How Secure was the USSR’s Control over Eastern Europe, 1948–c.1989?

• Stalin set up satellite states across Eastern Europe after WWII to create a "buffer zone" against the West and rebuild Soviet security.
• Hungary, 1956 — Imre Nagy's reforms (multi-party system, leaving the Warsaw Pact) were crushed by Khrushchev with 1,000 tanks; ~30,000 killed; Nagy executed.
• Czechoslovakia, 1968 — The "Prague Spring" under Dubcek ("socialism with a human face") was ended by a 500,000-strong Warsaw Pact invasion; led directly to the Brezhnev Doctrine.
• The Brezhnev Doctrine (1968) declared the USSR had the right to intervene in any satellite state where communism was under threat.
• The Berlin Wall (1961) was built to stop the mass refugee exodus from East to West Germany, after Khrushchev's Ultimatum (1958) failed to force the West out of Berlin.
• Solidarity in Poland (1980–81) — a trade union led by Lech Walesa with 3 million+ members forced concessions from the government, but was crushed by martial law in 1981 (with Soviet backing).
• Gorbachev (1985–91) introduced glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") to save a failing Soviet economy — but these reforms accidentally unleashed the forces that ended Communism in Eastern Europe.
• By the end of 1989, communist governments had collapsed in Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria — largely without Soviet military intervention this time.
• The USSR itself collapsed in 1991, following a failed coup against Gorbachev and the rise of Boris Yeltsin.

1Why Stalin Wanted Eastern Europe

Think of the USSR after World War Two as a country that has just survived a house fire that nearly killed it — 27,000,000 civilian and military casualties, 60 times the losses the USA suffered, and 3,000 towns and cities destroyed by Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion). Stalin's overriding goal from 1945 onwards was simple: never let that happen again.

Three separate motives fed into his takeover of Eastern Europe:

• Rebuilding & expanding power — a devastated USSR needed resources and status, and conquering territory delivered both.
• Reclaiming old imperial land — much of Eastern Europe had belonged to the 19th/20th century Russian Empire before Hitler's Lebensraum policy pushed Germany eastward. Stalin saw the Red Army's advance in 1943–45 as a chance to take it back.
• A "buffer zone" against the West — Stalin didn't trust the USA (especially after Truman kept the atomic bomb secret from him) or the containment strategy behind the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Aid. If the West ever wanted to attack the USSR, they'd have to fight through Eastern Europe first.

2The Reality of Life in the Eastern Bloc

1

2