Ironically, I mainly see foreigners drawing that false equivalence, and am always puzzled by it, as it seems to be far more persistent than anything constructed by the Soviets themselves. So I don't really think it's rooted in Soviet propaganda, it's always been there, even during early USSR which was worshipping the International. The perception in the US was especially persistent, you can see this in every media article and every public document/speech dating back to the 1920s as calling Soviets "Russians" was widespread.
>The association "USSR = Russians" is part of the systematic attempt by the soviet regime at cultural (and sometimes literal) genocide.
Using "Soviet" and "Russian" interchangeably was, in my opinion, mostly a Western phenomenon. I don't remember Soviet propaganda mixing the two. It always felt weird to me when in Cold War Hollywood movies they would refer to USSR as Russia, or Soviets as Russians. You wouldn't do it here. Usually they put emphasis on "Soviet man", not on particular ethnicities.
I am curious to know whether this Western perception was supported or opposed by the Soviet state. They have definitely “prioritized” Russian culture internally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflation was at least in part created by the Soviets.
"I was in volgograd not long ago, the locals now exclusively call is stalingrad once more"
Ditto, but never heard this even once. Just to add perspective.
Soviet sentiment is strong among Russians which is even more bizzare considering that Russians (as opposed to other Soviet nationalities) were the bulk victims of most Soviet mistreatment.
The weirdest part of it is that it seems to be an academic article. A lot of people are lumping all USSR and even exUSSR nationalities into "Russians" after the Cold War era dehumanization, but this doesn't seem to be ignorance.
I doubt that as a people Russians are any more "proud" than any other nation; such a sentiment reminds me of the age of Romanticism, when such kind of analysis of nations, or of national spirit, was commonplace. It is so very human (and so very superficial, too) to want to feel superior to or at least no worse than others, that states exploit this via propaganda. If people are being systematically told that they belong to a great nation (which defeated the Germans in WWII, or was the first to send a man in space, or has a magnificent cultural legacy in XIXth century writers, or has the second largest nuclear arsenal, or other such stuff intended to boost nationalism), they get "proud". When this propaganda stops, they go back to normal again.
Russia is always disproportionately blamed for being a cultural oppressor,
Might have something to do with the early 20th-century body count (whereas most of the other empires managed to get their megakilling sprees wrapped up by 1900 or so). Along with all those sinister Russian accents in Hollywood movies. But yeah, friends of mine have confessed this feeling to me, also (that, as Russians, they feel unduly blamed / hated by the world).
...however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language
Same justification used by... basically every other major empire on the planet, you know.
Either way, this is all getting very far afield from the topic of the original article.
We're just repeating an old page from an old playbook.
> Back in 1937 Comrade Stalin pointed out that as long as the Soviet Union existed amid capitalist encirclement we would have wreckers, spies, saboteurs and murderers sent to our home front by foreign states. [1]
Just change the names and the years and the professions around, and we'll be good to go. The actual existence, non-existence, or prevalence of spies, saboteurs and wreckers is second fiddle to the perception thereof. :)
>the claims were that they were due to Russian peasants, because of course nothing good could have originated in Russian "enemies of the people", e.g. aristocrats or bourgeoisie.
So it was the usual communist propaganda about social classes, but what you originally said sounded more like Russian nationalism. You also mention the word "Russian", did those books really use that word, not "Slavic" at least? Soviet propaganda, from what I read, preferred to talk about peasants in general, irrespective of specific ethnicities (USSR was a multiethnic state).
That's what I'm talking about. Some people can afford the fancy of believing in belonging to a “state” that has been a single entity through centuries, and introduce mental gymnastics to embrace the “good parts”, and expel the “bad parts” to “the past” to pretend that “modern day person” is automatically different. “We the people”, yada yada. How is Russian Empire the same thing as Soviet Union? You could be killed for making that statement after the Revolution. (There are works that do actually trace the socially inherited features, but they are a bit deeper than newspaper level looking at a name or at a map, and fantasizing about “empires”.)
I am not yet senile, so I do remember that not so long ago everyone living on a stretch of land from Balkans to Bering Straight was a “Russian” with the same thick accent, no matter what they thought about that. That's the level of scientific discourse we're talking about. So current media-induced hyper-attentiveness to proper identification of characters on stage seems a bit hypocritical to me. As I said, there are people from “all those -stan countries lumped together because I'm too lazy to point my finger at any of them”, and also people from Russia who dissect actual dynamics of relationships in local societies instead of winging it with “ugh Soviet empire something something like African slave trade problem solved”.
Let's not forget there were multiple options to emigrate in early '90s. If you had at least some Russian family ties, you could try to flee to Russia. If you had at least some Jewish family ties, you could try to flee to Israel. If you had at least some German family ties, you could try to flee to Germany. Let's say we have twin sisters who were born in Tajikistan, and lived there. One decided to move to Russia (maybe because she had family and kids, and relatives on husband's side), other decided to move to Germany. Assuming they start at the same point in space and time, please tell me when one turns into colonialist, and the other into indirect victim of Soviet forced deportations?
2 of my Ukrainian great-grandfathers died in WW2, many other relatives that I do not know about. Were they Russians?
Soviets did plenty of bad things, I don't get that jab. Many Russians now in Russia hate the Soviet moniker and look at the October Revolution as a catastrophe.
Only for Westerners Soviet == Russian, which puzzles me absolutely.
My family name is Polish, which was as good as Russian to the average American in the early 1950s. I grew up hearing stories about Cold War discrimination from my grandparents. That sort of paranoia is un-American. It shouldn't happen here.
But there were deeper reasons for the paranoia that settled over the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and pretending that some kind of parity exists between the two is the height of college-campus solipsism:
That's what the Soviet citizens were saying about the citizens of the Western block too. The reality is, it's probably all the same. There are very subtle differences of course, which tend to be exaggerated.
Are they Russians in Russia, who supported the Soviet Union? Or Russians that left Russia because the Soviet Union nationalised their land?
Most cases of "I know Russians and they say X" or "I know Cubans and they say Y" are claims in the West that are informed by the fleeing bourgeoisie that would of course be critical of the regime change.
> I think the point is that what we today might think of as Cold War style rhetoric and rivalry has antecedents in the Russian empire and points earlier.
Is probably true, people just reference Cold War because it's well known symbol and the rest of the history is not needed for them...
> I would even go so far as to say the whole thing is from the Great Schism. (...)
No, not really... The story in the article is placed when PLC was conquered, and similar things happened not only in Lithuania but also in Poland, where it was done by both Cyrillic Russia and Latin Germany. I'm not an expert on Russian history, but I could bet that at certain times they also tried to uproot other Cyrillic cultures who were deemed unwelcome by the rulers (both communist and before). I agree with the other person that this is just authoritarian thing.
> A couple months ago in the context of all the US-Russia political drama I was thinking of this...(...)
Well this one depends on the general world view I guess? If you tell history as a story of clashing ideas, then there will be a clear narration and you will easily see patterns as you describe, ever repeating conflicts of similar forces. But just one way of looking is often not enough to see the whole thing. I also see the direction of looking at the past tensions as promising, but then when do you stop? In this particular case the way of writing could be just an artifact of an older conflict used to reinforce the current one. We dnn't need to repeat the past, we can just reuse it.
No, I was referring to a line of thinking very common among folks I’ve met who grew up in post-USSR Russia vis a vis the worldview of many of the people I know who grew up in the USSR before.
The former tend to think everyone is corrupt and that if people have success or wealth or anything, it’s because those people swindled someone out of it or were connected to the right people.
Those who grew up in the USSR tend to have a more meritocratic worldview, where hard work and intelligence and studying for exams will result in a better life.
Maybe the people I know [strike]are[/strike] aren’t representative of those times and places. No matter, you can find justification for either worldview in nearly any situation, whether it’s 1970s USSR or ‘90s Russia or ‘50s America or Trump’s America. Reality is nuanced and filled with thoughtful insights that oppose each other and yet are equally true. The loudest people on HN are not people trying to square that circle.
It sure smells like it when you're using terminology outdated by 30 years. Don't use anachronisms if you don't want people to think you're anachronistic.
You may as well call Russians "Soviets". Yes, it's many of the same people in the same buildings, doing the same sort of bullshit. But they aren't called Soviets anymore and if you go around calling them Soviets, you'll going to have people think that you're stuck in the 80s.
I am Russian. Was born and lived in USSR until I was 30. As you might guess I knew a boatloads of them and I think most of them including yours truly would call a BS on that. Reading Dostoyevsky does not make one know Russians.
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