The article substantiates a point of view according to which «Soviet patriotism» is a continuation not of an «imperial» tradition, supposedly inherent in the Russian nation for a long time, but of another tradition - ideologized, socialistic one - originating from Russian populism and Marxism. Based on the concept of B. Anderson, it is asserted that nationalism is not the only society's integrating strategy of building a picture of an “imagined community” that has become possible in modernity. Under certain conditions, the picture drawn by social groups that dominate the process of forming the society's ideas about itself is not necessarily focuses on “national” issues. The article shows that the policy pursued in post-revolutionary Russia in the course of the socialist ideological tradition was aimed at the formation of a new non-nationalistic and non-imperial “imagined community”, nevertheless isomorphic to the Western types. The article argues that the objective result of this policy was not so much the formation of “Soviet patriotism” but of the “under-imagined community” that exists until now.