Out of Henry Kissinger's analysis about the subject, it is conceivable, though rare in practice, to distinguish the internal revolutionary intensity of a country's political rule from the way it finds a room in the international system - depending, of course, on the level of flexibility that the system itself affords to the revolutionary element. That is why Kissinger gives Nazi Germany as an instance of "revolutionary external policy", and not revolutionary Russia. That contradicts the perception of their own protagonists and heirs as well as the contemporary observers, and their successors, of the European parlamentary democracies and the United States - a view resilient enough to persist along all the Cold War era. So that it is worthwhile to explore the historical reasons of the break between perception and reality.
The international system; Revolutions; The Russian Revolution; The Great War; The Soviet Union