I don't believe it to be propaganda, if you want to see propaganda watch "5 days of war", but it without a doubt had a national tone to it but those were the times they lived in especially for the Cossacks They weren't serfs and weren't forced into war, but as for the nationalism, it's nothing that isn't comparable to any number of American movies, just watch "The Patriot".
"One is when Bulba speaks out his dream of all Christians uniting, and that's when he's busy massacring other Christians. You can't sound more stupid than that."
He was speaking of the Orthodox not the catholics, don't forget after the Fourth Crusader which was a crusade against the Orthodox Empire of Byzantium the Orthodox and Catholics weren't exactly friends,
"massacring other Christians"
He wasn't killing them for the fun of it, he was taking revenge, This movie is slightly abridged version of the source material, it doesn't cover the first quarter of it, which goes into detail that the Cossacks were betrayed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during their war with the Turks, which cost the cossacks many of lives, while the Polish-Lithuanians played dead hoping the Cossack armies would exhaust their man-power then take control of (the rest of)Ukraine.
During this time, Bulba's wife(among many other familie are killed when he is in Zaporizhia with his Sons, this is when he starts "massacring other Christians" Aka Polish-Lithuanian Armies.
"Another is the speeches the Cossacks cut down in the final battle give just before dying. There are about 10 of those and they're all the same, they're all blessing the Russian soil and condemning its enemies to hell."
Agreed that was sort of out of place and almost cringe worthy.
"I kept thinking through that: what would native Americans, who used to say that land belonged to nobody, think? They would probably think: who are these sick, fanatical madmen? What's wrong with these Slavs? I mean they've been living in that land for the last 1,500 years or so, and they think they own it? It used to belong to others, Scythes, Celts or other people"
Ummm..... the Slavs were the original people of that land, infact the land from kiev to moskva is the birth place of Slavic people, Slavs from west(poland) and south(down to Serbia) also came from that area, and the people before that well.... they weren't defined enough to tell them apart from any other early humans some 5000 years ago.
"There will be others after Russians are gone. Now I know why ancient Roman and Greek explorers never ventured into those lands - as soon as they heard those *beep* speeches they bolted. Or maybe they did go but dropped dead after hearing speech number 150, or were simply shot in the back of the head or sent to gulags as enemies of the revolution and foreigners ready to steal some of the sacred Russian land in their backpacks."
Oh....... You apparently have some sort of Anti-Russian agenda..... Well I got news for you by time the slavs are gone, my Germanic people are going to be gone too and so will the Latins and everyone else, so none of this will have ever mattered.
As for the Greeks and Romans umm.... They did explore those lands and had colonies all over the black sea, as for why didn't they expand further, well because their time ran out before they could.
And as for the rest of your paragraph.... I think you need to take more Prozac.
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