Playing Games with Empire: Finnish Political Imaginaries on the Early Soviet State

This chapter analyses the ways in which the imperial frame of interpretation was imposed on the early Soviet state by Finnish political cartoonists during the beginning of the interwar period (1918–26). The chapter engages with the notion of empire while recognizing that the analytical usefulness of the concept has been challenged in International Relations and related disciplines. On the one hand, insights that emerge from transhistorical analyses of empires have been recognized to be so abstract that they could equally well apply to other political formations, such as large states. On the other hand, analysing politics through the frame of empire often has a normative dimension; to say that a political unit is imperial is to impose a specific, often pejorative, frame on the phenomenon under analysis. In Russian studies, attempts to interpret the early Soviet state though the imperial frame have also been challenged. Mark Beissinger, for example, argues that ‘the temptation to read empire forward from Tsarist Russia and backward from the Soviet collapse … confounds the difference between the colonial state and the aggressively modern state’. ¹