Soviet patriotism

Soviet patriotism is the socialist patriotism involving emotional and cultural attachment of the Soviet people to the Soviet Union as their homeland. It is also referred to as Soviet nationalism due to the country's reliance on patriotic propaganda. Socialist patriotism Stalin emphasized a centralist Soviet socialist patriotism that spoke of a collective "Soviet people" and identified Russians as being the "elder brothers of the Soviet people". During World War II, Soviet socialist patriotism and Russian nationalism merged, portraying the war not just as a struggle of communists versus fascists, but more as a struggle for national survival. During the war, the interests of the Soviet Union and the Russian nation were presented as the same, and as a result Stalin's government embraced Russia's historical heroes and symbols, and established a de facto alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. The war was described by the Soviet government as the Great Patriotic War. After the war, nationalism was officially included into the ideology of the Soviet Union. Nationalities deemed "unreliable" were persecuted, and there were widespread deadly deportations during the Second World War. Nikita Khrushchev moved the Soviet government's policies away from Stalin's reliance on Russian nationalism. Khrushchev promoted the notion of the people of the Soviet Union as being a supranational "Soviet People" that became state policy after 1961. This did not mean that individual ethnic groups lost their separate identities or were to be assimilated but instead promoted a "brotherly alliance" of nations that intended to make ethnic differences irrelevant. At the same time, Soviet education emphasized an "internationalist" orientation. Many non-Russian Soviet people suspected this "Sovietization" to be a cover for a new episode of "Russification", in particular because learning the Russian language was made a mandatory part of Soviet education, and because the Soviet government encouraged ethnic Russians to move outside of Russia and settle in other Soviet "republics".