It was called the All-Union Communist Party for a reason. Part of what made the Bolsheviks able to unite a bunch of territories amidst a civil war against dozens of adversaries is because their party ran the breadth of the old empire across different ethnicities whose cadres wanted it dismantled . The idea that the Russians alone were able to subjugate Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Baltics and so on entirely against their will, after a disastrous series of wars and catastrophes which severed the colonial apparatus of the old Empire no less (first beginning with the February Revolution), is deeply insulting to the agency of those nationalities. Not at all surprisingly given how local nationalists have done their best to spread this narrative to decouple and "purify" their countries from participation in the Soviet project while Westerners cynically propagate it in a cynical appeal to national liberation.
Now this is not to say the Soviet Union didn't have cultural/structural holdovers of the old empire and would go on to foster Russian Chauvinism later on which came to a head in 1991, but there's a world of difference between looking at that more critically and thinking there's an unbroken line from the Russian Empire to the USSR to the current Federation.
It was called the All-Union Communist Party for a reason. Part of what made the Bolsheviks able to unite a bunch of territories amidst a civil war against dozens of adversaries is because their party ran the breadth of the old empire across different ethnicities whose cadres wanted it dismantled . The idea that the Russians alone were able to subjugate Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Baltics and so on entirely against their will, after a disastrous series of wars and catastrophes which severed the colonial apparatus of the old Empire no less (first beginning with the February Revolution), is deeply insulting to the agency of those nationalities. Not at all surprisingly given how local nationalists have done their best to spread this narrative to decouple and "purify" their countries from participation in the Soviet project while Westerners cynically propagate it in a cynical appeal to national liberation.
Now this is not to say the Soviet Union didn't have cultural/structural holdovers of the old empire and would go on to foster Russian Chauvinism later on which came to a head in 1991, but there's a world of difference between looking at that more critically and thinking there's an unbroken line from the Russian Empire to the USSR to the current Federation.