Russian imperialism pre-2022

[Ĝasper]

There's been a narrative for a few years of Russian state interference in other state's affairs. I feel like a fool for dismissing it as a conspiracy theory designed by Western hawks like Hilary Clinton in the USA and anti-Brexit fanatics in the UK to divert attention away from the failings of the liberal elite. The hegemony of Western supremacy blinded me (us?) to the fact that other non-Western powers play the same dirty tricks which our states play. Or at least I was mostly disinterested, if conscious of it.

A timeline of such (alleged) interference, with some side issues also included.

• 1994-6: Attempted Russian coup leads to war in Chechnya. Russia is defeated
• 1999-2009: Second Russo-Chechen war; Checnya incorporated into Russia.
• 2006 targetted fatal posonings of a Russian national in England (Litvinenko).
• 2008: Russia invades Georgia, and has occupied a number of counties ever since
• 2010 Smolensk air disaster kills 96 Polish officials in Russian airspace. They were travelling to commemorate the Katyn massacre in which 1000s of Polish military officers were killed by Soviet forces in 1940. 3 days before the 2010 plane crash, Putin had joined Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a different ceremony commemorating the massacre, marking the first time that a Russian leader had taken part in such a commemoration.
  • Prelude to Polish far-right taking power?
• 2013 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was due to sign a treaty with the EU, but pulled out last minute to embrace Russia instead. Students protested this and were battered by the police, leading to months of Euromaidan protests, and a 'Revolution of Dignity' in Febuary 2014 which overthrew the government and sent Yanukovych packing for Russia. The protesters were politically diverse, but condemned by Russia as neo-nazis.
  • There are some who call this an American coup...
  • Days later, Russia seizes Crimea. The soldiers removed their insignia, and Putin initially claimed no responsibility. Russian launched propaganda stating that Western Ukrainian Neo-Nazis were marching East to destroy the Russian-speaking population. Disinformation rallied Russian speaking Ukrainians to fight for Putin, to secede and join the Russian Federation. This was the origin of the war in Donbas, 2014-present.
• 2014 explosion of Czech army ammunition depot
• 2016 interference in Brexit referendum influencing outcome
  • social media bots, etc
  • 'Cambridge Analytica' Etonians face the same charge
• 2016 interference in US presidential election, influencing Trump victory
  • social media bots, leaking dodgy Clinton documents
  • Again, 'Cambridge Analytica' Etonians face the same charge
  • Trump later claimed that Ukraine had interfered in that election; a topic of Trump's first impeachment, 2019-20.
  • 2017: Trump sacked James Comey, head of CIA, because he investigated Russian interference
• 2018 targeted fatal poisonings of Russians living in England (the Skripals), and non-targetted poisonings of English people.
  • In the aftermath of 2014 Euromaidan, the Biden family capitalised upon Ukrainian gas. In 2019, Trump asked Zelenskyy to publicly condemn the Bidens as corrupt, and refused to handover $400m of agreed military aid to Ukraine because Zelenskyy never complied.
• 2020: UK parliament releases 'Russian report' stating that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace.
• 2020 interference in US presidential election
  • social media bots, slandering Biden
• 2021: Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania is intercepted in Belarus's air space, forced to land, with Belarus opposition activist Roman Protasevich and partner being arrested, and later disappearing.
• 2021-2: Lukashenko entices migrants from the Middle East, weaponising them, and sending them into Poland and the Baltic States.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

By pre-2022 I presume you mean 1991-2022?

 

[Cid]

Damn I was hoping for discussion of the Russo-Japanese war.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I still have some questions about that plane that went down in Smolensk with half the Polish government on board.

e2a: I see it's in the OP's list. As you were.

 

[turing test]

Damn I was hoping for discussion of the Russo-Japanese war.

That was a nice Navel battle. Hemmed em right in

 

[Dogsauce]

This is the view of someone from Estonia. Their opinion is that because Russian imperialism has never been challenged and because nobody has been held to account for atrocities over the last century then nothing will change, it’s part of the mindset and Russia always goes to war like this. Quite pessimistic really.

 

[hitmouse]

Echoing that Simon Pirani article posted over on another thread, I'd point out that tje list in the OP is missing the Russian intervention in Syria, one of the major imperialist atrocities of the century so far:

After six years of Russian airstrikes in Syria, still no accountability for civilian deaths

Airwars has tracked up to 23,000 civilian deaths from Russian military actions since 2015 - with Moscow yet to concede a single casualty.

airwars.org

As for the "Putin done Trump and Brexit" stuff, I'm skeptical of it in the same way I'm skeptical of "US/NATO/EU done Maidan" claims - I'm sure Russia gets up to dirty tricks and tries to influence the affairs of other countries just as much as any other state does, if not more so, but it wasn't Putin who created the circumstances that led to large numbers of people being sympathetic to Trump/Brexiteers' arguments, or that made Democrats/Remainers unable to appeal to a large enough constituency to outweigh them. Or who left the US with that daft electoral college system meaning that Trump could lose the popular vote and still win, I suppose.

 

[Dystopiary]

This is a good article on the colonialist and racist aspects of the USSR, effects of which are still felt today, particularly in North and Central Asia.

Why romanticising the Soviet Union obscures its colonial past

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

This is a good article on the colonialist and racist aspects of the USSR, effects of which are still felt today, particularly in North and Central Asia.

Why romanticising the Soviet Union obscures its colonial past

Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to say that under the Tsars, the Soviet Union and today, all the non-Russian nationalities of the various Russian empires have suffered either genocidal assaults, cultural denial, oppression and Russification or discrimination on a day to day level. All while pretending it never happens and never happened.

 

[petee]

Damn I was hoping for discussion of the Russo-Japanese war.

i was hoping for a discussion of Ivan III.

 

[Dystopiary]

Today marks 78 years since Crimean Tatars were forcibly displaced. Crimean Tatars have long suffered from Soviet and Russian colonialism.

May 18: In The Memory for the Deported Crimean Tatars - Democracy Seminar

Thread by @Engelhardt_dcc on Thread Reader App

Thread by @ahatanhel on Thread Reader App

 

[Dystopiary]

Long thread by Maksym Eristavi on Russian colonialism, it's well worth your time and contains a lot of links to other sources of info.

Content warning: details and pictures of dead people and colonialist atrocities.

Thread by @MaximEristavi on Thread Reader App

Original twitter thread started here:

 

[likesfish]

Chechnya the Russians got “creative” with some of their atrocities when they didn’t just use Russian smart weapons they hit Chechnya they were smart enough

 

[Dystopiary]

Long thread by Maksym Eristavi on Russian colonialism, it's well worth your time and contains a lot of links to other sources of info.

Content warning: details and pictures of dead people and colonialist atrocities.

Thread by @MaximEristavi on Thread Reader App

Original twitter thread started here:

Maksym Eristavi has added a lot to this thread and in the footnotes he's linked to many other resources on the subject.
Of course Russian colonialism goes back a lot further, but the period his thread covers is 1917 to the present.

Thread by @maksymeristavi on Thread Reader App

 

[Dystopiary]

Maksym Eristavi has added a lot to this thread and in the footnotes he's linked to many other resources on the subject.
Of course Russian colonialism goes back a lot further, but the period his thread covers is 1917 to the present.

Thread by @maksymeristavi on Thread Reader App

Maksym Eristavi's thread on Russian colonialism has been translated

by Soudabeh Qaisari into Farsi: Thread by @SoudabehQaisari on Thread Reader App

by nameislev into Russian: Thread by @nameislev on Thread Reader App

 

[Tanya1982]

I thought this was a great read - I was sorry when it ended, I'd have happily read much more of it - elegantly expressed, left me looking for more in all sorts of directions...

Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets’ Archenemies

Revisiting Russia’s brutal civil war

www.theatlantic.com

 

[Dystopiary]

Thread by Madi Kapparov on Khazakstan's Holodomor, Arshyshylyk:

Thread by @MuKappa on Thread Reader App

Much like with the Holodomor, besides Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich and Genrikh Yagoda were the main architects planning the depopulation of non-russians in the SSRs that were deemed "unloyal" to the empire. For Ukraine and Kazakhstan, hunger was chosen as the main genocidal tool.

1914: 6+ million Kazakhs (Bukeikhanov)
1926: 3.96 million Kazakhs (USSR census)
1937: 2.18 million Kazakhs (USSR census)

 

[ViolentPanda]

Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to say that under the Tsars, the Soviet Union and today, all the non-Russian nationalities of the various Russian empires have suffered either genocidal assaults, cultural denial, oppression and Russification or discrimination on a day to day level. All while pretending it never happens and never happened.

Although Russia gives it lots of mouth about how Ukraine is Russia's "little brother", they always leave out the fact that Ukraine fought the Reds, the Whites & the fascist adventurers & mercenaries off for a couple of years, with rifles & mounted irregulars. They also leave out the fact that they starved millions of us to death by stealing crops & shipping them east to Moscow, to keep Russians fed.

 

[not-bono-ever]

hello ViolentPanda !

 

[seventh bullet]

I thought this was a great read - I was sorry when it ended, I'd have happily read much more of it - elegantly expressed, left me looking for more in all sorts of directions...

Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets’ Archenemies

Revisiting Russia’s brutal civil war

www.theatlantic.com

It doesn't mention what the Tsarist cadets were up to prior to the capture of Taganrog by a Red Guard expeditionary force under Antonov-Ovseenko. Unleashing terror on the local working population, including severing limbs and burying people alive for even just being suspected of having Bolshevik sympathies. The locals demanded revenge for the atrocities carried out against them, and their imaginative cruelty saw a fitting punishment for the young scions who, no doubt, screamed as they were thrown one by one into the local foundry's blast furnace.

 

[Flavour]

Wasn't where to put this:

New New York times article about Russian meddling in Trump-era Washington

archive.ph

"There, with the skyline shimmering though the cigar-smoke haze, Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.

Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.

The scheme cut against decades of American policy promoting a free and united Ukraine, and a President Clinton would no doubt maintain, or perhaps even harden, that stance. But Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent."

 

[zahir]

Some history that I wasn't aware of:



If you don't want to go on twitter: Thread by @VlStarodubtsev on Thread Reader App

 

[seventh bullet]

Volga Tatar Sultan-Galiev, the Muslim National Communist, was brought on to incorporate an 'autonomous' Crimean region following Cheka repression. He would later fall foul of the Soviet government himself for his views and 'Sultan-Galievism' would later become Stalinese for a particular form of petite bourgeois nationalist deviation among Muslim minorities in the Caucasus and Central Asia, to be dealt with by tribunals and bullets.

 

[zahir]

Academics rethinking Russian imperialism

Moscow's Invasion Of Ukraine Triggers 'Soul-Searching' At Western Universities As Scholars Rethink Russian Studies

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is having a significant impact on the world of academia, pushing scholars in a field that has long focused primarily on Russia to reconsider how they study and teach the history and culture of a region spanning two continents.

www.rferl.org

 

[_Russ_]

Although Russia gives it lots of mouth about how Ukraine is Russia's "little brother", they always leave out the fact that Ukraine fought the Reds, the Whites & the fascist adventurers & mercenaries off for a couple of years, with rifles & mounted irregulars. They also leave out the fact that they starved millions of us to death by stealing crops & shipping them east to Moscow, to keep Russians fed.

You were starved to death by Russians?, you're looking good for it matey

 

[Dystopiary]

You were starved to death by Russians?, you're looking good for it matey

Despite the Soviet Russian authorities' efforts to destroy a people and cover up the evidence, there remain testimonies from survivors of the Holodmor.

A Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, visited Ukraine and Soviet Russia and was shocked by what he saw: people being starved to death. He wanted to tell the world, first he did so anonymously in the Times, later under his own name. He was kidnapped and murdered in 1935, aged 29.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

There's been a narrative for a few years of Russian state interference in other state's affairs. I feel like a fool for dismissing it as a conspiracy theory designed by Western hawks like Hilary Clinton in the USA and anti-Brexit fanatics in the UK to divert attention away from the failings of the liberal elite. The hegemony of Western supremacy blinded me (us?) to the fact that other non-Western powers play the same dirty tricks which our states play. Or at least I was mostly disinterested, if conscious of it.

A timeline of such (alleged) interference, with some side issues also included.

• 1994-6: Attempted Russian coup leads to war in Chechnya. Russia is defeated
• 1999-2009: Second Russo-Chechen war; Checnya incorporated into Russia.
• 2006 targetted fatal posonings of a Russian national in England (Litvinenko).
• 2008: Russia invades Georgia, and has occupied a number of counties ever since
• 2010 Smolensk air disaster kills 96 Polish officials in Russian airspace. They were travelling to commemorate the Katyn massacre in which 1000s of Polish military officers were killed by Soviet forces in 1940. 3 days before the 2010 plane crash, Putin had joined Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a different ceremony commemorating the massacre, marking the first time that a Russian leader had taken part in such a commemoration.
  • Prelude to Polish far-right taking power?
• 2013 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was due to sign a treaty with the EU, but pulled out last minute to embrace Russia instead. Students protested this and were battered by the police, leading to months of Euromaidan protests, and a 'Revolution of Dignity' in Febuary 2014 which overthrew the government and sent Yanukovych packing for Russia. The protesters were politically diverse, but condemned by Russia as neo-nazis.
  • There are some who call this an American coup...
  • Days later, Russia seizes Crimea. The soldiers removed their insignia, and Putin initially claimed no responsibility. Russian launched propaganda stating that Western Ukrainian Neo-Nazis were marching East to destroy the Russian-speaking population. Disinformation rallied Russian speaking Ukrainians to fight for Putin, to secede and join the Russian Federation. This was the origin of the war in Donbas, 2014-present.
• 2014 explosion of Czech army ammunition depot
• 2016 interference in Brexit referendum influencing outcome
  • social media bots, etc
  • 'Cambridge Analytica' Etonians face the same charge
• 2016 interference in US presidential election, influencing Trump victory
  • social media bots, leaking dodgy Clinton documents
  • Again, 'Cambridge Analytica' Etonians face the same charge
  • Trump later claimed that Ukraine had interfered in that election; a topic of Trump's first impeachment, 2019-20.
  • 2017: Trump sacked James Comey, head of CIA, because he investigated Russian interference
• 2018 targeted fatal poisonings of Russians living in England (the Skripals), and non-targetted poisonings of English people.
  • In the aftermath of 2014 Euromaidan, the Biden family capitalised upon Ukrainian gas. In 2019, Trump asked Zelenskyy to publicly condemn the Bidens as corrupt, and refused to handover $400m of agreed military aid to Ukraine because Zelenskyy never complied.
• 2020: UK parliament releases 'Russian report' stating that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace.
• 2020 interference in US presidential election
  • social media bots, slandering Biden
• 2021: Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania is intercepted in Belarus's air space, forced to land, with Belarus opposition activist Roman Protasevich and partner being arrested, and later disappearing.
• 2021-2: Lukashenko entices migrants from the Middle East, weaponising them, and sending them into Poland and the Baltic States.

Can it be conclusively proven that Russia definitely interfered to make Brexit happen and get Trump elected? There are apparently those in Russia who are anti-Putin who claim that this is not true, though Putin is apparently happy for people to believe it.

 

[A380]

MI5 refused to investigate ‘Russian spy’s’ links to Tories, says whistleblower

Party member lodges a complaint about the security services ignoring attempt of Russian infiltration into the Conservatives

www.theguardian.com

 

[zahir]

Open access book about Russian imperialism and nationalism pre-1917

The Tsar, the Empire, and the Nation

ceupress.com

This book addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire that first appeared on the empire’s western periphery. It was most prevalent in the twelve provinces extending from the Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, and in the Kingdom of Poland.

Did the late Russian Empire enter World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians? The studies seek to answer this main question while covering diverse issues such as native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” and the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution. The overall finding of the contributors is that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents.