Fraternity of peoples

Fraternity of peoples (Russian language: 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. The concept of the fraternity of the peoples is often opposed to "bourgeois cosmopolitanism".

The Tsarist Russian Empire was dubbed the "prison of the peoples"^[1] ("Тюрьма народов") by 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 USSR often claimed to make significant progress on that path, its dissolution put an end to that goal.

Soviet authorities frequently referred to "enemies of the people" (often meaning Jews) as "rootless cosmopolitans", meaning people with no loyalty to the motherland.^{[citation needed]} This could be seen a contradicting the theory of the fraternity of peoples by invoking nationalism.

Notes

1. ^ The expression "prison of the peoples" was first applied to pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia in the 1840s by 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.

See also

• Proletarian internationalism
• Bourgeois nationalism
• Evil empire
• Cosmopolitanism

External links

• On the National Pride of the Great Russians article by Lenin