page_title: Marxism–Leninism
section_title: Cold War, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (1945–1980)
hierarchical_section_title: Marxism–Leninism / History / Cold War, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (1945–1980)
caption_attribution_description: Español: Imagen de Mao Zedong proclamando la fundación de la República Popular China en la Puerta de Tian'anmen de la Ciudad Prohibida de Pekín el 1 de octubre de 1949. English: Pictured here is former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong announcing the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1 1949. Italiano: Immagine di Mao Tse-tung che proclama la nascita della Repubblica Popolare Cinese l'1 ottobre 1949 Bân-lâm-gú: 1949-nî Tiong-kok Tiong-iong Jîn-bîn Tsìng-hú tsú-si̍k Môo Ti̍k-tong tī khai-kok tāi-tián suan-pòo Tiong-huâ Jîn-bîn Kiōng-hô-kok tsìng-sik kiàn-li̍p. 1949年中國中央人民政府主席毛澤東佇開國大典宣布中華人民共和國正式建立。 中文: 1949年10月1日，中华人民共和国中央人民政府主席毛泽东在开国大典上宣布中华人民共和国中央人民政府正式成立。
context_page_description: Marxism–Leninism was the official state ideology of the Soviet Union and other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc as well as the political parties of the Communist International after Bolshevisation. As a political philosophy, it seeks to establish a socialist state to develop further into socialism and eventually communism, described as a classless social system with common ownership of the means of production, with full social and economic equality of all members of society. Marxist–Leninists espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of orthodox Marxism and Leninism, but they generally support the idea of a vanguard party, a communist party-led state, state-dominance over the economy, internationalism and opposition to capitalism, fascism, imperialism and liberal democracy. As an ideology, it was developed by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of both orthodox Marxism and Leninism. Today, Marxism–Leninism is the ideology of Stalinist and Maoist political parties around the world and remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam.
context_section_description: Upon Allied victory concluding the Second World War (1939–1945), the members of the Grand Alliance resumed their expediently suppressed, pre-war geopolitical rivalries and ideological tensions which disunity broke their anti-fascist wartime alliance into the anti-communist Western Bloc and the communist Eastern Bloc. The renewed competition for geopolitical hegemony resulted in the bi-polar Cold War (1945–1991), a protracted state of tension (military and diplomatic) between the United States and the Soviet Union which often threatened a Soviet–American nuclear war, but it usually featured proxy wars in the Third World.
  The events that precipitated the Cold War in Europe were the Soviet and Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian military interventions to the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) on behalf of the Communist Party of Greece; and the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) by the Soviet Union. The event that precipitated the Cold War in continental Asia was the resumption of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) fought between the anti-communist Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China. After military defeat exiled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang nationalist government to Formosa island (Taiwan), Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949.
  In the late 1940s, the geopolitics of the Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet predominance featured an official-and-personal style of socialist diplomacy that failed Stalin and Tito when Tito refused to subordinating Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union. In 1948, circumstance and cultural personality aggravated the matter into the Yugoslav–Soviet split (1948–1955) that resulted from Tito's rejection of Stalin's demand to subordinate the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the geopolitical agenda (economic and military) of the Soviet Union, i.e. Tito at Stalin's disposal. Stalin punished Tito's refusal by denouncing him as an ideological revisionist of Marxism–Leninism; by denouncing Yugoslavia's practice of Titoism as socialism deviated from the cause of world communism; and by expelling the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). The break from the Eastern Bloc allowed the development of a socialism with Yugoslav characteristics which allowed doing business with the capitalist West to develop the socialist economy and the establishment of Yugoslavia's diplomatic and commercial relations with countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yugoslavia's international relations matured into the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) of countries without political allegiance to any power bloc.
  At the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then consolidated an anti-Stalinist government. In a secret meeting at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences (25 February 1956) in which he specified and condemned Stalin's dictatorial excesses and abuses of power such as the Great purge (1936–1938) and the cult of personality. Khrushchev introduced the de-Stalinisation of the party and of the Soviet Union. He realised this with the dismantling of the Gulag archipelago of forced-labour camps and freeing the prisoners as well as allowing Soviet civil society greater political freedom of expression, especially for public intellectuals of the intelligentsia such as the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose literature obliquely criticised Stalin and the Stalinist police state. De-Stalinization also ended Stalin's national-purpose policy of socialism in one country and was replaced with proletarian internationalism, by way of which Khrushchev re-committed the Soviet Union to permanent revolution to realise world communism. In that geopolitical vein, Khrushchev presented de-Stalinization as the restoration of Leninism as the state ideology of the Soviet Union.
  In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological b
caption: The Chinese Communist Revolution (1946–1949) concluded when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949
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