ABSTRACT
In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union created a world based on a utopian anti-fascist vision of making an entirely new type of human. Many analysts in consequence take the hard “reality” of military matters, tanks, planes, and submarines, or of economics, steelworks, and space satellites, as central to the story of the Soviet collapse. Fascism is temporary, communism is an enduring way of life.” The communist leaders, many of whom had been in Moscow during the later 1930s and the war, looked to the Soviet Union as the model for anti-fascist social organization. The communist imposition of power was dramatically brutal after the Second World War, but it was precisely then that it exercised its greatest fascination and appeal for its worker and intellectual adherents. The countries occupied and politically reorganized by the Soviet Union were initially ruled by coalitions, as in Western Europe, which tried to embrace all political shades of anti-Nazi resistance movements.
