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The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), ... Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and from 1955 to 1964 in Albania. [197] ...
Eastern Bloc politics followed the Red Army's occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the Soviet Union's installation of Soviet-controlled Marxist–Leninist governments in the region that would be later called the Eastern Bloc through a process of bloc politics and repression.
The existence of a somewhat independent political structure and Czechoslovakia's initial absence of stereotypical Eastern Bloc political and socioeconomic systems began to be seen as problematic by Soviet authorities. [68] While parties outside the "National Front" were excluded from the government, they were still allowed to exist. [67]
Czechoslovakia is the only former Eastern Bloc state that had an entirely peaceful breakup. In the following years, as Slovakia's economy struggled, Slovaks began to describe the dissolution as a "sandpaper divorce". [6]
Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka—party leaders of East Germany and Poland, respectively—viewed liberalism as threatening to their own positions. The Soviet Union agreed to bilateral talks with Czechoslovakia to be held in July at Cierna nad Tisou, Slovak-Soviet border. At the meeting, Dubček defended the program of the reformist ...
Unlike the Czechoslovakian section of the Iron Curtain, whose main function was to prevent citizens of the Eastern Bloc escaping to the West, the purpose of these border fortifications was defence against possible German revanchist aggression and later also against possible attack by NATO forces.
After World War II, Czechoslovakia was reestablished under its pre-1938 borders, with the exception of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of the Ukrainian SSR (a republic of the Soviet Union). The Communist Party seized power in a coup in 1948. From 1948 to 1989, Czechoslovakia was part of the Eastern Bloc with a planned economy.
Accordingly, before 1961, most of that east–west flow took place between East and West Germany, with over 3.5 million East Germans emigrating to West Germany before 1961, [56] [57] which comprised most of the total net emigration of 4.0 million emigrants from all of Central and Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1959. [58]