Lenin and Stalin: The Great Organizers of the Soviet State by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House
Published: 1948-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

4. The Multinational Soviet State—A Family of Nations

The population of our country comprises many nationalities. This caused additional difficulties in the organization of the Soviet state. There have been various attempts, as we know, to solve the national question within the framework of capitalism—for example, in Austria-Hungary. These attempts, as we also know, have proved always fruitless, for the petty-bourgeois Socialists have evaded the fundamental problems involved, amusing themselves, as Lenin put it, with sour-sweet resolutions comprised of blatant, but purely formal legalistic, declarations.

Again, there have been those who simply brushed aside the national question: various phrasemongering "heroes" such as the Proudhonists and other representatives of petty-bourgeois Socialism, who denied the national question in the name, you see, of social revolution. Other "heroes," the Cunows, Parvuses, Vanderveldes, Renaudels from the camp of the Second International, the Trotskyites and Bukharinites, in varying degree, but essentially in concert, denied the right of nations to self-determination, not to speak of the right of nations to secession, without which correct solution of the national question is unthinkable.

Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century, and Lenin and Stalin in our time, demonstrated the fallacy, the impossibility of any solution of the national question other than that propounded by Marxism-Leninism.

In the U.S.S.R. the national question has been brilliantly and radically solved on the basis of Soviet power, on the basis of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy, proclaimed and consistently put into practice.

The most important thing in the solution of this question was, "establishing proper relations between the proletariat of the former sovereign nation, which is the most cultured section of the proletariat in our entire federation, and the peasantry, mainly the peasantry of the formerly oppressed nationalities."1 Such proper relations can be established and have actually been established in the land of the Soviets. They are founded on the principles of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy, namely: recognition of the people's sovereignty, of equality in law, of voluntary choice and fraternal co-operation; recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including secession, and unqualified rejection of all and any forms of coercion, or of racial or national exclusiveness or superiority.

1 Stalin, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Vol. V, p. 240.

The realization of these great principles of national policy brought into being those integral features of Soviet state policy which distinguish our state from all other states in the world.

The triumph of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy endued the Soviet state with entirely new qualities with new features native only to the state of the new type. Thus:

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