The Russian SFSR Annexes the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs

Very interesting; indeed, what exactly were the causes of this?

Well, like I said - opposition to Russian nationalism and hostility to the Empire's legacy, taken well beyond reasonable limits.
So, is having France pressure the Occitans and Bretons to assimilate to French culture and identity a case of French chauvinism?

Debatable. I'd say French nationalism and French identity is a composite identity born more or less spontaneously (the French Revolution being the most important, if not the only important factor in its development); and not something that was necessarily enforced on Occitans, Bretons etc.
 
Debatable. I'd say French nationalism and French identity is a composite identity born more or less spontaneously (the French Revolution being the most important, if not the only important factor in its development); and not something that was necessarily enforced on Occitans, Bretons etc.

So, La Vergonha never happened?
 
Ukrainian Communists were an essential part of the force that conquered the Ukrainian Directorate. If, from the beginning the Bolsheviks make there anti-Ukrainian and anti-Belorussian tendencies known the Ukrainian communists would have joined with Symon Petliura's socialist forces. Even in the ranks of the Ukrainian Communists there were still aspirations among some of an independent Ukrainian state separate from a Russian one though this view was more prominent during the 1920s when the Ukrainian SSR was granted so much autonomy by Moscow, until about 1927 IIRC.
 
Wouldn't happen, it's worth reading Stalin on the national question to understand this. It'd have to be someone else, and a good chunk of the party leadership would have to be different, in essence, not the Bolsheviks.

Actually, Stalin originally wanted the RSFSR to annex all the (nominally independent in the early 1920's) Soviet Republics (Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian) and make them Autonomous Republics of the RSFSR, with the same status as, say, the Bashkir or Yakut ASSR's. Lenin however feared that making all the other peoples part of an explicitly "Russian" state would exacerbate national discontent, and insisted on the creation of a new entity, the USSR, which would embrace all the Soviet republics, including the RSFSR. (One reason he favored this is that he still dreamed of other European nations joining the USSR after a revolution.) Stalin had never been much impressed by Lenin's distinction between "soviet" and "autonomous" republics. "In your theses," he wrote Lenin in 1920, "you draw a distinction between Bashkir and Ukrainian types of federal union, but in fact there is no such difference, or it is so small as to equal zero." https://books.google.com/books?id=smDy35onbtAC&pg=PA270 But ultimately he went along with Lenin, and the USSR was created, though the status of the RSFSR within it always remained something of a problem. (Almost to the end of the USSR, the RSFSR lacked some of the institutions the other Union Republics had, like its own Communist Party, own Academy of Sciences, etc.

So an RSFSR *instead of* a USSR seems a real possibility. What the initial post proposed, however, if I read it correctly, was something rather different: a USSR which would include Kazakh, Georgian, etc. SSR's but in which no separate Ukrainian or Belorussian national existence would be recognized, and in which Ukraine and Belorussia would become part of the RSFSR. This would be very unlikely. Bolsheviks, like other Russian Socialists, had always objected to the Tsarist attempts to suppress the Ukrainian and Belorussian languages, and ridiculed the Right's argument that Ukrainian and Belorussian were merely dialects of Russian that had been corrupted by Polish influence. Indeed, in the 1920's the Bolsheviks actually went out of their way to encourage national consciousness among the Belorussians (among whom it had been very weak--much weaker than among Ukrainians). There might or might not be a USSR; but if there was one, a Ukrainian (and probably a Belorussian) SSR would almost certainly be part of it.

There is also another, practical reason to have Ukrainian and Belorussian SSR's: many Belorussians and Ukrainians lived in Poland, and the existence of "their own" SSR's would be a magnet to induce them to seek to separate "West Ukraine" and "West Belorussia" from Poland and join the USSR. (The same consideration goes to Ukrainians who lived in Romania or Czechoslovakia. For that matter, the Ukrainian SSR exercised a considerable attraction to the Ukrainian diaspora as far away as Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_United_Ukrainian_Canadians though obviously this appeal waned after news of the 1933 famine became widespread.)
 
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So I spend an entire thread explaining how the Bolsheviks in places like Belarus are explaining to the population how they are an oppressed people who should fight a national liberation struggle, now you show me proof that this in the very least resonated with the Belarusians, now you're telling me only countries that vote for nationalist parties have a national consciousness?

The Bolsheviks did emphasize the idea of an oppressed Belorussian nation, but that was mostly *later*--in the 1920's when they went to great lengths to develop Belorussian as a literary language, etc. As of 1917, the Bolsheviks were even divided on whether the Belarusians were a nation at all. The big Bolshevik vote in Minsk was not from nationally-conscious Belarusians protesting national oppression; it was from soldiers who wanted the war to end.

Pers Anders Rufling in *The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism 1906-1931* shows that the Soviet policy of Belarusization in the 1920's ran into much indifference and even opposition from many Belarusians.

"Yet, opposition to the Belarusian language often came from the Belarusian-speakers themselves, who often found the Belarusian language 'harmful.' Often, these native Belarusian speakers did not understand the literary Belarusian language that was being constructed by national intellectuals. Most native Belarusian speakers dismissed their language as a 'servile' 'peasant' language (*kholopskii iazyk*) or even a 'canine tongue' (*sabachaiu movu*) unsuitable for use outside the village. Others denied the existence of a Belarusian language outright. '“No one doubts that … at some point there was a Belorussian language…in our time, the Belorussian language and culture as such do not exist.' Comparing Belarusization to Ukrainization, some critics claimed the latter to be more justified, arguing that 'Ukraine has its own history and heroes, something that is missing in Belorussia.'"

"In fact, Soviet census takers in the mid-1920s 'discovered that peasants did not distinguish between Belorussians, Great Russians and Ukrainians.' Instead, they used regional identities or indiscriminately referred to all eastern Slavs as “Russians.”84 As late as 1929, Belarusian peasants explained to representatives of the Soviet government in fluent Belarusian that they only spoke Russian."

https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/707957995/Rudling_Per_Spring2010.pdf
 
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