They would raid the nearby Ukrainian and Russian villages and sell the villagers into slavery. In one year, 1769, they captured 20,000 and sold them in slave markets in the Ottoman Empire.
From 1500 to 1700 or so, between 1 and 2 million Slavs were captured and sold off into slavery.
The end of the Crimean Khanate is about as distant in history as the Revolutionary War that started the USA. Of course Tatars don't do this anymore, but some people unfortunately prefer to remember old grievances and raise them again and again.
Source BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
> did not have "sits only for white" in the public transit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
> native languages had equal representation with Russian
This is still a debatable point, with no clear agreed definition.
"The Holodomor genocide question consists of the attempts to determine whether the Holodomor, the catastrophic man-made famine of 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine, was an ethnic genocide or an unintended result of the "Soviet regime's re-direction of already drought-reduced grain supplies to attain economic and political goals." The event is recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, and a genocide in Ukraine, while the Russian Federation considers it part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 and corresponding famine relief effort The debate among historians is ongoing and there is no international consensus among scholars or governments on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide."[1]
However you view it, it was an horrific event where millions died of hunger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
The scholarly debate on this issue is to say the least, very complex. You can't just say "it wasn't directed against Ukrainians as a people, period."
Khruschev was Ukrainian,
Khrushchev was born to poor parents of Russian descent. Anyway, while hardly a saint, he doesn't appear to had much, if any, role in the Holomodor. Chernenko is generally regarded to be of mixed background. As to Brezhnev,
Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamianske in Ukraine), to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. His parents used to live in Brezhnevo (Kursky District, Kursk Oblast, Russia) before moving to Kamenskoe. Brezhnev's ethnicity was specified as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, and Russian in others. --WP
The most "Ukrainian" of any of these may have been Gorbachev. But we all know where he sits in the pantheon of "supreme leaders" of the USSR.
Nothing close to the treatment of Native Americans, Asians and Blacks in the post-war United States.
Just because the Holomodor wasn't directly comparable to the Nazi genocides doesn't mean that (1) the Ukrainian people didn't suffer disproportionately during the 1932-1933 famine, and (2) the Soviet leadership (or the subset responsible for the Holomodor) wasn't aware of this fact, as it was happening.
"If you are from a Baltic country <..> people celebrate Nazis as heroes, just because they against Russia."
No. Simply no.
You're kidding right? They sent the local village priest to Siberia. Took away the land my great grand father owned.
Sent tens of thousands of other people to Siberia to labor camp. Yeah if you consider shoving them like cattle into unheated train cars in the middle of the winter for a multi-week journey "not kill" then yes, they just happened to freeze on their own...
It doesn't matter what the official stance was, what matters what happened. My own relatives were sent to Siberia for being ethnic minorities, despite that they fought for the reds with the russian troupes in the finnish civil war. You can make excuses as much as you like that it wasn't because of ethnicity but reality was that ideology didn't matter back then. People are hateful by nature, especially to foreign cultures, taking away the lands that feeds your children and sending all men in your family to Siberian death camp doesn't sound like preserving any minority culture to me.
My grandparents were stripped of all land as well and I am 100% certain it was not because of ethnicity since they were of the same as the ruling ethnic majority.
What you are explaining is probably local authorities - humans hated your relatives because of their ethnicity and that was one of the reason they got sent to Siberia. Taking land though was widespread in USSR. It was taken from ethnic Russians as well.
The fact that minorities survived and thrived on the same scale as Russians and got sent and taken land from on the same scale as Russians and got sent to Siberia on the same scale as Russians is a proof that there was no policy to destroy particular minority on a state level. It was a policy to destroy enemies of the state.
It is a matter of historical record beyond dispute that certain ethnic groups (e.g. Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Balts, Tatars, Cossacks, Chechen and Ingush, in particular) were murdered, deported and suffered otherwise disproportionately during Stalin's reign.
You can argue whether this was motivated out of some pure "hatred" or not -- but if so, you'd be splitting hairs.
Given the number of, literally, whole peoples picked up, stuffed into boxcars and dumped somewhere halfway across the country (and I bet you can name at least one very famous example from May 1944), and ample evidence of forced Russification in various contexts during the Soviet era -- this is, quite simply, a very weird and bizarre statement to make.
Overall, "forced russification" was about as bad as "forced Anglification" in Canada. Most of the republics of USSR were similar to Quebec in terms of being dominated by the language and culture of the majority.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
I'd prefer not get too much into personal identity or travel itineraries, if you don't mind. Let's just say I have plenty of shared personal context with the former USSR (enough to have found about the topic first through personal contacts, rather than stuff I read in the press or online).
I am not sure about what you mean by "forced russification"
It's kind of hard not to, these days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Under_the_Soviet...
Of course forced Anglicization has existed in nearly all parts of the former British Empire, also, and of course the original inhabitants (and other non-Anglophones) of these areas have been treated in many horrible ways long after independence, in some places still are up until the present day, etc, etc. But these are different topics.
Have you seen Spanish-teaching universities in the USA? I have not.
You might want to look at Puerto Rico.
If you follow the definition literally, then yes. Yet, Russia always was very careful with the culture of the colonies, way more careful than Britain, France and Westerners in General.
> But these are different topics.
No, actually not. Russia is always disproportionately blamed for being a cultural oppressor, however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language. In that respect, Russians were much less oppressing and arrogant than the British, Spaniards or French.
> You might want to look at Puerto Rico.
I want one in Texas.
Might have something to do with the early 20th-century body count (whereas most of the other empires managed to get their megakilling sprees wrapped up by 1900 or so). Along with all those sinister Russian accents in Hollywood movies. But yeah, friends of mine have confessed this feeling to me, also (that, as Russians, they feel unduly blamed / hated by the world).
...however as an Empire, USSR needed a single unifying culture and language
Same justification used by... basically every other major empire on the planet, you know.
Either way, this is all getting very far afield from the topic of the original article.
I have. Yes they did forced Russification.
Instead of admitting that this was wrong and horrible, and understand the part of Russians in it, some (I like to keep this option open that some do not) start to find utterly stupid excuses for it.
Maybe you try to be a different person? A better person, one that could be loved and cherished by your neighbours?
Saying that others did it too or that we also suffered does not cut it.
See, that you suffered because of a tyrant of your is your own fault, that you also together with your tyrant terrorised your neighbours is your fault. Until you keep justifying it, you will not find respect.
That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).