Something I’ve heard from both liberal friends irl and liberals online (especially if they are from the Baltics, Ukraine, and possibly Central Asia) is that the USSR/Russia was/is a settler colonial empire. I will often hear this claim in the context about discussion of western settler colonialism.
If a socialist points out the (indisputable) fact that settler colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing is a structural component of western liberal democracy and its capitalist expansion, pro-western liberals will pull a reverse “whataboutism” and claim that “actually, it’s not unique to America, Canada, Israel, Britain, etc. because the evil communist Russians did it in [Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, the Central Asian republics] too!”
I always found this suspicious. Like, I know there were ethnic deportations under Stalin and obviously that’s fucked up. But is that really comparable to the completely endemic nature of this shit to western governments for the past 500 years? The character of the USSR, being a state that emerged from a reactionary empire but also not one explicitly founded on racial supremacist ideology, always made these equivalencies between western vs. Russian settler colonialism ring hollow to me.
In sum, I would like a clear, more objective, and contextualized explanation of ethnic policy in the USSR and Warsaw Pact writ large since trying to do a comparison of pure deportation and death statistics feels like a macabre and futile exercise.
EDIT: The overarching reason I wanted to look into this is because I get annoyed by liberal narratives of history that mostly just group people and movements into being either “good” or “bad” according to their set of prescribed moral axioms (rule of law, individual freedoms, property rights, yada yada). Structures inherent to modern capitalism like colonization/imperialism are simply dismissed as “ah, well that’s because of bad people, unlike us, who only want good things!” They’ll turn around and point at socialist or anti-colonial projects as engaging in the same crimes because, again, “bad people” are the ones who inevitably end up in charge if you get too radical. They will say, “socialist revolution is bad, don’t you know Stalin killed people? We can only have small incremental changes.” There is never any further examination or analysis of historical or economic contexts, or why things happen. It’s all just “good” people and “bad” people.
They didn’t do the thing where they moved a bunch of Russian people into an area to displace the local population, did they? That would he settler colonialism and I don’t recall many instances of that.
Like someone else said, closest you can say that happened was maybe sending people to Siberia, but they never sent enough people to really make it happen.
But hopefully someone with more knowledge of history speaks up.
And AFAIK, the movement of people to Siberia was to get people out of the way of the incoming Nazi war machine intent on carrying out actual colonization and genocide. Like a lot of Jews were moved behind and beyond Moscow because the Soviets were worried about what the Germans had planned. Since, y’know, Hitler wrote a whole book about how he wanted to kill everything between Poland and Korea.
I’m going to use NATOpedia as a source here (I know, I know) since I think it’s a decent barometer for liberal narratives. Of course, tons of [citation needed] everywhere. On Russification: It seems like the policy was varied over the USSR’s lifetime, but I really can’t find any instances here that could be considered settler colonial, certainly not in the sense of the U.S. or Isr*el. Rather, it seems like early on there was more of an encouragement of indigenization (“Korenizatsiia”) to ensure loyalty of the USSR’s many ethnic minorities to the socialist project, but then by the late thirties, Stalin became concerned with bourgeois nationalism and tried to emphasize Russian culture in particular. This led to the persecution and transfer of ethnic minorities that were deemed suspicious and possibly potential collaborators with Nazi Germany (eg. Volga Germans) or Imperial Japan (eg. Koreans). Later on, after WWII, there was still Russification in the sense that the Russian language was emphasized or mandatory in schools across the USSR, but I still can’t find any evidence of Russians being massively settled in a place while the original ethnic population is completely killed or sent to constricted reservations
I thought this was an interesting (again, liberal) article from the Harvard library system, which includes accounts from a British journalist who was apparently in the USSR’s central Asian region during the 1930s. In it, the author talks about how the in the 1920s the USSR would do things like decolonize the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan of Cossack/Slavic settlers, and perhaps overemphasize ethnic nationalism of western Soviet populations like the Finns, Poles, and Germans (to sort of ensure their loyalty to the Soviet cause). The author calls these more decolonial, progessive sorts of actions the “Piedmont principle” and calls the more reactionary population transfer policy an instance of ideological/“national security” driven xenophobia (rather than explicitly racial.)
So my primary takeaway so far, is that no, the USSR was not a settler colonial entity, but a very contradictory place that had to navigate being a multi-ethnic socialist republic after emerging from a feudal, chauvinistic empire. The internal population transfers, while definitionally ethnic cleansing, were not purely driven by a sort of hierarchical racial supremacy/settler colonial mentality but were much more ideologically based in paranoid/xenophobic concerns about foreign collaboration.
I don’t think sending people to Siberia was settler-colonial. It’s very sparsely inhabited and for good reason, since it’s pretty hostile to life, and I don’t think the native population was seriously displaced or overrun. In addition, as others note, people sent to siberia were usually prisoners or temporary refugees (but sometimes people displaced by the USSR itself, like the Volga Germans).
I think you’d have an easier time talking about the Russians who took up former Volga German territory, though it’s worth mentioning that many different groups ended up populating it.