There have been two Russian empires, the Tsarist empire lasting from the 1550s until 1917 and, more controversially, the Soviet empire, which was founded in 1917 and fell in 1991. While they shared a broadly common physical space (with some differences at the margins) and similar geostrategic outlooks, and the former provided a potent historical and cultural legacy for the latter, the two empires also had significant differences.
The heartland of the Russian empire was that part of the Eurasian plain around the city of Moscow. This had become the strongest of the Slavic principalities by the mid-sixteenth century, and it was the seat of a succession of monarchs (tsars) who all seem to have harboured expansionist designs. However, the economic basis upon which such designs rested was weak. Russia had a very short growing season, approximately half that of other major food producers, with large parts of the country not well suited to agriculture. Cultivation methods were primitive. As a result, Russia experienced approximately one bad harvest out of every three.1 The consequent difficulty in generating consistent agricultural surpluses undercut the development of a powerful and independent nobility, thereby weakening a potential barrier to the emergence of absolutist monarchy. But the agricultural performance also made it difficult for the tsarist state to generate the sorts of revenues that would have facilitated the growth of a powerful state apparatus. This weak economic base, and the perceived need to supplement it from elsewhere, was one factor encouraging expansionist urges within elite circles.
The location of the heartland of the Russian state was important in explaining expansion in another respect. Moscow was situated in a vast plain lacking the sorts of physical barriers that could have accorded some security from outside enemies. To the south and southeast, the approaches to the Moscow region were wide open, and it was from this direction that the Russian state was incorporated into the Mongol empire in the mid-thirteenth century. It remained under Mongol suzerainty for nearly two and a half centuries. To the west and north, the land was devoid of major obstacles and from here too there were historically powerful foes, Lithuania–Poland and Sweden. The state that was developing around Moscow in the sixteenth century thus felt itself vulnerable to external foes, and one answer to this was to expand the territorial area of the state and thus push the border to a greater distance from the capital than had hitherto been possible.
Under Tatar suzerainty, Moscow emerged as the leading Russian principality and was gradually able to expand the area of territory under its control. After throwing off the ‘Tatar yoke’, and especially under Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’), the new Russian state expanded, so that by the middle of the sixteenth century much of the territory of the first Russian state, the former Kievan Rus, had been consolidated under Muscovite control. The Russian state now embarked on a process of imperial consolidation, gathering in lands never formerly part of Russia and, in some cases, occupied by hostile forces. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Ivan mounted a campaign against the Kazan, Astrakhan and Crimean khanates, which were subdued and the border pushed as far as the Caspian Sea. In the early 1580s a Cossack band led by Yermak crossed the Ural Mountains and took the Siberian khanate of Tiumen. In the seventeenth century, Siberia was conquered, with Russians reaching the Pacific shore by the mid-seventeenth century. Wooden forts established along the river routes formed the basis of towns resting on the fur trade, but it was not until the following two centuries that those areas suitable for agriculture were settled on a wide scale. And it was not until the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1915 that a reliable line of communication was established in this region. Russian exploration and colonization, drawn principally by the fur trade, even extended to Alaska until the latter was sold to the US in 1867. In the eighteenth century, Russian control was pushed to the edge of Mongolia, into what is now southern Ukraine, virtually to the edge of the Caucasus Mountains, and in the west into the Baltic states, Poland, contemporary Belarus and western Ukraine. All of these gains were made on the back of military power. In the nineteenth century, the Amur region in the Far East, Kazakhstan, Turkestan and the Caucasus region in the south, and Finland, the remainder of Poland and contemporary Moldova in the west were all brought under Russian control. This was a massive expansion of territory, with the size of the Russian lands increasing from 24,000 sq km (9,000 sq miles) in 1462 to 13.5 million sq km (5.2 million sq miles) in 1914.2
This expansion was propelled by a combination of economic and strategic causes. The move into Siberia was almost purely economic, to gain control of the lucrative fur trade and to open up the natural resources of the region, especially cultivable land, minerals and timber. The southward move into ‘New Russia’ (mainly southern Ukraine and the middle-lower Volga region) was motivated by the desire to crush the remaining Mongol khanates in that region and to open up the fertile black soil lands of the western steppe. This area also gave control over major south-flowing rivers and therefore access to the Black Sea. The advances to the west were primarily strategic in intent as Russia sought to create a buffer of land between its heartland and hostile Western powers, with the takeover of Finland in particular prompted by the desire to move the international border further away from the capital (since 1709), St Petersburg; access to the sea was also significant in the case of the Baltic region. The assertion of Russian control over Kazakhstan and Turkestan was prompted in part by geostrategic considerations related to the British attempt to block Russia in the southwest, reflected in the Crimean War. The Russian counter was to press its control further in the direction of British India. This region soon became important economically through the production of cotton. The drive into the Caucasus region was stimulated by appeals for support from their fellow Orthodox Christian Georgians, and also by the perceived need to stabilize this region which was a crossroads of religions and cultures and was seen as potentially destabilizing to the southern part of the empire.
The expansion of Russian power and the creation of empire that this constituted brought under imperial control a large range of peoples with a significant diversity of languages, cultures and histories. There were well over 100 different ethnic groups within the empire, possessing a vast range of languages, religions, cultures and economic styles of life. From formally illiterate reindeer herders in the north to nomadic Buddhist pastoralists around Lake Baikal, from enserfed peasants in central Russia to orthodox Jews beyond the pale of settlement, and from Muslim Chechen tribes to educated and cultured Russian elites in major cities, the empire was a patchwork of ethnic, religious and cultural identities. Russians were the largest single ethnic group, comprising some 44 per cent of the population in 1897, although if the Slavic Ukrainians and Belorussians are included, the Slavic contingent constituted some two-thirds of the population of the empire.3 As the empire expanded, migration of many of these people occurred on a significant scale. Particularly important was the migration of Russians into what were traditionally non-Russian areas. This sort of ethnic expansion was often driven largely by economic opportunities, but it was also administratively driven as a means of helping to tie the empire together.
Even though Russian imperialism was driven in part by economic motives, little attempt was made until the Soviet period to develop many of the newly absorbed territories. While there was some exploitation of the natural resources of Siberia, it was not until Soviet development of the vast mineral resources of this region that a major attempt was made to bring about economic development. Industrial development under the Tsarist empire was characterized by a major spurt in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century, but this was concentrated around Moscow (principally textiles) and the coal reserves of the Ural Mountains and Ukraine. Much of the rest of the empire remained relatively underdeveloped; a major role played by Siberia in the empire was to act as a home to political prisoners.
In the Tsarist empire, there was no strong sense of difference between metropole and colony, in part because Russia was a land-based empire lacking clear physical dividing features. This was reflected in the administrative structure. Although there needed to be some decentralization of authority from the capital, this was to administrative regions or provinces (guberniia) that were drawn on broadly administrative rather than ethnic lines. It was also reflected in the composition of the ruling elite. The Russian elite saw itself as the inheritor of European values, a stance which made it open to entry by non-ethnic Russians. This is reflected in the strong representation of Baltic Germans in Russia’s ruling circles, especially in the eighteenth century.
Generally provinces were headed by a civil governor, while some frontier regions, the capital and some other provinces of special significance were headed by a governor-general who had direct access to the emperor.4 Governors were directly responsible to the central government and were appointed by them; they were not accountable to those over whom they ruled. This system was generally maintained, with some strengthening of the governor’s powers in 1837, until the ‘great reforms’ of the 1860s, which introduced an element of representative government into the running of local affairs. However, such representation was strictly limited, both in terms of the personnel involved and the matters over which this body (the zemstvo) had jurisdiction. Their most important role was as a forum for the expression of enlightened opinion. Finland and Poland were exceptions to this general rule of administration; both enjoyed significant autonomy in internal affairs.
The powers of the governor at the provincial level were more than matched by those of the emperor at the centre. Absolutist monarchy had been established in the sixteenth century, and despite a number of weak emperors and the breakdown of the centralized monarchy in the early seventeenth century,5 this principle was maintained until 1905. The tsar, or emperor, was all-powerful, citing the principle of divine right and believing that he had no accountability to those over whom he ruled. Government ministers were purely advisory, holding office at the emperor’s pleasure. Although some ministers were able to exercise significant influence over government policy at different times – Speransky and Arakcheev in the early nineteenth century and Witte in the late nineteenth century are good examples – formally they always acted as the cipher of the emperor and the final decision always lay in the latter’s hands. The reforms introduced following the 1905 revolution seemed to modify the absolutism of the imperial office by introducing an elected legislative organ, the Duma, but in practice this did little to curb the imperial prerogative.
The theoretically high levels of centralism were not always realized in practice. This is principally because the state bureaucracy was not a very efficient machine and could not easily cope with the vast distances that needed to be spanned if the empire was to be effectively governed. Not only were communications slow and clumsy, a fact reflecting the state of contemporary technology, the economic backwardness of much of Russia, and the distances involved, but many bureaucrats were corrupt and more interested in lining their pockets than administering efficiently. For much of this period many also lacked the educational levels to be able to perform satisfactorily.
The imperial system was underpinned by an ideology of Russian exceptionalism. Following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the creation of a separate Moscow patriarchate in 1589 (which formally separated the Russian Church from that in Constantinople), the doctrine of the ‘third Rome’ appeared. This declared that both Rome and Constantinople had betrayed the true religion, and that Moscow was now the centre of that religion; it was the ‘third Rome’ and there would not be a fourth. This conception fed into the notion of ‘holy Russia’ often invoked by leading political and religious figures. This implied the unity of dynasty, Church and people, and was reflected in the trinity of concepts that for many symbolized the special status of Russia: ‘orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality’. This ideological construct emphasized the unity of the people with the emperor and the Church, and underpinned the widespread popular belief in and commitment to the monarchy. This gained increased prominence during the nineteenth century when the upper ranks of the state administration became less cosmopolitan and more Russian than had been the case earlier. Russian exceptionalism also provided a basis for Russian expansionism.
From the beginnings of imperial expansion, Russia always sought to play a role on the international stage befitting a major power. The chief arena in which it sought such a role was Europe. From the time of Peter I and his symbolic moving of the capital to the new city St Petersburg which was to give Russia its ‘window on the West’, most of Russia’s efforts were directed at Europe. However, because of the weakness of its informal instruments of empire, financial and commercial power, Russia was forced to seek expanded influence in the international arena principally through state action, both diplomatic and military.
Russian aspirations were looked at nervously in the West. European leaders were all too aware of the history of Russian expansionism. In addition, the Russians were seen as being crude and rough, as lacking the refinement of the west Europeans; the metaphor of the ‘Russian bear’ had significant appeal. But there was also concern in Western chancelleries about Russian military power. The source of this was not the advanced technical level of Russian weaponry, but the imagined unlimited supply of peasant soldiers. Western leaders were concerned about the possibility of the enormous Russian military steamroller moving into central Europe, a fear that was strengthened by the entry of Russian troops into Paris after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Such concern meant that Russia was always confronted with an unsympathetic international environment in its Western theatre of interest.
Russia sought continually to overcome the geographical restrictions under which it laboured. To the north and east, there were no ports that were ice-free the year round. To the west and southwest, Russia’s maritime access to the wider world was restricted through small choke points controlled by potentially hostile powers: access to and egress from the Baltic (and therefore from St Petersburg) was through the narrow channel between Sweden and Denmark, while movement from the Black Sea ports was through the Dardanelles. This situation made Russia’s maritime activities, both military and commercial, vulnerable, and was behind continuing Russian attempts to break out of this straitjacket. The Crimean War (1853–56) was in part motivated by the Russian desire to gain control over the Dardanelles and thereby remove this constraint.
Ultimately the collapse of the first Russian empire was precipitated by hostile action by competitors in Europe. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Russian empire was cast into direct conflict with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, both located on her western borders. In military terms, the war was disastrous for Russia virtually from the outset. By 1917, with the Russian army demoralized by successive defeats and public opinion turned against the war, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, bringing to an end the Russian monarchy and effectively marking the end of the empire. But this collapse was not solely due to the reverses in war. Also crucial had been the undermining of imperial authority by domestic developments.
In the half-century following defeat in the Crimean War, Russian society experienced major strains as a result of government policy and economic development. The government’s response to the Crimean defeat was to embark on a major programme of liberalization. The ‘great reforms’ that were introduced at that time involved the introduction of a measure of local and regional self-government (the zemstvo), the creation of a more regularized system of justice, the expansion, liberalization and restructuring of the education system, and the emancipation of the serfs. The first three of these helped to create the conditions for the emergence of a liberal, middle-class society that, by the end of the century, still represented only a small proportion of the empire’s population but dominated educated and cultured life in the major cities. It was from this milieu that many of the revolutionary leaders were to come. The other aspect of the reforms, the emancipation of the serfs, was crucial. Although it gave the peasants what they had demanded for a long time, control over the land, the terms under which this was granted propelled the majority of peasants into long-term and ever-increasing debt. The result was widespread peasant dissatisfaction.
The emancipation of the serfs also facilitated another development that was occurring at this time, the shifting of peasants off the land into the cities to work in the newly emerging industries. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Russia experienced a dramatic industrial spurt, powered in part by state policies championed by Minister of Finance and then Prime Minister Sergei Witte. This industrial development transformed the economy and those areas of the country (principally Moscow and St Petersburg, parts of the Urals and the mining areas of Ukraine) where it was concentrated. It led to a huge influx of people into the towns and the development of an urban working class. The conditions of life for these people were very hard; housing was inadequate, with many men forced to live in communal barracks and leave their families at home in the villages, there was virtually no infrastructure or social facilities to cater for them, and there was little legal protection for them against their employers. This created an environment within which the emergent working class was susceptible to revolutionary appeals.
Among the intelligentsia too there was growing disillusionment with the tsarist system. Throughout the nineteenth century, many educated Russians took their lead from the West, comparing the growth of more liberal societies with representative political systems to their own experience in Russia where the absolutism of tsarist rule continued to be asserted by successive tsars. By the 1860s a revolutionary movement was already emerging. There was little unity among the different strands of the revolutionary movement, with differences occurring regarding the strategies and tactics to be used (for example, the use of terror) as well as the type of system that should replace the existing one. An important, but initially minor, strand was that infused with the views of Karl Marx and his early Russian disciple, Georgii Plekhanov. Ultimately it was this strand of the revolutionary movement that was to come to power on the collapse of the empire.
Liberal circles were also becoming increasingly restive under the tsar’s refusal to limit his authority and, more specifically, to grant a constitution and political representation. These strands, revolutionary and liberal, seemed to coalesce in 1905. Following Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), revolution broke out. This was vigorously put down by force, but it also drove the tsar to introduce a series of measures designed to stabilize the situation. A far-reaching programme of land reform was introduced by interior minister and then prime minister Petr Stolypin, designed to create a stable class of farmers in the countryside. Also significant was the introduction in 1906 of the Duma, a legislative body that was designed to give liberal society a role in government. However, the tsar retained the right to rule absolutely when the Duma was not sitting and to dissolve it at will. Over time, conservative manipulation of the franchise, added to exercise of the tsar’s right of dissolution, robbed the Duma of any effective power. Nevertheless, the fourth Duma (1912–17) became increasingly critical of the tsar’s war policy and of the imperial regime in general.
The strains imposed by the war in addition to the tensions created over the course of the preceding half-century were enough to topple the regime. When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, his brother refused the throne, and there was insufficient support within Russian leading circles to restore the monarchy. The result was an interregnum of eight months, during which time public opinion was radicalized and one part of the Marxist revolutionary movement, the Bolsheviks, prepared to seize power. This they did in October 1917, and then set about reconstituting the empire.
The use of the term ‘empire’ for the Soviet Union is contentious. The Soviet leaders themselves rejected its applicability; the ideology they espoused saw empire as stemming from capitalism and therefore the socialist USSR could not be an empire. Of course, this also meant that the term ‘empire’ had particularly negative connotations, and its use with regard to the Soviet Union within the context of the Cold War was seen as being ideologically laden; President Reagan’s notion of ‘the evil empire’ is a good illustration of this. However, the Soviet Union covered much of the same territory as had the Tsarist empire, included most of the same ethnic communities, and was largely run by Russians. While it was very different from its predecessor in many respects, it was also similar in many others, so the term ‘empire’ is certainly justifiable.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they were confronted with the immediate problem of armed conflict on their territory. The German front remained alive until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 brought hostilities to an end, but three months later a civil war broke out which lasted into 1921. With the fall of tsarism, a number of parts of the old empire declared their independence. The new Soviet leaders accepted the independence of Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and, after an abortive attempt to carry the war into that country, Poland. These were the only parts of the former empire whose independence was recognized and, not coincidentally, these were the parts of the empire most accessible to the West and where any attempt to reassert Russian control might provoke expanded Western involvement. Poland also seized parts of contemporary Belarus and western Ukraine, while Romania occupied Bessarabia.
Other parts of the former empire also sought to break away from Russia. The Ukrainian declaration of independence in January 1918 was met with invasion by the new Red Army, but Communist control was not stabilized until the end of the civil war. Similar declarations in the Caucasian republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia in May 1918 reflected the emergence of independence-minded governments, but these were overthrown by Soviet invasion in 1920–21. In other parts of the former empire, Soviet control was established, mainly through the extension of military power into these regions.
By the early 1920s, Soviet control had been established on most parts of the territory of the former empire. Further alterations to the boundaries occurred in the lead-up to the Great Patriotic War, as the Second World War was called. In September 1939, those White Russian (Belarus) and Ukrainian areas occupied by Poland were taken over, in March 1940 two parts of Finland were incorporated into the USSR, in June 1940 Romania ceded Bessarabia to the USSR, and in August 1940, the Baltic states were reincorporated. Although these gains were not secure until after the war (at which time Russia also gained part of East Prussia), with the exception of Poland and Finland, this re-established the extent of the Tsarist empire under Soviet auspices.
From the time of its first constitution in 1918, the Soviet Union was formally a federation, consisting of nominally autonomous republics. The number of these changed over time, but the 1936 Constitution introduced the broad structure of fifteen republics that was still in existence at the time of the fall of the USSR. The republics were defined along ethnic lines, in the sense that the territory of each republic was meant to be the homeland of one particular ethnic community, although each republic was in fact multi-ethnic and had a substantial Russian population. The ethnic designation of each republic gave an appearance of self-government for the major ethnic groups; it was also to be a major factor in the break-up of the country in 1991.
Although the country was formally a federation, in practice it was run along highly centralized lines. Republican governments had little autonomy, with most important decisions being made in Moscow. An important factor in this was the Communist Party. This highly centralized and disciplined structure was the locus of effective power in the Soviet system. Its capacity to exercise administrative control over that system was an important factor in Soviet survival, and an important contrast with the Tsarist empire.
The Soviet system was underpinned by a formal ideology, Marxism-Leninism. This was a doctrine based principally on the writings of Marx and the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin (although during the period of Joseph Stalin’s ascendancy, his writings too were part of it). All policy was justified on the basis of this ideology and, formally at least, this guided all decisions. Based on an extensive system of political education, all Soviet citizens were expected to have imbibed the values of the ideology and thereby to have become committed to what it stood for. The principal role of the ideology was to legitimize the existing Soviet system, and it did this by offering an interpretation of history and socio-economic development that culminated in the achievement of an ideal end-state, Communism. Those who followed Marxism-Leninism were able to build socialism and, through this, to achieve Communism. Formally, from 1936, socialism was said to have been attained in the USSR, so that the task was the building of Communism. Being guided by the ideology, the party was the institution best suited to lead the construction of Communism and to rule in the country. The symbolism that was associated with this emphasized the common working man and woman, in stark contrast with the symbolism of other empires.
A key principle of the ideology was equality. This was to be achieved through a combination of the absence of the private ownership of productive capacity and the existence of substantial state-provided access to resources, like education, health care, housing, transport and employment. An important aspect of this was also the perceived equality between ethnic groups. At the outset, the Bolsheviks championed the development of indigenous national cultures. In the first decade of Soviet rule, significant resources were devoted to supporting the development and growth of national cultures in the non-Russian parts of the country. This process of ‘nativization’ led not only to the flowering of non-Russian cultures, but to the prominence in regional administrations of many non-Russians. However, with the push for industrialization and agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s, the policy of nativization was reversed and Slavs, especially Russians, were injected into leadership positions throughout the country. This was associated with the desire to ‘modernize’ the country and thereby to rely on those members of ‘more advanced’ nationalities. From 1936 there was a full-blown policy of Russification in place, designed to eliminate the differences between national groups and make them all into Russians. This emphasis was reinforced during the Great Patriotic War when Russian nationalism was officially revived by Stalin as a device to encourage patriotism and stimulate the war effort. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the extremes of Russification were toned down, but the general principle remained, although from 1964 until the collapse of the USSR there was in practice much greater freedom for ethnic elites to exercise power at the republican and lower levels.6 Nevertheless, throughout the Soviet period and notwithstanding Stalin’s Georgian nationality, ethnic Russians dominated the political system, just as Russia dominated the federation.
One of the most important characteristics of the Soviet empire is the massive economic development that it experienced. The rulers used a highly centralized economic system to direct that development in such a way as to turn what was a primarily agricultural country at the time of the Revolution into one of the post-war superpowers. This relied mainly on forced industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. The issue of the economic relationship between metropole and colony remains disputed in the Soviet case.7 There is no doubt that Moscow exploited the economic potential of the republics. For example, Central Asia was virtually turned into a cotton monoculture, Azeri oil and Ukrainian cereals and coal were extracted and their use determined by Moscow-based planners, and the development of all of the individual republics was made secondary to the development of the Soviet economy as a whole. But such exploitation was not the whole story. Many republics gained significantly as a result of the operation of the Soviet federation. In economic terms, some republics were not self-sustaining, but survived on the basis of effective subsidies from the centre; many of these republics could not have developed economically to the extent that they did without the Soviet input. Many peoples gained not only education, but a written script and a codification of national culture through Soviet efforts. And clearly many individuals from non-Russian nationalities obtained positions of power and influence through the Soviet system. So the USSR was not simply an exploitative imperial structure; it was also a system that produced benefits for the constituent republics.
From its inauguration, the Soviet state faced almost unrelenting hostility from the countries of the West. In part this was because the USSR represented an ideological threat to the way in which the Western states were organized. The Soviet version of modernity rejected the capitalist principles upon which the West rested, offering an alternative that, for many, seemed much more attractive. But the USSR was also seen to pose a geopolitical threat, and one that was evident right from the start in the way the new state rejected many established international norms (e.g. cancelling the debts owed by its tsarist predecessor) and sought to support revolutionary groups seeking the overthrow of Western governments. From the outset, the USSR had a messianic quality to it as it sought to spread Communism across the globe. Accordingly, the international environment within which the new state sought to make its way was one characterized by a high level of hostility. Such external hostility was a major factor in encouraging the Stalin leadership at the end of the 1920s to opt for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization. These developments were seen as having two positive effects: weakening domestic enemies, and building up the military capacity of the state the better to be able to protect itself. The dimensions of this economic modernization were immense, with the country becoming a major industrial power within just over a decade. Indeed, this industrial development was of sufficient scope to enable the country to withstand the German invasion in the Great Patriotic War and, along with its new Western allies, to defeat the Nazi threat.
The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two major powers on the globe. Its destroyed industry was rebuilt, its devastated cities reborn, and its military capacity vastly enhanced by the development of nuclear weapons. In the post-war period, the Soviet Union achieved the highest level of international political influence ever enjoyed by the Russian/Soviet empire. It was a major player in virtually all parts of the globe. While the opposition to it on the part of the Western powers expressed in the Cold War meant that its will was not always supreme, the Soviet Union was clearly a player on the global stage with a much higher status than Russia had ever experienced before. Its ships sailed on all the seas, its diplomats and agents worked throughout the globe, and its influence was felt everywhere.8
The capacity to project its power was most marked in the region of strongest historical concern to it, central-eastern Europe. As a result of the war, the Soviet Union was able to establish an effective empire in this part of the world. This is sometimes referred to as the Soviet ‘external empire’, to distinguish it from the ‘internal empire’ of the Soviet Union itself. This ‘external empire’ comprised virtually all of central-eastern Europe and the Balkans, with the exception of Greece, Yugoslavia (which broke with the USSR in 1948), Albania (which broke in 1961), and possibly Romania (which distanced itself from Moscow in the second half of the 1960s). In the other countries – Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria – the Soviet Union had for the most part quiescent satellites. They were bound together through a variety of international organizations (chiefly the Warsaw Treaty Organisation and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), by tightly controlled economic connections, and by the dominance exercised over local Communist parties by the Soviet party. Leadership changes and major policy decisions were almost invariably approved in Moscow before they were adopted in the local countries. In effect, these states were ruled by people who were almost satraps of the Soviet leadership. While there was some variation in the degree of standardization Moscow imposed on the political and economic structures of the countries of the region, ultimately all were dependent upon Soviet goodwill. When a country stepped too far out of line, as Hungary did in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, order could be restored through the use of troops. This ‘external empire’ constituted a geopolitical buffer between the USSR and the West, but it was also to prove an economic liability when the Soviet economy ran into difficulties in the 1970s.
The Soviet Union also had a unique instrument of informal empire, the international Communist movement. Non-ruling Communist parties throughout the world received often substantial funding and assistance from the Soviet Union and generally followed orders from Moscow; they acted largely as agents of the Soviet regime. This situation lasted until the split between the USSR and China, which came at the end of the 1950s and divided the international Communist movement. From that time on, the Soviet and Chinese parties competed for the allegiance of non-ruling Communist parties, a development that substantially curtailed this informal empire.
Soviet support for both ruling and non-ruling parties abroad was a constant drain on the Soviet budget. So too were the massive amounts of money that were directed into the military budget in an attempt to sustain the Soviet side of the Cold War and the arms race. When the economy ran into difficulties in the 1970s, such expenditures were a significant part of this. This was instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
In terms of its politico-administrative structure, the Soviet empire was like no other. The high levels of integration between political and economic structures and the high degree of centralization characteristic of the structure as a whole created a system that was unique. This highly centralized system, labelled by some ‘totalitarian’, meant that the state’s economy was directly controlled by the political leadership, and was used as a tool by that leadership to serve its political ends. This structure was useful in achieving the rapid industrialization of the 1930s and the post-war rebuilding, but once it came to the 1960s–70s and the need to shape a more consumer-oriented society (in line with popular desires), this structure was less satisfactory. However, instead of seeking to reform the system, Soviet elites simply muddled on. By the mid-1980s, the economy was in crisis.
In response, the Soviet leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a range of reform measures in the economic, political and cultural spheres, as well as in foreign policy.9 However, these measures were neither well integrated into a coherent programme nor implemented efficiently, with the result that the economic situation did not improve, political opposition to the reforms mounted and popular discontent grew. Most important was the growth of nationalist sentiment in some of the non-Russian republics, and from the late 1980s this sentiment escalated and was used by republican elites to press for independence. At the same time popular pressures mounted in the external empire, and following Gorbachev’s refusal to assist ruling elites to hold on to power, these countries broke free from Soviet control. Following a failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991, the Soviet Union broke up along the lines of the republics. The internal empire disintegrated, with the fifteen republics becoming independent states.
The collapse of the Soviet empire thus resulted in the same sort of outcome as the fall of the European colonial empires: the independence of the colonies. Russia itself also gained independence. Despite the existence within its boundaries of more than 100 different ethnic groups (unlike in the USSR as a whole, where by 1989 Russians officially constituted only 50.8 per cent of the population), within Russia itself Russians were an overwhelming majority – some 83 per cent.10 Russia had been reduced to an area that had been Soviet-defined, but which centred on the traditional principality of Muscovy and included those areas of north and south European Russia and Siberia colonized by the tsars. The Russian empire was at an end.