Lenin’s anti-imperialism
Unlike Western imperialism, which colonised overseas territories, the Tsarist empire expanded by annexing adjacent territories from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. In the Preface to Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains that in order to evade censorship, he had in 1916 substituted Japan for Russia, and Korea for ‘Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians’ (1). As a genuine anti-imperialist, he was as opposed to Great-Russian imperialist annexation of the territories of non-Great-Russian peoples as he was to Western imperialism.
However, many of Lenin’s colleagues opposed his policies favouring the right of Russia’s colonies to national liberation. After Finland’s independence was recognized in 1917, no other nation received the same treatment; but the larger nations of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet republics, while smaller nations within the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (including the Central Asian nations) became autonomous republics and autonomous regions responsible for matters of local government, education, culture and agriculture. A range of policies aimed at promoting the national, economic, and cultural advancement of the non-Russians was pursued: priority to the local language, a massive increase in native language schools, development of national cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as far as possible with local nationals.
Lenin did not arrive at this position entirely on his own; indeed, in the early 20th century, his position and that of the Iskra current to which he belonged was extremely unsympathetic to national liberation struggles in the colonies of the tsarist empire. Eric Blanc shows that it was non-Russian Marxist parties in the empire’s periphery – especially in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and the Caucasus – who were arguing the positions subsequently articulated by Lenin. These parties, despite being committed in theory and practice to opposing ethnic nationalism and building proletarian unity across national divisions, emphasized the need for national independence as well as the autonomy of their own parties in relation to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (2). Lenin was also influenced by the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who argued that the socialist revolution could not succeed without the participation of the colonised peoples of the East (3).