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except in the victory of the Soviet power over world imperialism.
6. Consequently at the present moment one cannot stop at a simple recognition or proclamation of the necessity for a union between the workers of different nations, but it is necessary to carry out a policy for a close union between all the national and colonial liberation movements and Soviet Russia, determining the form of such union in conformity with the development of the Communist movement among the proletarians of each country, or the bourgeois-democrat liberation movement of the workmen and peasants in the retrograde countries, and among the backward nationalities.
7. Federation is the transitional form towards a complete union of the workers of different countries. Federation has proved its efficiency in practice in respect to the relations between the R. S. F. S. R. (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic) and other Soviet republics (Hungary, Finland, Latvia, in the past, and Aserbeidjan, Ukraine at present), as well as inside the R. S. F. S. R., in respect to nationalities which had neither a separate state order nor autonomy (for instance. the Bashkir and the Tartar autonomous republics within the R. S. F. S. R., created in 1919 and 1920.
8. The duty of the Communist International in this respest consists in the further development and in stuby and verification by experience of these new federations, arising outside the Soviet order and Soviet movement. Acknowledging federation as a transition form towards a complete union, it is necessary to make efforts to attain a closer federative union, bearing in view, first, the impossibility of defending the existence of Soviet Republics, surrounded by the imperialistic countries of the whole world, incomparably stronger in military power, without a close union of all the Soviet Republics; second, the necessity of a close economic union of Soviet Republics, without which the restoration of the productive forces destroyed by imperialism, and the guaranteeing of the well-
