From Herzen to Lenin and beyond: national self-determination (or how to think about Ukraine)

 

In 1914, there was a dispute between Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin about the proper revolutionary view of the right to self-determination. Luxemburg dismissed the aspiration for independent statehood as a mask or strategy for maintaining bourgeois domination against the working class. She deduced from this that nothing was gained if, for instance, Poland became independent of Russia and regained its autonomy. Nationalism, for Luxemburg, was a trap and a bauble.

Looking back, Luxemburg’s position must have arisen not just because of her theoretical take on internationalism as the necessary precedent of a communist revolution, but also because of her experience in a Germany that had only recently unified and that was filled with an excessive nationalism, an emotional attachment to German power (as embodied in the military) that was dangerous and antithetical to the Socialist Democracy ideal.

Lenin, on the other hand, had a strong sense of Russia’s imperialist role in subordinating the regions by violence. When we read, say, Tolstoy’s Hajid Murad now, we don’t think of the ethnic cleansing of the Caucasus that was the basis of the wars and raids Tolstoy was writing about. But that ethnic cleansing was the preferred strategy of the Czarist state. Lenin was not shy about following a progressive line that had gotten Herzen in trouble: opposition to Great Russian nationalism, and support for a commonwealth of nations in the Russian sphere. The Polish rebellion of 1863 had sparked an ultranationalist reaction in Russia and a closing down not only of progressive dissent, but – surprisingly – dissent even from Dostoevsky’s journals, Vremia, which was closed down by the Czar. Herzen wrote:

“The situation of poor Poland is painful, but it will not perish. Europe is too divided in this moment and it is on this disaccord in general that Petersburg grounds all its hopes. However, the Polish question is already pushed so far that for the European powers is it as dangerous to do nothing for it as it is difficult to come to Poland’s aid. I think that after the second refusal [to desist] by the Saint-Petersburg chancellory, France, England and Austria will recognize Poland as a “belligerent party”. I hope Poland can last out this winter with the aid of arms and other aid which will openly arrive to them from Galicia.”

This is the background for Lenin’s great defence of a justified nationalism in the context of a militant worker’s internationalism.  You can read all about it in the thicket of Lenin’s collected works, volume 20 – which can be found in any well stocked used book store in Europe, where the fall of the Berlin Wall caused a great wave of book trades from former leftists: the collected works of Mao, of Enver Hoxa, of Stalin, of Lenin, of even our heroes Marx and Engels, all in dull colors, coffins of past revolutions.

The heart of Lenin’s notion of the nation-state is found in the polemic with Rosenburg entitled “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, written in 1914 before the fatal August.

 

In the leaps which all nations have made in the period

of bourgeois revolutions, clashes and struggles over the

right to a national state are possible and probable. We

proletarians declare in advance that we are opposed to Great-

Russian privileges, and this is what guides our entire propaganda

and agitation.

In her quest for “practicality” Rosa Luxemburg has lost

sight of the principal practical task both of the Great-Russian

proletariat and of the proletariat of other nationalities:

that of day-by-day agitation and propaganda against all

state and national privileges, and for the right, the equal

right of all nations, to their national state. This (at present)

is our principal task in the national question, for only in

this way can we defend the interests of democracy and

the alliance of all proletarians of all nations on an equal

footing.

Lenin is no philosopher, but here his notion of dialectic serves him well, helping him avoid the idea that internationalism and the national question are on opposite sides. In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Great-Russian nationalism – first under Yeltsin in Chechnya, then under Putin in all the guises of aggression he has promoted – is solidly anti-Leninist. In fact, it seems that Putin’s aggrieved sense of Great Russian history puts Lenin in the devil’s role, once again – a version of history that should be familiar to the American intelligence services and State Department, since they hired beaucoup anti-communists to broadcast just that message via Radio Free Europe for about forty years.

Lenin consistently supported the principle of secession. And he did so particularly for regions like Ukraine:

The position of the “bureaucracy” (we beg pardon for

this inaccurate term) and of the feudal landlords of our

united-nobility type is well known. They definitely reject

both the equality of nationalities and the right to selfdetermination.

Theirs is the old motto of the days of serfdom:

autocracy, orthodoxy, and the national essence—the

last term applying only to the Great-Russian nation. Even

the Ukrainians are declared to be an “alien” people and

their very language is being suppressed.

For “bureaucracy” here one can substitute secret police or simply police. Putin is, above all else, the product of a subculture of policing. His version of history is the narrow Russian  cops version of history – and, given the variables, an almost universal cop view of history. From the president of Russia to the mayor of New York City, the variables are filled in by different objects, but the system is the same. In 1919, fighting for the principle of self-determination against Bolshevist cirtics, Lenin put this cop view more pithily: “Scratch any communist…and you find a Great Russian Chauvinist. He sits in many of us and we must fight him.”

The Cold War slant on Lenin’s dialectical position was that it was all a trick. Underneath that groovyness about self-determination was the ruthless Machievellian accruing Soviet, ie Great Russian power. And indeed, Lenin’s successors did manage their program in that way. Still, the strain from Herzen to Lenin never died on the Left. Until, of course, the Left itself died and was buried in the Universities of the world.