Nations and Internationalism

A theoretical treatise on the national question, and held to a higher standard than a constitutional handbook because that is what it sets out to be.

V. S. Semyonov states the ambition at the outset: a theoretical exposition of nationhood and internationalism in the context of world history and the diverse forms of human community. Six chapters move from the emergence of ethnic groups in pre-class society, through the formation of nations in late feudalism, to imperialism, October, the war, developed socialism, and the world revolutionary process. He was an academic rather than a functionary, with a doctoral thesis on the subject and earlier books on non-capitalist development and on Soviet foreign policy behind him.

A great deal of what it reports is accurate and worth having. The Bolshevik position on the national question between 1917 and 1923 was the most advanced of any state of its era, and the book documents it at length and without softening: the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia of 2 November 1917, with self-determination up to and including secession; the same clause in the Party programme of 1903; and Lenin's own insistence in October 1917 that the party of the Great-Russian language was obliged to recognise the right of Finland, Ukraine, Armenia and every other nationality oppressed by tsarism to secede.

For once the date is close to honest: the 1977 Constitution is discussed as new, and the bibliography runs to 1979.

Translated by Lenina Ilyitskaya.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the chapter of Soviet national history the treatise cannot enter.