N’s parents traveled to the Soviet republic of Georgia back in the 1970s and saw a street vendor selling peaches. There were two lines, one very long and one short, to the same vendor of the same peaches. The short line was for men and the long line was for women. The two lines were needed so that men and women didn’t have any accidental physical contact with each other.
This was deeply bizarre even to Russians, let alone to Ukrainians or Baltic people. And there were even more hardcore places like Uzbekistan where some women still wore the veil until the 1970s, even though it was obviously illegal.
The USSR was so doomed because keeping such different people together can only be done by force. The Soviet authorities tried very hard to mix everybody up but it was still not working.
P.S. Nobody was religious in the USSR but Georgians are historically Christian.
Clarissa's Blog 
Plenty of disparate peoples have been forced into single nations by ruthless rulers. Given enough ill treatment over enough time it can work. The UK is an example.
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It didn’t work in Ireland and as far as I can see still doesn’t work very well.
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Perhaps we’re discovering the nation state again?
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“The USSR was so doomed because keeping such different people together can only be done by force”
A unifying idea (if it’s good enough) can work, but the USSR had no unifying ideas that I know of besides communism which was a proven failure by the 1950s or so and Russian supremacy which is not a great motivator those who are not Russian.
“The Soviet authorities tried very hard to mix everybody up but it was still not working”
The fact of self-segregation is a hard and bitter pill to swallow for those of us who are naturally curious about the world and other peoples. Sadly, most people, most of the time are not that interested in living around a lot of other people who are very different from them.
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Among my Ukrainian relatives back in the USSR, the favorite stories were about “That time when I visited Russia, and those Russians are so weird, they are nothing like us.” And Russians are not even that different. So people always had a need to remember their differences and guard them carefully.
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Well identity is largely oppositional “I’m not X” (where X is usually something close by in the environment).
Collective national identities are the same. The Danish TV series from the 90s Riget (the kingdom named after a hospital in Copenhagen) got a lot of humor out of cultural differences between Swedes and Danes (though non-Scandinavians think of them as identical).
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This is Freud’s Narcissism of Small Differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
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Small as they are, only in the last 2 years Russians already killed 10,000 Ukrainians for these differences. Their narcissistic wound must really hurt.
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It’s always the degree of narcissism that matters, not the size of the differences.
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