Politics & Power Quote by Vladimir Lenin

Lenin’s line lands like a trap sprung shut: it poses a question only to deny the audience any dignified way to answer wrongly. That clipped “It cannot” isn’t argument so much as verdict, the cadence of a revolutionary court. The intent is surgical: redefine “freedom” so it can’t be claimed by an empire, even one draped in the language of liberation. If your nation’s liberty depends on someone else’s subjugation, the whole project is counterfeit.

The subtext is where Lenin is most strategic. He’s not offering a moral plea to be kinder abroad; he’s issuing a diagnosis of political corrosion. Oppression doesn’t stay at the border. The machinery built to dominate “other nations” - the police powers, the propaganda habits, the economic extraction - inevitably gets repurposed at home. The ruling class learns to govern through coercion, and citizens are trained to accept hierarchy as normal. “Freedom” becomes a national myth used to sanctify force.

Context sharpens the edge. Lenin is speaking from inside a multiethnic empire (the late Russian Empire, then the early Soviet project) and trying to solve a practical revolutionary problem: how to keep anti-imperial movements from becoming anti-Bolshevik movements. By tying national self-determination to the legitimacy of the revolution, he aims to peel oppressed peoples away from imperial loyalties and toward a shared socialist future.

It’s also a preemptive strike against chauvinism on the left: any revolution that inherits imperial reflexes will reproduce the same domination, just with new slogans. Lenin makes “internationalism” less a virtue than a test of whether freedom is real.