"Among the biggest difficulties for Communists in power everywhere was their claim to stand for the international. The future, they said, belonged to the proletarians and the peasants—to classes, not to nation-states. The problem was that for many ordinary people in the 1940s and ’50s, a strong nation-state was what they wished for most. The war had shown what would happen to those groups who did not have the protection of their own state. The massive bloodletting in eastern Europe, the mass murders of Jews and Roma, and the moving of borders had made it possible for Poles, Hungarians, or Romanians to claim their countries to be nation-states. The Communists, even when professing to carry out a “national” revolution, also had to stand for internationalism, especially since Moscow made that the test case for the loyalty of each Communist regime. From the very beginning, therefore, the Communists had a troubled relationship with concepts of nation and nationhood, or even state independence."