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Was the USSR an "empire" in the imperial sense (genuine question) ? I had thought the revolution was to destroy all that, remove the czar, bring in autocratic

Was the USSR an "empire" in the imperial sense (genuine question) ? I had thought the revolution was to destroy all that, remove the czar, bring in autocratic states, etc. I feel like there is a distinction here but I can't easily point to it. But they were very anti-empire afaik

brazzy 4y ago
An empire is not defined by its internal form of government, but by having a poweful core state that keeps other territories (provinces, colonies, client states) in permanent subservience.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Surely not, an empire has an emperor/empress (an Imperator of some sort).
  - brazzy 4y ago
    No, that is not the definition used by historians and political scholars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire#Definition Because what some ruler calls him- or herself isn't really a useful category.
qsort 4y ago
The usual definition of an empire is a state where a dominant group uses an imperial elite to extract resources from peripheral groups. If you accept this definition, the USSR was an empire in the exact same sense the Romans or the British were, they just instantiated the template a little differently.
roundandround 4y ago
I think the USSR was a colonialist empire in the post Napolean Republican sense. The ideals of the exceptional Republic make it the perfect overseer of the implementation of its system upon inferior nations that lack the vision or commitment to find and implement the perfect ideals. My impression from how it is coverred in the US is that the UK's early colonialism was simple feudal empire (the Queen is pleased with your venture) and late colonialism was of the Republican empire sort (they need our assigned administration to at least become a poor model of us).
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Who were the colonisers?
  - roundandround 4y ago
    Private people who follow (or are relatives of) the military and other state personnel of a coloniser are generally the colonists and might be the only colonists unless a state starts forcibly exporting people like the UK and USSR did. (If you mean Napoleon, he was of course defeated and Austria setup a plan to contain France's ambitions, but his colonial aims could already be seen in his short lived satellite government in Switzerland.)
pjc50 4y ago
It wasn't colonialist, in that the USSR did not expand into overseas areas of nonwhite people, because by that time there weren't any left uncolonized, but it had all the other attributes of a Russian empire over the satellite republics. The liberatory aspects of it collapsed very early on in infighting. Then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  > It wasn't colonialist, in that the USSR did not expand into overseas areas of nonwhite people That is a peculiar definition of "colonialist". For instance, the ancient Romans colonized Great Britain, despite the fact that the Romans and the Britons were both "white". The Arabs colonized Spain, despite the fact that the Arabs were "non-white" (by some definitions) and the Spaniards were "white". The Mongols colonized a whole bunch of areas, of pretty much every ethnicity that exists in Eastern Europe and a large swath of Asia. And so on.

brazzy 4y ago

An empire is not defined by its internal form of government, but by having a poweful core state that keeps other territories (provinces, colonies, client states) in permanent subservience.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Surely not, an empire has an emperor/empress (an Imperator of some sort).
- brazzy 4y ago
  No, that is not the definition used by historians and political scholars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire#Definition Because what some ruler calls him- or herself isn't really a useful category.

qsort 4y ago

The usual definition of an empire is a state where a dominant group uses an imperial elite to extract resources from peripheral groups. If you accept this definition, the USSR was an empire in the exact same sense the Romans or the British were, they just instantiated the template a little differently.

roundandround 4y ago

I think the USSR was a colonialist empire in the post Napolean Republican sense. The ideals of the exceptional Republic make it the perfect overseer of the implementation of its system upon inferior nations that lack the vision or commitment to find and implement the perfect ideals. My impression from how it is coverred in the US is that the UK's early colonialism was simple feudal empire (the Queen is pleased with your venture) and late colonialism was of the Republican empire sort (they need our assigned administration to at least become a poor model of us).

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Who were the colonisers?
- roundandround 4y ago
  Private people who follow (or are relatives of) the military and other state personnel of a coloniser are generally the colonists and might be the only colonists unless a state starts forcibly exporting people like the UK and USSR did. (If you mean Napoleon, he was of course defeated and Austria setup a plan to contain France's ambitions, but his colonial aims could already be seen in his short lived satellite government in Switzerland.)

pjc50 4y ago

It wasn't colonialist, in that the USSR did not expand into overseas areas of nonwhite people, because by that time there weren't any left uncolonized, but it had all the other attributes of a Russian empire over the satellite republics. The liberatory aspects of it collapsed very early on in infighting. Then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...

Turing_Machine 4y ago
> It wasn't colonialist, in that the USSR did not expand into overseas areas of nonwhite people That is a peculiar definition of "colonialist". For instance, the ancient Romans colonized Great Britain, despite the fact that the Romans and the Britons were both "white". The Arabs colonized Spain, despite the fact that the Arabs were "non-white" (by some definitions) and the Spaniards were "white". The Mongols colonized a whole bunch of areas, of pretty much every ethnicity that exists in Eastern Europe and a large swath of Asia. And so on.