Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Ural Mountains stand as the eastern edge of Europe, yet the western boundary of Eastern Europe remains a ghost, shifting across maps and minds like a shadow at dusk. This region is not defined by a single line on a chart but by a century of competing definitions, from the Enlightenment's cultural constructs to the Cold War's Iron Curtain.
The Great Schism of 1054 severed the Christian world into two distinct halves, creating a religious cleavage that would define Eastern Europe for nearly a millennium. While Western Europe fell under the influence of the Catholic Church and later Protestantism, the eastern territories developed cultural unity within the framework of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The abolition of serfdom in Russia not occurring until 1861. Emancipation meant that ex-serfs paid for their freedom with annual cash payments to their former masters for decades, and the lack of industrialization during the long 19th century further set the region apart as Russia remained largely rural and agricultural.
Winston Churchill, in his well-known Sinews of Peace address of the 5th of March 1946, stressed the geopolitical impact of the Iron Curtain. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, working in collaboration with local communists, created secret police forces using leadership trained in Moscow to arrest political enemies according to prepared lists.
In 1991, COMECON, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union were dissolved. Many European nations that had been part of the Soviet Union declared or regained their independence, including Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
Between 2004 and 2013, all of them joined the European Union. The average government debt in the countries is nearly 44%, but the deviation is great, with the lowest figure close to 10% and the highest at 97%, and the inflation rate relatively quickly dropped to below 5% by 2000.