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https://t.co/T156yDY9D6 pic.twitter.com/poji9QuDsb
— KittyPooh (@KittyPo80176717) June 2, 2022
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Was the USSR anti-racist? Spoiler alert: No. However, this myth still exists in some circles. A thread about racism in the USSR 🧵 pic.twitter.com/SZZKnAZflm
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
The name of this declaration itself should let us know that 172 ethnicities and nations were forcibly "united" into "Russia."
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
The anti-racist policy of the USSR was surface-level, and propagandist in nature. It was done to create an appearance of being better than the West, more than to actually dismantle institutional racism.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
African Americans who visited and immigrated to the USSR, such as Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, William L. Patterson, and Harry Haywood, whose image the party used, lived a much more comfortable life than the USSR's average residents.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
For more than 30 years, Soviet propaganda created a visual image of anti-racism through posters, photographs, and films. A prominent example is a 1936 movie called Circus. pic.twitter.com/VhtPxDv0zQ
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
These efforts could be laudable if they were not whitewashing a bleak reality. While aiming to build an image of an anti-racist state, ethnic essentialism and state-level ethnic cleansing and genocide were the norms in the USSR. Here are only some examples:
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
North Caucasians. 478,000 people, of which 387,000 Chechens and 91,000 Ingush, were arrested and deported from the Caucasus to Central Asia in 1944. Between 30% and 50% of the deportees died during the journey of deportation and in the first years.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
Koreans. 175,000 Koreans who lived along the Chinese and Korean borders were deported to Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in 1937.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
I encourage you to imagine the amount of human suffering behind these numbers. Deportation might sound like “a trip.” In reality, the Soviets put these people on freight trains for days or weeks on short notice. Thousands were dying in the process, as well as afterward.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
In this essay, @mbudjeryn and @tkassenova try to crystallize the informal, unwritten racial hierarchy in the Soviet Union, which largely mirrors the global racial hierarchy: https://t.co/brekZQApGq
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
Four, the Moldovans, nations of the Caucasus, the Georgians, Armenians, and Turkic Azeris. Five, less white and more ‘Orient-looking’ Central Asians — Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmens, and Uzbeks.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
The official stance of the USSR was anti-racism. Moreover, the state propaganda proclaimed there is no racism, imperialism, sexism, or homosexuality (sic) in the country, implying that these are sins of the capitalistic world and not part of the communistic heaven.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
It was anything but anti-racist despite the attempts to build this image. USSR conducted ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns, and the culture was deeply ingrained with the racial stratification.
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
Thanks for spotting this!https://t.co/dHTONnPswO
— Mariam Naiem (@mariamposts) June 1, 2022
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weehingthong 