Stalin's response to Lenin's comment on national question **** (needs to be confırmed)

The first clear disagreement between Lenin and Stalin on the national question concerned Lenin’s theses to the Second Congress of the Comintern in June 1920. In these theses Lenin appeared (although he was not explicit) to be suggesting that the type of federal relationship that existed between the Soviet republics could be extended to other European countries following revolutions there. Stalin’s little-known reply is published in an end-note to the 1931 third Russian edition of

Lenin’s Works:

I am referring to the absence in your theses of any mention of confederation as one of the transitional forms of drawing together the workers of different nations. For the nations which came into the composition of old Russia, we can and ought to consider our (Soviet) type of federation as an appropriate path to international unity. The reasons are clear: these nationalities either have not enjoyed statehood previously, or lost it a long time ago, in view of which the Soviet (centralised) type

of federation applies to them without particular friction.

It is impossible to say the same about those nationalities which did not come into the composition of old Russia, which have existed as independent formations,which developed their own statehood and which, if they become Soviet, will need by the force of things to stand in some sort or another of state relationship (bond) to Soviet Russia. For example, a future Soviet Germany, Poland,Hungary, Finland. These peoples, when they have their own statehood, their own armed forces, their own finances, on becoming Soviet, would hardly agree to enter straight into a federative bond with Soviet Russia on the Bashkir or Ukrainian model (in your theses you make a distinction between the Bashkir and Ukrainian model of federative bond, but in actual fact there is no difference, or it is so small as to be negligible): for they would look at a federation on the Soviet model as a form of diminishing their state independence, as an assault on their independence.

I have no doubt, that for those nationalities the most appropriate form of drawing together would be a confederation (a union of independent states).

Here I am not even talking about other nationalities, like Persia and Turkey, in relation to whom the Soviet type of federation and federation in general would be even more inappropriate.

Starting from these considerations, I think that the given point of your theses on the transitional forms of bringing together the workers of different nations needs to include (along with federation) confederation.

Such an amendment would provide your theses with more elasticity, and would enrich them with one

more transitional form of drawing together the workers of different nations and would ease the state drawing together of those nationalities which were not previously part of Russia with Soviet Russia.21

20 I. V. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958–65),  XLI, p. 16

21 I. V. Lenin, Sochineniia, 3rd edn. (Moscow: IMEL, 1931), XXV, p. 624