‘Druzhba narodov ne znaet granits’: Pragmatika i ritorika bratstva i sovetskoe imperskoe voobrazhaemoe v poezii narodov SSSR stalinskoi epokhi

The rhetoric of brotherhood and friendship of peoples played a key role in the Soviet imperial construction. Its heyday is associated with the curtailment of the declared Trotskyist Marxist project of world revolution in the late 1920s. The international rhetoric of “proletarian brotherhood” was inverted, i.e. turned onto the Soviet peoples themselves and ideologically repackaged for domestic political and ideological consumption. On the one hand, such a turn fully met the tasks of forming a new — truncated — identity of the Soviet peoples. On the other hand, this rhetoric played an important role in the formation of a pan-Soviet identity and formed the basis of Soviet patriotism, dividing the world into a nationless and homogeneous realm within the Soviet borders (later these borders began to cover “fraternal socialist countries” of the Soviet bloc), and a hostile and internally “torn apart by national enmity” world outside the Soviet empire. The article examines the metaphors of brotherhood, the family of peoples, friendship and other tropes. Key to this tropology is the concept of border.