gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) (11/22/85)
In article <359@ubvax.UUCP> Tony Wuersch correctly notes that Russia does not dominate its 'subject peoples' in a cultural sense. He then goes on to ask: > Why then do some continue to maintain that Russians have an empire > over the other Soviet republics? I don't get it. 'Empire' is a loose, heavily loaded term with many connotations besides 'cultural dominance'. Its use (especially in contexts where the 'U.S. empire' and the 'Soviet empire' are mentioned in the same breath) is bound to lead to a lot of sterile and pointless shouting. I think the Soviet system is undoubtedly an empire but it is not operated for the benefit of Russian nationalism: in fact, Russians are its principal victims. To be more precise: the USSR can be thought of as a system based primarily on internal colonization and secondarily on external conquest. In this, it is the continuation of an unbroken pattern of Russian history and is radically different from, say, the French or Portuguese colonial empires. 'Internal colonization' may be defined as colonialism without the ethnic- cultural component: it refers to a relationship between governors and the governed, a form of organized plunder. It means the total disposition by the administration of the results of society's economic activity. It means supreme control over the entire national product by an elite that does not recognize any economic limitations on its power: the power to administer resources, people and ideas. The long Russian tradition of internal colonization may be illustrated by the approach Ivan IV has taken to the problem of an empty royal treasury: he simply sacked one of his own prosperous merchant cities (Novgorod, in 1570), robbing its treasures, burning it down and killing the occupants. (This has not happened in civil war conditions; the attack was unprovoked, without even a manufactured pretext.) Contrast this with the way medieval Western monarchs (a mean, tyrannical bunch on the whole) handled the same problem: to raise some money, they sold some judicial appointments which led to the creation of autonomous corporations of hereditary judges, whose assemblies were called 'parliaments': the seeds of our own institutions of representative democracy. The point is that within the Western pattern of development, the basic step of creating little islands of autonomy not totally dependent on the whim of the ruler is long lost in our prehistory: it is taken for granted. This step is missing from Russian history. ----- Gabor Fencsik {ihnp4,dual,hplabs,intelca}!qantel!gabor