The July 23 Revolution and pacts (30). The US and the Baghdad Pact (v). Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died in early March, 1953. Nikita Khrushchev, would eventually emerge as the new Soviet leader. Ironically, the US would begin heating up tensions as Khrushchev abandoned Stalin's foreign policies, began urging negotiations in Europe and peace in Korea, and embarked upon reigning in Stalin's secret police domestically. Due to several waves of African and Asian de-colonisation following the Second World War, a world that had been dominated for over a century by Western imperialist powers was now transformed into a pluralistic world of de-colonised African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations and of surging resistance to "Yankee imperialism" in Latin America. Amid postwar de-colonisation, the Soviet Union relished in its role as the leader of the ‘anti-imperialist' camp, winning great favour in the Third World for being a stauncher opponent of colonialism than many independent nations in Africa and Asia. And it did not go unnoticed in the Third World that the so-called ‘free world' consisted by and large of North Atlantic imperialist powers. In another exercise of the new ‘rollback' polices, acting on the doctrines of Dulles, Eisenhower thwarted Soviet intervention wielding US nuclear superiority and used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow unfriendly governments. As mentioned earlier, the Eisenhower-Dulles approach did not create, but heightened, the use of covert means, invested heavily in the region. The dynamic reformist leader Khrushchev was a committed Marxist-Leninist focused on broadening Moscow's policy by establishing new relations with India and other key non-aligned, noncommunist states in the Third World. The Soviet leader boosted his nation's power by developing a hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, by launching the first earth satellite. To stabilise his European position, he created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 (to counter West German rearmament), and built the Berlin Wall in 1961. [email protected]
