The quote is from an essay [1] by the future leader of Communist Russia - Lenin, describing the Czarist Russian empire on April, 1914.
[1] Original in Russian: http://libelli.ru/works/25-5.htm
[2] Google translated: https://libelli-ru.translate.goog/works/25-5.htm?_x_tr_sch=h...
For example, Chechnya tried to escape the prison, so Russian used thousands of tons of explosives, FAE's (which is comparable to low yield nuclear weapons) to destroy independent Chechnya state, which was able to escape after first war. Russian FSB bombed their own citizens to provoke war with Chechnya.
My comment was specific to your quote.
This kind of worked, somewhat, and not for reasons they were anticipating. Turns out that forcibly resettling people doesn't make them like you but it does make them tolerate each other a little bit better because they all now have one thing in common: shared adversity under the USSR. However, in the places where it didn't work it created bigger problems. Places (Chechnya) that could have been clean breakaway republics didn't do so because they had a ethnic Russian minority holding them in and in cases where those nations did break you have the Russian group trying to lean politically into Russia and the non-Russian group leaning away and that causes its own problems (Georgia, Ukrainian breakaway provinces, etc)
Russia is far more unified across ethnic lines than people give it credit for. It's not going to pull a Yugoslavia and erupt into genocide as soon as Putin croaks. That said, it's nowhere near as unified as the US (where you can basically count on any immigrant group becoming functionally "American" in 2 generations).