Eastern Bloc economies | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-11-28

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Eastern Bloc economies

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SUMMARY
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The Eastern Bloc (also known as the Socialist Bloc, Communist Bloc and Soviet Bloc) was the group of Communist-controlled states stretching from Central and Eastern Europe to East and Southeast Asia largely controlled by the Soviet Union during the Cold War in opposition to the Western Bloc led by the United States. The term generally includes the USSR and its satellite states in the Comecon, including Vietnam and its satellites Laos and Kampuchea, North Korea, and China (before 1961.) Cuba is included as well after 1961, but demonstrated independence from Soviet policy following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Widespread Soviet hegemony ended with the success of the Revolutions of 1989 against the Warsaw Pact, and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union brought the Eastern Bloc and the Cold War to an end. 
During Joseph Stalin's lifetime, Soviet control over the Eastern Bloc was tested but never seriously challenged by the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état and Tito–Stalin Split over control of Yugoslavia, the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution and Chinese and North Korean involvement in the Korean War against the United Nations. After his death in 1953, the Korean War was halted but not settled and anti-Soviet sentiment sparked the East German uprising. The Eastern Bloc started to break apart in 1956, when new leader Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin helped spark the anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which was suppressed by a Soviet invasion, and the Sino–Soviet Split with Mao Zedong's China, which gave North Korea and North Vietnam more independence from both, and facilitated the Soviet–Albanian split. The Cuban Missile Crisis preserved the Cuban Revolution from rollback by the United States, but Fidel Castro became increasingly independent of Soviet rule afterwards, most notably in its 1975 intervention in Angola. That year, the fall of former French Indochina to communism following the end of the Vietnam War gave the Eastern Bloc renewed confidence which had been frayed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring, which had led to Albania withdrawing from the Pact, briefly aligning with Mao Zedong's China until the Sino-Albanian split.
Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union reserved the right to intervene in other Communist countries. In response, China moved towards the United States following a 1969 border war which almost went nuclear, and later  reformed and liberalized its economy, while the Eastern Bloc stagnated economically behind the capitalist First World. Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan nominally expanded the Eastern Bloc, but the war proved unwinnable and too costly for the Soviets, challenged in Eastern Europe by civil resistance in Poland. In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pursued policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") to reform the Eastern Bloc and end the Cold War, which brought forth unrest throughout the bloc. Unlike previous Soviet leaders in 1953, 1956, and 1968, Gorbachev refused to use force to end the 1989 Revolutions against Marxist-Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Warsaw Pact spread nationalist and liberal ideals throughout the Soviet Union, which would soon fall itself at the end of 1991. Conservative communist elites attempted to turn back liberal reforms and movements, which hastened the end of Marxist-Leninist rule in Eastern Europe but preserved it in China.
Though the Soviet Union and its rival the United States considered Europe the most important front of the Cold War,  during the Cold War, the term Eastern Bloc was often used interchangeably with the term Second World. This broadest usage of the term would include not only Maoist China and Cambodia, but short-lived Soviet satellites such as East Turkestan Republic (1944-1949), the People's Repub ...