Written: Written in January–February 1916
Published:
First published in 1937 in Lenin Miscellany XXX.
Printed from the original.
Translated from the German.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 41,
page 366.2.
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.
There is some similarity between the way mankind should arrive at the abolition of classes and the way it should subsequently arrive at the fusion of nations. Thus, only a transition stage of dictatorship by the oppressed class leads to the abolition of classes, only the liberation of the oppressed nations and real eradication of national oppression leads to the fusion of nations, and the political criterion of the feasibility of this lies precisely in the freedom to secede. Freedom to secede is the best and the only political means against the idiotic system of petty states and national isolation which, to mankind’s good fortune, is being inexorably destroyed by the whole course of capitalist development.
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