Poster of Azerbaijan 1938. Iosif Stalin

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded in November 1917 by the Bolshevik Party. Led by Vladimir Lenin and, after 1923, by Josef Stalin, the Bolsheviks (later known as the Communists) established Communist rule in the former Russian Empire after the conclusion of a bitter civil war in 1921. The Soviet Union, as the new political entity was known, called for the world Communist revolution in the name of the international working class and advocated, in its propaganda, the eventual disappearance of national, cultural, religious, and economic distinctions. Since powerful elites could not be expected to voluntarily give up control, the Communists predicted a violent revolution that would destroy these classes. As a result of this prediction, middle-class societies in Europe and North America perceived the Soviet Union as a cultural and economic threat.

Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) was responsible for transforming the Soviet Union from an agricultural nation into a global superpower and did not see the elimination of millions of lives as an impediment to the achievement of this goal. Many intellectuals, dissidents, and even many allies were put to death under Stalin. Stalin's expansionism after World War II resulted in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by the West. In turn, Stalin gathered the Eastern European nations that were absorbed into the Soviet sphere after the Second World War under the umbrella of the Warsaw Pact. This, in turn, led to the Cold War and the periodic international crises, and the endless exchanges of hostile rhetoric in United Nations leadership circles until the final years of the Soviet Union.