Communist continuity backing Ukraine independence – The Militant

[....]Putin insists Stalin was right against Lenin.

Prior to the 1917 revolution, under czarist rule, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, and millions in Central Asia and the Caucasus region were oppressed, denied the basic right to read or use their native language, practice their religion or exercise control over cultural, economic and political affairs.

With the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the new workers and peasants government championed the right to self-determination of oppressed nationalities, within what had been the Russian Empire, and worldwide. The Ukrainian people established an autonomous republic and voluntarily joined the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. National pride grew. Use of the Ukrainian language, literature and the arts flourished.

In a 1922 memo to the Communist Party’s Political Bureau, Lenin declared “war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism.”

“Internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations,” he wrote to a party congress that same year, “must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even as an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question.”

Communist continuity backing Ukraine independence – The Militant