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Lenin appears to call Tsarist Russia the "prison of the peoples", in On the National Pride of the Great Russians, which surely could be a simple translation difference. However, he refers to it not as his own phrase, "... in a country which has been rightly called..."
Later in the same paper, Lenin quotes Chernyshevsky of referring to Russia as "A wretched nation, a nation of slaves, from top to bottom—all slaves." -Rholton23:01, 31 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link and the exact quote, I incorporated them into the article. Can't find the author yet. ←Humus sapiens←Talk 00:36, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Nice bit of detective work on the origins of the phrase. It's almost worth an article page of its own. -Rholton 06:27, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Deleting the reference to Hamlet; he doesn't mean anything like what is meant by the phrase "prison of the peoples"; it's rhetoric referring to the way he, personally, feels imprisoned by the limits of his role in the court of Denmark. [1]Winterbadger (talk) 17:51, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]