In his chilling address on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin denied the very existence of a Ukrainian nation. The fact that there is a country called Ukraine, with a capital, a government, and ambassadors is, in his view, a tragic mistake, artificially dividing a single Russian people with arbitrary borders. The culprit, Putin explained, was Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet founding father who granted the USSR’s constituent republics the right to secede, among other elements of self-determination, and thereby sowed the seeds of the union’s downfall. “Why was it necessary to appease the nationalists?” Putin fumed. The question is rhetorical—Putin is no doubt well-versed in Lenin’s writings on the question of Russia’s “national minorities.” But he is likely unaware of the role played by another revolutionary political theorist and public intellectual in the development of Lenin’s perspective on nationalism: the novelist, journalist, and Zionist visionary Vladimir Jabotinsky.