppressed nation’s right to genuine equality and a fierce organisational indictment of the leading figures driving the union project.