I dunno, Antique Aviator. Russia as "elder brother" is rather different from "no nationalities at all", and Stalin puffed Russian nationalism hard to help inspire the folks at home vs the Nazis: this sorta guarantees an "us vs. them" sentiment, not a "we're all in it together."
Stalin, at the same time, was following the Soviet view of nationality, in which local nationalisms were to be used as a vehicle for modernization and breaking down more local loyalties, such as the squashing of the original 191 "national groups" identified by Soviet ethnographers into 60 by the mid-1930s, or, equally, to prevent possible threatening coalitions, most importantly a possible unified central Asian "Turkish" or Muslim one.
The notion that all national identies needed to go _from the start_ (and some Soviets thinkers early on felt that the nation should be organized into rational economic units rather than national ones really wasn't on the table at the time - although it was generally felt that local nationalisms would eventually be absorbed into Soviet Mankind, a lot that was done simply excerbated national sentiments rather than eliminate them. Heck, the modern states of central Asia are essentially Soviet creations.
Bruce