Friendship of peoples

class struggle (i.e. the abolition of social classes), the natural brotherhood of all workers would make the idea of separate nations obsolete.^[1]

bourgeois cosmopolitanism". The concept of friendship of peoples was opposed to the concept of internationalism. In this context, the notion of internationalism was explained as "bourgeois cosmopolitanism", so the notion of "internationalism" was conceptually replaced by the notion of "international socialism", also known as "proletarian internationalism

empire, applied the "prison of nations" idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."^[3] Historian Kevin O'Connor described the concept "friendship of peoples" as "a metaphor that was intended to signify the existence of a multinational community on Soviet soil, but which in reality put the Russians "first among equals."^[4]

Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin despite the ubiquitous slogan of "friendship of the peoples" between 1939 and 1953 a total of approximately 6 million people from many of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities (Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Volga Germans, Finns, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Koreans, Chechens, Ingush, and others) were forcefully resettled or deported, often to remote locations in the Far East or Central Asia, 1.5 million of whom died of disease or hunger, which in some cases made up more than 40 percent of a deported population.^[5]