V. I. Lenin
Collected Works
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960, Vol. 24, p. 298
"Speech on the National Question April 29 (May 12)"
"Why should we Great Russians, who have been oppressing more nations than
any other people, deny the right to secession for Poland, Ukraine, or
Finland? We are asked to become chauvinists, because by doing so we would
make the position of Social-Democrats in Poland less difficult. We do not
pretend to seek to liberate Poland, because the Polish people live between
two states that are capable of fighting. Instead of telling the Polish
workers that only those Social-Democrats are real democrats who maintain
that the Polish people ought to be free, since there is no place for
chauvinists in a socialist party, the Polish Social-Democrats argue that,
just because they find the union with Russian workers advantageous, they
are opposed to Poland's secession. They have a perfect right to do so. But
people don't want to understand that to strengthen internationalism you
do not have to repeat the same words. What you have to do is stress, in
Russia, the freedom of secession for oppressed nations, and, in Poland,
their freedom to unite. Freedom to unite implies freedom to secede."
[MC5 adds: Thanks to former SDS leader Noel Ignatin for pointing out this
Lenin quote in the defunct Urgent Tasks magazine. The Polish communists
were a problem for forming a general line on self-determination,
because the Polish communists were hoping a war with Russia would give
them their chance to seize power. Thus the Poles said nationalism had to
take a backseat to class struggle. Lenin balked because it involved not
an inter-imperialist conflict but a conflict between a semi-imperialist
Russia and an oppressed nation, Poland. We also learn the lesson from
Lenin that what is right in an oppressor nation is not necessarily right
in an oppressed nation.]
