the first nation in the western hemisphere to fall to communism
History of Western civilization One major event that nearly brought the world to the brink of war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the 1950s a revolution in Cuba had brought the only Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere to power. In 1962, the Soviets began constructing missile sites in Cuba and sending nuclear missiles. Because of its close proximity to the U.S., the U.S. demanded the Soviets withdraw missiles from Cuba. The U.S. and Soviet Union came very close to attacking one another, but in the end came to a secret agreement in which the NATO withdrew missiles in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba.
History of communism At the start of the 20th century, the Russian Empire was an autocracy controlled by Tsar Nicholas II, with millions of the country's largely agrarian population living in abject poverty and the anti-communist historian Robert Service noted that "poverty and oppression constituted the best soil for Marxism to grow in".[34] The man responsible for largely introducing the ideology into the country was Georgi Plekhanov, although the movement itself was largely organised by a man known as Vladimir Lenin, who had for a time been exiled to a prison camp in Siberia by the Tsarist government for his beliefs.[35] A Marxist group known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in the country, although it soon divided into two main factions: the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and the Mensheviks led by Julius Martov. In 1905, there was a revolution against the Tsar's rule, in which workers' councils known as "soviets" were formed in many parts of the country and the Tsar was forced to implement democratic reform, introducing an elected government, the Duma.[36]