Friendship of peoples

Friendship of peoples, Russian druzhba narodov, is a concept rooted in Marxist theory of social class holding that nationalism is a tool used by a ruling class to divide workers and maintain control over them, and that once class struggle succeeded and social classes were abolished, the natural brotherhood of workers would render separate nations obsolete. The concept was framed in opposition to what Marxist theorists called bourgeois cosmopolitanism, recast instead as proletarian internationalism or international socialism, emphasizing worker solidarity over a broader cosmopolitan ideal. Vladimir Lenin had called Tsarist Russia a prison of the peoples, and the Soviet Union that replaced the empire adopted the friendship-of-peoples narrative as central to its nationalities policy, proclaiming the creation of a new Soviet people. During Joseph Stalin's era, roughly 1939 to 1953, the Soviet state deported an estimated six million people from ethnic minorities despite its rhetorical commitment to this ideal of friendship, and by the late 1930s Soviet publications increasingly cast ethnic Russians as the elder brother of the other Soviet peoples, creating a hierarchy that contradicted the concept's original egalitarian premise. Modern historians describe friendship of peoples as a metaphor meant to signify a multinational community that in practice positioned Russians as first among equals, so that the Soviet Union functioned, in this view, more as a prison-house of nations than as a genuine friendship of equals. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/