Red Imperialism, Corporate Rules: The Untold Story of Soviet Colonialism
When I moved to Ireland, it was the first time I spent enough time in a post-colonial country to really understand the ripple effects of what that means. Education is a bit different in every country. We learn history based on where we grew up, and as they say, the winners write the history.The longer I lived here and looked at how colonialism worked—especially land theft and how it completely destroys the original social structures of a place—the more I started noticing things about my own background. I'm from a post-communist country, and even though the regime changed and we got a new education system after the revolution, you can still see how much ideological control and brainwashing was baked into how history was taught.
One of the big things we were always supposed to accept (especially during the time of Eastern bloc) was that we had to be thankful to Russia because they were supposedly our "liberators." Once I started connecting the dots, I couldn't unsee how similar Soviet rule was to traditional colonialism. We really need to start calling it what it is: colonialism.
Take collectivisation, for example—taking all the land into state ownership. It completely destroyed the social fabric that had been built over thousands of years. It changed agriculture into something much more brutal and extractive, and the Soviets even used hunger and famines, like the Holodomor, against the population. I really believe that post-communist countries in the Eastern Bloc need to look deeper into their own history and reinterpret it through this reality.
When forced collectivisation swept through the USSR and across the Eastern Bloc after World War II, it wasn't just a political shift—it was state-mandated land theft. Small farmers and rural communities who held a deep, generational relationship with the soil were stripped of everything. Now, of course, the pre-communist feudal system wasn't an ideal or fair society either. But the Soviet communist promise of equality turned out to be the biggest lie ever told to the people. When you cut a population off from their land, you instantly wipe out their horizontal social structures—the natural neighbourly cooperation, local governance, seasonal rhythms, and folklore that kept communities whole. That organic way of living was replaced by vertical, bureaucratic command handed down from a distant center in Moscow. And somewhere in all of this, we lost our fundamental knowledge of the land itself.
We have to remember what we are as a species. As Homo sapiens, every cell in our bodies, our digestive systems, and our microbiomes are the evolutionary result of the Earth, the soil, and what grows from it. We are nature. The further we are disconnected from the Earth, the further we are disconnected from our own human nature—and the easier we are to manipulate and control.
When you step back, you realise that the way the Soviets treated land and people created a blueprint for modern corporate capitalism. Under the Soviet regime, the state owned everything, extracted resources without care for the soil, and turned every citizen into a replaceable worker for a "grand project" run by a handful of elites at the top. Look at big corporations today—the dynamic is virtually identical. Whether control is handed down from a central state committee in Moscow or dictated by the profit margins of a few billionaire corporate boards, the atmosphere is the same: regular people own nothing, have no say over the land, and are treated merely as labor units. Both systems operate on total extraction—extracting from the Earth until it's depleted, and extracting from human beings until they are severed from their sovereignty.
If you want to understand how this mechanism works on a deep level, I highly recommend reading Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott. He breaks down exactly how both high-modernist state communism and mega-capitalism attempt to flatten landscapes, ignore local knowledge, and control human populations from above, always resulting in ecological and social disaster.
When economists defend "capitalism," they usually talk about an idealised textbook model: small, independent local businesses competing freely, prices set by supply and demand, and anyone having a fair shot to build something. But the system we are actually in today—late-stage monopoly capitalism or corporate feudalism—is almost the exact opposite of that free market. Just as Soviet citizens were given the "illusion of choice" in a one-party election where only one name was on the ballot, modern consumers are often given the illusion of a free market when choosing between dozens of supermarket brands that are all secretly owned by the exact same parent corporation. And when ordinary working people are priced out of owning the ground beneath their feet and forced to rent forever from corporate landlords, that is simply modern land theft. It strips away generational stability and forces people into perpetual precarity. Monopoly capitalism and Soviet state control are two sides of the same coin—both obsessed with centralisation, extraction, and control from the top. If we look across history, two distinct historical paths brought us to this moment:
1. The Western Path: Capital and power stayed largely in dynastic hands, morphing smoothly over centuries from feudal land ownership to industrial factory monopolies, and finally into global tech hubs and private equity funds.
2. The Eastern Path: Communism violently wiped out old-money wealth, but instead of creating real equality, it created a state-managerial class. After 1989, this party elite simply converted state ownership into corporate oligarchy overnight.
3. The Global Destination: Both paths led to the exact same place today—a world where an ultra-concentrated elite owns the infrastructure, the technology, and the land, while regular people are left as dependent cogs in the machine.
In feudalism, land was the main capital. The lords and rulers held the land, so they held the power. Then came the industrial revolution, and factories and machines became the main capital. Today, we have moved into an era where technology and data are the main capital. The tools, the technology, and the specific forms of wealth change over time, but the core principle has remained identical: a central system built around managing, extracting, and hoarding the main capital of the age. In that sense, feudalism was just an early form of capitalism.
Now, let's be realistic about feudalism here. I am not glorifying feudalism or looking back at history through rose-colored glasses. While peasants held a practical, generational wisdom of the earth and agriculture, they were also at the very bottom of the societal ladder. There was real, grueling poverty. The lord held absolute power over their lives, and peasants lived with virtually no personal freedom. The deep knowledge of the soil did not erase their suffering.
We also have to admit the truth: over the last century, material quality of life generally increased for most of the world. Simple daily things like indoor plumbing, running tap water, heating, and modern medicine were genuine steps forward.
Yet, looking at our world today—with rising geopolitical turmoil and millions facing winters without guaranteed heating or basic security—we see how fragile even these basic privileges have become. And the fact that material conditions improved does not mean we should stay silent about the systemic issues beneath the surface.
If we continue down our current path, future generations will not have a better life than we do today. In fact, they may not even share the same basic quality of life. Decades of social experiments—from totalitarian state communism to hyper-extractive corporate capitalism and oligarchy—have severed us from our roots.
When you cut a population off from their land, you wipe out their horizontal social structures—the natural neighborly cooperation, local governance, seasonal rhythms, and folklore that keep communities self-reliant. That organic way of living was replaced by vertical, bureaucratic command handed down from a distant core.
What makes the communist story so ridiculous—and so dangerous—is the illusion it sold. It wrapped itself in the sweet talk of equality, convincing people that the system was built for the working class. But in reality, it took away individual ownership, destroyed local land-based communities, and handed total control to a small group of party bosses at the top.
Far-left and communist voters in ex eastern bloc countries rarely fit Western ideas of leftism. They aren't focused on abstract Marxist theory or progressive social issues. They want order, social security, strong leadership, and protection from rapid economic shifts. Babiš gave them exactly that: higher pensions, public transit discounts for seniors, higher minimum wages, and a strongman persona that pushes back against directives from the EU.
You can see how easily these two worlds merge if you look at modern Czech politics and the rise of Andrej Babiš. During communism, the state acted as an all-encompassing manager. It provided basic security, employment, and subsidies in exchange for complete conformity. Decades later, Babiš tapped directly into this psychological expectation with his famous slogan: "Řídit stát jako firmu" (Run the state like a company). For voters nostalgic for paternalistic governance, a billionaire boss framing himself as the "master manager" (hospodář) felt familiar and reassuring. It is no coincidence that Babiš comes directly from a prominent communist background—the jump from party insider to corporate oligarch is the exact same ladder. His party, ANO, completely absorbed the traditional left electorate by offering higher pensions and subsidies, leading to the historic 2021 election where neither the Communist Party nor the Social Democrats crossed the 5% threshold to enter parliament. The voters simply migrated to the billionaire manager who delivered the material benefits.
In the end, "Ideal Capitalism" and "Ideal Communism" are twin utopias. Both are beautiful stories written on paper that break down the moment they touch the reality of human behaviour, power, and nature. Ideal Communism promises a stateless, classless society of shared abundance, but in reality, it creates a massive bureaucratic state run by party bosses who strip away individual sovereignty. Ideal Capitalism promises a self-regulating free market of sovereign individuals, but left to its own devices, competition eats itself, capital consolidates into monopolies, and people are stripped of their land and independence. Both systems failed for the exact same reasons: they ignored how power naturally concentrates at the top, they treated the living Earth as an infinite resource bin to be extracted, and they severed human beings from their biological nature and local communities.
Whether power is held by a central state committee in Moscow or dictated by billionaire corporate boards, the result is identical: regular people remain dependent workers in a massive system run from above.