[coldtea]

>Ask, e.g. the Baltic nations whether what Stalin did to them was not "colonialism".

I could ask them, but I would get diverging opinions, especially if I go back to the generations that actually lived under that (and who often expressed how they find it "better" in several ways, in published post-1991 polls).

Not to mention the civil tension even at the start of this, pre- and post-WWII, between pro-communists and pro-USSR at the time (which had sizable popular support among European peoples, from Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Portuguese and so on, including sizable numbers in France and Germany) and also much more remote parts of the world, and which was squashed with quite a lot of blood and far right terrorism. Czechoslovakia itself had quite a strong communist party, way before 1948.