Dictated December 30-31, 1922 |
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Printed from |
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966
Vol. 36, pp. 605-11.
Translated from the Russian
by Andrew Rothstein
Edited by Yuri Sdobnikov
THE QUESTION OF NATIONALITIES OR "AUTONOMISATION" . . . |
605 | |
THE QUESTION OF NATIONALITIES OR "AUTONOMISATION"
(Continued ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
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page 605
   
I suppose I have been very remiss with respect to the workers of Russia for not having intervened energetically and decisively enough in the notorious question of autonomisation,[655] which, it appears, is officially called the question of the union of Soviet socialist republics.
   
When this question arose last summer, I was ill; and then in autumn I relied too much on my recovery and on the October and December plenary meetings[656] giving me an opportunity of intervening in this question. However, I did not manage to attend the October Plenary Meeting (when this question came up) or the one in December, and so the question passed me by almost completely.
   
I have only had time for a talk with Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who came from the Caucasus and told me how this matter stood in Georgia. I have also managed to exchange a few words with Comrade Zinoviev and express my apprehensions on this matter. From what I was told by Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who was at the head of the commission sent by the C.C. to "investigate" the Georgian incident, I could only draw the greatest apprehensions. If matters had come to such a pass that Orjonikidze could go to the extreme of applying physical violence, as Comrade Dzerzhinsky informed me, we can imagine what a mess we have got ourselves into. Obviously the whole business of "autonomisation" was radically wrong and badly timed.
   
It is said that a united apparatus was needed. Where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding sections of my diary, we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?
page 606
   
There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.
   
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. 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.
   
It is said in defence of this measure that the People's Commissariats directly concerned with national psychology and national education were set up as separate bodies. But there the question arises: can these People's Commissariats be made quite independent? and secondly: were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures although we could and should have done so.
   
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.
   
I also fear that Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who went to the Caucasus to investigate the "crime" of those "nationalist-socialists", distinguished himself there by his truly Russian frame of mind (it is common knowledge that people of other nationalities who have become Russified overdo this Russian frame of mind) and that the impartiality of his whole commission was typified well enough by Orjonikidze's "manhandling". I think that no provocation or even insult can justify such Russian manhandling and that
page 607
Comrade Dzerzhinsky was inexcusably guilty in adopting a light-hearted attitude towards it.
   
For all the citizens in the Caucasus Orjonikidze was the authority. Orjonikidze had no right to display that irritability to which he and Dzerzhinsky referred. On the contrary, Orjonikidze should have behaved with a restraint which cannot be demanded of any ordinary citizen, still less of a man accused of a "political" crime. And, to tell the truth, those nationalist-socialists were citizens who were accused of a political crime, and the terms of the accusation were such that it could not be described otherwise.
   
Here we have an important question of principle: how is internationalism to be understood?[*]
Lenin
   
Taken down by M. V.
   
December 31, 1922
December 30, 1922
Continuation of the notes.
Notes on |
page 713
[655]
Autonomisation -- the idea to unite the Soviet Republics through their entry into the R.S.F.S.R. on the principle of autonomy. This was at the basis of the "Draft Resolution on Mutual Relations of the R.S.F.S.R. and Independent Republics", which was proposed by Stalin and adopted, in September 1922, by a C.C. commission set up to work out for the C.C. plenum the question of further relationships between the R.S.F.S.R., the Ukrainian Republic, the Byelorussian Republic and the Transcaucasian Federation. In a letter to the members of the Political Bureau on September 26, 1922, Lenin seriously criticised the project. He proposed a totally different solution of the question, namely, voluntary union of all the Soviet Republics, including the R.S.F.S.R., in a new state entity, the Union of Soviet Republics, based on complete equality.
page 714
   
Lenin attached exceptional importance to the correct conduct of national policy and the implementation of the Declaration and Treaty, adopted by the Congress of Soviets. On December 30 and 31, he dictated his letter "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation'". It was read out at a meeting of leaders of delegations to the Twelfth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) in April 1923. The Congress adopted a resolution, "On the National Question", based on Lenin's injunctions.
[p. 605]
[656]
The plenary meetings of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) held in October and December 1922 had on their agenda questions of the formation of the U.S.S.R.
[p. 605]
He wrote: "We recognise ourselves equal with the Ukrainian Republic, and the others, and join the new union, the new federation together with them and on an equal footing. . . ." The C.C. Commission, in accordance with Lenin's instructions, revised the draft resolution, which was approved by a Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee in October 1922. Preparatory work for the unification of the Republics was started on the basis of the C.C. decision. On December 30, 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R. adopted its historic decision on the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.