On the Question of Nationalities
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Resolution on the Nationalities Question. April 1917
Original Source: Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (b) v rezoliutsiiakh ee s"ezdov i konferentsii,1898-1926 (Moscow, 1927), p. 183.
The policy of national oppression, an inheritance from autocracy and monarchy, is still fostered by the landowners, capitalists, and petty bourgeoisie in order to protect their class privileges and to disunite the workers of different nationalities. The contemporary imperialism, by furthering the tendencies toward the subordination of weaker peoples, is a new factor leading to an increase of national oppression.
The removal of national oppression can be effected only under an revolutionary democratic and republican form of government and state which will secure a complete equality of all nations and languages.
All nations included in Russia must have the free right of separation therefrom and the right of a free and independent state. The denial of such right and the failure to take proper measures to guarantee its proper execution are equivalent to support of the policy of annexation and conquest. Only recognition of the right of the nations to separate will secure a complete solidarity of the workers of different nations and further the actual democratic union of the nations.
The conflict existing at present between Finland and the Russian provisional government illustrates very clearly that the refusal of such right will lead to a manifest continuation of the tsarist policy concerning the right of nations to their free separation, and cannot be confused with that of the expediency of such separation. This last question must be decided separately in each case by the proletariat itself on the basis of economic conditions, customs, national composition of the population, etc.
The proletariat firmly denounces the so-called "cultural-national autonomy", i.e., taking the schools out of the state jurisdiction and transferring them to the national sejms, or the like. The workers living in the same locality and even working with the same enterprises, when following this cultural-national autonomy, will be artificially divided and appropriated to one or another "national culture"; in other words, there will be promoted the relation of the working masses with the bourgeois culture of separate nations, while the aim of the social democrats is to further the international culture of the proletariat of the whole world.
The party demands the inclusion in the constitution of a provision abolishing all privileges of one nation over another, and all restriction of the rights belonging to the national minorities.
Source: Walter Russell Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), pp. 76-77.