.
. The Eastern Bloc was often called the
Within the
Americas the countries aligned with the Soviet Union included
Cuba since 1961 and for limited periods
Nicaragua and
Grenada.
Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc was first tested by the
1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état and the
Tito–Stalin split over the direction of the
People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the
Chinese Communist Revolution (1949) and Chinese 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
East German uprising of 1953. The break-up of the Eastern Bloc is often attributed to
Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist speech
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences in 1956. This speech was a factor in the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which the Soviet Union suppressed. The Sino–Soviet split gave
North Korea and
North Vietnam more independence from both and facilitated the
Albanian–Soviet split. The
Cuban Missile Crisis preserved the
Cuban Revolution from
rollback by the United States but
Fidel Castro became increasingly independent of Soviet influence afterwards, most notably during the 1975
Cuban intervention in Angola. In 1975, 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
People's Republic of Albania withdrawing from the
Warsaw Pact, briefly 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 later
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 resistance of
Solidarity. In the late 1980s, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev pursued policies of
glasnost (openness) and
perestroika (restructuring) to reform the Eastern Bloc and end the Cold War, which brought forth unrest throughout the bloc.
The
start of the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc can be attributed to the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary at the
Pan-European Picnic in August 1989. On November 9, 1989,
East Germany reunited with
West Germany due to the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Due to the inconsistent action of the Eastern European rulers, the bracket of the Eastern Bloc was broken. 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. In 1991, Conservative communist elites launched a
1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, which hastened the end of Marxist–Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. However, the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests in
China were violently repressed by the communist government there, which maintained its grip on power.
The term Eastern Bloc was often 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 (1944–1949), the
People's Republic of Azerbaijan, and
Republic of Mahabad (1946), 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 (from 1967), the
People's Republic of the Congo (from 1969), 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 actually 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.
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 even when the Soviet Union opposed this.
The
only surviving (pseudo)communist states are
China, Vietnam, Cuba 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 four states all adopted
economic reforms to varying degrees. China and Vietnam are usually described as more
state capitalist than the more traditionalist Cuba and Laos. The exception is North Korea, which replaced Marxism-Leninism with its nationalist ideology of
Juche.
Cambodia and
Kazakhstan are still led by the same Eastern Bloc leaders as during the Cold War, though they are not officially Marxist–Leninist states. This was previously the case in Kazakhstan's fellow
post-Soviet states of
Uzbekistan until 2016,
Turkmenistan until 2006,
Kyrgyzstan until 2005, and
Azerbaijan and
Georgia until 2003. All presidents of
post-Soviet Russia were members of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (
Boris Yeltsin before 1990,
Vladimir Putin and
Dmitry Medvedev before 1991). Azerbaijan is an
authoritarian dominant-party state and North Korea is a
totalitarian one-party state led by the
heirs of their Eastern Bloc leaders, yet both have officially eliminated mentions of communism from their constitutions. In addition, the term "New Eastern Bloc"
recently applies to countries allied with
China and Russia such as
North Korea,
Cuba,
Venezuela,
Syria,
Iran,
Belarus,
Serbia and many other countries.
