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Originally Posted by eyeswideopen  Also East Germany and the Czech Republic. Russia under Stalin, as I said, treated the peripheral Eastern European states as a buffer zone. If you look at the historic maps, you'll see the Tzars did pretty much the same.. |
Indeed.The Imperial policies of the Tsars and the hard-headed realpolitik were reborn under Stalin
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Originally Posted by eyeswideopen Stalinism was a retrograde, parasitic tendency, that did enormous damage. It was not however colonialist in the same sense as Britain, France and the United States, which all in predatory fashion occupied and robbed territory all over the world. An example of the difference would be the Soviet backed democratic regime in Afghanistan, that in its clumsy way was trying to secularise and modernise the state, with education for women as a norm, as compared to Karzai, with his corrupt drug funded colleagues, putting through laws that make it legal to rape and starve your wife.
The economic drive of capitalism is to extend into new territories to extract profit from their labour forces and raw materials. The workers state economy, although mixed in character, did not have that same drive. |
True to a degree. The Soviet policies were unlike classical colonialism in important respects,in that they did not have the same relationship betwen the centre and the periphery. They were indeed a "clumsy" or it could be described as a rather crude and schematic attempt at modernisation and equalisation. But the effects sometimes paralelled colonial practices. Elites connected to the central regime were privileged over the rest of the hostile population and in the Soviet Union itself, there was an equation of Russian cultural superiority with Soviet power which involved the transfer of large numbers of Russians to the Republics with the objective of 'sovietizing' (in other colonial regimes it would be called 'civilizing') the natives. This objective of creating a common Soviet culture could not-given the overwhelming influence of Russia in the Union-but have the effect of diluting the other nationalities cultures, and probably eventually of eradicating the weaker (as in the Baltic states) ones.
21st November 2009
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