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- Title
A Soviet West: nationhood, regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands.
- Authors
Risch, William
- Abstract
This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.
- Subjects
WESTERN Soviet Union; BALTIC States; WESTERN Ukraine; LVIV (Ukraine); SOVIET Union; NATIONALISM; CULTURE; SOCIALISM; WESTERN countries; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY; HISTORY of socialism
- Publication
Nationalities Papers, 2015, Vol 43, Issue 1, p63
- ISSN
0090-5992
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1080/00905992.2014.956072