The Lost (Neo?) Colonies of Russia: An Examination of Core Periphery Dynamics in the Former USSR

This study examines the spatial and political economic dynamics in a real-existing socialist space: the USSR. Particularly, core-periphery dynamics and dependency. Employing critical Neo-Marxian lenses designed to analyze global capitalism through the political economy of dependency, this piece examines the main experiment for a socialist utopia of the 20th century. Utilizing the theoretical insights of Latin American development economists of the 70s (dependencistas), Wallerstein's world-systems perspective and economic imperialism, I examine the core-periphery dynamics of the former Soviet Union—European Russia as the center and Central Asian republics as the periphery. Drawing from the case of cotton extraction in Uzbekistan and literature related to colonial perceptions and orientalist perspectives remnant from tsarist Russia, this research attempts to shed light on the existence of core-periphery dynamics and dependency akin to that of global capitalist and neocolonial extraction—specifically that of the United States as the center and Latin America as the periphery.