Stalin’s simplifications displaced Lenin’s nuanced theory of national self-determination

Evidence

Of course, Lenin’s prominence as an architect of the October Revolution, as leader of the Soviet State and a founder of the Third International, gave his opinions the requisite authority to become dogma. Nevertheless, the complex and rather voluminous character of his writings on the national question left his ideas vulnerable to simplification. In the course of things, it was Lenin’s successor, Stalin, who would supply the most simple and authoritative proclamations on the national question. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 367

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reader wants the rise and fall of the Black radical tradition — the defeat of national-right theory inside orthodox Marxism is a causal precondition for that tradition’s being marginalized later.