Soviet empire

Major Soviet military interventions of this nature took place in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland from 1980 until 1983, and in Afghanistan from 1979 until 1989.

Although the Soviet Union was not ruled by an emperor, and declared itself anti-imperialist and a people's democracy, it exhibited tendencies common to historic empires.

Academically the idea is seen as emerging with Richard Pipes' 1957 book The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923; it has been reinforced, along with several other views, in continuing scholarship.

[5]: 41  Several scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and nation states.

For example, the state's prioritized grain production over livestock in Kyrgyzstan, which favored Slavic settlers over the Kyrgyz natives, thus perpetuating the inequalities of the tsarist colonial era.

[16] Leonid Brezhnev continued a policy of cultural Russification as part of Developed Socialism, which sought to assert more central control.

In a broad sense, it included the involuntary creation of Soviet-style authorities, imitation of elections held under the control of the Bolsheviks with the removal of opposition candidates, nationalization of land and property, repression against representatives of "class enemies" (kulaks, or osadniks, for instance).

[19] From the 1930s through the 1950s, Joseph Stalin ordered population transfers in the Soviet Union, deporting people (often entire nationalities) to underpopulated remote areas, with their place being taken mostly by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians.

[18] The Soviet Union had lost approximately 20 million people over the course of the Second World War, although Russian sources are keen on further inflating that figure.

[22] To prevent a recurrence of such costly warfare, Soviet leaders believed that they needed to establish a hierarchy of political and economic dependence between neighboring states and the USSR.

[29] The informal empire would have included Soviet economic investments, military occupation, and covert action in Soviet-aligned countries.

[32][33] After the Sino-Soviet conflict (1929), the Soviet Union regained the Russian Empire's concession of the Chinese Eastern Railway and held it until its return to China in 1952.

By the start of the Cold War it evolved into a "coded power language" that was once again international, but applied to the Soviet informal empire.

At times the USSR signaled toleration of policies of satellite states indirectly, by declaring them consistent or inconsistent with socialist ideology, essentially recreating a hegemonic role.

With Gorbachev's relinquishing of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1989, the informal empire reduced in pressure to a more conventional sphere of influence, resembling Finlandization but applied to the erstwhile East Bloc states, until the Soviet fall in 1991.

[44][45] Fierce Finnish resistance prevented the Soviets from achieving this objective, and the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on 12 March 1940, with hostilities ending the following day.

[46] Under the Paasikivi–Kekkonen doctrine, Finland sought to maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and extensive bilateral trade developed.

In the West, this led to fears of the spread of "Finlandization", where Western allies would no longer reliably support the United States and NATO.

The countries of the Warsaw Pact , the main block of Soviet imperialism
Greatest territorial extent of the Soviet empire (red) in 1959–1960; after the Cuban Revolution but before the Sino-Soviet split . This territory was politically, economically, and militarily dominated by the Soviet Union amidst the Cold War , covering an area of approximately 35,000,000 km 2 (14,000,000 sq mi). [ a ]
Flag of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union is seen in red while states in light pink were satellites. Yugoslavia , a Soviet ally from 1945 to 1948 and non-aligned state thereafter, is marked in purple. Albania , a state which ceased being allied to the Soviet Union in the 1960s after the Sino-Soviet split , is marked in orange.
States that had communist governments in red, states that the Soviet Union believed at one point to be moving toward socialism in orange, and states with constitutional references to socialism in yellow
Communist state alignments in 1980: pro-Soviet (red); pro-Chinese (yellow); and the non-aligned North Korea and Yugoslavia (black); Somalia had been pro-Soviet until 1977; and Cambodia ( Kampuchea ) had been pro-China until 1979.