Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Stalin would add his own thoughts. He was the party’s expert on nationalities, and was initially far less flexible than Lenin. Stalin’s essay, “Marxism and the National Question,” had argued in 1913 that nationalism was a distraction from the cause of socialism, and that comrades “must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds.”38 By 1925 his thoughts had evolved further into an argument about nationalism as an essentially peasant force. National movements, he declared, needed peasants in order to exist: “The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army…”39 That argument, which clearly reflected his observation of events in Ukraine, would become more significant later. For if there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, then someone who wished to destroy a national movement might well want to begin by destroying the peasantry.