Written by Lenin in the first months of the war and first published Sotsial Demokrat, No. 35, December 12, 1914. This first English translation from the Selected Works series edited by Alexander Trachtenberg in 1929.

‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians’ (1914) by V.I. Lenin from Selected Works, Vol. 18. International Publishers, New York. 1929.

So much talk so much comment, so much noise is being made around nationality and fatherland! Liberal and radical ministers in England, a host of “forward-looking” journalists in France (who have proven to be in full agreement with their reactionary colleagues), a swarm of official Cadets and progressive scribblers in Russia (including some Narodnik and “Marxist” writers) — all of them singing in a thousand tunes the praise of the freedom and Independence of the “fatherland,” the greatness of the principle of national independence. It is impossible to discern the line dividing the venal eulogist of the hangman Nicholas Romanov, or of the mutilators of Negroes and natives of India from the ordinary philistine who, thanks to stupidity or supineness, is swimming “with the current.” In truth, such distinction is not important. What we witness is a broad and very deep ideological current whose origins are closely interwoven with the interests of the landowners and the capitalists of the great nations. Tens, nay, hundreds of millions are being spent every year for the propaganda of ideas favourable to those classes. It is quite a sizable mill everything is grist for it, beginning with Menshikov, a chauvinist by conviction, and ending with chauvinists by opportunism or spinelessness, like all those Plekhanovs and Maslovs, Rubanoviches and Smirnovs. Kropotkins and Burtsevs

Let us Great-Russian Social-Democrats define our attitudes towards this ideological current. It does not behoove us, representatives of a great nation of Eastern Europe and a goodly portion of Asia, to forget the tremendous significance of the national question, especially in a country which has been rightly named the “prison of people”; and particularly at a time when in the East of Europe and in Asia capitalism awakens a whole series of “new,” great and small nations to life and self-consciousness; at a moment when the tsarist monarchy has put under arms millions of Great Russians and “aliens” for the purpose of “solving” a number of national questions in accordance with the interests of the Council of the United Nobility and those of the Guchkovs, Krestovnikovs, Dolgorukovs, Kutlers, Rodichevs.

Are we enlightened Great-Russian proletarians impervious to the feeling of national pride? Certainly not! We love our language and our motherland; we, more than any other group, are working to raise its labouring masses (i.e., nine-tenths of its population) to the level of intelligent democrats and Socialists. We, more than anybody, are grieved to see and feel to what violence, oppression and mockery our beautiful motherland is being subjected by the tsarist hangmen, the nobles and the capitalists. We are proud of the fact that those acts of violence met with resistance in our midst, in the midst of the Great-Russians; that we have given the world Radishchev, the Decembrists, the declasse revolutionaries of the seventies; that in 1905 the Great-Russian working class created a powerful revolutionary party of the masses; that at the same time the Great-Russian muzhik began to grow democratic, began to overthrow the priest and the landlord.

We remember that, half a century ago, the Great-Russian democrat Chernyshevsky, who sacrificed all his life to the cause of the revolution, said: “A miserable nation, a nation of slaves, from top to bottom, only slaves.” The open and covert Great-Russian slaves (slaves in relation to the tsarist monarchy) do not like to recall these words. We, however, think that those were words of real love for the motherland; it was love full of sadness due to the absence of revolutionary sentiment among the masses of the Great-Russian population. There was none of it at that time. There is little of it now, but it is already there. We are filled with national pride because of the knowledge that the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class; that it, too, has proven capable of giving humanity great examples of struggle for freedom and for Socialism; that its contribution is not confined solely to great pogroms, numerous scaffolds, torture chambers, great famines, and great servility before the priests, the Tsars, the landowners and the capitalists.

We are filled with national pride, and therefore we particularly hate our slavish past (in which the noble landowners led the muzhiks into war to stifle the freedom of Hungary, Poland, Persia, China) and our slavish present, in which the same landowners, aided by the capitalists, lead us into war to stifle Poland and the Ukraine, to throttle the democratic movement in Persia and in China, to strengthen the gang of Romanovs, Bobrinskys, Puiishkeviches that covers with shame our Great-Russian national dignity. It is nobody’s fault if he is born a slave, but a slave who is not only alien to the struggle for his freedom but also justifies and eulogizes his slavery (for instance, by calling the throttling of Poland, the Ukraine, etc., a “defence of the fatherland” of the Great-Russians) such a slave is a knave and a scoundrel who arouses a just feeling of indignation, contempt and loathing.

“No people can be free which oppresses other peoples.” This was said by the greatest representatives of consistent democracy of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, who became the teachers of the revolutionary proletariat. We, Great-Russian workers, filled with national pride, wish by all means to have a free and independent, sovereign, democratic, republican, proud Great-Russia, which is to maintain in relation to her neighbours the humane principle of equality, and not the serf principles of privileges that humiliate a great nation. It is because we wish it so that we say: It is impossible to “defend the fatherland” in the twentieth century in Europe, even if it be Far-Eastern Europe, otherwise than by fighting with all revolutionary means against the monarchy, the landowners and the capitalists of our fatherland, i.e., against the worst enemies of our fatherland: it is impossible for the Great Russians to “‘defend the fatherland” otherwise than by wishing defeat for tsarism in every war, this being the lesser evil for nine tenths of the population of Great-Russia, since tsarism not only oppresses these nine-tenths of the population economically and politically, but it also demoralises, degrades, defiles and prostitutes them by developing in them the habit of oppressing other peoples, by teaching them to cover up their shame with hypocritical, quasi patriotic phrases.

One will perhaps reply that outside of tsarism and under its wing there has already come into existence and developed another historic force, Great-Russian capitalism, which does progressive work by economically centralising and consolidating tremendous areas. Such an objection does not justify, on the contrary, it still more condemns, our social-chauvinists, who in truth ought to be called tsarist-Puishkevich Socialists (as Marx called the Lassalleans Royal Prussian Socialists!) Let us assume that history will decide in favour of the Great-Russian capitalists and against the hundred and one small nations. This is not impossible since the whole history of capital is a history of violence and plunder, blood and filth. We, on our part, are not unconditional advocates of small nations; other conditions being equals we are decidedly for centralisation and against the philistine ideal of federation. But even if this be the case, it is, first, not our business, not the business of democrats (to say nothing of Socialists) to aid Romanov, Bobrinsky, Purishkevich in stifling the Ukraine, etc. Bismarck did, in his own fashion, Junker fashion, an historically progressive thing, but a fine “Marxist” would be the man who, for this reason, would undertake to justify Socialists supporting Bismarck! Still, Bismarck hastened economic development by uniting the Germans who were split into many states and oppressed by other nations, whereas the economic prosperity and the rapid development of Great Russia demand the liberation of the country from Great-Russian violence perpetrated over other peoples. This difference is being forgotten by our admirers of hundred-per-cent-Russian would-be Bismarcks.

Secondly, if history were to decide in favour of Great-Russian great-nation capitalism, it follows that the greater will be the Socialist role of the Great-Russian proletariat as the main driving power in a Communist revolution generated by capitalism. For this revolution of the proletariat, it is necessary that the workers be educated for a long period of time in the spirit of the fullest national equality and brotherhood. It is consequently from the standpoint of the interests of the Great-Russian proletariat that it is necessary continuously to educate the masses in the spirit of the most decisive, consistent, courageous, revolutionary struggle for full rights and for the right of self-determination of nationalities oppressed by the Great-Russians. The national pride of the Great-Russians (understood not in a slavish way) coincides with the Socialist interests of the Great-Russian (and all other) proletarians. Our example is Marx who, having for decades lived in England, had become half English, and demanded the freedom and the national independence of Ireland in the interests of a Socialist movement of the English workers.

As to our home-made Socialist chauvinists, Plekhanov, etc., etc., they will prove to be traitors, in that last and hypothetical case which we have just considered, not only to their own motherland, the free and democratic Great-Russia, but also to the proletarian brotherhood of all the peoples of Russia, i.e., to the cause of Socialism.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

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