CB: The SU had autonomous regions.
They were formally autonomous. In reality, there was Great Russian chauvinism from just around the time that Stalin was consolidating power. Lenin's concern over this matter prompted him to wage his final struggle against Stalin.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm
It is said that a united apparatus was needed. Where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding sections of my diary, we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?
There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. Butr now, we must, in all consicence, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tasrist hotch-potch and there has been no posibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.
It is said in defence of this measure that the People's Commissariats directly concerned with national psychology and national education were set up as separate bodies. But there the question arises: can these People's Commissariats be made quite independent? and secondly: were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures although we could and should have done so.
I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure adminstration, together with his spite against the notorious "nationalist-socialism", played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.
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