Continued, read the beginning: Colonial backbones of Russia: Georgia. / Colonial backbones of Russia: the Baltics. / Colonial backbones of Russia: Ukraine (beginning). / Colonial backbones of Russia: Ukraine (created from scratch).
Beard question
We live in this country and from generation to generation we ask ourselves: why the Russians, who are the largest and most basic nationality of the Russian Empire, the USSR, the Russian Federation, live worse than all other nationalities, have the least rights in this country and are more often prosecuted by law?
And it's not that we don't know the answer, the point is that its simplicity and banality plays against it. We need evidence and independent arbitrators who have studied documents, decrees, notes, transcripts, and so on.
And finally, we can safely refer to the absolutely independent Canadian scientist (with Ukrainian roots) Terry Martin. He investigated the period of development of the USSR from 1923 to 1939. Having gained access to the archives of Russia and Ukraine in the 90s, he studied a huge array of documents and became the first historian who recognized and proved an obvious historical fact:
In the West, his dissertation, and then his book (on 528 pages) was a tremendous success. He was immediately offered a professor position at Harvard, his name became known all over the world … but not in Russia. Here they tried not to notice him and skip past his research - why?
A poster from the times of the USSR.
Promotional video:
Bolsheviks
In October 1917, the Empire fell on the Bolsheviks. It is clear that there was no experience in managing such a whopper and the putschists used the apparatus and methods left over from the "old regime".
But there were areas of relations where they could not apply the tsarist methods - for ideological reasons. For example, the national question. Their slogan, with which they came to power: "every nation has the right to self-determination" (in the modern interpretation of Yeltsin - "take as much sovereignty as you can" - remember?). And everything would be fine, but real life is far from slogans and the newly acquired state immediately began to fall apart.
First, Poland and Finland, followed by other regions aiming to exit. I had to do something urgently. Immediately after the end of the acute phase of the civil war, the Bolsheviks at the XII Party Congress in 1923 formulated a new concept of the state - “territorialization of ethnicity” (T. Martin's term).
Within the framework of this concept, the new authorities declared their readiness to support the following "forms" of the existence of nations: national territories, languages, elites and cultures. The construction of the "empire of positive activity" (T. Martin's term) began.
A poster from the times of the USSR.
Flirting with nationalists
Our elite (for some reason) always shy away from one extreme to another. This phenomenon requires additional study by specialists, but for now let's just accept it as a fact.
The implementation of the new Bolshevik domestic policy resulted in thoughtless indulgence of the demands of organized national minorities. Almost forcibly drove people into the national framework, at an accelerated pace they built schools with nat. bias, transferred office work to nat. languages, without a request in society, set quotas nat. language in culture (resembles nothing?) and finally, it came to internal boundaries.
Having studied the history of the movement of internal Soviet borders, T. Martin concludes: “Throughout the USSR, borders were drawn in favor of the territories of national minorities and at the expense of the Russian regions of the RSFSR. There was not a single exception to this rule. Such compliance continued until 1929, when Stalin admitted that the constant redrawing of internal borders contributed not to fading, but to exacerbate ethnic conflicts.
A poster from the times of the USSR.
Further examination of the documents led Terry Martin to the following conclusion: “Russians in the Soviet Union have always been an 'inconvenient' nation - too big to ignore, but at the same time too dangerous to be given the same institutional status as other major nationalities of the country”. (has something changed since then?)
As a result (and the professor defines this as the main paradox), placing on the shoulders of the "great-power" Russian people the historical blame for the oppression of the national outskirts, the Bolshevik Party in this way managed to preserve the structure of the former empire. It was a strategy to retain power in the center and in the localities: to prevent the centrifugal nationalism of non-Russian peoples at any cost.
To make the Soviet power seem to be its own, indigenous, and not “alien”, “Moscow” and (God forbid!) “Russian”, this policy was given the general name “indigenousization”. It was about the formation of a new party and administrative nomenclature on the territories (based on the national emphasis in personnel selection), as well as the immediate expansion of the sphere of using the languages of the peoples of the USSR.
In the mid-1920s, Ukrainization spread beyond the borders of Ukraine, covering the Kuban, Stavropol Territories and even the Far East. Soviet employees were obliged to take exams in "Ukrainian studies" as well, and "teachers" exchanged experiences in such bulletins.
Correct me, if this is not the case now, just a religious component has been added to the project.
… It didn't work out to eat the fish …
As Professor Martin notes, indigenousization was popular among the population of the non-Russian periphery and relied on the support of the center, but still … it failed almost everywhere.
Still, it was a utopia (not the only one in the Soviet regime), which in real life is difficult to fulfill. Moreover, the (artificial idea) indigenousization has generated resistance from all sectors of society. Someone did not want (stupidly) to retrain, someone was afraid of dismissal due to "non-compliance", but in some ways this process began to turn into the already familiar (from the civil war) forms of mass organization and ideas.
To rectify the situation, the Bolsheviks announced the successful completion of the indigenousization and curtailed the process everywhere. Following him, the transformation of Russians (in Ukraine and Belarus) into nat. minority.
A poster from the times of the USSR.
At whose expense is the banquet?
By starting to build the Soviet empire on the fact that the Russians "owe everything," the Bolsheviks laid a mine for the future. Even after revising this approach in the 1930s, the mine was not defused: as soon as the Union collapsed, it turned out that the "elder brother" owed everyone.
Terry Martin in his monograph refutes these claims, citing various evidence and facts.
Simultaneously with the development of its national concept, the Soviet government also established a subsidy fund for the development of the union republics. This fund was declassified only in 1991 after Prime Minister Ivan Silaev made a report to President Boris Yeltsin.
When the expenses from it were recalculated at the 1990 exchange rate (1 US dollar cost 63 kopecks), it turned out that $ 76.5 billion were sent to the union republics annually (from the accounts of the RSFSR). This secret fund was formed exclusively at the expense of the RSFSR: out of every three rubles earned, the Russian Federation kept only two for itself.
M. Gorbachev and I. Silaev.
Where's the justice?
Doctor of Economics, Professor V. G. Chebotareva, at an international conference in Moscow in 1995, presented her calculations, which showed how the process of pumping surplus product from the RSFSR to the union republics proceeded.
First, cash injections in their pure form. Published reports of the USSR Ministry of Finance for 1929, 1932, 1934 and 1935. allow us to conclude that in these years, 159.8 million rubles were allocated to Turkmenistan as subsidies, Tajikistan - 250.7, Uzbekistan - 86.3, ZSFSR - 129.1 million rubles. As for, for example, Kazakhstan, until 1923 this republic did not have its own budget (and even territory) - financing of its development came from the budget of the RSFSR.
But the calculation should include not only pure cash injections. For dozens of years, Professor Chebotareva said, in addition to purely monetary tribute, Russia has been giving the union republics “its most precious capital - highly qualified specialists.
The entire state policy in all directions was based on satisfying the interests of the national borderlands, and the interests of the indigenous population of the RSFSR were sacrificed to this absolute minority. While the economy and infrastructure of the union national republics grew fat and plump, the primordially Russian cities and towns were impoverished.
A poster from the times of the USSR.
In 1997, the famous writer and scientist Alexander Kuznetsov wrote:
M. Gorbachev and B. Yeltsin.
Collapse of the Union
After Silaev's report, the RSFSR government demanded that the practice of depleting Russia's economic resource be changed and that only (only!) 10 billion rubles be allocated to the subsidy fund. And even then, on condition that the republic that will take funds from this fund will not do so irrevocably, but only on credit and undertakes to conclude an agreement with the government of the RSFSR on the supply of its products against the obligatory repayment of the loan at the agreed time.
Agree, Professor Martin's research allows you to look at the real reasons for the collapse of the USSR in 1991 from a completely different angle. The disappearance of the USSR happened not at all because our great country allegedly "lost" the "cold war" in the confrontation with the United States, but because, first of all, by the end of the twentieth century, the Russian people no longer had the strength to drag on their shoulders into the "bright future "Outlying Soviet republics and all foreign" progressive mankind ".
But even from the collapse of the USSR, the national republics, these colonial backbones of Russia, contrived to benefit: the territories that had never historically belonged to them, all the debts of the Russian Empire and the USSR were dumped on the Russian Federation, and now they are quite successfully selling the Anglo-Saxons Russophobia - what they were taught at one time Bolsheviks.
Belovezhsky Treaty: Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich, December 19991.