Russian people, language, history, and literature (as a common Soviet asset, not as the exclusive property of the Russian Republic, which remained a ghost entity until the end of the Soviet Union). In 1930, Stalin ordered the proletarian poet Demian Bedny to stop carrying on about the proverbial Russian sloth. “The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries are avidly studying the edifying history of the Russian working class, its history and the history of Russia. . . . All this fills (cannot but fill!) the hearts of the Russian workers with the feeling of revolutionary national pride capable of moving mountains, of working miracles.” Bedny was too proletarian a poet to get the point. On November 14, 1936, a special Politburo decree banned his comic opera Warriors for “slandering the warriors of the Russian historical epics, the most important of whom live on in popular consciousness as the representatives of the heroic traits of the Russian people.” Several months earlier, Bukharin had been attacked for calling the Russians “a nation of Oblomovs,” and a few days before that (on February 1, 1936), a special Pravda editorial had formally announced that the Russian people were “first among equals” in the family of Soviet nations. By the end of the decade, patriotism had superseded world revolution, “traitors to the motherland” had replaced class enemies, most of the newly Latinized languages had been switched to Cyrillic, and all non-Russian schools in the Russian regions of the Russian Federation had been closed down. The study of Esperanto had become illegal, and the study of Russian had become obligatory. In May 1938, Boris Volin (an education official and the former chief censor) summarized the new orthodoxy in an article entitled “The Great Russian People,” published in the Party’s main theoretical journal: The Russian people have every right to be proud of their writers and poets. They have produced Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language, the founder of modern Russian literature, who enriched humanity with his immortal artistic creations. . . . The Russian people have every right to be proud of their scientists, who have provided more evidence of the inexhaustible creative genius of the Russian people. . . . The musical gifts of the Russian people are rich and diverse. . . . No less powerful are the manifestations of the Russian popular genius in the realm of fine arts and architecture. . . . The Russian people have created a theater that, one can say without exaggeration, has no equal in the world. . . . The Judas Bukharin, moved by his hatred of socialism, slandered the Russian people by describing them as “a nation of Oblomovs.”. . . This is base slander against the Russian nation, against the courageous, freedom- loving Russian people, who have struggled and toiled tirelessly to forge