that it established in the parts of Eastern Europe its army occupied in 1945. After eliminating capitalism and its advocates, it linked them to the USSR in terms of economics through Comecon and later the military through the Warsaw Pact. In 1948, relations with Yugoslavia disintegrated over mutual distrust between Stalin and Tito. A similar split happened with Albania in 1955. Like Yugoslavia and Albania, China was never controlled by the Soviet Army. The Kremlin wavered between the two factions fighting the Chinese Civil War, but ultimately supported the winner, Mao Zedong. Stalin and Mao both supported North Korea in its invasion of South Korea in 1950. But the United States and the United Nations mobilized the counterforce in the Korean War (1950–53). Moscow provided air support but no ground troops; China sent in its large army that eventually stalemated the war. By 1960, disagreements between Beijing and Moscow had escalated out of control, and the two nations became bitter enemies in the contest for control of worldwide communist activities. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States reached an all-time high during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Soviet missiles were placed on the island of Cuba well within range of US territory as a response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and to deter more US attacks. This was retrospectively viewed as the closest the world ever came to a nuclear war. After the crisis was resolved, relations with the United States gradually eased into the 1970s, reaching a degree of détente as both Moscow and Beijing sought American favor. In 1979, a socialist government took power in Afghanistan but was hard-pressed and requested military help from Moscow. The Soviet army intervened to support the socialists, but found itself in a major confrontation. The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States was fiercely anti-Soviet, and mobilized its allies to support the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The goal was to create something akin to the Vietnam War which would drain Soviet forces and morale. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he sought to restructure the Soviet Union to resemble the Scandinavian model of western social democracy and thus create a private sector economy. He removed Soviet troops from Afghanistan and began a hands-off approach in the USSR's relations with its Eastern European allies. This was well