"From mid-1988, the growing weakness of the Soviet state, and the division and confusion of the government’s response to nationalism, was accentuated by the strength of nationalist sentiment, especially in the Baltic republics, the Caucasus republics, and the western Ukraine. This sentiment had been manifested from the mid-1980s in increased opposition to Communist rule. The waving of national flags and singing of national songs became more frequent. On 23 August 1989, two million people formed a human chain between the capitals of the Baltic Republics. The Soviet idea of a limited flowering of national cultures as part of a wider concept of a unified Soviet people, a policy adopted in 1923, had proved a total failure, although, during the late Soviet period, some Russians resented the ‘internationalism’ of the Soviet Union wherein resources, money and technical know-how were handed over by Moscow to the non-Russian sectors. There was also resentment over the foreign accents that the non-Russians had when speaking Russian in the army and elsewhere. Moreover, an explicitly conveyed sense of Russian identity had emerged by the late 1960s with the derevenshchiki (ruralists): Russian writers such as Valentin Rasputin. Without tackling the censorship head-on, what the derevenshchiki tended to do was to decry the baneful effects of Soviet Communist modernisation upon the older rural way of life and its values. By the later 1970s, different strands of Russian national identity, expressed in the form of resentment over the perceived shunning of Russian cultural values, emerged with other writers."