Stalin’s Soviet DEI Program

by James Lindsay

Imagine a sociopolitical movement that divides the population roughly into two essential classes: the oppressive “great power” class and the marginalized minority classes, who are said to be oppressed by the powerful. Now imagine that movement tells the population—and especially those minority classes—the following story.

You are oppressed by the great power and its chauvinistic beneficiaries. Our movement sees this and thinks it’s a great injustice. We believe your people should be free from this oppression and should be able to self-determine. Your communities, your political meetings, and your schools, we believe, should be in your own languages.

Your history and cultures should be preserved against the great power that threatens to destroy them through forced assimilation and cultural chauvinism. We’re on your side, and they are against you.

What’s more, what sets you apart from the great power is that you’re more like us than you are like them. We recognize that. You’re more intrinsically communal and social than they are. They don’t value community like you do, or like we do. They claim to value individual rights and self-determination so long as you agree with them, and they don’t recognize your agency and autonomy, but we do.

Because we understand this injustice and have the power to help you, we want to ally ourselves with you. We will help raise up leaders among you who can help you resist the great-power chauvinism from the majority power, and we can bring your representatives into our Congress to fight against them and for your right to self-determination, autonomy, and community!

You might be thinking this story sounds a little bit like a weirdly generic version of the rationale behind our current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) regime, or a bit like Critical Race Theory (CRT). You’d be right to think so. That’s exactly how DEI and CRT work.

In our DEI-based system, the story is the same with unique specifics. There’s a great-power of “white supremacy culture,” “patriarchy,” “settler-colonialism,” and “heteronormativity” that must be resisted “intersectionally” with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives based on Identity Marxist theories like CRT and radical feminism. It will select leaders of all sorts from among those “marginalized groups” (and their ideological allies) and give them a leg-up in the professional world in every regard—so long as they agree with the underlying Critical Theory–based DEI ideology. This will be done for “equity” and “representation,” and anyone who doesn’t agree is a bigot. Also a bigot is anyone who disagrees with what any diversity hire says. (It will also be bigotry to accuse any diversity hire of being a diversity hire, especially when it’s true.)

What you just read, however, is more or less the story the Communists Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin told the variety of ethnic minorities bordering on and contained within the former Russian Federation in the 1920s, people like Georgians, Ukrainians, Caucasians, Latvians, and Estonians. In their version of the story, the “Great Russian” was imposing a “Great Russian chauvinism” upon them to make them act more Russian, and the Communists were there to help the minority non-Russian identities resist. These minority identities had different values that the Communists said were intrinsically more socialist than the feudal Russians or distant capitalists, so they were natural allies to the Bolsheviks, who by then held power under the banner of the Communist Party.

The Communists promised these non-Russian ethnic minorities—and delivered to them—not just the limited right to self-determination in their ethnic minority enclaves but also raised up leaders among them, both locally and in a second chamber of the Party Congress in Moscow. There was just one catch.

The general rule of both of these policies was to be strictly socialist, of course. Self-determination in their regions was allowed to the degree it didn’t contradict Communist Party goals, policies, programs, or leaders, and ethnic minority leaders were raised up both locally and centrally according to their alignment with the Party line. Only Socialist Georgians like Stalin, Socialist Ukrainians, Socialist Caucasians, Socialist Latvians, and Socialist Estonians, among Socialist others (like the Muslim Tatars) were elevated to leadership anywhere by the Soviets.

The Communists didn’t do this minority-outreach program out of the goodness of their black little Commie hearts, of course. There was a real perk for the Party to having these ethnic minorities in positions of power. Not only were they able to bring in loyalists; they were able to bring in loyalists who, whenever they might propose something more radical than the general Party Congress or other leaders might accept, could be shielded behind accusations of bigotry if anyone disagreed with the good token ethnic minority. Should you disagree with your Ukrainian comrade, for example, you could easily be accused very credibly of harboring and acting from Great Russian chauvinism rather than any principled disagreement.

The purpose of this program, as stated, was generally to promote a high Soviet Communist ideal: fakticheskoye ravenstvo (Фактическое равенство), “actual equality,” or what we call “equity” today. Actual equality was meant to begin with simple economic equality and extend beyond it to total (actual, or “factual”) equality across all domains of human experience and life: social, political, cultural.

This DEI-like program, instituted initially in 1921 and more fully in 1923 by Lenin and Stalin jointly, reigned over Soviet policy for most of that decade. It was called korenizatsiya (коренизация), which means “the process of putting down roots.” It was the Soviet Union’s “Inclusion” program that history has recognized as being the world’s first “Affirmative Action Empire.” In practice, it gave a great advantage to the Communists, particularly the most diabolical and Machiavellian among them, and among the people created immense and incurable ethnic strife throughout the young Soviet Union.

In the end, korenizatsiya was precisely the kind of predictable disaster one might expect—likely deliberately so—and it set the stage for a great unification (“Russification”) program in the 1930s where everyone would be a Russian Communist and, to prove it, several million Ukrainians (estimates give 3–9 millions) would be brutally and intentionally starved to death in the Holodomor for their mere capacity to potentially resist. Of course, “self-determination” was always to be secondary to the needs of the Party, and the party didn’t need Ukrainian kulaks nearly as much as it needed their land and their total submission.

The great unification program of korenizatsiya was always embedded within it under the brand name raznoobraziya (разнообразие), a program that Lenin favored and promoted strongly. Raznoobraziya, uncomfortably enough for us today, translates directly from Russian as “diversity,” and we would recognize it by that deceptive term. “Unity in content through diversity in form” was how Lenin understood the concept. That is, people will look different but all think the same: as Communists. By 1930, this “unity in form”—as Russian Stalinist Communists—is exactly what Stalin enacted using the failure of korenizatsiya as justification. The point was always the “unity in content.” “Diversity in form” was just an excuse and a lever. Just like DEI.

How did korenizatsiya get from there, then, to here, now?

In 1965, the (neo)-Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote in his infamous totalitarian essay “Repressive Tolerance” about “emancipation” to socialism requiring activists find the sociocultural Archimedean point that could leverage the whole society into this reunification of socialist consciousness. The phrase “Archimedean point” refers to a hypothesized spot where a fulcrum could be placed that could prop up a lever that could move the whole Earth. Stalin understood from when he outlined it in Marxism and the National Question in Vienna in 1913 that korenizatsiya would provide that Archimedean point for the Bolshevik vision of the USSR with its Russian core and growing variety of satellites. Marcuse understood the same thing about the tumultuous “melting pot” of the United States in the riotous 1960s.

The conditions Marcuse described in “Repressive Tolerance” and his other writing of the 1960s, particularly An Essay on Liberation (1969), make clear that he was trying to work out how to leverage the various “ghetto populations,” minority though they might be, to create a breakthrough against the capitalist West. His problem was that what he called “advanced capitalism” had tamed the working class and turned them conservative by giving them a better life and pleasant livelihood. Marcuse recognized that the various “ghetto populations” had the needed “vital energy” for revolution, but they didn’t have the theory or social location necessary for it.

To solve this problem, one would be tempted to say Marcuse reinvented korenizatsiya if it weren’t certain that he was already familiar with it, not just once but at least twice, if not three or even four times over. It’s not quite a reinvention if you just import it and apply it. It barely needs to be said today, of course, that Marcuse’s vision is how we ended up with the “liberating tolerance” regime of DEI, CRT, and all the rest, which is to say that Herbert Marcuse knew what he was doing.

See, the thing is that korenizatsiya didn’t die with Stalin’s reversal of the program in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. It wasn’t thrown on the ash-heap of history where it belongs as a catastrophic failed doctrine. Communists don’t throw away destructive things that achieve their ultimate purpose of consolidating their own power. Instead of being abandoned, korenizatsiya was recognized as a powerful tool—a evil means to a totalitarian end—and exported.

First, it was adopted line for line by Mao Zedong and his CCP in China to deal with the huge Han Chinese majority and the 55 ethnic minorities in that loose federation. “Criticize Han Chauvinism!” was the brand name for the program, and it worked to undermine the nationalist KMT (Guomindang) regime under Chiang Kai-shek and to consolidate power for Mao’s favored factions in the CCP throughout his reign. Mao brought it in because it works for its intended purpose of breaking down an existing regime and installing and consolidating Communist power over a diverse population.

It was also exported to the United States in the 1920s by both Soviet infiltrators and the Communist Party USA, seeking to turn the South into a socialist capital-B “Black” nation that would agitate against the United States on racial lines. Perhaps what saved the US from this powerful Communist racial attack was the Great Depression, which led millions of Southern blacks to migrate north in desperate search of work in the factory cities. Since Stalin’s definition of a nation was a continuous people in a continuous place with a continuous history, this need-driven diaspora of Southern blacks foiled the Soviets’ first attempt at korenizatsiya subversion of the United States. It took until 1989 for Critical Race Theory to get off the ground as its next serious attempt, some sixty years later, not to just gloss over Black Power, the Black Nationalism movement, and the Black Panthers in Marcuse’s day.

Korenizatsiya was also exported to the entire colonized world, Third World and First. It became the basis for the radically violent decolonization movements throughout the Third World, sometimes referred to as “Third Worldism” and sometimes as “postcolonialism.” It also set the stage for the radical indigenous movements that have torn apart nations like South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, not to mention U.S. states like Alaska, New Mexico, and Hawaii. It has even been secondarily imported into Europe along with the anti-indigenous populations of “migrants” who are currently “decolonizing” Europe through blatant and highly subsidized colonization. Korenizatsiya lives on throughout the entirety of the non-Communist world.

Marcuse was well aware of the program and its uses in the USSR. He was also familiar with and praised its uses in Mao’s revolutions in China. He was deeply aware of the “Third Worldist” liberation movements upon which he based his own ambitions. He was also astutely aware of the racial tensions and manipulative Communist history in the United States before and during the 1960s. It’s therefore extremely likely Marcuse knew he was refactoring korenizatsiya for America’s rawest wounds and softest spots.

In all places where it’s used, korenizatsiya is the same. An aggrieved minority population is told it can self-determine and must do so specifically in resistance against the great-power chauvinism it finds itself embedded in. Grifters and sympathizers within those populations, but no one else, are elevated within the community and in power centers within the majority population. The point is always “diversity in form but unity in content,” which is to say that “diversity” is as superficial to the program as it is to people and is just a cynical pretext to consolidate power in “unity of content” in anti-Western and ultimately Communist visions of control and conquest. Anyone who disagrees is tarred as a bigot. No one in the general population, majority and minority combined, has the slightest idea what to do about it.

In all places where it’s used, korenizatsiya also has the same results. Ethnic strife. A two-tiered system that favors radicals in the name of minority status. Degradation of the tokenized minority communities through socialism, grift, and bad leadership. Eventual backlash by the majority population and escalating ethnic conflict. Trust in systems breaking down and systems themselves breaking down to earn that newfound distrust. Civilizational breakdown and eventual catastrophe—all eyes on South Africa, the leading modern korenizatsiya experiment, for a look a few more years down that road.

What we’ve taken in over the last few decades and established in our countries institutional structures and national psyches is not an enlightened movement of empathy and tolerance that advances civil rights and equal opportunity. It’s a Soviet program of destruction and power consolidation called korenizatsiya that is a parasite on the noble ethics of civil rights and equal opportunity. That is, it’s a diabolical counterfeit that offers us only our own destruction while handing our society over to grifters and their Communist handlers.

The choices we face here in the West are therefore stark. We can continue on this morally gilded road to our own destruction; we can fall prey to the identity-driven backlash korenizatsiya is designed to produce in the “great power” majorities and throw away our peace and freedoms; or we can reject korenizatsiya in both the positive application and negative backlash and assert that free nations honor, respect, and secure individual liberties and recognize “social justice” to be nothing more than a pretext for tyranny.

That choice is ours. There’s only one right answer if we wish to remain free and prosperous.