The Militant, NY
Aug 24 2008

How Lenin fought to defend Georgia’s self-determination

The Pathfinder book Lenin’s Final Fight contains valuable documentary
material on the place of Georgia and the national question in the
battle by V.I. Lenin to defend the communist course of the October
1917 Russian Revolution against challenges raised by a narrow,
nationalist, petty-bourgeois layer that arose in the Soviet Union led
by Joseph Stalin.
Printed below is an excerpt from a review of Lenin’s Final Fight that
appeared in the June 5, 1995, Militant.

BY MARTÃ?N KOPPEL

Readers will find it hard to put down this book as they follow Lenin’s
struggle week by week, sometimes day by day, taking up political
issues that remain vitally relevant today. Lenin discusses questions
including the need to forge a union of workers and peasants republics,
to defend the rights of oppressed nationalities and combat Great
Russian chauvinism, and to strengthen the alliance between the working
class and the peasantry. He takes up the New Economic Policy and its
place in the world struggle for socialism, and defends the state
monopoly of foreign trade.

These questions, as the book’s introduction notes, `deal with the most
decisive piece of unfinished business in front of those who produce
the wealth of the world and make possible culture: they deal with the
worldwide struggle, opened by the Bolshevik-led revolution nearly
eighty years ago, to replace the dictatorship of a tiny minority of
exploiting capitalists families with the dictatorship of the
proletariat,’ that is, a workers state.

The revolutionary government that came to power in October 1917 was
based on councils of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ delegates
called soviets, the Russian word for council.

It mobilized peasants to expropriate the big landlords’ estates and
distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the tillers. It freed
oppressed peoples who had been under the tsarist boot of Russian
oppression from Ukraine to Mongolia, and guaranteed their right to
national self-determination’the first government in the world to do
so.

The Bolshevik leadership organized workers to expropriate capitalist
property in industry, banking, and wholesale trade, and established a
state monopoly of foreign trade.

Georgian republic
In September 1922, just a few months before the stroke that finally
debilitated him, Lenin launched a political fight around the question
of the Georgian republic and of the voluntary union of Soviet
republics.

In a letter to the party’s Political Bureau and addressed to Bolshevik
leader Lev Kamenev, Lenin criticizes the proposal by Joseph Stalin,
the CP’s general secretary, to incorporate five independent Soviet
republics’Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine’into
the Russian Federation as `autonomous republics.’ The book reprints
the text of Stalin’s initial plan.

Lenin proposes a completely different approach: that Russia join with
the other republics `on an equal basis into a new union, a new
federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.’

This stance was crucial, given the strong proindependence sentiments
of working people in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the
Caucasus because of Russian tsarist domination in the past. The
Georgian Communist Party had rejected Stalin’s `autonomization’ plan
and favored remaining independent as part of a Soviet federation.

Lenin’s Final Fight documents how Lenin waged a political debate to
win other members of the Bolshevik leadership to a proletarian
internationalist stance on this question. This fight was based on one
of the major conquests of the October 1917 revolution: the right of
oppressed peoples to national self-determination.

`War to the death’
Through the efforts of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was founded as a federation of equals at
the end of 1922. But Lenin felt compelled to `declare war to the death
on dominant nation chauvinism,’ as he put it in an October 6 memo to
the party’s Political Bureau.

In a series of notes addressed in December 1922 to the upcoming 12th
party congress, Lenin makes some of his sharpest and most concise
statements on the national question. Referring to the argument by some
Russian Communist leaders that a single government is needed to rule
over all the Soviet republics, he states, `Where did that assurance
come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which we
took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?’

Affirmative action
He adds that without a conscious approach of preferential treatment
toward the historically oppressed nations’an affirmative action
policy’all talk of a voluntary federation `will be a mere scrap of
paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that
really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a
rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.’

Lenin condemns Stalin for his `spite against the notorious
`nationalist socialism.” Stalin had accused the Central Committee of
the Georgian Communist Party of `nationalist deviations,’ saying these
should be `burned out with a red-hot iron.’

Lenin’s concern about Great Russian chauvinism was
well-founded. Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another Central
Committee member, resorted to strong-arm tactics to try to ram through
their policies on the national question. In protest, the Georgian CC
resigned. The conflict flared up in late November when Ordzhonikidze
struck one of the dissident Georgian communists during a verbal
confrontation. This fact came to light through an investigation by a
Political Bureau-appointed commission, headed by Russian CC member
Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

Over the final months of 1922, Lenin’s doubts about the conduct of
Stalin and his allies around the Georgian question mounted. Lenin
organized three of his personal secretaries to carry out a separate
investigation in February and March 1923 to verify the Dzerzhinsky
commission’s account. They reported to Lenin that Dzerzhinsky had
basically whitewashed the abusive policies of Ordzhonikidze and
Stalin.

This report’kept secret by Moscow until the collapse of the Stalinist
apparatus in the former USSR in 1991’appears in this volume for the
first time in any language.

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