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Hello. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 181, Red Star Over Tokyo, Part 6.

In 1991, the global Marxist movement experienced its biggest shake-up since 1917.

In that year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics imploded, to be replaced by a new constellation of independent republics and a new Russian state substantially reduced in influence,

for a time time at least.

The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union are manifold, complex, and mostly unrelated to the topic of this podcast.

For us, the most important thing to think about is how this sudden sea change in the political situation influenced the global communist movement.

All around the world, communist parties which had relied on Soviet support or built themselves on the Soviet model, began to question themselves.

Some entrenched communist parties, like that of Vietnam, were able to reinvent themselves along new lines, in the Vietnamese

case, as a sort of left-leaning nationalist party.

Others simply faded into obscurity, both because of a lack of Soviet support, and because now

...