The Teachings of Lenin and Stalin on Proletarian Revolution and the State by Andrey Vyshinsky

Author:Andrey Vyshinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soviet News London
Published: 1947-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

4. The Soviet State and the National Question

The national question is one of the most difficult and acute questions of internal policy, particularly in States composed of many nationalities. In the countries of bourgeois democracy, even in those most advanced like the U.S.A., France, Great Britain, the national question has not been solved and cannot be solved in the interests of the national minorities, since the whole system of capitalist social relations does not favour such a solution. Capitalist exploitation in the sphere of economic relations leaves its baneful mark on social relations in all other spheres of life as well. The merciless exploitation of the weak and the desperate competition of "free" commodity-owners on the "free" market give rise inevitably to the utilisation of racial, national and religious prejudices, in order to ensure to the economically and politically strongest groups a privileged position in the struggle for the market. This determines corresponding political and legal consequences on the one hand and moral and social consequences on the other.

The Negro question in the U.S.A., the Indian or Irish question in Great Britain, the Jewish question in France—all these "questions" are the offspring of capitalism, are organically connected with capitalism and cannot be correctly resolved within the framework of capitalism. Of course formally, juridically, not a single small nation in these countries is, as a rule, placed in a worse position than the predominant majority. But in practice there are not a few such restrictions and discriminations. It is not accidental, after all, that not a single Negro succeeded in being elected to the United States Congress during the last fifty years. Yet the American Constitution of 1787 proclaims the equality of the electoral rights of all American citizens, while the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 solemnly declares that the right to vote in elections "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude."1

1 Birley. Speeches and Documents in American History, 1865-1913, p. 91.

In the land of Socialism, in the Socialist State of workers and peasants, there is no place for a national question. There is not and cannot be any such question in the U.S.S.R., for there is no environment on which that question feeds, an environment which is characteristic of the capitalist countries and the absence of which is characteristic of a Socialist country.

The Dreyfus case in republican France—did it not fall as an ineradicable blot of shame on bourgeois democracy which, even though more than a hundred years had passed since the proclamation of the bourgeois republic, had not finally made an end of anti-Semitism and nationalist jingoism!

In the U.S.S.R. the national question was solved on the basis of the principles of the national policy of Lenin and Stalin, consistently and unswervingly applied from the first days of the formation of the Soviet State.

Marxism, as is known, links up the national question with the problem of the revolutionary movement of the oppressed nations for the emancipation.

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