Russian imperialism

This post is aimed at those useful idiots in the West who either support Russia or who claim they are 'neutral', because NATO is 'imperialist' which makes Ukraine just as bad than Russia. I was angered by a post on Facebook from an old friend who actually stated that Tony Blair is worse than Putin. [Blocked for good.]

Russia is an empire. An empire can be defined as "a political unit consisting of several territories and peoples, created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries". The difference between the current Russian empire and say, the former British or French empires, is geographic (it is contiguous, not offshore) and historic (the empire was punctuated by a period of being the 'Soviet empire'). But nevertheless, Russia is an empire.

At its peak in the 1860s, the Russian empire stretched well into Europe, with half of Poland, all of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and (from 1809 to 1917) Finland, within it. But the empire also stretched into North America - Alaska was Russian until 1867. 

Today, the Russian empire - other than ethnic Russians - includes hundreds of indigenous peoples subjugated by Moscow over the centuries, Russified to a greater or lesser extent. Buryats, Komi, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk, Chechens, deprived of their right to govern themselves, their languages and cultures crushed by tsars and commissars. 

Russia expanded eastward, conquering land at an average annual rate of the area of the Netherlands for 150 years. Hundreds of different nations were subjugated to the Tsar's will, and forcefully Russified. Serfdom - abolished in 1861- enslaved 23 million subjects of the Tsar (whilst in America, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally freed 3.5 million slaves - and started the Civil War).

After defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet empire extended beyond the farthest reaches of the Tsar's domain, with the subjugated satellite states stretching to the Elbe. By the Soviet times, the terms 'Russia' and 'Soviet Union' had become interchangeable in the West, with only purists and experts pedantically using the right term.

Example. I have a copy of Russian Self-Portraits by American photographer, David Attie. Published in 1978, it was a rare glimpse of ordinary people from behind the Iron Curtain. Attie set up a large view camera and full-length mirror in a studio; subjects were invited in to pose themselves and then press the shutter with a remote-release cable. They took Polaroid prints with negatives; the subjects would get the print and Attie would use the neg to print the photos for the book. This contained 84 self-portraits of individuals and groups. And here's the thing: the sessions took place in Kyiv (or Kiev as the book calls the Ukrainian capital). But the words 'Ukraine' and 'Ukrainians' are absent. There's only one mention (in the whole book!) - the Ukrainian Folk Ballet - suggesting cute folksy customs from bygone days. The words 'Soviet Union' and 'USSR' are also absent. Otherwise it's just  'Russians' in 'Russia'. It's as though a Chinese photographer visited Cardiff to take photographs of English people in England, and used them to represent the whole of the United Kingdom.

Russians tend to believe that Ukrainians are just Russians who've gone wrong - comedic bumpkins who speak funny who belong firmly within the Russki Mir. Because these 'Russians' have gone astray, choosing the West in preference to Mother Russia, they deserve nothing less than extermination, say a great many Russians (maybe even as many as one in five).

Who's dying for Russia? It's not ethnic Russians who are bearing the brunt of the fighting in Ukraine. On 6 April, the BBC’s Russian service compiled a list of names and regions of 1,083 of the 1,351 officially confirmed military deaths using official state and regional media sources. There was not one reported death from Moscow, a city of 13 million people, while 93 deaths - 9% - come from Dagestan alone. Buryatia has the next largest number of fatalities, at 52. [More here.] Imagine if in 1914 it transpired that the British soldiers killed at Mons, Arras or Namur were mostly from Ireland, Wales, Scotland or the Isle of Man  or Guernsey - and none were Londoners.

The Soviet Union's collapse was not followed by a period of national reckoning, as happened in Germany or Japan after 1945. There was no remorse, no attempt to describe what had occurred between 1918 and 1991- collectivisation, the Gulag, the Great Terror, the Holodomor - as wrong. Putin's popularity rests on perpetuating national myths - of the 'Great Patriotic War' (no one mention the Stalin-Hitler pact), the defeat of Nazi Germany, Sputnik and Gagarin - and a nuclear-armed empire spanning 11 time zones.

I can't find it now, but I recall reading a piece by an American journalist in Moscow about a taxi ride he took around the city. His driver, on hearing he had an American passenger, began to telling him how great everything was in Russia. When the American began listing the country's many shortcomings, the taxi driver changed tack. "Yes, you're right. It is a shit hole. Can you help me get a visa for the US?" The journalist said, helpfully, that it would be much easier to get a visa for Canada. The taxi driver spat on the floor of his car and said with disgust "I could never live in a country that's not a superpower!"

The British Empire faded away shortly after the crumbling of the Third Reich and the nuclear destruction of Imperial Japan. I can still remember 'Empire Day' at primary school being rebranded 'Commonwealth Day' after 1965, with children trooping around the playground carrying flags of the Commonwealth nations. But Russia insists - to this day - that its imperial sway holds dominion over Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and northern Kazakhstan. As well as - and it goes without saying - Buryats, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk and Komi people. Russian imperialists would dearly love to include the Baltic states and Poland into the fold - but fortunately, we are in NATO now.

See: White Fever - my review of Jacek Hugo-Bader's book about Russia's Far East

This time two years ago:
Drainage ditches and the hunters' pulpit
(The pulpit collapsed last year)

This time three years ago:
Aviation the theme 

This time four years ago:
Five closed-off hectares of central Warsaw

This time five years ago
Progress by the ponds

This time nine years ago:
Kaczyński's ignorance, deceit or folly? 

This time ten years ago:
The British electrical plug reigns supreme

This time 11 years ago:
Easter, and the end of Lent

This time 12 years ago:
That Icelandic volcano

This time 13 years ago:
Views of Historic Toruń

This time 14 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make