MARXIST INTERNET
ARCHIVE | V. I. Lenin
V. I. Lenin TO S. G. SAID-GALIEV
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Written: Written on July 20, 1921
Published: First published in 1923 in the book: Chetvyortoye soveshchaniye TsK
R.K.P. s otvetstvennymi rabotnikami natsionalnykh respublik i oblastei (Stenografichesky
otchot) (Fourth Conference of the C.C. of the R.C.P. with Responsible Workers of
the National Republics and Regions [Stenographic Report]), Moscow. Printed from
the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1971, Moscow, Volume 36,
page 541.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
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To the first question—yes.
To the second—for a long time yet.
To the third—not “pedagogues and nurse-maids”, but helpers.
To the fourth—please let me have exact, brief, clear information on the “two
tendencies”.
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Notes
[1] The note was in reply to a letter from S. G. Said-Galiev, Chairman of the
Central Executive Committee of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic,
who raised four questions:
“1. Is there need for the existence of small autonomous republics within the
Russian Soviet Federation in general, and of the Tatar Republic in particular?
“2. If the answer is ‘yes’, then for how long, or, in other words, until the
fulfilment of what tasks or the attainment of what goals?
“3. Is it right to say that the Communists of the formerly dominant nation, as
having a higher level in every respect, should play the part of pedagogues and
nurses to the Communists and all other working people of the formerly oppressed
nationalities, whose name has been given to the said autonomous republic
(region, commune), and that the former should give up their places to the latter
as they grow?
“4. In all autonomous republics, the Tatar Republic in this case, there are two
clearly distinct trends (groupings) among the native Communists (Tatars): one of
them takes the standpoint of class struggle and works for further class
differentiation of the sections of the native population, and the other has a
shade of petty-bourgeois nationalism....
“Is it right ... that the former should enjoy the full and all-round support of
the whole of the R.C.P.(B.) and its supreme organs, whereas the latter (insofar
as they are sincere and have a burning desire to work for the proletarian
revolution and insofar as they are useful because of their work) should merely
be made use of and simultaneously educated in a spirit of pure internationalism,
without, however, being given preference over the former, as has been recently
the case not only in the Tatar Republic?”
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