ABSTRACT
The equality of peoples, the basis of federal equilibrium in the 1920s, was intended to build the "friendship of peoples" living together. At the national level this attachment to typically non-Russian values had given desperate strength to the people's resistance to collectivization. Soviet historians found that, for many peoples subjugated by Russia, the choice had not been between colonization or liberty, but between two colonizations. Soviet society, as it emerged from the nightmare of collectivization and purges, could not yet see the implications of this new history of the peoples forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It was the Second World War which would give a definitive meaning to the Stalinist version of "the friendship of peoples. Lenin had imagined that some day the non-Russian peoples would voluntarily adopt the Russian language for the sake of ease and because they had been left free to develop their own cultures.
