--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Many common people of Russia have always been
> nationalist, and many of
> them are arguably "socialistic" if not socialist to
> this day, but were
> they ever really cosmopolitan and internationalist?
> Elite citizens of
> the USSR must have been cosmopolitan, and those
> Soviet citizens who
> actually had faith in socialism must have been
> internationalist to a
> certain extent, but the rest?
>
> Soviet leaders gave lots of weapons and other useful
> things to states
> and movements that they wanted to win to the Soviet
> sphere of
> influence. If decisions as to whether to spend
> resources abroad like
> that had been put to votes of all Soviet citizens,
> though, would they
> have voted for them? Since such votes were never
> taken, one never
> knows, but I suspect that Soviet leaders were more
> willing to commit
> resources to international socialism than common
> Soviet citizens were
> and that those cosmopolitan Russian elites who
> compared themselves to
> their Western counterparts and deplored their
> relative poverty were
> probably the first to complain of official Soviet
> internationalism.
> --
As a matter of fact, ethnic Russian nationalism ("why are we feeding those ethnics and spending money to keep Cuba afloat?") was one of the factors leading to the collapse of the USSR. It was feared by both the Tsars and General Secretaries as a threat to the multinational Empire.
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