Unfortunately, this sort of stuff was starting to come to the fore, within the communist party, during the 1980s. While the Gorbachev wing of the CPSU was deviating from Marxism in the direction of liberalism, the so-called “hardliners” were beginning to deviate from Marxism in the direction of reactionary nationalism. As Xi has said, the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed because ideological degeneration at every level made the party effectively unable to function.

It is true that the Krusuchevite “reforms” had set in motion a series of events which were turning the USSR from a workers’ state into a kind of social democracy with an out-of-touch elite. A reconnection with the masses was desperately needed. To that end, the continuity of Russian civilization (and of the various other civilizations within the USSR) needed to be emphasized, and some sort of rapprochment between Marxism and the various religions within the bloc needed to be made; one could say that the USSR needed to learn from the experience of Baathism. But nobody, anywhere, had any idea how to do this; boilerplate nationalism was not the answer, and the collapse simply brought out and enhanced this kind of nationalism’s negative characteristics. Had Putin and his gang not beaten the post-1991 economy into some sort of shape, Russian nationalism might even have slid into something like what are seeing in Ukraine. The sort of faux religiosity, historical illiteracy, and vaguely chauvinistic nationalism you see in pictures like the one above is troubling and offensive, but remember: it could have been a lot worse.