Investor Presentaiton

150 1917-1924. Stalin and Lenin worked together to establish an official statement on the Bolshevik view towards nationalities, and despite a few disagreements, the Twelfth Party Congress passed an official policy in the form of resolutions in April 1923, with a special Central Committee conference on nationalities set to occur in June. 151 Ultimately, the resolutions declared the state's commitment to fully supporting nationalities, in the form of language, territory, and culture, to the extent that they did not create a conflict with Communism or the central state. The resolutions changed little from the previous unofficial policy beyond officially stating the government had no intentions of abolishing national groups and would instead offer Ideologically, this decision was based on the concept that nationalism was an unavoidable product of both capitalism and early socialism. Much like capitalism was a them support. 152 necessary precursor to socialism, nationalism was an inevitable early stage that the world must go through before international socialism could be realized. It was "a masking ideology" through which legitimate class concerns could be vocalized in the form of an "above class national 99153 movement. Thus, although the concept of fully supporting nationalist movements seems inconsistent with both socialist ideology and Soviet central state aspirations, the Bolsheviks were able to delineate a theoretical middle ground. While the general issue of nationalism was in theory settled with the 1923 resolutions, the issue of Jewish nationalism remained – particularly, whether Jews constituted a nation or not. In summary, Stalin, under the tutelage of Lenin, did not originally define the Jews as a nation 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid, 98. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid, 97. 40 40

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