Thread by @ksvarnon

"The Devil's cleverest wile is to make men believe that he does not exist." This is Russian imperial history. I don't have time to go over ALL of Russian colonization and imperialism, so here are some highlights: 1/n

Siberia: Siberia is home to a myriad of indigenous groups who practice(d) pagan and naturalist religions. Throughout the 16th-19th centuries, the Russian imperial state used settler colonialism to Russify these areas and to force the indigenous peoples to become Orthodox.

The Caucasus: Home to dozens of peoples incl. Muslims. This region was last Russia colonized (19th c.) in a brutal, violent series of conflicts that sought to destroy the Islamic faith and practices of the people who called it home. Native languages were oppressed. 3

Kazakhstan: During the Imperial and Soviet period there were concerted efforts to destroy the nomadic practices and non-Orthodox religious practices on the Steppe. A reasonable comparison (in the goal) to the Dawes Act in US History. 4

Ukraine: Russianization of Ukraine began long before the Soviet period. The Valuev circular made it illegal to publish in Ukrainian. The government oppressed Ukrainian writers and scholars. 5

And the Pale of Settlement: Russia had forced settlement of Jews in today's Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. Jews were subject to official anti-Semitism and incredible public violence for centuries. Read Dostoyevsky for a glimpse of cultural popularity. 6

Main themes: violent settler colonization, oppression of minority languages and faiths (like beating Georgians and Ukrainians for speaking their languages in school), divide-and-conquer methods of rule, Russianization, deportation, resource extraction. 7

I have class, but I will write a longer piece on this. Russia did not participate in the Scramble for Africa because it already had a massive, land-based empire with the resources it wanted. It had used violence to repress the myriad of ethnic groups who lived there. 8

The racial and ethnic hierarchies the Russian empire utilized to oppress indigenous groups in Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Far East exist. Their legacies have continued. The Devil is a lie, and so is the idea that Russia wasn't a brutal imperial power. Fin.

And this is just Russian imperial history. Soviet history is an entirely new bag of worms.

Last thing: when you say Russia wasn’t imperialist you erase the history of the oppression of millions of people. You erase the ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of the largest country in the world, and how it was made through imperialism.

I’ll write my piece and put together a short reading list on Russian imperial history (b/c Soviet is another thing) sometime this week.