The repression of the regimes that followed didn't spring up in a vaccum, but was a natural evolution of the political environment they operated in.
Plus millennia of a very rich civilization, for the majority of which it was the richest economy in the world, a lot more advanced than the cruder rest of the world, and with a very intricate society and culture.
>Russia was a backwater, with constant repression and terrorism of it's population. Hell, it had serfdom until the mid 19th century.
Well, the US had slavery until the mid 19th century, Jim Crow until the 40s, and segregation until the 70s, so there's that.
Well, you'd be surprised. A large part of Europe (Germany, Austria, etc) halted serfdom only a few decades before Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_...
That's not how Europe works. Virtually everyone around here is "white". That doesn't prevent racism, it's just racism against Gypsies, or Albanians, or Itelmens, or Jews, or now (often white) muslims.
And of course in Europe we had a big thing for using class differences instead of using race differences as our justification for such things as serfdom.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
> A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The Russian term originally entered the English language in order to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
At least it is hard to see how the Soviets were an improvement on the past.
You can argue that it was a totalitarian government ruled by dictators, but you cannot argue that it was ruled by an aristocracy or that a peasant couldn't rise up to rule the country.
A well connected Party member or apparatchik could live relatively decently regardless of his ancestry, on "merit" (connectedness) alone. Yes, he could also get shot or imprisoned, but the same was true with the Empire, where he'd never rule.
Stalin was born in a poor family. Lenin's was wealthy middle class, but not aristocratic. Trotsky was born to (wealthy) farmers. Kruschev was the son of peasants and Brezhnev the son of workers. Just to name a few...
Yes, it absolutely absolutey did. [1][2][3]
And, you only need to stick a spade in the ground, to find literal skeletons in the closet of Imperial Russia (Whose military, historically spent most of its times brutally repressing ethnic minority uprisings... Just like the Soviets did, in the 20th century.)
> send millions of Russians to the gulags
How did you think St. Petersburg was built? With the bones of conscripted serfs. [4]
Or the Trans-Siberian? Do you think people were volunteering for the chance to work on it? Or, speaking of Siberia, in the rest of that hell-hole? No - Siberia was developed through forced labour of prisoners, under the Katorga system.
Did you think the Russian secret terror police start with the KGB, or the NKVD? This apparatus was invented by aptly-named Ivan the Terrible, who established the Oprichina.
Or the Trans-siberian?
[1] Persecuting jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom#Russian_Empire
[2] Persecuting muslims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims#Russian...
[3] Repression of non-Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Imperial_era_...
That said, for much of the Imperial period, crimes were punished not by banishment, but through mutilation (gouging eyes, cutting off tongues and hands, etc) and execution.