It's simple, in the past "empire" had a positive connotation and if they were a large country with a large population they could call themselves an empire, be it a monarchy or a republic, democracy or dictatorship, like France, the Netherlands or Germany in the past, a small country could also call itself an empire but that would be like a joke like the Empire of the island of Elba (Napoleon), however at the beginning of the 20th century it began to have a negative connotation, almost like an insult, we already know why and that was how all countries if they had one stopped using the term "empire" in any official matter until it disappeared.
@@BrunoDias1234 "Empire" has a specific historical, economic, geopolitical meaning that is almost entirely separate from the self-affixed label that some states took onto themselves. The main connection being that (some) of the states that took on the title "Empire" engaged in those imperial practices. But not every Empire engaged in imperialism, and not every imperialist state called itself Empire. S'not as simple as the popularity of the name. Also this comment has nothing to do with the comment you're replying to, why?
Yeah design changes are good, but my personal favorite designs for History Matters, were in his 2018-2020 videos, but the design changes in a way show how his videos have gotten better over the years.🙂
If you wonder why there is slide "Finns learn in Finnish", there used to be sizable Finnish minorities in Ingria and Republic of Karelia and Kola peninsula. "Used to be" being the important part here, they ended up in Finland or as a significant minority in Siberia, Sweden or six feet under.
Fins also managed to have a good amount of autonomy in the russian empire. And did an impossible job of keeping it while USSR was existing. Well, the NATO membership is the prize in the end.
@@danielbishop1863 hopefully, if this current war is eventually won, there will be a broader desire to redact some of those Soviet territorial claims. Unfortunately now several times in the past century or so, Russia has shown that as soon as it gets anywhere above destitute poverty, it immediately tries to swallow up and colonize its neighbors again
2:40 there technically did exist one officially sanctioned form of regional pay discrimination in the form of the so-called "Northern Bonus", instituted in regions designated as "the Far North" (mostly sparsely populated areas beyond or near the Arctic circle) where extra pay and non-monetary benefits were used to compensate workers for the harsh conditions and/or incentivise workers from other areas to move there at least for a short stint. To some extent this system still exists in modern Russia.
A really unexplored part of Russian history in the West is how the Russian state uses monetary incentive and gulag prisoners to colonize the north of the country.
@@FIVEBASKET This include every job, typically wages in the USSR are the same all around the country, but the far north get extra, mostly to make people want to move their for work. The job might be the same but your living condition might be worsen be cause of the insane cold, atleast you get pay extra
I don't think there is a single empire that would fit the definition that every subgroup within the "primary ethnicity" has to benefit from the empire. Roman Empire for sure had Italians who didn't seem to be getting too much out of the empire. You can always find some backwater town or socioeconomically marginalized group the capital doesn't care about that belong to the "primary ethnicity".
Fun fact: people tended to turn themselves into russians. Mama Chuvash papa Buryat, the child would have huge chances to identify as neither, but namely russian. Pretty unexpected for a nation repressed, isn’t it?
@@MidWitPride I think you mean Latins, Italians didn’t become a thing until after the fall of western Rome and German tribes settling and intermarrying with the Latins.
To be fair, even actual empires were often quite complex. The influence of the British empire varied greatly between colonies, between tight control and extractive economic policies to a more hands off relationship where London was happy to let the colony pretty much do its own thing, since it only really had the colony to stop a rival getting it.
Very good point! I’m Canadian and for centuries we were part of the British empire, yet for the most part we were treated better than any Soviet state outside of the major Russian cities.
British colonies were to ship their raw materials to English factories then import the finished goods As English companies reap the profits as owned both the mines and the factories
*Fun fact:* There are a ton of works of fiction (many of them made before the collapse of the communist regimes) in which the Soviet Union is still alive and powerful in a futuristic world. The 1968 dystopian science-fiction novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps?" (set in 2019) and the 1987 cyberpunk anime "Bubblegum Crisis" (set in 2032) serve as great examples of such works
He had almost every living relative of marshal Tukhachevsky executed or sent to the gulags. Because Tukhachevsky pointed out that Stalin was an incompetent commander to Lenin and blamed him for not covering his flanks during the battle of Warsaw. All of which was true and Stalin's incompetence was responsible for the disastrous casualties suffered in 1941-1942.
Lenin advocated for the Union of autonomous Soviet republics. Stalin advocated for a unitary state. There was also Rakovsky who advocated for a Soviet confederation. Before Lenin's death, his governing plan was mostly accepted. Stalin tried to push his idea at the time, but failed. And after Lenin's death, you know who got the power and purged most of the dissenters. It is a very important detail that this video overlooks.
Academician Sakharov (the creator of the nuclear bomb) was not in the power of the USSR, but he wanted absolute equality for all ethnic groups of the USSR. He proposed raising the status of Russian autonomies to the level of union republics.
When Tsar Nicholas took Russia into WW1 in 1914, he did so under the banner of Russianness and Orthodoxy. Yet at the time the country was only around 50% Russian, because it included lots of non-Russian minorities: Poles, Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Tatars etc. At the end of WW1, the Bolsheviks took power under the banner of Communist cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalism. The nine members of the first Soviet Politburo included four Jews (Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, plus Lenin was one quarter Jewish), a Georgian (Joseph Stalin), a Pole (Felix Dzerzhinsky) and just three Russians (Alexandra Kollontai, Andrei Bubnov and Lenin himself). But the country they governed had lost Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and around half of Ukraine. Now it really was very glaringly majority Russian (around 70-75%). Maybe it’s not surprising that the eventual winner of the post Lenin power struggle was the Georgian who preferred “socialism in one country” to Trotsky’s internationalist “permanent world revolution”.
Ukrainians were included under the banner of Nicholas II, as well as Byelorussians, Ukraine was called Little Russia at that time and Belarus means White Russia, all are Orthodox, with equal rights as Russians. I agree about the other minorities.
@@Edgar-jn5ulFun facf: during the times of the Russian Imperial Duma (parliament), Kiev was considered a vital electoral center of _Russian nationalists_ > Kiev > Center of Russian nationalism Just let that sink in
@@bassewitz. It depends on which time period are we talking about. Teaching and publishing in native languages could be banned, then partially allowed (with strong encouragement to only learn russian anyways in schools and universities), then fully allowed again only for authorities to list everyone who still clinged to their nationality and ban everything again.
Not accusing minute hist of anything, but often this sort of "giving facts but letting viewers decide" is a deception tactic. Since through the careful control what fact you give and what fact you omit can create a skewed view of reality but shield you with a "technically I'm right".
@@BlueHawkPictures17 for short videos like these, you arent meant blindly trust all the info presented anyway. Both "answering the question" and "letting the viewer decide" can be deception since you can always tailor your representation to suit your need. At the end of the day, its always a good thing to also look into the matter youself
I agree LORE: James Bisonette (December 18th 1878 - March 5th 1953) started the Russian revolution and proclaimed himself as emperor of Russia in December 30th 1922, establishing a one-party, Soviet, socialist, absolute monarchy. After his death in 1953, his son, Jerry Bisonette, took over. However, Jerry didn’t want to lead the country and denounced him in 1956, abolishing the monarchy and handing power to politician Nikita Khrushchev, who transformed the USSE (Union of Soviet Socialist Empires) and transformed it into a Socialist Republic called the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
Not Katoytska's? Sounds like unSoviet thought to me tovarich. You go join Great Siberian Tree Census now. (edit: lets see which words the snooperbots didn't like)
@@LiamDennehy very few. Speaking as someone whose family is from what was the poorest province in that empire (east Galicia, now western Ukraine), Austrian rule was much beloved. As of a couple weeks ago visiting it, you can still find Austrian flags being flown proudly and, importantly, voluntarily, beside the Ukrainian flag in Lviv. Austrian architecture, cafe culture etc are preserved and cherished. There was much better treatment of minorities. Even if there were occasional disputes, it is nothing at all in comparison to the gulags and genocide inflicted by Russia. Austria wasn't built for modern total war, but as empires go it was quite laid back and respectful to subject peoples
@@michaelwarenycia7588 true to an extent. One can argue that this laissez-faire faire attitude was being eroded by a younger generation of civil servants and diplomats towards the end of the empire, most notably in the annexation of Bosnia which was already an austrohungarian territory. The annexation was a bit more aggressive and caused concern on the international stage, most notably the empire now bordered Serbia and was more powerful than it. There is evidence that Hoyos and other foreign policy makers intended to make a move on Serbia next and that the black hand pre-empted this, although this is a bit more tenuous. What is fairly clear is that Hoyos' response to the assassination did nothing to lower tensions and can absolutely be argued that he steered the countries towards war. So for the majority of the empire's existence they were more respectful and slow in assimilation and growth but this seemed to be all but over by the end, leading to the aggression between the two countries and eventually european and global war
@@InvagPrune no, it was the same at the end. Heck my great grandfather was a military official in the Austrian army. It's only the Serbs who seemed to have a problem with Austria to the point of war and assassination. The experience of Serbs, themselves a proxy of the Russian Empire in the region, should not be generalized to the dozen or so nationalities of the Habsburg lands
@@michaelwarenycia7588 "To the point of a war" which was started by Austrians, even though Germany pushed for it. If any of the nations liked the empire, they wouldn't leave it. Because of German oppression lasting centuries many of the West Slavs (and all Old Prussians) are germanized (whole Polabia, Veletia, Lusatia, Pomerania, original Silesia, Prussia) and Czechs and Slovenians almost too. And because you can't build anything due to corruption and other things doesn't excuse the evil. Luckily, the tide turned around and they are destroying themselves.
@@janprochazka8095 the Russians are destroying themselves??? Your statement is rambling and confusing. There's no European empire today except Russia and, perhaps, in a mostly financial sense, France
Worth noting that Lenin and Stalin's policies toward language were less repressive than the Romanovs' had been. During the tsars' reign, teaching in non-Russian was outlawed, whereas Stalin encouraged it. Yes, he also forced the republics to teach Russian as well, but it's understandable why the government would want a common language
Would say its a double edged sword. The communists were trying to ignite a sort of identity of "you are nationally different from us, but we're all commies" but inheriting a Russian empire, it's morepractical to teach people the most common language within the union. It's basically role of English and maybe Hindi as official languagesin India. Nobody speaks English natively, but being formerly British domain its more practical to keep English.
I understand your comment, but you fell into a really retarded revisionism. "Stalin's policies towards language were less repressive... During the Romanovs, teaching in non-russian was outlowed... Yes, he(Stalin) also forced the republics to teach russian as well, but it's understandable why the government would want a common language" Just admit both were tyrants trying to make their gigantic empire more homogenous.
He probably saw the b*tching about the soviet union being another russian empire or whatever becoming a very hot topic in the last 2 year because of you know what and decided to talk about it.
@@a12shotman lol. Guys it’s a joke. “Keep it up!” Just sounds like something you’d tell a kid on their way to great things, but isn’t there yet. I was being ironic.
I don't usually call out mistakes in videos, but this one is kinda interesting to me. 1:31 The Finno-Soviet border is shown in the after-winter war look. But the European border is pre-WW2, which makes this map quite literally impossible. Now that I've engaged in some whell akstcually with a nerd emoji stiched on top, I'd like to say that your videos are amazing and incredibly educational!
I ADORE your attention to detail. At 2:09 Antanas Smetona, the Lithuanian President (Dictator) on the left is carrying a suitcase, a reference to how he fled the country before occupation Also, the main group that benefitted were those working with the communist party or the KGB, as far as I can recall
This is a really great video idea, it was really interesting. I'd also like to add on that my mum, born and raised in modern day turkmenistan (or USSR) learnt about both turkmen and soviet culture. She says that she felt soviet and had no problem with learning about russian history. Education for history was both soviet and turkmen (in other republics they would be similar for example in Ukraine they would learn both Soviet and Ukrainian history). They also learnt about older russian history like Peter and Catherine the great. After the collapse of the Soviet Union she was in University and said that they had compulsory history and learnt alot about Turkmen/ central asian history, which felt forced for her. She was born in 1974.
After 1991 in Central Asia and Ukraine they have begun to do histrocial revisionism, to lend themselves some percieved grandeur and claim statehood prior to the Soviet period.
This was lovely. A shame it wasn't longer for some of the information, but it does leave those who want to know more room to research. And the simple facts approach you always take is more than refreshing when the focus could be deeply biased thanks to who you're talking about.
You forgot about the forced deportation of entire ethnic groups during the 50s, this included the Chechens, Kalmyks, Circassians, Qirim and many others. The entire Qirim nation who were the majority population of Crimea were deported to Uzbekistan and were kept in forced labour camps between the 50s and 90s, when they were finally freed. Though they still weren't fully allowed to return home to their native Crimea, as they had to get visas whcih were often denied because of their ethnicity, they were also not compensated in any way for 40 years of slavery or the fact that all of their homes and property had been repossesed. Many Qirim still live in poverty today in Uzbekistan, while many others have returned to Crimea only to face oppresion from the new Russian regime and are now forced to squat on what was once their home.
That's an important story to tell, but keep in mind that this channel rarely publishes videos exceeding 4 minutes in length, including the Patreon supporter list. If the creator is aware of this story, he likely judged it to be insufficiently relevant to this video's central topic to warrant inclusion.
@@JobiWan144 I'd say that organised ethnic cleansing is an important topic when it comes to whether a nation was an empire or not. Because although not every empire committed genocide and not every genocide was committed by an empire. The 2 are very much interlinked.
Not saying that the deportations weren't tragic, but lying doesn't fix that. First, the Crimean Tatars had long ceased to be the majority in Crimea by the time they were deported to Central Asia. They had a 20% share, that was it. Second, nobody was kept in camps "until the 90s", all punitive measures (except the ban on returning to Crimea) were cancelled in 1956. Third, forced labour is not slavery, no matter how loudly one might cry about it. Deportees had rights, even if they didn't enjoy full freedom. Finally, don't think everybody missed your attempt to force a tear - "they went from one struggle to another" - while conveniently ignoring the 22-years-long period of Ukrainian rule. Why embellish and spread lies, isn't what those people really experienced enough?
@@advocatusdiaboli4861 You are right that Crimean Tatars didn't make up the majority before the deportations, as they stopped becoming the majority somewhere between the 1864 and 1897 censuses, that's my bad. Also it very much was genocide and slavery, roughly half of the Qirim populaztion died along the journey to Central Asia and they were very. Also the charges against the Qirim weren't dropped in 1956, they were dropped in 1967 with Decree number 493. When they were finally allowed out of the labourt camps, but even then many were forced into ghettos and Soviet propaganda used many racist streotypes to incite hate crimes against the Qirim, which were common in Uzbekistan. The reason I glossed over the 22 year long Ukrainian rule was becuase my comment was already long enough and I didn't want to waffle on for too long. I wasn't trying to twist the story, but the Qirim are still very much a marginalised and opressed people, though things did improve under Ukranian rule, only for them to end up back under Russian rule in 2014. They were then all kicked off of the lands they were "squatting" on by the new Russian appointed government, despite those lands being seized from their families onlyh 80 yeats prior. They were then forced to relocate to less desirabl lands in Crimea. i'm not in any way trying to lie about the situation, I did make a few errors, but I was trying to spread the message about the story of the Qirirm, who underwent genocide, slavery and organised hate crimes under the Communist Russian empire.
I think most of us would agree that such events are important. In defense of the History Matters crew, the 'population engineering' part were examples of what you're talking about. It was a tactic used where-ever Stalin gained control. Putin is using the same tactic, in the same area, today. If Ukraine gets any of their land back, chances are most of that land's population really will be Russian.
The problem with this video is the concept of an empire is almost impossible to give an explanation that is applicable to all empires in history without including other nations
It was the Russian Revolution that created the Soviet Union, other states declared their independence from it, but the Soviets were interested in reclaiming all parts of the former Russian Empire, they would allow those parts to have their independence. If you look at a map of the Soviet Union and their Eastern European satellites and superimpose a map of the old Russian Empire, the Russian Empire fits within a map of the Soviet Union and East block, there is very little difference between those two countries other than who rules.
@@pushista9322 Russia/USSR trying to reclaim by force parts of the Russian Empire makes about as much sense as the UK trying to reclaim Canada and Australia because those places used to be part of the British Empire.
Great Video, I enjoy your videos and always watch them right after you upload them. In all honesty, you are the best history UA-camr, thank you for your work.
The forced migrations, ethnic cleansings, Russian colonization of non-Russian land and using the Russian Empire's historical grievances with neighbors says yes, yes it was a continuation of the Russian Empire.
Im glad you mentioned the Baltics. My wife is Latvian and her family have said that Russian was the only language permitted in public and Russians got all the best houses and jobs.
I’d say the Baltics provide the best argument for the idea that the USSR really was an empire, even if Lenin’s ideology was supposed to be anti-imperial. The three Baltic states were incorporated into the USSR against the wishes of their inhabitants, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This meant that the Soviets couldn’t trust the local inhabitants to be loyal to the USSR - at least not as loyal as Russians would be. Imperial logic meant they “had” to favour Russians over Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians.
It omits the important part of relocations of smaller ethnic groups within Russian Soviet Republic and changing the borders of certain territories to instigate internal conflict between the groups. The infrastructure you mentioned was also strategically placed to make sure that different territories had conflicts between each other You can read further on that searching keywords "forced migration of Chechecns", "forced migration of Tatars", "Tatar and Bashkir Soviet Republic borders"
Ukraine and Russia were the two major powerhouses of the Soviet Union. This makes it perplexing that Russia assumed taking on Ukraine in 2022 would be easy. Many Ukrainian veterans who served in Afghanistan and worked within the Soviet system understand the inner workings of their Russian government and military counterparts, giving them insight into Russian strategies and tactics.
Ukraine was like Schleswig Holstein in Germany, just a region of Russia. It was created by the Soviet Union, before that it was Russia. Lenin and Stalin were very liberal to the regions culture. Probably because it's easier to rule people that are divided. That is why they fucked up the territory division (eg. Karabakh).
@@gamermapper Western Ukraine was Poland for the longest time. Those parts identified themselves rather polish than ukrainian either way. The ukrainian language you hear today is polish Ukrainian. There is also russian and romanian ukrainian language. They took a culture of a minority and forced the culture of it upon the majority. Odessa never spoke polish and I doubt that it ever will.
Their actions (impossible good treaties for Ukraine at the initial stage) do not seem to have had such main goals. Now it seems more and more that they wanted to make the world multipolar and used military conflict to achieve these goals.
Reminds me of animal farm. the horse worked so hard he got injured few months before his retirement. Instead of calling the vet, the Pigs took the horse to the slaughterhouse.
2:22 many Ukrainians were removed from the after-war Poland into the after-war Soviet Ukraine, the same with the Belarusians, and the Poles were removed in the opposite direction
well, i guess you didn't draw an exact conclusion, but I'd like to mention how it pretty much feels like an empire for me, seeing how my country's language and self identity were almost destroyed, and sadly are being destroyed by sad soviet-nostalgic old guys in the government
Ordinary Brits didn't benefit much from the British Empire either. So not sure that should be part of definition of what an Empire is. In fact an Empire can be a very expensive thing to have.
Except for all the capital produced and stolen from the empire getting reinvested in Britain leading to a more educated and prosperous people compared to any other part of the empire except for the dominions but sure
@@jeffersonclippership2588 Middle class and upper perhaps but they're not the majority of the British population they're the upper 5%. Also this whole "Britain stole" rhetoric is really boring (when Britain conquered its opponents directly). Meanwhile the colonies were expensive for Britain.
@@jeffersonclippership2588only a tiny number of Brits benefited from the Empire. The vast majority of Brits lived in absolute poverty and died young. The Empire was very expensive and many bits we didn't even want but had it in order to stop slavery (post abolition).
I was intrigued to see a thing a while ago that basically described it as an empire in reverse. The metropole exported raw materials (read: oil) to the subject states and they produced manufactured goods to send back. It was a weird system.
Thank you for mentioning annexation of the Baltics and relocation of russians. For others too often it is simply "former soviet republics" and russian % here gets mentioned without talking about how most of them got here.
This. It is disgusting to see how Soviet government used mass violence and repression not only against various ethnic groups but even workers they claimed to represent (Novocherkassk massacre).
Fwiw, those annexations were never recognized as legitimate by much of the world. Until 1991 made it moot, the US still recognized Baltic governments in exile.
Русские жили в Прибалтике и до СССР. Как и, например, немцы. Да, в период СССР много русских переехало в Прибалтику. Но! Разве это даёт право как-то притеснять/ограничивать права русских? Особенно на фоне болтовни о "демократии". То есть, сегодня вообще не имеет смысла, кто и отеуда взялся. Тогда тем же американцам в америке тоже не место у себя дома в США. Как и мне, русскому сибиряку, проживающему на бывших землях енисейских кыргызов. А про Израиль в данном случае даже можно и не говорить
This video is so weird. It just comes to the conclusion that people in big cities had better quality of life than people everywhere else. But, that's true of every society in history, to single out the Soviet Union for this perceived inequality when it's equally true of the US, China, etc. is non-sensical.
The arguments from this video are so weak and confusing, you might as well argue that empires like the ottoman empire werent empires. History Matters also completely ignores how the Soviet Union tried to restore their imperial borders and threatened/attacked Finland, Romania and Turkey, or how the Soviets "deported"/ethnically cleansed multiple minorities and replaced them with Russians, or how any rebellion and call for self determination in Eastern Europe was crushed by Soviet tanks.
During USSR though... A lot of cities emerged after the industrialization of the border states, the scale of mass productions on regions certainly brought QoL of most Soviets as more and more populations migrated to cities for better opportunities and those Stalinkas and post-WW2 recovery plans. Which would pay in the future by allowing Soviets some edge on Space Race in 60s and 70s.
Not really. Farmers amd rural towns have it better off half the time than anyone in megacity 1 in america. Like have you SEEN how rich alot of them are?
You don't even need to discuss the other SSRs to work out that the Soviet Union was imperialist. The Russian SSR alone was an imperialist project which dominated and controlled many many different indigenous people in across the vast area of Siberia from the Ket to the Chukchi. Just look at the territory of the Tsardom of Russia in the 1500s compared to the size of the USSR. Obviously this grew from way before the USSR took it over but when they did take over they didn't free the indigenous people of Siberia were still russifying the indigenous population and didn't even grant them their own SSRs.
The fact that russians are to this day very nostalgic about the soviet union while other ethnicities, even other slavs, aren't tells you a lot about the topic.
Not at all, lol, it’s just tells you a lot about the capabilities of Putins propaganda. Russians suffered no less, than other ethnicities during the Soviet dictatorship
The USSR existed in paper only. It was always Russia calling to the game. If you do not agree, then explain why after the collapse of the USSR, Russia asked the UN that RUSSIA will take the seat of vacated by the USSR at the Security Counsil and keep the right to veto inherited by the USSR.
While I agree that USSR was effectively just renamed Russia, Russia was declared the legal successor of the USSR *with* the consent of the other 14, at that time already fully independent, former soviet republics. This is because legal succession also meant that Russia would inherit all legal obligations of the USSR, most notably their entire collective debt, which understandably made stuff for the other republics way, way easier This wasn't done from the good of their heart of course, if you don't pay your debts, nobody will give you any loans again.....and russia specifically *really* needed those loans. And also they wanted the UN council seat
@@user-zz3sn8ky7z the other 14 post Soviet States themselves considered USSR as Russia USSR was *Russia only* Thr truth is Lenin wanted All other ethnicities of the former Russian Empire back under Communist Control So he decided *to make Russia a Union State which will be ruled by Soviets( Councils), And the divisions of this Nation will be divided on basis of ethnicity*
I think this misses one important thing about Russian imperialism - even within Russia proper, there are large regions where ethnic Russians are not the bulk of the populace, and those regions are (to this day) the poorest ones. Look at, say, Chechnya. So yes, there were parts of the RSFSR (now the Russian Federation) where the locals were treated as badly as Belarusians or Kazakhs, but those weren't areas like Moscow or Smolensk. The old Russian heartland from 500 years ago seems to have done a lot better than the outlying regions overall, even if it wasn't as nakedly exploitative as it could have been.
I'd love to see a short animated documentary on how the naval power nations of the world reacted to the first battle of Ironclads in the American Civil war
Yes, Russians all across the board WERE, in fact, better off than non-Russians. The only concrete thing this video mentions regarding how well off different Soviet citizens were is jobs, but there's so, so much more to people's livelihoods than jobs. No matter how poor they were, Russians still enjoyed the privileged that came with being put on a pedestal as the superior, more advanced and more intelligent culture.
1:15 - Why use that specific example when Lenin was the one to sign off on *Finnish independence from Russia*, and Finland didn't fall under Russian influence again until 1941\1945?
@@seneca983 Are you trying to imply that KARELIANS were allowed to teach in Finnish? In the middle of the civil war and de-kulakization, while Lenin was still alive?
Until the fall of Tsarist Russia, the Ukrainian Language had been banned for about a century. Afterwards schools and universities began to teach in Ukrainian, but the various Soviet rulers differed in the extent to which they tolerated the Ukrainian alphabet. Khrushchev, who was a Russian from the Donbass and had been Prime Minister as well as party leader of the Ukraine before the war, was the most tolerant.
Most of these qualifications (building infrastructure outside the metropole; local autonomy for client states; questionable benefits for ordinary members of the ruling ethnic group) are pretty common in empires
The british enjoyed unquestionable benefits from their empire, the autonomy of their client states was famously decided on a day by day basis by how racist the current diplomat was towards the other people and the buildings and infrastructure britain built was almost 90% only there to help with resource extraction. For example in nigeria, a country that the brits built up a lot, its easier to communicate or transport things from the capital to london than it is to go from the capital to the rest of the country
@@afridge8608 The British *state* obtained unquestionable benefits from the empire; historians continue to debate whether the average metropolitan British citizen got any net benefit from the empire, for much the same reason it’s debated whether the average Russian net benefitted from the USSR. The other points about infrastructure mostly being extractive, autonomy depending on officials capriciousness/prejudice, &c are all true for the USSR
@@andrewsoboeiro6979 You mean besides affordable housing after the war, paid education and healthcare and well planned transportation? I think the common soviet citizen had it pretty good without knowing it. My dad from the global capitalist south sure thought he made it to heaven when he arrived to the USSR.
@@burritoxl6056 are we talking about in Russia or in the other “republics”? Because a high standard of living for *Russians* is consistent with the USSR being an empire
They still brutally purged the old noble class, so no. Just like how 1930s gremany wasn't 'just' imperial gremany either. They want their old territory back but definitely had a new ideals about how to run it.
It's been different for a long time, you've confused it with the USSR. The rules have been simple for a long time. If you've earned a lot of money, then you get everything you want, if you don't know how to earn a lot of money, then you don't get it.
Fun Fact: You know how Stalin liked to readjust the borders of all the SSR's? He did this on purpose because he understood the ethnic groups in his own country and who their enemies were. He gave Uzbekistan and the surrounding countries very odd borders, so that if they ever left the Soviet Union, they'd be in an instantanous border crisis because of their strange borders. We're even heading towards a crisis in the area even today.
There was a lot of "affirmative action" especially in the early years, but for most of the Soviet Union's life the border republics received the most government aid. The post-WW2 Soviet Union had four levels of priority for receiving resources from the central system. The first priority included Moscow and Leningrad, but also Western Ukraine, the Baltic republics, the Caucasian republics, and the four Central Asian republics. The last priority included most of Russia and all of Belarus. Moscow essentially bribed the borderlands to keep them stable until the whole thing fell apart in the late 80s.
1:43 why did they only give autonomy to Central Asian republics, and not their stuff in Siberia or Caucasus? There is an alternative universe somewhere, where Dagestan, Tatarstan or Buryatia gain independence in 1991, because they were given the same autonomy as Ukraine or Belarus. If they didn't want to lose land, then why did they give a soviet republic status to Kazakhstan? It could've been part or Russia right now, if not for that decision in the 1920s. What was the criteria for deciding that?
Ignore the commenter above. To become a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), an ethnic territory had to 1) have more than a million people 2) have an external border/not be surrounded on all sides by Soviet land. As one can deduce from looking at a map, most of Russia's people do not fulfill 2), and the few ones that do don't fulfill 1). But that doesn't mean they were given no autonomy at all; rather, they were made Autonomous SSRs, which were subordinated to top-level SSRs.
Why would they need that? These republics would find themselves surrounded on all sides, in a logistical dead end, they would simply go bankrupt without logistics. It would be impossible to get there either by land or by sea without Russia's permission (since the route goes through Russia anyway), the only independent route would be through space, which is unrealistic.
The borders were NOT drawn on ethnic lines. They were drawn to make sure the republics whould go to war with rach other if the USSR ever collapsed. Why do you think Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have such were borders? To insite conflict, which it did. The same applies to almost all other republic's aswell. Armenia and Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh). Russia and Ukraine (Crimea, Donbas). Moldova (Transnistria). The Russias made these borders to ignite conflict after the enviable collapse of their empire, and they sadly did quite a good job of it too.
@@NokiaTheReuploader It doesn't matter it was an occupied nation. You could say that the Baltic states were also not officially recognized as Soviet republics by the vast majority of the western world, yet they are listed.
I ain't sure I like how this was mostly Stalin, please do a part two talking about after Stalin (harder to put together probably, but more interesting)
Russian empire was centered around religion and was fairly capitalistic. To say that both are the same is like saying Humans and ostrichs are the same because they are bipedals. Yes both were empires but making sweeping generalisations are problematic
@@u2beuser714 - "Russian Empire was centered around religion": No. It was centered around the autocratic government, with religion playing a secondary role. - "Russian Empire was fairly capitalistic": Very debatable, but irrelevant. Economics are not intrinsic to national identity. The Soviet Union tried to create a proletarian identity, but failed. - The "human/ostrich" analogy is pointless. A human cannot become an ostrich, and yet the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union, inheriting the former's power structure, economy, military, population, and culture. The Soviet Union was majority Russian, its capital was a Russian city, and the primary language was de facto Russian. It may not have been THE Russian Empire, but it was certainly A Russian Empire.
Im a polish american who has visited my polish relatives in poland who told me all about the soviet occupation. It was 100% a russian empire that dictated whatever it wanted to the member states on threat of military invasion. Experience speaks more than youtube videos sometimes... now i shall watch the rest of the video, i just wanted to clear things up from first hand experience.
There's a big difference between a country having an empire and a country being an empire as illustrated by the difference between the UK and the British empire
@@OghosasereEhondor ok... you did not address a single thing i just said. EDIT: unless you wanted your statement to be a stand alone comment at which point you should not be resonding to me you should make your own comment separately.
Was the British Empire an Empire despite there being plenty of Brits whose labour was exploited and living in poverty ( and conversely also plenty of wealth members of the native colonial population), and the semblance of development and political participation in the colonies? There are, unfortunately, too many Empire apologists out there for me not to make clear that I believe the answer is an obvious yes. The Soviet Union made pretty much the same territorial claims as the Russian empire. They might have tried to give it a semblance of legitimacy by reorganising the Empire into ethnic republics and early on to promote cultural distinctiveness, but these efforts were vastly outweighed by efforts to russify including removing vast numbers and replacing them with ethnic Russians.
The fact that they conquered by the Soviets made a lot of those countries feel like they were not equals. And that they weren't allowed to decide to leave. Somehow that's missing from this video.
@@NadirNovelties the reality of language and culture was also not what it appears on paper. Here in Ukraine, yes, Ukraine was legal but most of the schools were Russian, higher education was Russian, and you were treated like an inferior and untrustworthy/unfit for high status jobs if you didn't speak Russian. Some religions, like the Ukrainian Catholic church were also completely illegal whereas Russian Orthodoxy was tolerated
only a small minority of people within historically oppressed nations wanted to secede from the USSR. The vast majority of the peoples of the USSR supported their govt and saw each other as comrades and originally voted to jain, and later to remain in the USSR. They held a national referendum in 1991 where 90 percent of all the people of the USSR voted to retain their system, look it up
@@NadirNovelties what does the USSR collapsing have to do with what I said? Newsflash dumbass the USSR collapsed in 1991 despite over 80 percent of the population voting 90% in favor of keeping the system going. It was forcibly collapsed by the Yeltsin regime who killed hundreds of people directly and millions of people indirectly(7 million estimated excess deaths due to lack of access to food and medicine as well as crime and political violence)
One example you forgot is when the government ordered that all languages within the USSR be written in Cyrillic rather then the previous script I don’t know if it can be considered cultural assimilation but I mean it might as well be
One republic was spared from this: Armenia. I don't think anybody really knows why. The soviet union would alternate between pursuing russification or (korenizatsia) allowing local republics to retain their identity, depending one which regime was operating.
Thats not assimilation, Russian was the lingua franca and it would be easier for people to learn to write in it if they already knew Cyrillic due to having learned it for their own language
@@theotheagendashill818 Yes and disregarding hundreds of years of heritage that came in that writing system and that doesn’t make sense because it is like writing Russian in English it wouldn’t accurately record sounds.
You also need to emphasize that the way administration was conducted was completely different from the imperial system too. Succession was different for each Soviet premier. And like you said in the video lands were returned to states more often than not. Obviously with the exceptions of Bessarabia, Eastern Poland, (although lbh the treaty the allies signed regarding this sold the land out already from Poland and threw Poland under the bus.) and the Baltics. The Baltics were also still ran by the local communist parties respectively.
da comrade, at least they don’t eat ze bug, live in ze pod own nothing and be happy or celebrating being rapidly replaced by the immigrants like in ze west
i think it can also be boiled down to the fact that most industry in the Russian-empier pre-industrialized USSR was in russia, so in that sense russia had a sorta head start. also worth noting which he did kinda touch on is that generally the quality of life improved about about the same rates across all union republics. with urban centers being better off then rurel which russia also benefited from since pre-revolution it simply had more larger cities
About the USSR annexing parts of Poland, it should be noted that many of those territories were originally Soviet, but were conquered by the Polish in the Polish-Soviet war, in fact, many towns set up welcome ceremonies when the red army took them back at the start of WW2, rejoicing that their motherland had come to free them from the Polish Imperialists.
And before they were russian they were part of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth. But after they got screwed by russia, prussia and austria-hungary these areas got russified. The funny thing about history is that you can go back as far as you need to support your view.
Something to note is that the sole reason of drawing borders beyond the ethnic lines was to make sure the ethnicities were mixed enough to ensure no independence movements within the nations. Looking at the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan or Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, these were specifically deranged in order to "divide and conquer the nations". No wonder Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are still at war with each other more than 30 years after the USSR collapsed, and no wonder Russia still has extremely huge influence and power over these conflicts
I think you miss out a little on the fact that alot of the borders stalin drew were actually not matching ethnic lines, as he had a very "Divide and Conquer"esque mentality when drawing these borders.
@@enderkatze6129 it wasn't just drawing borders. He would deport huge numbers of natives, slaughter many of the rest in massacres and man made famines, and import Russian colonists, distorting the ethnic makeup of the territories
I love how the outfits of each historical figures gets a new design once in a while
@LolaNiky Bot report her please
@@yinghannongjust did
It's simple, in the past "empire" had a positive connotation and if they were a large country with a large population they could call themselves an empire, be it a monarchy or a republic, democracy or dictatorship, like France, the Netherlands or Germany in the past, a small country could also call itself an empire but that would be like a joke like the Empire of the island of Elba (Napoleon), however at the beginning of the 20th century it began to have a negative connotation, almost like an insult, we already know why and that was how all countries if they had one stopped using the term "empire" in any official matter until it disappeared.
@@BrunoDias1234 "Empire" has a specific historical, economic, geopolitical meaning that is almost entirely separate from the self-affixed label that some states took onto themselves. The main connection being that (some) of the states that took on the title "Empire" engaged in those imperial practices. But not every Empire engaged in imperialism, and not every imperialist state called itself Empire.
S'not as simple as the popularity of the name.
Also this comment has nothing to do with the comment you're replying to, why?
Yeah design changes are good, but my personal favorite designs for History Matters, were in his 2018-2020 videos, but the design changes in a way show how his videos have gotten better over the years.🙂
Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others.
Four legs good, two legs Bettttter!
Ah, Animal Farm reference.
@@Toonrick12jorjorwell wrote a fanfic about a state he barely knew anything about… so I must mean that that's exactly like the SU was like🤓
@@synthwave6995
Well he based it on Yevgeny's We, and Yevgeny was an actual Bolshevik, so...
My dad always tell me that quote
If you wonder why there is slide "Finns learn in Finnish", there used to be sizable Finnish minorities in Ingria and Republic of Karelia and Kola peninsula. "Used to be" being the important part here, they ended up in Finland or as a significant minority in Siberia, Sweden or six feet under.
Fins also managed to have a good amount of autonomy in the russian empire. And did an impossible job of keeping it while USSR was existing. Well, the NATO membership is the prize in the end.
I can't imagine being in six feet under. Such a bad band.
A lot of ethnic Finns were also displaced in the winter war of 1940, especially because the Soviet Union annexed 9% of Finlands territory.
@@MoonThuli : And the stolen territory contained Finland's second-largest city (Viipuri/Vybourg). And Russia *still* occupies it.
@@danielbishop1863 hopefully, if this current war is eventually won, there will be a broader desire to redact some of those Soviet territorial claims. Unfortunately now several times in the past century or so, Russia has shown that as soon as it gets anywhere above destitute poverty, it immediately tries to swallow up and colonize its neighbors again
2:40 there technically did exist one officially sanctioned form of regional pay discrimination in the form of the so-called "Northern Bonus", instituted in regions designated as "the Far North" (mostly sparsely populated areas beyond or near the Arctic circle) where extra pay and non-monetary benefits were used to compensate workers for the harsh conditions and/or incentivise workers from other areas to move there at least for a short stint. To some extent this system still exists in modern Russia.
It exists in the US too. Oil and gas companies have to pay more for workers to go to alaska than they would Texas.
A really unexplored part of Russian history in the West is how the Russian state uses monetary incentive and gulag prisoners to colonize the north of the country.
I mean, i wouldn't really call this bias more of Job being harder so you get more pay
@@FIVEBASKET This include every job, typically wages in the USSR are the same all around the country, but the far north get extra, mostly to make people want to move their for work.
The job might be the same but your living condition might be worsen be cause of the insane cold, atleast you get pay extra
@@FIVEBASKET It makes a lot of sense in a capitalist paradigm, but it's very un-communist.
"So did running a country centered in Russia benefit Russia and the Russians?"
Well yes, but actually no.
"Father, did we win?"
"No, son, we all lost."
Yesn’t
I don't think there is a single empire that would fit the definition that every subgroup within the "primary ethnicity" has to benefit from the empire. Roman Empire for sure had Italians who didn't seem to be getting too much out of the empire. You can always find some backwater town or socioeconomically marginalized group the capital doesn't care about that belong to the "primary ethnicity".
Fun fact: people tended to turn themselves into russians. Mama Chuvash papa Buryat, the child would have huge chances to identify as neither, but namely russian. Pretty unexpected for a nation repressed, isn’t it?
@@MidWitPride I think you mean Latins, Italians didn’t become a thing until after the fall of western Rome and German tribes settling and intermarrying with the Latins.
To be fair, even actual empires were often quite complex. The influence of the British empire varied greatly between colonies, between tight control and extractive economic policies to a more hands off relationship where London was happy to let the colony pretty much do its own thing, since it only really had the colony to stop a rival getting it.
Very good point! I’m Canadian and for centuries we were part of the British empire, yet for the most part we were treated better than any Soviet state outside of the major Russian cities.
British colonies were to ship their raw materials to English factories then import the finished goods
As English companies reap the profits as owned both the mines and the factories
You were white
@@tomhenry897 Some of them, for sure. But not others.
@@MacTac141by "we", are you referring to settlers or to indigenous people?
*Fun fact:* There are a ton of works of fiction (many of them made before the collapse of the communist regimes) in which the Soviet Union is still alive and powerful in a futuristic world. The 1968 dystopian science-fiction novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps?" (set in 2019) and the 1987 cyberpunk anime "Bubblegum Crisis" (set in 2032) serve as great examples of such works
Also 2010: a Space Odyssey
Ghost in the shell too (set in 2029)
I'll also add the Noon Universe books by the Strugatsky brothers which are more utopian in tone.
How did they get the future so wrong?
Also Cyberpunk 2020, the TTRPG
2:00 “If Stalin didn’t like you…. Oh boy”
Tito: that's too bad
He had almost every living relative of marshal Tukhachevsky executed or sent to the gulags. Because Tukhachevsky pointed out that Stalin was an incompetent commander to Lenin and blamed him for not covering his flanks during the battle of Warsaw. All of which was true and Stalin's incompetence was responsible for the disastrous casualties suffered in 1941-1942.
“You’re from Georgia, sweet Georgia, history books unfold ya”
yeah, that's what he said in the video, what's so funny about it?
@@thevickers7 Rasputin vs Stalin, Epic Rap Battles of History. It's quite good, actually.
Lenin advocated for the Union of autonomous Soviet republics.
Stalin advocated for a unitary state.
There was also Rakovsky who advocated for a Soviet confederation.
Before Lenin's death, his governing plan was mostly accepted. Stalin tried to push his idea at the time, but failed.
And after Lenin's death, you know who got the power and purged most of the dissenters.
It is a very important detail that this video overlooks.
Stalin dissolved the Checheno-Ingush ASSR, committed genocide against its inhabitants, and deported the survivors to Kazakhstan
Great revisionism and deletion of all the blood and actions on Lenin's hands
@@dusk6159 Revisionism? Deletion of all the blood? That's literal history. Get a book.
Academician Sakharov (the creator of the nuclear bomb) was not in the power of the USSR, but he wanted absolute equality for all ethnic groups of the USSR. He proposed raising the status of Russian autonomies to the level of union republics.
@@tintot4920 Thanks for your contribution! Mind if I include a reference to this in the comment?
My grandmother told me that when she was in the Estonian SSR, she could easily find shoes there, which were difficult to find in Leningrad.
The supply number for bough places was the same 2.
Thats true. Baltic states were much richer than most of the russia, even moscow and leningrad
@@Bobaeba Because we wherent communist during the interwar period.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 nope, this is not the reason. Thats because soviets used baltic state as showcase of mighty communism
@@Bobaeba So their mighty communism is a reduction in the quality of living and atempted genocide against the natives?
When Tsar Nicholas took Russia into WW1 in 1914, he did so under the banner of Russianness and Orthodoxy. Yet at the time the country was only around 50% Russian, because it included lots of non-Russian minorities: Poles, Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Tatars etc.
At the end of WW1, the Bolsheviks took power under the banner of Communist cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalism. The nine members of the first Soviet Politburo included four Jews (Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, plus Lenin was one quarter Jewish), a Georgian (Joseph Stalin), a Pole (Felix Dzerzhinsky) and just three Russians (Alexandra Kollontai, Andrei Bubnov and Lenin himself). But the country they governed had lost Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and around half of Ukraine. Now it really was very glaringly majority Russian (around 70-75%). Maybe it’s not surprising that the eventual winner of the post Lenin power struggle was the Georgian who preferred “socialism in one country” to Trotsky’s internationalist “permanent world revolution”.
>ukrainians
>non-rissian minority
Yeah that definitely how they were perceived in empire. India also have only 50% native hindi speakers.
@@myasovlavashe4303erm, Hindi is not a marker of ethnicity btw.
Ukrainians were included under the banner of Nicholas II, as well as Byelorussians, Ukraine was called Little Russia at that time and Belarus means White Russia, all are Orthodox, with equal rights as Russians. I agree about the other minorities.
"included four jews"
@@Edgar-jn5ulFun facf: during the times of the Russian Imperial Duma (parliament), Kiev was considered a vital electoral center of _Russian nationalists_
> Kiev
> Center of Russian nationalism
Just let that sink in
I don't think i've ever seen a skull in the History Matters artstyle before now
That's Stalin for you, it would be disingenuous to not mention the pits after all.
I was struck by that as well. It was strangely chilling.
Nah I feel like I’ve seen it before but I’ll admit I can’t tell you which video(s) it was off the top of my head
They've been there the whole time, but usually with faces in front of them,
Yeah that was pretty shocking to me
I like that you dont actually answer the question but just give the facts and let us viewers decide.
Interesting because another comment says teaching in another languages was forbidden in Russia but allowed in the SU. What is the truth?
@@bassewitz. It depends on which time period are we talking about. Teaching and publishing in native languages could be banned, then partially allowed (with strong encouragement to only learn russian anyways in schools and universities), then fully allowed again only for authorities to list everyone who still clinged to their nationality and ban everything again.
Not accusing minute hist of anything, but often this sort of "giving facts but letting viewers decide" is a deception tactic. Since through the careful control what fact you give and what fact you omit can create a skewed view of reality but shield you with a "technically I'm right".
@@BlueHawkPictures17 You are free to point out what was wrong in the video, or, you think, should've been mentioned.
@@BlueHawkPictures17 for short videos like these, you arent meant blindly trust all the info presented anyway. Both "answering the question" and "letting the viewer decide" can be deception since you can always tailor your representation to suit your need. At the end of the day, its always a good thing to also look into the matter youself
It was actually the James Bisonette empire
I agree
LORE:
James Bisonette (December 18th 1878 - March 5th 1953) started the Russian revolution and proclaimed himself as emperor of Russia in December 30th 1922, establishing a one-party, Soviet, socialist, absolute monarchy.
After his death in 1953, his son, Jerry Bisonette, took over. However, Jerry didn’t want to lead the country and denounced him in 1956, abolishing the monarchy and handing power to politician Nikita Khrushchev, who transformed the USSE (Union of Soviet Socialist Empires) and transformed it into a Socialist Republic called the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
no no no! we all know James Bisonette has his own merchant republic, with himself being the sole doge.
Not Katoytska's? Sounds like unSoviet thought to me tovarich. You go join Great Siberian Tree Census now.
(edit: lets see which words the snooperbots didn't like)
A mere satrapy of the Bisonette Dominion
Led by Stalin Money Maker
Hmmm... Problems with the initial conditions for "Empire". How many of these applied to the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
@@LiamDennehy very few. Speaking as someone whose family is from what was the poorest province in that empire (east Galicia, now western Ukraine), Austrian rule was much beloved. As of a couple weeks ago visiting it, you can still find Austrian flags being flown proudly and, importantly, voluntarily, beside the Ukrainian flag in Lviv. Austrian architecture, cafe culture etc are preserved and cherished. There was much better treatment of minorities. Even if there were occasional disputes, it is nothing at all in comparison to the gulags and genocide inflicted by Russia. Austria wasn't built for modern total war, but as empires go it was quite laid back and respectful to subject peoples
@@michaelwarenycia7588 true to an extent. One can argue that this laissez-faire faire attitude was being eroded by a younger generation of civil servants and diplomats towards the end of the empire, most notably in the annexation of Bosnia which was already an austrohungarian territory. The annexation was a bit more aggressive and caused concern on the international stage, most notably the empire now bordered Serbia and was more powerful than it. There is evidence that Hoyos and other foreign policy makers intended to make a move on Serbia next and that the black hand pre-empted this, although this is a bit more tenuous. What is fairly clear is that Hoyos' response to the assassination did nothing to lower tensions and can absolutely be argued that he steered the countries towards war. So for the majority of the empire's existence they were more respectful and slow in assimilation and growth but this seemed to be all but over by the end, leading to the aggression between the two countries and eventually european and global war
@@InvagPrune no, it was the same at the end. Heck my great grandfather was a military official in the Austrian army. It's only the Serbs who seemed to have a problem with Austria to the point of war and assassination. The experience of Serbs, themselves a proxy of the Russian Empire in the region, should not be generalized to the dozen or so nationalities of the Habsburg lands
@@michaelwarenycia7588 "To the point of a war" which was started by Austrians, even though Germany pushed for it.
If any of the nations liked the empire, they wouldn't leave it.
Because of German oppression lasting centuries many of the West Slavs (and all Old Prussians) are germanized (whole Polabia, Veletia, Lusatia, Pomerania, original Silesia, Prussia) and Czechs and Slovenians almost too.
And because you can't build anything due to corruption and other things doesn't excuse the evil. Luckily, the tide turned around and they are destroying themselves.
@@janprochazka8095 the Russians are destroying themselves??? Your statement is rambling and confusing. There's no European empire today except Russia and, perhaps, in a mostly financial sense, France
Worth noting that Lenin and Stalin's policies toward language were less repressive than the Romanovs' had been. During the tsars' reign, teaching in non-Russian was outlawed, whereas Stalin encouraged it. Yes, he also forced the republics to teach Russian as well, but it's understandable why the government would want a common language
Would say its a double edged sword. The communists were trying to ignite a sort of identity of "you are nationally different from us, but we're all commies" but inheriting a Russian empire, it's morepractical to teach people the most common language within the union.
It's basically role of English and maybe Hindi as official languagesin India. Nobody speaks English natively, but being formerly British domain its more practical to keep English.
Also, considering slav speaking countries, it wasnt much of a hindrance
If language is problem then US Is Empire because of using English and alfabet insted Native American
You're sure trying hard to lessen the historical oppression of Stalin. Weird.
I understand your comment, but you fell into a really retarded revisionism. "Stalin's policies towards language were less repressive... During the Romanovs, teaching in non-russian was outlowed... Yes, he(Stalin) also forced the republics to teach russian as well, but it's understandable why the government would want a common language"
Just admit both were tyrants trying to make their gigantic empire more homogenous.
Very interesting topic! Keep it up!
If he keeps it up, maybe he will one day run a successful channel! You never know...🤣
He probably saw the b*tching about the soviet union being another russian empire or whatever becoming a very hot topic in the last 2 year because of you know what and decided to talk about it.
@@financeexplainedgraphicsI would say 1.7 million subscribers is pretty successful bro. Nice rage bait
@@financeexplainedgraphics His channel is 4 years younger than your channel and he has 530x the subscribers. Sounds like you need to git gud
@@a12shotman lol. Guys it’s a joke. “Keep it up!” Just sounds like something you’d tell a kid on their way to great things, but isn’t there yet. I was being ironic.
I don't usually call out mistakes in videos, but this one is kinda interesting to me. 1:31 The Finno-Soviet border is shown in the after-winter war look. But the European border is pre-WW2, which makes this map quite literally impossible.
Now that I've engaged in some whell akstcually with a nerd emoji stiched on top, I'd like to say that your videos are amazing and incredibly educational!
I ADORE your attention to detail. At 2:09 Antanas Smetona, the Lithuanian President (Dictator) on the left is carrying a suitcase, a reference to how he fled the country before occupation
Also, the main group that benefitted were those working with the communist party or the KGB, as far as I can recall
As always, the people who benefit in an autocratic system are the nobility.
"If Stalin didn't like you, oh boy..."
I almost choked on my Fanta
Boy howdy he didn't like some people 😂
Is Fanta a reference to Nazis?
That was actually the ghost of Stalin punishing you for that choice of fanta.
strawberry fanta?
A decadent capitalist luxury!
The Stalin Poster at 1:39 is pretty awesome.
Swear to God?!? I thought these guys were athiests!
This is a really great video idea, it was really interesting. I'd also like to add on that my mum, born and raised in modern day turkmenistan (or USSR) learnt about both turkmen and soviet culture. She says that she felt soviet and had no problem with learning about russian history.
Education for history was both soviet and turkmen (in other republics they would be similar for example in Ukraine they would learn both Soviet and Ukrainian history). They also learnt about older russian history like Peter and Catherine the great. After the collapse of the Soviet Union she was in University and said that they had compulsory history and learnt alot about Turkmen/ central asian history, which felt forced for her.
She was born in 1974.
Kudos for sharing a Turkmen perspective!
The problem is that non-Russian history is fake. And Russian history especially is fake.
@@SL16867maybe she was not turkmen. But russian,ukrainian sent to turkmeniatan?
After 1991 in Central Asia and Ukraine they have begun to do histrocial revisionism, to lend themselves some percieved grandeur and claim statehood prior to the Soviet period.
@@mehmetfatihcetin5932 no she is of Uzbek + caucuses blood, born and lived in the Turkmenistan republic. She moved to UK where I was born :)
The patreon name read-out will always be fascinating
It ain't a History Matters video without our homie James Bizonette
1:38 I want that poster for my wall. XD
Yeah, pfp checks out
@@SeamedCarrot699 No, no, you don't have to be a furry to appreciate humor.
@@SeamedCarrot699 staunch anti furry here and I agree with Brown here that having this poster would be pretty funny.
He needs to start a store, just to sell these posters. Making pins of the various historical characters would also be pretty great.
LOL I just went back to look at it
This was lovely. A shame it wasn't longer for some of the information, but it does leave those who want to know more room to research. And the simple facts approach you always take is more than refreshing when the focus could be deeply biased thanks to who you're talking about.
You forgot about the forced deportation of entire ethnic groups during the 50s, this included the Chechens, Kalmyks, Circassians, Qirim and many others. The entire Qirim nation who were the majority population of Crimea were deported to Uzbekistan and were kept in forced labour camps between the 50s and 90s, when they were finally freed. Though they still weren't fully allowed to return home to their native Crimea, as they had to get visas whcih were often denied because of their ethnicity, they were also not compensated in any way for 40 years of slavery or the fact that all of their homes and property had been repossesed. Many Qirim still live in poverty today in Uzbekistan, while many others have returned to Crimea only to face oppresion from the new Russian regime and are now forced to squat on what was once their home.
That's an important story to tell, but keep in mind that this channel rarely publishes videos exceeding 4 minutes in length, including the Patreon supporter list. If the creator is aware of this story, he likely judged it to be insufficiently relevant to this video's central topic to warrant inclusion.
@@JobiWan144 I'd say that organised ethnic cleansing is an important topic when it comes to whether a nation was an empire or not. Because although not every empire committed genocide and not every genocide was committed by an empire. The 2 are very much interlinked.
Not saying that the deportations weren't tragic, but lying doesn't fix that. First, the Crimean Tatars had long ceased to be the majority in Crimea by the time they were deported to Central Asia. They had a 20% share, that was it. Second, nobody was kept in camps "until the 90s", all punitive measures (except the ban on returning to Crimea) were cancelled in 1956. Third, forced labour is not slavery, no matter how loudly one might cry about it. Deportees had rights, even if they didn't enjoy full freedom. Finally, don't think everybody missed your attempt to force a tear - "they went from one struggle to another" - while conveniently ignoring the 22-years-long period of Ukrainian rule. Why embellish and spread lies, isn't what those people really experienced enough?
@@advocatusdiaboli4861 You are right that Crimean Tatars didn't make up the majority before the deportations, as they stopped becoming the majority somewhere between the 1864 and 1897 censuses, that's my bad. Also it very much was genocide and slavery, roughly half of the Qirim populaztion died along the journey to Central Asia and they were very. Also the charges against the Qirim weren't dropped in 1956, they were dropped in 1967 with Decree number 493. When they were finally allowed out of the labourt camps, but even then many were forced into ghettos and Soviet propaganda used many racist streotypes to incite hate crimes against the Qirim, which were common in Uzbekistan. The reason I glossed over the 22 year long Ukrainian rule was becuase my comment was already long enough and I didn't want to waffle on for too long. I wasn't trying to twist the story, but the Qirim are still very much a marginalised and opressed people, though things did improve under Ukranian rule, only for them to end up back under Russian rule in 2014. They were then all kicked off of the lands they were "squatting" on by the new Russian appointed government, despite those lands being seized from their families onlyh 80 yeats prior. They were then forced to relocate to less desirabl lands in Crimea. i'm not in any way trying to lie about the situation, I did make a few errors, but I was trying to spread the message about the story of the Qirirm, who underwent genocide, slavery and organised hate crimes under the Communist Russian empire.
I think most of us would agree that such events are important. In defense of the History Matters crew, the 'population engineering' part were examples of what you're talking about. It was a tactic used where-ever Stalin gained control. Putin is using the same tactic, in the same area, today. If Ukraine gets any of their land back, chances are most of that land's population really will be Russian.
The Stalin banner @1:37 is amazing 😁
Another great video 👍
What was Imperial Japans reaction to the fall of Nazi Germany?
Military History Visualized has a video which sort of touches on that.
panik
There last telegram to Berlin was like this
"Good luck"
The problem with this video is the concept of an empire is almost impossible to give an explanation that is applicable to all empires in history without including other nations
It was the Russian Revolution that created the Soviet Union, other states declared their independence from it, but the Soviets were interested in reclaiming all parts of the former Russian Empire, they would allow those parts to have their independence. If you look at a map of the Soviet Union and their Eastern European satellites and superimpose a map of the old Russian Empire, the Russian Empire fits within a map of the Soviet Union and East block, there is very little difference between those two countries other than who rules.
@@thomaskalbfus2005I guess rules make the difference
@@thomaskalbfus2005 Because it makes sense geographically in this part of continent.
@@pushista9322 Russia/USSR trying to reclaim by force parts of the Russian Empire makes about as much sense as the UK trying to reclaim Canada and Australia because those places used to be part of the British Empire.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 Can Canada or Australia be used as foothold to attack Britain?
Great Video, I enjoy your videos and always watch them right after you upload them. In all honesty, you are the best history UA-camr, thank you for your work.
Have you considered making a video about the Pogroms in the Russian Empire?
The forced migrations, ethnic cleansings, Russian colonization of non-Russian land and using the Russian Empire's historical grievances with neighbors says yes, yes it was a continuation of the Russian Empire.
Love this channel!
0:42 that lone question mark that is upside down ... I felt that ... ¿
¿
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Im glad you mentioned the Baltics. My wife is Latvian and her family have said that Russian was the only language permitted in public and Russians got all the best houses and jobs.
I’d say the Baltics provide the best argument for the idea that the USSR really was an empire, even if Lenin’s ideology was supposed to be anti-imperial. The three Baltic states were incorporated into the USSR against the wishes of their inhabitants, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This meant that the Soviets couldn’t trust the local inhabitants to be loyal to the USSR - at least not as loyal as Russians would be. Imperial logic meant they “had” to favour Russians over Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians.
That's literally a lie
@@lysenkotheory3400Here comes the 12 year old tankie 😂
@@lysenkotheory3400And where are you from, comrade? A cushy apartment in California, perhaps? Or maybe a cozy house in France?
Holy based
Great video 👍 you guys never disappoints ❤
Guy*
It omits the important part of relocations of smaller ethnic groups within Russian Soviet Republic and changing the borders of certain territories to instigate internal conflict between the groups. The infrastructure you mentioned was also strategically placed to make sure that different territories had conflicts between each other
You can read further on that searching keywords "forced migration of Chechecns", "forced migration of Tatars", "Tatar and Bashkir Soviet Republic borders"
Ukraine and Russia were the two major powerhouses of the Soviet Union. This makes it perplexing that Russia assumed taking on Ukraine in 2022 would be easy. Many Ukrainian veterans who served in Afghanistan and worked within the Soviet system understand the inner workings of their Russian government and military counterparts, giving them insight into Russian strategies and tactics.
Ukraine was like Schleswig Holstein in Germany, just a region of Russia. It was created by the Soviet Union, before that it was Russia. Lenin and Stalin were very liberal to the regions culture.
Probably because it's easier to rule people that are divided. That is why they fucked up the territory division (eg. Karabakh).
@@Teney1994western Ukraine was Russia? When? Lviv was literally never Russian lmao
@@gamermapper Western Ukraine was Poland for the longest time. Those parts identified themselves rather polish than ukrainian either way.
The ukrainian language you hear today is polish Ukrainian. There is also russian and romanian ukrainian language. They took a culture of a minority and forced the culture of it upon the majority.
Odessa never spoke polish and I doubt that it ever will.
Their actions (impossible good treaties for Ukraine at the initial stage) do not seem to have had such main goals.
Now it seems more and more that they wanted to make the world multipolar and used military conflict to achieve these goals.
I love how Belarus is just the third wheel of the Rus. Like, Russia is the main player, Ukraine is backup, and Belarus is... Belarus.
The Stalin poster on the wall at 1:38 🤣
Reminds me of animal farm. the horse worked so hard he got injured few months before his retirement. Instead of calling the vet, the Pigs took the horse to the slaughterhouse.
@@pupper5580kinda reminds me of... capitalism healthcare
When watching I had to rewind (or whatever it's called now) to read it. I love when animination includes those messages
A brilliant and concise video. Good job mate.
Thank you for trying to be objective on such a sensitive topic in these troubled times
2:22 many Ukrainians were removed from the after-war Poland into the after-war Soviet Ukraine, the same with the Belarusians, and the Poles were removed in the opposite direction
"Equal Share for Everyone" - Soviet War Miner.
Didint know that it meant litterly equal in everything weather its good or bad for them.
I really love how accurately he makes and gives guns to appropriate troops
POSSIBLE HISTORY AND HISTORY MATTERS VID IN A DAY WOOOO
well, i guess you didn't draw an exact conclusion, but I'd like to mention how it pretty much feels like an empire for me, seeing how my country's language and self identity were almost destroyed, and sadly are being destroyed by sad soviet-nostalgic old guys in the government
The self analysis was noticed and appreciated. love your work
Ordinary Brits didn't benefit much from the British Empire either. So not sure that should be part of definition of what an Empire is. In fact an Empire can be a very expensive thing to have.
This was left out and should have been showed clearer
Except for all the capital produced and stolen from the empire getting reinvested in Britain leading to a more educated and prosperous people compared to any other part of the empire except for the dominions but sure
@@jeffersonclippership2588 Middle class and upper perhaps but they're not the majority of the British population they're the upper 5%. Also this whole "Britain stole" rhetoric is really boring (when Britain conquered its opponents directly). Meanwhile the colonies were expensive for Britain.
@@jeffersonclippership2588only a tiny number of Brits benefited from the Empire. The vast majority of Brits lived in absolute poverty and died young. The Empire was very expensive and many bits we didn't even want but had it in order to stop slavery (post abolition).
@@RoachChaddjr "It's not stealing if you call it something else"
Good video.
The characters, their expressions and the notes they hold are hilarious. :)
I was intrigued to see a thing a while ago that basically described it as an empire in reverse. The metropole exported raw materials (read: oil) to the subject states and they produced manufactured goods to send back. It was a weird system.
Were interesting take.
Thank you for mentioning annexation of the Baltics and relocation of russians.
For others too often it is simply "former soviet republics" and russian % here gets mentioned without talking about how most of them got here.
This. It is disgusting to see how Soviet government used mass violence and repression not only against various ethnic groups but even workers they claimed to represent (Novocherkassk massacre).
Fwiw, those annexations were never recognized as legitimate by much of the world. Until 1991 made it moot, the US still recognized Baltic governments in exile.
@@hasturtheunnameable3888 Yes, you are right. I was refering more to other YT videos about this topic, and also news etc.
Well, as for 2024, most of the russians in the baltics, were born there.
Русские жили в Прибалтике и до СССР. Как и, например, немцы.
Да, в период СССР много русских переехало в Прибалтику. Но! Разве это даёт право как-то притеснять/ограничивать права русских? Особенно на фоне болтовни о "демократии". То есть, сегодня вообще не имеет смысла, кто и отеуда взялся. Тогда тем же американцам в америке тоже не место у себя дома в США. Как и мне, русскому сибиряку, проживающему на бывших землях енисейских кыргызов. А про Израиль в данном случае даже можно и не говорить
This video is so weird. It just comes to the conclusion that people in big cities had better quality of life than people everywhere else. But, that's true of every society in history, to single out the Soviet Union for this perceived inequality when it's equally true of the US, China, etc. is non-sensical.
Correct
i mean yea were you expecting good history from these clowns lol
The arguments from this video are so weak and confusing, you might as well argue that empires like the ottoman empire werent empires.
History Matters also completely ignores how the Soviet Union tried to restore their imperial borders and threatened/attacked Finland, Romania and Turkey, or how the Soviets "deported"/ethnically cleansed multiple minorities and replaced them with Russians,
or how any rebellion and call for self determination in Eastern Europe was crushed by Soviet tanks.
During USSR though... A lot of cities emerged after the industrialization of the border states, the scale of mass productions on regions certainly brought QoL of most Soviets as more and more populations migrated to cities for better opportunities and those Stalinkas and post-WW2 recovery plans. Which would pay in the future by allowing Soviets some edge on Space Race in 60s and 70s.
Not really. Farmers amd rural towns have it better off half the time than anyone in megacity 1 in america. Like have you SEEN how rich alot of them are?
I immediately came to the comments as I knew from the thumbnail that it'd be a crapshoot 😂
Baltic seething. It never disappoints 😂
''was the soviet union a state of equals?''
estonians, latvians, lithuanians, ukrainians, georgians, armenians, kazakhs, tajiks: no
russians: yes
@HenriqueMagalhães-l4p cry about it
@HenriqueMagalhães-l4p in ukraine
lying. crimea WAS, IS and WILL BE forever TURKISH.
@@TsarIsBack prefer that over russians colonizing it
@HenriqueMagalhães-l4p in ukraine, cry more
Thanks for this vid! Never considered this topic and the answers surprised me
You don't even need to discuss the other SSRs to work out that the Soviet Union was imperialist. The Russian SSR alone was an imperialist project which dominated and controlled many many different indigenous people in across the vast area of Siberia from the Ket to the Chukchi. Just look at the territory of the Tsardom of Russia in the 1500s compared to the size of the USSR. Obviously this grew from way before the USSR took it over but when they did take over they didn't free the indigenous people of Siberia were still russifying the indigenous population and didn't even grant them their own SSRs.
By your logic English should stay in England since, you know, America is still controled by English, same with Canada, New Zealand and Australia
The fact that russians are to this day very nostalgic about the soviet union while other ethnicities, even other slavs, aren't tells you a lot about the topic.
Not at all, lol, it’s just tells you a lot about the capabilities of Putins propaganda. Russians suffered no less, than other ethnicities during the Soviet dictatorship
the work hard poster is brutal
0:37 The Brits, for all their faults, didn't try to force Christianity on (at least the vast majority of) their Empire.
Surprisingly based video
A very interesting question, and an even more interesting video to answer it ! Thanks
The USSR existed in paper only. It was always Russia calling to the game. If you do not agree, then explain why after the collapse of the USSR, Russia asked the UN that RUSSIA will take the seat of vacated by the USSR at the Security Counsil and keep the right to veto inherited by the USSR.
While I agree that USSR was effectively just renamed Russia, Russia was declared the legal successor of the USSR *with* the consent of the other 14, at that time already fully independent, former soviet republics. This is because legal succession also meant that Russia would inherit all legal obligations of the USSR, most notably their entire collective debt, which understandably made stuff for the other republics way, way easier
This wasn't done from the good of their heart of course, if you don't pay your debts, nobody will give you any loans again.....and russia specifically *really* needed those loans. And also they wanted the UN council seat
@@user-zz3sn8ky7z the other 14 post Soviet States themselves considered USSR as Russia
USSR was *Russia only*
Thr truth is Lenin wanted All other ethnicities of the former Russian Empire back under Communist Control
So he decided *to make Russia a Union State which will be ruled by Soviets( Councils), And the divisions of this Nation will be divided on basis of ethnicity*
I think this misses one important thing about Russian imperialism - even within Russia proper, there are large regions where ethnic Russians are not the bulk of the populace, and those regions are (to this day) the poorest ones. Look at, say, Chechnya. So yes, there were parts of the RSFSR (now the Russian Federation) where the locals were treated as badly as Belarusians or Kazakhs, but those weren't areas like Moscow or Smolensk. The old Russian heartland from 500 years ago seems to have done a lot better than the outlying regions overall, even if it wasn't as nakedly exploitative as it could have been.
open youtube, what's the problem? You can see there whether the region is poor or not.
I'd love to see a short animated documentary on how the naval power nations of the world reacted to the first battle of Ironclads in the American Civil war
"Gee, I wish we had some of them there ironclads"?
Yes, Russians all across the board WERE, in fact, better off than non-Russians. The only concrete thing this video mentions regarding how well off different Soviet citizens were is jobs, but there's so, so much more to people's livelihoods than jobs. No matter how poor they were, Russians still enjoyed the privileged that came with being put on a pedestal as the superior, more advanced and more intelligent culture.
@Энрике.Магальяйнсбраво, теперь еще придумываем ущербность из-за географических особенности. «Эволюция» деградация совкодрочеров на лицо.
1:15 - Why use that specific example when Lenin was the one to sign off on *Finnish independence from Russia*, and Finland didn't fall under Russian influence again until 1941\1945?
You know, e.g. Karelia had Finns, not just Karelians and Russians. Also, there were Red Finns who had fled Finland after having lost the Civil War.
@@seneca983 Are you trying to imply that KARELIANS were allowed to teach in Finnish? In the middle of the civil war and de-kulakization, while Lenin was still alive?
@@Xander77Ru I don't know. Do you?
Until the fall of Tsarist Russia, the Ukrainian Language had been banned for about a century. Afterwards schools and universities began to teach in Ukrainian, but the various Soviet rulers differed in the extent to which they tolerated the Ukrainian alphabet. Khrushchev, who was a Russian from the Donbass and had been Prime Minister as well as party leader of the Ukraine before the war, was the most tolerant.
Most of these qualifications (building infrastructure outside the metropole; local autonomy for client states; questionable benefits for ordinary members of the ruling ethnic group) are pretty common in empires
The british enjoyed unquestionable benefits from their empire, the autonomy of their client states was famously decided on a day by day basis by how racist the current diplomat was towards the other people and the buildings and infrastructure britain built was almost 90% only there to help with resource extraction. For example in nigeria, a country that the brits built up a lot, its easier to communicate or transport things from the capital to london than it is to go from the capital to the rest of the country
@@afridge8608yes because Britains as the only empire to ever exist huh?
@@afridge8608 The British *state* obtained unquestionable benefits from the empire; historians continue to debate whether the average metropolitan British citizen got any net benefit from the empire, for much the same reason it’s debated whether the average Russian net benefitted from the USSR. The other points about infrastructure mostly being extractive, autonomy depending on officials capriciousness/prejudice, &c are all true for the USSR
@@andrewsoboeiro6979 You mean besides affordable housing after the war, paid education and healthcare and well planned transportation?
I think the common soviet citizen had it pretty good without knowing it.
My dad from the global capitalist south sure thought he made it to heaven when he arrived to the USSR.
@@burritoxl6056 are we talking about in Russia or in the other “republics”? Because a high standard of living for *Russians* is consistent with the USSR being an empire
Was communism then just another form of Russian imperialism, an imperialism dressed up as ideology?
They still brutally purged the old noble class, so no. Just like how 1930s gremany wasn't 'just' imperial gremany either. They want their old territory back but definitely had a new ideals about how to run it.
Good episode. You narrowed the nuance accurately.
Russia still acts like this. If you don't live in Moscow or St Petersburg, you aren't getting the shiny new stuff
It's been different for a long time, you've confused it with the USSR. The rules have been simple for a long time.
If you've earned a lot of money, then you get everything you want, if you don't know how to earn a lot of money, then you don't get it.
Oh, wow. Big cities are more modern. Unthinkable.
Maybe not Russian chauvinism but definitely Muscovite chauvinism was at the center of the Soviet Union.
Fun Fact: You know how Stalin liked to readjust the borders of all the SSR's? He did this on purpose because he understood the ethnic groups in his own country and who their enemies were. He gave Uzbekistan and the surrounding countries very odd borders, so that if they ever left the Soviet Union, they'd be in an instantanous border crisis because of their strange borders. We're even heading towards a crisis in the area even today.
Why did the southern German kingdoms unite with Prussia after the Franco-Prussian War?
Because they had no choice.
They felt threatened by France.
Because of national sentiment in the population who (in their majority) had wanted a unified German nation state since the early 1800s.
What does James Bisonette think?
Not sure why this is even a question. Lithuania and the Baltic states never wanted to be violently invaded and genocided
There was a lot of "affirmative action" especially in the early years, but for most of the Soviet Union's life the border republics received the most government aid. The post-WW2 Soviet Union had four levels of priority for receiving resources from the central system. The first priority included Moscow and Leningrad, but also Western Ukraine, the Baltic republics, the Caucasian republics, and the four Central Asian republics. The last priority included most of Russia and all of Belarus. Moscow essentially bribed the borderlands to keep them stable until the whole thing fell apart in the late 80s.
1:43 why did they only give autonomy to Central Asian republics, and not their stuff in Siberia or Caucasus? There is an alternative universe somewhere, where Dagestan, Tatarstan or Buryatia gain independence in 1991, because they were given the same autonomy as Ukraine or Belarus. If they didn't want to lose land, then why did they give a soviet republic status to Kazakhstan? It could've been part or Russia right now, if not for that decision in the 1920s. What was the criteria for deciding that?
The actual answer has to do with when the various bits were conquered by Russia.
Ignore the commenter above. To become a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), an ethnic territory had to 1) have more than a million people 2) have an external border/not be surrounded on all sides by Soviet land. As one can deduce from looking at a map, most of Russia's people do not fulfill 2), and the few ones that do don't fulfill 1). But that doesn't mean they were given no autonomy at all; rather, they were made Autonomous SSRs, which were subordinated to top-level SSRs.
@@advocatusdiaboli4861Well Kazakhstan was surrounded by soviet lands. Did you mean « Russian » land ? (As lands populated by Russians)
Why would they need that? These republics would find themselves surrounded on all sides, in a logistical dead end, they would simply go bankrupt without logistics. It would be impossible to get there either by land or by sea without Russia's permission (since the route goes through Russia anyway), the only independent route would be through space, which is unrealistic.
The borders were NOT drawn on ethnic lines. They were drawn to make sure the republics whould go to war with rach other if the USSR ever collapsed. Why do you think Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have such were borders? To insite conflict, which it did.
The same applies to almost all other republic's aswell. Armenia and Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh). Russia and Ukraine (Crimea, Donbas). Moldova (Transnistria). The Russias made these borders to ignite conflict after the enviable collapse of their empire, and they sadly did quite a good job of it too.
Why didnt you put barbed wiring on the North Caucasus in the thumbnail video?
Because it was never a soviet republic, duh
@@NokiaTheReuploader It doesn't matter it was an occupied nation. You could say that the Baltic states were also not officially recognized as Soviet republics by the vast majority of the western world, yet they are listed.
@@NorthCaucasusPatriot thats because they got independence
It's a lot clrearer when you think it was always a Moskovite empire.
I ain't sure I like how this was mostly Stalin, please do a part two talking about after Stalin (harder to put together probably, but more interesting)
Was the Soviet Union just a rebranded Russian Empire?
"Yes, but actually no, but actually yes."
Russian empire was centered around religion and was fairly capitalistic. To say that both are the same is like saying Humans and ostrichs are the same because they are bipedals. Yes both were empires but making sweeping generalisations are problematic
@@u2beuser714
- "Russian Empire was centered around religion": No. It was centered around the autocratic government, with religion playing a secondary role.
- "Russian Empire was fairly capitalistic": Very debatable, but irrelevant. Economics are not intrinsic to national identity. The Soviet Union tried to create a proletarian identity, but failed.
- The "human/ostrich" analogy is pointless. A human cannot become an ostrich, and yet the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union, inheriting the former's power structure, economy, military, population, and culture. The Soviet Union was majority Russian, its capital was a Russian city, and the primary language was de facto Russian. It may not have been THE Russian Empire, but it was certainly A Russian Empire.
Im a polish american who has visited my polish relatives in poland who told me all about the soviet occupation. It was 100% a russian empire that dictated whatever it wanted to the member states on threat of military invasion. Experience speaks more than youtube videos sometimes... now i shall watch the rest of the video, i just wanted to clear things up from first hand experience.
There's a big difference between a country having an empire and a country being an empire as illustrated by the difference between the UK and the British empire
@@OghosasereEhondor ok... you did not address a single thing i just said.
EDIT: unless you wanted your statement to be a stand alone comment at which point you should not be resonding to me you should make your own comment separately.
It was nice of you to give Steven Seagal a job playing the Baltic dude.
Was the British Empire an Empire despite there being plenty of Brits whose labour was exploited and living in poverty ( and conversely also plenty of wealth members of the native colonial population), and the semblance of development and political participation in the colonies?
There are, unfortunately, too many Empire apologists out there for me not to make clear that I believe the answer is an obvious yes.
The Soviet Union made pretty much the same territorial claims as the Russian empire. They might have tried to give it a semblance of legitimacy by reorganising the Empire into ethnic republics and early on to promote cultural distinctiveness, but these efforts were vastly outweighed by efforts to russify including removing vast numbers and replacing them with ethnic Russians.
The fact that they conquered by the Soviets made a lot of those countries feel like they were not equals. And that they weren't allowed to decide to leave. Somehow that's missing from this video.
@@NadirNovelties the reality of language and culture was also not what it appears on paper. Here in Ukraine, yes, Ukraine was legal but most of the schools were Russian, higher education was Russian, and you were treated like an inferior and untrustworthy/unfit for high status jobs if you didn't speak Russian. Some religions, like the Ukrainian Catholic church were also completely illegal whereas Russian Orthodoxy was tolerated
only a small minority of people within historically oppressed nations wanted to secede from the USSR. The vast majority of the peoples of the USSR supported their govt and saw each other as comrades and originally voted to jain, and later to remain in the USSR. They held a national referendum in 1991 where 90 percent of all the people of the USSR voted to retain their system, look it up
@@ShiningSta18486 None of this it true. You do know that the USSR collapsed, right?
So, it's the same with the Confederate states?
@@NadirNovelties what does the USSR collapsing have to do with what I said? Newsflash dumbass the USSR collapsed in 1991 despite over 80 percent of the population voting 90% in favor of keeping the system going. It was forcibly collapsed by the Yeltsin regime who killed hundreds of people directly and millions of people indirectly(7 million estimated excess deaths due to lack of access to food and medicine as well as crime and political violence)
The soviets did what revolutionaries always do: replace something they consider bad for something bad of their own.
Much respect that you chose to write a script longer than just the word “yes”
One example you forgot is when the government ordered that all languages within the USSR be written in Cyrillic rather then the previous script I don’t know if it can be considered cultural assimilation but I mean it might as well be
So is US empire because it force people to use English and Alfabet.
One republic was spared from this: Armenia. I don't think anybody really knows why. The soviet union would alternate between pursuing russification or (korenizatsia) allowing local republics to retain their identity, depending one which regime was operating.
Thats not assimilation, Russian was the lingua franca and it would be easier for people to learn to write in it if they already knew Cyrillic due to having learned it for their own language
@@theotheagendashill818 Yes and disregarding hundreds of years of heritage that came in that writing system and that doesn’t make sense because it is like writing Russian in English it wouldn’t accurately record sounds.
@@theotheagendashill818 Why are you making excuses for forceful cultural imperialism?
Another amazing video
You also need to emphasize that the way administration was conducted was completely different from the imperial system too.
Succession was different for each Soviet premier.
And like you said in the video lands were returned to states more often than not.
Obviously with the exceptions of Bessarabia, Eastern Poland, (although lbh the treaty the allies signed regarding this sold the land out already from Poland and threw Poland under the bus.)
and the Baltics.
The Baltics were also still ran by the local communist parties respectively.
Union of equals. Equally oppressed
da comrade, at least they don’t eat ze bug, live in ze pod own nothing and be happy or celebrating being rapidly replaced by the immigrants like in ze west
Yet more people died in Holodomors in republics and not in Russia proper.
at least soviets eat natural food but capitalist eat cancer food
@@10.huynhphathuy8 The West has been like this only for a decade though
i think it can also be boiled down to the fact that most industry in the Russian-empier pre-industrialized USSR was in russia, so in that sense russia had a sorta head start. also worth noting which he did kinda touch on is that generally the quality of life improved about about the same rates across all union republics. with urban centers being better off then rurel which russia also benefited from since pre-revolution it simply had more larger cities
About the USSR annexing parts of Poland, it should be noted that many of those territories were originally Soviet, but were conquered by the Polish in the Polish-Soviet war, in fact, many towns set up welcome ceremonies when the red army took them back at the start of WW2, rejoicing that their motherland had come to free them from the Polish Imperialists.
And before they were russian they were part of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth. But after they got screwed by russia, prussia and austria-hungary these areas got russified. The funny thing about history is that you can go back as far as you need to support your view.
0:18 Caralho, nunca imaginei ver a bandeira do Império Brasileiro no History Matters
Tbm fui pego de surpresa
Something to note is that the sole reason of drawing borders beyond the ethnic lines was to make sure the ethnicities were mixed enough to ensure no independence movements within the nations. Looking at the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan or Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, these were specifically deranged in order to "divide and conquer the nations". No wonder Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are still at war with each other more than 30 years after the USSR collapsed, and no wonder Russia still has extremely huge influence and power over these conflicts
I think you miss out a little on the fact that alot of the borders stalin drew were actually not matching ethnic lines, as he had a very "Divide and Conquer"esque mentality when drawing these borders.
@@enderkatze6129 it wasn't just drawing borders. He would deport huge numbers of natives, slaughter many of the rest in massacres and man made famines, and import Russian colonists, distorting the ethnic makeup of the territories
You are right about this one. The Armenian-Azeri modern wars is a prime example of Stalin's divide and conquer policy.