Editing Marxism–Leninism (section)

=== Cold War, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (1944–1953) ===
{{Further|Cold War|De-Stalinization|Maoism}}
[[File:Yalta Conference (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) (B&W).jpg|thumb|left|[[Winston Churchill]], [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] and Stalin established the [[Aftermath of World War II|post-war order of the world]] with geopolitical [[spheres of influence]] under their [[hegemony]] at the [[Yalta Conference]].]]
Upon Allied victory concluding the Second World War (1939–1945), the members of the [[Grand Alliance (World War II)|Grand Alliance]] resumed their expediently suppressed, pre-war [[geopolitical]] rivalries and ideological tensions which disunity broke their [[anti-fascist]] wartime alliance through the concept of [[totalitarianism]] into the anti-communist [[Western Bloc]] and the Marxist–Leninist [[Eastern Bloc]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Brook |last=Defty |year=2007 |title=Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953 |others=Chapters 2–5 |publisher=The Information Research Department}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Siegel |first=Achim |year=1998 |title=The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment |publisher=Rodopi |pages=200 |isbn=978-90-420-0552-5 |quote=Concepts of totalitarianism became most widespread at the height of the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, especially since the Korean War, they were condensed into a far-reaching, even hegemonic, ideology, by which the political elites of the Western world tried to explain and even to justify the Cold War constellation.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Guilhot |first=Nicolas |year=2005 |title=The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order |publisher=[[Columbia University Press]] |pages=33 |isbn=978-0-231-13124-7 |quote=The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of a deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Caute |first=David |author-link=David Caute |year=2010 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |title=Politics and the Novel during the Cold War |publisher=[[Transaction Publishers]] |pages=95–99 |isbn=978-1-4128-3136-9 |access-date=24 April 2022 |archive-date=14 April 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210414175538/https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |url-status=live |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Reisch |first=George A. |year=2005 |title=How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |pages=153–154 |isbn=978-0-521-54689-8}}</ref> The renewed competition for geopolitical [[hegemony]] resulted in the bi-polar [[Cold War]] (1947–1991), a protracted state of tension (military and diplomatic) between the United States and the Soviet Union which often threatened a Soviet–American [[nuclear war]], but it usually featured [[proxy war]]s in the Third World.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Cook |editor-first=Chris |date=1998 |title=Dictionary of Historical Terms |edition=2nd |pages=69–70 |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |isbn=978-0-333-67347-8}}</ref> With the end of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War, anti-fascism became part of both the official ideology and language of Marxist–Leninist states, especially in [[Socialist Unity Party of Germany|East Germany]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Richter |first=Michael |year=2006 |chapter=Die doppelte Diktatur: Erfahrungen mit Diktatur in der DDR und Auswirkungen auf das Verhältnis zur Diktatur heute. |trans-chapter=The double dictatorship: experiences with dictatorship in the GDR and effects on the relationship to the dictatorship today. |editor1-last=Besier |editor1-first=Gerhard |editor2-last=Stoklosa |editor2-first=Katarzyna |title=Lasten diktatorischer Vergangenheit – Herausforderungen demokratischer Gegenwart |language=de |trans-title=Burdens of the dictatorial past – challenges of the democratic present |publisher=LIT Verlag |pages=195–208 |isbn=978-3-8258-8789-6}}</ref> ''[[Fascist (epithet)|Fascist]]'' and ''anti-fascism'', with the latter used to mean a general [[anti-capitalist]] struggle against the [[Western world]] and [[NATO]], became epithets widely used by Marxist–Leninists to smear their opponents, including [[democratic socialists]], [[libertarian socialists]], [[social democrats]] and other [[anti-Stalinist left]]ists.<ref>{{cite book |last=Malycha |first=Andreas |date=2000 |title=Die SED: Geschichte ihrer Stalinisierung 1946–1953 |language=de |trans-title=The SED: The History of its Stalinization |publisher=Schöningh |isbn=978-3-506-75331-1}}</ref>

The events that precipitated the Cold War in Europe were the Soviet and Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian military interventions to the [[Greek Civil War]] (1944–1949) on behalf of the [[Communist Party of Greece]];{{sfn|Kohn|2007|p=216}} and the [[Berlin Blockade]] (1948–1949) by the Soviet Union. The event that precipitated the Cold War in continental Asia was the resumption of the [[Chinese Civil War]] (1927–1949) fought between the anti-communist [[Kuomintang]] and the [[Chinese Communist Party]]. After military defeat exiled Generalissimo [[Chiang Kai-shek]] and his Kuomintang nationalist government to Formosa island ([[Taiwan]]), Mao Zedong established the [[People's Republic of China]] on 1 October 1949.{{sfn|Kohn|2007|p=121–122}}

[[File:Josip Broz Tito uniform portrait.jpg|thumb|[[Josip Broz Tito]]'s rejection in 1948 of Soviet hegemony upon the [[Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia]] provoked Stalin to expel the Yugoslav leader and Yugoslavia from the [[Eastern Bloc]].]]
In the late 1940s, the [[geopolitics]] of the Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet predominance featured an official-and-personal style of socialist diplomacy that failed Stalin and Tito when Tito refused to subordinating Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union. In 1948, circumstance and cultural personality aggravated the matter into the [[Tito–Stalin split|Yugoslav–Soviet split]] (1948–1955) that resulted from Tito's rejection of Stalin's demand to subordinate the [[Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia]] to the geopolitical agenda (economic and military) of the Soviet Union, i.e. Tito at Stalin's disposal. Stalin punished Tito's refusal by denouncing him as an ideological revisionist of Marxism–Leninism; by denouncing Yugoslavia's practice of [[Titoism]] as socialism deviated from the cause of [[world communism]]; and by expelling the [[Communist Party of Yugoslavia]] from the [[Communist Information Bureau]] (Cominform). The break from the Eastern Bloc allowed the development of a socialism with Yugoslav characteristics which allowed doing business with the capitalist West to develop the [[socialist economy]] and the establishment of Yugoslavia's diplomatic and commercial relations with countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yugoslavia's international relations matured into the [[Non-Aligned Movement]] (1961) of countries without political allegiance to any [[power bloc]].

At the death of Stalin in 1953, [[Nikita Khrushchev]] became leader of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then consolidated an anti-Stalinist government. In a secret meeting at the [[20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]], Khrushchev denounced Stalin and [[Stalinism]] in the speech ''[[On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences]]'' (25 February 1956) in which he specified and condemned Stalin's dictatorial excesses and abuses of power such as the [[Great purge]] (1936–1938) and the [[cult of personality]]. Khrushchev introduced the [[de-Stalinisation]] of the party and of the Soviet Union. He realised this with the dismantling of the Gulag archipelago of forced-labour camps and freeing the prisoners as well as allowing Soviet civil society greater political freedom of expression, especially for public intellectuals of the [[intelligentsia]] such as the novelist [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], whose literature obliquely criticised Stalin and the Stalinist [[police state]]. De-Stalinisation also ended Stalin's national-purpose policy of [[socialism in one country]] and was replaced with [[proletarian internationalism]], by way of which Khrushchev re-committed the Soviet Union to [[permanent revolution]] to realise [[world communism]]. In that geopolitical vein, Khrushchev presented de-Stalinisation as the restoration of Leninism as the state ideology of the Soviet Union.<ref>{{cite book |last=Powaski |first=Ronald E. |author-link=Ronald E. Powaski |date=1997 |title=The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 |location=Oxford |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-507851-0}}</ref>

{{Maoism sidebar}}
In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological bad news for the People's Republic of China because Soviet and Russian interpretations and applications of Leninism and orthodox Marxism contradicted the Sinified Marxism–Leninism of Mao Zedong—his Chinese adaptations of Stalinist interpretation and praxis for establishing socialism in China. To realise that leap of Marxist faith in the development of Chinese socialism, the Chinese Communist Party developed [[Maoism]] as the official state ideology. As the specifically Chinese development of Marxism–Leninism, Maoism illuminated the cultural differences between the European-Russian and the Asian-Chinese interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism in each country. The political differences then provoked geopolitical, ideological and nationalist tensions, which derived from the different stages of development, between the urban society of the industrialised Soviet Union and the agricultural society of the pre-industrial China. The theory versus praxis arguments escalated to theoretic disputes about Marxist–Leninist revisionism and provoked the [[Sino-Soviet split]] (1956–1966) and the two countries broke their international relations (diplomatic, political, cultural and economic).{{r|World History 2000. p. 769}} China's [[Great Leap Forward]], an idealistic massive reform project, resulted in [[Great Chinese Famine|an estimated 15 to 55 million deaths]] between 1959 and 1961, mostly from starvation.<ref name="nyt">{{cite news |last=Mirsky |first=Jonathan |author-link=Jonathan Mirsky |date=9 December 2012 |title=Unnatural Disaster |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/tombstone-the-great-chinese-famine-1958-1962-by-yang-jisheng.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20121207 |access-date=7 December 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121211072252/https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/tombstone-the-great-chinese-famine-1958-1962-by-yang-jisheng.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20121207 |archive-date=11 December 2012}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Holmes |first=Leslie |title=Communism: A Very Short Introduction |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |date=2009 |isbn=978-0-19-955154-5 |page=32 |quote=Most estimates of the number of Chinese dead are in the range of 15 to 30 million.}}</ref>

In Eastern Asia, the Cold War produced the [[Korean War]] (1950–1953), the first proxy war between the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, resulted from dual origins, namely the nationalist Koreans' post-war resumption of their [[Korean Civil War]] and the imperial war for regional hegemony sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Kohn|2007|p=291–292}} The international response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea was realised by the [[United Nations Security Council]], who voted for war despite the absent Soviet Union and authorised an international military expedition to intervene, expel the northern invaders from the south of Korea and restore the geopolitical ''status quo ante'' of the Soviet and American [[division of Korea]] at the 38th Parallel of global latitude. Consequent to Chinese military intervention in behalf of North Korea, the magnitude of the [[infantry]] warfare reached operational and geographic [[stalemate]] (July 1951 – July 1953). Afterwards, the shooting war was ended with the [[Korean Armistice Agreement]] (27 July 1953); and the superpower Cold War in Asia then resumed as the [[Korean Demilitarised Zone]].

[[File:John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev 1961.jpg|thumb|The [[Sino–Soviet split]] facilitated Russian and Chinese rapprochement with the United States and expanded East–West geopolitics into a tri-polar [[Cold War]] that allowed Premier [[Nikita Khrushchev]] to meet with President [[John F. Kennedy]] in June 1961.]]
Consequent to the Sino-Soviet split, the pragmatic China established politics of [[détente]] with the United States in an effort to publicly challenge the Soviet Union for leadership of the international Marxist–Leninist movement. Mao Zedong's pragmatism permitted geopolitical rapprochement and eventually facilitated President [[Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China]] which subsequently ended the policy of the existence to [[Two Chinas]] when the United States sponsored the People's Republic of China to replace the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations. In the due course of Sino-American rapprochement, China also assumed membership in the [[Security Council]] of the United Nations.{{r|World History 2000. p. 769}} In the post-Mao period of Sino-American détente, the [[Deng Xiaoping]] government (1982–1987) affected policies of [[Economic liberalism|economic liberalisation]] that allowed continual growth for the Chinese economy. The ideological justification is [[socialism with Chinese characteristics]], the Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism.<ref>{{cite book |last=Priestland |first=David |author-link=David Priestland |date=2009 |title=The Red Flag: A History of Communism |pages=502–503 |publisher=[[Grove Press]] |isbn=978-0-8021-4512-3}}</ref>