In addition to their national prejudice, the Bolsheviks had particular political reasons for disliking the idea of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine was still overwhelmingly a peasant nation, and according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset. In an 1852 essay Marx famously explained that they were not a “class” and thus had no class consciousness: “They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent
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