TITOMAn
22nd April 2002, 04:39
"National oppression in Russia was incomparably rougher than in the neighbouring states not only on its western but even on its eastern borders," relates Trotsky. "The vast numbers of these nationalities deprived of rights, and the sharpness of their deprivations, gave to the national problem in Tsarist Russia a gigantic explosive force." (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 890.)
Tsarist Russia was a prison house of nationalities. One of the key reasons for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution was its approach to the national question. Lenin realised that the only way a new socialist federation could be built was on the basis of complete equality of the national minorities that made up Russia. There could be no compulsion of one nation by another. A socialist republic could only be established on a voluntary basis, as a voluntary union of nationalities. As a consequence, the right of nations to self determination was enshrined on the banner of the party and the young Soviet republic, up to and including secession.
Lenin stood for the unity of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire, but it had to be a voluntary unity. That is why he insisted from the very beginning on the right to self-determination. This idea which is frequently misinterpreted to mean a demand for separation is entirely incorrect. The Bolsheviks did not advocate separation, but defended the broadest possible extension of national self-determination, up to and including separation. No one has the right to oblige a people to live within the confines of a state when the majority do not wish to do so. But the right to self-determination no more implies the demand to separate than the right to divorce means the demand that all couples must separate, or that the right to abortion means that all pregnancies must be terminated. As Trotsky explains in his History of the Russian Revolution:
"In this the Bolshevik Party did not by any means undertake an evangel of separation. It merely assumed an obligation to struggle implacably against every form of national oppression, including the forcible retention of this or that nationality within the boundaries of the general state. Only in this way could the Russian proletariat gradually win the confidence of the oppressed nationalities." (Ibid., p. 891.) On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were implacably opposed to bourgeois nationalism that attempted to divide the working class. The Bolsheviks stood for the unity of all workers within one organisation, irrespective of nationality, race or religion. "A revolutionary organisation is not the prototype of the future state, but, merely the instrument for its creation. An instrument ought to be adapted to fashioning the product; it ought not to include the product." (Ibid., 891.)
In his work on Stalin, Trotsky explained that "segregating the various nationalistic portions of mankind was never our concern. True, Bolshevism insisted that each nation should have the right to secede--the right, but not duty--as the ultimate, most effective guarantee against oppression. But the thought of artificially preserving national idiosyncrasies was profoundly alien to Bolshevism. The removal of any, even disguised, even the most refined and practically 'imponderable' national oppression or indignity, must be used for the revolutionary unification rather than the segregation of the workers of various nationalities. Wherever national privileges and injuries exist, nations must have the possibility to separate from each other, that thus they may facilitate the free unification of the workers, in the name of a close rapprochement of nations, with the distant perspective of the eventual complete fusion of all. Such was the basic tendency of Bolshevism, which revealed the full measure of its force in the October Revolution." (Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. one, p. 232.) This was a dialectical concept that could provide the basis for the resolution of the national question.
National problems were a left-over of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Capitalism in its decline exacerbated these problems. Only the socialist revolution could resolve them and provide a genuine equality of nations. When the Bolsheviks came to power the old Tsarist empire was in a process of rapid disintegration. The Soviet republic could only reconstruct the unity of peoples, in the words of Lenin, "not by force, but by voluntary agreement". This constituted a complete break with Great-Russian nationalism of the past. The Bolshevik doctrine of national self-determination was firstly applied to the concrete conditions of war, when the soviets issued an appeal for peace "without annexations". Social liberation and self-determination became cardinal.
The right of self-determination was an important part of Lenin's programme, insofar as it demonstrated clearly to the oppressed workers and peasants (especially the latter) of Poland, Georgia, Latvia and the Ukraine that the Russian workers had no interest in oppressing them and would firmly defend their right to determine their own destiny. But this was only half of Lenin's programme on the national question. The other half was equally as important--the need to uphold the union of the proletariat above all national, linguistic or religious differences. As far as the Bolshevik Party was concerned, Lenin always opposed any tendency to divide the party (and the workers' movement in general) along national lines.
After the Revolution, Lenin hoped that there could be a voluntary and fraternal union of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire in the form of a Soviet Federation. To this end, he demanded that the nationalities be treated with extreme sensitivity. Every manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism was to be rooted out. As a matter of fact, for some time after October, the word "Russia" disappeared altogether from official documents. The official name of the homeland of October was simply "the Workers' State".
Despite the military and strategic needs of the civil war, the Bolsheviks applied the right of self determination unreservedly. In 1918 they accepted the secession of Finland and Poland. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania independent Soviet republics were recognised in 1918, but were overthrown with the backing of the British and were recognised as independent bourgeois republics in 1920. In Georgia, a bourgeois republic was recognised in 1920 and a Soviet republic in 1921. Only when the very survival of the Soviet regime was put at risk was this principle transgressed. As Trotsky explained: "At Brest-Litovsk the Soviet government sacrificed the national independence of the Ukraine in order to salvage the workers' state. Nobody could speak of treason towards the Ukraine, since all the class conscious workers understood the forced character of this sacrifice." (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 27. New York, 1970 edition.) The Soviet intervention in the Ukraine in 1919 and again in 1920 was a measure of self defence against a government which had invoked foreign intervention. The same was true of the lower Volga, of central Asia and Georgia.
The defeat of the White armies, and the subsequent withdrawal of British, Japanese and French forces led to the recovery of territory and the establishment within the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) of numerous autonomous republics and regions. The principle of independence or autonomy had been extended to the whole of the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was a loose union based upon bilateral treaties between the Federation and the republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In 1922 Stalin, Commissar of Nationalities, was responsible for normalising relations between the republics. Eventually, on the 30th December 1922, the federation evolved into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a union of equal partners. Foreign affairs, defence, foreign trade, communications and posts and telegraphs all fell within the exclusive responsibility of the central government of the USSR. According to the declaration: "Finally the very structure of Soviet power, which is international by its class nature, drives the working masses of the Soviet republics along the path of union into a single socialist family.
"All these circumstances imperatively demand the unification of the Soviet republics into a single union state capable of guaranteeing external security, internal economic progress and freedom of national development for the peoples." (Quoted by E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 401.)
However, Stalinism--a regime of bureaucratic centralism--came into conflict with the aspirations of the minority nationalities. As early as 1922 Stalin came into collision with Lenin as a result of the former's high handed manner in dealing with the national minorities. Stalin was attempting to crush the opposition of the Georgian Bolsheviks to his plans for the Federation. Lenin wrote to the Politburo in September 1922 concerning Stalin's handling of the republic's relations with the RSFSR: "In my opinion, the question is of prime importance. Stalin is rather in too much of a hurry." (LCW, Vol. 45, p. 211. Russian edition. It does not appear in the English Collected Works.) A week later, Lenin wrote to Kamenev, "I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism". (Mistranslated in Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 372, original in Russian, Vol. 45, p. 214.) The following month he writes: "I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious 'nationalist-socialism,' played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles."
In a broadside against Stalin, Lenin warned against that "really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is." He continued: "There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great Russian riffraff like a fly in milk". He then concluded: "The political responsibility for all this truly Great Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky." (LCW, Vol. 36, pp. 605-11.) Lenin had suffered two serious strokes and realised he could die at any moment. While he was ill, he insisted on dictating a letter to Krupskaya for Trotsky congratulating him for having triumphed "without a blow being struck" in the Central Committee's discussion on the foreign trade monopoly. Stalin got to hear of this, telephoned her and swore at her, unheard of conduct for a Bolshevik leader.
The following day, 23rd December 1922, very upset, Krupskaya wrote to Kamenev: "Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday about a brief note that Lenin dictated to me, with the permission of the doctors. I didn't join the Party yesterday. In the whole of these last 30 years I have never heard a single coarse word from a comrade. The interests of the Party and Ilich are no less dear to me than to Stalin. At the moment I need all the self control I can muster?" Krupskaya asks (it is the editors who summarise without quoting) to be protected "from gross interference in her private life, unworthy abuse and threats". (Central Archives of the Party at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, in Lenin, Collected Works, Russian ed., Vol. 54, pp. 674-5.)
On the 30th December 1922, Lenin writes: "If matters have come to such a pass? we can imagine what mess we have got ourselves into." He exchanged letters with Trotsky and entrusted him with the defence of their common cause. On the 5th March he wrote to Trotsky asking him to undertake the defence of the Georgian case against Stalin. In his Testament, which he dictated at the cost of enormous effort each day, he calls for Stalin's removal as general secretary. This was Lenin's last political act.
The national question requires great sensitivity. Bureaucratic high-handedness is incompatible with such an approach. "The cultural demands of the nations aroused by the revolution require the widest possible autonomy," explained Trotsky. "At the same time, industry can successfully develop only by subjecting all parts of the Union to a general centralised plan. But economy and culture are not separated by impermeable partitions. The tendencies of cultural autonomy and economic centralism come naturally from time to time into conflict. The contradiction between them is, however, far from irreconcilable.
"Although there can be no once-and-for-all prepared formula to resolve the problem, still there is the resilient will of the interested masses themselves. Only their actual participation in the administration of their own destinies can at each new stage draw the necessary lines between the legitimate demands of economic centralism and the living gravitations of national culture. The trouble is, however, that the will of the population of the Soviet Union in all its national divisions is now wholly replaced by the will of a bureaucracy which approaches both economy and culture from the point of view of convenience of administration and the specific interests of the ruling stratum." (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 170-1.)
Tsarist Russia was a prison house of nationalities. One of the key reasons for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution was its approach to the national question. Lenin realised that the only way a new socialist federation could be built was on the basis of complete equality of the national minorities that made up Russia. There could be no compulsion of one nation by another. A socialist republic could only be established on a voluntary basis, as a voluntary union of nationalities. As a consequence, the right of nations to self determination was enshrined on the banner of the party and the young Soviet republic, up to and including secession.
Lenin stood for the unity of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire, but it had to be a voluntary unity. That is why he insisted from the very beginning on the right to self-determination. This idea which is frequently misinterpreted to mean a demand for separation is entirely incorrect. The Bolsheviks did not advocate separation, but defended the broadest possible extension of national self-determination, up to and including separation. No one has the right to oblige a people to live within the confines of a state when the majority do not wish to do so. But the right to self-determination no more implies the demand to separate than the right to divorce means the demand that all couples must separate, or that the right to abortion means that all pregnancies must be terminated. As Trotsky explains in his History of the Russian Revolution:
"In this the Bolshevik Party did not by any means undertake an evangel of separation. It merely assumed an obligation to struggle implacably against every form of national oppression, including the forcible retention of this or that nationality within the boundaries of the general state. Only in this way could the Russian proletariat gradually win the confidence of the oppressed nationalities." (Ibid., p. 891.) On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were implacably opposed to bourgeois nationalism that attempted to divide the working class. The Bolsheviks stood for the unity of all workers within one organisation, irrespective of nationality, race or religion. "A revolutionary organisation is not the prototype of the future state, but, merely the instrument for its creation. An instrument ought to be adapted to fashioning the product; it ought not to include the product." (Ibid., 891.)
In his work on Stalin, Trotsky explained that "segregating the various nationalistic portions of mankind was never our concern. True, Bolshevism insisted that each nation should have the right to secede--the right, but not duty--as the ultimate, most effective guarantee against oppression. But the thought of artificially preserving national idiosyncrasies was profoundly alien to Bolshevism. The removal of any, even disguised, even the most refined and practically 'imponderable' national oppression or indignity, must be used for the revolutionary unification rather than the segregation of the workers of various nationalities. Wherever national privileges and injuries exist, nations must have the possibility to separate from each other, that thus they may facilitate the free unification of the workers, in the name of a close rapprochement of nations, with the distant perspective of the eventual complete fusion of all. Such was the basic tendency of Bolshevism, which revealed the full measure of its force in the October Revolution." (Trotsky, Stalin, Vol. one, p. 232.) This was a dialectical concept that could provide the basis for the resolution of the national question.
National problems were a left-over of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Capitalism in its decline exacerbated these problems. Only the socialist revolution could resolve them and provide a genuine equality of nations. When the Bolsheviks came to power the old Tsarist empire was in a process of rapid disintegration. The Soviet republic could only reconstruct the unity of peoples, in the words of Lenin, "not by force, but by voluntary agreement". This constituted a complete break with Great-Russian nationalism of the past. The Bolshevik doctrine of national self-determination was firstly applied to the concrete conditions of war, when the soviets issued an appeal for peace "without annexations". Social liberation and self-determination became cardinal.
The right of self-determination was an important part of Lenin's programme, insofar as it demonstrated clearly to the oppressed workers and peasants (especially the latter) of Poland, Georgia, Latvia and the Ukraine that the Russian workers had no interest in oppressing them and would firmly defend their right to determine their own destiny. But this was only half of Lenin's programme on the national question. The other half was equally as important--the need to uphold the union of the proletariat above all national, linguistic or religious differences. As far as the Bolshevik Party was concerned, Lenin always opposed any tendency to divide the party (and the workers' movement in general) along national lines.
After the Revolution, Lenin hoped that there could be a voluntary and fraternal union of the peoples of the former Tsarist empire in the form of a Soviet Federation. To this end, he demanded that the nationalities be treated with extreme sensitivity. Every manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism was to be rooted out. As a matter of fact, for some time after October, the word "Russia" disappeared altogether from official documents. The official name of the homeland of October was simply "the Workers' State".
Despite the military and strategic needs of the civil war, the Bolsheviks applied the right of self determination unreservedly. In 1918 they accepted the secession of Finland and Poland. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania independent Soviet republics were recognised in 1918, but were overthrown with the backing of the British and were recognised as independent bourgeois republics in 1920. In Georgia, a bourgeois republic was recognised in 1920 and a Soviet republic in 1921. Only when the very survival of the Soviet regime was put at risk was this principle transgressed. As Trotsky explained: "At Brest-Litovsk the Soviet government sacrificed the national independence of the Ukraine in order to salvage the workers' state. Nobody could speak of treason towards the Ukraine, since all the class conscious workers understood the forced character of this sacrifice." (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 27. New York, 1970 edition.) The Soviet intervention in the Ukraine in 1919 and again in 1920 was a measure of self defence against a government which had invoked foreign intervention. The same was true of the lower Volga, of central Asia and Georgia.
The defeat of the White armies, and the subsequent withdrawal of British, Japanese and French forces led to the recovery of territory and the establishment within the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) of numerous autonomous republics and regions. The principle of independence or autonomy had been extended to the whole of the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was a loose union based upon bilateral treaties between the Federation and the republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In 1922 Stalin, Commissar of Nationalities, was responsible for normalising relations between the republics. Eventually, on the 30th December 1922, the federation evolved into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a union of equal partners. Foreign affairs, defence, foreign trade, communications and posts and telegraphs all fell within the exclusive responsibility of the central government of the USSR. According to the declaration: "Finally the very structure of Soviet power, which is international by its class nature, drives the working masses of the Soviet republics along the path of union into a single socialist family.
"All these circumstances imperatively demand the unification of the Soviet republics into a single union state capable of guaranteeing external security, internal economic progress and freedom of national development for the peoples." (Quoted by E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 401.)
However, Stalinism--a regime of bureaucratic centralism--came into conflict with the aspirations of the minority nationalities. As early as 1922 Stalin came into collision with Lenin as a result of the former's high handed manner in dealing with the national minorities. Stalin was attempting to crush the opposition of the Georgian Bolsheviks to his plans for the Federation. Lenin wrote to the Politburo in September 1922 concerning Stalin's handling of the republic's relations with the RSFSR: "In my opinion, the question is of prime importance. Stalin is rather in too much of a hurry." (LCW, Vol. 45, p. 211. Russian edition. It does not appear in the English Collected Works.) A week later, Lenin wrote to Kamenev, "I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism". (Mistranslated in Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 372, original in Russian, Vol. 45, p. 214.) The following month he writes: "I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious 'nationalist-socialism,' played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles."
In a broadside against Stalin, Lenin warned against that "really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is." He continued: "There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great Russian riffraff like a fly in milk". He then concluded: "The political responsibility for all this truly Great Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky." (LCW, Vol. 36, pp. 605-11.) Lenin had suffered two serious strokes and realised he could die at any moment. While he was ill, he insisted on dictating a letter to Krupskaya for Trotsky congratulating him for having triumphed "without a blow being struck" in the Central Committee's discussion on the foreign trade monopoly. Stalin got to hear of this, telephoned her and swore at her, unheard of conduct for a Bolshevik leader.
The following day, 23rd December 1922, very upset, Krupskaya wrote to Kamenev: "Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday about a brief note that Lenin dictated to me, with the permission of the doctors. I didn't join the Party yesterday. In the whole of these last 30 years I have never heard a single coarse word from a comrade. The interests of the Party and Ilich are no less dear to me than to Stalin. At the moment I need all the self control I can muster?" Krupskaya asks (it is the editors who summarise without quoting) to be protected "from gross interference in her private life, unworthy abuse and threats". (Central Archives of the Party at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, in Lenin, Collected Works, Russian ed., Vol. 54, pp. 674-5.)
On the 30th December 1922, Lenin writes: "If matters have come to such a pass? we can imagine what mess we have got ourselves into." He exchanged letters with Trotsky and entrusted him with the defence of their common cause. On the 5th March he wrote to Trotsky asking him to undertake the defence of the Georgian case against Stalin. In his Testament, which he dictated at the cost of enormous effort each day, he calls for Stalin's removal as general secretary. This was Lenin's last political act.
The national question requires great sensitivity. Bureaucratic high-handedness is incompatible with such an approach. "The cultural demands of the nations aroused by the revolution require the widest possible autonomy," explained Trotsky. "At the same time, industry can successfully develop only by subjecting all parts of the Union to a general centralised plan. But economy and culture are not separated by impermeable partitions. The tendencies of cultural autonomy and economic centralism come naturally from time to time into conflict. The contradiction between them is, however, far from irreconcilable.
"Although there can be no once-and-for-all prepared formula to resolve the problem, still there is the resilient will of the interested masses themselves. Only their actual participation in the administration of their own destinies can at each new stage draw the necessary lines between the legitimate demands of economic centralism and the living gravitations of national culture. The trouble is, however, that the will of the population of the Soviet Union in all its national divisions is now wholly replaced by the will of a bureaucracy which approaches both economy and culture from the point of view of convenience of administration and the specific interests of the ruling stratum." (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 170-1.)