It was written during a time where both the US and USSR were developing nuclear weapons, WW2 was over for a few years, and both countries were essentially subdividing their fiefdoms across the line of West and East Germany. In the USSR, cossacks were marred as traitors and lynched, and millions of people were starved to death during the great famines. In the US, black people were still treated as unequal and lynched in the South for a myriad of reasons, and all the meanwhile, if you were a little too left-leaning or even gay, your life was ruined if outed.