Socialism in Europe and the Russia

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• Questions
• Summary

1. Existing socialist parties in Europe did not wholly approve of the way the Bolsheviks took power – and kept it.
2. However, the possibility of a workers state fired people’s imagination across the world.
3. In many countries, communist parties were formed – like the Communist Party of Great Britain.
4. The Bolsheviks encouraged colonial peoples to follow their experiment.
5. Many non-Russians from outside the USSR participated in the Conference of the Peoples of the East (1920) and the Bolshevik-founded Comintern (an international union of pro-Bolshevik socialist parties).
6. Some received education in the USSR’s Communist University of the Workers of the East.
7. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, the USSR had given socialism a global face and world stature.
8. Yet by the 1950s it was acknowledged within the country that the style of government in the USSR was not in keeping with the ideals of the Russian Revolution.
9. In the world socialist movement to it was recognised that all was not well in the Soviet Union. A backward country had become a great power.
10. Its industries and agriculture had developed and the poor were being fed.
11. But it had denied the essential freedoms to its citizens and carried out its developmental projects through repressive policies.