“All happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Imagine, as Lenin liked to do, that a country is a marriage of different nationalities. Lenin believed, and he enshrined this principle in the Soviet constitution, that if the federal family was unhappy and one of the partners in the polyamorous union wanted out, it could initiate divorce proceedings. The Soviets were big on secession–at least in theory.
In practice, Moscow was more a believer in traditional family values. It tried to hold on to the wayward Baltic republics–even …read more
Source: The Huffington Post
