PREFACE.
The materials printed below relate to various periods. The first of them, "Theses on the National Question," extracted from Vladimir Ilyich's archive, recently delivered to the LENIN Institute from Galicia, and two letters to S. Shaumyan, date back to 1913.
The years 1912-1913 were precisely the period of growth of nationalist tendencies in "society" and opportunistic-nationalist attempts by Menshevik-liquidationist circles to revise the party's program on the national question. The party as a whole, and Vladimir Ilyich in particular, had to pay more attention to this issue in order to counter these attempts with their revolutionary-Marxist interpretation of the national program. For this purpose, among other things, the national question was placed on the agenda for discussion at the so-called summer or August meeting of the Central Committee with responsible workers, which took place abroad (in Galicia) at the end of September 1913 and adopted a well-known resolution, detailing the Bolsheviks' views on the national question. A comparison of this resolution with the "Theses" we are publishing and the correlation of certain facts mentioned in the text clearly indicate that the "Theses" were intended for the aforementioned meeting or for the report read by Vladimir Ilyich, mentioned in his letter to S. Shaumyan, and thus date back to the summer of 1913.
It was necessary to substantiate one's views on the national question more thoroughly and accurately not only because of the above-mentioned, so to speak, "external" reasons, but also because, within the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves, there were comrades who had not yet fully grasped Lenin's position on the national question. Among them was such an excellent Leninist as Stepan Shaumyan, an Armenian by origin, who worked among the multi-ethnic proletariat of the Caucasus. His correspondence with Vladimir Ilyich, of which we currently have only two letters from Vladimir Ilyich, touches on a number of issues (on the state language, autonomy, federation, etc.), on which Vladimir Ilyich gives simple, clear, and precise answers. The second of these letters was published in No. 2-3 of "Krasnaya Letopis" for 1922 and in No. 49(271) of "Izvestia of the Baku Soviet" on March 3, 1918, with a preface by S. Shaumyan.
The following letters to N. D. Kiknadze take us into the era of the war and the debates within the Bolsheviks themselves on the right of nations to self-determination. Against Lenin's understanding of this slogan, during the war, both Polish Social Democrats led by K. Radek and a number of Bolsheviks (Yu. Pyatakov, N. Bukharin, and others), who denied this slogan and oversimplified the national question, came out. Against Lenin's approach to the national question, the "Vpered" group (comrades Lunacharsky, Bezrabotny, and others) also spoke out. Comrade Lunacharsky gave a report on this topic at the end of 1916 at one of the meetings in Geneva, where comrade N. D. Kiknadze appeared as his opponent. The course of this debate—the "Geneva disputes"—was described by the latter in one of his letters to Vladimir Ilyich, which sparked an active exchange of letters between them on this issue.
Vladimir Ilyich wrote three letters to N. D. Kiknadze. Unfortunately, one of them has been lost. It is also evident that the letters to comrade Buachidze (Noi) mentioned in one of Vladimir Ilyich's letters have been lost. It is currently impossible to establish the exact date of the surviving letters. Comrades Kiknadze, Lunacharsky, and others, whom we consulted, could not, due to the passage of time, provide precise indications of the date. However, there is no doubt, judging by the text, that both letters were written at the end of 1916, in the autumn or even winter.
The second of these letters was published in No. 22 of "Rabochaya Pravda" (Tiflis) on January 27, 1924.
The last of the materials we are publishing relate to a more recent period, the preparation for the Eighth Party Congress—February 1919—and shed light on how the formulation of the RCP(B) program on the national question was developed. From the speeches of Lenin and Bukharin at the Eighth Congress, it is known about the disagreements that existed in the commission for developing the party program, which, in the end, led to the commission adopting a compromise formulation that rejected Bukharin's proposed formulation of "self-determination of the working classes of each nationality" and accepted Lenin's more flexible formulation, introducing the principle of gradation of nations (from the Middle Ages to bourgeois democracy or from bourgeois to Soviet or proletarian democracy), which was then approved by the congress. Subsequently, as is known, comrade Bukharin recognized the correctness of Lenin's point of view.
The documents being published, extracted from the archives of the Central Committee of the party, allow us to more clearly trace the path along which this point was developed. We have five documents: a draft by comrade Kamenev—evidently the very first project of the formulation; a draft by comrade Bukharin—evidently his initial formulation; two drafts by V. I. Lenin with his initial formulation, with the second being a slightly modified and more developed version of the first; and, finally, the final formulation by comrade Bukharin with corrections and additions by Vladimir Ilyich. This last document is the text adopted by the congress without changes.
I. T.