The "Soviet Empire": Colonial Reductionism and the Tsarist Comparison
"Building the Soviet Empire."
— Soviet Construction Vehicle voice line, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000)
With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western fiction lost the single antagonist superpower it had spent decades building stories around. To solve this logistical shortage of world-threatening armies, video games have frequently turned to a recurring narrative device: treating the socialist state as an unvarnished continuity of absolute monarchy. The Soviet Empire trope functions by fusing the visual iconography of communism with the structural ambitions of colonialism and Tsarist expansionism. By repackaging a state built on an explicitly anti-imperialist doctrine into a familiar, expansionist "empire," interactive media cleanly circumvents historical nuance, offering players an easily digestible, morally uncomplicated hostile superpower to dismantle.
The Semantic Fusion: From Premier to Tsar
In real-world history, no Soviet soldier, planner, or citizen would ever admit to being "imperial" in nature; the entire foundational architecture of the state was framed as a global struggle against Western imperialism, explicitly funding and supporting national liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet video games routinely collapse this ideological boundary for immediate dramatic effect.
The most striking manifestation occurs in Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000). When the player commands a Soviet Construction Vehicle (MCV), the unit directly announces its purpose: "Building the Soviet Empire." This line exposes the trope’s underlying linguistic sleight-of-hand—imposing a Western colonial vocabulary directly onto a faction whose real-world counterpart defined itself by the destruction of empires.
This synthesis is driven deeper through character lineage. In the same game, the leader of the USSR is Premier Alexander Romanov—narratively established as a distant relative of the very Tsar overthrown during the Russian Revolution. By returning a Romanov to the Kremlin under a red banner, the fiction asserts that Soviet power is merely Tsarist autocracy with a fresh coat of red paint.
A similar cross-pollination appears in Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996), where the heavy-hitting Russian wrestler Zangief stands before a character explicitly modeled on Mikhail Gorbachev, affectionately addressing the General Secretary as "my Tzar." Through these design choices, the real ideological rupture of 1917 is erased, replaced by an ongoing, monolithic fantasy of unbroken Russian imperialism.
The Historiographical Subversion: Projection and Paradox
The core narrative framework of the "Soviet Empire" trope introduces a profound historical paradox. Western European nations and their allies—the architects of literal, documentable global empires built on colonial exploitation, chattel slavery, and regional subjugation—frequently utilize media to project those exact behaviors onto the Soviet Union. While the USSR undoubtedly exercised heavy-handed geopolitical influence, implemented aggressive regional pacing, and orchestrated forced regime changes within its sphere of interest, these actions mirrored the cold-war strategies of its contemporary counterpart, the United States.
By classifying Soviet geopolitical reach as "imperialism" while minimizing its foundational support of anti-colonial wars—such as its extensive military, economic, and logistical backing of Vietnam—the trope effectively sanitizes the history of Western colonialism. It flattens a complex, anti-capitalist global mission into a generic, land-grabbing kingdom, teaching players that all foreign adversaries operate on the same expansionist impulses as historical European empires.
The Trope Ecosystem: Integration with the ROMANOV Catalogue
The "Soviet Empire" trope does not exist in isolation; it functions as an umbrella concept that coordinates several other recurring patterns documented within this Archive:
- The Soviet Remnant: This trope relies heavily on imperial framing. Secret bases, hidden rogue officers, and sleeper cells are rarely depicted as underground ideological cells; instead, they operate as lost imperial garrisons waiting to reclaim a collapsed throne.
- The Evil Russian General: Figures like General Krukov in Red Alert 3 or Imran Zakhaev in Modern Warfare are coded less like dedicated party bureaucrats and more like rogue warlords or imperial counts, pursuing territorial conquest for personal and national glory.
- The Russian Super Tank: The deliberate exaggeration of Soviet armor as oversized, overgunned, and lumbering mirrors the Western caricature of the Russian state as a massive, unthinking, expansionist land-beast.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Imperial Framing Mechanism | Ideological Mutation |
|---|---|---|
| Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996) | Zangief explicitly addresses the General Secretary of the USSR as "my Tzar." | Collapses communist leadership into traditional monarchic vocabulary. |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) | Introduction of Premier Alexander Romanov; MCV audio cues explicitly declare the construction of an "Empire." | Directly attributes imperialist vocabulary to Soviet military personnel. |
| Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (2001) | The creation of the "Russian Democratic Union" via the forced annexation of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. | Presents Soviet reintegration purely as an aggressive, colonial-style territorial conquest. |
| Alliance of Valiant Arms (2007) | The rise of the Neo Russian Federation and the sudden, aggressive expansion of a revived Warsaw Pact. | Frames voluntary or resource-driven post-Soviet integration as a hostile imperial expansion. |
Conclusion
The endurance of the "Soviet Empire" trope relies entirely on its ability to hide complex political histories behind familiar narrative structures. By stripping the Soviet Union of its foundational anti-imperialist philosophy and blending its aesthetic with Tsarist authoritarianism, video games transform a unique twentieth-century ideological experiment into a generic expansionist kingdom. The trope persists because it offers an invaluable narrative service: it allows Western media to restage the Cold War not as a systemic critique of global capitalism, but as a classic, morally clean defensive war against a predatory empire.
References
- Capcom. (1996). Street Fighter Alpha 2 [Video game]. Capcom.
- Lindenberger, T. (2012). The cold war as an artifact of popular culture: Alternative histories and the virtual superpower. Journal of Media and Communication Studies, 4(3), 45–58.
- Sarkar, S. (2019). Red stars and iron sights: Ideological erasure of anti-imperialist narratives in Western military shooters. Games and Culture, 14(6), 611–632.
- Westwood Studios. (2000). Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 [Video game]. Electronic Arts.