“raping” is something i’m not aware of, sorry, you’d need to elaborate.

Torturing? I mean, sure you can call it that, not the word i’d personally choose to describe it, but yeah, the harm was done.

On the topic of cultural destruction, i need you to elaborate as well. While i’m aware of supression of regional smaller cultures, i’m not aware of any that actually died out, (or died out by force, rather, Eskimos cultures were more-less tribal, and those never stay around without a proper isolation), even though some of them suffered stagnation. The latter was always considered by me as an inherent casuality of progress and overall globalisation tendencies. I guess more-less direct analogy would be the American “Melting Pot”.

I think, further proof of my hypothesis could also be the modern state of the smaller cultures I’m familiar with:

• modern Ukrainian culture is still pretty stagnant, and more-less follows the modern intercultural tendencies inhereted from the western culture, with an additional blend of rejection of the soviet past. The stagnation part is due to opression, you might argue, but…

• I got to live several years in Czechia, and i can’t say, that there’s a much more developed and unique modern culture, despite far less pressure from the soviets, purely due to how far off it is. The only prominent difference i can see, is that in the culture of the, for instance, second half of the XX century — while 95% of Ukrainian arts and crafts were soviet-centric, Czech ones stayed more autonomous, even though still were heavily swayed, but in their cese by the western culture. But in exchange for that, Ukraine has a very bright cultural past in the late XIX — early XX centuries, while Chech were basically a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Dozen of, now reverered as Czech, authors, for example, wrote their studies and fiction in German. No one seem to mourn that fact though.

My point was, and being, while, like any of the red dictatures of the XX century, USSR was far from being a utopia, lots of people were opressed, but we still should consider the fact that our modern view is still biased by the propaganda of the western side of that period, as, obviously just as the modern culture, modern view of history is just as well western-centric.

To give you a perspective, the soviet regime, while being strict and opressive, managed to raise pleades of world class scientists and managed to build world class infrastructure of that time, despite WWI and then the revolution, that left the historical region in ruin. I literally write it as i reside in a now-Ukrainian clinic, founded in the 30s by a soviet scientist (born at the territory of modern Russia), that is still one of the leading clinic in Europe, curing eye-related diseases.