We always hear about the fall of Aztecs and Maya under the Spanish, a sad fall of civilizations. For the British/Americans we hear about the struggle of “less advanced” tribes fighting for centuries for their freedom and equality, ending with genocide (and including the Trail of Tears).
I suppose we know and hear less about it because that part was never independent of Russia – so Holodomor and Circassian and other atrocities against minorities in Western/European Russia are more easily accessible to us, while the one in Asia/Siberia mostly remain unknown to us.
So were there any important events? Genocide or atrocities? Maybe some admiration of the natives by Russian intellectuals, just as some American/British intellectuals admired the “noble savage”? Were there any (let us say) “glorious, great and odd” nations like the (Aztecs for the Spanish) that the Russian expansion destroyed?
Thank you in advance.
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More can be said but I will link to this earlier answer I wrote about the Russian conquest of Siberia, and how that conquest interplayed with the spread of smallpox epidemics.
I also have this answer about the conquest and settlement of Siberia, its place in the Russian cultural imagination, and ways it compares and contrasts with the conquest and settlement of North America.
As for some of the other questions – yes, native Siberians were often explicitly compared to indigenous peoples of the Americas by Russian authorities (“our Indians”, often with Russian imperial policies trying to copy aspects of native-European relations in North America). And as for “big events” – what particularly comes to mind is the conquest of the Khanate of Sibir (which the region gets its name from), led by Yermak, who was a late 16th century Cossack and something of a conquistador-type figure. u/ecmrush has more on Yermak here.
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