ABSTRACT
The Bolshevik government's nationalities policy was an envisagement of Marxist-Leninist ideology. In accordance with these principles, all nations would disappear with time; in fact, nationalism itself was considered a bourgeois ideology. However, the Bolshevik leaders saw the revolutionary potential inherent in nationalism as beneficial for the advancement of the revolution, and thus supported the idea of national self-determination. Even so, the idea of self-determination was in itself contradictory to what Marxist-Leninist ideology encouraged. Therefore, nationalism was one of the more controversial concepts introduced by the Bolshevik government. Most probably it was due to this controversy that neither Soviet leaders nor Sovietologists regarded nationalism as a potential threat to the very existence of the Soviet Union. It was under Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership in the late 1980s and the early 1990s that many national republics and ethnic groups began to challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet state and posed a threat to the stateness of both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the national republics.
