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. Several scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and
nation states. The Soviets pursued
internal colonialism in
Central Asia. 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. While Maoists criticized post-Stalin USSR's imperialism from a hardline communist viewpoint,
reformist socialist critics of Soviet imperialism, such as
Josip Broz Tito and
Milovan Djilas, have referred the
Stalinist USSR's foreign policies, such as the occupation and economic exploitations of
Eastern Europe and its aggressive and hostile policy towards
Yugoslavia as Soviet imperialism. Another dimension of Soviet imperialism is
cultural imperialism, the
Sovietization of culture and education at the expense of local traditions.
Leonid Brezhnev continued a policy of cultural
Russification as part of
Developed Socialism, which sought to assert more central control.
Seweryn Bialer argued that the Soviet state had an imperial nationalism. 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. The policy officially ended in the
Khrushchev era, with some of the nationalities allowed to return in 1957. However,
Nikita Khrushchev and
Leonid Brezhnev refused the right of return for
Crimean Tatars,
Russian Germans and
Meskhetian Turks. In 1991, the
Supreme Soviet of Russia declared the Stalinist mass deportations to be a "policy of defamation and genocide". The historical relationship between Russia (the dominant republic in the Soviet Union) and these Eastern European countries helps explain their longing to eradicate the remnants of Soviet culture. Poland and the Baltic states epitomize the Soviet attempt to build uniform cultures and political systems. According to Dag Noren, Russia was seeking to constitute and reinforce a buffer zone between itself and Western Europe so as to protect itself from potential future attacks from hostile Western European countries. 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. 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. This and the interventionist
Brezhnev Doctrine, permitting the invasion of other socialist countries, led to characterisation of the USSR as an empire. The Soviet Union sought a group of countries which would rally to its cause in the event of an attack from Western countries, and support it in the context of the Cold War. After the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation
was recognized as its successor state, inheriting $103 billion of Soviet foreign debt and $140 billion of Soviet assets abroad. The Soviet informal empire depended on subsidies from Moscow. The informal empire in the wider Warsaw Pact also included linkages between Communist Parties. Some historians consider a more multinational-oriented Soviet Union emphasizing its socialist initiatives, such as
Ian Bremmer, who describes a "matryoshka-nationalism" where a pan-Soviet nationalism included other nationalisms. The informal empire would have included Soviet economic investments,
military occupation, and
covert action in Soviet-aligned countries. The studies of informal empire have included Soviet influence on
East Germany From the 1919
Karakhan Manifesto to 1927, diplomats of the Soviet Union would promise to revoke concessions in China, but the Soviets secretly kept tsarist concessions such as the
Chinese Eastern Railway, as well as consulates, barracks, and churches. 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. == Communist states aligned with the Soviet Union ==