In the mid-1920s the Soviet working class was predominantly a Russian working class. But with radical industrialization and collectivization, millions of non-Russian peasants entered the urban labor force and ended the Russian dominance of the working class in their regions. Massive peasantization and indigenization of the Soviet working class created serious political problems for the Stalinist order.

In 1926 the majority of the 4 million Soviet workers (71.4 percent) lived in the RSFSR. With the exception of the Ukraine, with one-fifth of all Soviet workers, only a small percentage resided in the non-Russian republics and regions. But because Russians constituted either a significant plurality, or a majority of the working class in the non-Russian republics and regions, the number of non-Russian workers was even smaller than these figures suggest. The percentage of indigenous peoples within the working class and among civil servants was lower than their percentage of the population in their region.

The percentage of Russian workers within each regional working class varied between the autonomous republics and the union republics. Most Russian workers in the non-Russian areas were concentrated in the autonomous republics within the RSFSR and their strength ranged from 17.2 percent in Dagestan to 73.1 percent in Buriat-Mongolia. The percentages of Russian workers in the union republics varied from 1.4 percent in Armenia to 35.1 percent in Turkmenia. The majority of Russian workers outside the national Russian heartland resided in the Ukraine (312,600), where they constituted 29.2 percent of the percentage.