ABSTRACT
In the decade since the XX Congress of the Communist Party, the problem of dealing with the non-Russian nationalities has been a major preoccupation of the Soviet leadership. Soviet federalism, potentially and to some extent in practice, implies that local nationals have greater ease of access to the levers of state power than they probably would under other organizational arrangements. The current debate must be viewed against the backdrop of Stalinist ideas about Soviet federalism. The question of the nature of the nationality problem forms one of the principle battlegrounds in the dispute over federalism and is in turn closely linked to the question of proper therapy. Lenin's position on federalism never changed fundamentally, to say that it did would be to claim that Lenin's views before the revolution proved to have been wrong. The positions of Soviet writers on the present role of the national-territorial structure quite naturally correspond to their views on Lenin's approach to federalism.
