on
October Revolution Day in
Moscow in 1977. ,
Latvia, Soviet Union in 1988. pays tribute on
Victory Day in 2014 with the
Soviet flag flying in the background. in 1920, the predecessor of the
Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic founded in 1936. in
Donetsk, 2014. The red banner with yellow script reads, "Our homeland is the USSR". Under the outlook of
world communism Vladimir Lenin separated patriotism into what he defined as
proletarian, socialist patriotism from
bourgeois nationalism. 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. 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. However, even at this early period the Soviet government appealed at times to Russian nationalism when it needed support - especially on the Soviet borderlands in the Soviet Union's early years. Stalin emphasized a
centralist Soviet socialist patriotism that spoke of a collective "Soviet people" and identified Russians as being the "elder brothers of the Soviet people". During
World War II, Soviet socialist patriotism and
Russian nationalism merged, portraying the war not just as a struggle of communists versus fascists, but more as a struggle for national survival. During the war, the interests of the Soviet Union and the Russian nation were presented as the same, and as a result Stalin's government embraced Russia's historical heroes and symbols, and established a
de facto alliance with the
Russian Orthodox Church. The war was described by the Soviet government as the
Great Patriotic War. Nationalities deemed "unreliable" were
persecuted, and there were
widespread deadly deportations during the Second World War.
Nikita Khrushchev moved the Soviet government's policies away from Stalin's reliance on Russian nationalism. Khrushchev promoted the notion of the people of the Soviet Union as being a supranational "Soviet People" that became state policy after 1961. This did not mean that individual ethnic groups lost their separate identities or were to be assimilated but instead promoted a "brotherly alliance" of nations that intended to make ethnic differences irrelevant. At the same time, Soviet education emphasized an "
internationalist" orientation. Many non-Russian Soviet people suspected this "
Sovietization" to be a cover for a new episode of "
Russification", in particular because learning the
Russian language was made a mandatory part of Soviet education, and because the Soviet government encouraged ethnic Russians to move outside of
Russia and settle in other Soviet republics. Efforts to achieve a united Soviet identity were severely damaged by the severe
economic problems in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s resulting in a wave of
anti-Soviet sentiment among non-Russians and Russians alike.
Mikhail Gorbachev presented himself as a Soviet patriot dedicated to addressing the country's economic and political challenges, but he was unable to restrain the rising regional and
sectarian ethnic nationalism, with the USSR
breaking up in 1991. ==Contemporary Soviet patriotism==