Kazakhstan and the USSR: discussions on empire

Abstract

The problem of understanding the nature of the Soviet power in general and relations “Center-Periphery” in particular is one of the key problems in the process of formation of historical consciousness of the Kazakh society at the present stage. There is a long history of discussion of this problem in the research literature. The discussion is reduced to two questions — whether the USSR was an empire and, if it was, whether it was a classical empire and Kazakhstan was a classical colony. The analysis of the results of the discussion has shown that the Western research tradition is dominated by the viewpoint of the imperial character of the Soviet Union. In modern Russian political and historical science, there are both concepts that completely deny the imperial character of the USSR, and those that consider the USSR as an “empire of a new type”, not based on unequal relations “Center-Periphery”. Kazakhstan’s research tradition is still in its infancy. However, it can be argued that the Bolshevik/Communist Party leadership pursued a classic imperial policy in Kazakhstan and other peripheral territories of the USSR, characterized by subordinating the interests of the regions to the interests of the imperial military-political elite, ignoring the formal sovereignty of the union and autonomous republics, pursuing an active colonization policy to the detriment of the interests of the local population, and cultural and linguistic assimilation.