Soviet empire
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Soviet Empire expresses a political term used in Sovietology (also called "Kremlinology") to describe the actions and power before 1989 of the Soviet Union, with emphasis on its dominant role in other countries.
In the wider sense, the term refers to the country's foreign policy during the Cold War which has been argued as being imperialist: the nations which were part of the Soviet Empire were nominally independent countries with separate governments that set their own policies, but those policies had to remain within certain limits decided by the Soviet Union and enforced by threat of intervention by the Soviet forces, and then the Warsaw Pact. Major military interventions took place in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980 and Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Countries in the Eastern Bloc were considered satellite states.
See also
- American imperialism
- Anti-Russian sentiment
- Captive Nations
- Cominform
- Communist state
- Evil Empire speech
- Foreign relations of the Soviet Union
- Imperialism
- Index of Soviet Union-related articles
- Russian imperialism
- Sino-Soviet split
- Social imperialism
- Soviet Union–United States relations