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Ways of the World: A Global History
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Western Heritage Since 1300, AP Edition
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Terms in this set (19)
• An elastic concept of enemy came to include not only surviving remnants of the old prerevolutionary elites but also, and more surprisingly, high-ranking members and longtime supporters of the Communist Party who had allegedly been corrupted by bourgeois ideas. Refracted through the lens of Marxist thinking, these people became class enemies who had betrayed the
revolution and were engaged in a vast conspiracy, often linked to foreign imperialists, to subvert the socialist enterprise and restore capitalism.
• In an effort to combat capitalism and instill socialist values in society, communist regimes promoted the Communist Party's penetration of all levels of society in ways that some Western scholars
have called totalitarian. As part of this process, the state came to control almost the entire economy; ensured that the arts, education, and the
media conformed to approved ways of thinking; and controlled mass organizations for women, workers, students, and various professional groups.
• While many aspects of their experiences were similar, one critical difference was that, in the Soviet Union, the growth of a privileged bureaucratic and technological elite was largely accepted, whereas in China under Mao Zedong there were recurrent attempts, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution, to combat these tendencies and revive the revolutionary spirit.
• As part of this process, Mao pushed several reforms, including the promotion of small-scale rural industrialization over urban industrialization, of widespread technical education, and of an immediate transition to communism in the "people's communes."
• The experiences of the Soviet Union and China also diverged dramatically after the mid-1970s, when Soviet communism failed to reform and ultimately collapsed
completely, while Chinese communism reformed more slowly and without completely collapsing.
• In 1917, Russia became the first country to embrace communism.
• Communism also came to China, Eastern Europe, and the northern part of Korea in the wake of World War II.
• First the northern portion of Vietnam and then, after 1975, the whole of Vietnam became communist.
• Communist parties took power in Laos and Cambodia in the mid-1970s.
• Cuba
moved toward communism after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
• A shaky communist regime took power in Afghanistan in 1979, propped up briefly by the Soviet Union.
• After World War II, communist political parties also had influence in a number of nations, including Greece, France, and Italy.
• There was a small communist party in the United States that became the focus of an intense wave of fear and repression in the 1950s.
• Revolutionary communist movements threatened
established governments in the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, Bolivia, Peru, and elsewhere.
• A number of African nations in the 1970s proclaimed themselves Marxist for a time and aligned with the Soviet Union in international affairs.
• In the Soviet Union, the communist government declared full legal and political equality for women.
• Marriage became a civil procedure among freely consenting adults.
• Divorce was legalized and made easier, as
was abortion.
• Illegitimacy was abolished.
• Women no longer had to take their husbands' surnames.
• Pregnancy leave for employed women was mandated.
• Women were actively mobilized as workers in the country's drive to industrialization.
• The party set up a special organization called Zhenotdel (Women's Department), whose radical leaders, all women, pushed a decidedly feminist agenda in the 1920s by organizing conferences for women, training women to run day-care centers
and medical clinics, publishing newspapers and magazines aimed at a female audience, providing literacy and prenatal classes, and encouraging Muslim women to take off their veils.
• In China, the Marriage Law of 1950 was a direct attack on patriarchal and Confucian traditions, decreeing free choice in marriage; relatively easy divorce; the end of concubinage and child marriage; permission for widows to remarry; and equal property rights for women.
• The Chinese Communist Party also
launched a Women's Federation, a mass organization that enrolled millions of women, although its leadership was less radical than that of Zhenotdel.