Boris Yefimov
Boris Yefimovich Yefimov was a Soviet political cartoonist best known for his critical political caricatures of Adolf Hitler and other Nazis produced before and during the Second World War, was the chief illustrator of the newspaper Izvestia. During his 90-year career he produced more than 70,000 drawings. Yefimov was born in Kiev as the second son of a Jewish shoemaker, his father was Haim Movshevich Fridlyand. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Białystok, where he grew up alongside his older brother Mikhail. During the First World War, his family fled the advancing German armies and returned to Kiev, where he pursued legal studies, he began to express his emotions through caricatures of politicians, the first of which were published in 1919 and circulated in the Kievian Red Army. From 1920 to 1921, Yefimov designed posters and brochures for the communist organisation Agitprop moving to Moscow in 1922 after his brother, who worked as an editor for Pravda, offered him a job drawing political cartoons.
His artistic talent, directed against the West, gained him prominence, his work started appearing in such titles as Izvestia and Ogonyok, a magazine founded by his brother Mikhail Koltsov. The year 1924 saw the publication of his first book, Political Cartoons, which included a foreword by Leon Trotsky. In 1937 Boris Efimov covered the Show Trials and drew cartoons against people like Nikolay Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. During this period Efimov drew political cartoons against those he had admired within the Soviet leadership. Following the war, Yefimov traveled to the Nuremberg Trials with the task of caricaturing the Nazi defendants, he was ordered to poke fun at the Western powers in what was transforming into the Cold War. He went on to become the chief editor of Agitprop, cooperated with Pravda until the 1980s, he published an autobiography, Moy Vek, for his centennial, resided in Moscow. Yefimov received the USSR State Prizes in 1950 and 1951 and was named People's Painter of the USSR in 1967.
In 2002 he became chief of the Political Propaganda Department of the Russian Academy of Arts. In a 2005 interview with Russian TV, Yefimov recalled his experiences in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution, admitting that he had changed his real name in order to dissimulate his Jewish origins. On September 28, 2007, his 107th birthday, he was appointed to the post of the chief artist of the Izvestia newspaper. In 2008, Yefimov was still working writing memoirs and drawing friendly cartoons, he was active in public life: he attended memorials and anniversary meetings and other functions up until his death in Moscow on October 1, 2008, only three days after what was reported as his 108th birthday. Boris Yefimov is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. Yefimov was married twice, his first wife was Rosaliya Borisovna Koretskaya. After his death he left one son, Efimov Mikhail Borisovitch, a grandson, two great grandchildren. Yefimov was a cousin of journalist Semyon Fridlyand. Norris, Stephen. "Cartoon allies".
Russia Beyond the Headlines. Retrieved April 2, 2010. List of Soviet poster artists 1998 Interview for Red Files, a PBS Documentary Three days before his death Picture at 107 At his 107th birthday At his 107th birthday Photos through his life 1 Photos through his life 2 Метрическая книга Киевского раввината за 1900 год, рождение // ЦГИАК Украины. Ф. 1164. Оп. 1. Д. 454. Л. 435об—436. Запись 721
Moscow
Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits, 17 million within the urban area and 20 million within the metropolitan area. Moscow is one of Russia's federal cities. Moscow is the major political, economic and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city on the European continent. By broader definitions, Moscow is among the world's largest cities, being the 14th largest metro area, the 18th largest agglomeration, the 14th largest urban area, the 11th largest by population within city limits worldwide. According to Forbes 2013, Moscow has been ranked as the ninth most expensive city in the world by Mercer and has one of the world's largest urban economies, being ranked as an alpha global city according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, is one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in the world according to the MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index. Moscow is the coldest megacity on Earth.
It is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe. By its territorial expansion on July 1, 2012 southwest into the Moscow Oblast, the area of the capital more than doubled, going from 1,091 to 2,511 square kilometers, resulting in Moscow becoming the largest city on the European continent by area. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, making it Europe's most populated inland city; the city is well known for its architecture its historic buildings such as Saint Basil's Cathedral with its colorful architectural style. With over 40 percent of its territory covered by greenery, it is one of the greenest capitals and major cities in Europe and the world, having the largest forest in an urban area within its borders—more than any other major city—even before its expansion in 2012; the city has served as the capital of a progression of states, from the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow and the subsequent Tsardom of Russia to the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union and the contemporary Russian Federation.
Moscow is a seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, a medieval city-fortress, today the residence for work of the President of Russia. The Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament sit in the city. Moscow is considered the center of Russian culture, having served as the home of Russian artists and sports figures and because of the presence of museums and political institutions and theatres; the city is served by a transit network, which includes four international airports, nine railway terminals, numerous trams, a monorail system and one of the deepest underground rapid transit systems in the world, the Moscow Metro, the fourth-largest in the world and largest outside Asia in terms of passenger numbers, the busiest in Europe. It is recognized as one of the city's landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. Moscow has acquired a number of epithets, most referring to its size and preeminent status within the nation: The Third Rome, the Whitestone One, the First Throne, the Forty Soroks.
Moscow is one of the twelve Hero Cities. The demonym for a Moscow resident is "москвич" for male or "москвичка" for female, rendered in English as Muscovite; the name "Moscow" is abbreviated "MSK". The name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river. Finno-Ugric Merya and Muroma people, who were among the several Early Eastern Slavic tribes which inhabited the area, called the river Mustajoki, it has been suggested. The most linguistically well grounded and accepted is from the Proto-Balto-Slavic root *mŭzg-/muzg- from the Proto-Indo-European *meu- "wet", so the name Moskva might signify a river at a wetland or a marsh, its cognates include Russian: музга, muzga "pool, puddle", Lithuanian: mazgoti and Latvian: mazgāt "to wash", Sanskrit: májjati "to drown", Latin: mergō "to dip, immerse". In many Slavic countries Moskov is a surname, most common in Bulgaria, Russia and North Macedonia. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa.
The original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. As with other nouns of that declension, it had been undergoing a morphological transformation at the early stage of the development of the language, as a result the first written mentions in the 12th century were Московь, Moskovĭ, Москви, Moskvi, Москвe/Москвѣ, Moskve/Moskvě. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, a result of morphological generalisation with the numerous Slavic ā-stem nouns. However, the form Moskovĭ has left some traces in many other languages, such as English: Moscow, German: Moskau, French: Moscou, Georgian: მოსკოვი, Latvian: Maskava, Ottoman Turkish: Moskov, Tatar: Мәскәү, Mäskäw, Kazakh: Мәскеу, Mäskew, Chuvash: Мускав, etc. In a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed it became a collo
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred on 26 December 1991 granting self-governing independence to the Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was a result of the declaration number 142-Н of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union; the declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States, although five of the signatories ratified it much or did not do so at all. On the previous day, 25 December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the USSR, declared his office extinct and handed over its powers—including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes—to Russian President Boris Yeltsin; that evening at 7:32 p.m. the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. From August to December all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had either seceded from the union or at the least denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR.
The week before formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol formally establishing the CIS and declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist. Both the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR marked the end of the Cold War. Several of the former Soviet republics have retained close links with the Russian Federation and formed multilateral organizations such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, Eurasian Economic Community, the Union State, the Eurasian Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union to enhance economic and security cooperation. On the other hand, the Baltic states have joined the European Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on March 11, 1985, three hours after predecessor Konstantin Chernenko's death at age 73. Gorbachev, aged 54, was the youngest member of the Politburo, his initial goal as general secretary was to revive the Soviet economy, he realized that doing so would require reforming underlying political and social structures.
The reforms began with personnel changes of senior Brezhnev-era officials who would impede political and economic change. On April 23, 1985, Gorbachev brought two protégés, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, into the Politburo as full members, he kept the "power" ministries happy by promoting KGB Head Viktor Chebrikov from candidate to full member and appointing Minister of Defence Marshal Sergei Sokolov as a Politburo candidate. This liberalization, fostered nationalist movements and ethnic disputes within the Soviet Union, it led indirectly to the revolutions of 1989, in which Soviet-imposed socialist regimes of the Warsaw Pact were toppled peacefully, which in turn increased pressure on Gorbachev to introduce greater democracy and autonomy for the Soviet Union's constituent republics. Under Gorbachev's leadership, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1989 introduced limited competitive elections to a new central legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies. In May 1985, Gorbachev delivered a speech in Leningrad advocating reforms and an anti-alcohol campaign to tackle widespread alcoholism.
Prices of vodka and beer were raised, intended to discourage drinking by increasing the cost of liquor. A rationing program was introduced, where citizens were assigned punch cards detailing how much liquor they could buy in a certain time frame. Unlike most forms of rationing, adopted as a strategy to conserve scarce goods, this was done to restrict sales with the overt goal of curtailing drunkenness. Gorbachev's plan included billboards promoting sobriety, increased penalties for public drunkenness, censorship of drinking scenes from old movies; this mirrored Tsar Nicholas II's program during the First World War, intended to eradicate drunkenness in order to bolster the war effort. However, that earlier effort was intended to preserve grain for only the most essential purposes, which did not appear to be a goal in Gorbachev's program. Gorbachev soon faced the same adverse economic reaction to his prohibition; the disincentivization of alcohol consumption was a serious blow to the state budget according to Alexander Yakovlev, who noted annual collections of alcohol taxes decreased by 100 billion rubles.
Alcohol sales migrated to the black market and moonshining became more prevalent as some made "bathtub vodka" with homegrown potatoes. Poorer, less educated Soviets resorted to drinking unhealthy substitutes such as nail-polish remover, rubbing alcohol, or men's cologne, resulting in an additional burden on Russia's healthcare sector due to the increased poisoning cases; the underlying purpose of these reforms was to prop up the existing command economy, in contrast to reforms, which tended toward market socialism. On July 1, 1985, Gorbachev promoted Eduard Shevardnadze, First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, to full member of the Politburo, the following day appointed him minister of foreign affairs, replacing longtime Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; the latter, disparaged as "Mr Nyet" in the West, had served for 28 years as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Gromyko was relegated to the ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, as he was considered an "old thinker".
On July 1, Gorbachev sidelined his main rival by removing Grigory Romanov from the Politburo and he brought Boris Yeltsin and Lev Zaikov into the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat. In the fall of 1985, Gorbachev continued to bring more energetic men into government. On September 27, 55-year-ol
Petrograd Soviet
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was a city council of Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire. For brevity, it is called the Petrograd Soviet; the soviet was established in March 1917 after the February Revolution as a representative body of the city's workers and soldiers, while the city had its well established city council, the Saint Petersburg City Duma. During the revolutionary days, the council tried to extend its jurisdiction nationwide as a rival power center to the Provisional Government, creating what in Soviet historiography is known as the Dvoyevlastiye, its committees were key components during the Russian Revolution and some of them led the armed revolt of the October Revolution. Before 1914, Petrograd was known as Saint Petersburg, in 1905 the workers' soviet called the St Petersburg Soviet was created, but the main precursor to the 1917 Petrograd Soviet was the Central Workers' Group, founded in November 1915 by the Mensheviks to mediate between workers and the new Central Military-Industrial Committee in Petrograd.
The group became radical as World War I progressed and the economic situation worsened, encouraging street demonstrations and issuing revolutionary proclamations. On January 27, 1917 the entire leadership of the Central Workers' Group was arrested and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the orders of Alexander Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior in Imperial Russia, they were freed by a crowd of disaffected soldiers on the morning of February 27, the beginning of the February Revolution, the chairman convened a meeting to organize and elect a Soviet of Workers' Deputies that day. That evening, between 300 people attended the meeting at the Tauride Palace. A provisional executive committee was chosen, named "Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies" and chaired by Nikolay Chkheidze, with Menshevik deputies.. Izvestia was chosen as the official newspaper of the group; the following day, February 28, was the plenary session. Non-representative voting and enthusiasm gave the Soviet 3,000 deputies in two weeks, of which the majority were soldiers.
The meetings were chaotic and unruly, little more than a stage for speechmakers. The party-based Ispolkom took charge of actual decision-making. Nikolay Chkheidze, March 12 – September 19, 1917 Leon Trotsky, 25 September 1917. – 26 October 1917 Grigory Zinoviev, December 13, 1917 – March 26, 1926 The members of the Executive Committee, called Ispolkom, came only from political groups, with every socialist party given three seats. This created an intellectual and radical head to the peasant-, worker-, soldier-dominated body; the Executive Committee meetings were more intense and as disorderly as the public meetings, were extremely long. On March 1, the Executive Committee resolved to remain outside any new State Duma; this allowed the group to criticize without responsibility, kept them away from any potential backlash. On March 2, the Soviet received the eight-point program of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, appointed an oversight committee, issued a decidedly conditional statement of support.
Moreover, the Soviet undermined the Provisional Government by issuing its own orders, beginning with the seven-article Order No. 1. The Soviet was not opposed to the war – internal divisions produced a public ambivalence–but was worried about counterrevolutionary moves from the military, was determined to have garrison troops on its side. Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee Committee on Revolutionary Defense The Petrograd Soviet developed into an alternate source of authority to the Provisional Government under Georgy Lvov and Alexander Kerensky; this created a situation described as dvoevlastie, in which the Petrograd Soviet competed for legitimacy with the Provisional Government until the October Revolution. The Ispolkom of the Petrograd Soviet publicly attacked the Provisional Government as bourgeois and boasted of its de facto power over de jure authority. A "shadow government" with a Contact Commission was created on March 8 to "inform... about the demands of the revolutionary people, to exert pressure on the government to dissatisfy all these demands, to exercise uninterrupted control over their implementation."
On March 19, the control extended into the military front lines with commissars appointed with Ministry of War support. In March 1917, the Petrograd Soviet was opposed to the workers, which protested its deliberations with strikes. On March 8, the Menshevik newspaper Rabochaia Gazeta claimed that the strikers were discrediting the soviet by disobeying it; the Ispolkom expanded to 19 members on April 8, nine representing the Soldiers' Section, ten the Workers' Section. All members were the majority Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries. After the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Petrograd Soviet began adding representatives from other parts of Russia and the front lines, renaming itself
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, library directors who wanted to create a cooperative computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio; the group first met on July 5, 1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization, hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, to design the shared cataloging system.
Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the world's information in order to best serve researchers and scholars; the first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data. Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.
As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic and full-text information to anyone. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from private libraries worldwide; the Open WorldCat program, launched in late 2003, exposed a subset of WorldCat records to Web users via popular Internet search and bookselling sites.
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was phased out; the Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users; this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. Starting in 1971, OCLC produced catalog cards for members alongside its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, such as CONTENTdm for managing digital collections.
It offers the bibliographic discovery system WorldCat Discovery, which allows for library patrons to use a single search interface to access an institution's catalog, database subscriptions and more. OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications; these publications, including journal articles, reports and presentations, are available through the organization's website. OCLC Publications – Research articles from various journals including Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Research, Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries News, Art Libraries Journal, National Education Association Newsletter; the most recent publications are displayed first, all archived resources, starting in 1970, are available. Membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding. Newsletters – Current and archived newsletters for the library and archive community.
Presentations – Presentations from both guest speakers and OCLC research from conferences and other events. The presentations are organized into five categories: Conference presentations, Dewey presentations, Distinguished Seminar Series, Guest presentations, Research staff
Beslan school siege
The Beslan school siege started on 1 September 2004, lasted three days, involved the illegal imprisonment of over 1,100 people as hostages, ended with the deaths of at least 334 people. The crisis began when a group of armed Islamic militants Ingush and Chechen, occupied School Number One in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia on 1 September 2004; the hostage-takers were the Riyad-us Saliheen, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who demanded recognition of the independence of Chechnya, Russian withdrawal from Chechnya. On the third day of the standoff, Russian security forces stormed the building with the use of tanks, incendiary rockets and other heavy weapons; as of December 2006, 334 people were killed, including 186 children. The event led to security and political repercussions in Russia; as of 2016, aspects of the crisis in relation to the militants continue to be contentious: questions remain regarding how many terrorists were involved, the nature of their preparations and whether a section of the group had escaped.
Questions about the Russian government's management of the crisis have persisted, including allegations of disinformation and censorship in news media, whether the journalists who were present at Beslan were allowed to report on the crisis, the nature and content of negotiations with the terrorists, allocation of responsibility for the eventual outcome, perceptions that excessive force was used. The European Court of Human Rights in a 2017 ruling criticized Russia for not taking sufficient precautions before the event, for using excessive lethal force when concluding the siege which violated the "right to life". School № 1 was one of seven schools in Beslan, a town of around 35,000 people in the republic of North Ossetia–Alania, in Russia's Caucasus; the school, located next to the district police station, had around 60 teachers and more than 800 students. Its gymnasium, where most of the hostages were held for 52 hours, was a recent addition, measuring 10 metres wide and 25 metres long. There were reports that men disguised as repairmen had concealed weapons and explosives in the school sometime during July 2004, something the authorities denied.
However, several witnesses have since testified they were made to help their captors remove the weapons from the caches hidden in the school. There were claims that a "sniper's nest" on the sports hall roof had been set up in advance; the attack on the school took place in 2004 on 1 September—the traditional start of the Russian school year, referred to as "First Bell" or Knowledge Day. On this day, the children, accompanied by their parents and other relatives, attend ceremonies hosted by their school; because of the Knowledge Day festivities, the number of people in the schools was higher than on a normal school day. Early in the morning, a group of several dozen armed Islamic-nationalist guerrillas left a forest encampment located in the vicinity of the village of Psedakh in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, east of North Ossetia and west of war-torn Chechnya; the terrorists wore green military camouflage and black balaclava masks, in some cases were wearing explosive belts and explosive underwear.
On the way to Beslan, on a country road near the North Ossetian village of Khurikau, they captured an Ingush police officer, Major Sultan Gurazhev. Gurazhev escaped after reaching the town and went to the district police department to inform them that his duty handgun and badge were taken away. At 09:11 local time, the terrorists arrived at Beslan in a GAZelle police van and a GAZ-66 military truck. Many witnesses and independent experts claim that there were, in fact, two groups of attackers, that the first group was at the school when the second group arrived by truck. At first, some at the school mistook the guerrillas for Russian special forces practicing a security drill. However, the attackers soon began shooting in the air and forcing everybody from the school grounds into the building. During the initial chaos, up to 50 people managed to alert authorities to the situation. A number of people managed to hide in the boiler room. After an exchange of gunfire against the police and an armed local civilian, in which one attacker was killed and two were wounded, the militants seized the school building.
Reports of the death toll from this shoot-out ranged from two to eight people, while more than a dozen people were injured. The attackers took 1,100 hostages; the number of hostages was downplayed by the government to 200–400, for an unknown reason announced to be 354. In 2005, their number was put at 1,128; the militants herded their captives into the school's gym and confiscated all their mobile phones under threat of death, ordered everyone to speak in Russian and only when spoken to. When a father named Ruslan Betrozov stood to calm people and repeat the rules in the local language, Ossetic, a gunman approached him, asked Betrozov if he was done, shot him in the head. Another father named Vadim Bolloyev, who refused to kneel, was shot by a captor and bled to death, their bodies were dragged from the sports hall, leaving a trail of blood visible in the video made by the hostage-takers. After gathering the hostages in the gym, the attackers singled out 15–20 of whom they thought were the strongest adults among the male teachers, school employees, fathers, an
Eastern Bloc
The Eastern Bloc was the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and Southeast Asia under the hegemony of the Soviet Union during the Cold War in opposition to the capitalist Western Bloc. In Western Europe the term Eastern Bloc referred to the USSR and its East European satellite states in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In the Americas, the communist bloc included the Caribbean Republic of Cuba, since 1961. Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc was tested by the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état and the Tito–Stalin Split over the direction of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Chinese Communist Revolution and China's participation in the Korean War. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Korean War ceased with the 1954 Geneva Conference. In Europe, anti-Soviet sentiment provoked the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany; the break-up of the Eastern Bloc began in 1956 with Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.
This speech was a factor in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The Sino–Soviet Split 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 independent of Soviet influence afterwards, most notably during the 1975 Cuban intervention in Angola. That year, the communist victory in former French Indochina following the end of the Vietnam War gave the Eastern Bloc renewed confidence after it had been frayed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring; this led to the Socialist People's Republic of Albania withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact 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 socialist states. In response, China moved towards the United States following the Sino-Soviet border conflict and reformed and liberalized its economy while the Eastern Bloc saw the Era of Stagnation in comparison with the capitalist First World.
The Soviet–Afghan War nominally expanded the Eastern Bloc, but the war proved unwinnable and too costly for the Soviets, challenged in Eastern Europe by the civil resistanceof Solidarity. In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pursued policies of glasnost and perestroika 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 dissolve at the end of 1991. Conservative communist elites launched a 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, which hastened the end of Marxist–Leninist rule in Eastern Europe; the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China were violently repressed by the communist government there, which maintained its grip on power. Although the Soviet Union and its rival the United States considered Europe to be the most important front of the Cold War, the term Eastern Bloc was 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 the Second East Turkestan Republic, the People's Republic of Azerbaijan and Republic of Mahabad, as well as the Marxist–Leninist states straddling the Second and Third Worlds before the end of the Cold War: the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the People's Republic of the Congo, the People's Republic of Benin, the People's Republic of Angola and People's Republic of Mozambique from 1975, the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada from 1979 to 1983, the Derg/People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1974 and the Somali Democratic Republic from 1969 until the Ogaden War in 1977. Many states were accused by the Western Bloc of being in the Eastern Bloc when they were part of the Non-Aligned Movement; the most limited definition of the Eastern Bloc would only include the Warsaw Pact states and the Mongolian People's Republic as former satellite states most dominated by the Soviet Union.
However, North Korea was subordinate before the Korean War and Soviet aid during the Vietnam War enabled Vietnam to dominate Laos and Cambodia until the end of the Cold War. Cuba's defiance of complete Soviet control was noteworthy enough that Cuba was sometimes excluded as a satellite state altogether, as it sometimes intervened in other Third World countries when Moscow opposed this; the only surviving communist states are China, Cuba, North Korea and Laos. Their state socialist experience was more in line with decolonization from the Global North and anti-imperialism towards the West instead of the Red Army occupation of the former Eastern Bloc; the five surviving socialist states all adopted economic reforms to varying degrees. China and Vietnam are described as more state capitalist than the more traditionalist Cuba and Laos and the more Stalinist North Korea. Cambodia and Kazakhstan are still led by the same Eastern Bloc leaders as during the Cold War, though they are not Marxis
