Abstract
The words ‘empire’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘sovietisation’ often appear together in academic and non-academic narratives of the Communist experience, yet very few attempts have been made to connect these concepts on a more abstract, theoretical level.1 While the notion of ‘empire’ enjoys a pivotal status in recent historiography of the Russian and Soviet past, scholarly works advocating the idea that the Soviet Union was a novel and distinct form of Empire usually do not incorporate ‘sovietisation’ into their (meta-)conceptual framework.2 In a similar way, theories of sovietisation — with a few notable exceptions — only make passing references to the imperial nature of Soviet power.3 This failing is partly due to both the strong negative connotations and the semantic complexity of the terms ‘empire’ and ‘sovietisation’. Other contributing factors include differences in their use in the vernacular and in academic contexts, the differences between their use today and in the past, and the uneven amount of attention they received from scholars. This brief chapter cannot provide a complex theoretical assessment of these terms either. It will, however, argue for the need of such a study, and will highlight one possible avenue of research that would make a combined analysis of the two notions feasible.
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Apor, B. (2014). Sovietisation, Imperial Rule and the Stalinist Leader Cult in Central and Eastern Europe. In: Healy, R., Lago, E.D. (eds) The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450753_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450753_14
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