In a speech delivered before an audience of industrial managers on 4 February 1931, Joseph Stalin condemned Russia’s chronic underdevelop­ment. He asserted that

one feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suf­fered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys.

... Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its inde­pendence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in build­ing up its socialist economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: “Either we perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.”

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.¹

Stalin’s remarks on the Russian/Soviet past expressed the frustrations of all who recognized that in the competitive world of nations, states, empires, and ideological struggles, economic underdevelopment also represented an unwanted reality of economic poverty, political inferiority, military impo- tency, and an unequal relationship with the developed world, a dysfunc­tional dependency. Economic and social privation created weakness and constant humiliation. Backwardness, as the party leader suggested, would lead to the extinction of nations, states, and political systems.

Delivered in the third year of the Soviet Union’s first five-year economic plan (1928-32), Stalin’s speech responded to the uncertainties of the inter­national situation at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, highlighting the reasons for the Soviet ambition to modernize its economy and society at an accelerated pace.

Stalin’s emphasis on “socialism in one country” and his public conflation of Russia (not the multinational Soviet Union) with the “socialist father­land” championed a new ideological interpretation - Soviet patriotism - which emphasized that “national differences within the Soviet Union were secondary to the shared history and loyalty that united all Soviet citizens.”⁴ Despite its self-proclaimed internationalist orientation, the party started to favour Russian interests at the expense of the non-Russian population of the Soviet Union. This speech, moreover, implied a retreat from koreniza- tsiia and from Ukrainization.⁵ Within ten years after the start of the New Economic Policy and a moderate Soviet nationalities policy, Stalin and the Communist Party steered the Soviet Union into new, uncharted waters.