When the Bolsheviks came to power, they decided to renounce this heritage. They guaranteed the right of secession to all such peoples who had come under the sway of Czardom.
Did they really?
Of course they did. This does not mean that there was resistance from within the Bolshevik leadership. By 1921, there were *already* signs of the Thermidor that would become full-blown in a couple of years after Stalin had seized power. This would introduce what Lenin refers to below as a "tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff".
THE QUESTION OF NATIONALITIES OR "AUTONOMISATION" by V.I. Lenin December 31, 1922
I suppose I have been very remiss with respect to the workers of Russia for not having intervened enegetically and decisivley enough in the notorious question of autonomisation, which, it appears, is officially called the question of the Soviet socialist republics.
When this question arose last summer, I was ill; and then in autumn I relied too much on my recovery and on theOctober and December plenary meetings giving me an opportunity of intervening in this question. However, I did not manage to attend the October Plenary Meeting (when this question came up) or the one in December, and so the question passed me by almost completely.
I have only had time for a talk with Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who came form the Caucasus and told me how this matter stood in Georgia. I have also managed to exchange a few words with Comrade Zinoview and express my apprehensions on this matter. From what I was told by Comrade Dzerzhinksy, who was at the head of the commission sent by the C.C. to "investigate" the Georgian incident, I could only draw the greatest apprehensions. If matters had come to such a pass that Orjonikidze could go to the extreme of applying physical violence, as Comrade Dzerzhinsky informed me, we can imagine what a mess we have got ourselves into. Obviously the whole business of "autonomisation" was radically wrong and badly timed.
It is said that a united apparatus was needed. Where did that asurance 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 infintesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.
full: http://www.ex.ac.uk/Projects/meia/Lenin/Archive/19221231a.htm
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