#occidentalist

You can just, like, not do that.

And if you feel the need to clarify that you ARE including colonized peoples in your nuking statements

These types of posts are frustrating to me, because they're not necessarily completely untrue. On the one hand, it's certainly true that people from Western Europe had a long tendency of treating Russia as being the way it is because of its inherent "Asiatic savagery" or whatever. Typically, talking posts you'll find along these lines include the idea that the Russian absolute monarchy was derived from the Mongols. If you actually dig into the history, though, there's not much to actually support this idea. Mongol khans were always at least technically elected and their power was never close to absolute.

Russian absolutism instead mainly derived from the exact same source that French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish absolutism did: the Roman Empire and especially the emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. This is why the Russian tsars used a title derived from Caesar before later switching to Emperor, called themselves the Third Rome, and used the double headed eagle as a symbol.

It's also important to constantly ask yourself how much, say, Ivan the Terrible actually differed from other early modern monarchs and rulers to his west. Many of them were also incredibly paranoid and likewise enjoyed ordering judicial murders of nobility whom they suspected of disloyalty and numerous massacres of their own subjects and embarking on aggressive wars for no other purpose than to enlarge their kingdom.

However, as is typical for posts like this, while Occidentalist seems to know quite a lot about how westerners have viewed Russia, there's not much said about how Russians have viewed themselves or about the long history of Russian expansionism. Her idea that Russians somehow exist on the fringes of empire is a load of bullshit. While the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch were extracting resources from the Americas to enrich themselves and slaughtering whatever indigenous peoples got in their way, the Russians were doing exact the same thing in Siberia. This too was a colonialist venture even if Yermak Timofeyevich, Vassili Poyarkov, Semyon Dezhnev, etc. didn't have to use boats in order to get to Siberia.

And that's just the beginning. The Russians also took Finland and Estonia from the Swedish Empire, carved up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth along with Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and conquered most of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Between 1763 and 1864, they waged a war of conquest against the Circassians that ended with the ethnic cleansing of least of 80% of them and perhaps as many as 97%.

And then there's the Crimea. Once populated primarily by Crimean Tatars, it was conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Catherine the Great, who then embarked on a policy of de-Tatarization. Prior to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, it was 95% Tatar while today, it's only 10% Tatar and over 65% of its population identify as Russians.

Occidentalist's nonsense about how the current Russian Federation is an enemy of empire is particularly mendacious. Yup, that must be why Russia's current rulers behave as if Ukraine and Georgia especially are silly children who must be forcibly brought back under the loving control of Mother Russia.

I am constantly perturbed at people fall for the line of Russia being a victim of European imperialism rather than one of its biggest perpetrators: at its greatest extent, the Russian empire covered 1/6 of the world's land mass and even today, the Russian Federation remains the world's largest country by landmass.

And yet you somehow believe this came about by accident and not by colonialism on a grand scale? Come on now.

Bonus! Occidentalist reserves pushback on their post from a Pole, completely misunderstands why they brought up Poles and Ukrainians, and then makes a new post wishing they could order mass executions like Stalin