I agree with you, Kruska, but i don't think your words conflict with mine. What i am trying to say is that ideological confrontation was just a cover, outside appearance of a banal fight for spheres of influence. It's obvious for me that Politburo didn't care too much about the Vietnamese' prosperity when Russia helped them to fight against the United States occupation. I'm pretty sure Reagan as well didn't cry his heart out because of Afghani freedom fighters struggling against Soviet invasion. Vietnamese managed to pull out the Americans and didn't manage to build a prosperous society anyway, no need to mention fate of Afghanistan, which means that neither Russia, nor the United States ever cared of those peoples who were unlucky enough to find themselves between a hammer and an anvil.
It was not communism that moved on national liberation movements all over the world, it was the Soviet Union - Soviet diplomats and military. They didn't want those 'liberators' to swear an oath to Marxism, they wanted them to buy Soviet guns, tanks, tractors, machines, locomotives etc etc for diamonds, gold, forest, sugar and loyalty. The Soviet Union didn't have serious problems with most of other rich nations, except for the US. In the same way the US easily got along well with poor nations.
Marxist ideology of collective society with equal rights of every man, with collective property is of course eternal. Magnetism and absolute on-paper-fairness of communism was the exact reason why this ideology was exploited by the USSR in foreign policy. Simple people could believe that mighty and rich Russia is going to help them build a Heaven-on-Earth and protect them from the corrupt two-faced bourgeois, but that was very far from reality.