Was the U.S.S.R imperialist power ?
In its binary and manihean approach, the mainstream in the West has to use the term expansionism instead of imperialism to hide the really long and bloody European and American imperialism while the word imperialism is automatically and unconsciously reserved to the U.S.S.R. The question that deserves to put is : was really the U.S.S.R imperialist power ? To be put it otherwise, through the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pacts, and the division of Europe at the end of the Second World War, could the Soviet Union be qualified as imperialist and conquering nation ?
According to the 1939 Nazi-soviet pacts, during the truce period between Germany and the U.S.S.R.,the Soviet union seized areas such as Latvia, Estonia, half of Poland and Bessarabia. Why precisely these areas and not other ones ? the answer is very easy when we think in terms of geopolitics. All tehse areas were seized by the Soviet Union as defense buffer zones and valuable strategic positions against Germany; the Baltic states region is the most vital and at a planning conference on « Barbarossa » on February 3, 1941, Hitler declared that « the main aim is to gain possession of the Baltic States and Leningrad » . On can remember also before World War I Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been provinces of Russia. Then at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Germany had forcibly annexed them. During the subsequent years of western intervention the Allies encouraged and sponsored the White forces and finally they established the three countries as part of the cordon sanitaire designed to contain the Soviet Union.
