Stalin on Autonomy

Whatever the whole meaning and effect of the change in Russia's Government may be, the scheme is consistent with Joseph Stalin's own theories. As early as 1913, when he was an obscure, anti-Czarist underground worker, he wrote: "The only real solution is regional autonomy."

In 1920, as a rising young Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin declared: "Soviet autonomy is not a rigid thing fixed once and for all time; it permits of the most varied forms . . . from narrow administrative autonomy . . . to the supreme form of autonomy--contractual relations. . . . This elasticity makes it possible to embrace all the various types of border regions in Russia."

Revolutionary Russia originally consisted of four wholly autonomous republics which kept their own armies, made their own arrangements with foreign powers. This decentralized system ended in 1922, when the Soviet Union was formed. Last week Molotov reminded the Supreme Soviet that Stalin said then: "I do not preclude the possibility that subsequently we may have to separate certain commissariats which are now merging in the Union of Republics."

Molotov spoke; Stalin studied his feet.

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