History of Russian Empire Thread

GarryB wrote:What has fair to do with it?

the British museum has lots of treasures from around the world that it refuses to return because it claims only it can look after them properly...  

The lesson is that if you steal something, just put it in a nice display case and you wont have to give it back...

Perfect example of this is the Elgin Marbles dispute between Greece and the UK.

This is an economics post but fits the thread theme. Russia has never been an Empire. It does not conform to the definition of
an Empire as a leech on its colonies. Instead, Russia elevated its "colonies" to levels higher than the center which basically
no Empire in history has ever done. The USSR inherited this un-Empire mode in the name of the communist ideal. You can now
see the impact of the collapse of the Russian un-Empire in Ukraine, the Baltics, and Central Asia. All of those "colonies" are reverting
to their original states.

Here is a nice video analysis:

Because they were not colonies in the western term but equal parts of Russia. That´s the problem of these "states". They are mostly artificial in nature. They had to invent there own history, which was mainly done by far-right extremists (coming from the west) in the 90´s. In that regard I don´t see it as an "error" of Russia to invest money in these regions in the past. Odessa, Riga and Baku were part of Russia just like Murmansk or Wladiwostok.

https://qr.ae/pNucGO

Here is an interesting answer post of mine and some of it relates to Grand Tartaria or forgotten Russian history.

Got something interesting for this board. https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421/https://www.stolenhistory.org/threads/tartary-an-empire-hidden-in-history-it-was-bigger-than-russia-once.40/

I wonder if Grand Tartaria should have its own thread here or not.

Did you know that stolypin created the anticommunist sentiment in ukraine and belorus? His plan was to encourage the creation of middle class yeomen or kulaks in those areas(through land loans) which would be an anticommunist political and financial bulwark, while great russian peasants were basically rentier farm laborers for their former masters or an industrial proletariat living in hellish conditions for barely any pay.


BTW if the Russian empire was so technologically advanced, why did it have to import all heavy machinery, like thornycroft boilers from england or germany? Every single russian warship was designed by westerners and/or built by westerners.

The same anticommunists who criticise the soviet union for importing western tech ignore these facts. The USSR had an excuse, a devastating civil war and utter technological backwardness. The russian empire had only its own aristorcratic inertia and backwardness as its excuse.

Russian imperial artillery and firearms were mostly designed by foreigners by the 19th century. The berdans, krnka rifles, russian smith and wessons had no ethnic russian input in their designs. The mosin nagant too wasnt fully russian. The russian impier just copied the maxim. They just copied the chauchat. Name me a single russian impeiral firearm which was mass produced and not designed by a westerner for hire? I can only think of the lender guns, putilov guns and fyodorov gun.

Moreover, the russian military officer corps was mainly a "varangian guard" for the romanovs consisting baltic german aristocrats. It was an ethnic aristocratic clique that didnt recruit based on skill but noble and ethnic connections. This lead to general incompetence which lead to the defeats at tannenberg, the russojapanese war, etc.

As for the lamenting about sikorsky, that guy just built helicopters and some flying boats and most of his designs were utter failures produced in boutique quantities. His helicopter designs are utterly inferior to the homegrown mil and kamov. The USSR became a leader in helicopter design by the 60s, so so much for the "loss" of sikorsky.

What is your guys opinion of Peter the Great? IMO he does not deserve being called great.

what do you guys think of this article by Politico about the Russia exploration of Alaska?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/russia-colonization-alaska-ukraine-00123352

andalusia wrote:what do you guys think of this article by Politico about the Russia exploration of Alaska?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/russia-colonization-alaska-ukraine-00123352

Standard propaganda shit that you brought here for some reason. Starting with the naming of events in Ukraine as "Russian aggression", ending with exaggerations of "Russian atrocities" in the American colonies. Compared to what the American settlers did, the Russians are not even 1% as bad, preferring to trade with the local population rather than pursue a policy of genocide, as the Americans did.
And this is even if we forget about the moronic narrative that equates Ukrainians with native American peoples.

The narrative in this article is retarded.   Ethnic Russians settled and inhabited the south and east of Soviet-concocted Ukraine since the
1600s.  Every freaking city in this region was founded by the Russian Empire.  They did not ethnically cleanse or genocide any indigenous
population.    The Tatar-Mongol horde is what destroyed the original population distribution in the Ukraine.   They burned Kiev to the ground
and there was a general depopulation of this region.   Kiev was an ethnic Russian city from its founding and was not any "Ukrainian" city.  
There was no such ethnic group in the 1200s and the arrival of the horde.  Ukrainians are an ethnic group created in the western-most
lands of Soviet Ukraine from ethnic Russians by Polish and Lithuanian assimilation.   They were put in this situation because of the horde.  
If there was no invasion by the Tatar-Mongol horde there would never have been such an ethnic group emerging and Kiev would have
remained the capital city of Russia.  

There is zero similarity between Ukraine and North America.   North America was invaded and settled by Europeans who had zero
historical presence there before the invasion.   Absolute zero and simply no claim to these lands.  It was a pure land grab and the indigenous
population was ethnically cleansed.   The Catholic Church pronounced that New World aboriginals did not have souls and that this
justified making them slaves.   The British and the French did not have this sort of fatwa but the end result was basically the same.

Claiming Russians are invading Ukraine like Europeans invaded the New World is intellectually insulting excrement.   They are "invading"
their own historic lands.   But, in fact, millions of them are still living there and never left.  Did New World aboriginals invade the New World,
genocide themselves and put the ones who survived onto reservations?

Scorpius wrote:

andalusia wrote:what do you guys think of this article by Politico about the Russia exploration of Alaska?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/russia-colonization-alaska-ukraine-00123352

Standard propaganda shit that you brought here for some reason. Starting with the naming of events in Ukraine as "Russian aggression", ending with exaggerations of "Russian atrocities" in the American colonies. Compared to what the American settlers did, the Russians are not even 1% as bad, preferring to trade with the local population rather than pursue a policy of genocide, as the Americans did.
And this is even if we forget about the moronic narrative that equates Ukrainians with native American peoples.

It is a half-truth.


The Aleuts were indeed badly treated by the Russians during the earliest period of their interaction with them, similar to how the English/Portuguese/Spaniards were treating most of the Native Americans; however, the Russian treatment of the Aleuts improved over time.


Also, the other Native American peoples were never treated as harshly by the Russians, so I guess the Aleuts were an unlucky exception.


But the impression you get from this manipulated article is that Russians always treated the Aleuts in a harsh and brutal manner, which is not true, and that they treated the other Native Americans in such a manner, which is also not true.



Russian Fort Ross on the Coast of California.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSRe5RewErI





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgQxH54mmMI



I have visited Fort Ross a long time ago.

It was nice to see it.

Ukr nazionalists claim every single Kievan Rus knyaz as being Ukr.   They also engage in the racist masturbation that Russians are Finno-Ugric invaders from the east.   So we had the absurd celebration in Kanada in 1988 of the 1000 years of "Ukrainian" Christianity.    Of course Russian Knyaz Vladimir became Ukr Volodymyr.  

Russia was Kievan Rus.   There was no migration into "Ukraine" by some Finno-Ugric tribe.   Moscow was founded because of the destruction of Kiev and partly by people who migrated out of "Ukraine".    

There is not a single example of the word "Ukrainian" existing and being used in the 1200s.  None of the "beresti" (birch bark scripts) have this word.   Also, the Ukr "national" symbol (the one that looks like trident) was one of the runes found on beresti.    The whole of Ukr identity and history is fake.   This seems to be a problem for some Slavic populations.   We have similar, but not as extreme, nonsense from the FYROM (now generously called Northern Macedonia) which claims Alexander the Great was a FYROMian.   Total absurdity.   These Slavs moved into the Balkans long after Alexander the Great during the first millenium AD.

Did Russia Try to Recreate the Byzantine Empire During the 18th Century?





The forgotten so-called "Greek Project."

Brief Overview of the Russian Colonies.

Video is entirely in Russian.





Port Artur (Kvantunskaya Oblast)
Alaska
Ross Stronghold (Fort Ross)
Hawaiian Island of Kauai
The mining settlements on Svalbard (these were Soviet and the video's author himself claims that it is open to debate if they should be counted as colonies).  


Not included is the short-lived New Moscow on the coast of Djibouti.

The video also mentions some plan to establish a colony on Madagascar, but I have no idea what he means by that, as he does not elaborate on the matter.

Kodiak Russian Creole, a Linguistic Legacy of the Russian Control over Portions of Southern Alaska.


"(...). Many contact languages are now threatened, including a few on the precipice of extinction, a state termed “dormancy” in linguistics. This map shows the 11 most critically endangered contact languages and where they are spoken. Some, like Kodiak Russian Creole, have so few remaining speakers, and were used in such insular situations and places, that linguists don’t know them well. (...)"

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2020/fragile-state-contact-languages



"(...) Kodiak Russian Creole, a language of approximately five speakers whose average age is 90 and apparently without a page on either Wikipedia or Ethnologue. (...)."

https://livinglanguages.wordpress.com/category/languages-spoken/kodiak-russian-creole/



Kodiak Russian Creole language has reportedly only five speakers left (are they all fluent?).

https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/2090




The so-called contact languages are artificial languages created by a mixture of two or more languages.


Other Russian-related contact languages:

Mednyj Aleut (extinct by late 2022).
Russenorsk (extinct by the 19th century).
Kyakhta Russian–Chinese Pidgin (extinct by the early 20th century).

Looking back on it, it was probably a good thing that the Tsars sold Alaska to the US can you imagine the cold war if Alaska was still part of Russia.  Th Russian Foreign Minister wrote a letter to the Tsar telling him that England had it's eyes on Alaska. Russia did not want a war with England, they would lose. Queen Victoria was related to the Tsar and was already moving against European rivals in South Africa and Asia.I think the US and Canada would have invaded and occupied Alaska in the 1930s or 1940s if the USSR since controlled it.  The Russians would not have been able to defend Alaska because of the Bering Strait barrier that separated Alaska from Russian land mass.  How would the USSR be able to defend Alaska from the US military at the conclusion of WWII would tensions were high between the two?  What do you guys think?






https://www.thestatesman.com/features/russia-sell-alaska-united-states-1503068737.html

It was probably the right move to sell it. It was indefensible and non-contiguous with the mainland. It's almost certain it would have been occupied by interventionist forces following the Bolshevik revolution and what it then would turn out to be is anyone's guess. Maybe a sort of Taiwan-like break-off state legitimized by a Russian government in exile supported by US and Britain, who knows.

But it also didn't add any value to Russia, really. Yeah it turned out to be rich in oil. But so is Siberia. So was Azerbaijan and a bunch of other places. Russia had enough oil.

flamming_python wrote:It was probably the right move to sell it. It was indefensible and non-contiguous with the mainland. It's almost certain it would have been occupied by interventionist forces following the Bolshevik revolution and what it then would turn out to be is anyone's guess. Maybe a sort of Taiwan-like break-off state legitimized by a Russian government in exile supported by US and Britain, who knows.

But it also didn't add any value to Russia, really. Yeah it turned out to be rich in oil. But so is Siberia. So was Azerbaijan and a bunch of other places. Russia had enough oil.

I think these are some of the situations that could have happened if Russia kept Alaska and the potential consequences:



1.   After the loss to Japan in 1905, Japan could have seized Alaska and gained control of it in post war negotiations.  This could have led to the US taking control of Alaska after defeating Japan in World War II.

2.   Russia could have still retained Alaska during the rest of the 19th century. However, Russia could have made the same mistake like Mexico in the 1820s and invited Americans to settle in Alaska to help populate it when gold was         discovered in the 1890s.  When the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution occurred, americans living in Alaska could have petitioned the US government to take over Alaska and protect them from Communist rule or could have declared independence and joined the US.  

3. In your scenario cited above, lets say if this break off state legitimized by a Russian government in exile would have reunited with Russia following the fall of communism in 1992, their would be an ever present danger of invasion by NATO that Russia would have to be concerned about.

4.  Canada wanted Alaska badly and could have encouraged Canadians to illegally settle it.  When the 1917 revolution occurred, Canada could invaded an taken control of the territory.  These Canadians probably would have used violence against Russians living in Alaska and taken possession of their property and expelled them from Alaska.  

There are probably other scenarios that others could think of but looking back, the Tsars didn't see the US as an enemy at that time and were allies and had a common enemy in the United Kingdom in the 19th century geopolitical world.

andalusia wrote:I think these are some of the situations that could have happened if Russia kept Alaska and the potential consequences:



1.   After the loss to Japan in 1905, Japan could have seized Alaska and gained control of it in post war negotiations.  This could have led to the US taking control of Alaska after defeating Japan in World War II.

2.   Russia could have still retained Alaska during the rest of the 19th century. However, Russia could have made the same mistake like Mexico in the 1820s and invited Americans to settle in Alaska to help populate it when gold was         discovered in the 1890s.  When the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution occurred, americans living in Alaska could have petitioned the US government to take over Alaska and protect them from Communist rule or could have declared independence and joined the US.  

3. In your scenario cited above, lets say if this break off state legitimized by a Russian government in exile would have reunited with Russia following the fall of communism in 1992, their would be an ever present danger of invasion by NATO that Russia would have to be concerned about.

4.  Canada wanted Alaska badly and could have encouraged Canadians to illegally settle it.  When the 1917 revolution occurred, Canada could invaded an taken control of the territory.  These Canadians probably would have used violence against Russians living in Alaska and taken possession of their property and expelled them from Alaska.  

There are probably other scenarios that others could think of but looking back, the Tsars didn't see the US as an enemy at that time and were allies and had a common enemy in the United Kingdom in the 19th century geopolitical world.

There was never any significant Russian settlement in Alaska. You had several hundred fur trappers from Russia working there, half of which were actually indigenous Siberian hunters, and some administrators and merchants too. Other than that the 'Russians' living in Alaska by the time of the sale of Alaska were either creole families of mixed Russians and Alaskan natives, or one of several native Alaskan tribes outright which converted to Orthodox Christianity. Both of these populations are still around by the way.

I think even if Russia kept control over the territory Americans and Canadians would go to prospect there one way or the other, I don't think the Russian colonial administration there had much real control past the coastlines anyway, and Russian legitimacy would fade away over time, so even the establishment of a Russian government in exile or anything of the sort would be unrealistic. It would simply have been taken over by the Americans or the British or the Japanese as you said once all these calamities began for Tsarist Russia

GarryB wrote:Hahaha... Imagine of it was still owned by Russia in 1905 and the Japs invaded Alaska and took it over... useful gas and oil resources to power the Japanese economy without the US or UK blockade being able to strangle them in the middle of the century to start WWII...

WWII might have been restricted to Europe and Alaska might be Japanese today.... solving their gas and oil problems and making them an independent state no longer occupied by the US.

I don't think so Garry, the US would have invaded Alaska. I don't think Japan would have been able to defend it. How would Japan be able to defend against a possible 30,000 US troop invasion force during WWII?

andalusia wrote:I don't think so Garry, the US would have invaded Alaska.  I don't think Japan would have been able to defend it.  How would Japan be able to defend against a possible 30,000 US troop invasion force during WWII?

If Japan had Alaska the Americans would not be able to strangle their economy with a ban on oil sales to them. Japan might not have even have been as tempted to go after the European colonies in Asia for their resources either. Long story short Japan might have stayed out of the wider war, attempting to preserve their empire in Korea and keeping their invasion to just China... which probably wouldn't work out well for them in the end anyway but it would take a lot longer.