Chapter 21 pg 1035-1068 Documents 1069-1085

During the cold war decades, the Warsaw Pact brought the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist states together in military alliance designed to counter the threat from the Western capitalist countries of the NATO alliance. Although the globalization of communism found expression primarily in the second half of the twentieth century. Communist movements of the twentieth century drew on the mystique of the earlier French Revolution.

In Russia, Communist came to power and it took place within a single year. the pressure from WWI represented the catalyst for that revolution as accumulated tensions of Russian Society exploded. The next major extension of communist control occurred in East Europe in the after math of WWII.

Communism triumphed in the ancient land of China in 1949 thirty years after the Russian Revolution. Unlike Russia, the Karl Marx and his ideas were barely known in China.

Communist countries pioneered forms of women's liberation that only later were adopted in the West. Still communist style women's liberation had definite limits. In neither the Soviet Union nor China did the Communist party undertake a direct attack on male domination within the family.

The Soviet collapse represented a unique phenomenon in the world of the late twentieth century.

Stalin on Stalinism

In 1933 Stalin appeared before a group of high ranking party officials to give a report on the achievements of the countries five year plan for overall  development. The years encompassed by the plan and Stalin rose to the position of supreme leader within the governing communist party of the Soviet Union.