section_path: Imperialism by country/Russia
section_name: Russia
paragraph_text: Russia
  
  By the 18th century, the Russian Empire extended its control to the Pacific, peacefully forming a common border with the Qing Empire and Empire of Japan. This took place in a large number of military invasions of the lands east, west, and south of it. The Polish–Russian War of 1792 took place after Polish nobility from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth wrote the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The war resulted in eastern Poland being conquered by Imperial Russia as a colony until 1918. The southern campaigns involved a series of Russo-Persian Wars, which began with the Persian Expedition of 1796, resulting in the acquisition of Georgia as a protectorate. Between 1800 and 1864, Imperial armies invaded south in the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, the Murid War, and the Russo-Circassian War. This last conflict led to the ethnic cleansing of Circassians from their lands. The Russian conquest of Siberia over the Khanate of Sibir took place in the 16th and 17th centuries, and resulted in the slaughter of various indigenous tribes by Russians, including the Daur, the Koryaks, the Itelmens, Mansi people and the Chukchi. The Russian colonization of Central and Eastern Europe and Siberia and treatment of the resident indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization of the Americas, with similar negative impacts on the indigenous Siberians as upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The extermination of indigenous Siberian tribes was so complete that a relatively small population of only 180,000 are said to exist today. The Russian Empire exploited and suppressed Cossacks hosts during this period, before turning them into the special military estate Sosloviye in the late 18th century. Cossacks were then used in Imperial Russian campaigns against other tribes.
  
  The acquisition of Ukraine by Russia commenced in 1654 with the Pereiaslav Agreement. Georgia's accession to Russia in 1783 was marked by the Treaty of Georgievsk.
  
  Bolshevik leaders had effectively reestablished a polity with roughly the same extent as that empire by 1921, however with an internationalist ideology: Lenin in particular asserted the right to limited self-determination for national minorities within the new territory. Beginning in 1923, the policy of " Indigenization " was intended to support non-Russians develop their national cultures within a socialist framework. Never formally revoked, it stopped being implemented after 1932. After World War II, the Soviet Union installed socialist regimes modeled on those it had installed in 1919–20 in the old Russian Empire, in areas its forces occupied in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union and later the People's Republic of China supported revolutionary and communist movements in foreign nations and colonies to advance their own interests, but were not always successful. The USSR provided great assistance to Kuomintang in 1926–1928 in the formation of a unified Chinese government (see Northern Expedition). Although then relations with the USSR deteriorated, but the USSR was the only world power that provided military assistance to China against Japanese aggression in 1937–1941 (see Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact). The victory of the Chinese Communists in the civil war of 1946–1949 relied on the great help of the USSR (see Chinese Civil War).
  
  Trotsky, and others, believed that the revolution could only succeed in Russia as part of a world revolution. Lenin wrote extensively on the matter and famously declared that Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. However, after Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin established ' socialism in one country ' for the Soviet Union, creating the model for subsequent inward looking Stalinist states and purging the early Internationalist elements. The internationalist tendencies of the early revolution would be abandoned until they returned in the framework of a client state in competition with the Americans during the Cold War. In the post-Stalin period in the late 1950s, the new political leader Nikita Khrushchev put pressure on the Soviet-American relations by starting a new wave of anti-imperialist propaganda. In his speech on the UN conference in 1960, he announced the continuation of the war on imperialism, stating that soon the people of different countries will come together and overthrow their imperialist leaders. Although the Soviet Union declared itself anti-imperialist, critics argue that it exhibited traits common to historic empires. Some scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and nation-states. Some also argued that the USSR practiced colonialism as did other imperial powers and was carrying on the old Russian tradition of expansion and control. Mao Zedong once argued that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a socialist façade. Moreover, the ideas of imperialism were widely spread in action on the higher levels of government. Josip Broz Tito and Milovan Djilas have referred to the Stalinist USSR 's foreign policies, such as the occupation and economic exploitations of Eastern Europe and its aggressive and hostile policy towards Yugoslavia as Soviet imperialism. Some Marxists within the Russian Empire and later the USSR, like Sultan Galiev and Vasyl Shakhrai, considered the Soviet regime a renewed version of the Russian imperialism and colonialism. The crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Soviet–Afghan War have been cited as examples. Contemporary Russian imperialism is seen by some in Russian-occupied territories.