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The Warsaw Pact was put in place as a consequence of the rearming of West Germany inside NATO. Soviet leaders, like many European leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain, feared Germany being once again a military power and a direct threat. The consequences of German militarism remained a fresh memory among the Soviets and Eastern Europeans.
End of most communist states. End of the Cold War; Spread of liberal democracy; End of the Soviet Union as a superpower and its dissolution on 26 December 1991; Collapse of the one-party state regimes, democratic centralism, planned economy; Socio-economic reforms in China, Laos, and Vietnam; Dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Comecon, and Eastern ...
According to the scholar Marcel H. Van Herpen, the end of the Soviet Union marked the end of the last European empire, and some authors called it the death of Russian colonialism and imperialism. [173] As the Soviet Union began to collapse, social disintegration and political instability fueled a surge in ethnic conflict. [174]
Early in the morning of 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression pact, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The pact contained a secret protocol by which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet " spheres of influence ". [ 23 ]
By the end of 1943, the Soviets occupied half of the territory taken by the Germans from 1941 to 1942. [148] Soviet military industrial output also had increased substantially from late 1941 to early 1943 after Stalin had moved factories well to the East of the front, safe from German invasion and air attack. [149]
In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression pact, but in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the largest land invasion in history, opening the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviets played a decisive role in defeating the Axis powers, suffering an estimated 27 million casualties, which accounted for most Allied ...
After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union kept most of the territories it occupied in 1939, while territories with an area of 21,275 square kilometers with 1.5 million inhabitants were returned to communist-controlled Poland, notably the areas near Białystok and Przemyśl. [12]
The pact was broken by the Soviets on September 17, 1939, when the Soviet and German jointly invaded Poland, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The pact was considered at the time as a major success of Polish diplomacy, which had been greatly weakened by the toll war with Germany, the renouncement of parts ...