V. I. Lenin: Editorial Note to the Article “The Ukraine and the War” From the Editors

Sotsial-Demokrat No. 28, February 12, 1915. Printed from the Sotsial-Demokrat text.

Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 41, page 345.2.

Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov

Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala

Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) © 2004 Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  

The above article has been written by a prominent sup porter of the Dzvin trend.{1} Just recently, we have had to engage in some sharp polemics with that trend. We still have some differences with its writers. We do not regard as correct the concessions they have made to nationalism; we believe the idea of “cultural-national autonomy” to be bourgeois nationalism; we do not think that the best way to organise the proletariat is to break it up into national curias, and we do not share their views of the distinctions between “anational”, national and international. Being advocates of consistent i n t e r n a t i o n a l i s m, we entertain the hope that the author of this article and his friends will learn the necessary lessons from the events of the European war.

At any rate, we are happy to note that precisely at this hard moment the said group of Ukrainian leaders are most aware of their propinquity with Sotsial-Demokrat. It is to their credit that they have succeeded in separating them selves from the notorious “Alliance for the Liberation of the Ukraine”,{2} whose activity has nothing in common with Social-Democracy.

Notes

{1} Dzvin (The Bell)—a legal nationalist monthly of Menshevik make up, published in Ukrainian in Kiev from January 1913 to mid-1914. There were 18 issues. Among those who took part in the magazine were V. Vinnichenko, L. Yurkevich (Rybalka), S. Petlyura, G. Alexinsky, P. Axelrod and L. Trotsky. The magazine ceased publication at the beginning of the First World War.

The article “The Ukraine and the War” was written by V. Levinsky. p. 345

{2} Alliance for the Liberation of the Ukraine—a bourgeois nationalist organisation set up by a group of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists in 1914, after the start of the First World War. Expecting the defeat of tsarist Russia in the war, the alliance set itself the task of securing Ukraine’s secession from Russia and establishing a bourgeois and landowner autocratic Ukrainian state under the German protectorate. p. 345