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[[File:Trotsky-Saint George allusion.png|thumb|right|Bolshevik propaganda poster from the [[Russian Civil War]] with an allusion of [[Saint George and the Dragon]] with [[Red Army]] leader [[Leon Trotsky]] as being a Saint George figure who was slaying the dragon which represented [[counter-revolution]]. The symbol of Saint George slaying the dragon was and still is a Russian national symbol.]]
[[File:Thecristisrizenoldrussiancivilwarposter.jpg|thumb|right|[[White movement|White Russian]] anti-[[Soviet Union|Soviet]] poster, {{Circa|1932}}, depicting the female personification of Russia known as [[Mother Russia]]]]
In 1917, Russia became a communist (Soviet) country. In 1922, the multi-national [[Soviet Union]] was founded (under duress from the Russian Bolshevik communists). However Russia was ''de facto'' the dominant country in area and population as well as in economy, the capital of the Soviet Union was in Russia, and its government and economy were highly centralized. Under the outlook of [[World communism|international communism]] that was especially strong at the time, [[Vladimir Lenin]] separated patriotism into what he defined as [[Proletariat|proletarian]], socialist patriotism from [[bourgeois nationalism]].<ref>''The Current digest of the Soviet press, Volume 39, Issues 1-26''. American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1987. Pp. 7.</ref> Lenin promoted the right of all nations to [[self-determination]] and the right to unity of all workers within nations, but he also condemned [[chauvinism]] and claimed there were both justified and unjustified feelings of national pride.<ref>Christopher Read. ''Lenin: a revolutionary life''. Digital Printing Edition. Oxon, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 115.</ref> Lenin explicitly denounced conventional Russian nationalism as "[[Great Russian chauvinism]]", and his government sought to accommodate the country's multiple ethnic groups by creating republics and sub-republic units to provide non-Russian ethnic groups with autonomy and protection from Russian domination.<ref name=Motyl501>Motyl, 2001, page 501</ref> Lenin also sought to balance the ethnic representation of leadership of the country by promoting non-Russian officials in the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] to counter the large presence of Russians in the Party.<ref name=Motyl501 /> However, even during this early period of Soviet history, the Soviet government appealed to Russian nationalism when it needed support - especially on the Soviet borderlands in the Soviet Union's early years.<ref name=Motyl501 />
Since Russian patriotism served as a legitimizing prop of old order, Bolshevik leaders were anxious to suppress its manifestations and ensure its eventual extinction. They officially discouraged Russian nationalism and remnants of Imperial patriotism, such as the wearing of military awards received before the Civil War. Some of their followers disagreed; in non-Russian territories, Bolshevik power was often regarded as renewed Russian imperialism during 1919 to 1921. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed with its members combined, but Russia was the largest and most populous member. After 1923, following Lenin's ideas, a policy of [[korenizatsiya]], which provided government support for non-Russian culture and languages within the non-Russian republics, was adopted.<ref name="ChulosPiirainen8">Timo Vihavainen: ''Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments?'' in [https://archive.org/details/fallofempirebirt0000unse/page/84/mode/2up Chulos & Piirainen 2000].</ref> However, this policy was not strictly enforced due to domination of Russians in Soviet Union.<ref>Law, Ian. Red racisms: racism in communist and post-communist contexts. Springer, 2016, p. 19</ref><ref name=":2">Martin, Terry Dean. ''The affirmative action empire: nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939''. Cornell University Press, 2001.</ref>{{Rp|page=394|quote=The status of the Russian nationality was raised dramatically in the period from 1933 to 1938, along with the status of the RSFSR. This development threatened the foundations of the Affirmative Action Empire [...]}}<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=O'Connor |first=Kevin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=apP4-vjizsYC |title=Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution |date=2008 |publisher=Lexington Books |isbn=978-0739131220 |language=en}}</ref>{{Rp|page=24|quote=While the early Bolsheviks claimed to be internationalist, committed to a worldwide revolution of the proletariat, in today's Russia basic component of communist ideology is the recognition of the Russian people's special ethnic identity and their mission to unite and lead the diverse peoples of Eurasia down a distinctly non-Western path of development. This broad appeal to Russian nationalism in its traditional{{snd}}that is, ethnic, and more overtly, imperial{{snd}}forms might at first glance seem to be antithetical to the Marxism's traditional emphasis on internationalism and Lenin's own efforts to suppress "Great Russian chauvinism"}} This domination had been formally criticized in the tsarist empire by Lenin and others as [[Great Russian chauvinism]].<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":2" />{{Rp|page=8|quote=[Soviet] reasoning can be summarized [...] the nationalism of the oppressed non-Russian peoples expresses not only masked class protest, but also legitimate national grievances against the oppressive great-power chauvinism of the dominant Russian nationality. Therefore, neither nationalism nor national identity can be unequivocally condemned as reactionary.}} Thomas Winderl wrote "The USSR became in a certain sense more a [[Prison of the peoples|prison-house of nations]] than the old Empire had ever been. [...] The Russian-dominated center established an inequitable relationship with the ethnic groups it voluntarily helped to construct."<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Bekus |first=Nelly |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DiwPRpRYt2kC |title=Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative 'Belarusianness'|date=2010|publisher=Central European University Press |isbn=978-9639776685 |pages=41–50 |language=en |chapter=Nationalism and Socialism: The Soviet Case}}</ref> Various scholars focused on the nationalist features that already existed during the Leninist period.<ref name=":0" />{{Rp|page=43|quote=Sergei Maksudov and William Taubman write that the Soviet Union rested on three main pillars{{snd}}"ideology, dictatorship and nationalism" against the three pillars of tsarist Russia{{snd}}orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost [national spirit], thus, giving place to nationalism as a significant premise of state ideology during the Soviet time}}{{Rp|page=48|quote=Ian Bremmer calls this matryoshka-nationalism which implies the existence of nations inside a larger nation as a specific phenomenon of soviet nationalism. It gave birth to all national movements}}<ref>{{Cite web |title=Soviet Policy on Nationalities, 1920s–1930s{{snd}}Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: The University of Chicago Library |url=https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/soviet-imaginary/socialism-nations/soviet-policy-nationalities-1920s-1930s/ |access-date=2022-08-31 |website=www.lib.uchicago.edu}}</ref><ref name=":1" />{{Rp|page=24|quote=the merger of Marxism-Leninism and Russian nationalist-conservatism continues a trend that had been taking place in Soviet Russian communism since Stalin or even since the early 1920s.}} Korenizatsiya's multinational construction weakened during Stalin's rule. Stalin's policies established a clear shift to Russian nationalism, starting from the idea that Russians were "first among equals" in the Soviet Union, escalating through the "nationalities deportations".<ref name=":2" />{{Rp|page=453|quote=[Stalin] called the Russians "the most industrial, the most active, and the most Soviet of all nations in our country." [...] In a May 1933 speech in the Kremlin, Stalin again complimented the Russians as "the major nationality of the world; they first raised the flag of the soviets in opposition to the rest of the world. The Russian nation{{snd}}it is the most talented nation in the world." [...] Significantly, all these remarks were either private or addressed to limited elite audiences... since they contradicted the spirit of the Affirmative Action Empire. [...] By 1938, the Soviet government was propagating an extraordinarily crude essentialist Russian nationalism.}}<ref name=":3" /> According to scholar Jon K. Chang, the Bolsheviks "never made a clean break from Tsarist-era nationalist, populist and primordialist beliefs".<ref name=":3" />{{Rp|page=7}} Russian historian Andrei Savin stated that Stalin's policy shifted away from internationalism towards [[National Bolshevism]] in the 1930s. In a marked change from elimination of the class enemies, the nationality-based repressions declared entire ethnicities counter-revolutionary enemies, although "class dogmas" declaring targeted nationalities to be ideologically opposed to the Soviets were usually added.<ref name=":42">{{Cite journal |last=Савин |first=Андрей |title=Ethnification of Stalinism? National Operations and the NKVD Order № 00447 in a Comparative Perspective |url=https://www.academia.edu/38594214 |journal=Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research. Edited by Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström. Stockholm |date=January 2017 |page=62 |quote=The choice of “unreliable nations” as an internal enemy and the “fifth column,” as well as the shift in the national policy of the Stalinist regime of the 1930s from internationalism to Russification and “National Bolshevism,”is generally consistent with the theory of the ethnification of Stalinism.}}</ref>
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