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For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed. [28] In the other countries of the Bloc, Stalin stated that the Eastern European version of democracy was a mere modification of western "bourgeois democracy."
The War Communism period (1918–1921) which saw the forming of the International, the Russian Civil War, a general revolutionary upheaval after the October Revolution resulting in the formation of the first communist parties across the world and the defeat of workers' revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary, Finland and Poland.
By the end of World War II, most of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union in particular, suffered vast destruction. [9] The Soviet Union had suffered a staggering 27 million deaths, and the destruction of significant industry and infrastructure, both by the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Soviet Union itself in a "scorched earth" policy to keep it from falling in Nazi hands as they advanced over 1,600 ...
In the mid-1980s, Communist Czechoslovakia was prosperous by the standards of the Eastern Bloc, and did well in comparison to many richer western countries.Consumption of some goods like meat, eggs and bread products was even higher than the average countries in Western Europe, and the population enjoyed high macroeconomic stability and low social friction. [1]
Before World War II, no greater than 1%–2% of those countries' trade was with the Soviet Union. [174] By 1953, the share of such trade had jumped to 37%. [ 174 ] In 1947, Joseph Stalin had also denounced the Marshall Plan and forbade all Eastern Bloc countries from participating in it.
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, (Czech and Slovak: Československá socialistická republika, ČSSR) [a] known from 1948 to 1960 as the Czechoslovak Republic, [b] Fourth Czechoslovak Republic, or simply Czechoslovakia, was the Czechoslovak state from 1948 until 1989, when the country was under communist rule, and was regarded as a satellite state in the Soviet sphere of interest.
By the end of 1989, revolts had spread from one capital to another, ousting the regimes imposed on Central, South-East and Eastern Europe after World War II. Even the isolationist Stalinist regime in Albania was unable to stem the tide.
Judt first presents the immediate aftermath of World War II, with Europe as a "battered, broken, helpless continent". [9] The second part of Postwar follows the development of Europe into socio-economic stability and eventual prosperity, with a focus on European integration. Judt argues that the conditions for this development were created by ...