section_path: History/Cold War
section_name: Cold War
paragraph_text: Cold War
  
  Its leading role in World War II saw the emergence of the industrialized Soviet Union as a superpower. Marxist–Leninist governments modeled on the Soviet Union took power with Soviet assistance in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. A Marxist–Leninist government was also created under Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia; Tito's independent policies led to the Tito–Stalin split and expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948, and Titoism was branded deviationist. Albania also became an independent Marxist–Leninist state following the Albanian–Soviet split in 1960, resulting from an ideological fallout between Enver Hoxha, a Stalinist, and the Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev, who enacted a period of de-Stalinization and re-approached diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia in 1976. The Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong, established the People's Republic of China, which would follow its own ideological path of development following the Sino-Soviet split. Communism was seen as a rival of and a threat to Western capitalism for most of the 20th century.
  
  In Western Europe, communist parties were part of several post-war governments, and even when the Cold War forced many of those countries to remove them from government, such as in Italy, they remained part of the liberal-democratic process. There were also many developments in libertarian Marxism, especially during the 1960s with the New Left. By the 1960s and 1970s, many Western communist parties had criticized many of the actions of communist states, distanced from them, and developed a democratic road to socialism, which became known as Eurocommunism. This development was criticized by more orthodox supporters of the Soviet Union as amounting to social democracy.
  
  Since 1957, communists have been frequently voted into power in the Indian state of Kerala.
  
  In 1959, Cuban communist revolutionaries overthrew Cuba's previous government under the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, ruled Cuba from 1959 until 2008.