ABSTRACT
The Rumanian Preamble asserted that ‘friendship and alliance with the great Soviet Union, its support and its disinterested and fraternal aid, assure the independence, sovereignty, development and progress of the Rumanian People’s Republic’. The separation of the supreme command in government and in the Communist Party, which took place in the Soviet Union after J. V. Stalin’s death, when the offices were divided between Malenkov and Hrushchov, was imitated in Eastern Europe in the following months. The influence of events in the Soviet Union on the Popular Democracies can be seen only in very general terms. The Soviet state bourgeois are justifiably proud of their factories, of the great industrial machine which they have built, and of the industrial progress of their country. Soviet advances to Yugoslavia reached a climax with the visit to Yugoslavia in June 1955 of a Soviet delegation headed by Bulganin and Hrushchov.
