hydroptic , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Eeeeeeexactly. The few times Russians have managed to produce or acquire leaders who weren’t sociopaths, they were fairly universally hated.

It’s just incredibly short sighted of people to think that Putin is some kind of an anomaly and that he alone is the reason why Russians are so fucked up, when they have a centuries-long history of genocides, violent repressions by various secret police organizations, colonialism etc. Nobody seems to even understand that Russia is still a colonial empire, just one with contiguous borders

EDIT: Some Russian genocides and ethnic cleansings over the years

Just to drive the point home, here’s a list I copied from an earlier comment of mine of just the easiest to find genocides and ethnic cleansings perpetrated by Russians that I found with a minimum of searching based on what I remember from history. Note that there’s some overlap between these, so you can’t just sum the “victims” column to get a total victim count.

Date	Event	Victims
1785 – 2017	Chechen genocide	500,000 – 900,000 deaths
1800 – 1870	Circassian genocide	1,500,000 – 2,000,000 deaths
1850s – ongoing	Cultural genocide by Russification in colonized areas	Hard to estimate. Millions, with many minority cultures lost
1920s – 1930s	Genocide of the Ingrian Finns	Ingrian population reduced from 140,000 – 160,000 before the persecution to 19,000 today
1920s – ???	Ethnic cleansings on the Kola Peninsula	Nordic population of the Kola peninsula dropped from 20% to 0.2%
1930 – 1952	Cultural genocide by forced migration in the Soviet Union	6,000,000 deported
1932 – 1933	Genocide of Ukrainians in the Holodomor	3,800,000 – 5,300,000 deaths
2015 – ???	Syrian, Russian forces carrying out ethnic cleansing around Aleppo, Turkmen accuse Russia of ethnic cleansing in Syria air strikes	Tens of thousands displaced and/or dead
2022 – ongoing	Genocide in the current Ukraine war	???
2023 – ongoing	Pogroms in the Caucasus	???