As a fact of history and problem of contemporary geopolitics, Russia’s nature as an imperial power is incontrovertible. After World War I, the Russian Empire avoided the permanent dismemberment that befell other multiethnic land empires, such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The Soviet Union not only reconquered most of the non-Russian lands that had declared independence from Moscow in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—but even expanded the empire in the course of World War II, annexing Moldova, the western part of Ukraine, and other lands. Nor did the Soviet Union participate in the decolonization era. Even as the French and British empires were being dissolved, the Soviet Union was expanding its colonial reach, tightening its grip deep into Eastern and Central Europe with bloody crackdowns and military actions.
Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics in 1991,