(OLD) Self-Determination of Peoples?

A look at Lenin, Russia and the Soviet Union

“Russia is a prison of peoples”

Vladimir Lenin once said this describing the situation in Russia during the 19th and early 20th century. Emerging and expanding far beyond it’s traditional homeland, from the 17th through the 19th century Russian civilization had united numerous peoples of diverse ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds through martial conquest, eventually becoming one of the largest empires in human history.

None of these peoples possessed any sovereignty or political rights as such within Russia at the dawn of the 20th century. Lenin writing in his 1915 pamphlet The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination said:

”The Russian proletariat cannot march at the head of the people towards a victorious democratic revolution (which is its immediate task), or fight alongside its brothers, the proletarians of Europe, for a socialist revolution, without immediately demanding, fully and rückhaltlos, for all nations oppressed by tsarism, the freedom to secede from Russia.”

He backed his ideas up with action.

On November 15th, 1917 the new Russian-Soviet government issued The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia built around the following points:

• Equality and sovereignty of peoples of Russia

• Right of peoples of Russia of a free self-determination, including secession and formation of a separate state

• Abolition of all national and religious privileges and restrictions

• Free development of national minorities and ethnographical groups populating the territory of Russia.

Many countries such as Latvia and Ukraine chose to secede and form non-Soviet republics, only to have their new independence challenged from outside and within by factions aligned to the new Soviet government. Some may view these invasions by Lenin’s government as pure hypocrisy, however his actions are easily explainable by reading ahead in the same 1915 pamphlet:

”This we demand, not independently of our revolutionary struggle for socialism, but because this struggle will remain a hollow phrase if it is not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all questions of democracy, including the national question. We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.”

He closes his argument with Marx’s position on Ireland in 1869, calling for partition, but with caveat that reunion on a free and equal basis ought to occur at some point in the future. Lenin truly believed, through the framework of Marxism, that the various peoples of the former Russian Empire had the right to self-determination. But he recognized in practice that small independent states, isolated from Russia and one-another, would fail to realize any sort of meaningful self-determination. In such a condition, these states would quickly be transformed by the capitalist powers into a kind of colony at the mercy of Western financial and industrial interests and later used as launch-pad for counter-revolutionaries trying to overthrow the Soviet government.

The Soviet government launched invasions and participated in numerous civil wars in former territories of the Russian Empire throughout the early 1920s, collectively dubbed the Russian Civil War, ultimately losing many territories but remaining in control of others. The Soviet Union was formally created on Dec. 30th 1922 at the close of the civil war; consisting of a two-tiered hierarchy of ‘Union Republics’ and ‘Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics’, the former having more powers devolved in them and possessing the theoretical right to secede.

Within each of these Soviet republics were many initiatives concerning the protection and promotion of culture and language, the development of regional economy, and the institution political freedoms. Each one had their own autonomous government and legal system; their own flag & national anthem and a seat on the All-Union Congress of Soviets. Russia had seemingly transformed, from a prison of peoples into a house of nations.

Fast-forward to the year 1991. In the fallout of the collapse of the New Union Treaty, many of the SSRs like Ukraine invoked the right to independence guaranteed by the Soviet constitution, while the ASSRs also contemplated asserting their own independence, resulting in the total collapse of the Soviet Union.

The implosion of orthodox Marxist ideology in the latter half of the 20th century, increasingly faced with new problems emerging from the post-WW2 order, marred by internal contradictions and challenged by the post-Marxist New Left, lent much to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. Yet the resulting geopolitical crises in the former Soviet Union have actually vindicated what appeared to be Lenin’s hypocrisy.

Ukraine is the example.

Beginning almost immediately, the former Ukrainian SSR began being pulled into the orbit of the West with the intention of transforming it into a neo-colony. The oligarchy hastily fashioned from the carcass of Soviet wealth was consumed by vulturous Western imperialism overnight.

Ukraine has no real national-bourgeois, but a class of national-traitors totally subservient to Western interests masquerading as patriots. Since their complete takeover in the 2014 ‘Maidan’ coup, these pro-Western oligarchs first ruined the economy by selling off Ukraine’s assets to Western corporations, and have finally managed to transform their country into a battlefield.

What’s left for the average Ukrainian, workers, farmers, and small business owners, but a situation far worse than the situation they faced when Lenin declared Russia a prison of peoples in 1915?

Far from the stability of the Russian Empire or relative national-freedom and prosperity during the Soviet period, Ukraine has been reduced to a heap of rubble at the behest of a vicious anti-Russian oligarchy and Western imperialists, in a war against a people they lived in harmony and brotherly-union with less than fifty years ago. This is not-self-determination.

In practice Lenin was right. In the 20th and 21st centuries a Ukraine outside of Soviet (Russian) orbit will be deprived of any meaningful self-determination. Isolated nation-states unable to achieve a form of semi-autarky and incapable of becoming imperial powers themselves will necessarily fall into the orbit of an empire or some other aggregate of states in varying degrees.

Self-determination is only possible within the bounds of transnational geopolitical entities, the only other option is potential not-self-determination within the bounds of another.

But what about the peoples in the contemporary Russian Federation that aren’t Russians?

The Soviet system of republics was largely carried over into the framework of the Russian Federation, which today is divided into eighty-five federal subjects, twenty-two of which are republics, including: Dagestan, Chechnya, and Bashkortostan. Other countries like Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan are politically defacto states, but are incorporated into the Eurasian Customs Union.

The Russian Federation, an aggregate of states with Russia proper at the helm, offers us a glimpse of the self-determination of peoples in practice freed from the ideological constraints of 20th century Marxism.

For North American and European patriots who find themselves struggling for identity and self-determination in the wake of an increasingly globalized, anti-national (as opposed to international) system of emerging world government, the historical example of the Soviet Union and the contemporary Russian Federation serve as an indispensable model in our own search for an alternative.

Part 2. coming soon