What’re your thoughts on the concept? From what I’ve read, what’s most commonly allegated as “colonialism” in the USSR is stuff like the dependency of Central Asia on goods from Moscow (sometimes spun as the “metropolis”) and systems inherited from the Tsarist government which were phased out during centralisation, so the foundation for such an argument seems shaky - especially considering the massive efforts to modernise the colonial territories that the Soviet government undertook. The closest thing I can really find is the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, which was definitely bad but was also a singular event brought upon by the second world war and not really indicative of a greater system of colonialism at play.
Is this that lib Dru Gladney’s “research”? It’s such nonsense to whitewash and equivocate on the topic of genocidal European colonialism to compare internal developmental inequity in the Soviet Union. These losers apply the same model to China to say the landlocked people are colonized by the rich coastal port denizens.
By that logic, the lumpen bourgoisie of Indiana are colonized by working stiffs in New York City.