Most of the wars in Europe and Asia after 1945 grew out of ideological divides that had been created by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In almost all countries around the world, a minority of educated elites had started to believe that only a society patterned on the Soviet Union could create wealth while doing away with injustice and the oppression of peasants and workers. They had good reasons for their belief. While technological progress in the nineteenth century had created a world in which products could be created faster, better, and with more ease than before, the social gap between the working class, which produced the new material wealth, and the bourgeoisie, which consumed it, had grown ever wider. In rural areas, which dominated all the countries where wars continued after World War II, new forms of travel and communications exposed the age-old oppression of the peasantry and made it harder to bear. While the spread of the capitalist market in the early part of the twentieth century had held out the promise that people would improve their lot quickly through hard work or luck, the crises of the late 1920s and 1930s crushed many of these hopes. By the 1940s, with great parts of both continents in ruins after another devastating war unleashed by the dominant powers, time seemed ripe for revolutionary transformation of the Soviet kind.

The attractiveness of the Soviet model had been confirmed by the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and its decisive intervention against Japan in 1945. Prior to World War II, Stalin’s domestic purges, his willingness to enter into a pact with Hitler, and the brutal destruction of Poland and the Baltic republics had held back enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, even among leaders of left-wing organizations. In the postwar era, however, the skepticism dramatically diminished. Many socialist and left-wing nationalist groups wanted to ally themselves with the Soviet Union in order to defeat their enemies, but Stalin was cautious in giving them grounds for optimism. In his view, neither Europe nor the colonial world was, with a few exceptions, ready for communist revolutions. The Soviet Union therefore became an inspiration and a model more than a helper for much of the left.