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.
With such historical lessons in mind, Stalin suggested to the officials 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 the idea of a possible peaceful transition to socialism, given the presence of the Soviet Red Army.
For example, Ruth Amende Rosa stated: the U.S.S.R. apparently felt obliged to establish its own position of ideological "leadership" in eastern Europe and, simultaneously, to fit the concept of "people's democracy" into the body of orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
[4] However, in 1949, Varga recanted his ideas,[4] and many high ranking Communists, including Dimitrov, suggested that people's democracies actually were similar to the USSR.
The people's democratic model would later be applied to socialist states in Asia, including China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
Nikita Khrushchev explicitly stated that the possibility of peaceful transition to people's democracy was predicated on the global strength of the USSR as a superpower.
The common features characteristic of people's democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat were determined by the broad social base underlying the socialist revolutions that occurred in the European and Asian countries after World War II, their relatively peaceful development and the assistance and support rendered to them by the Soviet Union.
Yet, in each particular country, people's democracy has its own distinctive features, since the socialist changeover took place there under specific historical and national conditions.
The parties united in the Popular Front to fight fascism and imperialism; under these conditions, the multi-party system helped to expand the social base of the revolution and better fulfil the tasks facing it.
merged with Social-Democratic parties on the basis of Marxism-Leninism (q. v.), while in Hungary and Romania the multi-party system was replaced by a single-party one.Trotskyists and other dissident anti-Stalinist Communists were against the idea of people's democracy which they considered as denying the Leninist insistence on the class essence of all state power.
The social relations of production upon which the Red Army rested, i.e. the political-economy of the Soviet Union, imposed themselves upon the countries it occupied.