 As People's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin believed that each national and ethnic group should have the right to self-expression, facilitated through "autonomous republics" within the Russian state in which they could oversee various regional affairs.In taking this view, some Marxists accused him of bending too much to bourgeois nationalism, while others accused him of remaining too Russocentric by seeking to retain these nations within the Russian state.Stalin's native Caucasus posed a particular problem due to its highly multi-ethnic mix.