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.
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.