Stalin and the "Russian Question"

The problem of the so-called "Russian question" troubled Joseph Dzhugashvili throughout his conscious life. At different times he approached it from different angles, but was never able to reach a final conclusion.From his youth, he considered himself a representative of a national minority in a vast ethnic Russian sea, but overall—a Russian.But later, his views underwent fairly radical changes.After the revolution, Stalin "learned" that the Russian people, who had held a "dominant position" in the Tsarist Empire, were the "oppressors" of all the smaller nations, and therefore until the early 1930s he supported the ideological thesis that it was necessary to fight against "Great Russian chauvinism".From the early 1930s, and especially during the Great Patriotic War, Stalin became an active promoter of the thesis that the Russian nation is the leading force in the national family of the Soviet peoples.In the second half of the 1940s, the leader once again changed his position on this issue and physically eliminated a significant portion of the leaders of the RSFSR and USSR of Russian origin.