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To a degree I see a point to this, but it's more of "I see why you feel this way, but I don't agree".

Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.

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watwut 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.

There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.

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thrwwXZTYE 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.

Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.

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PrismCrystal 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Probably because they colonized white people.

Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.

	▲	thrwwXZTYE 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		They also colonized Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, etc.

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jltsiren 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.

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thrwwXZTYE 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.

But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.

In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...

> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.

Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".

Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.

Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.

There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.

Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.

	▲	jltsiren 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You are making the mistake of assuming that ethnicities are disjoint categories that remain immutable over generations. Russification has been going on for 1000+ years. Often organically, and often by forced policies. People abandon their languages and cultures and adopt Russian language, culture, and ultimately identity, until one day their descendants are ethnic Russians. Some maintain the ethnic identities of their ancestors, but many – often most – don't.

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aguaviva 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

No, it's just a different flavor of colonization.

Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.

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StefanBatory 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm Pole so I am biased, but... What was Soviet Union but another colonial project? And not to even say of countries they annexed. If Baltic states were not in Europe, everyone would agree that it was plain colonial arrangement.

"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."