Kinda. Also, to be fair, post-Stalin leaders are more to blame than him or Lenin. There were reasons for dealing with national elites at the time (although, I think we could do without creating them where there were none), and Stalin started clamping down on them, but later Soviet leadership just kept flirting and now we have conflicts all over the former USSR territory fueled by nationalism: Georgia/Abkhazia/Ossetia, Azerbaijan/Armenia, Pridnestrovie/Moldova and, of course, Russia/Ukraine. Chechnya was a bit of a different case, but sort of applicable. And there are also balticshits barking in the corner, but they’re irrelevant.

What to learn is a good question. I suppose, to avoid self-determining on the basis of opposition. Ukrainization, for example, was too overzealous with dissociating everything from Russian. Lo and behold, some western meddling later Ukrainian national idea is basically being anti-Russia and even the language is a mess these days with all the forced borrowing from English and shit, just to have as little connection to Russian as possible.