The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

Why socialists put the national question in their programme

For late nineteenth-century European socialists the national question was awkward. The movement's slogan was that workers have no country, yet nations locked inside other empires, Poles, Irish, Czechs, kept asking the socialist movement to back their independence.

Lenin's answer began by distinguishing oppressor nations from oppressed ones. If a Russian worker will not support Polish independence, the Polish worker learns only that the Russian worker is ultimately on the side of those who rule him. Socialists of the oppressor nation must therefore insist on the freedom to separate, and socialists of the oppressed nation on the unity of workers. Hence the famous analogy: recognising the freedom to divorce is not the same as recommending divorce.

What Luxemburg objected to

Rosa Luxemburg opposed writing the principle into the programme at all. Poland was already tightly woven into the Russian and German economies, so independence would be an economic regression, and 'self-determination' would in practice give the national bourgeoisie a way to dress its class interest as the will of the whole nation. A nation has no single will, so the sentence 'the nation decides for itself' leaves unclear who is deciding.

Lenin accepted much of the logic and reversed the political conclusion: strike self-determination from the programme, and what fills the gap is not internationalism but the accomplished fact of the ruling nation. The disagreement recurred later, because the habit of granting the right while judging its exercise by class criteria became the basic grammar of Soviet nationality policy.

How principle and practice diverged

The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (November 1917) proclaimed equality, self-determination, the abolition of national privileges and the free development of minorities. Finland's independence was recognised that December, and Poland and the Baltic states separated. But where non-Bolshevik governments declared independence, in Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, Soviet power arrived through civil war and the Red Army. Reading the subject of self-determination as the working people of a nation rather than the nation as such is what justified this.

When the USSR was founded in 1922 the principle survived in the treaty and the constitutions as the right of secession, and turned inward into the affirmative-action policy of korenizatsiya. That the wording was never deleted had an unforeseen consequence: when the republics left the union after 1988, the ground they cited was the Soviet constitution's own clause.