Just about everything you asked and much more can be found in:
Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917 by Author: Geoffrey Hosking Released: October, 1998 ISBN: 0674781198 Paperback
and/or
Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals Dominic Lieven
ISBN: 0300097263 Format: Paperback, 528pp Pub. Date: August 2002
Publisher: Yale University
Chris Doss <itschris13 at hotmail.com> wrote:
This brings me to something I've been wondering about lately. As the Russian Empire expanded, unlike its British and later American counterparts, it did not attempt (as far as I know) to uproot peoples, displace them, wipe them out or, before the Stalin era, really try to assimilate them. (I guess this facet of its expansion was similar to that of the Roman Empire, which exacted tribute from conquered groups but didn't generally try to wipe them out.) As a result, Russia, which is a land mass the size of an ocean, is a crazy-quilt of ethnicities and cultures that have by and large preserved their own identities, as opposed to living on squalid reservations as the native peoples often do elsewhere.
Anybody know of any, I don't know, comparative imperiology that might address this issue? A typology of empires of sorts?
"The Russians are coming!" should really have been "The Russians (and the Ukrainians, and the Ingush, and the Chuvash, and the Evers, and the Moldovans, and the Uzbeks, and the Avars, hell, all 89 of the nationalities are coming!"
>From: Thiago Oppermann
>
>When asked to identify their ancestry, a very large number of Brazilians
>with my kind of family tree tend to overplay the Jewish, African and
>Amerindian roots (mine are extremely remote). That's interesting. There is
>a
>similar effect in New Zealand regarding Maori roots. An increasing number
>of
>Australians identify some remote and often unverifiable aboriginal
>ancestry.
>I think this shows we are dealing with our nasty pasts in one of the
>classic
>modalities of human conflict-resolution: altering kinship. But how many
>Japanese fake Korean roots? How many Israelis acknowledge (let alone fake)
>Arab roots?
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