alternatehistory.com

The Soviets made great strides in supporting and promoting their minorities up until Stalin started reversing things. No matter how much they did, though, demographically the Soviet Union was majority Russian, majority Orthodox Christian, and overwhelmingly Slavic. No matter how hard they held to international ideas, they couldn't change the fact that the country was built by Russians while the minorities mostly tried to go their own way. The country was supposed to be new, but territorially it was just a smaller version of the Tsars'. Even Kaliningrad was made Russian through an extraordinarily thorough ethnic cleansing.

The question here is whether we can devise a Soviet Union that is inherently a multinational state by virtue of its inhabitants and more-than-Russian by virtue of its borders. In simpler terms, include from near the outset a large population and territory that were never within Imperial Russia.

What say you?
Top