Stalin has perceived in advance that one of the most formidable impediments to the triumph of the Marxian “ideology” among the peoples of the Soviet Union is likely to be the attraction of the alternative “ideology” of Nationalism – a competing Western political idea which has already captured some of the most highly cultivated peoples of the Union, such as the Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians, and which is likely to continue to spread until its leaven – or virus – will have infected even the most remote and backward tribes in the mountain-fastnesses of the Caucasus and Altai and in the tundras beyond the Arctic Circle. Recognizing that this unwelcome triumph of Nationalism is at least as probable as the triumph of the Communism which it is his mission to promote, Stalin has set himself to prevent the plague of Nationalism from taking a virulent form by applying the homoeopathic treatment of inoculation. He has thrown open to the peoples of the Union so wide a scope for the satisfaction of nationalist proclivities as to reduce to a minimum the danger that nationalist grievances may be used as a “red herring” to draw the peoples’ feet away from the path of Communism which Stalin wishes them to tread.
In this field, at any rate, Stalin knows what he is about; for he is himself a Georgian by birth and he has thus had a direct experience of the stimulating effect of the old Imperial Russian policy of repression upon national movements among non-Russian subjects of the Tsar. [...]
Unhappily the homoeopathic treatment which the All-Union Communist Party, under Stalin’s inspiration, have applied to the problem of Nationalism within the frontiers of the Soviet Union has not been their policy in dealing with corporations and parties and sects and classes.
Communist China applied the same remedy (in a smaller dose), with its “recognition” of over fifty non-Han ethnic minorities, whose songs and dances have greeted so many visiting foreign delegations. The China National Ethnic Song and Dance Ensemble was founded by Zhou Enlai in 1952.
A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939
