ABSTRACT
The nationalities issue is of secondary importance after a victorious socialist revolution. In the mid-1930s, Stalin began to enforce a nationalities policy that assumed the USSR had entered the phase of national assimilation, of the "merger of nations." Stalin claimed that socialist nations are "more tightly bound together" and are fundamentally different from bourgeois nations. The new doctrine and the political measures that complemented it suggest that Stalin thought that at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union had entered the phase of the peoples' "merger." The purges in the national territories were complete in that they destroyed the leadership cores nearly everywhere—whereas, in Moscow, the center, Stalin's immediate entourage stayed alive. In a demonstration of the Ukrainian leadership's self-confidence, the Ukrainian CC's plenum made a rare attempt to resist Stalin and refused to carry out Moscow's directives. The Ukrainian purge promoted N. S. Krushchev into the innermost circle of leaders surrounding Stalin; in January 1938, Khrushchev replaced Kosior.
