Currently reading about the Eastern Front of WWI and something struck me.
Where the fuck did all these Russians come from? Why is Russia so populous? I understand it's a massive fucking country but for it to be filled with so many Russians is another thing entirely. Austria-Hungary got fucked by it's disparate peoples that made up the empire, why didn't Russia? Did all the steppe peoples just assimilate really well?
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY RUSSIANS?
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>tfw my thread is going to die
One of the Tsar's titles was Emperor of All the Russias, that is all culturally Rus people. Which is basically most of Russian territory west of the Ural mountains, so that's a lot of Russians. That is my understanding of it anyway.
friendly ukranian is here to bump and tell you THAT WE WERE NOT ALL RUSSIAN
1. They're not all Russians.
2. You'd be surprised how effective tyrannical Asiatic rule is when it comes to gathering people for cannon fodder.
No sources on this one, but from my understanding the Russian SSR only had about 1/2 of the SU's population even at its height. Ukraine, Belarus, and even the Stans are all fairly populous (Ukraine especially). So even though current Russia's population is pretty small compared to the U.S., just 30 years ago the S.U. actually had a greater population than the U.S. (250 mill to 230 or something like that).
Furthermore, during WW2, the S.U.'s relative population compared to any other country but China was much greater, since the S.U. was mainly agricultural farms and urban anyway, which means that the S.U.'s percentage of world population actually fell from 1945-1990.
Except there's not a whole lot of people east of the Urals... It's not like by conquering most of Ukraine the Germans got their peoples (like HOI3). Many of the industry, peoples, and soldiers in those lands simply fled east.
So if there aren't actually that many Russians, how did they get away with having an empire of very different people like Balts and west Slavs and whatever the fuck else is out there without imploding?
>1. They're not all Russians.
This, according to the 1897 Imperial Russian Census, only 44% (55 Million) of the total population were Russian.
Source:
demoscope.ru
c. WWI
>German empire
65 million
>Austrian empire
50 million
>Russian empire
170 millions
>without imploding
The same way the Brits held a huge empire of non-Brits. Or the Spanish. Or any other.
>without imploding
They had various rebellions, such as the January and November uprisings, they were simply put down.
Might have something with massive plains, grains and all that.
The Early Slavs were excellent farmers, but also very peaceful. This made it possible for the Rus' to quickly sail down the Dnieper and take Kiev, the largest city of the East Slavs, and subdue the Polovcians, the most sophisticated of the East Slavs. The Rus' quickly became Slavicized, and used the manpower of the first Slavs they had conquered to subdue the other Slavic tribes. The only other big native presence in the region were the Volga Finns, but their population was sparse because they did not farm as well and so they were easily assimilated.
Of the Asiatic tribes that came into the region, they had very small populations, and when they raped or married Slavic women, they did not stay around to raise the child, so the children grew up Slavic. The nomads also often preferred to exact tribute rather than rule directly over their subjects.
But that's only Europe. The rest is useless steppe
Most of the Asian non-Russian population was very widely dispersed, whereas ethnic Russians built cities and towns in the most economically profitable areas. The biggest threat to the integrity of the state were the European non-Russians who already had big population centers.
>The Early Slavs were excellent farmers, but also very peaceful.
The Slavic tribes were actually pretty niggerish tho. At least those who invaded the Balkans.
The Communist regime established a huge tax for people who didn't have children somewhere in early 20s.
1) Urbanization came late, still a lot of people were farmers (who prefer to have a lot of children) when medicine and hygiene already advanced and drastically mitigated child mortality. This is what happens in Africa now.
2) In Tsarist times peasants were organized into 'mir', a kolhoz-like structure, where the redistibuted land everywhere based on number of family members. The more children you had the more land you used. Disadvantage: nobody cared about land quality and land fertility was diminishing.
I was speaking about the Slavs who lived in what is today Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It's definitely true that the South Slavs were more violent, probably because the Balkans had a lot more valuable shit to plunder.
Yeah and guess where all the people in Russia live in? Not in Siberia.