ABSTRACT
The period between the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Czechoslovak ‘events’ of 1968 was a difficult one for the rulers of eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, despite its technological achievements in space, suffered a number of major setbacks; so too did Moscow’s east European allies. There were serious defeats for Soviet foreign policy in central and western Africa, in the six day war of 1967, and above all in the humiliation of Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. At the same time there were ideological discomforts. Despite the marxist-leninist prediction that the capitalist states would inevitably fly at each others’ throats and would equally inevitably impoverish their working classes, western Europe moved towards a significantly higher level of economic and political cooperation and enjoyed a seemingly unbreakable rise in living standards in all levels of society, whilst the Japanese showed that recovery from the devastation of war could be achieved outside the framework of marxismleninism. And it was the communist world which was fragmenting, most dramatically with the Sino-Soviet split.
