The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities

Abstract

Empire is a difficult concept for the comparative historian and social scientist. The word 'empire' has a number of rather different meanings and applications, some of them vague and others inclined to alter with time. Some scholars have tended to concentrate on the external aspects of empire, investigating the roots of expansionism, for instance, or the military and economic sinews of power.2 Others have looked at the domestic constitutions of empires, analysing, for example, the management of multi-ethnicity.3One major problem is that 'empire' in the contemporary world is a word with very strong negative connotations. A century ago, European countries and their rulers welcomed the term. It implied not only that a country was powerful but also, probably, that it was in the forefront of progress, one of that very small group of great powers entrusted, in Hegelian terms, with leading mankind towards higher levels of culture, wealth and freedom. Flattering comparisons were made with the great civilizations of the past, almost all of them embodied in political terms in empires. In the late twentieth century, however, empire implies exploitation of weak communities by stronger ones, as well, particularly, as the suppression of the Third World by Western power and culture. Empire is seen, moreover, not merely as wicked but also as anachronistic and doomed to disappear. In the post-1945 global economy, autarchy and physical control of territory are viewed as largely irrelevant: peaceful access to food, raw materials and markets seems assured, and the skills, unity and motivation of a country's workforce are regarded as the keys to prosperity and even power. Countries are unwilling to take upon themselves

New Wild Fields: How the Russian War Leads to the Demodernization of Ukraine’s Occupied Territories

“…Throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the Russian empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had a long history of occupying stateless territories and the territories of other neighboring states, for the capture of which Russia fought colonial wars of varying intensity (Lieven 1995;Arbatov 2006;Inozemtsev 2017).…”

Anticolonial Nationalism From Imagined Communities to Colonial Conflict

“…2 Similarly, the secessionist movements in the former Soviet Union were not strictly anticolonial in our definition. As historians and specialists show, while they may have discursively rendered themselves to be “colonies”, and while they have functioned within the Soviet Union as economic colonies, our conceptualization of “colonial” would not apply because these territories were all equally part of a federal, not imperial, system [Lieven 1995 and 2002]. The same goes for other cases like Bangladesh.…”

Communists like us

“…A desire to portray the USSR as a continuation of or, at some point, as reverting to Tsarist imperialism and, by extension, to offer the Soviet empire's 'survival' in the mid-and late 20th century as a colonial anachronism threads its way through a great deal of western and post-Soviet commentary (see, for example, Carrere d 'Encausse, 1993;Conquest, 1970Conquest, , 1986Dawisha and Parrott, 1997;Lieven, 1995;Rywkin, 1994;Slezkine, 2000;Suny, 1995;Tucker, 1990). The same parallel invites a simple reversal of the once orthodox anti-racist image of the Soviet Union, a trend that, in the English speaking world, has been encouraged by the development of a considerable literature on Soviet antisemitism (Baron, 1975;Kelman, 1979;Miller, 1984).…”