Eastern Bloc

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eastern Bloc was an unofficial coalition of communist states that stretched from Central and Eastern Europe across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, bound together by alignment with the Soviet Union and existing from 1947 until 1991. At its broadest, the term encompassed not just the Warsaw Pact nations but short-lived satellites like the People's Republic of Azerbaijan, which existed for less than a year in 1945-1946, and far-flung allies from Cuba to Vietnam. How did a loose ideological alignment harden into one of the defining geopolitical structures of the twentieth century? What did it mean to live inside it, to be governed by it, to try to leave it? And when the Soviet Union finally instructed a young East German communist that "it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control", what exactly did that control look like in practice?

• 2. How the Bloc Was Built

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  In 1939, the USSR entered the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, a deal that contained a secret protocol dividing Romania, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Lithuania was added to the Soviet sphere in a second secret protocol in September of that same year. Soviet NKVD troops raided Baltic border posts in mid-June 1940, liquidated local state administrations, and installed Soviet cadres in their place. Elections were then held with single candidates listed, and the official results were fabricated to show approval rates of 92.8 percent in Estonia, 97.6 percent in Latvia, and 99.2 percent in Lithuania. The fraudulently installed assemblies immediately declared each country a Soviet Socialist Republic and requested admission into the Soviet Union; the formal annexation followed in August 1940. The international community condemned these annexations as illegal.

  After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Eastern Front consumed those same territories until Soviet forces pushed westward. From 1943 to 1945, a series of Allied conferences shaped what would come after. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill viewed Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a "devil"-like tyrant. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a different view, reasoning that if he gave Stalin "everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace." At the February 1945 Yalta conference, the parties agreed that liberated European countries would be allowed to create democratic institutions of their own choice, with free elections to follow. The 1946 Polish "Three Times Yes" referendum and the subsequent 1947 Polish parliamentary election did not meet democratic standards and were largely manipulated.

• 3. The Machinery of Control

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  Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk was summoned to Moscow and berated by Stalin personally for considering joining the Marshall Plan in 1947. That episode illustrated how Soviet control worked in practice: overt intimidation against any hint of independence, combined with rewards for compliance. Polish Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz received a five-year trade agreement including $450 million in credit, 200,000 tons of grain, heavy machinery, and factories in return for rejecting the Plan. Stalin ordered Eastern Bloc countries to withdraw from the July 1947 Paris Conference on the European Recovery Programme, an event described as "the moment of truth" in the post-war division of Europe.

  After Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito split with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in June 1948, Stalin converted the Cominform into an instrument to monitor and control the internal affairs of other Eastern Bloc parties. Soviet cadres were instructed to foster intra-leadership conflict and transmit information against party members to one another. In Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had made pro-Yugoslav statements, was deposed as party secretary-general in early September 1948 and subsequently jailed. In Bulgaria, Traicho Kostov, who was not a Moscow cadre, was arrested on Stalin's orders in June 1949, sentenced to death, and executed. Stalin and Hungarian leader Matyas Rakosi met in Moscow to orchestrate a show trial of Rakosi's opponent Laszlo Rajk, who was then executed.

  Even the Berlin Blockade had its origins in democratic defiance: in local elections of October 1946, Berliners had rejected the Soviet-backed Socialist Unity Party in favor of the Social Democratic Party by a margin of two and a half to one. Stalin instituted the blockade on the 24th of June 1948, cutting off food, materials, and supplies to West Berlin. The United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries responded with a massive airlift; 300,000 Berliners demonstrated in support of it. Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.

• 4. Living Under the System

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  Parliamentary meetings in Eastern Bloc countries occurred only a few days per year, convened only to rubber-stamp decisions made by rulers. So little attention was paid to parliaments that some members serving were actually dead, and officials openly stated they would seat members who had lost elections. The first or General Secretary of the central committee in each communist party was the most powerful figure in each country. Party membership was restricted to between three and fourteen percent of the population, but those who secured membership received considerable rewards: access to special shops stocking confections, alcohol, cigars, cameras, and televisions; special schools; holiday facilities; homes; permission to travel abroad; and official cars with distinct license plates so police could identify them at a distance.

  Political police became the core of each system, their names synonymous with raw power and the threat of violent retribution. The Soviet Union had the KGB; East Germany maintained the Stasi, Volkspolizei, and KdA; Czechoslovakia operated the STB and LM; Romania deployed the Securitate and GP; Hungary relied on the AVH and Munkasorseg. The press served as an organ of the state. Before the late 1980s, radio and television organizations were state-owned across the Bloc, while print media was usually owned by political organizations. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, known as TASS, was frequently infiltrated by Soviet intelligence agencies including the NKVD and GRU. Western countries invested in powerful transmitters enabling services such as the BBC, VOA, and Radio Free Europe to be heard in the Bloc despite jamming attempts.

  Religion was actively suppressed under state atheism, with both the peoples and their national churches targeted by the Soviets. Housing conditions were severe: for all countries for which data existed, 60 percent of dwellings had a density of greater than one person per room between 1966 and 1975, against an average of approximately 0.5 persons per room in western countries. Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu's systematization program in the 1970s and 1980s demolished entire hamlets, villages, and historic city centers to make way for standardized apartment blocks. He built the Centrul Civic of Bucharest, which contains the Palace of the Parliament, in place of the former historic center.

• 5. Economics of Shortage

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  Between 1945 and 1953, the Soviets received a net transfer of resources from the rest of the Eastern Bloc under a plunder policy of roughly $14 billion, an amount comparable to the net transfer from the United States to western Europe in the Marshall Plan. Romanian reparations to the Soviets between 1944 and 1948 were valued at $1.8 billion. Before World War II, no greater than one to two percent of Eastern Bloc countries' trade was with the Soviet Union; by 1953, that share had jumped to 37 percent.

  Central planning steered investment overwhelmingly toward heavy industry, even when countries lacked the basic prerequisites. Every country, including Albania, built steel mills regardless of whether they possessed the requisite energy or mineral ores. A massive metallurgical plant was built in Bulgaria even though its ores had to be imported from the Soviet Union and then transported 320 kilometers from the port at Burgas. A Warsaw tractor factory in 1980 maintained a 52-page list of unused, rusting equipment. The wait list for a Trabant automobile in East Germany was ten years in 1987, and up to fifteen years for a Soviet Lada or a Czechoslovak Skoda car.

  The deficiencies drove parallel economies. Black and gray markets for foodstuffs, household goods, medical supplies, clothes, furniture, cosmetics, and toiletries flourished throughout the Bloc. In Romania, Kent cigarettes functioned as an unofficial, extensively used currency for buying goods and services. Special hard-currency stores inaccessible to most citizens operated under names like Intershop in East Germany, Beryozka in the Soviet Union, Pewex in Poland, Tuzex in Czechoslovakia, Corecom in Bulgaria, and Comturist in Romania. By the mid-1970s, budget deficits rose considerably and domestic prices widely diverged from world prices, while production prices averaged two percent higher than consumer prices.

• 6. Emigration and the Wall

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  Russia restricted emigration as early as 1917 by instituting passport controls, and by 1928, even illegal departure from the Soviet Union had been effectively made impossible through border controls combined with internal passport requirements and residence permits. After the Eastern Bloc was established, emigration out of newly occupied countries was effectively halted in the early 1950s.

  East Germany proved the most dramatic exception. The Inner German border between occupied zones provided a route west, and hundreds of thousands used it: 197,000 in 1950, 165,000 in 1951, 182,000 in 1952, and 331,000 in 1953. The sharp increase in 1953 was driven in part by fear of further Sovietization following Joseph Stalin's increasingly paranoid actions in late 1952 and early 1953. By the first six months of 1953 alone, 226,000 had fled. The Berlin city sector borders remained accessible because all four occupying powers administered them, creating what amounted to a loophole. The 3.5 million East Germans who had left by 1961, known as Republikflucht, represented approximately 20 percent of the entire East German population. In August 1961, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that was eventually expanded into the Berlin Wall.

  Between 1950 and 1990, more than 75 percent of those who emigrated from Eastern Bloc countries did so under bilateral agreements for ethnic migration. About 10 percent were refugee migrants under the Geneva Convention of 1951. Most Soviets allowed to leave during this period were ethnic Jews permitted to emigrate to Israel after a series of embarrassing defections in 1970 caused the Soviets to open very limited ethnic emigrations. Among the famous defectors was Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter, who denounced her father after her 1967 defection.

• 7. Space and Science

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  In April 1967, the Soviet space program founded the Interkosmos program to increase cooperation in space exploration among Soviet-aligned socialist nations, though it also included crew members from non-aligned nations such as India. The first crewed Interkosmos flight lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 2nd of March 1978, carrying Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Gubarev and Czech cosmonaut Vladimir Remek to the Salyut 6 Space Station. The pair occupied the station for seven days before returning to Earth on the 10th of March. That Soyuz-28 mission was the first crewed spaceflight to include a crew member from neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. From 1967 to 1991, the Soviet Union launched 18 Interkosmos missions, drawing crew from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, and Romania.

  Back on the ground, the world's first nuclear power plant was commissioned on the 27th of June 1954 in Obninsk. In 1975, the number of scientific personnel in the USSR amounted to one-fourth of the total number of scientific personnel in the world. That concentration of talent also brought catastrophe: the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukrainian SSR was caused by an irresponsible safety test, operators who lacked a basic understanding of the reactor's processes, and an authoritarian bureaucracy that had consistently promoted incompetent personnel and chosen cheapness over safety. The resulting fallout forced the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people, leaving behind a vast Zone of alienation filled with extensive, still-standing abandoned urban development.