The postcolonial viewpoint holds that the Soviet Union was a colonial or imperial power that subjugated non-Russian peoples under a nominally internationalist ideology, and that its internal and external policies toward peripheral nations and ethnic minorities are best understood through the same analytical frameworks applied to Western European empires. Scholars working in this tradition argue that Soviet Marxism-Leninism functioned as a modernizing, civilizing discourse structurally analogous to Western colonial ideologies, and that the USSR's dissolution should be read not merely as the collapse of a communist state but as the end of a Russian-centered empire. This viewpoint is held primarily by postcolonial theorists, scholars of Soviet nationalities policy, and intellectuals from formerly Soviet-dominated nations in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

Postcolonial analysts argue that despite formal commitments to the equality of Soviet nationalities, political and cultural power remained concentrated among ethnic Russians. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the dominant republic in all but name; Russian was the de facto language of state, military command, and upward mobility. Non-Russian elites were expected to Russify in order to advance, a dynamic these scholars compare to the assimilationist pressures colonial administrators imposed on subject peoples in British India or French Africa. They point to the privileged position of Russian Orthodox cultural memory in late Soviet nationalism, even within an officially atheist state, as evidence that Soviet universalism masked ethnic particularism.

A central postcolonial argument holds that Soviet modernization campaigns in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia replicated the logic of the Western colonial civilizing mission. Campaigns to collectivize nomadic herders, eliminate traditional religious practice, and impose literacy in Cyrillic-script languages are read as coercive cultural transformation projects serving Russian-center interests while erasing indigenous ways of life. Scholars such as Adeeb Khalid argue that Soviet antireligious campaigns in Muslim-majority regions were not simply ideological but functioned as Russifying and secularizing interventions that destroyed existing social structures.¹⁾ The Stalinist deportations of entire ethnic groups - Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Koreans, and others - are cited as extreme instances of colonial population management.

Proponents invoke Lenin's own early characterization of Tsarist Russia as a “prisonhouse of nations” and argue that the Soviet successor state reproduced this structure despite its founding promises. The formal federal architecture of the USSR - union republics, autonomous oblasts, autonomous okrugs - is interpreted as an administrative grid that named and bounded nationalities in ways that served central control rather than genuine self-determination. Drawing on Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin's work on the Soviet “affirmative action empire,” some postcolonial scholars argue that even Soviet policies that promoted minority languages and cultures did so in ways that paradoxically entrenched central authority by creating manageable, legible national categories.²⁾

The postcolonial framework is also applied to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after 1945. Scholars from Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, and Czechoslovakia have argued that the Warsaw Pact order was a colonial relationship: satellite states were economically extracted, politically supervised through Communist Party structures loyal to Moscow, and subject to military intervention when they moved toward independence - as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted Soviet authority to intervene in socialist states to protect “socialist gains,” is read as a formal articulation of imperial prerogative. Intellectuals such as Milan Kundera framed Soviet domination as a specifically colonial erasure of Central European culture and identity.³⁾

Postcolonial scholars argue that the successor states of the former USSR are engaged in ongoing decolonization - recovering suppressed languages, rehabilitating historical memory, and disentangling national identity from Soviet-imposed categories. This framing is particularly strong in Ukraine, where scholars and public intellectuals have argued that the Holodomor (the famine of 1932-33) was a colonial act of demographic destruction targeting the Ukrainian nation, and that Soviet cultural policy systematically suppressed Ukrainian language and identity. Ukrainian postcolonial scholars, among others, cite works such as Anne Applebaum's documentation of the famine's deliberate targeting of Ukraine in support of this framing.⁴⁾ Similar arguments are made in Kazakhstan regarding collectivization famine and in the Baltic states regarding deportations.

The application of postcolonial theory to the Soviet Union developed unevenly. Classical postcolonial theory, emerging from the work of Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Edward Said, focused on Western European maritime empires and largely exempted the Soviet Union, which presented itself as an anti-imperialist force and supported many Third World liberation movements. Soviet propaganda successfully positioned the USSR as a natural ally of decolonizing nations, complicating critical analysis.

Serious postcolonial scholarship on the Soviet Union gained momentum after 1991, when the dissolution of the USSR, the emergence of post-Soviet nationalisms, and the opening of archives enabled new historical work. Scholars such as Suny, Khalid, Francine Hirsch, and Yuri Slezkine developed frameworks for analyzing Soviet nationality policy that drew selectively on postcolonial concepts while remaining grounded in archival history.⁵⁾⁶⁾ The Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2014 and escalating in 2022 accelerated the adoption of decolonial framing in Ukrainian scholarship and public discourse, and drew renewed international attention to postcolonial interpretations of Russian imperialism.

Adeeb Khalid - Professor of history at Carleton College; argues that Soviet modernization in Central Asia was a variant of colonial transformation that destroyed Islamic civil society and imposed alien categories of nationality.

Ronald Grigor Suny - Historian of the Soviet nationalities and the Caucasus; his concept of the “affirmative action empire” is widely used, though Suny himself occupies a nuanced position between postcolonial and conventional Soviet historiography.

Yuri Slezkine - Author of the influential essay “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” which argued that the Soviet state paradoxically strengthened ethnic nationalism by institutionalizing national categories.

Oksana Zabuzhko - Ukrainian novelist and public intellectual who has argued forcefully for the decolonial reading of Ukrainian history under both Tsarist and Soviet rule.

Olga Bertelsen - And other Ukrainian diaspora scholars who have applied decolonial frameworks specifically to Soviet cultural policy, the Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1930s, and the Holodomor.

Milan Kundera (1929-2023) - Czech novelist whose 1984 essay on Central Europe framed Soviet domination as colonial erasure of a distinct civilization; influential on Eastern European postcolonial self-understanding.

Scholars holding broadly postcolonial views of the Soviet Union disagree on several significant questions.

Was Soviet colonialism continuous with Russian imperialism or distinct from it? Some argue the Soviet period represented a sharp intensification of Tsarist imperial practices under ideological cover; others contend that Soviet nationality policy was genuinely novel - creating nations where they had not previously existed in modern form - and should not be collapsed into a simple continuity narrative.

Did Soviet anti-imperialism have any genuine content? Some postcolonial scholars acknowledge that Soviet support for Third World liberation movements, opposition to formal Western colonialism, and early nationality policies offered real, if compromised, anti-colonial content. Others regard this as purely instrumental propaganda that served Soviet geopolitical interests.

Does the postcolonial framework fit, or does it distort? A significant minority of scholars sympathetic to the underlying critique argue that concepts developed to analyze maritime, racially structured Western empires fit awkwardly onto a land empire where the “colonizers” and “colonized” shared borders, intermarried extensively, and were often indistinguishable by phenotype. These scholars prefer frameworks drawn from imperial history, nationalism studies, or comparative genocide studies rather than postcolonial theory proper.

Scope of the claim - Some scholars apply the postcolonial framework primarily to Central Asia and the Caucasus, where non-European, non-Slavic peoples faced the most dramatic cultural transformation. Others extend it fully to Eastern Europe and Ukraine. A smaller number argue it applies even to peripheral Russian regions such as Siberia, where indigenous peoples faced extractive and assimilatory policies.

• Soviet Union - Main Topic
• Soviet Union - Official Marxist-Leninist Viewpoint
• Soviet Union - Anti-Communist Viewpoint
• Soviet Union - Totalitarianism Viewpoint
• Soviet Union - History
• Soviet Union - Debate
• Russian Imperialism - Postcolonial Viewpoint
• Holodomor - Genocide Viewpoint
• Soviet Nationalities Policy

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