Tsarist elites as foreign rulers of Russia.
I wrote a 17 thousand character text about how the high and even middle aristocracy distinguished itself from outsiders.
Even the liberal part of the elite, such as the great scientist Pyotr Semyonov-Tian-Shansky, with whom I began the text, had a memory of foreign ancestors. He mentions that on his father's side his ancestors are the Tatar lord Morzes and the Polish lord, on his mother's side they are the French-German Blanc, who came to Russia during the time of Peter the Great.
I quote the calculations of the late Tsarist lawyer Zagoskin, who calculated that of the 915 high nobles of Russia only 4.6% were Great Russians. Among the boyars, Russian came to mean "disenfranchised", "a person of the lowest class".
Russian tsars even brought Persians, Turks and Uzbeks to Russia and made them leaders - if not the Great Russians.
In general, it is not surprising that in Russia there was such a socio-cultural gap between the highest nobles and the common people. The vast majority of the highest nobles remembered their national roots, and even centuries later they boasted of their foreign ancestors who had nothing in common with the local proles. In the literal sense, in Russia foreigners (including self-consciously) ruled the serfs.
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Hence the conclusion of the British historian Dominic Levin that the October Revolution includes There was a revolution of national liberation:
"The position of the Russians in the tsarist empire was more similar to the position of the natives in the overseas colonies in Europe. European officials formed a thin ruling layer at the top of the native society and were unable to delve deeper into its life. These officials may have admired and even romanticized the cultural disparity of the Natives to the war, but they were unmistakably Native peasants to the war. the ones they controlled. ".