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Soviet Empire was a term used to critically describe the actions and nature of the Soviet Union. It gained popularity after US President Ronald Reagan famously denounced the USSR as an " evil empire" in a 1982 speech to the United Kingdom House of Commons.1 Motivation of the term
Though it was not ruled by an Emperor and never formally considered itself to be an Empire (indeed, it officially loathed the very notion of "empire"), the Soviet Union exhibited certain imperialistic tendencies common to historic empires:
- Territorial expansion through invasion or subversion (e.g.: Poland, Baltic States, Finland, Afghanistan).
- Strong central government controlling the governments of all subsidiary and satellite territories.
- Interference (including through the use of military force) in the internal politics of its allies (see histories of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland).
For these reasons and others, the Soviet Union is sometimes considered by certain historians to be one of the main empires of history, equal to such notables as the British EmpireThe British Empire in the early decades of the 20th century, held sway over a population of 400 500 million people (roughly a quarter of the world's population), and covered nearly 30 million square kilometres, (roughly two-fifths of the world's land area and the Roman Empire60 and 400 with major cities. During this time only Dacia and Mesopotamia were added to the Empire but were lost before 300. The Roman Empire is the term conventionally used to describe the Roman state in the centuries following its reorganization under t, and borrowing some of the foreign policy of the Tsarist Russian Empire that it replaced.
2 The Soviet sphere of influence
At the height of its existence, the "Soviet Empire" consisted of the following nations:
2.1 Member states of the Soviet Union
- ArmeniaArmenia ( Armenian: ''Hayastan is a landlocked country in southern Transcaucasia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan in the east and Iran and the Naxcivan exclave of Azerbaijan in th
- AzerbaijanThe Republic of Azerbaijan ( Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan or #x4D9;јҹ is a country in the Caucasus adjacent to the Caspian Sea that shares borders with Russia in the north, Georgia, Armenia, in the west and Iran in the south. The Nakhchivan Au
- BelarusThe Republic of Belarus ( Belarusian: #x301 Russian: #x301 (former: #x301 ) is a landlocked nation of Eastern Europe with the capital Minsk. Name Main article: White Russia The spellings Belorussia and Byelorussia are transliterations of the name of the c
- EstoniaThe Republic of Estonia is a country in Northern Europe, bordering the Baltic Sea to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the north, and sharing a land border with its fellow Baltic state Latvia to the south and with Russia to the east. Eesti Vabariik ( In
- Georgia
- Kazakhstan
- Kyrgyzstan
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Moldova
- Russian Federation (which in its turn consisted of several autonomous republics)
- Tajikistan
- Turkmenistan
- Ukraine
- Uzbekistan
