Socialist patriotism refers to a form of civic patriotism promoted by Marxist–Leninist movements.Socialist patriotism promotes people living within Marxist-Leninist countries to adopt a "boundless love for the socialist homeland, a commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society [and] the cause of communism". Marxist-Leninists claim that socialist patriotism is not connected with nationalism, as Marxists and Marxist-Leninists denounce nationalism as a bourgeois ideology developed under capitalism that sets workers against each other. Socialist patriotism is commonly advocated directly alongside proletarian internationalism, with communist parties regarding the two concepts as compatible with each other. The concept has been attributed by Soviet writers to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin separated patriotism into what he defined as proletarian, socialist patriotism from bourgeois nationalism. Lenin promoted the right of all nations to self-determination and the right to unity of all workers within nations, however he also condemned chauvinism and claimed there were both justified and unjustified feelings of national pride. Lenin believed that nations subjected to imperial rule had the right to seek national liberation from imperial rule.
Socialist patriotism was promoted by Joseph Stalin, Stalinists claimed that socialist patriotism would serve both national interest and international socialist interest. While promoting socialist patriotism for the Soviet Union as a whole, Stalin repressed nationalist sentiments in fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. However, according to some academics Soviet patriotism had in practice Russian nationalist overtones.