Imperialism - Tsarist and Soviet Russian Imperialism

Tsarist and Soviet Russian Imperialism

As Germanic tribes conquered western Europe, Slavic peoples gradually expanded their control over eastern Europe and northern Eurasia, and in the form of the Romanov Empire extended that control to the Pacific forming a common border with the Qing Empire.

Bolshevik leaders had effectively reestablished a polity with roughly the same jurisdiction as that empire by 1921, but with an internationalist ideology: Lenin in particular asserted the right to self-determination for national minorities within the new territory. Beginning in 1923, the policy of "Indigenization" was intended to support non-Russians develop their national cultures within a socialist framework. Never formally revoked, it stopped being implemented after 1932. After World War II, the Soviet Union installed socialist regimes modelled on those it had installed in 1919–20 in the old Tsarist empire in areas its forces occupied in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union and People's Republic of China supported post–World War II anti-colonial national-liberation movements to advance their own interests but were not always successful.

Trotsky, and others believed that the revolution could only succeed in Russia as part of a world revolution, which was in fact shortly after the Russian Revolution spreading in the defeated central powers of Europe. Lenin wrote extensively on the matter and famously declared that Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. However after Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin established Socialism in one country for the Soviet Union, creating the model for subsequent inward looking Stalinist states and purging the early Internationalist elements. The internationalist tendencies of the early revolution would be abandoned until they returned in a client state form in the competition with the United States in the Cold War.

Though the Soviet Union declared itself anti-imperialist, critics argue that it exhibited tendencies common to historic empires. Some scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and nation states. It has also been argued that the USSR practiced colonialism as did other imperial powers and was carrying on the old Russian tradition of expansion and control.