V. I.

Lenin

The new, coalition Provisional Government’s policy failure is
becoming more and more obvious. The Universal Act on the
organisation of the Ukraine, issued by the Ukrainian Central
Rada [1] and adopted on June 11, 1917, by the
All-Ukraine Army Congress, plainly exposes that policy and
furnishes documentary proof of its failure.

“ Without seceding from Russia, without breaking away from
the Russian State," reads the Act, “let the Ukrainian people have the right to shape their own life on their own
soil.... All laws by which order is to be established here in
the Ukraine shall be passed solely by this Ukrainian
Assembly. And laws establishing order throughout the Russian
State must be passed by the All-Russia Parliament.”

These are perfectly clear words. They state very specifically
that the Ukrainian people do not wish to secede from Russia at
present. They demand autonomy without denying the need for the
supreme authority of the “All-Russia Parliament”. No democrat, let alone a socialist, will venture
to deny the complete legitimacy of the Ukraine’s demands. And
no democrat can deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. Only unqualified recognition of this right
makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and
the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one state. Only unqualified recognition of this right
can actually break completely and irrevocably with the accursed
tsarist past, when everything was done to bring about a
mutual estrangement of the two peoples so close to each
other in language, territory, character and history. Accursed
tsarism made the Great Russians executioners of the Ukrainian
people, and fomented in them a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in
their native tongue.

Russia’s revolutionary democrats, if they want to be truly
revolutionary and truly democratic, must break with that past,
must regain for themselves, for the workers and peasants of
Russia, the brotherly trust of the Ukrainian workers and
peasants. This cannot be done without full recognition of the
Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession.

We do not favour the existence of small states. We stand for the
closest union of the workers of the world against “their
own” capitalists and those of all other countries. But for this union to be voluntary, the Russian worker, who does not
for a moment trust The Russian or the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in
anything, now stands for the right of the Ukrainians to secede,
without imposing his friendship upon them, but striving to win their friendship by treating them as an
equal, as an ally and brother in the struggle for socialism.

*     * *
Rech , the paper of the embittered bourgeois counter revolutionaries, who are half demented with rage, savagely
attacks the Ukrainians for their “unauthorised” decision. “That act by the Ukrainians," it says, “is
a downright crime under the law, and calls for the immediate
application of severe legitimate punitive measures." There is
nothing to add to this attack by the savage bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. Down with the counter-revolutionary
bourgeoisie! Long live the free union of free peasants and
workers of a free Ukraine with the workers and peasants of
revolutionary Russia!

---
Notes:
[1]
The Ukrainian Central Rada (Council) was a counter-revolutionary
bourgeois nationalist organisation founded in April 1917 at the
All-Ukraine National Congress in Kiev by a bloc of Ukrainian
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist parties and groups.
M. S. Grushevsky, an ideologue of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, was
its chairman and V. K. Vinnichenko its vice-chairman. Among
its members were Petlyura, Yefremov, Antonovich and other
nationalists. Socially, the Rada relied for support on the urban
and rural bourgeoisie, the kulaks, and the petty-bourgeois
nationalist intellectuals. It tried to consolidate the power of the Ukrainian
bourgeoisie and landowners and to establish a Ukrainian bourgeois
state, taking advantage of the national liberation movement in the
Ukraine. Under the guise of lighting for national independence, it
strove to win the support of the Ukrainian people, divert thorn from
the all-Russia revolutionary movement, bring thorn under the
sway of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, and prevent the victory of the
socialist revolution in the Ukraine. The Rada supported the
Provisional Government despite differences over the issue of granting
autonomy to the Ukraine.

Following the victory of the October Socialist Revolution
the Rada declared itself the supreme organ of the “Ukrainian
People’s Republic” and campaigned openly against Soviet rule.

It was one of the principal centres of the counter-revolutionaries
of the whole of Russia.