If you read a bunch of esoteric books about the Cold War twenty years after it ended for no reason, like I do, you’ll find a bunch of hand-wringing from US policymakers about “Soviet imperialism”, a notion which spreads by the 1970s into the Non-Aligned Movement (especially after the US-China rapprochement). When I first started digging into this, I thought of Fidel Castro’s very apt point during a 1973 speech in Algeria:
How can the Soviet Union be labeled imperialist? Where are its monopoly corporations? Where is its participation in the multinational companies? What factories, what mines, what oil fields does it own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa, or Latin America by Soviet capital?
I also thought about Lenin’s nationalities policy, and how the early USSR helped establish e.g. Mongolia as an independent, sovereign nation.
The key to “resolving” this, I think, came from the description of colonialism in Turkestan under the Russian tsar, in [@rywkin_moscow_1982].