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The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was the collective term for an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were aligned with the Soviet Union and existed during the Cold War (1947–1991).
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 ...
Soviet expansion, change of Central-eastern European borders and creation of the Eastern Bloc after World War II. In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union extended its political and military influence over Eastern Europe, in a move that was seen by some as a continuation of the older policies of the Russian Empire.
The proposal not to expand NATO eastward, which was one of the ways Western countries took the initiative on the issue of German reunification and reducing the possibility of the Soviet Union's influence on this process, [12] was based on the provisions of the speech of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in Tutzing, announced on January 31, 1990. [13]
Eastern Europe after 1945 usually meant all the European countries liberated from Nazi Germany and then occupied by the Soviet army. It included the German Democratic Republic (also known as East Germany), formed by the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. All the countries in Eastern Europe adopted communist modes of control by 1948.
In 1939, the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted an invasion of Finland, [79] subsequent to which the parties entered into an interim peace treaty granting the Soviet Union the eastern region of Karelia (10% of Finnish territory), [79] and the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was established by merging the ceded territories with the ...
Organizations that the Soviet Union created in order to solidify its control over Eastern Europe, and which tied the Eastern Bloc together, included: Comecon – the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was founded in accordance with Joseph Stalin's desire to enforce Soviet domination of the lesser states of Central Europe. Initially, the ...
The Soviet Union sought an official acceptance of the state borders drawn up in post-war Europe by the United States and Western Europe. The Soviets were largely successful; some small differences were that state borders were "inviolable" rather than "immutable", meaning that borders could be changed only without military interference, or ...