During the 1920s and early 1930s the Communist Party in the Soviet Union attempted to implement three goals concurrently. The first was to maintain the political monopoly it had won at the end of the civil war. The second was to legitimize its power monopoly where resistance to the Bolsheviks was greatest during the revolution and civil war: in the countryside and in the non-Russian borderlands of the former tsarist empire. The third was to create a socialist economy and establish a modern industrial society in a backward, predominantly agricultural country.

In theory, these three goals were complementary. By establishing industrial centers in the non-Russian republics, the Soviet leadership believed that, with economic development, the indigenous populations would be modernized, would be proletarianized, would acquire a working-class consciousness, and would accept the Soviet order as legitimate. Legal, social, political, and economic equality would shift the focus of the non-Russians from their national identities to an international working-class identity. In the long run, the non-Russians would become Sovietized. In the short run, the Bolsheviks hoped to legitimize their urban-based revolution in a predominantly agricultural, multi-national state by modernizing within a framework of multiple languages and identities.

In the early 1920s the party assumed that order and legitimacy were compatible during industrialization. If judged only by economic indicators, the Soviet modernization effort of the late 1920s and 1930s was an impressive achievement. But the interaction between industrialization and korenizatsiia did not fully integrate the non-Russians to the Soviet order. Over the long run, industrialization did not equalize the economic and social disparities among the non-Russians or between them and the Russians.