The ascent to political power of a party espousing Marxism heightened the threat to Western governments. Soviet political and legal philosophy posed a challenge to the West on issues spanning the full breadth of the law. In regard to the economy, a new notion of rights of individuals on economic issues was espoused. Crime policy was viewed in a new light. Equality of the sexes figured prominently in Soviet thinking. Homosexuality and prostitution were analyzed anew. Even relations between nations were revisited, in particular, Western nations' control over colonies.

The Soviet analysis of economics was central to the new thinking on all issues. The revolutionaries were steeped in the Marxian analysis of capitalism. Economics, proclaimed Friedrich Engels, determined other aspects of society: “the production of the means to support human life – and, next to production, the exchange of things produced – is the basis of all social structure.”

As Marx grasped the effects of the industrial revolution and how it changed society from the rural-based economies that preceded it, he concluded that this radical change in economics had changed the political and social order.

In Russia, the government of the Bolshevik Party that emerged out of the 1917 revolution took Marx's analysis seriously. It derided Western governments for providing formal legal equality to citizens but for presiding over an economic order that kept many citizens unequal in fact.