The Soviets had the opportunity to give land back, and they didn’t.

Context: The Russian Empire famously bulldozed across indigenous Siberian land, much like what settlers did in America, when an anti imperialist faction took Moscow and executed the whole royal family, treatment of many of these ethnic minorities did not change at all.

[https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/wars-and-memories/movement-in-times-war/repressed-peoples-in-soviet-union](https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/wars-and-memories/movement-in-times-war/repressed-peoples-in-soviet-union)

[https://iwgia.org/en/russia/3903-indigenous-activism-in-russia-what-s-next.html](https://iwgia.org/en/russia/3903-indigenous-activism-in-russia-what-s-next.html)

They also had a policy of russification, so they exported Russians to places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan to create populations more to their liking.

The USSR is imperialism for leftists. Built on the bones of empire, it didn’t shrink it at all

im starting to think we need a special tag everytime we make a meme thats going to summon…. ☭ɬɧɛɱ☭

Russia has been a colonizer longer than the US has been a country. The USSR implemented much of the same program against its indigenous peoples too, just instead of reservations it was labor camps that made goods for the imperial center(s).

Of course a leftist will just say that’s all just CIA propaganda and talk down to me to inform me that I’m just a super-colonized native. What a brain-dead ideology.

Many such cases. 

The USSR’s expansion and russification was absolutely awful and something we should condemn, but not imperialist in the way we use it today. Instead its policies were driven by two specific things: the aftermath of the civil war and Stalinism.

Claiming the Soviet treatment of Siberians was the same as the Russian Empire’s treatment of them isn’t really correct. The Russian Empire imposed the title of alien upon native Siberians, while the Soviet Union stripped them of their inferior position and applied citizenship to them (1). They then did “give” land to the various ethnic groups, but these weren’t independent. The Sakha people even attained their first state, the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (2).

Before Stalin took power and began the reversal of many of the policies of Lenin, the Siberian people even saw improvements in the conditions in the east. Ethnic minorities were given access to new programs improving the neglected Siberian people, leading to one of the only times in recent history Siberian ethnic people saw any real representation (3). This was destroyed when Stalin took power.

Stalin’s nationalistic and isolationist policies hurt Siberia because of the focus on western Russia, and that isn’t to mention the oppression of political enemies and the gulag system.

The claim that the USSR was oppressive in the same way the Russian Empire was against Siberians isn’t really correct, though the government of the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin was far worse to the population and reversed many of the progressive policies they had introduced. I will also add the USSR under Stalin wasn’t trying to achieve worldwide communism, that’s kind of Stalin’s whole thing.

Sources:

1. https://russiasperiphery.pages.wm.edu/general-2/inorodtsy/
2. https://urbanresiliencehub.org/city-context/yakutsk/
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/ussr-as-a-communal-apartment-or-how-a-socialist-state-promoted-ethnic-particularism/99C0B9E2F31C01096AD26CA8AC4FC3E3