This article was originally published in Unity & Struggle, No.47, October 2023
Communist Party of Labor (PCT) of the Dominican Republic
I. History as a Weapon
The ongoing imperialist war in Ukraine is an extraordinary event that activated the imperialist propaganda machine of the opposing sides to justify their respective projects of domination. As always happens in such a scenario, the manipulation of history, if not its complete falsification, has been one of the arsenals that feed the aforementioned imperialist propaganda machine.
In this sense, Western academies and their press monopolies have tried to take advantage of the current military conflict by evoking the events that led to the disintegration of the USSR, highlighting that at that time Ukraine supposedly achieved its freedom and independence, because it had been under Moscow’s control since it was subjugated and dominated by the Soviet government and Stalin.
The current war scenario and its motivation in the contradictions and interests of Russia, Europe and the United States as imperialist powers, constitute an opportunity for Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and honest academics to claim the guiding role of history. In this regard, it is appropriate to highlight the ideas raised theoretically by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin on the national question, the rights of nationalities, self-determination and socialism, which were made into state policy.
In assessing the stamp on history of revolutions in general and of the Bolshevik revolution in particular, Josep Fontana, a contemporary classic of critical historiography, states that “The history of humanity is there. It is full of periods of struggle for freedom and equality, of revolts against oppressors and of attempts to build more just societies, crushed by the defenders of the established order, who have always maintained, and continue to do so today, that subjection and inequality are necessary to ensure collective prosperity, or even that they are part of the divine plan. One such attempt at social transformation, which began in Russia in 1917, has marked the course of the hundred years since then.”[1]
Another renowned historian of the 20th century, who until the end of his days defended the Marxist paradigm as a tool for historical analysis, considering the importance of the event that we commemorate in relation to the context created by the collapse of so-called “real socialism”, observed that: “There is no way in which the Soviet era can be written out of Russian or world history, as though it had not been…. The history of the Short Twentieth Century cannot be understood without the Russian revolution and its direct and indirect effects.”[2]
The experience of the Soviet Union as a democratic confederation of republics, until it was aborted by the betrayal of the revisionist clique headed by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, contained in itself one of the incontrovertible successes of socialism in power. It was a great mosaic of a country, whose republics were made up of nations with diverse cultures marked by the imprint of various empires from the Feudal Era to the beginning of the 20th century.
The betrayal by the revisionist clique that succeeded Stalin in Soviet power made possible the capture of the revolutionary state from within by the enemy and restored capitalism in the former USSR. They tried to justify this in the infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, where the coup de grâce was given to the October revolution. But, as honest intellectuals have pointed out and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary parties have affirmed, above this betrayal shine the successes of the great epic of the Soviet workers, nations and peoples.
For these reasons, in the context of today’s world, it will always be relevant to defend, argue for and disseminate the policy of the Soviet Power regarding nationalities as one of its legacies, whose relevance is reaffirmed in today’s world in the face of the long series of inter-ethnic and national conflicts within dozens of countries and regions on the globe.
II. The Historical Relationship Between Russia and Ukraine Prior to the USSR:
A Brief Synopsis
Ukraine and Russia have a common origin dating back to the 11th century, when Kiev was the centre of the first Slavic state created by Scandinavians, called Rus. Meanwhile, the Crimea was linked to the Greeks and Tatars, and was dominated by the Russian and Ottoman empires. From the 17th century on, large areas of present-day Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire until its overthrow by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russian Empire developed a program of Russification in order to weaken the national identity of the Ukrainian people, whose language was eliminated from schools.
The emergence of the Ukrainian state as such took place in the heat of the events unleashed by the Bolshevik revolution. On November 20, 1917, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed, and in 1921 it decided to become part of the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
However, as a result of the wars and pacts between colonial empires, in which the Austro-Hungarian empire played an important part, former territories inhabited by the Ukrainian people (the so-called western Ukraine) ended up in the sphere of Poland until the end of the Second World War when the Red Army, the resistance and the anti-fascist front of the peoples in Europe wrote one of the most glorious pages in the outstanding liberation struggle of unprecedented internationalist solidarity.
The crisis of the revisionist regime in the USSR ended in its collapse in 1991, as a result of which the former Soviet republics formalized their independence, which Ukraine proclaimed in August of that same year.
The current war is linked to that latter event, which resulted in a realignment of imperialist forces. In the current contest between imperialist powers for the control and domination of countries, territories and resources, Ukraine has become a shock piece for Europe and the United States against present-day imperialist Russia, which is why Ukraine ceded its territory for placing military bases on the border with Russia, a provocation that served as a pretext to unleash the war.
Faced with this scenario, it is necessary to highlight the orientation of the ICMLPO: “The struggles between the imperialist countries and powers to divide up again and again an already divided world, to conquer new markets and areas of influence, is the fundamental cause for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine which, as we have already denounced, is a conflagration of an inter-imperialist nature. The ICMLPO condemns this war and the warmongers who promoted and fuel it; we express our solidarity with the people of Ukraine who are victims of the military invasion of Russian imperialism led by Vladimir Putin, of US imperialism – led by Joe Biden – and its allies – the members of the European Union and NATO – and of the reactionary regime of Vladimir Zelensky” (Declaration of the 27th Plenary of the ICMLPO, Santo Domingo, July 2022).
This brief account allows us to place the relations between Russia and Ukraine in an historical context, from which we have an appropriate framework to compare the balance that we present below on the experience of the Soviet republics under socialism, as a legacy that constitutes a theoretical-political weapon in the hands of revolutionaries and communists for our struggle for socialism in the world today.
III. Birth and Development of the Soviet Republic
With the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the territories of Central Russia formed a federal state system, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), but not all the republics that were part of the Russian Empire were part of the Soviet project: Poland, Finland and the Baltic states remained independent republics. The latter joined the USSR as federated republics in 1940.
In the case of the republics of Ukraine, Byelorussia and the so-called Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, they established governments and constitutions along the Russian model of 1918.
In the heat of those first years of Soviet power established in the different republics and the RSFSR, which equally faced enemy aggression and hostility, bonds of cooperation and alliance were forged for the common defence. It was a question of the survival of the revolution, which was barely taking its first steps, in the grips of a terrible civil war imposed by the remnants of the old tsarist regime with the belligerent support of the main capitalist and imperialist countries, as already stated.
After the victory in the civil war, the tendency towards the unification of these republics gained a new impetus, since the whole revolutionary process had been led by the Bolshevik Party, whose political-organizational conception recognized as equals the workers and peoples, regardless of the territory or nationality to which they belonged.
The Second Congress of Soviets, inaugurated on November 7, the same day as the Revolution, was the creative organ of the Soviet state through the Manifesto to the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers. This body adopted a series of decrees on November 8, 1917: on peace and on land; elected the CEC (Central Executive Committee), the highest organ of power between congresses of the soviets, formed the Soviet government, the Council of Commissars, headed by Lenin.
A number of measures were adopted in the following days, which were related to the national question: the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, on November 15, 1917; the Appeal to the Moslems of Russia and the East, December 7, 1917; Declaration on Ukraine, December 17, 1917; the Decree on Turkish Armenia of January 11, 1918.
These measures were later generalized through the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” which supplemented the first acts of the Soviet republic. This declaration, adopted on January 3, 1918, at the CEC of the Soviets, was rejected by the Constituent Assembly when it was established, thus decreeing its own death. It was ratified on January 12, 1918 by the 3rd All-Russia Congress of Soviets, the supreme organ of the new state. At this crucial moment of the Russian Revolution, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks is often presented as an anti-democratic act by certain historians, who are generally silent about the above-mentioned refusal of this Assembly to recognize the balance of forces within it. The constituent Assembly obviously did not represent the pulse of society and the state of mind and interests of the people who were leading the crucial battles at those precise moments that would define the course of the revolution underway. To recognize such a Constituent Assembly in these circumstances would have been to try to impose formalism over the reality that the people, the true Constituent Assembly, were expressing through the organ that faithfully expressed their will and power, the soviets, as would be affirmed from now on.
The Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People[3], by virtue of what it stipulated, provided the initial basic guidelines of what would become the Soviet model of state organization:
” Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. All power, centrally and locally, is vested in these Soviets.
“The Russian Soviet Republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics….
“The Constituent Assembly whole-heartedly endorses the policy pursued by Soviet power of denouncing the secret treaties, organizing most extensive fraternization with the workers and peasants of the armies in the war, and achieving at all costs, by revolutionary means, a democratic peace between the nations, without annexations and indemnities and on the basis of the free self-determination of nations.
“Power must be vested wholly and entirely in the working people and their authorized representatives—the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.
“At the same time, endeavouring to create a really free and voluntary, and therefore all the more firm and stable, union of the working classes of all the nations of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines its own task to setting up the fundamental principles of a federation of Soviet Republics of Russia, while leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative Congress of Soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government and in the other federal Soviet institutions, and on what terms.”
Another key moment in the building of the Soviet model of state organization was the scenario for the Third Congress of Soviets of Russia held in January 1918: a resolution on the federal institutions of the Russian Republic was voted on, which determined the system of organs of the Soviet state. In addition, this congress recommended working on the draft Constitution that should be presented for consideration by the Fourth Congress. The German aggression perpetrated in those days postponed these tasks until after peace was signed.
The first constitution of the RSFSR was adopted at the Fifth Congress of Soviets, held on July 10, 1918. This great legal instrument consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the republic of soviets and consolidated the system of state organs: the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Council of People’s Commissars; local organs of power, congresses of regional, provincial, county and district soviets and their executive committees; urban and peasant soviets. Between 1919 and 1922, this constitution was adopted as a model for the constitutions of the Soviet republics of Byelorussia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, at their respective national and regional congresses.
The culmination of all the accumulated policy on nationalities was expressed in December 1922, with the signing of a Treaty to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which laid the foundations for a Constitution based on the principle of federation. The treaty was signed by delegates from the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Transcaucasian republics.
In July 1923, the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviets approved the draft Constitution, which came into force immediately. In January 1924 this constitution was ratified by the supreme authority of the new state, the Congress of Soviets.
The Constitution defined the USSR as a federal state composed of national entities organized politically into three categories: federated republics, autonomous republics and autonomous regions. It should be remembered that at that time both the Russian republic and Transcaucasia were each a federation in itself. In this way, the formation of the USSR was carried out on the basis of the national realities that each nation had built up to the moment of unification.
As can be seen, this was a system that not only guaranteed internal coherence in its operation but at the same time provided expeditious ways for complementarity by combining autonomy and federation; it implied the recognition of the various particularities and potentialities within the Union that was being constituted as a whole.
The Declaration and Treaty formalizing the existence of the USSR consolidated the voluntary union of the Soviet socialist republics into a single federal state, ensuring the coherence between the rights of the federation and the republics and between the system of state organs of the USSR and those of the republics, recognizing the right of a republic to freely leave the union; It also opened up to new revenues.
The creation of the USSR, as the result of a democratic, revolutionary process with broad participation of the peoples and nations involved, expressed the solution of the national question within the framework of proletarian internationalism.
IV. Lessons from a Defeat
In the light of the facts, it is indisputable that, at least during the first decades after the establishment of Soviet power, this model of state organization became the appropriate framework for the approach and solution to the burning national question within the framework of a multinational state such as the one that was being designed.
The model worked effectively for a long period without major setbacks, because the theoretical principles upheld by Leninist doctrine guided the design and application of the national policy of the Soviet state, a theory and policy that were based on democracy and self-determination as incontrovertible guarantees of the rights of the nations that converged in the Soviet state.
The theoretical theses put forward by Lenin and Stalin to deal with the national question before and after the victory of the revolution proved their validity at least for a long time of the exercise of Soviet power. If the shadow of the old Great Russian chauvinist spirit, the ignorance of rights or the oppression of some nations within the framework of the Federation prevailed, changing the relationship of equality and solidarity, this can only be explained by the violation of the theoretical principles on which this colossal political work was built.
At this point, what is pertinent again in terms of a balance is to reflect on the circumstances and the process that put an end to democracy and the participation of the masses in the functioning of the different organs of the Soviet state, to the point of creating a hostile environment in which the nationalities felt themselves hostage to the state and the nation that controlled it, and therefore this state apparatus kept its federated character only in appearance.
How did that process happen and when did it start. The role played in all this by the high treason of the Khrushchevite clique has become sufficiently clear and has been sufficiently explained in Marxist-Leninist literature. But we must delve into the lessons of that great tragedy and in that sense we must take advantage of the access that we are beginning to have to sources from the archives of the former USSR, disregarding all the manipulation that surrounds this resource under the circumstances in which its opening has been taking place.
In any case, any honest assessment of the invaluable experience of the USSR in relation to the drama of the war in Ukraine will prove to the world the superiority of the socialist system, as these reflections confirm.
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Bibliography consulted
Fontana, Josep. El Siglo de la Revolución. Una Historia del mundo desde 1914 (The Century of the Revolution. A History of the World since 1914). Barcelona: Planeta-Crítica. 2017. Major Series.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, Pantheon Books, New York, 1994.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 33. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.
The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation” (1922) Collected Works, Volume 36, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.
Theses on the National Question (1913), lectures given in various Swiss cities, Collected Works, Volume 19, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.
The Working Class and the National Question (1913), Collected Works, Volume 19, pp. 91-92, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).
The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) Collected Works, Volume 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.
Stalin, Joseph. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, FLP Peking, 1972.
The Social-Democratic View of the National Question, Works, Volume 1. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954.
Vilar, Pierre. Palabras de presentación a la edición en España de las Obras Completas de Stalin (Introductory Remarks to the Spanish Edition of the Complete Works of Stalin), Madrid: Vanguardia Obrera, December 17, 1984.
- J. Fontana, 2017, p. 11. ↑
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, Pantheon Books, New York, 1994, pp. 83-84. ↑
- Taken from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/03.htm, accessed November 27, 2023. ↑