ncert books notes free

GORBACHEV AND THE DISINTEGRATION Mikhail Gorbachev , who had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 , sought to reform this system. Reforms were necessary to keep the USSR abreast of the information and technological revolutions taking place in the West. However, Gorbachev's decision to normalize relations with the West and democratize and reform the Soviet Union had some other effects that neither he nor anyone else intended or anticipated. The people in the East European countries which were part of the Soviet bloc started to protest against their own governments and Soviet control. Unlike in the past, the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, did not intervene when the disturbances occurred, and the communist regimes collapsed one after another. These developments were accompanied by a rapidly escalating crisis within the USSR that hastened its disintegration. Gorbachev initiated the policies of economic and political reform and democratization wit...

CHALLENGE TO BIPOLARITY We have already seen how the Cold War tended to divide the world into two rival alliances. It was in this context that nonalignment offered the newly decolonized countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America a third option-not to join either alliance. The roots of NAM went back to the friendship between three leaders - Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito. India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser - who held a meeting in 1956. Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah strongly supported them. These five leaders came to be known as the five founders of NAM. The first non-aligned summit was held in Belgrade in 1961.  This was the culmination of at least three factors: (1) cooperation among these five countries. (2) growing Cold War tensions and its widening arenas, and (3) the dramatic entry of many newly decolonized African countries into the inter- national arena. By 1960, there were 16 new African members in the UN . The firs...