Comments by "Mitch Young" (@mitchyoung93) on "" video.

@missmiss8359 No, Stalin was a Soviet. He simply recognized that Russian was the lingua franca of the space that he ruled and that ethnic Russians were the largest group.
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What country takes kindly to independence movements? France has fought Corsican independence movements for decades. Spain arrested Catalan independence leaders and crushed Basque independence politicians. Ukraine itself has banned a party wanting simple federalism (the party of the regions) rather than independence. My own country, the US, fought a war keep eleven of its states from becoming independent.
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BS. The first leader of independent Estonia had been an officer in the Soviet Army, the editor of the Estonian communist paper, and a member of the all Soviet legislature before Estonia became independent. I.e. he was a dedicated member of the Soviet nomenklatura. Incidentally he is the father of the current Estonian leader.
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@grimwaltzman What evidence is there for that?
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There is nothing wrong with having a central people. The Han Chinese are central to Singapore, but the other communities are respected. It's way better than the 'democratic' and 'liberal' way of France, which is obliterating Walloon, Provencal, Catala, Alsatian, Gascon, etc etc.
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Probably a disproportionate number were from ethnic minorities like Buryats and Tatars. But the overwhelming majority are from 'country' Russian oblasts. This mirrors the dead in recent US conflicts where a disproportionate number of Pacific Islanders (including from territories that aren't states) and Indians, but the majority are young white men from rural and exurban America. They die for a US regime that hates them.
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There's an entire Tatar republic in the Russian Federation. People there speak Tatar. There is no meaningful difference between Crimean Tatar and Tatar Tatar. In a way, Stalin just gave the Crimean Tatars a ticket home. After all, that people genocided the Ostrogoths (the population of Crimea before the so-called 'Crimean Tatars'.
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It's an open question whether Armenia would still exist without Russian (Imperial and Soviet) protection. It's not for nothing that 'Putin's Propagandist', Margarita Simyonan, is completely Armenia by blood and upbringing and self-identifies as Armenian.
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There were no 'Ukrainians' outside the USSR. The people speaking languages akin to 'Ukrainian' were Rusyns and Ruthenians. There was no 'Estonian' state before Russia. Simply didn't exist. Same btw with Finland. These peoples when from being ruled by one power (Sweden) to another (Russia). Lithuanian is another whole ball of wax...it had a state that was known for literally centuries of aggression against Rus (East Slav, Orthodox) lands. And many members of the 'Lithuanian' elites, even today, are the descendants of Germanic adventurers in the Baltics with barely Lithuanianized surnames.
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First, it would be really useful for Georgians, Turkmens, etc to known Russian, as huge numbers of these folks work in the Federation. There were, for example, an estimated 500,000 Georgians in the Russian Federation as of 2020. Second, nearly all the ex colonial empires do the same. France promotes le Francophonia. Spain, who you'd think would be satisfied with its 17 or so countries that have Espanyol as official, promotes Spanish even in places like Morocco and Equitorial Guinea and the Philippines. Even Germany has its Goethe institutes around the world but especially in Central Europe.
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@badluck5647 Actually wrong. Lukashenko got elected precisely because they did look fondly on the Soviet Union if not Russia.
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And indeed had 'pure wool' Quebeckers votes been counted for independence, you'd have it. Instead Trudeau the elder purposely flooded your land with immigrants who would vote to stay in Canada.
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The Soviet government literally forced Russian speaking kids in areas than had never really spoken 'Ukrainian' to learn 'Ukranian' in schools. So I'm guessing you are not right.
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