Part of the reason why Communist regimes cherished women’s return to the domestic sphere after first having enabled them to make other choices was the gradual militarization of society. The Cold War played a significant role in this. As was the case in the capitalist countries, the Communists needed new soldiers for their armies, and falling birth rates did not serve that purpose.

The resource advantages of centralization in an underdeveloped economy played a part in initial successes, as did the enthusiasm of workers to rebuild and see their factories and countries succeed. But there were also inefficiencies built into the planned economy, which became more glaring as economies matured. There was a lack of efficient allocation, innovation, and product differentiation. There was also a lack of incentives for workers, and a lack of economizing or preservation of resources, natural or industrial.

But by the late 1940s he had started taking leave of the flawed but careful reasoning that lay behind his earlier decisions. Increasingly he acted on his own whims and regarded himself as being omniscient, at least as far as strategy went.

How could the normally cautious and realistic Stalin have sanctioned an attack on an area that he knew Washington regarded as being within its sphere? The main reason was that the aging Soviet leader was increasingly getting caught in his own delusions. The late-1940s’ purges of Communists in eastern Europe, the many “plots” discovered against Stalin in the USSR, and the treatment of the Yugoslavs and Chinese all point in the same direction.

Korea was a perfect test case for the “internationalism” of the new CCP regime in China. If they went along with a green light to Kim Il-sung for an attack, then they would have proven themselves revolutionaries in practice, not just in theory.

The land reform secured support for the regime among peasants, and improved food supplies across North Korea. But it also contributed, with other Communist political campaigns, to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.

But during the purges of the late 1930s all top Korean Communists in Moscow were arrested and shot, accused of being Japanese spies. In 1937 almost two hundred thousand Soviet Koreans living in the USSR’s Pacific regions were forcibly deported to central Asia. Stalin’s fear of a fifth column in Soviet Asia was more important than his dedication to revolution in Korea.

IN IRAN, AS elsewhere in Asia, Soviet policy was riddled with contradictions. Stalin wanted to support the Communist parties, but did not in a single case believe that they were ready to carry out revolutions on their own. When he was proven wrong, as in China, he spent more time worrying about the “real”—meaning potentially discordant—content of these massive political transformations than designing plans for their further development.

Stalin’s contradictory orders did little good for Soviet diplomacy. When the Red Army did withdraw, under US pressure, in May 1946, Qavam lost no time in breaking every promise he had given to the Soviets. In December 1946 Iranian troops took control of the north, and the Azeri and Kurdish leaders who did not escape to the Soviet Union were publicly executed.

The relationship between India and Pakistan was poisoned as a result, and the other countries that came out of British decolonization in south Asia—Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)—all looked with suspicion at the behavior of their big neighbor India. Nehru’s Congress government was born into a difficult foreign policy region.

Still, the French had lost, the government in Paris had collapsed as a result, and Pierre Mendès-France, the new Left-leaning French premier, wanted to withdraw from Indochina as soon as possible.

The internationalism of Soviet Communism appealed to many in the Vietnamese independence movement. It gave them a chance to show why and how their struggle for self-rule was of global importance,

the Communist revolution was a kind of cleansing: it might have used methods that were incomprehensible or even inhuman, but the revolution gave them the opportunity to immerse themselves in something bigger than the individual, something meaningful, something that would, eventually, set China right.

While Chiang got into trouble on the battlefield, he also began weakening his own position in the cities and in other areas controlled by his government. Chiang was a man in a hurry. He wanted too much too fast.

Across Asia, nationalist movements were positioning themselves to take power. Most of their leaders combined ideas of a nation, often represented by its past glory, with concepts of modernization and state planning.

they found that they were increasingly doing so within a framework defined by the Cold War. They may not have felt that they were part of the conflict, but they could not avoid being touched by it. It created strictures and opportunities they had not seen before, whether in war or in peace. And gradually, the Cold War connected different parts of the world in ways and purposes that had not been obvious in the past.

The Berlin blockade, which lasted for almost a year, was a Soviet political failure from start to finish. It failed to make west Berlin destitute; a US and British air-bridge provided enough supplies to keep the western sectors going. On some days aircraft landed at Tempelhof Airport at three minute intervals. Moscow did not take the risk of ordering them to be shot down. But worse for Stalin: the long-drawn-out standoff confirmed even to those Germans who had previously been in doubt that the Soviet Union could not be a vehicle for their betterment. The perception was that Stalin was trying to starve the Berliners, while the Americans were trying to save them.

When the deutschmark started appearing in Berlin, the Soviets cut off all surface traffic between western Germany and the capital. In the days that followed they also terminated all deliveries of food or electricity to western Berlin. Stalin had decided on the first real showdown of the Cold War.

A main reason why Soviet-style Communism lost out in France or Italy was simply that their working classes began to have a better life, at first more through government social schemes than through salary increases.

The draft declaration rested on the assumption that the interests of the individual came before those of the State and that the State should not be allowed to deprive the individual of his dignity and his basic rights. The opposing conception was that the rights of the individual must give precedence to the interests of society.”

The main reason for this was that both the Soviets and the Americans—as Kennan had pointed out in his Long Telegram—stood for models of human endeavor that had universalist pretensions. The Nazis had tried to rule through extermination. The colonial empires had ruled through exploitation and racial oppression.

People’s Republics became halfway houses: they could become fully Communist, but not entirely Soviet.

The concept “People’s Republic” was a Soviet invention from 1924, created for use in Outer Mongolia, a territory in eastern Asia under Red Army control that Moscow could not integrate as a full Soviet republic without serious problems with the Chinese who had ruled there for centuries.

Stalin would probably have chosen isolation anyway. But the intensity of the conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had been made by the stronger power to entice Moscow toward forms of cooperation.