Question by Ashley: What was the initial appeal of Soviet-style communism to Europeans?
Westerners usually consider Soviet-style communism to be inhuman. What was the initial appeal to those living in Eastern Europe during the immediate post-war years?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Sir Caustic
An aversion to Soviet-style communism during those times could have been injurious to their well-being.
Answer by Spellbound
The appeal was that Nazism / Fascism had failed, democracy had a short, but ineffective run between the wars, and communism appeared to be very good at rebuilding a shattered country. You have to remember that American hatred of communism only came about AFTER WWII, and is based mostly on propaganda, not the reality of the situation.
Further to this, the communist governments of Eastern Europe were imposed on the countries by the Soviet Army.
There are three main reasons for their establishment.
1) Russia has historically had no secure border. There are no great rivers, no mountains, no deserts no seas that separate her from her potentially war-like neighbours. This fear of invasion, and the idea of buying time through land (Russia, when invaded has often allowed the enemy to invade, then, when their supply lines are overstretched, they counter-attack) is one of the reasons that Russia became so big. As former border towns become consolidated into the Russian political landscape, so does the need to push the border further away from the heartland. After the devastation faced in the Soviet Union in WWII the Soviets wanted to push the border as far away from Kiev, from Moscow & Minsk as they could.
2) They wanted to set up satellite countries because they could. The Red Army had conquered the territory at great expense and the Soviet leadership was unwilling to simply withdraw – allowing Western style governments to push right up to her borders.
3) The Yalta Agreement between FDR, Churchill & Stalin had laid out the spheres of influence that each of the Allied countries would have, and the satellite countries all fell under the Soviet sphere.
Some further reasons:
The Soviets had a different view of democracy to the one in the West. The Soviets argued that as the Communist party represented the people and was of the people, it was an inherently democratic form of government.
There was also Marxist ideology behind it. Marx claimed that the Communist Revolution was inevitable – especially in highly industrialised and advanced Germany. The Soviets saw it as their mission to export the revolution to other countries – especially Germany.
The Soviets saw what the Western Allies were doing in Western Europe as no different to what they were doing – establishing governments based on models of the victors’ own governments.
And one final reason was to prevent a unified Germany from being a threat to the Soviet Union ever again.
See:
The Captive Nations – Patrick Brogan (it’s a simplistic overview of the histories of the countries under Communist domination in Europe after the war)
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Jason Williams says
There was no such thing as “appeal”. All Eastern European countries that were not invaded and annexed by the USSR (Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, etc.) were under the gun of the Soviet Bolsheviks and every time one of them attempted to depart from the Communist sphere they were invaded by the Soviets (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland).
So the only “appeal” was the business end of an AK-47.
Jay says
In Eastern Europe they didn’t have much choice, those who objected to Soviet rule were swiftly purged. After WWII Europe, especially central Europe was in ruins, what the Nazis had begun in their march eastwards the Soviet Red Army completed when they marched west. Not only was Eastern and Central Europe in ruins so was the economy and infrastructure. The Soviets established control and put in place governments and backed those governments with investment, military power and strong secret polices which actively discouraged dissent.
The Soviets whether you liked the methods or not were demonstrating control and were giving people work and food. This was not an era where people were being ideologically motivated – they wwre hungry, needed homes and that’s what they got.