ABSTRACT
For nearly 50 years after the Second World War the Soviet Union played a decisive role in defining the shape and pattern of world politics. Before the Second World War the Soviet state was only an intermittently important actor in European politics, often ignored or marginalised by the other great powers. After the war, however, the Soviet Union came to head a powerful military-political bloc of states in eastern Europe. In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union emerged as a global, nuclear superpower-involved in all the major developments, issues and crises of world politics. At the same time the Soviet Union remained a communist state, officially committed to the establishment of a global socialist system. Indeed, at times during the postwar period-as Soviet and communist influence spread across the world-it seemed that Moscow’s trumpeting of the historical inevitability of socialism was more than mere hyperbole. In the late 1980s, however, it was not capitalism but communism that collapsed, first in eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union itself.
