Bolshevik ranks embodied the wildly multinational character of imperial Russia (as the names, given in this book in the original, demonstrate) but the Bolsheviks were thoroughly Russified, too (as shown by the more typical spellings of their names). Still, they were conscious of the difference between ethnic Russia and imperial Russia. Trotsky, a Russified Jew, painted Russia in profoundly negative cultural terms, demanding a “final break of the people with Asianism, with the seventeenth century, with holy Russia, with icons and cockroaches.”23 Lenin, vehemently excoriating Great Russian
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