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Vol. 80/No. 23 June 13, 2016
(Books of the Month column)
Trotsky’s 1939 call for ‘united, independent Soviet Ukraine’
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-1939) is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the
Month for June. This excerpt is from “The Ukrainian Question,” written
April 22, 1939, as World War II was approaching. At that time, Ukraine
was divided between the Soviet Union and Poland. Trotsky, a leader of
the Bolshevik-led 1917 Russian Revolution, championed V.I. Lenin’s
communist course, including on the national question, against the
counterrevolution by the privileged bureaucracy in the Soviet Union
headed by Joseph Stalin. The Stalinist regime’s “massacre of national
hopes” in Soviet Ukraine that Trotsky refers to includes the creation of
an artificial famine in 1932-33 in which millions perished. Copyright ©
1974 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY LEON TROTSKY
The Bolshevik Party, not without difficulty and only gradually under the
constant pressure of Lenin, was able to acquire a correct approach to
the Ukrainian question. The right to self-determination, that is, to
separation, was extended by Lenin equally to the Poles and to the
Ukrainians. He did not recognize aristocratic nations. Every inclination
to evade or postpone the problem of an oppressed nationality he regarded
as a manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism.
After the conquest of power, a serious struggle took place in the party
over the solving of the numerous national problems inherited from old
czarist Russia. In his capacity as people’s commissar of nationalities,
Stalin invariably represented the most centralist and bureaucratic
tendency. This evinced itself especially on the question of Georgia and
on the question of the Ukraine. The correspondence dealing with these
matters has remained unpublished to this day. We hope to publish a
section of it — the very small section which is at our disposal. Every
line of Lenin’s letters and proposals vibrates with an urge to accede as
far as possible to those nationalities that have been oppressed in the
past. In the proposals and declarations of Stalin, on the contrary, the
tendency toward bureaucratic centralism was invariably pronounced. In
order to guarantee “administrative needs,” i.e., the interests of the
bureaucracy, the most legitimate claims of the oppressed nationalities
were declared a manifestation of petty-bourgeois nationalism. All these
symptoms could be observed as early as 1922–23. Since that time they
have developed monstrously and have led to outright strangulation of any
kind of independent national development of the peoples of the USSR.
In the conception of the old Bolshevik Party, Soviet Ukraine was
destined to become a powerful axis around which the other sections of
the Ukrainian people would unite. It is indisputable that in the first
period of its existence Soviet Ukraine exerted a mighty attractive
force, in national respects as well, and aroused to struggle the
workers, peasants, and revolutionary intelligentsia of Western Ukraine
enslaved by Poland. But during the years of Thermidorean reaction, the
position of Soviet Ukraine and together with it the posing of the
Ukrainian question as a whole changed sharply. The more profound the
hopes aroused, the keener was the disillusionment.
The bureaucracy strangled and plundered the people within Great Russia,
too. But in the Ukraine matters were further complicated by the massacre
of national hopes. Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions, and in
general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous
sweep as they did in the Ukraine in the struggle against the powerful,
deeply rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and
independence. To the totalitarian bureaucracy, Soviet Ukraine became an
administrative division of an economic unit and a military base of the
USSR. To be sure, the Stalin bureaucracy erects statues to [Ukrainian
poet Taras] Shevchenko but only in order more thoroughly to crush the
Ukrainian people under their weight and to force it to chant paeans in
the language of the Kobzar [the Bard, a nickname for Shevchenko] to the
rapist clique in the Kremlin. …
The Fourth International must clearly understand the enormous importance
of the Ukrainian question in the fate not only of Southeastern and
Eastern Europe but also of Europe as a whole. We are dealing with a
people that has proved its viability, that is numerically equal to the
population of France and occupies an exceptionally rich territory,
which, moreover, is of the highest strategical importance. The question
of the fate of the Ukraine has been posed in its full scope. A clear and
definite slogan is necessary that corresponds to the new situation. In
my opinion there can be at the present time only one such slogan: A
united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine. …
Insofar as the issue depends upon the military strength of the
imperialist states, the victory of one grouping or another can signify
only a new dismemberment and a still more brutal subjugation of the
Ukrainian people. The program of independence for the Ukraine in the
epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the
program of the proletarian revolution. It would be criminal to entertain
any illusions on this score.
But the independence of a United Ukraine would mean the separation of
Soviet Ukraine from the USSR, the “friends” of the Kremlin will exclaim
in chorus. What is so terrible about that? — we reply. The fervid
worship of state boundaries is alien to us. We do not hold the position
of a “united and indivisible” whole. After all, even the constitution of
the USSR acknowledges the right of its component federated peoples to
self-determination, that is, to separation. Thus, not even the incumbent
Kremlin oligarchy dares to deny this principle. To be sure it remains
only on paper. The slightest attempt to raise the question of an
independent Ukraine openly would mean immediate execution on the charge
of treason. But it is precisely this despicable equivocation, it is
precisely this ruthless hounding of all free national thought, that has
led the toiling masses of the Ukraine, to an even greater degree than
the masses of Great Russia, to look upon the rule of the Kremlin as
monstrously oppressive.
Related articles:
Framed Ukraine pilot Savchenko freed from Russian jail
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