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Pax Sovietica


The informal term "Soviet Empire" is used by critics of the Soviet Union and Russian nationalists to refer to that country's perceived imperialist foreign policy during the Cold War. The nations said to be part of the "Soviet Empire" were officially independent countries with separate governments that set their own policies (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the country), but those policies had to remain within certain limits decided by the Soviet Union and enforced by threat of intervention by the Warsaw Pact (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland 1980). Countries in this situation are often called satellite states.

Though the Soviet Union was not ruled by an emperor and declared itself anti-imperialist and a people's democracy, 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,Maoists argued that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a socialist façade.

The other dimension of "Soviet imperialism" is cultural imperialism. The policy of Soviet cultural imperialism implied the Sovietization of culture and education at the expense of local traditions.

Overall, the Soviet Empire was a political-military construct. Its hub, Russia, was not a colonial state in the classical sense of holding colonies and exploiting their natural resources. The economies of various parts were both diversified and interrelated, frequently specialising in one type of production and fully dependent on others in both the supply and demand chains. For example, while Uzbek SSR may have been viewed as a typical example of a monoculture country producing cotton, its capital, Tashkent has become a major industrial centre, and Russia itself was a major supplier of raw materials for all its "colonies". In cases where political control wasn't yet firmly established, the satellite states were economically exploited at full scale, as it happened in post-war Poland and Baltic states.


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