>>484202This is why I oppose the worst of all Great Russian Chauvinsts, Agent
Zelensky. While Putin took the moderate nationalist position of only annexing the rebel provinces during the peace talks, Agent
Z was unsatisfied with that. He pushed for expanding the war, so that Russia will be able to conquer more land and eventually realize the Russian nationalist dream of Novorossiya.
Jokes aside, Lenin and other theorists of the national question were writing at a time when national chauvinism within continental European empires meant the total supression of the linguistic and religious rights of a particular nation. This meant that public schooling was limited to a single language and in order become a government bureaucrat, you had to have a certain religion and speak certain language. Only thing that counterbalanced this is that these empires were seriously backwards with large rural populations who didn't have any access to formal education. This meant that as these empires urbanized, the lesser nations would simultaneously disappear.
This is why some Marxists and the intellectuals of lesser nations were concerned that without statehood, they would cease to exist, just as if they were all marched into gas chambers. The counterargument of other Marxists and proponents of the Great Nations was that these people barely constituted real nation, that their "nationhood" was nothing more than a provincial identity and the illusions of a handful of intellectuals. And in the end the process of assimilation was voluntary process, it didn't require physical violence. This is why Pan-Slavism, an ideology proposing that every single Slavic nation should be ruled by the Czar, had numerous genuine proponents among Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, etc.
Marxists added an additional layer to this debate concerning the feudal and bourgeois-progressive attributes of these empires that existed alongside each other. For someone like Luxemburg, the backwardness of these empires was exemplified by the persistence of provincial non-nations whose only basis of existence was their loyalty to the local nobility and clergy instead of emerging centralized state. Lenin argued that the real backwardness was the dynastic basis of these empires. Assimilation was viewed as impossible, half-assed attempt from the o
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