How so? The only out-and-out cases of ethnic cleansing (via mass deportation intended to be permanent, and liquidation of cultural elites) were to my knowledge against the Poles in 1939-1941.
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On occupied territories from 1939 indeed, in the USSR since mid 1930s.
According to wiki about the Poles:
wiki said:
And generally for different nations:
wiki said:
But is it ethnic cleansing if it doesn't clean up the ethnic map?
As far as I understand the terms, breaking up large homogeneous areas and distributing people across an empire isn't ethnic cleansing, as long as it's not deliberately intended to make people assimilate into a larger ethnicity, it's just a general kind of imperial style resettlement policy. Stalin didn't intend for Koreans to become Russians he just intended for them to move away from the potentially troublesome Manchurian border.
The Poles though were the ones deliberately targeted for destruction as a people (certainly spiritually and in terms of identity, maybe also physically, haven't read enough about that)
Ethnic cleansing is then people are forcibly removed en masse from certain area because of their ethnicity. Where exactly they end up is not really relevant to that question. Also spreading a previously relatively concentrated minority group over a wide area makes them assimilating into majority population far more likely. Like Ingrian Finns were a quite coherent ethnic minority in 1920s, today they are mostly Russified.
Yeah I think Mazower was mainly talking about the earlier period before Stalin's purges, because the context was a discussion of the theoretical founding values of different central European countries and how the roots of fascism were immediately present in post-war European politics.
The deportation of ethnic groups, regardless of the intended purpose, is generally considered a form of ethnic cleansing.
By the way, in the USSR (1930's, pre-WW2), entire non-Russian villages (like Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish etc) inside the Russian SSR were completely wiped out by mass executions. People who were not russian were just rounded up and just shot.
The process was identical for all ethnicities but the "Polish operation" has the most easily found information. ~110 000 Poles were executed 1937-1938 purely because of their nationality. Considering how long the USSR existed, their forms of genocide on non-Russian ethnicities were quite well worked out by the late 1930's. Also, mass deportations of entire (non-Russian) populations to a faraway area were done by the Russian empire already in the 17th century. Usually almost all of them died on the way, so it was a form of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_Order_No._00485
Maybe a bit off topic, but is this why in Victoria 2 HPM there's a Russian satellite state in the Baltics? Baltyiska Guberniya or something like that?
Stalin had an acute personal vendetta against the Poles (or maybe 'great distrust', 'immense disdain' at least), stemming from their activities going way back to the days of the Revolution & especially the subsequent Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21. So all these mentions of atrocities should be kept in perspective as Stalin's policies more so than 'Russia's policies'. E.g., when the USSR took control of eastern Poland in late '39, Stalin's first priority was to immediately go in there, and 'take care of them' (you get the idea).
To the point of the OP, my ancestors were actually high nobility in one of the Baltic States during the days of the Russian Empire. Passed down from my great-grandfather, the sentiments I've been told in regards to the Russian monarchy were mostly those of civilized, high society. Relations were warm, cordial -- the Tsar attended our weddings & the monarchy was not nearly as heavy-handed as you might imagine. We were obliged to serve in the army as officers, of course. We played this game until 1916 when it was clear that the ship was sinking.
The next in line to serve was my great-grandfather, who was imminently to begin his training as a CAV officer cadet. Of course commanding cavalry into the machinegun fire of WWI was a death sentence. That, along with the writing on the wall already being clear that the state & monarchy was in serious trouble, it was decided that no further sacrifice would be made to the empire. Thus, my young ancestor was fled to America (via Scandinavia) in 1916. -Just him, and his (much) younger brother.
But before you call him a coward, you should know that in early 1917 when the USA entered the war, he lied about his age (still too young) and served in the U.S. Marine Corps on the western front (where he, and the rest of the U.S. forces swiftly brought the Allies to glorious decisive victory via acts of heroism unmatched in the annals of the history of warfare). Once the armistice was signed, he tried to return home to his family, only to find the former empire in total chaos. Unable to locate his family (maybe in Siberia, maybe dead?), he returned west, picked up the most attractive, well-formed German babe he could find near the Rhine, and returned to his new home in glorious & victorious America... the last, best hope for the future of mankind.
To the point of the OP, my ancestors were actually high nobility in one of the Baltic States during the days of the Russian Empire. Passed down from my great-grandfather, the sentiments I've been told in regards to the Russian monarchy were mostly those of civilized, high society. Relations were warm, cordial -- the Tsar attended our weddings & the monarchy was not nearly as heavy-handed as you might imagine. We were obliged to serve in the army as officers, of course. We played this game until 1916 when it was clear that the ship was sinking.
The next in line to serve was my great-grandfather, who was imminently to begin his training as a CAV officer cadet. Of course commanding cavalry into the machinegun fire of WWI was a death sentence. That, along with the writing on the wall already being clear that the state & monarchy was in serious trouble, it was decided that no further sacrifice would be made to the empire. Thus, my young ancestor was fled to America (via Scandinavia) in 1916. -Just him, and his (much) younger brother.
But before you call him a coward, you should know that in early 1917 when the USA entered the war, he lied about his age (still too young) and served in the U.S. Marine Corps on the western front (where he, and the rest of the U.S. forces swiftly brought the Allies to glorious decisive victory via acts of heroism unmatched in the annals of the history of warfare). Once the armistice was signed, he tried to return home to his family, only to find the former empire in total chaos. Unable to locate his family (maybe in Siberia, maybe dead?), he returned west, picked up the most attractive, well-formed German babe he could find near the Rhine, and returned to his new home in glorious & victorious America... the last, best hope for the future of mankind.
Tbh I havent played Victoria so can't really comment in detail, but Baltic governorates did retain significant autonomy under control of Baltic-German knighthoods, so that is most likely the basis for it.
That's really interesting. During history class they always taught us that the Finns and the Poles (until they started revolting too much) were the only people in the Russian Empire to have to be autonomous. I never knew that it was the same thing going on in the Baltics (though it was apparently the Germans that held the power and not the Latvians/Estonians).
The Baltic provinces did not have constitutional level autonomy like Finland and Poland which were kind of states of their own in personal union with the Russian czardom. They were just provinces with a lot of peculiar local laws that the czars of old (16th-18th centuries) had at some point promised to respect after they had conquered the place, in exchange for promises of loyalty from the local estates. Kind of like the provincial autonomies in the various parts of the Spanish monarchy, except the czars mostly got along much better with their autonomous provinces than the Spanish kings did with theirs.
For the Russian Empire this was for a very long time a pretty good deal - by military might they had conquered provinces that had far more developed economy and institutions than the provinces of the Russian heartland. But military might was not the tool to make them loyal and have them contribute into the empire. The czars knew that the best way to have these richer and more developed provinces contribute into the empire was not to force Russian institutions and laws on them (which they would have revolted against, and which would probably have impoverished those provinces in the long run) but to leave their own institutions and laws in place and receive tax and services from them instead. And in fact places like Riga and Tallin were Russia's main trade ports. The upper classes of these provinces provided lots and lots of specialists, generals and admirals for the Russian Empire that often had education and skills that the czars needed but couldn't find in sufficient numbers among the nobility of the Russian heartland. And that's not even mentioning what Czar Peter I had in mind for the modernisation of his empire.
You are completely wrong. All non-Russians in the entire Russian SSR suffered under executions in the 1930's, purely because of their nationality. This was extremely harsh on natives living in border areas, like Finns, Karelians, Estonians in the Pskov region etc. I just gave the Polish example as it actually has Wikipedia articles about it, read my previous post. The USSR was a manifestation of Russian imperialism and non-Russians suffered under genocide and russification. If you study 20th century history in university like I did then you cannot pass without learning about the USSR in great detail. Just saying "Oh, Stalin just didn't like Poles" and completely denying the genocide, mass deportations, mass executions, russification etc. that is either ignorance or having an agenda.
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On a much-much smaller scale than before the mass deportations, mass executions (AKA genocide) and russification. Mass deportations to faraway places inside the USSR served the sole purpose of russification. You could look at the population of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in the 1930's and in 2000, 2010 or 2018. After WW2 all Western countries recovered their lost population and have a larger native population now while the Balts who were occupied, kept suffering under genocide and russification, dropping their numbers really low compared to the trend in the rest of Europe.
You're reported. I obviously meant that all of them suffered under executions.
Not entirely correct. Some minorities suffered horribly under Soviet rule (Balts, Poles, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Cossacks, Germans (Crimean and Baltic), Poles and Finns to name a few) but others were tolerated and some benefitted. For example the Soyut and Yakut reindeer herders had their lifestyle actively protected by the state, and were relatively affluent at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of the peoples of central Asia were also fairly well treated by the Soviet authorities and were better off than their neighbours in China.
The picture in the Soviet Union was complex with a range of different treatments for various ethnic groups, ranging from genocide to active support. To say the Soviet Union was universally xenophobic against non-Russians is as incorrect as to say they were a haven of tolerance.
The school year started and I had to give several lectures today in uni
That's like saying that some minorities suffered horribly under Nazi Germany while other were tolerated and some benefited, like the Danes to some extent and the Balts.
You're trying to make black into white, what you're trying to say is short of denying the holocaust if drawing parallels. The russification of non-Russians well into the 1980's was done by the USSR on a massive scale. The genocide committed earlier is a known fact.
Just wow... I have to give lectures in uni to first year BA students as a part of getting my MA and I've never seen ignorance so big. *slow clap*