The twentieth century might fairly be called the Bolshevik century. From the moment of the Soviet Union’s emergence after the October Revolution, the presence of this new historical actor on the world stage affected every important event. Its birth changed the fortunes of World War I. The Allied victory in World War II owed much to the prodigious human and material capacities the Soviets were able to mobilize— despite the prior loss of many millions and vast resources from the purges, gulags, collectivization, and man-made famines of the 1930s.1 So successful was the wartime effort that Stalin was able to bring into the Soviet sphere a number of other countries in Eastern Europe at the war’s end. The presence of the Soviet Union in the world shaped not only international but internal politics everywhere, from Western European social-welfare policies to the many Third-World struggles that advanced under Soviet aegis.