[silversmith]

From the "I remember" I assume you lived through it. Were you per chance from "proper" soviet union, aka Moscow / Petrograd area? Because allegiance to the state and nothing else was the ideal in the "less correct" regions such as Baltics. It "got better" as time wore on, but especially after the occupation, every attempt was made to erode anything and everything else people might gather around. Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity. Pioneer movement and schoolwork that taught you to think of the union first, family second. Heck, even open encouragement to rat out your parents for "un-soviet" behavior.

It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.

[sangnoir]

> Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity.

Did you mean "to dilute regional/ethnic identity"? National identity cuts across regions and ethnicities.

[ido]

I guess they meant the national identities like Ukranian, Georgian, Uzbek, etc.

[thriftwy]

This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities with no real national identity.

[gdy]

You are right about national policy of the early Soviet Union which was promoting national identities of people of former Russian Empire [0] but you are definitely wrong about Georgia [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Georgia

[orbital-decay]

Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.

[thriftwy]

That's exactly the vibe of Soviet nation-building propaganda that you have quoted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia

But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.

[orbital-decay]

I don't really understand what you claim to be the Soviet propaganda. 400 years of the unified Kingdom of Georgia founded in 11th century?.. Mingrelia was one of the pieces of a single country torn apart by Arab, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian conquests.

[gdy]

"Forced ethnic mixing"

Yeah, I've heard you prefer not to mix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Estonia#Eston...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Latvia#Arajs_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Lithuania#Par...