result of the radical collectivization of industry, agriculture, politics, and speech during the “Stalin Revolution.” The newly completed command economy and the newly unified socialist-realist society seemed to require greater transparency, centralization, standardization, and thus—among other things—a unionwide lingua franca and a streamlined system of communications. By the end of the 1930s, most ethnically defined soviets, villages, districts, and “minority” schools had been sacrificed on the altar of a symmetrical federation of relatively homogeneous protonation-states and a few ethnic subunits too well entrenched to uproot (most of them in the Russian Republic). Modern states require nations at least as much as modern nations require states. By representing and embodying political communities that share a common space, economy, and conceptual currency, they tend to become “ethnicized” in the sense of acquiring a common language, purpose, future, and past. Even the epitome of non-ethnic liberal statehood, the United States of America, has created a nation bound by a common language-based culture and thus by a sense of kinship more tangible and durable than the cult of a few political institutions. The Soviet Union’s version of “the American people” was Sovietness, of course, but the Soviet Union was an ethnoterritorial federation in which each unit had its own native language and native speakers (except for the Russian Federation, which was still doing penance for its imperial past while also serving as an example of an ethnicity-free society). For the first fifteen years or so, Sovietness seemed to refer to the sum total of all native languages without exception plus a Marxist cosmopolitanism centered in Moscow. After Stalin’s Great Transformation, however, the language of Marxist cosmopolitanism became the lingua franca of the entire Soviet command society. That language was Russian (not Esperanto, as some people proposed)—and Russian, in addition to being the language of Marxist cosmopolitanism, was the proud possession of a very large group of people and the revered object of a powerful Romantic cult. Moreover, it was the everyday language of top Bolshevik officials, most of whom (including the important Jewish contingent) were members of the Russian intelligentsia as well as revolutionaries of “the Social Democratic nationality.” Equally devoted to Pushkin and world revolution, they did not sense any tension between the two because most of them believed that Pushkin and the world revolution were fraternal twins. In a familiar paradox of nationalism, the Soviet advance toward modernization and unification led to the “Great Retreat” toward the Volk . The leap into socialism resulted in Russification. The Soviet Union never became the Russian nation-state, but the country’s