19) Resolution on the National Question
The policy of national oppression, inherited from the autocracy and monarchy; is maintained by the landowners, capitalists, and petty bourgeoisie in order to protect their class privileges and to cause disunity among the workers of the various nationalities. Modern imperialism, which increases the tendency to subjugate weaker nations, is a new factor intensifying national oppression.
The elimination of national oppression, if at all achievable in capitalist society, is possible only under a consistently democratic republican system and state administration that guarantee complete equality for all nations and languages.
The right of all the nations forming part of Russia freely to secede and form independent states must be recognised. To deny them this right, or to fail to take measures guaranteeing its practical realisation, is equivalent to supporting a policy of seizure or annexation. Only the recognition by the proletariat of the right of nations to secede can ensure complete solidarity among the workers of the various nations and help to bring the nations closer together on truly democratic lines.
The conflict which has arisen at the present time between Finland and the Russian Provisional Government strikingly demonstrates that denial of the right to free secession leads to a direct continuation of the policy of tsarism.
The right of nations freely to secede must not be confused with the advisability of secession by a given nation at a given moment. The party of the proletariat must decide the latter question quite independently in each particular case, having regard to the interests of social development as a whole and the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat for socialism.
The Party demands broad regional autonomy, the abolition of supervision from above, the abolition of a compulsory official language, and the fixing of the boundaries of the self-governing and autonomous regions in accordance with the economic and social conditions, the national composition of the population, and so forth, as assessed by the local population itself.
The party of the proletariat emphatically rejects what is known as “national cultural autonomy”, under which education, etc., is removed from the control of the state and put in the control of some kind of national diets. National cultural autonomy artificially divides the workers living in one locality, and even working in the same industrial enterprise, according to their various “national cultures”; in other words, it strengthens the ties between the workers and the bourgeois culture of their nations, whereas the aim of the Social-Democrats is to develop the international culture of the world proletariat.
The party demands that a fundamental law be embodied in the constitution annulling all privileges enjoyed by any one nation and all infringements of the rights of national minorities.
The interests of the working class demand that the workers of all nationalities in Russia should have common proletarian organisations: political, trade union, co-operative educational institutions, and so forth. Only the merging of the workers of the various nationalities into such common organisations will make it possible for the proletariat to wage a successful struggle against international Capital and bourgeois nationalism.
| Supplement to Soldatskaya Pravda No. 13, May 16 (3), 1917 | Published according to the manuscript |
20) Speech on the Situation within the International and the Tasks of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.) May 12 (April 29)
ComradeZinoviev admitted that our visit to Stockholm would be the last one, and that we would only be there for the purpose of information.[1]
When Grimm invited us to the conference, I refused to go, because I realised that it would be useless to talk to people who stood for social-chauvinism. We say: “No participation with social-chauvinists.” We come and address ourselves to the Zimmerwald Left. Grimm had a moral and formal right to draw up today’s resolution. His right was based on Kautsky in Germany, on Longuet in France. This is how the matter stands officially: Grimm has announced, “We will disband our bureau, as soon as Huysmans organises a bureau.” When we said that such a solution was not acceptable to Zimmerwald, he agreed, but said “this is the opinion of the majority”—and that was true.
As to our visit. “We shall get information, we shall get in touch with the Zimmerwald Left,” it is claimed. There is very little hope of our winning over anybody else. Let us have no illusions; first, the visit will not take place; second, if it does, it will be our last; third, we cannot, for technical reasons, win over the elements that wish to break with the social-chauvinists. But let Comrade Nogin make the first and Comrade Zinoviev the last visit to Stockholm. As for me, I express the very legitimate wish that this “last-visit” attempt should be made as quickly and successfully as possible.
| A brief report published May 13 (2), 1917 in Pravda No. 46 | Published according to the typewritten copy of the Minutes |
| First published in full in 1925 in the book The Petrograd City and the All-Russia Conferences of the R.S.D.L.P.(B), April 1917 |
Notes
[1] This refers to participation in the proposed third conference of the internationalist socialists due to beheld in Stockholm on May 18, 1917. It was held in August 1917. By decision of the April Conference, the Bolsheviks attended it. Lenin disagreed with this decision and voted against the resolution on the situation in the International and the tasks of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.). Lenin considered attendance of the Bolsheviks at this conference possible only for purposes of information. He wrote about this in his pamphlet The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (see p. 82 of this volume). In the postscript to the pamphlet, written in May 1917, Lenin calls this decision of the conference a mistake (see pp. 89–90 of this volume).
