Making Postwar Communism

The Soviet Union's victory in World War II offered both Moscow and Communists in Europe the opportunity to break out of the isolation that had afflicted them during the interwar years. With the end of the war in Europe in 1945, the Soviet front line traversed Central Europe from Germany's Baltic Coast in the north to the Yugoslav–Italian border in the south. By the mid-1950s, the enhanced influence of communism had been both consolidated and contained. Explaining the paradoxical consolidation and containment of communism's influence across the continent is fundamental to grasping the contours of politics in Europe during the postwar period. The dominant strand in the historiography that approaches such an explanation is informed by the perspective of international history. The pressures of survival during the precarious situation for the Soviet Union that persisted throughout 1942 reinforced the non-participatory, bureaucratic Stalinism which emerged during 1939–1940. The launch of Barbarossa underpinned an escalation in the radicalisation of Nazism.