This demonym was presented in the ideology of the country as the "new historical unity of peoples of different nationalities" (новая историческая общность людей различных национальностей).

By the late 1930s, however, the policy was changed to a more active promotion of the Russian language and later to more overt Russification, which accelerated in the 1950s,[citation needed] especially in Soviet education.

On the one hand, the ethnologist V. A. Tishkov and other historians believe that "for all the socio-political deformities, the Soviet people represented a civil nation.

A. Grushin noted that sociology in the USSR "recorded a unique historical type of society that had already gone into oblivion".

[8] In December 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pointed out the lack of an all-Russian unifying idea as a problem during a discussion in the State Council and proposed multiethnic patriotism as a replacement for the idea of "the Soviet people".