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Following the teaching of Marx, the London Congress in 1896 of the Marxist Second International supported the universal right to national self-determination, including the right of national minorities to secede from nonnational rule and establish themselves as independent nation-states. This position was predicated on the economic premise that the common language of the national state was the natural unit for the most accelerated development of the forces of production under capitalism, and moral premise that the international solidarity of the working class demanded support for the liberation of national minorities as working-class brothers from non-national political oppression. For the Marxist movement in Tsarist Imperial Russia the issue of national self-determination was particularly important, as by the end of the nineteenth century it included a population of 170 million, of which only 75 million were of Great Russian extraction, with 57 percent of the population being of a polyglot extraction, especially those inhabiting the western, southern, and central Asian borderlands.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137460295_5

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