Re: Putin

[Chris Doss <nomorebounces@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Melvin,

Have I mentioned that you rock?

I was going to comment on this bit you write a while back but then got distracted by a pointless flame war. So here I go. You say:

For example the ruling people inside the Soviet Union were (white) Russians for a similar reason that the ruling peoples - not simply propertied class, in American are Anglo-American. I do not mean that the people of Chechnya were owned by the Russian people as whites once owned blacks, but that the imperial status of a people has much to do with their economic development and export of productive forces to less developed regions and areas. Here is the bottom line economic logic that placed many Russians at the top of the federated system.

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I just wanted to comment that racialist thinking, in the Western sense, is quite foreign to Russian culture (now I expect to get lots of posts about ethnic violence in Russia that I am going to ignore -- of course there is ethnic violence in Russia, but it is not "racial"). Use of the word "chyornyi" (black), which is sometimes used in a derogatory fashion by ethnic Slavs for people from the Caucasus or Central Asia, is a post-Soviet development, and appears to be an attempt to copy the West -- "see! We have blacks too!" Similarly, the Russian word for African, "negr," historically has had no negative connotations -- but it is beginning to acquire them, because it sounds like a certain English word for black people that Russians see used in Hollywood movies.

I think the obvious reason for this divergence between Russia and the West is that the Russian Empire never imported slaves. It already had its own, Russian, slaves.