How to step in boldly and with disarming clarity on the concepts of internationalism and nationalism (set aside the specific experience being referenced. The analysis holds true beyond the particular context: reflect especially on the very first and last lines.):
"You don’t become a communist in a day. Nationalism has always been a concept foreign to me, and the extremist variant that arose in Lithuania at the end of the eighties was unacceptable to me. My parents were peasants, we were poor, and if it hadn’t been for the Soviet power, I would never have left this little farmhouse where I am now conversing with you. I would have worked as a laborer and spent my whole life here, next to the photograph of my parents and this icon that had already been hanging here when I was born. I was able to study, I watched Lithuania grow economically and culturally. Lithuania, as the intellectual Saloméja Néris wrote, was a "vibrating string" within the Soviet Union, and things were working, but the nationalists destroyed everything, and this is not just a Lithuanian illness: now in Russia, they shout "Russia for Russians" just as we once shouted "Lithuania for Lithuanians." This is simply not right."
(Juozas Kuolelis, former head of the ideological department of the Lithuanian Communist Party, interviewed by journalist Galina Sapoznikova, author of "The Lithuanian Conspiracy," from which this excerpt is taken.)