USSR’S POLICY IN THE DECOLONISED EAST IN THE 1960s AND 1980s: NEOCOLONIALISM, THE THEORY OF “SOCIALIST ORIENTATION” OR POSTCOLONIAL APPROACH?

Abstract

The article analyses the historiographical concepts used to interpret the USSR's policy towards the decolonized states of Asia and Africa and identifies the prospects for studying it using the theoretical and methodological principles of the postcolonial approach. It is found that the theories of neocolonialism and “socialist orientation”, which prevailed in Western and Soviet social science during the Cold War, examined the experience of imperial-colonial interaction between the “first” and “third” worlds. Since the classical colonial theory inextricably linked the concepts of “capitalism” and “colonialism”, it did not apply to the Soviet Union and its relations with dependent states and regions. The postcolonial approach, initiated by the classic works of E. Said, also focused, at least in its initial cultural and literary version, on the study of the peculiarities and consequences of colonial rule in different regions of the world, especially in the British and French empires. The collapse of the USSR and the “world socialist system” contributed to the revival of imperial studies and the gradual transfer of postcolonial discourse to the territories of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In the 1990’s, Ukraine experienced a “postcolonial boom”, when Ukrainian literary scholars – both in the diaspora and later in the national academic community – studied various aspects of the cultural consequences of Russian-Soviet domination in Ukraine. At the beginning of the XXI century, thanks to the works of D. Moore, E. Thompson, and others, the postcolonial approach finally spread to the study of the history of the Russian and Soviet empires, as well as the USSR’s satellites in Central and Southeastern Europe. The analysis of the fundamental principles of the Soviet Union’s policy in Asia and Africa, which were defined as “states of socialist orientation” (mechanisms of political domination and control over domestic and foreign policy, imposition of economic, cultural and ideological dependence, use of sovereign states to satisfy its own geopolitical interests, etc. This, in turn, opens up significant prospects for specific historical research into this component of the modern history of Asia and Africa as well as the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.