Published:
Pravda No. 83, June 29 (18), 1917.
Printed from the Pravda text.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 41,
page 439.1.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Copyleft:
V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
© 2004
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Here is what Mr. Stan. Volsky, a leader writer of Novaya Zhizn,{1} has talked himself into today:
“...While denying the right of the big nations to enslave the small nationalities, socialism has never recommended the opposite course of action: enslavement of the big nations by the small nationalities. But it is precisely to this kind of violence against the will of the all-Russia democracy, to a denial of joint revolutionary democratic work, a substitution of national hostility for the class struggle, that the programme, or at any rate the tactics, of the Ukrainian Rada boils down....”
There you see where the swings of the Novaya Zhizn petty-bourgeois chatterboxes are taking them—straight to the Black-Hundred reaction! It is after all only the Menshikovs yesterday and the Katkovs the day before yesterday who could say that the Ukrainians’ desire to have their own sejm, their own ministers, their own army, their own finances and other things was “enslavement” of the Russian people!
A foul Great-Russian chauvinism, touched up with sweet quasi-Marxist words, such is the sermon of Minister V. Chernov, Mr. Volsky and Rabochaya Gazeta.
{1} Novaya Zhizn (New Life)—a daily published in Petrograd from April 18 (May 1), 1917, to July 1918. It was started by a group of Menshevik internationalists and writers connected with the journal Letopis. Characterising this group, Lenin said that “intellectual scepticism, which conceals and expresses lack of principle, is the dominant mood” in their midst (see present edition, Vol. 25, p. 271), and ironically called them “would-be internationalists” and “pseudo-Marxists”.
The newspaper took a hostile attitude to the Socialist Revolution in October 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet power. From June 1, 1918, it had two editions: one in Petrograd, another in Moscow. Both were closed down in July 1918. p. 439
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