On November 15, 1917 -. The Council of Peoples' Commissars adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia.
Before 1917, the Russian Empire was a single state where the rights and freedoms of national minorities were suppressed. The "national question" was given much attention by the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin.
The RSDLP(b) program proclaimed the right of peoples to self-determination. This provision was developed in one of the first documents of Soviet power, the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, adopted on November 15, 1917*.
The declaration announced four principles of the national policy of Soviet power:
1 Equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia;
2 The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination until separation and the establishment of an independent state.
3 Cancellation of all kinds of national and religious-national privileges and restrictions;.
4 Free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.
The adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia became one of the most important events in Russian history - for the first time in hundreds of years, the peoples of the vast land won the right to their own identity and the opportunity to develop independently.
In accordance with the declaration, in the following years autonomous republics were declared on the territory of the former empire within the republics of the RSFSR and the Soviet republics, which united in 1922 into a single Soviet Union.
Source: CPRF.
The document is dated November 2 in the old style of the Julian calendar.