Was the Soviet Union an Empire?

[Ahovking]

needed a poll

 

[rollo1066]

In a broad sense of that the term yes. It had states which were virtual vassels in eastern Europe, a large military to maintain control of its teritory and that of it's allies/vassels. In the strict sense of being ruled by an Emperior not quite although Stalin was close.

 

[Traitorfish]

In the strict sense of being ruled by an Emperior not quite although Stalin was close.

But if we're talking about the technical sense, then the authority of the head of state is quite irrelevant; the modern Japanese Emperor is the powerless figurehead of a constitutional monarchy, but that does not imply that he is anything other than an Emperor, any more than the personal authority of any autocrat implies association with any monarchical rank. Stalin was no more a Tsar than, for example, Cromwell was a King.

 

[amadeus]

http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

A bit old, but nevertheless...

You are sadly mistaken if you believe India was anything but socialistic from 1947 to around 1991; India for those four decades had a heavily interventionist economy with significant state planning.

Chalmers Johnson, who you might better know for a series of books titled Blowback, in his 1982 book MITI and the Japanese Miracle expanded on an idea by Ralf Dahrendorf, separating countries into three different groups: market-rational economies, where the market was responsible for producing economic results; plan-rational economies where the government was responsible for producing economic results to achieve a certain political goal; and plan-ideological economies, where the goal (simply put) was in and of it self to just have a planned economy. The Soviet Union, pre-Deng China, and pre-1991 India would all fit into that latter category.