Russian imperialism includes the policy and ideology of power exerted by Russia, as well as its antecedent states, over other countries and external territories. This includes the conquests of the Russian Empire, the imperial actions of the Soviet Union (as Russia is considered its main successor state), as well as those of the modern Russian Federation. Some postcolonial scholars have noted the lack of attention given to Russian and Soviet imperialism in the discipline.
Montesquieu wrote that "The Moscovites cannot leave the empire" and they "are all slaves". Historian Alexander Etkind describes a phenomenon of "reversed gradient", where people living near the center of the Russian Empire experienced greater oppression than the ones on the edges. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in turn argued that Poland was not free because of Russian imperialism. In 1836, Nikolai Gogol said that Saint Petersburg was "something similar to a European colony in America", remarking that there were as many foreigners as people of the native ethnicity. According to Aleksey Khomyakov, the Russian elite was "a colony of eclectic Europeans, thrown into a country of savages" with a "colonial relationship" between the two. A similar colonial aspect was identified by Konstantin Kavelin.
Russian imperialism has been argued to be different from other European colonial empires due to its empire being overland rather than overseas, which meant that rebellions could be more easily put down, with some lands being reconquered soon after they were lost. The terrestrial basis of the empire has also been seen as a factor which made it more divided than sea-based ones due to the difficulties of communication and transport over land at the time.
Russian imperialism has been linked to the labour-intensive and low productivity economic system based on serfdom and despotic rule, which required constant increase in the amount of land under cultivation to legitimise the rule and provide satisfaction to the subjects. The political system in turn depended on land as a resource to reward officeholder.
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The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union (USSR), which resulted in the end of the existence of the country and of its federal government as a sovereign state, which in turn resulted in its 15 constituent republics gaining full independence on 26 December 1991. It brought an end to General Secretary (also President) Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide.
Russian irredentism (Русский ирредентизм), sometimes expressed by the term Greater Russia (Великая Россия), refers to territorial claims made on behalf of the Russian Federation to parts of the former Russian Empire and/or the former Soviet Union. It seeks to politically incorporate Russians who are living in territories that fall outside of Russia's modern borders. Since it began in 2014, the Russo-Ukrainian War has been described as a culmination of Russia's irredentist policies towards Ukraine.
Prison of peoples or prison of nations (тюрьма народов) is a phrase first used by Vladimir Lenin in 1914. He applied it to Russia, describing the national policy of that time. The idea of calling Russia a prison is based on Marquis de Custine's book La Russie en 1839. Engels had used the phrase. It is also associated with Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky's criticism of "Russia—prison of the peoples" and "Russia—international gendarmerie". The main meaning of the phrase was the general idea of the Russian Empire as a backward authoritarian state.
This article revolves around the concept of reverse colonialism and uses the fascinating example of Pripyat as a case study. Pripyat was deeply affected by the devastating Chornobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Following the disaster, the disappearance o ...