I Stalin created satellite Communist states in Eastern Europe. The Chinese Communists (see CHINA), who triumphed in 1949, aided movements in Southeast Asia. U.S. opposition to these and other actions by Soviet, Chinese, and other Commmunists led to the COLD WAR, KOREAN WAR, VIETNAM WAR, and proxy wars elsewhere, particularly in Latin America and Africa. Economic difficulties, particularly shortages of food and other consumer goods, and the resurgence of NATIONALISM led to demands for reform and internal problems in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1956, 1981), and other Communist countries, and to the often violent suppression of protest. In the 1960s Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, and the Communist parties of Western and THIRD WORLD countries began to assert their independence of those two powers. Popular uprisings, economic collapse, and free elections ousted Communist governments in much of Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990, and the failed hard-line coup against Soviet Pres. GORBACHEV led to the suspension of the Communist party in the USSR and the country's subsequent disintegration in 1991. By the early 1990s traditional Communist party dictatorships held power only in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. China, Laos, Vietnam, and, to a lesser degree, Cuba have reduced state control of the economy in order to stimulate growth. Communist parties, or their descendent parties, remain politically important in many Eastern European nations, in Russia and other nations of the former USSR, and elsewhere.[See also: capitalism, socialism, ideology, egalitarianism] Comparative advantage Both communism and liberalism maintain with complete certainty that the destruction of the existing society will give birth to a new form of human existence at the least approaching utopia. They are what Daniel Chirot dubbed 'tyrannies of certitude'.A particular group of people has been responsible for blocking the happy developme...
