The next time you believe that Russia & the USSR was and is anticolonial, think of whether Russia did the decolonization within its borders first.
Spoiler alert: Russia never revised its colonial history regarding it's conquests in Siberia, the so-called Russian North (Karelia and other Ugro-Finnic lands), the Caucasus mountains and Central Asia. Instead, they still worship the very people who committed those crimes as national heroes.
A perfect example of such a Russian national “hero” is Semyon Dezhnev, a 17th-century Russian (Moscovian) cossack. In Russian schools they teach that he was a great traveler and explorer, that he discovered new lands in Siberia for the tsar, that he was the first European to swim through the Bering Strait, and that he befriended the native Siberian nations. During the Soviet era, he was so revered that several icebreaker ships were named after him.
What they don't mention, however, is the fact that in relation to native Siberians, particularly Sakhans (Yakuts), he was a sort of a character that we could compare to the Spanish conquistadors in South and Central Americas or to English settlers in North America. I believe that the best character in the Western historiography that I can compare him to is John Smith. Yeah, the one who abducted a 12-year-old Powhatan girl named Matoaka, but you may know her in her romanticized, sexu@lized version as Pocahontas.
In other words, I mean that Semyon Dezhnev was a colonizer, and most likely a murderer and a r@pist.
Because yeah, the story of Semyon Dezhnev and his Sakhan (Yakutian) wife, Abakayade, is sort of like the Russian version of the story of Pocahontas and John Smith. It is heavily romanticized and almost always centres the perspective of the colonists and marginalizes native voices.
But you know what is the difference between the story of Pocahontas & John Smith and the story of Semyon Dezhnev & Abakayade?
That the native people of the Americas managed to fight back and reclaim their own narrative. That the white settlers were forced to stop spreading this false narrative which only served to legitimize colonialism and genocide.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the story of Dezhnev & Abakayade was cemented by the Soviet propaganda as the perfect example of the fraternity of peoples. Yes, the same concept of the fraternity of peoples that the Soviets popularized among the POC in the West as an example of a decolonized, equal society.
And the lie has been so strong, that in 2005 Semyon Dezhnev was commemorated in a monument in Yakutsk, the capital city of the republic of Yakutia (Sakha) - the capital city of the very lands that he raided and exploited. And to make things worse, he is depicted as a loving husband to Abakayade, the woman whom he abducted, forcefully baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, married in this very religion that was foreign to her, then r@ped and impregnated so that she had his child.
How disgusting you have to be to lie to the world about being “anti-colonial” and then commemorate straight-up colonizers?
And yeah, before you accuse me of defending the US - the fact that I criticize Russian imperialism, Russian colonialism and the concept of Russia as a whole does not mean that I am fond of the US. Heck, I am not. But the problem is that criticizing the US has been a thing for decades, while the victims of Russian colonialism and imperialism has been silenced this entire time because too many people out there believed in the myth called fraternity of peoples - a myth invented by Russkiye (white Slavic) Russians for Russkiye Russians, and to make Russiye Russians look good in the eyes of the world; a myth, in which the native population is just an addition to the “glory” of the Russkiye.
My point is not that the US is better, my point is that the US and Russia, somewhat like the Western and Eastern Rome, are two sides of the same coin and none of them deserves praise just because it's against the other. They equally deserve condemnation.
Have a picture of a monument of a colonizer with his victim 🙃