Echoes of the Crossroads

My mom recently wrote a post on her English-language blog that was mostly about the state of Russian society and Russian opposition to Putin’s rule, and… Those are some of the issues I’ve been thinking about, and this post just compelled me to finally put it to digital paper.

First of all, a bit of context that I’m not sure comes through in the original post to those who didn’t grow up in the former Soviet Union. There are two related pieces here. One, because Soviet Union was officially anti-imperialist and the Russian education system didn’t make an effort to reject many underlying Soviet-era assumption, there is a widespread belief that Russia and Soviet Union after it, wasn’t imperialist or colonialists. There is the idea that, unlike those evil Americans who killed Native Americans and forced them into reservations, we integrated native peoples of Siberia and parts of south and west peacefully. The whole thing doesn’t stand up to scrutiny – as I’ve often pointed out, the Soviet Union had its own version of reservation schools, there were policies that actively encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in territories that weren’t majority-Russian at the start of the 20th century, the way Soviet Union went back and forth of encourgaing multiculturalism and promoting Russian supremacy, that sort of thing. And, of course, it’s hard to see Russian imperial expansion into Caucasus mountain and Central Asian region as any different from what Western powers were doing outside Europe at the time. Even with Ukraine and Belarus, where things are more ambiguous due to their shared heritage, too many people accept the idea that Ukraine “returned” to Russia voluntarily, at face value, which just isn’t the case.

None of this is secret. Jut recently,the Kommersant newspaper, a major Russian daily newspaper, published an article doing a pretty thorough deconstruction of that version of history, and showed how much of what we learned as kids omitted some very important context. Like, the entire history of centuries of Ukrainian uprisings and push-and-pull between Ukrainian and Russian leaders. But thing is, the way history gets contextualized in school matters. If you have the idea of how the history is “supposed to be,” you’re not going to want to seek out things that don’t fit that. Not unless something compels you.