
In the two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in this year following Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s brutal response, we have been faced with the questions of colonial and imperialist oppression, and the struggles of national groupings to win their freedom from aggressors and oppressors. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, revolutionaries were faced with similar questions, which they termed the “National Question.” In answering it, they came to believe that the right of nations to self-determination was an essential part of the meaning of the Russian Revolution and an essential phase on the international road to socialism.
Nations in Russia
Over centuries of rule the Tsarist Russian Empire (or Great Russia, as it was often called) had subjugated many minority groups. Some of these groups were tiny, with only tens of thousands of members, while others were huge, with populations in the millions. These minority groupings, while not nation-states as we think of them today, were often referred to as nations. These diverse national groups were cohered around a shared language, religion, culture, and often tribal or kinship-based groups. At just more than fifty percent of the population of the Empire, these smaller national groupings actually outnumbered the total number of ethnic Russians in the population.
Despite their combined majority, for Poles and Ukrainians in the west, for Muslims and Georgians in the south, to Kazakhs in the east and the so-called “small peoples” in the north (members of the Uralic and Altaic language families of the Arctic regions), the Russian empire was an oppressive force. Since it dominated and oppressed so many separate peoples, socialists of the time called it “the prison house of nations.” Along with the political-military force that underpinned the Empire’s dominance, many Russian-speaking people of Russia proper did also hold a set of beliefs we can call chauvinism – the nationalistic belief that one’s culture and society, or nation, are superior to or more deserving of privileges than others’.
Early revolutionary thinkers like Marx and Engels had recognized the role of national oppression in keeping workers divided from each other, and therefore unable to unite to challenge their true oppressors – traditional landowning ruling classes and the newly empowered capitalist class. Marx believed that fighting for the independence of Ireland, for example, was a strategic move that could weaken the material basis for conservative rule in England, therefore providing openings for activity among the British working class. He also believed that if British workers supported Irish independence, it would weaken the paralyzing antagonism that often existed between Irish workers and British workers who were employed in the same factories in parts of Scotland and Engaland. They urged British workers to join Irish workers in their fight for freedom, or else give up all hope for their own liberation as workers. They also paid attention to the Polish people who live under Russian domination and demanded their independence just as they did for the Irish.
The Revolution and National Self-Determination
When working people took control of their cities, towns and regions during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and immediately after, their leadership understood, as had Marx and Engels, that they could not and should not try to impose their rule on peoples in lands that the Tsars had oppressed. Lenin and other leaders of the newly formed and still evolving Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (or RSFSR, which would soon become the Soviet Union) believed strongly that the working people and peasants of those smaller nations had every right to choose their own government and the forms it would take. Like Marx, Lenin understood that supporting independence and democracy for national groups was right in and of itself, but also that risings for national independence in colonized regions could contribute to proletarian activity and breakthroughs in the colonizing powers themselves. Also like Marx, he highlighted how Irish struggles to throw off the British yoke could contribute to the larger revolutionary proletarian movements that were growing as the war dragged on.
In the Russian Empire, this national ferment was already happening even before the soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers took power in late October 1917. As the Revolution spread and deepened after the fall of the Tsar in February of 1917, Ukrainians formed a Ukrainian Central Rada (or council), Muslims organized an All-Russian Muslim Congress, Muslim women organized a Women’s Muslim Congress, and most boldly, the aforementioned Ukrainian Rada organized a Congress of Nationalities which brought together representatives of more than a dozen minority linguistic and religious nationalities that had been imprisoned by Great Russia.
In this spirit, the successful Russian revolutionaries in October of 1917 proclaimed the “equality and sovereignty” of all the “peoples of Russia,” including their rights to self-determination and the abolition of any “privileges” or “disabilities” among them. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, had earlier written that “mankind can proceed towards the inevitable fusion of nations only through a transitional period of the complete freedom of all oppressed nations.” By “fusion,” Lenin meant independent nations choosing to join with a larger socialist world no longer divided by the borders of capitalist nation states. By “transitional period” he meant a time where previously oppressed peoples could begin to govern themselves, and then make the conscious decision for themselves to join with a larger socialist world (which was in this case and at that time the RSFSR). Class, Lenin argued, would become the politically dominant social identity only if national identity was given proper respect. Only when working people could govern themselves free of national oppression, and when their national identity was given basic human respect, could a class perspective and class identity become the dominant social identity, making it possible for the imagined, often invented and manufactured ideas of nationhood to be seen as the smoke and mirrors that they are. This was a nuanced and practical understanding of how national identity and progressive strivings for freedom of oppression would contribute to the development of a revolutionary class consciousness and the dismantling of capitalist-fueled imperialism.
Nationalism of the Right
These types of progressive, national struggles for freedom and self-determination differ radically from what most of us recognize today as nationalism – reactionary right-wing chauvinism, ethnic and racial hatred, and militarism. This type of nationalism is a destructive, violent, and hate-filled force that seeks to divide working people. Donald Trump, the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers in the United States; Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy party; Jair Bolsonaro and the Social Liberal Party in Brazil; Victor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary; the AfD in Germany; Vladimir Putin’s followers in Russia and others like them all represent this type of nationalism which has been co-opted by and used by the ruling classes of these nations.
Despite the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s and after under Stalin, Lenin’s original understanding – that we must support national feelings and national struggles for freedom against oppression – is a crucial legacy of the Russian Revolution. While we must stand against the reactionary violent form of nationalism pushed by the Trumps and Bolsonaros who use it to dominate and stoke division and hatred and pursue their own profit and plunder, we must continue to support real struggles for national freedom. Only in the struggle against national oppressions and for national self-determination will socialists win the confidence of oppressed nationalities. This has been true historically and it remains true to this day.
As much, for example, as we have serious criticisms of the Zelensky government in Ukraine (He is head of an oligarchic capitalist state who glorifies openly fascist battalions within the Ukrainian military.), we still absolutely defend the right of the Ukrainian people to fight to defend their nation against Russian aggression. As long as Russian troops have a presence in territory populated by Ukrainians, Ukrainians have the right to struggle against and drive out their invaders.
As much as we also have serious criticisms of the Hamas regime in Gaza (Hamas is a reactionary Islamic and undemocratic military organization.), we nonetheless understand the condition of Zionist occupation and national-religious oppression in which the Palestinian struggle developed, and absolutely support the right of the Palestinian people to fight for freedom from Israel’s U.S.-supported imperialist oppression. As long as the Zionist state and war machine occupy Palestinian lands and maintain an open-air prison for millions, we support the right of Palestinians to challenge and drive out their U.S. financed occupiers.
The Limits to Nationalism: Why We Need Internationalism
But to succeed in liberating the oppressed working classes of those nations, we must go beyond simply supporting national liberation and self-determination for oppressed peoples. Within those national movements, the working class must fight for leadership and win the mass of working people over to the need for international revolution that goes beyond their national borders. Neither the Zelensky government nor Hamas, even if they presided over independent nation-states, would rid the Ukrainian or the Palestinian working classes of their oppression by their own capitalist classes, which are themselves part of the larger global capitalist system.
As the Russian experience shows us, when even an explicitly socialist revolution was contained within the borders of Russia and was unable to spread into Germany and the core capitalist states of western Europe, the newborn Soviet state slipped into a state of degeneration, leading to the rise of a bureaucratic caste and the authoritarian government of Stalin. The failure of working-class socialist revolution to spread internationally condemned it to degeneration and years of vain attempts to create the impossible – socialism in one country. We have over and over again seen the futility of nationalist movements that claim to be socialist or communist, fight for and win power over capitalist nation-states, and then, after winning power simply become authoritarian ruling castes over still-capitalist nations, continuing to oppress and exploit the mass of the population. Only international socialist revolution can go beyond these limitations, and lead to something meaningful for the working classes of those nations.
Our Perspective
On the road to a socialist world, we must support national struggles for freedom, which are the legitimate struggles of people for freedom from oppression. But support for a nation’s people does not mean support for their rulers, nor that the creation of numerous independent nation-states is the ultimate goal. We must support and help the working classes of those oppressed nations fight for and win leadership of those movements that can and will struggle for an international revolution. Only then, as part of an international socialist revolutionary movement, can the working classes of the world truly challenge capitalist dominance and usher in a new world for all of humanity.
These are some of the significant lessons handed down to us from experience of the Russian Revolution.