The attitude of the Bolsheviks to democratic demands is shown by their stance on the national question. Without a clear and principled stand on the national question, they could never have led the working class to the conquest of power. The national question was of decisive importance for Russia, where 57 per cent of the population consisted of non-Russian national minorities who suffered oppression and discrimination at the hands of the 43 per cent who were Great Russians. The onset of reaction in the period 1907-10 intensified the national antagonisms to an unbearable degree. Rampant reaction immediately trampled underfoot all the gains made by the oppressed nationalities in the previous period. Finnish autonomy was abolished. Millions of people were deprived of voting rights on grounds of their ‘citizenship’.
Anti-Semitism revealed its ugly face again in the notorious Beylis case in Kiev, when Black Hundred elements blamed the Jews for the alleged ritual murder of a Christian boy. The vilest racist prejudices were deliberately used by the regime to divide and enslave the people. The right-wing press published sensationalist articles claiming that the ritual murder of Christian boys by Jews was part of the Jewish faith. The case was so scandalous that a wave of indignation swept through Russian society. Liberal public opinion expressed its moral outrage. But the fact was that the origin of this racist poison was the regime itself and the social system upon which it rested. It is no coincidence that anti-Semitism was rife at the court of Nicholas and was shared by the Tsar and his entourage who deliberately encouraged it.
The only way to fight racism is by uniting the workers in struggle against all forms of oppression and discrimination, as part of the general revolutionary struggle to change society. This does not preclude, but presupposes that action is taken by the labour movement to deal with fascists and racists who attack members of oppressed minorities. But it is imperative that the defence of the oppressed minority be undertaken by the working class united as a whole, without distinction of race, language, or colour. At the time of the Beylis trial, the Social Democrats organised a protest campaign against the anti-Semites. In September and October the Bolsheviks put out a series of leaflets. One of them said:
Comrades: We workers, do not need the enslavement of one nation by another. Finn, Pole, Jew, German, Armenian are all brothers to us. We must not fight against them, but against the autocracy and capitalism. (Quoted in Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 431.)
The leaflets called for protest strikes, which actually took place in Petersburg, Kiev, Revel, Gomel, Byelostok, Brest-Litovsk, and other areas. In other words the Party responded to racist poison with a class appeal.
The workers of Russia and the Ukraine responded with strikes in defence of the oppressed Jewish people. Finally, under pressure from the mass protest movement, Beylis was declared innocent. The way to combat racism is precisely by strengthening the unity of all working people in struggle, cutting across all differences of nationality, race, religion, colour, or language. By contrast, the kind of petty-bourgeois nationalism that emphasises national differences merely acts as grist to the mill of the racists. Thus, in the context of tsarist Russia, the separatist line of the Bund was extremely harmful. They pursued a policy which amounted to splitting the workers on national lines, demanding the right to act as the sole representative of the Jewish workers, demanding Saturday rest for Jews, rights for the Jewish language, and other demands in line with ‘cultural-national autonomy’.
Members of the oppressed nationalities (Estonian workers, Ukrainian peasants, etc.) frequently wrote asking for support to the Social Democratic Duma fraction. The Bolshevik Party itself was a model of how to unite workers from different nationalities in common class organisations, even where there was a history of racial conflict between them, as was the case in tsarist Russia, where the regime not only incited the Russians and Ukrainians against the Jews, but also turned Azeris and Georgians against Armenians. The pogroms against Armenians in Baku are now less well remembered than those against the Jews, but they were every bit as horrific. And yet in Bolshevik organisations Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Latvian, Armenian workers worked together. Lenin was always radically opposed to separate national organisations of the working class:
In our party in the Caucasian Social Democracy, Georgians, Armenians, Tartars, Russians have been working together in united social democratic organisations for more than ten years. This is not a phrase, but a proletarian solution of the national question. The only solution. The same thing in Riga: there are Russians, Latvians, and Lithuanians; the only ones to organise apart are the separatists – the Bund. This is also the case in Vilna. (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, in Russian, vol. 48, p. 162.)
This is a crushing answer to all attempts to split the workers organisations on national lines.
Great-Russian chauvinism was always one of the most powerful weapons of reaction. On the issue of the national question, too, Lenin denounced not only the open Black Hundred reaction, but also the liberal bourgeoisie:
The liberal bourgeoisie of all nations – and the Great Russian above all – fights for the privileges of ‘its’ nation… for national particularity, for national exclusiveness and through this, assists the policy of our ministry of internal affairs. (Ibid., vol. 25, p. 71.)
And again:
Bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism are two implacably opposed slogans, corresponding to two great class camps throughout the entire capitalist world and expressing two policies (rather, two world outlooks) on the national question. (Ibid., vol. 24, p. 123.)
Confusion over the national question would have been a catastrophe for the Russian Revolution. That is why it occupied a central place in all the debates from 1903 onwards. There were serious problems not only with the Jewish nationalists of the Bund, but also with the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democrats who were influenced by Rosa Luxemburg who denied the rights of nations to self-determination. Rosa Luxemburg was undoubtedly a resolute defender of internationalism. In her stubborn resistance to the prejudices of the petty-bourgeois Polish nationalists of the Polish Socialist Party (PSP), she had right on her side. But her understanding of internationalism was rather abstract and one-sided. In effect, she denied the right of the Polish people to self-determination. For the RSDLP to have accepted this position, as she demanded, would have been an unmitigated disaster and a gift to the Polish nationalists. So serious were the differences that it led to a split in the Polish Social Democracy in which an opposition group, which sympathised with Lenin’s position, and led by JS Hanyecki and AM Malecki, broke away. Lenin’s position was far more profound and dialectical. In the years immediately before and during the First World War, he wrote a large number of articles and documents on the national question which to this day retain all their vitality and relevance. As was his wont, Lenin discussed his ideas on this with younger cadres and encouraged them to go into print: The result was, among others, Shaumyan’s pamphlet On National-Cultural Autonomy and Stalin’s article in Prosveshtchenye, The National Question and the Social Democracy, which was, in effect, dictated by Lenin.