Yelensky to CoE delegation: Russia is abandoning Leninist principles
In talks with a Council of Europe delegation, the head of Ukraine’s State Service for Ethnopolitics criticized Russia for abandoning Lenin-era policies toward ethnic minorities.
On March 25, the leadership of DESS held a working meeting with a delegation from the Secretariat of the Council of Europe, according to the agency’s press service.
During the meeting, DESS head Viktor Yelensky commented on Russia’s policy shift away from Leninist principles in its treatment of nationalities.
“The head of DESS stressed that Russia’s new strategy consists in a complete rejection of the so-called ‘Leninist nationalities policy,’ which envisaged concessions to national minorities in exchange for political loyalty, and is aimed at the total denationalization of non-Russian peoples and their blanket assimilation,” the press service said.
Yelensky’s deputy, Ihor Lossovskyi, said the Russian authorities are deliberately sending not ethnic Russians, but representatives of other national groups, to fight in the “special military operation.” He pointed to the “disproportionately high losses among non-Russian peoples of Siberia and the North Caucasus,” compared with those suffered by participants in the war from Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The sides also discussed freedom of religion in the temporarily occupied territories, as well as the condition of Ukraine’s national minorities and indigenous peoples under occupation.
Earlier, the UOJ reported that Viktor Yelensky, during his time at the Institute of Scientific Atheism, wrote a work praising Lenin’s policy of destroying the Orthodox Church. In his words, “Marxist-Leninist theory gives us the tools, the method for penetrating into the depths of the economy, politics, and the spiritual sphere of human life.”
