Soviet sailors would anchor in European ports in the years after the revolution, and people would ask if they wanted to defect to the West. Why would we want to live outside the USSR they replied.

Actually, French and German authorities feared the ideas these sailors might put into the heads of their working class and tried to stifle them. Pictures like Battleship Potemkin were banned for similar reasons.

This started changing in the 1950s. China declared during the Sino-soviet split that the USSR had played itself out and the Chinese communist party was now at the vanguard of fast-moving change, and that seems to have been correct.