Soviet Patriotism and Proletarian Internationalism in USSR Propaganda of the 1930–1940s

The article examines the idea of Soviet patriotism in the context of the development of the theory of world revolution in the USSR. The author compares the views of the classics of Marxism on patriotism and the transformation of these views in relation to the 1930–50s of the twentieth century. From the author’s point of view, Stalin was a consistent supporter of the world revolution and proletarian internationalism, and his use of patriotism was, on the one hand, a concession to the petty-bourgeois strata of the population, on the other hand, Soviet patriotism itself was fundamentally different from bourgeois patriotism in its anti-chauvinistic and internationalist character. The main thing is that Soviet patriotism was addressed not to an abstract “homeland”, but to a specific socialist state of the USSR, the strengthening of which was one of the conditions for the successful development of the world revolution at that historical stage. In the conditions of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet patriotism did not lose its class proletarian character, but as capitalist tendencies in the production relations of the USSR strength-ened, in Soviet patriotism, as in the ideology that dominated in the USSR in general, supra-class features began to strengthen, the proletarian character gradually faded away.