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Meanwhile, the west followed the opposite policy and wiped out the numerous native languages of Western Europe due to their policy of nationalism. In the latter half of the 19th century, most of France were not even French speakers. Only 12.5 % of People could speak French fairly well. And the dialects that were French were often incomprehensible. Whilst the Russian/Ukraine only separated about 600 years ago. For reference, af May and af Maxa Tiri separated 1500+ years ago. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion of Russia followed what the rest of Europe did.The USSR fostered Ukrainian nationalism and suppressed Russians, what are you on about?
Lenin saw the connection between socialism and national struggle, concluding that the way to bring minorities along with the revolution was to grow their national identity. Under the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and its state apparatus, the country’s cities became majority Ukrainian, so ‘between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kiev’s population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cent’. There was also a flourishing of Ukrainian culture, and ‘the Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognised as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native elite.’
The Bolsheviks also saw Russian linguistic domination as a product of capitalism, and that under a neutral state it would come to overwhelm others. Grigory Zinoviev, Stalin’s close ally who helped Stalin’s rise to power (murdered by Stalin, 1936) had said in 1923: ‘We should first of all reject the “theory” of neutralism. We cannot adopt the point of view of neutralism… we should help [the non-Russians] create their own schools, should help them create their own administration in their native language.’
More Ukrainian children learned to read their native language in the 1920s than in the whole of the nineteenth century, The Soviet state financed the mass production of books, journals, newspapers, movies, operas, museums, folk music ensembles, and other cultural output in the non-Russian languages.
The Bolsheviks believed that people misinterpreted class conflict as national conflict, but Lenin also believed there were fundamental differences between the Bad Nationalism of Russians and the Good Nationalism of oppressed people. ‘The nationalism of the oppressed, Lenin maintained, had a “democratic content” that must be supported, whereas the nationalism of the oppressor had no redeeming value’.
Lenin argued that they should ‘Fight against all nationalism’ but ‘first of all, against Great Russian nationalism’. He coined the term rusotiapstvo — mindless Russian chauvinism — and in December 1922 declared that one must ‘distinguish between the nationalism of oppressor nations and the nationalism of oppressed nations, the nationalism of large nations and the nationalism of small nations… In relation to the second nationalism, in almost all historical practice, we nationals of the large nations are guilty, because of an infinite amount of violence’ committed. This led to the ‘greatest-danger principle’ that chauvinism was greater danger than small nationalism