The Tsarist Russian Empire was dubbed the "prison of the peoples" ("Тюрьма народов") by Vladimir Lenin. The Soviet Union, which replaced the empire, proclaimed that the goal of its national policy was to forge a new national entity, the "Soviet people". Even though the Soviet Union often claimed to make significant progress on "the nationalities question", its dissolution came about largely due to inter-ethnic conflict and like other communist countries a privileged nationality (in this case the Russians, in Yugoslavia the Serbs, in Vietnam the ethnic Vietnamese and in China the Han Chinese) had more political and economic power.