Fraternity of peoples (

Russian language Russian (russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, link=no, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the First language, native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European langua ...

: Дружба народов, ''druzhba narodov'') is a concept advanced by

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...

theory. According to Marxism,

nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...

is only a tool of the

ruling class In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society. In Marxist philosophy, the ruling class are the capitalist social class who own the means of production and by exten ...

, used to keep the

working class The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colou ...

divided and thus easier to control and exploit. With the success of

class struggle Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms ...

(i.e. the abolition of

es), the natural brotherhood of all workers would make the idea of separate

nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those ...

s obsolete.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) The concept of the fraternity of the peoples is often opposed to " bourgeois cosmopolitanism". The concept of "fraternity of peoples" was opposed to the concept of

internationalism Internationalism may refer to: * Cosmopolitanism, the view that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality as opposed to communitarianism, patriotism and nationalism * International Style, a major architectur ...

. 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 Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all communist revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that ...

". The

Tsar Tsar ( or ), also spelled ''czar'', ''tzar'', or ''csar'', is a title used by East Slavs, East and South Slavs, South Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word ''Caesar (title), caesar'', which was intended to mean "emperor" i ...

ist

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

was dubbed the "

prison of the peoples Prison of the nations (russian: Тюрьма́ наро́дов) is a phrase first used by Vladimir Lenin in 1914. He applied it to Russia, describing the national policy of that time. The idea of calling Russia a prison is based on Marquis de Cus ...

" ("Тюрьма народов") by

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...

. The

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

, which replaced the empire, proclaimed that the goal of its national policy was to forge a new national entity, the "

Soviet people Soviet people ( rus, сове́тский наро́д, r=sovyétsky naród), or citizens of the USSR ( rus, гра́ждане СССР, grázhdanye SSSR), was an umbrella demonym for the population of the Soviet Union. Nationality policy in t ...

". 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 Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...

the Serbs, in

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

the ethnic Vietnamese and in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

the Han Chinese) had more political and economic power. The Constitution of the USSR of 1977 states: "The union of the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the people's intelligentsia, the fraternity of peoples and nationalities of the USSR have been strengthened."КОНСТИТУЦІЯ (ОСНОВНИЙ ЗАКОН) СОЮЗУ РАДЯНСЬКИХ СОЦІАЛІСТИЧНИХ РЕСПУБЛІК від 07.10.77
zakon5.rada.gov.ua

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On the National Pride of the Great Russians
article by Lenin Anti-nationalism Internationalism Marxist terminology Social classes Soviet phraseology {{USSR-stub

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