The USSR and Colonialism

The Soviet Union’s relationship to colonialism and imperialism was complex. Initially, its anti-imperialism was uncompromising, flowing from the revolutionary upsurge of 1917. Over subsequent decades, this turned to ambivalence or worse.

In 1917, the insurrectionary forces pursued anti-colonialism at multiple scales. The regime they overthrew, the Tsarist empire, was notoriously a “prison of the peoples,”1 where Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Poles, indigenous peoples in Siberia and a host of others suffered colonial oppression and economic extractivism. The early Soviet government defined itself against this order. In what was called Korenizatsiia (indigenisation), it created autonomous republics for dozens of national minorities, encouraged education in native languages and promoted local cultures.

And not only were forms of autonomy on offer. Outright secession was too, on grounds theorised by Lenin in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. In a head-on repudiation of Tsarist colonialism, one of the new government’s first decrees, the Declaration on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, proclaimed the freedom of all peoples within the former empire, including their right to self-determination up to and including secession. Finland was the first former Tsarist province to take advantage, gaining acceptance of its independence in December 1917, followed by the Baltic states in 1920.

The revolution confronted not only Russia’s historical imperialism but the hierarchies of global order. Again, theoretical grounding was supplied by Lenin, through his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. The pamphlet’s core argument boils down to three claims: “Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and financial strangulation of the majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries,” the “antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world” are intensifying, and “imperialism leads to increased national oppression, and, consequently, to increasing resistance.” In Lenin’s reading, imperialism is, firstly, power rivalry within the modern capitalist global economy. Within the field of capitalist power, politics is typically structured through the nation state; it is, for Lenin, “the rule and the norm of capitalism.”2 Secondly, as an element of that broader rivalry, the Great Powers subjugate and exploit the rest of the world. Thirdly, oppressed minorities will fight back.

Its challenge to global imperialism was visible in one of the first acts of the Soviet government. Having come across the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, they published it in Pravda and Izvestia. This was embarrassing to London and Paris. It exposed their designs on the Middle East, as well as the incompatible promises they had made to Arabs and to the Zionists. This was a landmark act of solidarity with colonised peoples, a commitment that was then institutionalised through the Communist International (Comintern). An early showcasing of Comintern anti-colonialism arrived in 1920 in Baku, at the Congress of the Peoples of the East. Chairing the assembly, Grigory Zinoviev called for armed uprisings across the colonised world. He highlighted the contrast of communism with the social democrats of the Second International: the latter advocated “a so-called ‘progressive’ colonial policy,” one that, in practice, backed “the bourgeoisie with white skins” in their subjugation of “the peoples with black and yellow skins.”3 The Comintern went on to fund and train anti-colonial militants in Asia and Africa, up until its dissolution in 1943.

In its early years, then, the revolution’s anti-imperial character was unambiguous and radical. It not only overthrew Russia’s imperial regime but initiated an ideological rupture and practical confrontation with global imperialism. As the world-revolutionary tide ebbed in the 1920s, however, the regime’s radicalism, including its anti-imperialism, weakened.

Put simply, the workers’ state could not subsist for long in isolation. It existed “in a system of states”, Lenin reminded his comrades, and could not survive “alongside the imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must triumph in the end.”4 The Bolsheviks’ wager was that Russia’s revolutionary trajectory would consolidate if similar breakthroughs occurred elsewhere. Yet, in the meantime, an imperialist assault—the invasion of over a dozen powers, in support of the counter-revolutionary Whites’ bid to crush the revolutionary regime—was undermining the basis of Soviet power. Already by 1920, with the working class dwindling and its democratic organs in abeyance, the Communist party-regime was atrophying. Great-Russian chauvinism began to reassert itself, above all in the state apparatus which, Lenin cautioned, had been adopted “from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil.”5

Lenin’s warning came in response to a troubling shift in the treatment of former Tsarist colonies. In early 1921, a section of the Red Army under Stalin’s ally Sergo Ordzhonikidze marched into Georgia, overthrew the Menshevik government and purged the Communist Party. The regime’s founding goal of radical democracy, including the right of oppressed nations to secede, was already being buried under the centralisation of power in Moscow.

From the late 1920s, a ‘modernising counter-revolution’ was pushed through under Stalin’s leadership.6 The Soviet party-state morphed into an agent of capital accumulation, its driving aim being to catch up with the Western imperial powers through strategies of breakneck industrialisation and forced collectivisation. The strategy required upskilling of the labour force, combined with counter-revolutionary terror, directed at ‘Old Bolsheviks’ and peasants, but national minorities too. These tended to operate in combination. For example, in Ukraine, the reversal of ‘Ukrainisation’ policies proceeded in tandem with a collectivisation drive that was more brutal than in Russia and led to one of the worst famines in the modern world, the Holodomor.

The new regime, though multiethnic in name, was de facto a national-imperial formation, with Russia as its core. The reforms that had made the Soviet Union “the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire”7 were dialled back. Cultural and linguistic autonomy was suppressed in line with Russification. The earlier tolerance toward veil-wearing Muslims was reversed, and prominent Muslim communists were executed. Massacres were perpetrated against national minorities (such as Chechens at Khaibakh). Entire populations were deported, including Chechens and Ingush, Kalmyks, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Kurds, Koreans and many more. Nations of the former empire that had declared independence were re-occupied, notably the Baltic states under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. The Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan — were restructured according to the logic of ‘modernising counter-revolution.’ On the one hand, their economies were oriented on extractivist lines (such as cotton monoculture in Uzbekistan) not unlike Western European overseas colonies; on the other, investments in ‘modernisation’ (education and industry) led to markedly higher literacy rates and living standards compared to the Tsarist period.

Following victory in World War II, the USSR announced itself as a major imperialist power, its reach extending across Central and Eastern Europe. Were the territories annexed during the war not being run as “colonies, as much as any of the colonial territories in Africa or Asia?”, asked the prime minister of Ceylon, John Kotelawala, at the Bandung Conference in 1955.8 In the following year the question was answered in a language of blood and iron, when Moscow sent tanks to prop up its puppet in Hungary, much as it did in East Germany in 1953 and would do in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Formal justification for these interventions was announced in the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine,’ a declaration of Moscow’s suzerainty over allied regimes.

On the world stage, the revolutionary aspirations of the early communist regime gave way to realpolitik. Moscow began to play the diplomatic game according to rules codified in the period between Waterloo and Versailles: each Great Power’s defining interest lies in maintaining its sphere of influence, with ‘international order’ managed through power balancing, occasional Great Power conferences, and Great-Power-led multilateral organisations. Revolutionary uprisings abroad that threatened these arrangements were opposed by Communist parties (CPs), most notoriously in Catalonia. The Comintern renounced ‘world revolution’ in favour of raison d’état, the promotion of the ‘national interest’ of the USSR. In some cases this took an especially reactionary shape. In 1947, in order to expedite Britain’s exit from the Middle East, the USSR and four Moscow-steered states voted for the UN Partition Plan for Palestine. Had they voted against, the plan would not have achieved the requisite two-thirds majority; Israel would not exist as a UN-legitimated settler-colonial entity. In the following year, the USSR was the first state to recognise Israel, with Czechoslovakia its principal source of arms.

In a sense, the USSR in mid-century paralleled the USA: a rising power, with a strategic interest in loosening the grip of Western Europe and Japan over their colonies. But the wealth disparity was colossal. The USA subsumed the colonial powers into its ‘liberal’ world economy; the USSR was hegemonic in a much smaller region, and was economically less ‘advanced’ than some countries it occupied. As a backward power on a war-economic base, extending its sway required the imposition upon occupied territories of war-economic structures like its own. Beyond Eastern Europe, its success in state-capitalist modernisation, and its ability to evade Western domination, appealed to independence struggles and to state managers in post-colonial regimes.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Moscow was a major supporter of liberation movements, including the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, ZAPU in Zimbabwe, and the Vietnamese struggle against French and US imperialism. In some, notably Vietnam, Soviet support was essential; in others, such as Kenya, Algeria, and 1950s Cuba, it was not. Throughout, Soviet solidarity was embedded in strategic calculations, and movements that did not align with Moscow’s interests – such as Eritrea’s liberation struggle – received little support or were actively undermined. Following the Sino-Soviet split, the two ‘communist’ Great Powers commonly backed opposing sides, for example in Bangladesh’s independence struggle, and in Angola and Mozambique. Soviet-aligned post-colonial governments often found themselves locked into new economic relationships that reproduced dependency in a different form – Cuba as supplier of sugar to Russia was a case in point.

In sum, the Soviet Union occupied a deeply ambiguous position in the histories of colonialism and imperialism. In the revolutionary years, it made a historically novel attempt to construct a multi-ethnic postcolonial political formation. From the 1920s, it evolved into an imperial power. At the very moment when, globally, the imperial state form was experiencing its final, convulsive demise – the implosion of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and German empires, and the decline of imperial Japan, colonial Britain and the rest – the USSR adapted the Tsarist model of peripheries dominated by an imperial Russia. The Soviet Union extended its imperial dominium over the peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, while simultaneously sponsoring anti-colonial movements worldwide.