I would say that a more fundamental reason is that they hadn't developed the same economic conditions that other European countries that paricipated in the scramble for Africa as laid out in Lenin's Imperialism. The type of imperialism in the Russian empire was fundamentally different from what happened in the scramble for Africa.

What do u think makes it fundamentally different

There were different systems. Tsarist Russia was mostly feudal, the European colonizing countries in Africa had highly developed capitalist economies, I guess one could say it was the highest stage

While there was certainly exploitation, in a feudal system you don't have it to the same degree as seen by how it hadn't lead to unequal development between the imperial core and periphery as with New Imperialism.

There is also the fact that there were more "organic" economic relations in the Russian empire and more of a shared culture compared to let's say Belgium and the Congo. Those relations between Europe and Africa were purely exploitative and the result of a surplus in capital that would be more profitable to invest elsewhere than in Europe, and there was less regard for their culture, again partly because they shared less culturally in the first place.

You also don't have anything similar in Russia to the hegemonic white supremacist ideology that Europeans developed to justify their colonialism, but that's more an ideological consequence of those fundamental differences in material conditions than a fundamental difference itself.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense

>more of a shared culture

This is true because of the Russian Empire, just as today people from Nigeria move to the UK and people from Senegal to France. Historically Central Asia and was more tied to the Persian world, Siberia had nothing to do with Russia, etc

>no hegemonic ideology

Zass considered Circassians to be subhumans inferior to the "European Race", particularly Germans and Russians.13161412 The only way to deal with the Circassians, in his opinion, was to scare them away "just like wild animals." He kept a box under his bed with his collection of severed Circassian body parts.28

Russian expansion into Siberia being directly a***ogous down to American Westward expansion down to the dates, conversion efforts, views of native people and their cultures, even how other European ethnicities were used to help settle it. Not to mention the Russian and British division of Iran into spheres of influence, Russia being seen as a threat to India by the British, the land where Vladivostok is having been seized from China, Russian concessions in China, and surely many more. Russia was an active participant and beneficiary of the international system of the day, including colonialism. In fact, Japan’s victory over Russia inspired joy and hope in colonized countries precisely because it was the defeat of a European colonizing power!

So with regards to the shared culture, I'm aware of central Asia, Siberia etc being culturally distinct, but look at Ukraine or other Eastern European countries for example, those cultural similarites are unlike any of those between European and African nations were. And to further that point, while there were surely differences between Russia and central Asian nations for example, they were still way more similar to eachother than African cultures were to European cultures, as they still both had Abrahamic religions for example.

With regards to the hegemonic ideology, I didn't mean to say thay there was no hegemonic ideology, not even that there wasn't one which had claims to superiority, but that in Russia it was unlike that of European white supremacy, for white supremacist ideology didn't just have claims of cultural inferiority which justified their oppression, but claims of innate biological inferiority, written into law, which justified the oppression, which is an important difference and had lead to real differences in outcomes, no chance of any integration being one of those.

Arresting youtubers for treason because they're "pro-Russian", another big democracy moment for the EU

Well of course Eastern Europe and especially Ukraine and Belarus are different but even then you can make the argument that it was some sort of imperialism. This is true even with something like French linguistic policy post-1789 (regarding minority languages in Metropolitan France), despite it being between peoples who are very similar. But once we get to the Caucasus and the Urals, it’s clear-cut for me, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I think Siberia and the North Caucasus are pretty similar to the American West, and Central Asia and the South Caucasus perhaps to British India, which were themselves definitely imperialist in nature. Not sure about the ideological justification here honestly, but there were the same things you saw in those places - wars, forced resettlements, massacres, bringing in settlers, building railroads, building forts, missionary activity, favoring certain groups/leaders - all the classics.

foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/12/putins-thousand-year-war

heres some of the paragraphs i found interesting

This attitude also has profound roots in Russian history, especially the Russian belief that Orthodox Christianity is superior to the West’s liberalized Christianity, which Putin and other conservative Russians view as corrupted by Enlightenment ideas. In the early 19th century, the Russian answer to the French Revolution’s Enlightenment creed, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity), was “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”—which Sergey Uvarov, minister of public education to Tsar Nicholas I, formulated as the conceptual foundation of the Russian Empire. This tripartite credo isn’t mentioned in Putin’s speeches and writings—he still likes to pretend Russia is a democracy—but it has been invoked by the far-right thinkers said to influence Putin, including Aleksandr Dugin, Lev Gumilev, Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, and others dating back 200 years.

For Putin, the idea of rebuilding a Eurasian empire under his rule—of which Ukraine must be a part—seems central to his sense of destiny as a leader. Russia, a vast land straddling Europe and Asia, is a civilization that has never been able to decide whether it is more European or Asian—a dilemma made more confusing by the fact that Mongols ruled it for 240 years, leaving behind millions of Tatar descendants. Russia also can’t agree on what its borders ought to be, not even after a thousand years.

Graham and other Russia experts said it is a mistake to view Putin merely as an angry former KGB apparatchik upset at the fall of the Soviet Union and NATO’s encroachment after the Cold War, as he is often portrayed by Western commentators. Putin, himself, made this clear in his Feb. 21 speech, when he disavowed the Soviet legacy, inveighing against the mistakes made by former leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to grant Ukraine even partial autonomy. On the contrary, Putin and other Russian nationalists today see Marxism-Leninism as just another regrettable Western import.

To a degree little understood by many Westerners, Russian literary figures they revere, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were also devotees of this idea of a “greater Russia” under an absolute autocrat. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for writings that exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulag, later became one of Putin’s favorite intellectuals. Before his 2008 death, Solzhenitsyn wrote in an essay: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood.” Shortly before his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote: “To the people the Czar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs.”

Oh I'm not saying it wasn't imperialist, there's no denying that, even in Eastern Europe, but to equate Russian imperialism to the era of New Imperialism broughy by European would be inaccurate in my opinion. Imperialism under Tsarist Russia was ​categorically different from what Europe did in Africa for example, and it has a material basis for that lead to that difference, that's all I'm saying.

Wars, resettlements etc., are important characteristics of a broader definition of imperialism, and Tsarist Russia was certainly imperialist, but as a Marxist, I think a materialist a***ysis of the relations of production is important to make important fundamental distinctions, and I think it explains much of why these forms of imperialism were not only materially different and lead to different material outcomes, but also lead to different ideologies taking shape.

Fair enough, just operating from an “I know it when I see it” approach Russia strikes me as fundamentally similar. Even then, I think a lot of the differences are simply rooted in Russia’s unique geography vis-à-vis the Western European great powers

I mean in a sense they share fundamental simalitities, but also fundamental differences.

I think slavery is another good example where this is the case. You had both African slaves the muslim world as well as in Europe, but there were also fundamental differences between the two. In both European Christian culture as in Muslim culture it was seen as a violation of their religion and illegal to enslave somebody who converted to Islam or Christianity, but at some point, European Christians found a way to justify the enslavement of Africans who did convert to Christianity and thus you had the chattel slavery we seen in the US for example which was many times more brutal than the slavery in muslim countries.

Is this because muslims are inherently more moral than christians? Or anything to do with the teachings of Islam and Christianity? As a Marxoid I say NO to all that idealist nonsense

And I say YES to the materialist a***ysis which allows us to be enlightened by examing how a different mode of production lead to a greater incentive for exploitation and thus different ideologies coming to form in Europe compared to muslim countries with slavery

news.sky.com/story/boris-johnson-accused-of-being-threat-to-national-security-over-reports-he-attended-tory-fundraiser-on-night-putin-launched-ukraine-invasion-12570842

Yeah he's an incompetent f***head

Make Keir PM

0 chance they will ever do it

Watch this get ignored with, RUSSIA WAS GOING TO INVADE ANYWAY

Trump apparently heard Putin using the N word, multiple times

Give him his twitter back

Dog