Russian eastern expansion in a nutshell

    by GPN_Cadigan

    8 Comments

    1. They also did this to the Baltic countries which were just objectively more developed than Russia on average.

    2. I once met a woman from Yakutia. The Yakuts (or Sakha) are a people from central Siberia, part of the Siberian turkic group, long cousins of the Kazakhs and the Tatars. Until the Soviet regime, they were pastoralists and hunter gatherers. They spoke their own tongue, most of them were shamanic/tengrists. They completely look Asians, a layman would have a lot of difficulty to differentiate them from Koreans and Japanese people. Her people were subjected to various atrocities and forced assimilation programs by Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and Republican Russia.

      That lady, a doctorate in French literature, described herself as Russian. She was raised in Russian, was taught cyrillic, had a russified name (a turkic family name with a Russian suffix) and was really uncomfortable with the notion of multiculturalism and to speak about her extremely obvious non-Russian origins, even with foreigners who couldn’t be a threat to her in any ways.

      I was stomped, because I kind of naively taught that Russia had been doing better with its natives people than Canada and the USA. Like everything, it’s way worse.

    3. Beat_Saber_Music on

      Fun fact, the Russians had their own version of the Chinese great wall known as the “Zasechnaya Cherta” they had to build in the southern parts of central Russia just to be able to farm land without constant nomad raids. One of the original fortress lines went from Bryansk and Tula to Ratsa, while a later line ran from Belgorod, Voronezh and Tambov to Uljanovsk, and in part being central cities on this fortificaiton line is what made cities like Voronezh, Tula or Kursk notable settlements originally. Even as Russia may have officially controlled large areas south of this line, they were ruled by Cossack war bands and the likes being more subjects to Moscow than being integral parts of Russia.

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