ABSTRACT
Alliances with "African socialist" governments added to the strains that Russia's and China's revolutions had already placed on Marx's philosophy of history. And without communist-led multilateral institutions large and diffuse enough to accommodate these governments, unity with them was impractical. By the time that a second, "revised and enlarged" edition of The Soviet Bloc appeared in 1967, it was "difficult to exaggerate the historical significance of the Sino-Soviet conflict", and bloc members' disillusionment with African socialism had proved Brzezinski right. The seven years between the first and second editions of Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Soviet Bloc confirmed the federations' significance to Cold War history as bellwethers of "unity and conflict" in the world communist movement. Anti-communists read and wrote a great deal about some developments in the world communist movement in the early 1960s. Joseph Stalin's antipathy for congresses and conferences was noteworthy, considering how much stock the world communist movement placed in them.
