Stalin saw the danger of “peasant armies” united behind a national banner. His Bolshevik colleague Mikhail Kalinin made the same point, though Kalinin also repeated a solution offered by the advocates of collectivization: turn the peasants into a proletariat. That way they would lose their attachment to a particular place or nation: “The national question is purely a peasant question…the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers…which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal
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