in Russia occurred in the wake of the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, especially during the early 1960s under Nikita Khrushchev, but the Soviet system was largely in place within the Soviet Union and, to a modified extent, in the other Soviet bloc countries through the mid-80s.
In military terms, after being forced to retreat under the threat of a nuclear showdown with the United States in 1962 from its placement of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba, the U.S.S.R. had through a massive rearmament program achieved near parity with the United States. During the 1970s, Soviet power had been projected into many areas of the world. In much of the Third World, the West appeared to be on the defensive. All attempts by Eastern European peoples, in Hungary in
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