When he declared war against Ukraine last February, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin for recognising the right of Ukrainians to be sovereign and run their own country.
He said: “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.
This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia – by separating, and severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought.”
Putin accused Lenin of reversing the imperialist policy of Tsarist Russia because he wanted to hang on to power. “After the revolution, the Bolsheviks’ main goal was to stay in power at all costs, absolutely at all costs. They did everything for this purpose” including satisfying “any demands and wishes of the nationalists within the country”.
As a result, “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect.”
Before coming to power, Lenin denounced Czarist Russia “as the prison house of nations”. Czarist Russia was composed of 200 nationalities and languages. The Czarist nobility belonging to the ‘Great Russian nation’ crushed this amazing ethnic diversity and very brutally oppressed the Ukrainians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Turkic and other peoples.
Imperialist Russia not only denied these peoples the right to self-determination but also institutionally oppressed them by banning their languages and persecuting those who practiced religions other than Orthodox Christianity.
Self-determination
In 1914, eight years before the birth of the Soviet Union, Lenin declared that setting these peoples free from “the prison house of nations” was indispensable to overthrowing Czarist Russia. He did not want the first state in the world committed to building socialism based on equality and freedom of oppression to continue ruling the former colonies of Great Russia in the same imperial way.
Tragically, the way the Soviet Union developed after Lenin shows that it became the new “prison house” of the nations that composed it, including those in its sphere of influence as agreed at Yalta.
Lenin believed that the new socialist state should be against Great Russian oppression, privilege and racism and the oppressed people of Czarist Russia should be set free by recognising their right to self-determination and equality of language, education and cultural rights.
The West allowed the collapse of the Soviet Union to be a humiliating experience for Russia- Evarist Bartolo
In 1915, he wrote that all nations oppressed by tsarism should be free to secede from Russia. “This we demand, not independently of our revolutionary struggle for socialism but because this struggle will remain a hollow phrase if it is not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all questions of democracy, including the national question.
We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.”
Putin’s neo-imperialist dream of resurrecting the Czarist Empire must not be allowed to happen. Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and all the former colonies of Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union have the right to exist as sovereign states and their people the right to choose their own social, political and economic system and their security arrangements. But without threatening Russia’s security. The US, NATO and the EU must take Russia’s national interest seriously.
The key to Russia
In 1939, Winston Churchill famously said that Russia “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest”. Crimea’s warm port and Ukraine joining NATO are existential matters for Russia. So are the rights of the Russian communities in former Soviet republics, including Ukraine.
In his book, Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall concludes his analysis of Russia: “From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist – the ports still freeze and the North European Plain is still flat.”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the European Security Architecture based on the Helsinki declaration of 1975 also collapsed. The West was ready to applaud Mikhail Gorbachev in his reforms but not to support him tangibly to win over the Russian citizens by delivering a better standard of living.
The West allowed the collapse of the Soviet Union to be a humiliating experience for Russia. Cooperative security was killed when, instead of taking the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact as an opportunity to dismantle NATO, the West went ahead and enlarged NATO to the frontiers of Russia and even as far as the North European Plain where Russia feels vulnerable and from where it was invaded by Napoleon and Hitler.
In his 2015 foreword to Marshall’s book, Sir John Scarlett, chief of the Intelligence Service (MI6) 2004-2009, asks (after the take-over of Crimea by Russia in 2014,): “What has influenced Russian action in Ukraine? Did we (the West) fail to anticipate this? If so, why? How far will Moscow push now?”
Seven years later, we know the answer to the last question. There will only be peaceful coexistence between Russia, its neighbours, including Ukraine, all the European continent and beyond if Russian leaders do not allow their great country to be a new “prison house of nations” and if the West take Russia’s concerns and national interests seriously.