While the prospect of forging one Soviet nation out of Slavs and non-Slavs was clearly in trouble, the formation of a big Russian nation out of the Eastern Slavs was just as clearly under way. There appeared to be no barrier to the realization of the old dream of the imperial nation-builders—the formation of an all-Russian nation. The only thing their successors needed to complete the project was time, but by the late 1980s they had run out of it.
After Stalins death yin 1953, Nikita Khrushchev assumes power after a short power vacuum. Khrushchev is primarily focused on the internationalization of communism and has a goal of unifying the Soviet Union under one guise of communism within 20 years. As a result, he puts much less pressure on the Russification of the union and concedes certain powers to other ethnic leaders in order to gain their political support. Khrushchev focuses on de-Stalinization culturally and politically.
“Khrushchev had moved away from Stalin’s view of the nation as defined mainly by a common language, culture, and territory. State, economy, class, and ideology were the main markers of the new Soviet political nation. Although the party program pledged to defend and develop the languages of the peoples of the USSR, in fact there was no alternative to building the new Soviet people on the foundations of the Russian language and culture.”
Under Khrushchev the Russians sent someone to space in 1961.
In 1964, a coup was led against Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev and other conservative politicians who were concerned that Khrushchevs decentralization of power to other Soviet republics and obsession with communism was destabilizing the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev, ethnic nationalism aside from Great Russian nationalism was dissuaded, and the strong Russian language initiatives started by Khrushchev, began to see a strengthening of an all Russian nation in the Western Soviets.
