Friendship of peoples (Russian: дружба народов, druzhba narodov) is a concept advanced by Marxist social class theory. According to Marxism, nationalism is only a tool of the ruling class, used to keep the working class divided and thus easier to control and exploit. With the success of class struggle (i.e. the abolition of social classes), the natural brotherhood of all workers would make the idea of separate nations obsolete.[1]

The concept of the friendship of peoples is often opposed to "bourgeois cosmopolitanism". The concept of friendship of peoples was opposed to the concept of internationalism. In this context, the notion of internationalism was explained as "bourgeois cosmopolitanism", so the notion of "internationalism" was conceptually replaced by the notion of "international socialism", also known as "proletarian internationalism".

The Tsarist Russian Empire was dubbed the "prison of the peoples"[2] ("тюрьма народов") by Vladimir Lenin. The Soviet Union, which replaced the empire, proclaimed that the goal of its national policy was to forge a new national entity, the "Soviet people". Even though the Soviet Union often claimed to make significant progress on "the nationalities question", its dissolution came about largely due to inter-ethnic conflict and like other communist countries a privileged nationality (in this case the Russians, in Yugoslavia the Serbs, in Vietnam the Kinh people and in China the Han Chinese) had more political and economic power. Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial empire, applied the "prison of nations" idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."[3] Historian Kevin O'Connor described the concept "friendship of peoples" as "a metaphor that was intended to signify the existence of a multinational community on Soviet soil, but which in reality put the Russians "first among equals."[4]

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty writes how in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin despite the ubiquitous slogan of "friendship of the peoples" between 1939 and 1953 a total of approximately 6 million people from many of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities (Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Volga Germans, Finns, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Koreans, Chechens, Ingush, and others) were forcefully resettled or deported, often to remote locations in the Far East or Central Asia, 1.5 million of whom died of disease or hunger, which in some cases made up more than 40 percent of a deported population.[5]

The Constitution of the USSR of 1977 states: "The union of the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the people's intelligentsia, the friendship of peoples and nationalities of the USSR have been strengthened."[6]

Notes

  1. ↑ Буржуазный национализм — средство идеологической диверсии: критика буржуазных националистических концепций и практики их использования в идеологической диверсии против СССР / Иван Григорьевич Иванченко. Гол. изд-во Издательского объединения "Вища школа", 1985. — 253 с. (с.: 161)
  2. ↑ The expression "prison of the peoples" was first applied to pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia in the 1840s by Marquis de Custine's critical book La Russie en 1839. It was later taken up by Alexander Herzen and the goal of demolishing this "prison of the peoples" became one of the ideals of the Russian Revolution. Ironically, the same expression was adopted decades later by the dissident movement against the so-called Soviet Empire.
  3. ↑ Bekus, Nelly (2010-01-01). Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative "Belarusianness". Central European University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-963-9776-68-5.
  4. ↑ O'Connor, Kevin (10 March 2006). Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution. Lexington Books. p. 35. ISBN 978-073-9156-48-3.
  5. ↑ "Stalin propaganda and reality". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved 27 November 2023.
  6. ↑ КОНСТИТУЦІЯ (ОСНОВНИЙ ЗАКОН) СОЮЗУ РАДЯНСЬКИХ СОЦІАЛІСТИЧНИХ РЕСПУБЛІК від 07.10.77 Archived 2018-08-03 at the Wayback Machine zakon5.rada.gov.ua

See also

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