V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v24;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

RESOLUTION ON THE NATIONAL QUESTION

I. 1. It is urgently necessary to define in detail and in all its aspects our attitude to the national question for the following reasons:

(α) historical (objective): reactionary nationalism and bourgeois-progressive (even bourgeois-democratic) nationalism of the counter-revolutionary epoch;

(β) of Party life: the split of the Bund, its separatism, its bloc with non-Social-Democratic parties retaining nationalist features (P.P.S.), its disruption by the compromise decision of the Stockholm Congress{125}. The disintegration of the “federation of the worst type”{126}.

II. 2. The clause on self-determination signifies only political separation.

{3. The necessity of this clause for Russia because of:

(α) the general principle of democracy;

(β) the existence of oppressed nations on the borderlands;

(γ) the incompleteness of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Eastern Europe in general, and in Russia in particular;

(δ) the greater reactionary character of the state system (monarchy) in Russia as compared both with the West and the East.

6. The example of Poland and Finland in 1905 shows the drawing together of the landlord and bourgeois-nationalist parties with the monarchy of Nicholas II; it shows the deception of the workers of Poland and Finland by the nationalist bourgeoisie of their own countries; it shows that the workers who preferred political (and ideological) rapprochement with their own bourgeoisie to unity with the proletariat of other nations would be betraying both socialism and democracy and their own fatherland.

V. 11. A negative attitude towards cultural-national autonomy:

(α) the ideological and political incorrectness of the slogan “national culture”;

(β) it contradicts the internationalism of the proletariat;

(γ) it draws the masses into the ideas of bourgeois nationalism;

(δ) it diverts attention from the tasks of a centralised democratic revolution (it points to a path of supposedly national separation, whereas in reality only a centralised democratic revolution is possible);

(ε) the propaganda of this slogan by all bourgeois parties of one of the nations (the Jewish), placed in the position of a caste;

(ζ) the division of the proletariat (of nations living together) is harmful in school affairs; unification is necessary.

V. 12. The merging of the workers of all nations in all organisations.

13. Not a federal, but an integral structure of the Party (the Caucasus, etc.).