On Wednesday’s class we discussed Russia’s involvement in pre-WWII politics. One of the themes of that class that most interested me was Russia’s involvement in rising leftist regimes around the world. As we discussed, Stalin was initial more in favor of a mass improvement within the State rather than focusing than the globalization of communism. However, Russia provided “aid” to countries such as China in order to promote the rise of leftist governments. After observing the balance of political perspectives in class, my question is this. Was Russia’s size beneficial or detrimental in spreading communism?

Russia was already an enormous country at this point. Obviously, an enormous country has it’s benefits. For example, they had millions of soldiers to utilize in battle. From what we’ve learned, however, the country was still not very stable at this point. Even if it is large, how could Russia “help” other countries given it’s lack of organization? While this is an extremely negative comparison, Germany managed to conquer an enormous amount of land through war efforts during the same era.

As usual, it seems as through Russia was striving for idealism rather than realism in this case. They wanted to promote leftist regimes, but how would that be possible after a civil war and before/during WWII?