Letter

On the Formation of the Soviet Union

The following is reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1088 (22 April), newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.

17 March 2016

Dear Comrades,

In “Australian Union Tops Push Chauvinism Against Trade Pact: Defend China!” [ASp No. 228, Autumn], we state: “In 1920, during the Soviet-Polish War, the Soviet Union began negotiations with imperialist Britain to conclude a trade pact.” In fact, the entity known as the “Soviet Union” did not exist in 1920. It was voted into existence on 30 December 1922, more than five years after the October Revolution.

Stalin’s move to form the Soviet Union involved large doses of national coercion. It is no accident that the same day the union was created, Lenin began to author his scathing letter on “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’,” singling out Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and Ordzhonikidze as exemplars of Great Russian chauvinism for their bullying of the Georgian Communists. As first proposed by Stalin, the autonomization plan called for the formal entry of the independent Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia [now Belarus], Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Under Lenin’s pressure, Stalin changed this wording to formal unification with the RSFSR. But by the time of his letter, Lenin had come to view the whole business of autonomization as “radically wrong and badly timed.”

Lenin defended the creation of a union of socialist republics, saying that it “is necessary for us and it is necessary for the world communist proletariat in its struggle against the world bourgeoisie and its defence against bourgeois intrigues.” At the same time, he left open the possibility that this union might be retained only for military and diplomatic affairs, while in all other respects it might restore full independence to the individual People’s Commissariats. It goes without saying that Lenin was for unity against imperialism, but he warned, “It would be unpardonable opportunism if, on the eve of the debut of the East, just as it is awakening, we undermined our prestige with its peoples, even if only by the slightest crudity or injustice towards our own non-Russian nationalities.”

Comradely greetings,

Bert