The term communism is generally applied to the Marxist-Leninist political and socioeconomic doctrines (see \TMarxism\t; LENIN, V.I.) that guided the \TUSSR\t until 1991 and that were shared by governments and political parties in eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere. The term also denotes the former centralized political system of the Soviet Union and those other countries. This system, associated with collective ownership of the means of production, central economic planning, and rule by a single political party, was discredited almost everywhere outside China, North Korea, and Vietnam as a result of its near-total collapse in Europe and the \TUSSR\t. What remains, after the disestablishment of the Soviet party in 1991, is its Marxist ideology, shorn of its Leninist--and, in China, much of its Maoist (see \TMao Tse-tung\t)--trappings. Communism is an outgrowth of the 19th-century \Tsocialism\t. It became a distinct movement after the \TRussian Revolutions\t of 1917, when a group of revolutionary socialists seized power and adopted the name Communist party of the \TUSSR\t. Mongolia became a Communist state in 1921. After World War II other Communist states were established in the Eastern European countries of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania, and in the Asian countries of China and North Korea. Communist regimes were subsequently established in Cuba, in the Southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (Kampuchea), and in Afghanistan. Pro-Soviet revolutionary governments existed in several African states, notably Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. In the Western Hemisphere the leftist Sandinista regime (1979-90) in Nicaragua was under heavy Soviet and Cuban influence. Early Forms of Communism Originally, the term communism signified an ideal society in which property would be owned in common and the necessities of life shared by members of the community according to their needs. Communism in this sense dates back to classical antiquity. \TPlato\t proposed a kind of aristocratic communism in his Republic. Some of the early Christian groups held property in common. The idea of common ownership figured in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), and was espoused by such religious groups as the \TAnabaptists\t in 16th-century Germany. It inspired numerous religious and social reformers of the 19th century, including Etienne \TCabet\t, Charles \TFourier\t, Robert \TOwen\t, Pierre Joseph \TProudhon\t, and the comte de \TSaint-Simon\t. Their theories contributed to the 19th-century socialist movement aimed at replacing the system of private property with one in which property would be owned by society as a whole. Stronger revolutionary socialist theories were expressed by Francois \TBabeuf\t during the French Revolution and by Louis \TBlanc\t and Auguste \TBlanqui\t later in France (see \TRevolutions of\t 1848). The Rise of Marxism In their \TCommunist Manifesto\t (1848), Karl \TMarx\t and Friedrich \TEngels\t applied the term communism to a final stage of socialism in which all class differences would disappear and humankind would live in harmony. Marx and Engels claimed to have discovered a scientific approach to socialism based on the laws of history. They declared that the course of history was determined by the clash of opposing forces rooted in the economic system and the ownership of property. Just as the feudal system had given way to \Tcapitalism\t, so in time capitalism would give way to socialism. The class struggle of the future would be between the bourgeoisie, or capitalist employers, and the proletariat, or workers. The struggle would end, according to Marx, in the socialist revolution and the attainment of full communism. Marxism became the dominant body of thought in European socialism in the 19th century. Socialist parties grew rapidly and, despite their revolutionary theories, began to elect representatives to national legislatures. Much controversy raged within the parties between those who felt the need for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and those who held that socialism might be achieved through gradual reforms. European Marxists were strongly international in their outlook. They proclaimed their opposition to imperialism and militarism and declared that the workers had no fatherland. However, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 demonstrated that nationalism had a much stronger grip on the socialist parties than their theorists had realized. Except for a few radicals such as Karl \TLiebknecht\t and Rosa \TLuxemburg\t in Germany and Lenin in Russia, the party leaders and most members supported the war policies of their governments. The Russian Revolutions of 1917, which enabled Lenin and his followers to seize power, divided world socialism into competing groups of parties--those which opted for the Russian path and those which kept to the democratic tradition. COMMUNISM IN THE USSR Two Russian revolutions took place in 1917. The first, in February (O.S.; March, N.S.), brought the collapse of the tsarist regime and its replacement by a weak provisional government. A jostling for power began among various parties and groups, including two factions, called \TBolsheviks\t and \LMenshevi\lks, of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' party, a Marxist party founded in 1898. The Mensheviks, led by, among others, the party's founder, Georgy \TPlekhanov\t, believed that "feudal" Russia would have to pass through the capitalist phase under a bourgeois democratic regime before it would be ripe for socialism. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, called for the overthrow of the provisional government in favor of immediate rule by the workers and peasants. Leninism Lenin made important additions to the theory of Marxism and created a doctrine for professional revolutionists that gained considerable influence in the economically backward areas of the world. In his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902) he called for an elitist, disciplined party of professional revolutionists to lead the working class toward communism. The principles of "the leading role of the party" and "democratic centralism"--meaning an almost military organizational discipline within the party--were supposed to be practiced by all Communist parties. Lenin also preached flexibility in strategy and tactics, by which he meant a willingness to adapt party programs so as to enlist the support of the peasantry and oppressed national minorities without giving up the goal of communism. Lenin's forceful insistence on his own point of view caused the Russian socialists to divide into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903. In October (O.S.; November, N.S.) 1917, Lenin led the Bolsheviks in a successful coup d'etat against the provisional government. The initial period of Lenin's Soviet government (1917-21) was characterized by trial and error in the midst of economic dislocation, social chaos, domestic civil war, and foreign intervention. Lenin soon abandoned the notion that the government could function as a "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants." He dissolved the Constituent Assembly that had been elected after the Bolsheviks seizure of power because the Bolsheviks did not control it. Soon all other parties were outlawed, and the internal discipline of the ruling Bolshevik, or Communist party became even stricter. Lenin also laid the basis for the domination of other Communist parties by the \TUSSR\t. He insisted that foreign parties break with the existing Second (Socialist) \TInternational\t and form a Third, or Communist, International, which came to be known as the \TComintern\t. Every party was required to impose Leninist discipline on its members and on the world Communist movement as a whole. As a result the Comintern, with its headquarters in Moscow, eventually became little more than an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. A second phase began in 1921, when Lenin recognized that priority must be given to economic reconstruction. The \TNew Economic Policy\t (\TNep\t) legalized private trade, encouraged small-scale private enterprise, and loosened the state's grip on agricultural production, all in sharp contrast to the radical social and economic experimentation of the preceding period. The \TNep\t, however, was no more than a strategic retreat. The party took the offensive again in 1928 by introducing centralized economic planning through the First Five-Year Plan, which called for forced-draft industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. By means of these programs, implemented at terrible human cost, the Communist party attempted to create the kind of industrial system that already existed in the capitalist countries of the West, but with state ownership of the means of production. Stalinism The Soviet leader by this time was Joseph \TStalin\t. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin skillfully used his position as general secretary of the Communist party to obtain a monopoly of power. He overcame the opposition of Leon \TTrotsky\t, who had been Lenin's chief lieutenant during the revolution. Lenin and Trotsky had justified their seizure of power as being only the beginning of international revolution that would soon overthrow capitalism in advanced industrial countries such as Germany. They had believed that they would have to wait for the revolution to happen elsewhere before they could begin to build socialism in Russia. Stalin, however, enunciated the doctrine of "socialism in one country," maintaining that the \TUSSR\t could build socialism by itself. He also believed that unless the \TUSSR\t became an industrial power it would be destroyed by the stronger capitalist nations of the West. Stalin ruthlessly carried out the policies of industrialization and collectivization and did not hesitate to root out and destroy anyone he thought might someday turn against him. Between 1936 and 1940, most of the Old Bolsheviks (the leaders of the 1917 revolution) were executed. At the same time, Stalin systematically eliminated most of the officer corps of the Red Army, purged government bureaucracy, and unleashed indiscriminate mass terror against the population as a whole. (See \TGreat Purge\t.) Stalin's political system has been characterized as \Ttotalitarianism\t. Under Stalin the party strove to control every aspect of Soviet life, including the activities of workers, peasants, artists, writers, and athletes. A cult of praise that amounted almost to deification developed around Stalin as supreme leader. His policy decisions, made arbitrarily, were enforced as much by the secret police as by the party. The pervasive controls were relaxed somewhat during World War II, in order to gain popular support for the war effort against the invading Germans, but at the end of the war they were quickly reestablished. Stalin believed that the struggle with the capitalist West called for the strictest ideological and political discipline. The Soviet population was once again forced to endure economic privation in the interest of reconstructing and expanding the domestic base of heavy industry needed to establish the \TUSSR\t as a world power. Stalin died in 1953, and Soviet leadership was eventually taken over by Nikita \TKhrushchev\t. At the 20th Congress of the Communist party in February 1956, Khrushchev made a "secret speech" in which he denounced Stalin's political methods and disclosed some of the crimes Stalin had committed to protect his rule. Under Khrushchev the party cautiously loosened its grip on the country without permitting any basic criticism of Communist policies. Many of the labor camps in the \TGulag\t system, to which millions of people had been sentenced under Stalin's regime, were closed, and a degree of dissent was tolerated. Khrushchev also sought to raise living standards by diverting resources from industry to agriculture. In October 1964, Khrushchev was unseated by his associates and replaced by Leonid \TBrezhnev\t as general secretary and Aleksei \TKosygin\t as premier. Although it not return to the terror of Stalin's time, the Brezhnev regime cracked down on domestic dissidence. Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union undertook a major arms buildup and sought to expand its political influence abroad in ways that damaged relations with the United States and threatened East-West \Tdetente\t. At home the Soviet system suffered from widespread bureaucratic stagnation and rampant corruption. Brezhnev, who died in 1982, was succeeded by two short-lived successors, Yuri \TAndropov\t and KONSTANTIN \TChernenko\t. The Gorbachev Revolution In March 1985 a new leader Mikhail \TGorbachev\t, took over the Kremlin. Seeking to revitalize the Soviet system, Gorbachev advocated \Tglasnost\t, or openness in public affairs, and called for \Tperestroika\t, a restructuring of economic and organization and political life. Among other institutional changes was the creation of the powerful new office of Soviet president, to which Gorbachev himself was duly elected. The Soviet leader's espousal of "new thinking" in foreign policy with its promise of more friendly relations with the West, won him much popularity abroad. Within the Soviet Union, however, Gorbachev's reform program encountered political opposition, bureaucratic obstruction, and popular skepticism. At his behest, the Soviet Communist party gave up its Leninist claim to a monopoly of political power, grudgingly accepting a degree of political pluralism and the prospect of genuine parliamentary democracy. This alienated Communist hard-liners without satisfying radical reformers, many of whom expressed their discontent by resigning from the party. As centrifugal forces increased, a cabal of hard-liners in August 1991 arrested President Gorbachev and mounted an abortive coup. That precipitated the end of Communist rule over the Soviet Union. Restored to his office by triumphant reformers, Gorbachev succumbed to their pressure to disband the party leadership. COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE When the Soviet armies moved into Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, they installed Communist governments in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Stalin soon moved to reduce these new "people's democracies" to the status of Soviet satellites. Because the Comintern had been dissolved during the war, another international organization, the Communist Information Bureau (\TCominform\t) was founded in 1947 to coordinate the policies of Communist parties. Yugoslavia Communist regimes were also established in Yugoslavia and Albania after the war. In these countries, however, the Communists came to power largely through their own efforts, after fighting a successful struggle for national liberation from German occupation. When the Yugoslav leader, \TTito\t, resisted Stalin's efforts to control him, the Yugoslav party was expelled (1948) by the Cominform. Following the break with Tito, Stalin also purged the other East European parties of so-called Titoists, national Communists, and other deviationists. Throughout the area under his power, he imposed the same political and economic regimentation with which he ruled the \TUSSR\t. The Crises of 1956 Stalin's imperialistic system received a series of shocks after his death, in March 1953. Those who succeeded him in the Kremlin had to establish their own policies, including a rapprochement with Tito, partial easing of the Soviet grip on the East European satellites, and some halfhearted domestic reforms. After Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, a crisis of authority occurred in Eastern Europe. It was most severe in Poland and Hungary. In Poland the Communists were able to survive the crisis after Moscow allowed the return to power of Wladyslaw \TGomulka\t, a former leader who had been ousted as a national Communist in 1948. In Hungary the unrest exploded into open rebellion (October 1956). Because of popular pressure, certain Communist leaders in Hungary permitted the reintroduction of a genuine multiparty system and declared Hungary's neutrality in international politics. The \THungarian Revolution\t was put down by Soviet troops. In the aftermath of the 1956 upheaval, Khrushchev worked to reconstitute the Soviet bloc. He sought to preserve Soviet dominance and vigorously combatted revisionists who wanted to introduce more freedom into the system. He also sought to foster the development of institutions, such as the \TWarsaw Treaty Organization\t and the \TCouncil for Mutual Economic Assistance\t, that would tie the Soviet-bloc countries together. Later Developments The decay of Soviet authority over other Communist governments could also be seen elsewhere. Yugoslavia had been the first to take a different road after 1948, giving up the attempt to collectivize agriculture and turning over industrial enterprises to workers' councils. Its leaders held to this path after Tito's death, in 1980. In 1968 economic and political liberalization led by Alexander \TDubcek\t threatened to undermine the Communist party's monolithic control of Czechoslovakia and possibly set off repercussions in other East European countries. Moscow denounced the trend as "creeping counterrevolution." In August 1968, Czechoslovakia was invaded by armies of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The country was speedily "normalized" and orthodox leadership reinstated. To justify its intervention in Czechoslovakia, the \TUSSR\t asserted the right and duty of Communist countries to render "fraternal assistance against counterrevolution," which was known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine. In 1979 the doctrine was exercised in Afghanistan, which was occupied by Soviet troops to prop up the pro-Soviet regime there. In 1980 a wave of strikes in Poland led to the legalization of an independent trade union movement, \TSolidarity\t, and the promise of further liberalization. In December 1981, however, the Polish government, pressured by Moscow, declared a "state of war" against its own society and suppressed Solidarity. Although martial law was officially lifted in 1983, the Polish Communist regime under Gen. Wojclech \TJaruzelski\t ruled with a heavy hand. This did little to ameliorate Poland's deteriorating economic situation and made it difficult to rally popular support. The Overthrow of the System In 1989, with the tacit endorsement of the Gorbachev regime in Moscow, new negotiations with Solidarity led to Poland's first partially free elections in 40 years and produced a major defeat for the Polish Communist party. Jaruzelski then called on a Solidarity leader to head a coalition government that included both Communists and anti-Communists--a previously unthinkable eventuality. The new Solidarity-led government soon introduced a package of sweeping economic reforms designed to replace Poland's defunct command economy with the free market. Throughout Eastern Europe, 1989-90 was a time of major upheaval. East Germany, amid widespread popular protests, changed its leadership, and in November 1989 it opened its border with West Germany (where many East Germans had recently fled) for the first time in decades. In March 1990 free elections in East Germany produced a non-Communist government. This marked the beginning of the end of a separate East German state, which in a rapid succession of moves merged with West Germany. Demands for reform supported by Moscow toppled the Czechoslovak regime in November 1989, leading quickly to a freely elected non-Communist government there. In 1990, Hungary also held free elections. Hungary's reformist Communist party had reconstituted itself and campaigned under a new name; nonetheless, it was voted out of office. In December 1989 the Romanians overthrew the brutally repressive dictatorship of Nicolae \TCeausescu\t. Romania's new leaders renounced Marxism, but many of them were former Communists, and they used strong-arm methods in dealing with dissidents. Bulgaria also underwent a change in top leadership, but its first steps toward democracy were hesitant. In Yugoslavia the authority of the Communist party crumbled as the country experienced a revival of separatism and ethnic strife. Even Albania, long a bastion of rigid orthodoxy, began to change. COMMUNISM IN CHINA In 1949 a Communist movement won power in China under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. Founded in 1921, the Chinese Communist party allied with the \TKuomintang\t (Nationalists) in 1923, under orders from the Comintern. By 1927, however, the Nationalists had turned on the Communists, and a long civil war began, during which the Communists received little aid from Moscow. Forced to retreat into the interior (the Long March of 1934-35), the Chinese Communists built their party on peasant support. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937 and eventually became part of World War II, the party provided more effective resistance to the Japanese than did the Kuomintang, and by the end (1945) of the war controlled large areas. Within four years it had defeated the discredited Kuomintang and established control over the entire country. Maoism Although the Chinese Communist party gave lip service to the doctrines of Lenin and Stalin, its Marxism was shaped by its own unique experience and blended with the ideas of Mao. Mao saw humans as engaged in a permanent struggle against nature. Society was riven by contradictions between classes (antagonistic contradictions) and between groups (nonantagonistic contradictions). The antagonistic contradictions could be solved by revolution, but after the revolution it was necessary to work out the nonantagonistic contradictions that existed among the people and even within the party. Mao also believed that the revolution did not end when the Communists came to power; it had to be waged continually against vestiges of the old culture and against bureaucratic habits. Under Mao, China was subjected to startling shifts in policy that began with the elite and were carried downward through all parts of society. Stalin treated the Communist victory in China as a mixed blessing. Though he gave some small-scale Soviet aid to the Chinese, he remained deeply suspicious of any Communist movements not subject to his direct personal control. Under Stalin, Sino-Soviet relations were correct but not close. After his death the two powers came into serious conflict. The Sino-Soviet Split Khrushchev initially improved relations with Peking by recognizing China's autonomy in the world Communist movement, revising the terms of the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance in China's favor, and offering substantial economic assistance. Political and ideological differences soon emerged, however, particularly after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and his espousal of the goal of "peaceful coexistence" with the West. The Chinese showed no interest in reducing the tensions of the \Tcold war\t. In 1960 the \TUSSR\t discontinued military and technical aid to China, and in 1962 it began to supply war materials to India on the eve of the Sino-Indian war. After the \TUSSR\t signed a treaty with the United States and Great Britain in July 1963 banning most tests of nuclear weapons, the Chinese accused the \TUSSR\t of joining with China's enemies. Thereafter, both sides waged a bitter propaganda war. The Sino-Soviet dispute destroyed the unity of Marxism-Leninism as a world view and weakened the pretension of the \TUSSR\t to be the leader of the world Communist movement. When Khrushchev's successors tried to improve relations with Peking, they were rebuffed by Mao Tse-tung for practicing "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev." The Chinese, who were struggling to maintain revolutionary militance in a vast peasant country, refused to accept Soviet leadership. They had collectivized agriculture and socialized industry during the 1950s but then had turned away from Soviet-style economic planning. They announced a \TGreat Leap Forward\t that was to carry China into the Communist era ahead of other countries. The aim was to speed up economic progress by using China's human reserves in place of scarce capital, but the acceleration resulted in a seriously disorganized economy, and the attempt was abandoned. A struggle continued in China between those who wanted to follow the Soviet approach to industrialization and those who thought of the Soviets as another bourgeois society and regarded technicians and bureaucrats as enemies of the revolution. Mao himself declared that the Soviet Communists had betrayed the revolution. In 1966, Mao launched the \TCultural Revolution\t, in which millions of young Communists, organized as Red Guards, went through the country denouncing senior officials and establishing revolutionary committees in place of local government bodies. The Cultural Revolution ended in 1969, and the leaders set about rebuilding new party and state organs. The power struggle finally ended after Mao's death in 1976 with the moderates in control, led by \TTeng Hsiao-p'ing\t. China then embarked on a program of technological modernization. China established diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979 and subsequently encouraged increased interaction with Western nations. It also moved to improve relations with the \TUSSR\t. The end of the Sino-Soviet conflict was symbolized by Gorbachev's meeting with Teng in Peking in May 1989. Chinese Contradictions Teng's initial, ideologically ambiguous call for the "four modernizations" developed into a concerted program for economic reform, featuring various market incentives and the establishment of special economic zones with considerable latitude for private enterprise. Opponents of the party's dictatorship asked for more, a "fifth modernization"--that is, the renunciation of the party's leading role and the introduction of democracy. This was rejected by most of China's aging Communist elite. Teng and his entourage wanted economic reform without political change. They were determined to crush their critics by force, if necessary, and did so in the June 1989 massacre of students and others in Peking's Tiananmen Square where up to one million pro-democracy protesters had gathered for weeks on end. COMMUNISM ELSEWHERE Communist movements developed in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. In some cases, notably in Asia and Africa, they have been associated with \Tnationalism\t and anticolonialism. In Latin America, Communists identified themselves with the struggle against poverty and economic imperialism. In Western Europe they became major parliamentary parties in France and Italy and won control of many municipal governments. North Korea The Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea was established (1948) under Soviet occupation forces after World War II. The state survived the \TKorean War\t (1950-53), and its first leader, \TKim Il Sung\t, remained in power more than 35 years later, even as his son, Kim-Jong II, moved to the fore. When the Sino-Soviet conflict developed, Kim and his party had to maneuver between the two great powers: first leaning toward Moscow, then neutral, then leaning toward Peking, then independent, and then leaning again toward Peking. In domestic affairs the Korean Communists followed orthodox patterns emphasizing strict political control and giving continued priority to heavy industry. They stressed Kim's ideology of Juche, or self-reliance, and engaged in acts of hostility against the government of South Korea. Southeast Asia Communism in Vietnam became intertwined with the long struggle for national liberation from French colonial rule. The well-organized Communist party became the most effective faction in the liberation movement (\TViet Minh\t) during World War II, and by the end of the war it was the strongest political force in Vietnam. The French, seeking to reestablish their colonial rule after the Japanese withdrew, were forced to fight a long war that ended in their defeat at \TDien Bien Phu\t in 1954 and in the division of Vietnam into a Communist state in the north and an anti-Communist state in the south. In 1957 a Communist-led insurrection began in the south, leading to the \TVietnam War\t, in which the United States became heavily involved. After U.S. withdrawal in 1973, the armies of North Vietnam soon conquered (1975) South Vietnam, and a unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established on July 2, 1976. The Vietnamese Communists followed the Soviet model in their internal policies, including a single-party regime, state-owned industry, and collectivized agriculture. In foreign affairs, they aligned themselves with the \TUSSR\t and set out to establish hegemony over the other indochinese countries of Laos and Cambodia. The Laotian Communists (\TPathet Lao\t) had consolidated their power in 1975 after years of military and political struggle. Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea) had been taken over by a harsh Communist (\TKhmer Rouge\t) regime in the same year: the regime depopulated the cities and killed large numbers of Cambodians. In 1977 fighting erupted between Kampuchea, which received military aid from China, and Vietnam, which was backed by the \TUSSR\t. This culminated in 1979 in the Vietnamese conquest of Kampuchea, which in turn provoked a brief punitive invasion of Vietnam by China. By 1991, Vietnam had withdrawn its forces, the country's name was changed back to Cambodia, and the competing factions had signed a peace accord that offered hope for an end to the fighting. Cuba Communism came to Cuba after a revolution that brought Fidel \TCastro\t to power in January 1959. While at first he seemed to have only a pragmatic socialist program, Castro gradually moved leftward, expropriating the property of U.S. business firms and turning to the \TUSSR\t for economic assistance. The U.S. government tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Castro through the \TBay of Pigs invasion\t in 1961. In 1965, Castro merged his political movement with the Communist party of Cuba and followed Soviet guidance thereafter. For a time Castro sought to extend his revolution to other countries of Latin America, but the death (1967) of his former associate Che \TGuevara\t in Bolivia, where Guevara had gone to organize a guerilla movement, marked the end of that effort. All of the Western Hemisphere countries except Mexico and Canada broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in the 1960s. In the 1970s, detachments of Cuban troops and military advisors appeared in Africa, where they played a part in the civil war in Angola and assisted Ethiopia against Somalia. In 1979, Cuba hosted a conference of the nonaligned movement and renewed its efforts to establish the socialist bloc as the "natural ally" of nonaligned countries. As a result of the Soviet Union's domestic economic problems and its efforts at improved relations with the West, Soviet aid to Cuba fell dramatically from 1989 and a complete Soviet troop withdrawal and aid cut-off were announced in 1991. Cuba's dire economic condition also likely contributed to the end of its African adventures. Western Europe France and Italy emerged from World War II with large Communist parties. The French party had won popular support because of the part it played in the wartime resistance movement. In the first three decades after the war it regularly received between 20 and 26 percent of the votes cast in national elections, giving it a large bloc of seats in the National Assembly. It had strong support among industrial workers and some of the peasantry. Until the 1960s the French party supported Moscow's positions faithfully, but after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it assumed more critical positions. In 1976 it adopted a policy of "socialism in the colors of France," and in 1981, Communists were appointed to the cabinet. Nonetheless, during the 1980s the party suffered a major erosion of electoral strength, and its role in French politics became increasingly marginal. The Italian Communist party was long known for its critical attitude toward Moscow. Under the leadership (1944-64 of Palmiro \TTogliatti\t, it put forward a doctrine of "polycentrism"--meaning that there should be room for a diversity of views among Communist parties. Later, under Enrico \TBerlinguer\t (1972-84), it became politically and ideologically moderate, favoring alliances with non-Communist parties. Its political fortunes waned after 1980 as it suffered electoral losses even in its traditional strongholds in Italy's industrial north. The party's peripheral role in Italian politics was underscored in 1991 when it changed its name to the Democratic Socialist Party in an effort to gain mainstream acceptance. Eurocommunism During the 1970s leaders of the Italian, French, and Spanish Communist parties began to act together as a political bloc on the basis of common reformist concepts known as Eurocommunism. This regional unity did not last very long. Eurocommunism lost most of its political appeal and disintegrated along national lines. PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS Communism today is in retreat almost everywhere. International Communist unity has not existed for decades. The Comintern and the Cominform are now distant and, for many Communists, bitter memories. With the fall of the Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe from 1989, the end of \TComecon\t and the \TWarsaw Treaty Organization\t in 1991, and the spectacular failure of the counterrevolutionary coup in the Soviet Union later that year, the world Communist movement largely ceased to exist. Vietnam, China, and Cuba insisted that they remained committed to communist principles but even they recognized the economic hardships that such a commitment entailed. Communist ideology offered no ready solutions to the many pressing practical problems that confronted Communist governments. Foremost among these was the challenge of economic reform. The dismantling of command economies in Eastern Europe caused great disruption and socioeconomic stress. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the former East Germany, and others have begun to struggle to create the financial, political, and economic institutions that will permit them to make the transition to market economies. Even the Soviet Union applied to become a member of the International Monetary Fund, and Soviet President Gorbachev was given observer status at the 1991 economic summit meeting of the industrialized nations, a prospect unimaginable even three years earlier. Melvin Croan Bibliography: Brown, J.F., Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (1988); Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1967) and The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century (1989); Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1973); Daniels, Robert, ed., Marxism and Communism: Essential Readings (1965); Fairbank, John K., The United States and China, rev. 4th ed. (1983); Goldston, R.C., ed., Communism: A Narrative History (1972); Harding, Harry, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (1987); Koakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. (1978); Laqueur, Walter, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost (1989); Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (1988); Lowenthal, Richard, Communism: The Disintegration of a Secular Faith (1964); McLellan, David, Marxism after Marx (1980); Schwartz, B.I., Communism and China (1968); Seton-Watson, Hugh, The Imperialist Revolutionaries: Trends in World Communism in the 1960's and 1970's (1978; repr. 1985); Solomon, Richard H., Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (1971); Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The Gulag Archipelago, 3 vols. (1974-78); Timmermann, Heinz, The Decline of the World Communist Movement (1987); Volkogonov, Dmitri, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (1991); Wolfe, Bertram, Three Who Made a Revolution (1964). See also: \TChina, history of\t; \TCommunist Party, U.S.A\t.; \TRussia/Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, history of\t; \Tutopias\t.