There is a reason why Russia is not like Balkans, and it's not because we gassed everyone who was even a little bit different from ethnic Russian stereotype.
It was my understanding that Cossacks and colonists arriving in Siberia left something of a mark on the local populations, and while Tatars and other people the Russian Empire took over weren't just killed off (with a few exceptions, notably the Circassians) they weren't exactly tolerated either.
Okay, so I guess I'll just have to say it directly.
There was a great deal of cultural osmosis between Russia and all those indigenous cultures - for example, a big part of southern Cossack's culture is almost entire based around the Ciscassian culture - their clothing, their traditions, most of that shit was straight-up copied, with maybe some slight adaptations.
People from Urals and Stavropol, people from Nizhniy Novgorod, people from Moscow and St. Petersburg, people from Siberia and Far East - they all have their own little - and big - variations in terms of traditions and culture, stemming from the historical cultural osmosis and mutual assimilation with local population, to the extent that local dialects from one part of the country are almost unrecognisable to people in the other side.
And all these people are still considered - and consider themselves - as Russian as everyone else. Which should be impossible, according to Sonlirain - because he thinks that there are only two possible outcomes of introducing people of different cultures into your own - "our culture stays the same", or "they replace our culture with their own", with nothing in between.
That's the main gist of the point I was trying to make. Unlike Balkan states, who try to "preserve" their own cultures at maximum purity and, as a result, are a fractured mess, Russia does not try to preserve the mythical "cultural purity" at all costs (hell, "pure Russian" is like "pure American" - if you try to actually define it concretely, you'll fucking fail and this is why Russian ethnic nationalism is so dumb; like, none of these "hurr-durr, ethnic Russians!" people have any idea about how their own culture even works!), and thus it is not suffering from, you know,
Balkanization.