Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21: The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war. In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such…