Fraternity of peoples

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Fraternity of peoples (Russian language: Дружба народов, druzhba narodov) is a concept advanced by the Marxist social class theory. According to it, the success of class struggle (i.e. the abolition of social classes) would make the idea of separate nations obsolete. Fraternity of the peoples principle was often opposed to "bourgeois cosmopolitanism". Many Marxists believe that nationalism is only a tool of the ruling class, used for the purpose of keeping the working class divided and thus easier to control and exploit.

The Soviet Union, founded in the place of the multi-national Tsarist Russian Empire (which had been dubbed the "prison of the peoples"1 ("Тюрьма народов") by Lenin), proclaimed that the goal of its national policy was to forge a new national entity, the "Soviet people". Even though the USSR often claimed to make significant progress on that path, the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to anything that might have been achieved in this direction.

A seemingly conflicting Soviet policy was the habit to term "enemies of the people" as rootless cosmopolitans, for having no loyalty to the motherland, often targeting Jews.

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1 The expression "prison of the peoples" most likely comes from "Denmark's a prison" (Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, 262). In its present form it was first applied and brought to pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia in the 1840s by De Custine's critical book La Russie en 1839. It was later taken up by Alexander Herzen, and the goal of demolishing this "prison of the peoples" became one of the ideals of the Russian Revolution. Ironically, the same expression was adopted decades later by the dissident movement against the so-called Soviet Empire.

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