How China and Poland took on the Soviet Union, 1956-1960

About this Event

Stalin expanded communist power across Eurasia, from Berlin to Pyongyang, linking disparate territories into a single geopolitical organism under his dictatorial control. Three years after his death, in 1956, a backlash of pent up political and economic anger overthrew Stalinism and shook the foundations of the Eastern Bloc, as communist regimes almost fell in Poland and Hungary. Four years later, the intercontinental communist bloc built by Stalin fractured when People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union went their separate ways in the acrimonious Sino Soviet split. Those two momentous events in the history of the Cold War are rarely linked. The paper I present seeks to fill that gap and rewrite the history of the late 1950s as a single process of grappling with…

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