"The greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century"

It is only about a week before the twentieth anniversary of what Russian leader Vladimir Putin, despite
other aspects of his politics, aptly called "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century,"
whose negative impacts are still felt by workers the world over even today.  It is also about a week or two
before the eighty-ninth anniversary of what could be considered one of the unsung geopolitical
tragedies of the 20th century.  The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was a historical mistake.

In my opinion, the debates that led to this episode had Lenin in the wrong and his People's Commissar of
Nationalities mostly in the right.  The promotion of miscellaneous national peculiarities and
"positive discrimination" in favour of non-Russians within what Terry Martin called the "affirmative
action empire" may definitely have been more positive than, say, the later discrimination against
non-Slavs becoming combat pilots in the Soviet Air and Air Defense Forces.  However, too ethnic minority
concessions were made.  Today's Quebecois intercultural policies demonstrate in hindsight that the
cultural diversity positives could have been achieved with neither linguistic korenizatsiya
(Quebec's Bill 101 makes French the only official language in Quebec) nor fragmented geopolitical identiti
 es past reasonable autonomy; the entire Soviet space in 1922 should have simply been an enlarged RSFSR.

Another criticism that should be levelled at the left-nationalism of much of the Russian Left (from the
Left Front to well-meaning leftist activists within the RCWP-RPC and within the CPRF cesspool), then, is
that their nostalgia for the *Soviet Union* is misplaced.

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