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p There were several factors or developments which served to create an international situation favouring the success of national liberation revolutions in the countries of Asia and Africa. These were: the determining role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of the fascist bloc powers in the West and in the Far East; the formation of a world socialist system; and the support given by the socialist camp and the international workers’ movement to the struggle waged by the oppressed nations.

p The contradictions between the forces of independent national development for colonial and dependent countries, on the one hand, and foreign monopoly capital, on the other, had become increasingly acute during the Second World War. The aggravated situation affected directly not only the people at large, but also a segment of the landed gentry, who came to lose their income and found themselves forced to sell their estates.

p A new factor had been the menace of a Japanese attack, which had subsequently become for many Asiatic lands more than just a menace. Progressive elements in the countries of the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia had been ready to join with the colonial powers to fight the fascist aggressors, but only provided substantial concessions were promised to satisfy their national democratic demands. The British and French governing classes, however, both on the eve of the Second World War and after it had begun, had refused to meet even the minimum requirements of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples. This had made it all the easier for the fascist countries to practise their discreet and judicious forms of propaganda. Japan advanced such ideas as "a common co-prosperity sphere”, "Asia for the Asians" and so on, making skilful use of racial prejudices.

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p The hard-headed policy of the Western colonial powers had played into Japan’s hands, for it prevented many statesmen in the lands of Asia and Africa to realise the indubitable fact that only a victory of the democratic forces over the fascist coalition could bring national independence within their grasp. In Asia, many true patriots had let themselves be deluded by Japan’s specious propaganda in the hope of casting off the imperialist yoke with her help. It was this attitude that had helped Japan seize the colonies of the European powers and the United States in Southeast Asia and create the menace of an invasion of India.

p As it turned out, however, the Japanese invaders practised a policy of even greater exploitation of the population, destruction of the export branches of the national economy, confiscation of food products and forcible mobilisation of the population; and all illusions had soon been shattered. Resistance to the new colonial oppression had appeared, then spread, assuming a diversity of forms. Sometimes patriotic statesmen, who officially continued to collaborate with the Japanese military and succeeded in extracting various concessions from Japan, would turn out to be closely associated with an underground movement and even armed resistance.

p As the end of the fascist coalition loomed closer, and especially after Germany’s surrender, the Japanese, in their efforts to strengthen their position in the occupied lands, would find it expedient to resort to all sorts of manoeuvres. Local people would be allowed to occupy posts in the army or administration formerly unattainable (under Japanese control, of course), or formal independence would be proclaimed, or else a constitution would be promulgated, etc. All these subterfuges were useless, however. Peoples had learned to resist the invaders by force of arms, without the aid of their European masters, and this had fostered national self-consciousness and proved valuable later in the development of independent states.

p The situation that evolved in the colonial countries during the war was such that the formation of a broad national front was now fully possible. In some countries such a front acquired an organised form; in others it existed merely de facto. All classes of the colonial population were interested in winning national independence, with the sole exception of a narrow stratum of reactionaries who feared the prospect of losing the economic benefits and privileges accruing to them in the service of their colonial masters.

p The nature of the anti-imperialist struggle and the forms of the national liberation revolutions depended above all on which social class assumed their leadership. Wherever propitious conditions had been created before or during the war (as in China, North Korea and North Vietnam) leadership of the national liberation 408 movement was in the hands of the working class, and the anti-colonial struggle took the shape of popular-democratic revolutions, assuring the winning of national independence and preparing conditions for further development along socialist lines.

p In most of the colonial countries, where leadership of the liberation movement belonged to the national bourgeoisie, the formation of a single national front was generally a considerably longer process. In such cases organisation lagged behind the expanding liberation struggle, and was never achieved while the Second World War was being fought, or, as a matter of fact, sometimes even after it was over.

When, with the ending of the Second World War, a number of former colonies became independent states, the crisis of the colonial system may be said to have entered a new phase: that of disintegration.