Why do people forget that Russia and the Soviet Union before it (and Russia before the USSR) have an imperial past that continues to the present?
Russia’s attitude to its past is similarly fractured. The clearest sign of this is blazing ignorance and apathy about its victims. Put simply: nobody disputes the fact of Russia’s empire. But ask what it colonised and blank stares abound.Some bits have vanished. Hard-won Russian settlements in California and Alaska seem as distant as our rule over Calais or the Crusader castles. In other cases the victims were all but wiped out. ...
Even survivors struggle to be taken seriously. Russification (whether under Tsarist or Soviet rule) was ruthless. ...
Undigested imperial history and the seething resentments it engenders guarantee friction between Moscow and its former colonies that can easily spill over into war. What Putin, in his 21st-century tsarist pomp, really fails to see is that it may also doom the Russian Federation.
Russia still has a lot of conquered territory. During the late Cold War, a teaching assistant was outraged when I referred to the USSR as the Russian empire. I did not back down.
And a preppy Soviet customer at an arcade I worked at was visibly annoyed when he saw me reading a book about faltering Soviet Russification efforts. The book was Decline of an Empire.
Truly, if Putin keeps effing up royally, the empire might get back to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, eh?
It is easy to overlook the imperial history because Russia is a contiguous empire (except for Kaliningrad now). Westerners tend to think that only overseas colonies count.
Russia was and is an empire.
