On Stalin's supposedly "anti-Russian" policies:
(1) It is not true that he always settled boundary issues to the disadvantage of the RSFSR. For example, the RSFSR retained the Kuban, even though the Ukrainians had a reasonable demographic claim to it, based on both the Imperial 1897
http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/emp_lan_97_uezd.php?reg=414 and the Soviet 1926
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainians_in_Kuban census. Other areas the Ukrainians could plausibly claim include Taganrog
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\T\A\Tahanrih.htm and parts of Voronezh oblast, especially Ostrogozhsk.
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\O\S\Ostrohozke.htm
(2) To view Ukrainian national consciousness in Ukraine as simply the product of Korenizatsiya is a gross oversimplification. Look at the 1917 Constituent Assembly election. Why did so many Ukrainians (especially in the most "Ukrainian" of provinces like Poltava) vote for the
Ukrainian SR Party when they had a choice of voting instead for the all-Russian SR's? This is in striking contest to Belorussia where the vote for the Belorussian Socialist Hromada (the largest "Belorussian" party) was negligible. Here are a couple of pages from Oliver Radkey's book on the Constituent Assembly elections:
I agree that the majority of Ukrainians in 1917 did not favor complete separation from Russia but it is impossible to say that by this time they had no national consciousness. For that matter, even the first two State Dumas had a substantial number of nationally conscious Ukrainian deputies.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ussianStateDuma.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
As for western Ukraine, which was added to the USSR in 1939-41 and again after 1944-5, it is ridiculous to see national consciousness there as Soviet-inspired. Even in 1914, Durnovo dismissed the Russophiles in Galicia as a hopeless minority: "It is obviously disadvantageous for us to annex, in the interests of national sentimentalism, a territory [Galicia] that has lost every vital connection with our fatherland. For, together with a negligible handful of Galicians, Russian in spirit, how many Poles, Jews, and Ukrainized Uniates we would receive! The so-called Ukrainian, or Mazeppist, movement is not a menace to us at present, but we should not enable it to expand by increasing the number of turbulent Ukrainian elements, for in this movement undoubtedly lies the seed of an extremely dangerous Little Russian separatism which, under favorable conditions, may assume quite unexpected proportions."
https://books.google.com/books?id=KVVK8Wra4iIC&pg=PA472"Negligible" may be understating their numbers but they were definitely in decline by 1914: "Help from Russian and Polish patrons largely failed to prevent the Russophile decline. By the early 20th century, the Russophiles became a minority in Galicia. Within the Church, they were nicknamed "bisons," in scholar Himka's words an "ancient, shaggy species on the verge of extinction." Of nineteen Ukrainian periodicals published in Galicia in 1899, sixteen were Ukrainophile in orientation, only two were Russophile in orientation and one was neutral.
[19] In the 1907 elections to the Viennese parliament, the Ukrainophiles won 22 seats while the Russophiles won five. But the Russophiles, due to Polish interference, won elections to the Galician parliament the same year by taking 11 seats, the Ukrainophiles 10. In 1913, 30 Ukrainophile and only 1 Russophile delegate were sent to the Galician Diet..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_Russophilia
(3) Yes, Stalin took the lead in introducing Korenizatsiya in the 1920's. But he also took the lead in retreating from it in the 1930's. The percentage of publications in Ukrainian as opposed to Russian reached its peak in 1931 and had declined steadily by 1939. Ukrainian and Russian orthography were brought into closer alignment, the Ukrainian language was "cleansed" of "Polonisms," etc. And a lot of Ukrainians and other non-Russians were shot for "bourgeois nationalism." (Yes, plenty of Russians were shot, too--but they were not accused of Russian nationalism.)
(4) With regard to the Kazakhs, yes, it is true that they were outnumbered by East Slavs in Kazahstan by the time of the 1939 census. But this was largely because of the famine of 1932-33 and it seems rather bizarre to see the massive decrease in the Kazakh population caused by this as a sign of anti-Russian pro-Kazakh bias! (If I were Ukrainian or Kazakh, I think I would judge the question of whether Stalin favored the non-Russian nationalities less by the boundaries of the Union Republics and more by the fact that Ukrainians and Kazakhs died disproportionately in the famine...)
Granted, the Kazakh SSR did contain some areas where Kazakhs were in a minority even in 1926. But instead of seeing their inclusion in the Kazakh SSR as "anti-Russian" it would be just as plausible to say that it was a way to guarantee that Russians and Russified Ukrainians etc. would dominate Kazakhstan. (It didn't turn out that way in the long run but that was only because of the Kazakh demographic revival decades later.)
Now, I agree that people who see Stalin as a "Russifier" are oversimplifying things. The decision in the 1930's to make Russian a compulsory subject in schools could be justified; the Soviet Union needed a
lingua franca, and that could only be Russian. And during World War II he encouraged not only Russian patriotism but a sort of Ukrainian patriotism, though one based on the assumption that "true" Ukrainian patriotism was based on close ties to Russia, Khmelnytsky being a hero because of the treaty of Pereyaslav, Shevchenko being praised as an ally of Russian radicals (with his nationalism denied or played down), etc. It was in this period that Sosiura's poem
Love Ukraine was published. But it is significant that this poem was later attacked as "nationalistic," and that Stalin never entrusted the First Secretaryship in Ukraine to an ethnic Ukrainian; his last First Secretary there, Leonid Melnikov, was a Russian who was later condemned after Stalin's death for Russifying policies.
And one cannot ignore Stalin's rehabilitation of Russian history starting in the late 1930's or his famous toast to the Russian people, "the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union.... the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country....Our Government made not a few errors, we experienced at moments a desperate situation in 1941-1942, when our Army was retreating, abandoning our own villages and towns of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Moldavia, the Leningrad Region, the Baltic area and the Karelo-Finnish Republic, abandoning them because there was no other way out. A different people could have said to the Government: “You have failed to justify our expectations. Go away. We shall install another government which will conclude peace with Germany and assure us a quiet life.” The Russian people, however, did not take this path because it trusted the correctness of the policy of its Government, and it made sacrifices to ensure the rout of Germany. This confidence of the Russian people in the Soviet Government proved to be that decisive force which ensured the historic victory over the enemy of humanity—over fascism."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945/05/24.htm Of course one should not take anything Stalin said at face value, but there was some truth there: the resistance to the Soviets was greatest among non-Russians, especially in areas recently incorporated into the USSR (western Ukraine, the Baltic states).
(5) Finally, it is true that the RSFSR, almost until the end of the Union, lacked some institutions the other Union Republics had: there was no RSFSR Communist Party Central Committee or Politburo (though Khrushchev did set up a Bureau for the RSFSR), no RSFSR Academy of Sciences, etc. I do not see this as necessarily "anti-Russian" however. Rather, the point seems to be that the USSR itself, though multinational (as indeed the Russian Empire had been in its population) was fundamentally a Russian state: the majority of its population had Russian as their first language (and even many of those who didn't knew it about as well as their "own" language). Russians could therefore realize their national aspirations on an all-Union level. There was no need to duplicate all-Union institutions on the soil of the republic which constituted the majority of the USSR. As Gorbachev put it, "What is Russia? It is the Union. What is the Union? It is mostly Russia."
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y5QYDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT164 In short, Soviet identity and Russian identity were not regarded as two distinct things.