There is a general consensus among Russian watchers that in many ways the Putin regime is a watered-down version of the Soviet regime. Here is Nikita Khrushchev's gread-granddaughter making just such a comparison about the show trials in Putin's Russia and those in the Soviet era of her ancestor. It allows for elections, but the electronic media that ordinary people use to evaluate the candidates and parties remain firmly in the hands of the ruling party. The regime is basically staffed by the siluviki --those from an intelligence services or Soviet Communist Party background during the Soviet era. But what about Russian foreign policy?
During the Soviet period the Soviet Union was one large ideological empire with three different levels. First, was the core--the old Russian Empire minus Finland and Poland and the Baltic States rechristened the Soviet Union in 1922. In 1939-40 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 the Soviet Union reabsorbed the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and part of eastern Finland and eastern Poland. Second, in 1944-45 as a result of the victory over Nazi Germany the Soviet Union reabsorbed the Baltic States (lost in 1941) and took over what eventually became the Warsaw Pact: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. The third level consisted of all of those overseas ideological allies that were deemed to be Communist or merely socialist or even just anti-Western.
