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[Sergarr]

Well, I was kind of going two-dimensional with this allegory:

1) first, by saying that Russia did not actually annex countries and turned them into Russia 2.0, at least not in a sense of "we will eradicate your culture and substitute with our own Canonical Russian Culture", because Canonical Russian Culture is not a thing.

2) second, by saying that if, despite the point 1, you still say that Russia is on a "bit of a record" in subjugating other countries and assimilating them, a lot of other countries were also engaged in this sort of thing, and on a much bigger scale than we did, so it doesn't make sense to single Russia out on that.

[Erkki]

Sure it doesn't. It just happens that the nation currently being proactive in doing evil shit happens to be Russia.

Similarly, most of us probably do condemn Iraqi Freedom(although it wasn't an annexation but blowing things up to get oil and to sell arms, concrete and hospital equipment afterwards while the people who decided on things were either major stock holders of Locheed-Martin and Raytheon at least or were otherwise greedy basterds), or China assimilating Tibet/Xinjiang(happening right now) etc. We have discussed this before. Someone else having done shit before doesnt make it right or acceptable for anyone else to do more of it.

I wonder how Finno-Ugric languages do in Russia that totally isnt russifying the peoples with their own distinctive cultures that speak those languages? Oh yeah, soon theres none that speaks them, many only have speakers in the thousands at most and most of them are 50 years old or older.

[scrdest]

Well, I was kind of going two-dimensional with this allegory:

1) first, by saying that Russia did not actually annex countries and turned them into Russia 2.0, at least not in a sense of "we will eradicate your culture and substitute with our own Canonical Russian Culture", because Canonical Russian Culture is not a thing.

2) second, by saying that if, despite the point 1, you still say that Russia is on a "bit of a record" in subjugating other countries and assimilating them, a lot of other countries were also engaged in this sort of thing, and on a much bigger scale than we did, so it doesn't make sense to single Russia out on that.

1) And yet concentrated efforts were made to, for example, erase the native languages and substitute Canonical Russian... Russian in their lieu. Or Orthodox church. It actually led to a revival of Gothic architecture in Catholic churches, as those were harder to convert into Orthodox churches.

2) We're not talking about other countries. True, they did. They are also not currently carrying military operations in Ukraine. Some didn't, but we're not talking about them, so no point bringing them up.

[Sergarr]

I thought most native languages have been erased because they were less competitive than Russian one and thus nobody wanted to speak them? There surely isn't any "concentrated efforts" on pushing Russian language in Ukraine, for one, and almost half of the country speaks Russian!

Also, that's the first time I heard about that Gothic architecture thing. I think the only Catholic country that we've ever been in was Poland, right?

[scrdest]

I thought most native languages have been erased because they were less competitive than Russian one and thus nobody wanted to speak them? There surely isn't any "concentrated efforts" on pushing Russian language in Ukraine, for one, and almost half of the country speaks Russian!

Also, that's the first time I heard about that Gothic architecture thing. I think the only Catholic country that we've ever been in was Poland, right?

I don't know. The example is Polish, at any rate.

You know why half of Ukraine speaks Russian? Because it would be weird if Russians suddenly started using Ukrainian, and they were literal Russians sent to Ukraine en masse to... basically colonize. Same thing happened in Transnistria - it's a region of Moldavia that got more or less a Russian majority, so it's a satellite in all but name.

Plus, state language being Russian only, demanding to change signs to be in Russian and Russian alone, Russian-only education and suppression of any attempts to teach local languages as an additional option... It's hard to be less competitive when you have a rifle backing you up.

[Descan]

I think the only Catholic country that we've ever been in was Poland, right?

Lithuania too. Belarus has a decent minority, not sure of the history entirely but it makes sense considering a lot of Belarus territory used to be Poland/Lithuanian.

[Guardian G.I.]

I think the only Catholic country that we've ever been in was Poland, right?

Lithuania too. Belarus has a decent minority, not sure of the history entirely but it makes sense considering a lot of Belarus territory used to be Poland/Lithuanian.

Most of the Catholic believers are in the Western part of the country - they can hardly be found to the east of Minsk.
There's also a pretty big Protestant minority here.

[Sergarr]

You know why half of Ukraine speaks Russian? Because it would be weird if Russians suddenly started using Ukrainian, and they were literal Russians sent to Ukraine en masse to... basically colonize. Same thing happened in Transnistria - it's a region of Moldavia that got more or less a Russian majority, so it's a satellite in all but name.

Okay.

Plus, state language being Russian only, demanding to change signs to be in Russian and Russian alone, Russian-only education and suppression of any attempts to teach local languages as an additional option... It's hard to be less competitive when you have a rifle backing you up.

1) There are 35 different languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian.
2) If Russia really wanted to purge all other local languages on the basis of them being "foreign" and un-Russian, then why would it put so much effort on giving people knowledge of "foreign" languages like English? There is a lot of talk about including a mandatory exam for English language at the end of the high school in 2020. You don't pass it - you fail - you can't basically do anything, can't get into university, can't get any meaningful jobs... In other words, there's a rifle backing up this initiative, too.

I mean, teaching all people English language sounds like a perfect way to make your language as un-competitive as it gets, so your explanation doesn't appear to be right.

[Owlbread]

Examples of countries turned into Russia: Funny Accent Edition - Belarus, Land of the Nogai (now Stavropol Krai or something), Karelia, Buryatia, Circassia, Ubykh territories, lots of little Finno-Ugric republics too and they become innumerable the deeper you go into Siberia.

The loss of East Ukraine though (the area north of the Caucasus) is very striking though. You can read up on Ukrainians in Kuban here.

Spoiler: Check this quote from Wikipedia (click to show/hide)

In 1930 the Ukrainian People’s Komissar Mykola Skrypnyk as one of those involved in solving the nationalities question within the USSR put forward suggestions to Joseph Stalin:

    1) That the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR be valid on the territory of the whole USSR
    2) That the territories of Voronezh, Kursk, Chornomoriya, Azov, Kuban regions be administered by the government of the Ukrainian SSR
    3) That Ukrainian colonies in the Russian SFSR and other Soviet Republics be given national-political autonomy (VS. p 36)

However, the Ukrainization policies of Kuban were abruptly reversed at the end of 1932. The December 14, 1932 publication of the grain procurement resolution of CK VKP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars demanded the immediate transfer of all official paperwork and publishing of the "ukrainized" districts of Kuban into Russian language "more intelligible for the people of Kuban".[4]

In 1932-33, the policies of forced collectivization of the Ukrainian population of the Soviet Union, which caused a devastating famine that greatly affected the Ukrainian population of the Kuban.

The mass repressions of the 1930s also resulted in the arrest and execution of over 1500 Ukrainian speaking intellectuals from Krasnodar. Many teachers of Ukrainian language were arrested and exiled from the region. By 1932 all Ukrainian language education establishments were closed. The professional Ukrainian theatre in Krasnodar was closed. All Ukrainian toponyms in the Kuban, which reflected the areas from which the first Ukrainians settlers had moved, were changed. The names of Stanytsias such as Kiev was changed to "Krasnoartilyevskaya", and Uman to "Leningrad", and Poltavska to "Krasnoarmieiskaya". The physical destruction of all aspects of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian population, and the resultant ethnic cleansing of the population, the terrorist tactics of Russification, the Holodomor of 1932-33 and 1946-7 and other tactics used by the Union government lead to the catastrophic fall in population that associated themselves with Ukrainian ethnicity in the Kuban. Official Soviet Union statistics of 1959 state that Ukrainians made up 4% of the population, in 1989 – 3%.

The number of self-identified Ukrainians in Kuban fell between 1927 to 2002 from 1,222,140 (55% of the 1927 total) to 61,867 (0.9% of the 2002 total).

Obviously there's some heavy pro-Ukrainian POV pushing there but it would be interesting to see anyone refute it rather than acting like Sergarr or Guardian G.I. and point out that the USA wiped out Native American tribes or something.

[RedKing]

*cough* Volga Germans *cough*

That wasn't even Russia: Funny Accent Edition, it was Russia: German Cemetary Edition.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

That's not "turning into Russia 2: Funny Accent Edition", though. That's more like that "melting pot" kind of thing that some Americans love to talk about. There are a lot of different sub-cultures under a single unifying label of "Russian", it's not like there are some "how you should behave if you're a Russian" guidelines that define a Canonic Russian Culture. There just isn't one, at this point, after 15-16th century at least. Russia is way too big and diverse for that to be a thing.

Oh. It is a melting pot, violent edition.

Russian situation is not unique. Look at our Spanish friend with his dislike of Catalonia. (Really his arguments are so funny for me, I can find a matching Russian for most of them)

Before WW1 English, Turkish, Austrian, German and other assimilation machines were roughly similar to  Russian. It is after WW1 when real shit started. Some empires died, Some became weaker and more liberal,  Some went exterminate other nations route, Russian Empire transformed into USSR that was much worse than Russian Empire.

USSR never bothered with turning entire population in Russians. It worked on transforming its population into a brand of two legged cattle called "Soviet people". Russian culture and language were tools in this process not the goal. When this tool didn't work, genocide was used.

Actually karma is a bitch. Real Russians have rather unpleasant lives nowadays as they have no own country. Their lands are populated by a weird mix of people who call themselves Russians but if you take away the language, there are very little Russian in them. They are rebranded Soviets with their awful hypocrite morals.

I thought most native languages have been erased because they were less competitive than Russian one and thus nobody wanted to speak them? There surely isn't any "concentrated efforts" on pushing Russian language in Ukraine, for one, and almost half of the country speaks Russian!

Inertia. And pro-Russian parliament for all that time. Parliament that never did anything to reverse the directions set in previous centuries.

[Arx]

Out of idle curiosity, do you guys think Britain is terrible for turning South Africa into Britain Two: Funny Accents Edition? There are two speakers of the San language left alive and if you don't speak English you have very limited prospects.

[LordSlowpoke]

...uh, no

south africa wasn't even halfheartedly turned into anything funny accents edition

funny accents edition happens when all other languages are lost, and considering you live in south africa, you'd be far more than aware of the fact there are a fuckton of languages involved with english being the glue that allows you to communicate with other people, so if anything the influence was positive as the opportunities for that would have been greatly limited by a language barrier

gods know how you'd keep a country together without a common tongue

[Arx]

Oh, I do. Increasingly, people don't necessarily teach children their mother tongue, though, as far as I know.

Genuine curiosity, though. I can never make sense of these arguments, possibly because I suck at politics.

[Graknorke]

Out of idle curiosity, do you guys think Britain is terrible for turning South Africa into Britain Two: Funny Accents Edition? There are two speakers of the San language left alive and if you don't speak English you have very limited prospects.

Well to be fair, South Africans do have funny accents.