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.
Russian Empire did engage in settler colonialism in Caucasus and USSR tried to somewhat rectify it, especially given that settlers consistently sided with Whites.
Interesting, do you have some more sources on this?
I believe some keywords here are “Circassian genocide” and “de-Cossackization”. I have a hard time finding explicitly Marxist sources about these things and there naturally tend to be a lot of brainworms in how non-Marxist sources discuss these things — which I find a bit shameful, because the Circassian genocide is one of those historical events where once you know about it, it suddenly starts showing up in all sorts of unusual places. It’s got connections to P. T. Barnum’s circus, a random Japanese Internet meme, the Sochi Olympics, the conscription practices of the IOF, the extinction of the non-click language with the greatest number of consonants, and the way Cossacks dress, among other things.
Prolewiki’s incredibly brief mention of the Circassian genocide on the page for “Russian Empire” cites Austin Murphy’s The Triumph of Evil (2000), which itself doesn’t say much about the Circassian genocide, but does cite The Massacre in History (War and Genocide, 1) by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (1999), so that book might be a good place to start when it comes to Imperial Russian settler-colonialism along the Black Sea coast — though I haven’t read it myself so I can’t necessarily give it my stamp of approval. I don’t know where you’d find a PDF of it.
The only mention of “de-Cossackization” on the Marxists Internet Archive is this Macedonian-language article.
Otherwise, you have the keywords, so you can find a lot of liberal writings through Wikipedia or Google Scholar or JSTOR or whatever else.
4·4 months agoThe Massacre in History (War and Genocide, 1)
I can tell from the filename it comes from the Internet Archive… oh right, it says it with
ia.Bangers, thanks!
The book is very shallow on the Soviet Union in regards to the Circassians, taking some more words to describe what has already been described in this thread.
Edit: the natopedia stuff marx_ex_machina brought up.
Thanks! I also found a source of my own that I linked above (the article from the Harvard library system) that briefly talks about de-Cossackization, where the Soviet government tried to remove some of the reactionary Cossack settlers who had displaced the local populations in the north Caucasus.
the “polish plumber” is settler colonist of polish empire. (that’s as related to baltics/poland/ukraine post-stalin, people moving around is not settler colonialism, there are polish/caucasian/german/uzbek people all around modern russia left from ussr times), and additionally accounts that ussr was plundering it’s friends are close to just rewriting history flat out, western part of warsaw pact was richer throughout ussr development (only eastern germany was close to plundered, but they know what they did)
i mean, depending how you frame it, conquest of siberia during 17-19th century was close to colonialism, they would build out outposts staffed with military to pacify population, but mainly cause the population density, they didn’t achieve same level of hegemony as american colonialists, closer to colonialist part of the equation, not so much settler part (which would be somewhat escaped peasants, but again - very low density of population).
The conquest of Siberia was closer to feudal conquests, where the main goal was to tax local population and control trade, rather than settle the land, and control was exercised mostly through local vassals, supplemented by small Russian garrisons in ostrogs, which were a cross between small wooden fortresses, trade outposts and sometimes prisons.
that is close to british raj in essence no? kind of administration on top of local sympathesizers. Only cause small density it was rather trivial in size and scope, and wealth extraction was more like we will hunt for furs here (early on obv) or mine some stuff (got worse in 18-19th century) and tax trade. I think by the 1917, local indigenous people were sympathetic to ussr but i don’t remember whether it was from general peasant or specific nationalist oppresion.
British Raj also significantly relied on old feudal relations to function. The main difference IMO is that British India was permeated by capitalist relations from the beginning, while in Siberia they were very weak due to extremely low surplus value production in local economies.
Similar on a surface level, but so is almost any government if you just define it by “tax local population and control trade.” The British Raj was much more than taxing, it completely reshaped (destroyed) the Indian economic base to turn it into a raw resource supplier.
I believe it’s more of a function of population density, not some enlightened minorities view, cause in caucus there were much more india adjacent shit (pitting local minorities against one another, military campaigns). One could argue they were just absorbing local khanates in siberia, which were leftovers from mongols.
But i think colonialism fairly well describes it tbh, they just couldn’t extract either slaves or commodities or settle as in america, so they were more light on the oppression side, cause there was no purpose to hunt 20k local population over territory of wales in dense forests/mountains/steppes to get them to do stuff (especially when the stuff to do, at the time, could be described as forestry+ at best), when they can just control roads with outposts and trade.
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.
whataboutism 
The Tsars engaged in feudal conquest westward, brutally slaughtering their way across the Urals to the Pacific and leaving behind the corpses of the conquered and the peasant conscripts whos lives were spent to take the land. Over the decades those lands would slowly be settled by migrants and exiles from the imperial heartlands. It wasn’t until the annexation of outer Manchuria that migration of Russians (as in the empires citizens not the ethnic group) really began to pick up and the opening of the trans-siberian railway “brought civilization to the wild east”. While not necessarily exactly like the u.s westward expansion, the Russian Tsardom’s expansion holds strikingly strong similarities to America.
In the late modern era, around the same time the u.s was exterminating or expelling native Americans from their homelands, the Russian Tsardom was engaged in similar circumstances with Circassia and Chechnya.
There was also similar circumstances occurring in the Kazakh steppe where the Russian imperials worked to destroy the nomadic lifestyle of the people there, causing mass starvation and revolts against the squalid conditions forced upon the indigenous population as the Trans-Aral Railway “brought civilization to the south” and Russian migrants to settle newly opened lands.
This was what the Soviet Union was forced to inherit with its creation. During its early years under Lenin and the pre-war Stalin period, considerable work was made to try and remedy wrongs made against the fraternal Soviet nations ranging from focused industrial development in their respective nations to emplacing positive discrimination laws to proletarianize the people out of their squalid living standards.
Of course in the years building up to the war and the period thereafter positive discrimination and other measures were ended in order to focus on building up for the inevitable war. This period also say rollbacks in woman’s reproductive rights, an end to the discrimination and persecution of traditionalist elements and a generally more conservative and patriotic fostered culture.
Overall to touch base with what you’re talking about, shitlibs are just absurdly myopic to the point of ignorance to the rest of history in relation to their hate for communism in addition to wanting to paper over the indiscriminate evils perpetrated by our still-existing government on the native Americans of the past and the present. Additionally we as communists have to be careful as well to not embrace the mistake of national exceptionalism as it is akin to putting horse-blinders on to focus solely on a singular point ahead of us and and thus become blinded to the wider lessons history can teach us.
