COMMUNISM OUTSIDE EUROPE  
Until about 1920 the socialist movement had been confined only to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (in the United States it was not significant). The victory of the Communists in Russia, however, gave a considerable boost to the expansion of socialist ideology outside the developed world. Anticolonial activists saw the USSR as a champion of anticolonialism and as a model for overcoming backwardness without recourse to capitalism. As early as 1920 Lenin had realized the potential appeal of Communist Russia to what we now call the Third World. The young Indian Communist Manabendra Nath Roy predicted that Asia would be the most fertile territory for the spread of Communism. Many young and largely middle-class Asian revolutionaries attended the Bolshevik Congress of Eastern Peoples in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920. Communist parties were created all over the world, including Japan, Turkey, Persia, India, and China. In the 1920s, however, the only Asian Communist party which had an important working-class following was that of China. Though traumatically defeated in 1927 by the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communist party, led by Mao Zedong retreated to the countryside, reconstructed itself as a peasant party, gradually emancipated itself from Soviet control, and eventually fought back until it gained control of the whole of China in 1949 and established the People's Republic.

In the inter-war years, Communism had acquired three features which distinguished it sharply from socialist parties. In the first place it was a movement in defence of the construction of socialism (the preparatory phase of Communism) in the USSR. Secondly, it consisted of militant and disciplined parties with a working-class following whose aim was a revolutionary upheaval. Thirdly, it embraced anticolonial activists for whom Communism provided not only a perspective for the anti-imperialist struggle but also a non-capitalist path of development for former colonies.