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Western Ukraine was pre-war Poland; the population was resettled to settle parts of Germany that were annexed to Poland post-war. This is part of several massi

Western Ukraine was pre-war Poland; the population was resettled to settle parts of Germany that were annexed to Poland post-war. This is part of several massive ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin so successful that we forget about them today. But you are right that there was substantial continuity between imperial Russian and Soviet policy around russification of the various provinces. With regard to Solidarity, there were plenty of resistance movements in Eastern Europe over the years; the real shocker around its 1988 incarnation was that it was allowed to peacefully assume power, and the Soviet Union didn't impose a red line enforced by tanks. That was new! It wasn't the return of Solidarity so much as Gorbachev openly saying "we're not going to intervene" that got the process of collapse rolling.

keiferski 2y ago
Well, personally I don’t forget about them because I actually have some Lemko ancestry, which are the group of people that got moved. Again I don’t think as a whole the Soviets really did a great job assimilating cultures outside of historically Russified areas. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time to do so, but more in a broad geopolitical sense, I’m not sure it ever would have worked.
- idlewords 2y ago
  I see the process more in line with how China handles being a multi-ethnic state. You have a dominant ethnicity and a pretty aggressive program of settling people from that ethnicity in the provinces. If you were a Russian engineer or doctor, you had a fair chance of being sent to Kishinev or Almaty or somewhere else in the empire; conversely, bright up-and-comers in the provinces would have a chance to come to St. Petersburg or Moscow. The Soviet state, like the PRC today, took care to advertise its many ethnicities while making sure as a practical matter that Russia would be the dominant power. I think you have to be careful excluding "historically Russified areas" in your evaluation, because then that kind of begs the question. Those areas didn't just russify themselves! I agree that the process happens on longer time scales than the Soviet Union lasted for, but I think they continued a quite successful tradition from Tsarist times, with the added help of extremely aggressive and mostly forgotten ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin, like the removal of the Volga Germans.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Maybe another way to put it is: the Russian empire was reasonably “successful” (not actually good, ethically, IMO) in assimilating areas that had a stronger tie to the historical Eastern Orthodox core of the Moscow state. Tie also meaning the expulsions you mentioned. They had a more difficult time on the borders of and outside this zone. (Poland, for example.) This continued into the Soviet era. A good metric of assimilation might be the alphabet. Seems to me that if the imperial core is using one alphabet (Cyrillic) but outlying areas with a hostile history are using another (Latin), then the assimilation process wasn’t working and perhaps never would work. And more broadly this alphabet difference is really a religious-cultural difference going back a millennium. In short, IMO the Latin-using Catholic Poles had a long history of being different from the Cyrillic-using Orthodox Eastern Slavs, and were large enough as a group to not get relocated or assimilated, and therefore basically never would have been properly assimilated into the Russian-dominated Soviet identity.

keiferski 2y ago

Well, personally I don’t forget about them because I actually have some Lemko ancestry, which are the group of people that got moved. Again I don’t think as a whole the Soviets really did a great job assimilating cultures outside of historically Russified areas. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time to do so, but more in a broad geopolitical sense, I’m not sure it ever would have worked.

idlewords 2y ago
I see the process more in line with how China handles being a multi-ethnic state. You have a dominant ethnicity and a pretty aggressive program of settling people from that ethnicity in the provinces. If you were a Russian engineer or doctor, you had a fair chance of being sent to Kishinev or Almaty or somewhere else in the empire; conversely, bright up-and-comers in the provinces would have a chance to come to St. Petersburg or Moscow. The Soviet state, like the PRC today, took care to advertise its many ethnicities while making sure as a practical matter that Russia would be the dominant power. I think you have to be careful excluding "historically Russified areas" in your evaluation, because then that kind of begs the question. Those areas didn't just russify themselves! I agree that the process happens on longer time scales than the Soviet Union lasted for, but I think they continued a quite successful tradition from Tsarist times, with the added help of extremely aggressive and mostly forgotten ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin, like the removal of the Volga Germans.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Maybe another way to put it is: the Russian empire was reasonably “successful” (not actually good, ethically, IMO) in assimilating areas that had a stronger tie to the historical Eastern Orthodox core of the Moscow state. Tie also meaning the expulsions you mentioned. They had a more difficult time on the borders of and outside this zone. (Poland, for example.) This continued into the Soviet era. A good metric of assimilation might be the alphabet. Seems to me that if the imperial core is using one alphabet (Cyrillic) but outlying areas with a hostile history are using another (Latin), then the assimilation process wasn’t working and perhaps never would work. And more broadly this alphabet difference is really a religious-cultural difference going back a millennium. In short, IMO the Latin-using Catholic Poles had a long history of being different from the Cyrillic-using Orthodox Eastern Slavs, and were large enough as a group to not get relocated or assimilated, and therefore basically never would have been properly assimilated into the Russian-dominated Soviet identity.