No. The situation is absolutely different.
Colonies are the territories separated by large distance from metropole. This means the situation, when the leading ethnicity of the country is a considerable minority in its colonies. For example, there are a lot of British people in England and quite few in India, when it was British colony. Yet what is British people? These are English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish. Indians, despite India being a jewel of British empire - never were to be considered British, they were strangers and were deprived of civil rights.
I could talk about how Scots, Welsh, English and especially Irish people did not have the same rights in the British Empire (Irishmen were considered "n*ggers turned inside out") but that would distract from the main issues here.
Therefore, colonial empires trigger a specific type of behavior, where you either beat a native populace into submission to prevent rebellions, or almost completely exterminate it. Which was the fate of Native Americans and Australians, for example. So, basically, colonial empire means treating native population as lower race, sub-humans, untermenschen.
This is very interesting considering I have heard several Russians use those exact words to describe Caucasians, and if you don't call
this genocide I don't know what is. Same with the deportations that lead to nearly 50% of the Crimean Tatar population dying of starvation, or the deportation of the Vainakh (Chechen/Ingush) peoples which led to up to 200,000 of the 500,000 Vainakhs in total dying of starvation and neglect.
Again with the Soviet revisionist bile. I know we criticise the Japanese for rewriting history in school history textbooks but this really gets on my wick.
What we have here, I think, is better called - a continental Empire.
When the new territories are adjacent to the main land, you see, it allows the common folk to migrate proportionally, have active contacts with each other, already have some shared history, borrow culture elements, integrate and intermingle into each other.
I take it by "intermingle and integrate" you mean
ethnically cleanse and displace? Leading to, in effect, genocide as a result of starvation and hardship?
So, almost none ethnicities were discriminated in Russia throughout the history, no one here sent blankets with smallpox to the native peoples of Siberia, for example, and their nobles often became Russian nobility, too.
You mean certain ethnic groups were considered more useful than others to the Russian colonists, like the Ossetians. They have been consistently used in attempts to keep tabs on the Caucasian nations whether they were Ingush, Chechen or especially Georgian. Those that were considered a problem (i.e. wanted independence) were going to have it tough. In Scotland the British government did the same thing by choosing Protestant Highland clans like the Munros and Campbells to control the rebellious ones.
Ethnic groups considered useful to the Russian establishment have been rewarded in the past for their support. Take a look at the
East Prigorodny Conflict where native Ingush were ethnically cleansed from their lands in North Ossetia-Alania by Ossetian militias supported by Russian government forces.
Relations between, say, Russians and Tatars are like between English and Welsh - foreigners would hardly make a difference.
I notice you are bringing up the Tatars and Bashkirs, ethnic groups considered useful and non threatening to Russian control.
Now, imagine an Indian noble in the British House of Lords during Victorian era
Why, yes. Yes, imagine that.Also we develop new territories, not bleed them out of resources.
So that's what you call it.
We have and always had, especially in comparison to European countries experience, a surprisingly peaceful, united and multi-cultural society.
I was going to give you a list of all the nationalist insurgencies that the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and Russian Federation have faced in the last 300 years of expansion but I realised it was going to be so long it would be virtually impossible to fit in. Let me just say that nearly 20,000 Russian men and boys didn't die in two wars 20 years ago because you showed the people of the mountains too much kindness, nor those who died in the last insurgency, or the insurgency before that...
I'm just going to show you this quote taken from
this book by the Russian playwright and historian
Edvard Radzinsky in which Soviet records were examined in order to write a biography of Stalin.
The following quote is taken from an eyewitness of the
Khaibakh massacre during the Vainakh deportations (previously mentioned) also known as "Operation Lentil".
they combed the huts to make sure there was no one left behind... The soldier who came into the house did not want to bend down. He raked the hut with a burst from his submachine gun. Blood trickled out from under the bench where a child was hiding. The mother screamed and hurled herself at the soldier. He shot her too. There was not enough rolling stock. Those left behind were shot. The bodies were covered with earth and sand, carelessly. The shooting had also been careless, and people started wriggling out of the sand like worms. The NKVD men spent the whole night shooting them all over again.
During the massacre more than 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death by NKVD General Gveshiani who was awarded a medal for his efforts by Beria. Chechen soldiers came home to discover that while they had been fighting for the USSR on the Eastern Front, their relatives had been burned alive. I should have made it clear that these people, the ones killed in the massacre, were the people considered impossible to transport. That meant they were basically all old women, newborn babies and children.
I have similar quotes to hand for the genocide/ethnic cleansing of the Circassians, Nogai, Balkars etc if you want. Stories that are certainly burned into my mind, anyway.
It's funny, I know how people often talk about "American Exceptionalism" but there's still very much an old concept of Russian/Soviet benevolence that just refuses to die no matter how many Russians are killed in inter-ethnic wars and insurgencies.
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