>The Soviet empire was not extortionary, in the sense of providing a bounty of riches to the imperial center, as India and other colonial holdings had done for Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries; instead, it was a drain on Moscow. Without oil, the heirs of Lenin would have had great difficulty subsidizing their needy allies, their globe-spanning navy, their 45,000 nuclear weapons, their four-million-man army, their record-setting Olympians and their space stations. Oil was, in many ways, more crucial to the Kremlin than ideology.<
Some scholars (sorry, I don't have the reference here) argue that even the British empire wasn't profitable for Britain as a whole. But it clearly benefited the upper classes, who were more important in decision-making. Jim Devine
