Koreans Becoming a Soviet People 81STA L I N AND SOVIET RUSSIFICATION
Old Bolsheviks such as Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others had
assimilated to Rus sian culture long before the Rus sian Revolution (1917).
The aforementioned four Bolsheviks Russified their given names and/or
surnames from their Jewish or Georgian origins.^2 Iosif Dzjugashvili took
the name of Stalin, a Rus sian sobriquet for “man of steel.” However, Stalin
was Russification’s greatest Soviet patron. As an example, Stalin’s son Vasilii,
sometime during his adolescence, exclaimed, “ Father used to be a Georgian!”
upon finding out that his father was not Rus sian.^3 Anatoly Khazanov, a
former Soviet ethnographer and anthropologist noted: “A significant num-
ber of persons in the Soviet Union, particularly among dispersed nationali-
ties or those residing outside their ethnic formations [communities], wanted
to be registered as Rus sian.”^4 The aforementioned Soviet leaders seemed to be
examples of this desire to Russify themselves. In Moscow, the Soviet no-
menklatura (elites) enjoyed many of the same luxuries as the Rus sian nobil-
ity during tsarism. The Soviet elites received the “Kremlin ration.” They had
servants and drivers, some owned many homes and dachas (among them
Stalin), shopped at exclusive stores, hired nannies who spoke En glish or
French to their children, and got their beef, lamb, and fish from special re-
serves/preserves. In each of Stalin’s homes (no specific number was given),
there was a double staff of waitresses, cleaning women, servants, and two
cooks so that food could be prepared at any hour. Wines and fresh fruit
were flown in especially for Stalin from Rus sia’s southern regions.^5 Along-
side the primacy of Rus sian culture, tsarist ways of viewing nationality (in
general) and minority peoples also carried over into korenizatsiia from the
inception of the USSR.^6
Despite cultural autonomy during korenizatsiia, the cultural values of
the Soviet Union were decidedly a mixture of socialist and Rus sian cultural
values.^7 Soviet culture was never fully ideological; it was never fully deraci-
nated from a base of Rus sian culture and values. Evidence of the new social-
ist culture in the postrevolutionary period (1918– late 1920s) reveals laws
that legalized the equality of all nationalities and both sexes; relatively high
salaries paid to workers and proletariat; an emphasis on science and technology
as part of Soviet culture; divorce made easier for women to obtain; legalized
abortions; and banning of the Orthodox Church and religious practice, and
others.^8 Yet, Rus sian and Eu ro pean traditions and values did not dis appear
during this period. After 1934, many of the aforementioned markers of
Soviet culture were reversed, and thereafter the Soviet Union began to pro-
mote and exalt Rus sian culture and tsarist- era Rus sian heroes such as the
great Rus sian writers (Gorky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin) and tsarist- era patriotic