Vol. 79/No. 9      March 16, 2015

Lenin’s Final Fight, Speeches and Writings, 1922-23, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. Between September 1922 and early March 1923, the final months of his active life, Vladimir Lenin, the central leader of the world’s first socialist revolution, led a political battle within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At stake was whether the party would continue advancing along the internationalist proletarian course that brought the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants of the former czarist empire to power in October 1917. Central to this battle was Lenin’s uncompromising opposition to Great Russian chauvinism, as shown by the memo below, written to the Political Bureau in October 1922.

In the second piece, Lenin responds to the abuses by Joseph Stalin and his allies against the people of Georgia, a Soviet republic and formerly part of the Russian czar’s prison house of nations. The counterrevolution carried out by the Stalin-led bureaucracy after Lenin’s death against his support for the nationalism of the oppressed peoples was a deadly blow to the workers’ movement worldwide. The fight to reconquer Lenin’s legacy is a crucial part of the struggle to defend the national sovereignty of Ukraine today. Copyright © 1995 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY V. I. LENIN

On combating
great-power chauvinism
Memo to the Political Bureau

October 6, 1922
I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism. I shall eat it with all my healthy teeth as soon as I get rid of this accursed bad tooth. It must be absolutely insisted that the union Central Executive Committee should be presided over in turn by a Russian,
Ukrainian,
Georgian, etc.
Absolutely!
Yours,
Lenin

December 31, 1922
In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.

In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. It is sufficient to recall my Volga reminiscences of how non-Russians are treated; how the Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachishka, how the Tatar is nicknamed Prince, how the Ukrainians are always Khokhols and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always Kapkasians.

That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or “great” nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as Derzhimordas^*), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question; he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view.

What is important for the proletarian? For the proletarian it is not only important, it is absolutely essential that he should be assured that the non-Russians place the greatest possible trust in the proletarian class struggle. What is needed to ensure this? Not merely formal equality. In one way or another, by one’s attitude or by concessions, it is necessary to compensate the non-Russians for the lack of trust, for the suspicion and the insults to which the government of the “dominant” nation subjected them in the past.

I think it is unnecessary to explain this to Bolsheviks, to Communists, in greater detail. And I think that in the present instance, as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness, and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us. The Georgian who is disdainful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of “nationalist socialism” (whereas he himself is a real and true “nationalist socialist” and even a vulgar Great Russian Derzhimorda), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice. “Offended” nationals are not sensitive to anything so much as to the feeling of equality and the violation of this equality, if only through negligence or jest to the violation of that equality by their proletarian comrades. That is why in this case it is better to overdo rather than underdo the concessions and leniency towards the national minorities. That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian solidarity and consequently of the proletarian class struggle requires that we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question, but always take into account the specific attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small) nation towards the oppressor (or great) nation.

Derzhimorda, a policeman in the play The Government Inspector by Russian writer
Nikolay Gogol, came to personify the rude, arrogant state functionary.