Some observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s 1909 “The National Question” and the response later given by Vladimir Lenin 1914 “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”
Rosa expresses the view that upholding a principle about national right to self-determination is incompatible with socialism.
What is especially striking about this formula is the fact that it doesn’t represent anything specifically connected with socialism nor with the politics of the working class. Luxemburg: The National Question
Lenin takes another stance. He is not afraid of taking ideas captured by the bourgeoisie and re-theorize them.
The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion. Lenin: The Right of Nations..
He stresses how the working class should keep aloof of the suggestive nature of nationalism. Thus he insists on upholding that in theory the workers can be in favour of the principle of right to self-determination for all, because that will weaken the non-genuine wish of the bourgeoisie for an independent nation.
[…] in either case, the important thing for the proletariat is to ensure the development of its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this development by pushing the aims of its “own” nation before those of the proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.
However, we cannot move towards that goal unless we combat all nationalism, and uphold the equality of the various nations. Whether the Ukraine, for example, is destined to form an independent state is a matter that will be determined by a thousand unpredictable factors.
Without attempting idle “guesses”, we firmly uphold something that is beyond doubt: the right of the Ukraine to form such a state. Lenin: The Right of Nations..
With the relation between nations in mind, the fact that two nations can exist while one is an oppressor and the other an oppressed nation, he opts for a principled right to secede from another nation as an independent nation.
Failing to grasp this, Rosa Luxemburg, by her misguided eulogy of practicality, has opened the door wide for the opportunists, and especially for opportunist concessions to Great-Russian nationalism.
Why Great-Russian? Because the Great Russians in Russia are an oppressor nation, and opportunism in the national question will of course find expression among oppressed nations otherwise than among oppressor nations.
Perhaps a modern day Lenin leading a modern day socialist revolution would have prevented the Russo-Ukranian war?
This early view on nationalism soured as we know considerably in the Stalin era.
The historian Serhy Yekelchyk depicts the troubled past of Ukraine in this setting:
For the first time in modern history, eastern Ukranians had a territorial entity with borders closely corresponding to the ethnic boundaries of Ukranian settlement. A part of the Soviet Union, the Ukranians republic nonetheless provided a symbolic national homeland for generations of Soviet Ukranians. Serhy Yekelchyk - Ukraine, Birth of a Modern Nation, p.85
Just like in Russia, it was not given that the Bolsheviks would seize power, and the interim between the abdication of the last Romanov and the October Revolution unleashed all the struggling parties immediately.
Meanwhile, the Ukranian leaders were becoming increasingly frustrated with the Provisional Government. After the Bolskeviks in Petrograd overthrew the Kerensky’s government on November 7, 1917, […] the Central Rada’s troops supported the Kyivan Bolsheviks in their fight against the loyalist units of Kyiv Military District.
[…] The Rada’s Third Universal (November 20) announced the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic as an autonomous unit in the future democratic federation of Russia’s nationalities that was to emerge after the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Serhy Yekelchyk - Ukraine, Birth of a Modern Nation, p.71
Serhy continues though:
Although their program proclaimed the nation’s right of self-determination, the Bolsheviks had no intention of accepting the separation of Ukraine, which included major industrial and agricultural regions of the former Russian Empire.
However Lenin was a staunch supporter of Ukrainian secession in every statement he made. Ukraine harboured many factions interested in some version of autonomy from the Tsarist Russia.
It doesn’t matter to Lenin how benevolent or well-intentioned a nationalist present himself. What matters is that any straying from a theoretical goal will corrupt the outcome. This probably ended up reflecting back on the nationalist movements in Ukraine.
A final quote:
Russia’s revolutionary democrats, if they want to be truly revolutionary and truly democratic, must break with that past, must regain for themselves, for the workers and peasants of Russia, the brotherly trust of the Ukrainian workers and peasants. This cannot be done without full recognition of the Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession.
We do not favour the existence of small states. We stand for the closest union of the workers of the world against “their own” capitalists and those of all other countries. But for this union to be voluntary, the Russian worker, who does not for a moment trust The Russian or the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in anything, now stands for the right of the Ukrainians to secede, without imposing his friendship upon them, but striving to wintheir friendship by treating them as an equal, as an ally and brother in the struggle for socialism.
/ПРИЗРАК