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.
Ukrainians were amongst the foremost settlers in tsarist russia as well. Southern Ukraine, Don-Kuban region, Crimea, Siberia, they all werent indigenous ukrainian lands.
The fact is that the Soviet Union tried to reverse that, they actual had affirmative action and land back (for a time). The “problem” with the soviets building like a city in northern Siberia (massive areas where there are only like 10k yakuts for example) to extract necessary resources, since you know they were under attack by the west, is that many times native Siberians would migrate into these cities (for like the hospitals or schools) and stay. So on paper the xyz ssr suddenly becomes 70% non-native, despite those 70% being located in like one city, while the rest of the ssr is still native villages. Also Intermarriage is quite common in Siberia. And languages of the natives are still mandatory at school, I cant say the same for most natives of north america.
During Stalin’s time a lot of these programs were rolled back due to the fear of nazi/west collaboration, which did happen and was a point of infiltration during the cold war.