https://themilitant.com/2018/12/15/lenin-i-declare-war-to-death-on-great-russian-chauvinism/
Lenin: ‘I declare war to death on Great Russian chauvinism’
Vol. 82/No. 48
December 24, 2018
V.I. Lenin, central leader of 1917 Russian Revolution, at left in front,
with delegates at 1920 Second Congress of Communist International. He
led 1922-23 fight to defend national rights of oppressed peoples long
encased in czardom’s prison house of nations, like toilers in Ukraine.
V.I. Lenin, central leader of 1917 Russian Revolution, at left in front,
with delegates at 1920 Second Congress of Communist International. He
led 1922-23 fight to defend national rights of oppressed peoples long
encased in czardom’s prison house of nations, like toilers in Ukraine.
Below are excerpts from Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings,
1922-1923. The first is a memo by Vladimir Lenin to the political bureau
of the All-Russian Communist Party, formerly the Bolshevik Party. From
chapter two of the book — “The Fight Opens: the National Question and
the Voluntary Union of Soviet Republics” — the memo is entitled, “On
Combating Great-Power Chauvinism.” The second selection is from the
introduction by Jack Barnes and Steve Clark. Barnes is the national
secretary of the Socialist Workers Party and Clark is managing editor of
Pathfinder Press.
Lenin was the central leader of the world’s first socialist revolution,
the Russian Revolution, from 1917 until his death in January 1924. The
book documents what was to be his last political battle in 1922-23. At
stake was whether that revolution would remain on the proletarian course
that had brought workers and peasants to power, sweeping aside the
former czarist empire in 1917.
One of the central issues was Lenin’s fight to win the leadership of the
party to defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination and
equality, ensuring a voluntary union of Soviet republics.
Lenin’s note below proposes a measure to resist the encroaching
influence of the Great Russian bureaucracy. Lenin also supported
language-rights movements in the oppressed nations and nationalities,
such as the Ukrainization of Ukraine, to advance equal status between
the Soviet Republics. After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin consolidated
power at the head of a bloody political counterrevolution that reversed
Lenin’s course of proletarian internationalism. Copyright © 1995 by
Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
❖
BY VLADIMIR LENIN
Memo to the Political Bureau
October 6, 1922
I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism. I shall
eat it with all my healthy teeth as soon as I get rid of this accursed
bad tooth. It must be absolutely insisted that the union Central
Executive Committee should be presided over in turn by a Russian,
Ukrainian,
Georgian, etc.
Absolutely!
Yours,
Lenin
* * *
BY JACK BARNES
AND STEVE CLARK
The Bolshevik-led government sought from the outset to establish a union
of proletarian Russia and the oppressed peoples long encased within the
old tsarist prison house of nations across Europe and Asia. But that
goal could only be achieved by the voluntary action of those peoples,
whose unconditional right to national self-determination was recognized
by the new government.
The Soviet congress in January 1918 established the Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) “leaving it to the workers and
peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own
authoritative congress of soviets whether they wish to participate in
the federal government. . . and on what terms.”
By late 1922, twenty-one autonomous republics and regions had been
established within the RSFSR itself, and the revolutionary government
was collaborating with soviet republics in Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine to form what in December 1922 would
become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin, however,
objected to Stalin’s initial draft of a Central Committee resolution,
which negated the Bolsheviks’ long-standing proletarian internationalism
by calling for “entry” of these other republics into the Russian federation.
“We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR, and others equal,” Lenin
wrote in a September 1922 letter to the party’s Political Bureau, and
“enter with them on an equal basis into a new union, a new federation,
the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.”
In a note to the Political Bureau the following day, Stalin acquiesced
to an amended form of this proposal and several other of “Comrade
Lenin’s unimportant amendments,” as he called them. Stalin’s note
dismissively referred to Lenin’s uncompromising opposition to Great
Russian chauvinism as the “national liberalism of Comrade Lenin.”
Two months later Lenin was outraged to discover that Central Committee
member Grigory Ordzhonikidze, in the presence of another CC member,
Aleksey Rykov, had physically struck a Communist from Georgia during a
dispute over national rights. In Lenin’s late December letter to the
upcoming party congress, he wrote that the Bolsheviks’ support for the
right of national self-determination “will be a mere scrap of paper” if
the party is “unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of
that really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a
scoundrel and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.”
And Lenin concluded: “That is why internationalism on the part of
oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great
only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in
the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an
inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would
compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who
does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude
to the national question; he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his
point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point
of view.”
In early March 1923, Lenin, who knew he was too ill to attend the
upcoming Central Committee meeting later that month, wrote Trotsky with
an “earnest request that you should undertake the defense of the
Georgian case in the party CC. This case is now under ‘persecution’ by
Stalin and [Feliks] Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their
impartiality.” Trotsky did so but, as recorded later in these pages, the
motion he placed before the Central Committee was defeated.
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