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.

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 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."