>>18133326
Okay. When you invade and occupy a country/people and then force them to serve as an unwilling component of your empire while resettling your own ethnic majority onto their lands? That’s colonialism. The Russian empire at least had the excuse that it was nothing more than a medieval autocracy descended from the Mongolian Horde. It didn’t even try to pretend otherwise. The communists said imperialism and colonialism were bad. Fine, I agree. They’re kind of shit and tend to cause a lot of problems. Just look at your map. The native people of Siberia that Russia committed genocide against (and still are if you look at how they’re killing Buryat), the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, the Baltic peoples, and so on. The best way to judge how shitty Moscow was to live under is look at what happened the moment the colonies had the chance to break away. Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, the whole Warsaw pact for that matter ran for the exits.