Lenin's policy vs. Stalin's: How the Bolsheviks defended rights of national minorities

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Russian deputy is confronted by demand for more freedom for national republics. 20 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1991 Stalin's "autonomization" proposal and other violations of national rights— such as the breaking of the Georgian Communist Party-were not published in the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death.

Stalin had used the argument that the Communist Party needed to combat all forms of "nationalism" equally-the national feeling of small nations as well as the large. He adopted this stance particularly in attacking communists among the oppressed nationalities who defended the national rights of their peoples against the growing Great Russian chauvinism of the increasingly bureaucratized Soviet Communist Party.

ic. After the occupation of Georgia by the Red Army in 1922, Stalin proceeded to crush the Georgian Communist Party under the guise of suppressing what he called "bourgeois nationalism."

In his article "The Question of бе3 CONSER (Quoted in "Internationalism or Russification," by Ivan Dzyuba. English translation from Ukrainian original, published by Monad Press, New York, 1968, p. 60.)

Stalin's repression in Georgia led Lenin to break with him and propose an alliance with Trotsky.

Self-determination in the East Two national questions were posed with particular acuteness during the period of the civil war (1918-1922)that of the Ukraine and that of the peoples of Muslim tradition, then mainly grouped in the province of Turkestan.

The base of the Soviet government in Turkestan was mainly among the Russian-speaking population of the cities, in particular in Tashkent. The danger arose that the Russians would attempt to maintain colonial domination in the name of the revolution.

This threat was denounced in the Bolshevik congresses. At the Tenth Congress, a delegate spoke in the folPeter Turnley for Newsweek tions, leaving the mere nationalists high and dry. ("Sovetskii Tatarstan, Teoriiya i Praktika Leninskoi Natsionalnoi Politiki," Our Word, London, 1974.)

Davletshin also points out that the Bolshevik decision to grant full rights of self-determination, up to and including secession, to the nationalities-while the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky refused to do this—was decisive turning turning the struggle in favor of the Bolsheviks.

This was also a crucial factor in the civil war, in which the Whites alienated the non-Russian peoples with their project of restoring the unity of the Russian empire.

Furthermore, the bourgeois and pro-bourgeois nationalists tended not to be very nationalistic. The Bolsheviks actually went beyond the nationalists with their support for the right of the oppressed peoples to the fulfillment of their national aspirations and their right to adhere or not to the Soviet Union. ment ousted by the Bolsheviks, reveals that "Bolshevik agitation" had largely "demoralized" the Ukrainian nationalist forces. ('Istoriia Ukraini z Dodatkom Novoho Periodu Istorii Ukrainy za roky vid 1914 do 1919" ', Shkol'na Rada, New York, undated.)

The Bolsheviks came not only to defend Ukrainian sovereignty as a principle. They undertook a program of imposing Ukrainian as the language of culture and public life in the republic, which lasted from 1925 to 1932. For the first and last time, the Ukrainian language was raised from its minority, marginal position on its own territory. The reversal of this policy by Stalin in the early 1930s was marked by the suicides of the Ukrainian Communist Party leader Mikola Skrypnyk and the leading Ukrainian Communist intellectual, the writer Mikola Khvylovy. ti.

Stalin developed such hatred for the Ukrainians that Khrushchev was led to say in his "secret speech" of 1956 that Stalin would have liquidated the Ukrainians entirely if there had not been so many.

The Bolshevik nationalities policy was to a large extent hardened up and consolidated by the experience of the civil war in the Ukraine. At the time of the November revolution, the major front between the German and Austrian armies and those of the Russian empire ran through the Ukraine. This area included major industrial regions and sources of food and raw materials. In the course of the civil war, control of the Ukraine changed hands eight times.

The Bolshevik forces were mainly centered in the Russian-speaking proletariat, who had little sympathy with Ukrainian national feeling. Moreover, the Bolshevik political and military commanders were led by the pressures of the civil war, in which the Germans intervened, to disregard Ukrainian national aspirations and feelings. These tendencies threatened to lead to the defeat of the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. The central leadership had to intervene directly to force their local followers to change their approach.

In late 1919, following the Red Army victory over the White general Denikin, Lenin wrote in an open letter to the Ukrainian workers and peasants:

"We Russian Communists must repress with extreme rigorness the least manifestation of Russian nationalism that arises among us, because such manifestations are a betrayal of communism. They do us enormous harm, separating us from our Ukrainian comrades, and this plays into the hands (continued on next page)

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...Nationalities of Denikin and his policy." (Retranslated from the Spanish; quoted in "Lenin y las naciones," Javier Villanueva, Editorial Revolución, Madrid, 1987, p. 384.) pass on their traditions to the leaders of the Ukrainian literary renaissance of the 1960s, who were jailed in the 1970s. Some of the latter have now re-emerged as leaders of the Ukrainian national democratic movement, called Rukh. Thus, among Ukrainians the tradition of ship, when the party top echelon and its Siamese twin-organized crime-wants to convert it into their own private property. The real facts and the laws that the party, Komsomol, and economic magnates adopt in the Supreme Soviets in Moscow and Kiev confirm that this national freedom". Russia in the revolutionary period showed more understanding and offered greater perspectives for achieving the aspirations of oppressed peoples than any other major force in history.

The collapse of Stalinism has opened the way for the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union to resume their advance toward achieving their aspirations.

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Stalin's repression in Georgia The case of Georgia was symptomat-