ABSTRACT
History is a succession of specific epochs. In geopolitical terms, the post-war period has been identified as a period of ideological bipolarism in which the superpowers achieved a high degree of societal order and political discipline within their sphere of influence. At the end of the 1940s the development process of the new nations was conceived as an effort to replicate everywhere the models of the hegemonic leader of the West (the United States) or of the Soviet Union. An intense wave of Westernisation and of Sovietisation set in. With the wave of decolonisation the two superpowers were offered a chance to expand their spheres of influence. The communist bloc organised a system of authoritarian socialism supported by a planned economy. In the early post-war period Stalin’s development strategy posed as a model of ‘catching up’ for latecomers. In the second half of the 1980s, it became clear that the commando system had exhausted its promise. Gorbachev’s efforts oriented towards a system change produced a watershed. In the wake of the system’s sudden collapse, there followed an ethno-cultural eruption in the former Soviet empire.
