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.
The Soviet Union did the exact opposite of colonialism. It exported wealth from the Russian core to the peripheral republics so much that a common complaint of anti-communist Russians today is that the Soviet leadership took from Russians and spent too much on affirmative action and development boosting programs for the various minorities and republics.
This is exactly what virtue signaling liberals who claim to give a shit about minorities and colonized people in the global south say they would like to do, but they end up somehow doing the opposite, supporting white supremacist neoliberal austerity policies that disproportionately harm minorities in their own countries while upholding colonialism and imperialism abroad.
It is yet another of a million and one instances of projection from Westerners. The Soviet Union was deeply and thoroughly anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. Lenin explicitly built it to be that way, he recognized the old Russian Empire as a Prisonhouse of Nations and designed a system that would be its complete opposite by liberating and uplifting said nations.
it’s an example of liberals misunderstanding colonialism.
Central Asia in particular was massively developed and invested in by Moscow, not just in terms of building infrastructure, schools, hospitals, housing, factories etc. but culturally too. There were programs of promoting national culture and languages all throughout the non-Russian republics (including Ukraine by the way: Soviet Ukrainization policies of the 1920s actively promoted the spread of Ukrainian language and culture - sometimes even to the point of backfiring on the Soviets by giving cover to reactionary nationalists to spread counter-revolutionary messaging - contrary to the repression and “genocide” claims of the Banderite Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and today, not to mention that Ukraine received the most industrial development and had one of the highest standards of living of all republics because it got such preferential treatment).
Central Asia experienced an enormous increase in literacy, and many ethnic groups that had never even had a way to write their own language before were helped to develop alphabets and written language by these cultural programs. Millions of people went from barely scraping by an existence at the edge of the subsistence minimum as nomads in very inhospitable regions to living in modern housing and having all the amenities of industrial society. The Soviets developed Central Asian agriculture and irrigation systems massively and enabled these regions to finally be able to escape perpetual famine. Again, the opposite of what colonialism does: US imperialist policy deliberately suppresses the developmemt of food agriculture in developing nations in order to keep them dependent on exporting raw material and cash crops in exchange for food.
Fascinating, any books about the topic?
I have not read it, but “Red Star Over the Third World” by Vijay Prashad has been recommended to me as an insightful look into how the global south viewed the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet Union moving forward, mostly as a beacon of hope. The pdf is free online as well.
I second that recommendation. I gifted a physical copy of that book to a comrade recently, it’s very good.
Adding to my list!
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.
