V. I. Lenin

Hereis what Mr. Stan. Volsky, a leader writer of
Novaya Zhizn , {1} has talked himself into today:

“...Whiledenying the right of the big nations to enslave the small nationalities, socialism has never recommended the
opposite course of action: enslavement of the big nations by the small
nationalities. But it is precisely to this kind of violence against the
will of the all-Russia democracy, to a denial of joint revolutionary
democratic work, a substitution of national hostility for the class
struggle, that the programme, or at any rate the tactics, of the Ukrainian
Rada boils down....”

Thereyou see where the swings of the Novaya Zhizn petty-bourgeois chatterboxes are taking them—straight to the
Black-Hundred reaction! It is after all only the Menshikovs yesterday and
the Katkovs the day before yesterday who could say that the Ukrainians’
desire to have their own sejm, their own ministers, their own army, their
own finances and other things was “enslavement” of the Russian people!

Afoul Great-Russian chauvinism, touched up with sweet quasi-Marxist
words, such is the sermon of Minister V. Chernov, Mr. Volsky and
Rabochaya Gazeta .

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Notes:
{1}
Novaya Zhizn (New Life)—a daily published in Petrograd from
April 18 (May 1), 1917, to July 1918. It was started by a group of
Menshevik internationalists and writers connected with the journal
Letopis . Characterising this group, Lenin said that “intellectual
scepticism, which conceals and expresses lack of principle, is the dominant
mood” in their midst (see present edition, Vol. 25, p. 271), and ironically called them “would-be internationalists” and
“pseudo-Marxists”.

Thenewspaper took a hostile attitude to the Socialist Revolution in
October 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet power. From June 1, 1918,
it had two editions: one in Petrograd, another in Moscow. Both were closed
down in July 1918.

p. 439