this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
738 points (93.3% liked)
Memes
51519 readers
1519 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, this is wrong.
The Soviet economic system was federated and planned. The political control in Moscow wasn't absolute by any stretch.
The various Soviet Republics were not colonies, not by any stretch. Resources and goods were shipped around the whole system as needed, not just imported into Moscow.
There was no forcible cultural assimilation. There was a huge effort to cultivate a soviet identity, but there wasn't an attempt to erase cultural identity. The famine in the 1930s was caused by natural causes, not "demographic engineering," grain was re-allocated to Ukraine once it was known that there were famine conditions. There was forcible re-allocation of various ethnic groups like Koreans, which did exist, but this isn't the same claim you made either in scope or character.
So no. The USSR was not imperialist, not by the correct concept of imperialism as a form of international extraction, nor the vague "Soviet Bad" thing you tried to make it out to be.