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Soviet Patriotism and its Discontents among Higher Education Students in Khrushchev-Era Russia and Ukraine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Benjamin Tromly
Benjamin Tromly*
Affiliation:
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, CGIS-S, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Extract

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a “social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland“—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term “the Soviet people,” entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism (natsionalizm) in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it “harmoniously combined” the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with “the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR.”

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Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 299 - 326
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Copyright © 2009 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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