The Soviet Empire: Colonial Reductionism and the Tsarist Comparison
"Building the Soviet Empire."
— Soviet Construction Vehicle voice line, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000)
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, Western fiction lost the one antagonist superpower it had spent two generations building its stories around. The shortage was as much narrative as geopolitical: writers were suddenly without an obvious army large enough to threaten the world. The most economical solution was also the most historically dishonest one—to treat the socialist state as an unbroken continuation of absolute monarchy, a red-painted Tsardom that had merely swapped one crown for another. The Soviet Empire trope operates by welding the visual iconography of communism onto the structural ambitions of colonialism and Tsarist expansionism. By recasting a state founded on an explicitly anti-imperialist doctrine as a familiar, land-hungry "empire," interactive media sidesteps historical nuance entirely, handing the player a morally uncomplicated hostile superpower to dismantle.
What makes the trope worth documenting is not merely that it distorts, but that it inverts. The specific accusation—that Russia and the Soviet Union were empires in the European colonial mold—is levelled most loudly by the cultural descendants of the powers that actually built overseas colonial empires on chattel slavery, racial hierarchy, and extraction. The trope, in other words, is a projection. And as this entry will argue, it is a projection that even the fiction cannot make internally consistent, because the moment a Soviet unit is scripted to call its own project an "empire," the writing has produced a sentence no Soviet soldier, planner, or citizen would ever have uttered.
The Semantic Fusion: From Premier to Tsar
In the historical record, the Soviet state defined itself against empire. Its founding grammar was one of global struggle against Western imperialism; it funded, armed, and trained national-liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America precisely on the premise that empires were the enemy. Video games routinely collapse this ideological boundary for immediate dramatic effect, and they do it through vocabulary before they do it through plot.
The clearest specimen is Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000). Order a Soviet Construction Vehicle to deploy and the unit announces its own purpose: "Building the Soviet Empire." The line is a linguistic sleight-of-hand in miniature—a Western colonial noun placed in the mouth of a faction whose real-world counterpart defined itself by the dismantling of empires. It is a self-description that could only have been written by someone outside the ideology looking in.
The same game drives the fusion deeper through bloodline. Its leader of the USSR is Premier Alexander Romanov—written explicitly as a distant relative of Nicholas II, the last Tsar, and installed as the successor to Joseph Stalin. By seating a Romanov in the Kremlin beneath a red banner, the fiction makes its thesis literal: Soviet power is Tsarist autocracy wearing a fresh coat of red. The 1917 rupture is not merely downplayed; it is written out of existence, the House of Romanov quietly restored as though the Revolution had been an interlude rather than an overthrow.
This wardrobe of restored monarchy recurs across the medium. In Red Alert 3, the Soviet Conscripts are dressed in long red coats deliberately evocative of the Muscovite Streltsy, the musketeer corps that predated Peter the Great's reforms—a sixteenth-century silhouette draped over a twentieth-century foot soldier. Warhammer 40,000 models its Vostroyan Firstborn regiments directly on Tsarist armies, complete with sabres, bling, and towering fur hats. And in Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996), the Russian wrestler Zangief stands before a character openly modelled on Mikhail Gorbachev and addresses the General Secretary of the USSR as "my Tzar." In each case the visual or verbal cue performs the same operation: it reaches past the Soviet century to retrieve an older, safer, more storybook Russia—the Russia of tsars and boyars—and pastes its imagery over the socialist state, so that the ideological content of 1917 never has to be reckoned with at all.
The Impossible Confession: Why the "Soviet Empire" Cannot Speak Its Own Name
The Red Alert 2 construction line is the trope's purest artifact, and also its most revealing error, because it puts the accusation in the defendant's own mouth. No Soviet actor—no engineer laying foundations, no officer, no Party functionary—would ever have described the work of the state as "building the Soviet Empire." The word would have been not merely off-brand but ideologically incoherent. In Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, imperialism was a technical term with a precise and damning meaning: it named the highest and final stage of capitalism, the predatory export of monopoly capital by the very Western powers the USSR positioned itself against. To call oneself an empire was, within that grammar, to confess to being the enemy.
The Soviet self-conception was revolutionary, not imperial. The state understood its expansion—accurately or not—as the extension of a liberating world revolution, the building of socialism in a widening family of republics, the vanguard of the colonized against the colonizers. One may contest whether that self-image matched the reality of Soviet conduct in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or elsewhere; that is a legitimate debate. But the self-image itself is a matter of record, and it is the opposite of imperial. The fiction that scripts a Soviet unit boasting of empire-building has not exaggerated the Soviet worldview—it has substituted a Western one. It has ventriloquised the accusation, then congratulated the accused for agreeing to it.
This is why the trope so often needs the Tsar. A revolutionary state cannot plausibly narrate its own imperialism, so the writing reaches for Romanov, for the Streltsy coat, for the "my Tzar"—for a pre-revolutionary Russia that can be an empire without contradiction. The monarchic overlay is not decoration. It is the load-bearing device that makes the impossible confession sayable.
The Post-Soviet Reunion: Projecting the Empire Onto the New Russia
The same machinery that turns the USSR into a Tsardom is applied, almost unchanged, to the Russian Federation. Here the device is what fandom calls the Post-Soviet Reunion: the modern Russia gathers some or all of the former Soviet republics back into an alliance or superstate, which is then read, near-automatically, as a resurrected empire on the march. The trope is the present-tense edition of the same accusation—modern Russia charged with the imperial designs that fiction had already retroactively assigned to the USSR.
The catalogue is extensive and remarkably uniform in its instincts. In the original Modern Warfare trilogy, the Ultranationalists seek to restore Soviet glory and end the last game with a full-scale Russian invasion of Europe. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (2001) has an Ultranationalist coup overthrow Vladimir Putin for the crime of siding with the West, then forcibly annex Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan into a "Russian Democratic Union" before turning to conquer the rest. EndWar gives a cash-flush Russia that de facto annexes the excluded states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans up to the Adriatic. Alliance of Valiant Arms rebrands Russia as the Neo-Russian Federation, rebuilding the USSR by force. Girls' Frontline engineers a Neo-Soviet Union by 2032; the Front Mission series folds the Commonwealth of Independent States into the villainous Republic of Zaftra. In every case the default assumption is coercive: reunion means annexation, and annexation means empire.
It is worth noting, precisely because it exposes the default as a choice, that the medium is fully capable of imagining the reunion otherwise. Command & Conquer: Generals — Rise of the Reds depicts a liberalised, energy-rich Russia that shares its prosperity with Eastern European and Balkan states which then align with it voluntarily, after being snubbed by a Brussels-style continental bloc—integration by attraction, not conquest. Civilization: Beyond Earth goes further still with its Slavic Federation: a reconstituted Russia-led polity defined by inclusivity, broad autonomy for its non-Slavic members, and a reputation built on "heroic infrastructure" and space exploration rather than military power—famous, pointedly, for engineering rather than armies. These outliers prove the point. When a designer wants a benign or even admirable reunion, the tools are all there. The overwhelming preference for the hostile version is not a constraint imposed by the material; it is an editorial decision made again and again.
The Historiographical Subversion: The Colonial Double Standard
Beneath the trope lies a genuine historical paradox. The nations most responsible for authorship of the "Soviet Empire" image—Western European states and their allies—are the architects of the literal, documented, overseas colonial empires of the modern era: empires built on the transatlantic slave trade, on chattel bondage organised by race, on the extraction of colonies held as legally subordinate possessions an ocean away from the metropole. The trope takes this exact model—maritime, racial, extractive—and projects it onto a state that practised nothing of the kind.
The distinction is not evasive; it is structural, and it matters. Russian and later Soviet expansion was continental: the incorporation of contiguous territory into a single state rather than the seizure of overseas colonies to be drained and discarded. Neither Imperial Russia nor the USSR ran a transatlantic slave trade, built its wealth on plantation slavery, or administered a racially stratified colonial empire on the British, French, Belgian, Spanish, or Portuguese pattern. This is what is meant by the claim that Russia never practised colonialism as Europe did: not that its expansion was gentle or free of coercion—serfdom and conquest are part of the record—but that the specific institution the trope invokes, the plantation-and-slave-ship colonialism of the Atlantic world, was simply not Russia's history to answer for.
With the Soviet Union the inversion sharpens into irony. Far from suppressing the national identities of its constituent peoples, the early USSR institutionalised them. Through the policy of korenizatsiya ("indigenisation"), it built national republics, standardised and promoted local languages, printed and schooled in dozens of tongues, and cultivated native administrative and cultural elites—an apparatus that the historian Terry Martin has called, without exaggeration and with deliberate irony, an "affirmative action empire." Whatever else this was, it was the structural opposite of colonial rule, which everywhere sought to erase the colonised, not to constitutionalise their nationhood. Abroad, the same state poured military, economic, and logistical support into the anti-colonial wars of the twentieth century—Vietnam being only the most conspicuous case—precisely in order to break the empires the trope now accuses it of imitating.
By filing Soviet geopolitical reach under "imperialism" while erasing this record, the trope performs a quiet act of laundering. It flattens an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial project into a generic land-grabbing kingdom, and in doing so it sanitises the history of the actual colonial powers, teaching the player that every adversary is driven by the same expansionist impulse that once drove Europe—so that no one need ask which empires actually crossed the oceans, and why.
The Trope Ecosystem: Integration with the ROMANOV Catalogue
The "Soviet Empire" trope does not stand alone; it is an umbrella that coordinates several other recurring patterns documented within this Archive:
- The Soviet Remnant: relies heavily on imperial framing. Secret bases, rogue officers, and sleeper cells are rarely written as underground ideological cells; they are staged as lost imperial garrisons waiting to reclaim a fallen throne.
- The Evil Russian General: figures such as General Krukov in Red Alert 3 or Imran Zakhaev in Modern Warfare are coded less as Party bureaucrats than as rogue warlords or imperial counts, pursuing territory for personal and national glory.
- The Russian Super Tank: the exaggeration of Soviet armour as oversized, over-gunned, and lumbering mirrors the caricature of the Russian state itself as a vast, unthinking, expansionist land-beast.
- The Post-Soviet Reunion: the modern-Russia extension of the trope, in which the Federation reconstitutes the bloc and is read as a restored empire almost by reflex (see above).
Notable Appearances
| Title | Imperial Framing Mechanism | Ideological Mutation |
|---|---|---|
| Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996) | Zangief addresses the General Secretary of the USSR as "my Tzar." | Collapses communist leadership into monarchic vocabulary. |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) | Premier Alexander Romanov, written as a Romanov and Stalin's heir; MCV audio declares the building of an "Empire." | Fuses Tsar and Premier; attributes imperialist self-description to Soviet personnel. |
| Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (2001) | An Ultranationalist coup forms the "Russian Democratic Union" by forcibly annexing Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. | Presents post-Soviet integration purely as colonial-style conquest. |
| Alliance of Valiant Arms (2007) | The Neo-Russian Federation revives the USSR and a Warsaw Pact by force. | Frames resource-driven reunion as hostile imperial expansion. |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008) | Soviet Conscripts wear long coats modelled on the Muscovite Streltsy. | Overlays a pre-Petrine monarchic silhouette onto the Soviet soldier. |
| Warhammer 40,000 | Vostroyan Firstborn regiments built on Tsarist armies—sabres, fur hats, "bling of war." | Transplants Imperial Russian aesthetics wholesale into a "Russian" faction. |
| Modern Warfare trilogy (2007–2011) | Ultranationalists restore Soviet glory, culminating in a Russian invasion of Europe. | Reads restoration of the USSR as the launch of a war of conquest. |
Conclusion
The endurance of the "Soviet Empire" trope depends entirely on its ability to hide a complicated political history behind a familiar narrative shape. By stripping the Soviet Union of its founding anti-imperialist philosophy and fusing its aesthetic with Tsarist autocracy, video games convert a singular twentieth-century experiment into a stock expansionist kingdom—and then hand the same template forward to the Russian Federation, so that every reunion of the post-Soviet space reads as a resurrected empire on the march. The trope survives because it performs an invaluable service: it lets Western media restage the Cold War not as a systemic contest over the future of global capitalism, but as a clean defensive war against a predatory empire—and, in the same motion, quietly relocates the history of real colonialism away from the powers that practised it. Its deepest tell is the line it cannot honestly write: for a state that understood itself as the gravedigger of empires would never have knelt at its own foundations and called the work "building the Soviet Empire."
References
- Capcom. (1996). Street Fighter Alpha 2 [Video game]. Capcom.
- Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press.
- 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.
- Martin, T. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press.
- 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.
- Ubisoft / Red Storm Entertainment. (2001). Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon [Video game]. Ubisoft.
- Westwood Studios. (2000). Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 [Video game]. Electronic Arts.
- EA Los Angeles. (2008). Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 [Video game]. Electronic Arts.