The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years. Norman Davies
About This Quote

When he was talking about the title "Lord of All-Rus", Stalin was telling his countrymen that they should not consider themselves Russian because their language and culture were different from Russians. He was telling them that they should not try to be part of Russia because there was no Russia in the world at that time. It did not make sense for him to say this because Russia had already been separated into many little states at that time.

Source: Europe

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