was one of the first to suggest the possibility of Communists working for a democratic republic in his so-called Blum Thesis of 1929. Lukacs recounted in 1967:
It is hard for most people to imagine how paradoxical this sounded then. Although the Sixth Congress of the Third International did mention this as a possibility, it was generally thought to be historically impossible to take such a retrograde step, as Hungary had already been a soviet republic in 1919.
Joseph Stalin, who had been in Soviet administration throughout the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, well remembered how the attempt to fight Bolshevik-style revolutions throughout Europe during and after World War I—the revolutions of 1917–1923—had mostly failed. Many Old Bolsheviks had thought at the time that these revolutions were the vanguard of the world revolution, but the latter never materialized. It was this very reality that had driven the development of the idea of socialism in one country as the Soviet Union's own path. With such historical lessons in mind, Stalin suggested to the leaders of Eastern European communist parties at the end of World War II that they should present themselves as advocates of a people's democracy. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies in Eastern Europe, Marxist–Leninist theoreticians first began expanding on the idea of a possible peaceful transition to socialism, given the presence of the Soviet Red Army. In most areas of Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties did not immediately take power directly but instead worked in Popular Coalitions with progressive parties. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was officially a one-party state, a majority of people's democracies of Eastern Europe were theoretically multi-party states. Many of the ruling Marxist–Leninist parties no longer called themselves Communist in their official title as they had in the 1930s. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany for instance was ostensibly a union of the SPD and the Communist Party of Germany. Many of the other European states were ruled by Worker's or Socialist Parties. In the Eastern Bloc, People's democracy was a synonym for socialist state. Mao Zedong proposed a similar idea of a cross-class democracy in the 1940 essay On New Democracy. In 1949, he would make a speech on the people's democratic dictatorship. The people's democratic model would later be applied to socialist states in Asia, including China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
Idea
While people's democracies were considered a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, classes such as the peasantry, petite bourgeoisie and progressive bourgeoisie were allowed to participate. Nikita Khrushchev explicitly stated that the possibility of peaceful transition to people's democracy was predicated in the global strength of the USSR as a superpower. The Soviet Textbook A Dictionary of Scientific Communism defined people's democracy as follows: Trotskyists and other dissident anti-Stalinist Communists were against the idea of people's democracy which they saw as denying the Leninist insistence on the class essence of all state power. The Marxists Internet Archive dictionary critiques people's democracy as follows:
