I have been wondering how the USSR compared to western nations on issues related to identity and oppression. I can't seem to find any sources that don't scream anti-communist propaganda though and was wondering if anyone could help point the way?

  • gammison [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Here's some resources I had posted in a thread down below but am reposting here so you get the notification:

    They did, Siberian indigenous peoples did suffer, particularly on the Bering Strait border region. Peoples who had ties to both sides of the strait got fucked by both governments.

    There's a good recent book on this and the history of the strait in general: https://www.amazon.com/Floating-Coast-Environmental-History-Bering/dp/0393635163, and the author went on The Dig about it, here, and Sean's Russia Blog here.

    On more insular indigenous people, there's also some very recent work on the Kazakh famine, see an interview about it here.

    There's also this recent work on race in Imperial Russia and how it continued/changed during Soviet Union.

    There is also these two books:

    Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

    Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

    Overall from those two books, you'll get the picture that the Siberian peoples especially had varied treatment over time, alternating between fascination, romanticism, condescension, and indifference to the point of callousness (especially with environmental concerns). Not nearly as bad as American settler colonialism (the russian empire had done most of that work) but really not remedying or listening to concerns. They did the whole white man's burden but with a twist that it was bringing those people into soviet modernity, acting in constant tension with the brotherhood of nations that the union officially supported (and really did believe in), a contradiction they never resolved. This was harder pre war, post war there was more attention on preserving cultural entities but still slipped in the romanticism of siberian people, and the pollution was also worse. The Gorbachev period marked an official change from modernizing to preservation but not that much change in practice. Overall there is repeated otherness and problems placing these peoples in the soviet experience.

    One of the great cultural productions that shows the romanticization and view of soviet modernity is Kurosawa's film Dersu Uzala.