Russian Colonialism
Encyclopedia
Russian Colonialism extended over regions forming modern Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

, Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 and the Baltic countries
Baltic countries
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

, Moldavia
Moldavia
Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...

, Central Asia
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...

, Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

 and the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...

. Its beginnings can be dated to the Muscovite conquest of the Republic of Novgorod in 1478 and its subsequent colonization by settlers from Muscovy. Although Russian colonialism formally ended in 1991 with the political independence of the former Republics, in practice Russian capital still dominates those territories and can be said to maintain a neo-colonial relationship to them, much as the US and European countries still control their former overseas colonies. Russian settlers who arrived in Soviet times still tend to identify culturally and intellectually with Moscow and Russian, rather than the nations they live in. The media in the newly independent non-Russian former Republics, with the exception of the Baltic states, remain heavily Russified. Much more audio-visual products are in Russian than warranted by the percentage share of the Russian population.

Colonial Policy

In the late 19th century,industrialization became a driving force behind imperial policy, and coal and iron-ore extraction were rapidly developed in areas like the Donets Basin
Donets Basin
Donbas or Donbass , full rarely-used name Donets Basin , is a historical, economic and cultural region of eastern Ukraine. Originally a coal mining area, it has become a heavily industrialised territory suffering from urban decay and industrial pollution.-Geography:Donbas covers three...

,eventually eclipsing production in the Urals. Cotton began to be planted in Russian Central Asia. While industrial growth occurred it was one sided because finishing and manufacturing was underdeveloped in non-Russian territories, except for Russian Poland and Baltic provinces
Baltic provinces
The Baltic governorates , originally the Ostsee governorates is a collective name for the administrative units of the Russian Empire set up at the territories of Swedish Estonia, Swedish Livonia and, afterwards, of Duchy of Courland and Semigallia .-History:The Treaty of Vilnius of 1561 included...

. In the 19th century, Russian settlers on traditional Kirghiz land drove a lot of the Kirghiz over the border to China.

In Ukraine under Tsarist rule, mercantilist legislation enacted in the 1720s in order to foster trade and commerce in central and north-western Russia,effectively destroyed Ukrainian urban manufacturing and merchants by the nineteenth century. Throughout the next century,tariff policy benefited central-Russian producers at the expense of non-Russian borderland producers. State-sponsored programs under the Tsarist and Soviet regimes developed extractive and heavy machine-building industries and promoted agricultural export. On the other hand, they neglected the consumer manufacturing, finishing and service sectors.In 1900,Ukraine produced 52 percent of the empire's pig iron and 20 percent of its iron and steel. Between 1900 and 1914,Tsarist Ukraine produced on average 75 percent of the empire's grain export. Meanwhile, peasants still used earthenware utensils, wooden axles and hinges, and straw-thatched roofs. Finished goods were imported at excessively high prices set by Russia, while the prices for Donets' industrial products was low. Vladimir Lenin, in exile in 1914, stated in a speech that "it [Ukraine] has become for Russia what Ireland was for England: exploited in the extreme and receiving nothing in return."

On the eve of independence, eight of Ukraine’s thirteen parties referred to the country as an exploited “colony” in their programs. After 1991 most Ukrainian historians described Ukrainians as victims of colonialism while literary scholars drew attention to the nation’s “post-colonial” condition. Most Russian historians stressed that Ukrainians had also been agents of empire and characterized Ukraine’s historical status as “semi-colonial.” Whereas academics disagree as to whether central policies were “Russian,” tsarist, or soviet and intentionally “anti-Ukrainian,” and whether the development that did occur was worth the cost, most Russians and a minority of the population in Ukraine regard the country’s historical association with Russia favourably and deny that it was a colonial victim of Russian imperial power.

See also

  • Russian colonization of the Americas
    Russian colonization of the Americas
    The Russian colonization of the Americas covers the period, from 1732 to 1867, when the Tsarist Imperial Russian Empire laid claim to northern Pacific Coast territories in the Americas...

  • Russification
    Russification
    Russification is an adoption of the Russian language or some other Russian attributes by non-Russian communities...

  • Russification of Finland
    Russification of Finland
    The policy of Russification of Finland was a governmental policy of the Russian Empire aimed at limiting the special status of the Grand Duchy of Finland and possibly the termination of its political autonomy and cultural uniqueness...

  • Colonialism
    Colonialism
    Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK