V. I.

Lenin

“ Macedonia’s conquest by Bulgaria and Serbia means for her a bourgeois
revolution, a kind of 1789 or 1848.” These words of Otto Bauer, the
Austrian Marxist, reveal at a stroke the meaning of the events now taking
place in the Balkans.

The revolution of 1789 in France and that of 1848 in Germany and other
countries were bourgeois revolutions, because the liberation of the country
from absolutism and from landlord, feudal privileges in fact provided
freedom for the development of capitalism. But it goes without saying that
such revolutions were most urgently required by the interests of the
working class; in 1789 and 1848 even “non-Party” workers, who were not
organised as a class, were leading fighters of the French and German
revolutions.

Macedonia, like the other Balkan countries, is economically very
backward. She still retains exceedingly strong survivals of the feudal
system and of medieval dependence of the peasants on their feudal
landlords. Among those survivals are quit-rent (in money or kind),
share-cropping (the Macedonian peasant usually gives the landlord one-third
of the harvest, that is, less than the Russian peasant does), and so on.

The landlords in Macedonia (known as spahijas ) are Turks and
Mohammedans, while the peasants are Slays and Christians. The class
antagonism is therefore aggravated by a religious and national antagonism.

Thus, the victories gained by the Serbians and Bulgarians denote the
undermining of feudal rule in Macedonia, the formation of a more or less free class of peasant land owners, and a
guarantee for the entire social development of the Balkan countries, which
has been checked by absolutism and feudal relations.

Bourgeois newspapers, from Novoye Vremya to Rech , are talking of national liberation in the Balkans, leaving out
economic liberation. Yet in reality it is the latter that is the
chief thing.

Given complete liberation from the landlords and from absolutism,
national liberation and complete freedom of self-determination of the
peoples would be an inevitable result. On the other hand, if the tyranny of
the landlords and the Balkan monarchies over the peoples remains, national
oppression, too, is bound to persist in some measure or another.

If the liberation of Macedonia had been accomplished through a
revolution, that is, through the Serbian and Bulgarian and also the
Turkish peasants fighting against the landlords of all nationalities (and against the landlord governments in the Balkans),
liberation would probably have cost the Balkan peoples a hundred times less
in human lives than the present war. Liberation would have been achieved at
an infinitely lower price and would have been infinitely more complete.

One may ask what are the historical causes of the issue being settled
by war and not by revolution. The main historical cause is the weakness,
disunity, immaturity and ignorance of the peasant masses in all the Balkan
countries, as well as the small number of the workers who had a clear
understanding of the state of affairs and demanded a Balkan federal (union)
republic.

This brings out the radical difference between the European bourgeoisie
and the European workers in their attitude to the Balkan problem. The
bourgeoisie, even the liberal bourgeoisie, similar to our Cadets, shouts
about the “national” liberation of the “Slavs”. Thereby it plainly
misrepresents the meaning and historic significance of the events now
taking place in the Balkans, and thus hampers the real liberation
of the Balkan peoples. It thus contributes to the preservation of
landlord privileges, political tyranny and national oppression in some
measure or another.

On the other hand, the worker democrats are the only ones to champion
the real and complete liberation of the Balkan peoples. Nothing but
economic and political liberation of the peasants of all the
Balkan nationalities, carried through to the end, can eliminate all
possibility of any sort of national oppression.

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