• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Depends who you ask. To a lot of Russians and a lot of minorities within Russia, they’re just that: colonies. Unlike the other European empires the Russian empire never properly disbanded, and so in a lot of ways saying a guy in Dagestan is Russian is like saying Narendra Modi is British.

    It’s worth mentioning that Putin is actually fairly verbally supportive of a civic nationalist Russia, so he would say Dagestanis are Russians. That doesn’t mean he acts like it, but he would say that. This is a big part of the reason Navalny would only be only an incremental improvement: he all-but-openly sees them as lesser people to be civilised.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, but that one literally is (you know where Russia came from, right?). You could argue it’s changed, but in the post-Soviet world at the very least you’d be wrong. If you want gory details I suggest Kamil Galeev, he has some pretty close analyses of the system in Dagestan and Chechnya.