ABSTRACT
The Presidium saw Great-Russian chauvinism as the main reason and assumed this chauvinism was supported by non-Russians who refused to use their own native tongues in government offices and factories because they were frequently unable to read and write their native languages competently. Resolutions to introduce non-Russian languages also often failed because of the bureaucracy's passive resistance. The Twelfth Party Congress in April, 1923 assessed the "fight against the remnants of Great Russian Chauvinism" as the Party's "most important task at present" in connection with the nationalities issue. The most basic form of conflicts among individuals of different nationalities arose from the discrimination non-Russian workers in multinational factories and at multinational construction sites faced. The new policy's practical consequence was that the media dealt with the threat Russian nationalism posed for socialist society less and less, but more and more often with "local nationalism," which by that time was usually referred to as "bourgeois nationalism.".
