4 ms·

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 peop

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

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.