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.
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.