Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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I think it would have been very unlikely for a number of reasons, but specifically two main ones:

- The Soviet Empire never transformed into an assimilative empire and was always something of a post-war occupation state. If you look at other empires that managed to last longer, they almost always had an “absorbing” of the captive areas, adopting some of their cultural ideas, incorporating local elites into the state apparatus, etc. (think of the Romans in Greece, for example.) This didn’t really happen in Soviet member and client states and was more of a top-down promotion of particular individuals and parties.

- The existence of Poland. Soviet history really goes back to Russian Empire history, which includes the partitions of Poland and the numerous uprisings for independence during the 19th century. I don’t think it was ever realistic to think Poles would be happy in a Russian empire, and the continual existence of such a large, unhappy client state in the Soviet sphere seems like it was an inevitable weak spot. The Solidarity movement was key in bringing down the USSR, so that is essentially what happened.

The Soviet empire was very much assimilative, so successfully that people sometimes overlook it. Its greatest leader was Georgian, while three others were Ukrainian. Parts of it ("Western Ukraine", Kaliningrad) were annexed outright after World War II, while other areas continued a Russification program that started under the tsars.

As for Poland, the Solidarity movement was quite effectively suppressed in 1981 and ceased to be an effective political force until the Polish government badly miscalculated and allowed it to reconstitute itself eight years later. The biggest mistake the Soviets made in Poland was in giving a large degree of autonomy to the Catholic Church.

All of those areas other than Kaliningrad were assimilated primarily during the Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union.

As for Solidarity, I suggest reading about its influence on the Soviet bloc as a whole. Again, even if it didn’t work, it was just another example of a resistance movement in Poland. Another one would have likely occurred a decade or two later.

Western Ukraine was pre-war Poland; the population was resettled to settle parts of Germany that were annexed to Poland post-war.

This is part of several massive ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin so successful that we forget about them today. But you are right that there was substantial continuity between imperial Russian and Soviet policy around russification of the various provinces.

With regard to Solidarity, there were plenty of resistance movements in Eastern Europe over the years; the real shocker around its 1988 incarnation was that it was allowed to peacefully assume power, and the Soviet Union didn't impose a red line enforced by tanks. That was new! It wasn't the return of Solidarity so much as Gorbachev openly saying "we're not going to intervene" that got the process of collapse rolling.

Well, personally I don’t forget about them because I actually have some Lemko ancestry, which are the group of people that got moved.

Again I don’t think as a whole the Soviets really did a great job assimilating cultures outside of historically Russified areas. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time to do so, but more in a broad geopolitical sense, I’m not sure it ever would have worked.

I see the process more in line with how China handles being a multi-ethnic state. You have a dominant ethnicity and a pretty aggressive program of settling people from that ethnicity in the provinces. If you were a Russian engineer or doctor, you had a fair chance of being sent to Kishinev or Almaty or somewhere else in the empire; conversely, bright up-and-comers in the provinces would have a chance to come to St. Petersburg or Moscow. The Soviet state, like the PRC today, took care to advertise its many ethnicities while making sure as a practical matter that Russia would be the dominant power.

I think you have to be careful excluding "historically Russified areas" in your evaluation, because then that kind of begs the question. Those areas didn't just russify themselves! I agree that the process happens on longer time scales than the Soviet Union lasted for, but I think they continued a quite successful tradition from Tsarist times, with the added help of extremely aggressive and mostly forgotten ethnic cleansing campaigns under Stalin, like the removal of the Volga Germans.

Maybe another way to put it is: the Russian empire was reasonably “successful” (not actually good, ethically, IMO) in assimilating areas that had a stronger tie to the historical Eastern Orthodox core of the Moscow state. Tie also meaning the expulsions you mentioned. They had a more difficult time on the borders of and outside this zone. (Poland, for example.) This continued into the Soviet era.

A good metric of assimilation might be the alphabet. Seems to me that if the imperial core is using one alphabet (Cyrillic) but outlying areas with a hostile history are using another (Latin), then the assimilation process wasn’t working and perhaps never would work. And more broadly this alphabet difference is really a religious-cultural difference going back a millennium.

In short, IMO the Latin-using Catholic Poles had a long history of being different from the Cyrillic-using Orthodox Eastern Slavs, and were large enough as a group to not get relocated or assimilated, and therefore basically never would have been properly assimilated into the Russian-dominated Soviet identity.

Its greatest leader was Georgian, while three others were Ukrainian.

That's a very odd adjective choice to apply to the Georgian one.

The other 3 are usually cited as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko, but the former two were of Russian ancestry.

That leaves us with Stalin and Chernenko in our multicultural icon set. The latter having of course served but a year, mostly as a walking corpse.

Litigating this is like arguing about whether George W. Bush was a southerner. He was a Connecticut blueblood who grew up in the South, made his political career there, spoke with a southern accent, married a southerner, and so on.

The war with Ukraine has made questions of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity much more salient then they used to be, but it's important not to project that onto the past. The situation with Khrushchev and Brezhnev is a lot like W's—they grew up and made their political careers in Ukraine; Khrushchev in particular had a strong southern accent.

Аnd if you absolutely insist on blood tests, then you'd have to count Gorbachev as half Ukrainian, which would be a further bit of proof about the effectiveness of assimilatory policy...

Khrushchev in particular had a strong southern accent.

You can take the matter up with his granddaughter if you like:

   I remember my grandmother saying that Khrushchev spoke Ukrainian all the time and that it was so embarrassing because it wasn’t the real thing! That said, Khrushchev was a Russian. It’s erroneous to say that he was Ukrainian—as Henry Kissinger just did, in a recent article. He did not transfer Crimea to Ukraine because he was Ukrainian. He was a Russian.

https://macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/nina-khrushcheva-...

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