In the years between 1934 and 1938, more than eight million Soviet citizens were accused of crimes they couldn't have possibly committed, and executed or worked to death in labor camps. Among these millions, were three fourths of the 1934 party leaders and thousands of loyal officers in the Red Army, all of whom confessed to the impossible crimes following physical and mental torture.
Purges had occurred previously under Lenin and earlier with Stalin but none to such an eye-popping extreme. Stalin took the murders to a new level because he was an ineffectual leader and he knew he didn't deserve his position; Stalin feared that a better qualified person might usurp his power. Rather than risk it, Stalin simply killed everyone who he thought might somehow be involved in removing him from power, and others apparently thrown in for good measure.
Although intended to reduce to no government whatsoever, the USSR became the most intrusive and domineering government ever seen. This was the government for which the term totalitarian was coined. How did this utopian vision become so swiftly and brutally replaced by an authoritarian regime? The answer is built into Marxism itself. One of the basic tenets of Marxism is that the democratic system of checks and balances was wholly unnecessary in a communist state. Marx believed that once the proletariat, or working class, ousted the evil overlords, the people would not be corrupted because the evil influence was no longer there. Therein lies the most significant problem with communism. Other contributing factors included the similar power that the Russian tsars had over the people before the Revolution and the reign of terror created by Stalin.
Before World War II, the only two Communist states were the USSR and the People's Republic of Mongolia which was set up in 1924 by the Soviets after ridding Mongolia of Chinese forces. Following a hard-won success in the war, the Soviet Union set up puppet regimes throughout eastern Europe. Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia were all thinly disguised Soviet governments. Yugoslavia and Albania created similar governments independent of Russian assistance. In 1949, the Soviet Union occupied East Germany and organized an authoritarian dictatorship there as well.
Only the two separate communist countries could have stood on there own, but the puppet governments created a buffer zone from capitalist Western Europe and let Soviets believe that communism was spreading. The puppet governments were a huge source of anxiety for the West and were the main cause of the Cold War, the forty-five year long period of tension between the Soviets and the capitalists. There were two sides in the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) created in 1949 by capitalist powers and the Warsaw Pact established in 1955 by the Soviets.
The Cold War caused an enormous nuclear arms race that put the entire world in jeopardy for decades.
