The interview of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Alexey Erkhov, has caused a great resonance among a significant number of Russians and immigrants from the territory of the present Russian Federation. It is the brightest illustration that the people who rule them are not even stuck at the end of the last century, but have regressed to its beginning.
The speech, of course, refers to the ambassador’s words in an interview with a website aimed at the Adyghe-Circassian audience (Sputnik Abkhazia), in which he justifies the events that Adyghe-Circassians unanimously perceive as the genocide of their people by the Russian Empire in the pre-last century:
«Has anyone thought, for example, what it was like for the inhabitants of Russian villages to live side by side with neighbors whose well-being was based on so-called raids — that is, on murders, robberies, and the slave trade? When every month, every week, and every day these same ‘peaceful highlanders’ could come, kill men, and take women and children captive? The Russian government of the time put up with it, put up with it, and then their patience ran out, and the army moved forward — first trying to ‘separate’ itself from those with whom it was impossible to live in peace, and then trying to put a complete stop to their criminal way of life. These people were offered a choice: ‘Either you move to the plain, they will give you land and you will start to work productively, or you emigrate, brotherly Turkey is ready to receive you’.»
The fact that these events caused outrage in the world Circassian diaspora, whose position was expressed in particular by the Federation of Caucasian Associations of Turkey (KAFFED), does not seem to contradict the main message of the ambassador’s interview about how various «foreign agitators» are rocking the boat.
However, Russian Circassians also strongly condemned the ambassador’s words. Asker Sokht, the head of the Krasnodar regional organization «Adyge Khase,» called them a «falsification of history» and an «informational and political provocation. Patimat Takhnaeva, a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, accused Erkhov of a «vulgar interpretation of real historical facts. And financier Zamiret Pseush appealed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to recall the ambassador from Turkey, saying he should have at least studied history thoroughly before commenting on such sensitive issues.
But in our opinion, the situation was best characterized by Ibrahim Yaganov, the head of the Kabardino-Balkarian public movement «Khase», who called Erkhov’s position «the standard opinion of the Russian Empire». «The main problem, in my opinion, is that Russia is stuck in the colonial period and is at least 100 years behind the developed world. To this day they think that they brought civilization and enlightenment to the ‘wild Caucasus’. Russia is divided into Moscow and the rest of the regions. And between Moscow and the rest of Russia there are purely colonial relations,» he said.
With regard to contemporary neo-colonialism in Russia, this is undoubtedly true, but now we are not talking about it, but about classic colonialism, which has become relevant again. And here Yaganov is even more right: in any Western country with a colonial history, whitewashing its official figure from the dark pages of that history would be considered utter madness and unthinkable today. Such statements would have caused a huge scandal, and the official who made them would have been removed from his position and turned into a «toxic» figure for society.
And if European countries have relatively easily resolved this issue by granting independence to their former colonies and condemning the crimes of colonialism, in countries like the United States, Australia and New Zealand, where the descendants of the colonizers live side by side with the indigenous population, it remains acute. The attitude towards these events goes so far that many states are dismantling monuments to Christopher Columbus, who discovered America (for Europeans), which led to the genocide of its indigenous population. But even those who protest this, believing that Columbus should be revered (because without him, there would be no America as we know it, with a European population), still condemn the genocidal actions of the European colonists against the Native Americans and agree that they should receive assistance as compensation.
To imagine today that any U.S. Ambassador, even under a president — an American nationalist, as he calls himself, Donald Trump, would declare that it was right for white Americans to subjugate and drive these «aggressive Indians» into reservations is simply unthinkable. And this is an illustration of the difference in the level of development between Russia and the Western world.