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The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was 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).
Stalin presented the theory of socialism in one country as a further development of Leninism based on Lenin's aforementioned quotations. In his 14 February 1938 article titled Response to Comrade Ivanov, formulated as an answer to a question of a "comrade Ivanov" mailed to Pravda newspaper, Stalin splits the question in two parts. The first ...
The Soviet invasion of these areas in 1939 created local allies and produced NKVD officers experienced in imposing the communist system. The Soviet Union began planning the transformation of Eastern Europe even before the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. There is evidence that the USSR did not expect to create a communist bloc quickly or easily.
Communism was decisively defeated in other states, including Malaya and Indonesia. In 1972–1979, there was détente between the Soviet Union and the United States. The end of communism in Europe (1980–1992) in which Soviet client states were heavily on the defensive as in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. The United States escalated the conflict ...
But Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them.
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 September 1947, a meeting of East European communist leaders established Cominform to co-ordinate the Communist Parties across Eastern Europe and also in France and Italy. [516] Stalin did not personally attend the meeting, sending Andrei Zhdanov in his place. [464] Various East European communists also visited Stalin in Moscow. [517]
Knowing that the main resistance force in Greece was the Communist-dominated EAM (Ethnikó Apeleftherotikó Metopes-National Liberation Front), British policy was to support EAM as a way to tie down German forces that might otherwise fight against the British, but at the same time to prevent EAM from coming to power and ensure that the Greek ...