Challenges to communist power

The late Stalin era made the Soviet Union into the military and technological superpower for which industrialisation and the victory in the Second World War had laid the foundations. While the territorial expansion of the Soviet Union into eastern Europe, the success of communist movements worldwide from China in 1949 to Vietnam and Cuba in the 1950s, and military and technological successes such as the H-bomb and the launch of Sputnik in 1957 testified to growing strength, communist power was challenged by an impressive return to diversity, especially in eastern Europe. This chapter argues that despite the failure to overcome communist power, the revolutionary events in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1980 produced authority vacuums that entailed new symbolisations as markers of certainty, which became the spiritual foundations of democracy.

Explanations of communism's collapse that are sensitive to the past have argued that all regimes that ended peacefully were fully integrated into the Soviet bloc. Due to the centralised control of domestic militaries by the Soviet centre, Gorbachev's policy of non-intervention at the end of the 1980s prevented power incumbents from using military force in defence of their power. By contrast, all the countries that experienced violence during the collapse of communist party hegemony were either completely outside the bloc (Albania), associated with it but not a full member (Yugoslavia), or a member in ‘poor standing’ (Romania).