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The Soviet Union Was Not Really an Empire — On the Complexities of USSR History
I’ve recently written a longer blog post on Eastern European dissent toward the Soviet sphere of influence.
But I wanted to also briefly address why the term ‘empire’ is at times difficult to associate with the Soviets especially as it relates to the Warsaw Pact states (think: Soviet NATO) rather than the Soviet republics.
To be fair, there are many reasons we might suppose that the Soviet Union acted like an empire over the region, but there are also reasons to doubt it.
Let me explain.
Ronald G. Suny and Terry Martin note in their excellent book, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, when we use the term ‘empire,’ we typically refer to “internally repressive” and “externally expansionist” regimes.
The authors define empire as “a particular form of domination or control between two units set apart in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship,” and where a “metropole dominates a periphery to the disadvantage of the periphery.”
Importantly, it is also marked, by “difference” between the metropole and periphery.
When it comes to Soviet republics like Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, or Kazakhstan, in different decades…
