The genocidal campaign of slaughter carried out by the Russians against the natives of Siberia bears a closer resemblance to the German Holocaust than the winning of the West:
Upon arrival in an area occupied by a tribe of natives, the Cossacks entered into peace talks with a proposal to submit to the White Tsar and to pay yasak, but these negotiations did not always lead to successful results. When their entreaties were rejected, the Cossacks chose to respond with force. At the hands of people such as Vasilii Poyarkov in 1645 and Yerofei Khabarov in 1650 some many people, including members of the Daur tribe, were killed by the Cossacks. 8,000 out of a previous population of 20,000 in Kamchatka remained after the first half century of the Russian conquest.[8] The Daurs initially deserted their villages fearing the reported cruelty of the Russians the first time Khabarov came.[9] The second time he came, the Daurs fought back against the Russians, but were slaughtered.[10] In the 17th century, indigenous peoples of the Amur region were attacked by Russians who came to be known as "red-beards".[11]
In the 1640s the Yakuts were subjected to violent expeditions during the Russian advance into the land near the Lena river, and on Kamchatka in the 1690s the Koryak, Kamchadals, and Chukchi were also subjected to this by the Russians according to Western historian Stephen Shenfield.[12] When the Russians did not obtain the demanded amount of yasak from the natives, the governor of Yakutsk, Piotr Golovin, who was a Cossack, used meat hooks to hang the native men. In the Lena basin, 70% of the Yakut population declined within 40 years, native women were raped and, along with children, were often enslaved in order to force the natives to pay the Yasak.[9][better source needed]
According to John F. Richards:
Smallpox first reached western Siberia in 1630. In the 1650s, it moved east of the Yenisey, where it carried away up to 80 percent of the Tungus and Yakut populations. In the 1690s, smallpox epidemics reduced Yukagir numbers by an estimated 44 percent. The disease moved rapidly from group to group across Siberia. Death rates in epidemics reached 50 percent of the population. The scourge returned at twenty- to thirty-year intervals, with dreadful results among the young.[7]
In Kamchatka, the Russians crushed the Itelmens uprisings against their rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741. The first time, the Itelmen were armed with stone weapons and were badly unprepared and equipped but they used gunpowder weapons the second time. The Russians faced tougher resistance when from 1745–56 they tried to subjugate the gun and bow equipped Koraks until their victory. The Russian Cossacks also faced fierce resistance and were forced to give up when trying unsuccessfully to wipe out the Chukchi in 1729, 1730–1, and 1744–7.[13] After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Pavlutskiy was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730–31, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely.[14] Cleansing of the Chukchis and Koraks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744–47 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However the Chukchi ended this campaign and forced them to give up by killing Pavlutskiy and decapitating him.[15]
The Russians were also launching wars and slaughters against the Koraks in 1744 and 1753–4. After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, the different native peoples like the Koraks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukagirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746.[16] Kamchatka today is European in demographics and culture with only 2.5% of it being native, around 10,000 from a previous number of 150,000, due to the mass slaughters by the Cossacks after its annexation in 1697 of the Itelmen and Koryaks throughout the first decades of Russian rule. The killings by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka.[17] In addition to committing massacres the Cossacks also devastated the wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur.[18] 90% of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules were killed from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and the rapid slaughter of the indigenous population led to entire ethnic groups being entirely wiped out, with around 12 exterminated groups which could be named by Nikolai Iadrintsev as of 1882. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the fur trade.[19]
Interesting. Russian attacks on Siberian natives was ahead of the schedule of European attacks on their American cousins. But during Cold War our academics said we were bad, Russians were good on nativist front.
Continuing the Orc tradition of slaughter:
Soviet whaling: The Most Senseless Environmental Waste of the 20th Century
Pacific Standard ^ | November 12, 2013 | Charles Homans
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774
Thanks ZF, for both of those posts.