There of course existed another ideology which hymned dictatorship, militarism, cities, gigantism and distrust of the West and derided peasant, village and Christianity. That ideology was Marxism–Leninism. What Stalin had done was to strip back the various versions of Russian national identity to a single, very peculiar one — and it was one which maximised the overlap with Marxist–Leninist notions as they had evolved since 1917. Russians were encouraged to enjoy a sense of nationhood but were severely dissuaded from exploring it. The authorities felt they knew what national identity was good for the Russian people, and punished attempts to offer alternatives.
Russians, furthermore, were expected to be as much Soviet as Russian. Just as the Romanov tsars had fostered popular allegiance to the Russian Empire more than to any national idea, so Stalin induced a mingling of multinational pride in the USSR more than unequivocal nationalism.23 He gave an impromptu speech at the dinner in Voroshilov’s flat on 7 November, and among other things he declared:24
Old Russia has now been turned into the USSR where all peoples are equal. The country is strong through its own power, army, industry and collective farm agriculture. Among the equal states and countries in the USSR it is the Russian nation which is the most Soviet and the most revolutionary.
He did not explain why Russians were more loyal than other nations to the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. But two factors stood out. One was that the Soviet Union was founded on a Russian territorial core. Another was that the Russian people were given advantages denied to others. Nevertheless Stalin did not want them turning into nationalists. He still feared the Russians. Consequently while other peoples had their own communist parties, he withheld this from the RSFSR. Their national feelings were to be channelled into a fusion of Soviet and Russian identities. By this means he would be able to enlist their support without letting the uncontrollable genie of nationalism into the open.
What is also clear is that Russification had its limits in the other Soviet republics. The USSR remained a multinational state and Stalin stayed committed to inducing non-Russians to assimilate themselves to the Soviet order. For this he needed schools and press to use local languages and for access to be open for the promotion of local national groups. National pride had to be fostered. Thus the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who died in 1861, was celebrated the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Similar trends occurred in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the south Caucasus as national literary figures were acclaimed. The process of getting the peoples of central Asia to assimilate their sentiments to the territorial units demarcated by the boundaries of Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan also continued; and the Belorussians, whose national consciousness had been weakly developed before 1917, continued to possess their own schools and press.
This immense conglomeration of peoples, held together in the framework of a revolutionary state, required new forms of rulership. Stalin is wrongly depicted as simply a tsar in Red clothing. In several ways he could not have been more different from Nicholas II. It is true that both Stalin and Emperor Nicholas, apart from a few trips to the ballet, rarely appeared in public except on occasions of great state ceremony. But Nicholas and his wife regularly went to the places favoured by peasants for Christian pilgrimage. They passionately enjoyed attending the reburial of St Serafim of Sarov deep in Russia’s countryside in summer 1903.25 Stalin went nowhere regularly unless to his dacha or on holiday. He did not deign to receive groups of peasant petitioners as the tsars had done. Lenin had understood that such activities helped him to keep in touch with what was happening in the country at large and to enhance his popularity. This practice was shunned by Stalin long before he started to worry about his personal security: he must have known that peasants — and probably most workers too — would have given him an earful of complaints about the dreadful conditions in the country.
