Lenin’s agrarian program was endangered by Stolypin’s reforms, which promised (or threatened, depending on one’s viewpoint) to create a class of independent and conservative peasants. Ever the realist, Lenin wrote in April 1908 that if Stolypin’s agrarian reforms succeeded, the Bolsheviks might have to give up their agrarian platform:
It would be empty and stupid democratic phrase-mongering if we said that the success of such a policy is “impossible.” It is possible!… What if, despite the struggle of the masses, Stolypin’s policy survived long enough for the “Prussian” model to triumph? The agrarian order in Russia would turn completely bourgeois, the stronger peasants would seize nearly all the allotments of communal land, agriculture would become capitalist, and under
The statement suffers from a curious contradiction: since, according to Marx, capitalism is supposed to carry the seeds of its own destruction, the capitalization of Russian agriculture, with its swelling masses of landless proletarians, should have made a “solution” of the “agrarian problem” easier for the revolutionaries rather than impossible. But as we know, Lenin’s fears proved groundless in any event, for the Stolypin reforms hardly altered the nature of landownership in Russia and not at all the mentality of the
Lenin also took an exploitative approach to the nationality question. It was axiomatic in Social-Democratic circles that nationalism was a reactionary ideology which diverted the worker from the class struggle and promoted the breakup of large states. But Lenin also realized that one-half of the population of the Russian Empire consisted of non-Russians, some of whom had a strongly developed national consciousness and nearly all of whom wanted a greater measure of territorial or cultural self-government. On this issue, as on the peasant question, the official party program of 1903 was very niggardly: it offered the minorities civic equality, education in their native languages, and local self-rule, accompanied by the vague formula of “the right of all nations to self-determination” but nothing more specific.89
In 1912–13, Lenin concluded that this was not enough: although admittedly nationalism was a reactionary force and probably anachronistic in the era of mounting class conflicts, one still had to allow for the possibility of its temporary appearance. The Social-Democrats, therefore, had to be prepared to exploit it on a conditional and transitory basis, exactly as in the case of peasant claims to private land:
It is the support of an ally against a
Searching for a programmatic formula, he rejected the two solutions popular among Eastern European socialists, federalism and cultural autonomy, the one because it promoted the disintegration of large states, the other because it institutionalized ethnic differences. After long hesitations, in 1913 he finally formulated a Bolshevik program for the nationality question. It rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the formula “national self-determination” of the Social-Democratic program to mean one thing and one only: the right of every ethnic group to secede and form a sovereign state. When his followers protested that this formula fostered particularism, Lenin reassured them. For one, the forces of capitalist development, which progressively fused the diverse regions of the Russian Empire into an economic whole, would inhibit separatism and ultimately render it impossible. Second, the “proletarian” right to self-determination always took precedence over the rights of nations, which meant that if, contrary to expectations, the non-Russian peoples separated themselves, they would be reintegrated by force. By offering the minorities a choice between all or nothing, Lenin was ignoring the fact that nearly all of them (the Poles and Finns excepted) wanted something in between. He fully expected the ethnic minorities not to separate but to assimilate with the Russians.91 Lenin used this demagogic formula to good effect in 1917.
