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Chapter 22: Communism was a powerful force in the world of the 20th century. Modern communism which was based on the teachings of Karl Marx and later with Lennon and Stalin led to communist nations around the world including the Soviet Union and China, Cuba and many African nations. In the decades after World War II communist countries came together in the Warsaw pact which brought together  the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist states such as East Germany in a military alliance. The Western capital countries formed the NATO alliance. The Soviet Union and China signed a treaty of friendship in 1950. In Russia the communist took power in a single year 1917, when they brought down the government of Tsar Nicholas II. Everything in Russia changed as the large land holder estates were seized and became the property "people" and under the power of the state. The aristocracy was out and the common people such as the peasants and workers came into power under the leaders of the Bolshevkis led by Lennon. The Bolshevkis were able to keep Russia out of World War I by signing a peace treaty with Germany. When the communists took over there was a civil war that put down nationalists rebellions. The communists formed a huge army called the red army and also transformed the economy by industrialization. Even though the communists were hostile to the democratic western countries the Soviet Union made huge sacrifices to help defeat the Nazis. Communism did not win in China until 1949. China did not have a socialists tradition and the Chinese communists party was not founded until 1921 with sixty people. Under the leadership of Maozedong the CCP struggled against the Japanese and defeated the nationalist party which had been governing China. This party was led by Chiang Kai-shek. The CCP gained support when Japan invaded China. The CCP brought in many reforms teaching literacy, mobilizing women and reducing rents and taxes for the poor. The nationalists called the Guomindang were forced to Taiwan and Maozedong was in complete power. Chinese communism faced large tasks to make a modern society. The communism there focused on organizing peasants, promoting the equality of women and spreading literacy. In both China and the Soviet Union industrialization came through state development of heavy industry. Over time the Russian leader Stalin became more nationalistic and power was concentrated in the communist party leadership. In China, the communist party tried to bring about industrialization on a smaller scale in rural areas and its set goals in the Great :Leap Forward. China was stricken by a massive famine that killed or injured 20 million people between 1959-1962. In the period after World War II the world was divided between the communist countries and the western democracies. Communism reached into the developing world and Marxism was taken up by many of the new nations that were throwing off their colonial rulers. A "Cold War" grew between the west (NATO) and the Soviet Union (Warsaw pact). Both the United States and the Soviet Union began an arms race to build nuclear weapons. The fact that a single nuclear bomb could destroy an entire major city was one of the reason that the cold war did not become a third world war in terms of actual fighting. There were crises such as the Cuban missle crisis where the Soviets tried to deploy missles in communist Cuba. The United States became the super power of the west with a huge military and an enormous multi national economy. The US dollar was king. The Soviet Union was the communist super power but it had to control many of the other countries it had taken over such as Hungary and Poland and these started to rebel against its control. The Soviets actually invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the independence movements. In the last two decades of the 20th century communism basically came to an end. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991 and the former Soviet republics formed their own nations. In China communists thinking changed greatly at the end of the 20th century as the CCP remained in power but there were huge economic reforms that led to private property, massive urban construction and the production of huge amounts of goods that were exported to the west and the US in particular. In part this change in the goals of the party were in reaction to Maos' cultural revolution which challenged all the priviledges of the communist leadership and forced educated Chinese teachers, doctors, artists and others into reeducation camps.