The book by Harvard University professor Terry Martin is dedicated to the Stalinist national policy pursued in the USSR in 1923–1939. According to the scientist, the Soviet Union was neither a federation nor a monoethnic state. The originality of Soviet policy lay in the fact that it supported the external forms of existence of national minorities - culture, language, elites, territories - to a much greater extent than the national majority - Russians. Thus, the Bolsheviks tried to combine the demands of the nationalists with the demands of the socialists, who set as their goal the creation of an economically and politically unified state, to characterize which the author introduces a new term - the empire of “positive activity”. The research is based on archival sources introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, as well as materials Ukrainian and Russian press of those years. Recognized as the most important work on the history of Soviet national politics and becoming a classic, the monograph will be of interest not only to historians, teachers and students, but also to everyone interested in the history of Stalinism.