the individual ethnic identity of bolsheviks matters little if they identified with imperial russian culture and spoke and thought in russian and were advocates of political economic and adminstrative centralization within the imperial russian space centered on the old imperial capital stalin was born georgian hitler was born austrian but they chose to identify and work within the russian and german political sphere also note that empires do not have ethnic minorities indians or africans are not called ethnic minorities in the british or any other empire ethnic minorities in the russian empire were russians in the non russian territories muslims in russian territories and jews scattered in all territoies