Satellite state

• 1. Introduction

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  A satellite state has been part of the English language since as early as 1780, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That is decades before the Cold War made the phrase famous. The term was coined by analogy to astronomy, comparing a country to a small moon circling a much larger planet. Its most famous example, though, disappeared almost the instant its planet did. The Mongolian People's Republic collapsed less than two months after the Soviet Union itself dissolved. A satellite state, by definition, is only formally independent: a flag and a government with no real control over its own decisions. So what actually keeps a country in that kind of orbit, and what happens once the gravity disappears?

• 2. Whose Word Is It

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  Cuba earns the satellite state label mainly for one moment: joining Comecon, the Soviet-led economic bloc, in 1972. North Korea carries the same label especially for the years surrounding the Korean War of 1950-1953. North Vietnam picks it up for the Vietnam War. On the opposite side of that same war, South Vietnam gets the label too. It's tied to the years 1964-1973 and the American sphere of influence rather than the Soviet one.

  Central and Eastern European members of the Warsaw Pact are where the term gets used most, alongside Mongolia and Tuva between 1924 and 1990. All of those states are singled out as economically, culturally, and politically dominated by the Soviet Union. In Western usage, writers have seldom applied the phrase to any country outside that Soviet orbit.

  Soviet usage worked in the opposite direction. Moscow applied the same term to states orbiting Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, cases the West instead called client states. During wars and periods of high tension, a satellite state's location itself did work. It functioned as a buffer, separating an enemy country from the power that controlled it.

  Two of the earliest cases, Mongolia and Tuva, took shape years before the Warsaw Pact existed, born out of a revolution in 1921.

• 3. Two Early Experiments

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  In 1921, during the Mongolian Revolution, Mongolian revolutionaries expelled the Russian White Guards from the country with help from the Soviet Red Army. That fighting fell inside the wider Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, itself triggered by the October Revolution of 1917. The revolution also ended Manchurian sovereignty over Mongolia, a relationship that had existed since 1691.

  The theocratic Bogd Khanate of Mongolia nominally continued even after the revolution, surviving a series of violent power struggles while Soviet influence quietly grew stronger. The Bogd Khan died in 1924, either of laryngeal cancer or, as some sources suggest, at the hands of Soviet spies. The Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed on the 26th of November 1924. Despite being nominally independent and sovereign, it has been described as a Soviet satellite state from 1924 until 1990.

  Red Army troops occupied Tuva in January 1920. Tuva had been part of the Qing Empire of China and a protectorate of Imperial Russia. The Tuvan People's Republic was proclaimed a nominally independent state in 1921, though Moscow kept it under tight control. It is considered a satellite state of the Soviet Union until 1944, when the USSR annexed it into the Russian SFSR.

  Another early Soviet satellite in Asia, the Far Eastern Republic, existed only briefly in Siberia. Within a few decades, the same pattern of occupation and forced political consolidation would repeat itself much further west, across Central and Eastern Europe.

• 4. The Postwar Bloc

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  By the end of the Second World War, Soviet troops occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe. Those countries, together with the Soviet Union itself, made up what became known as the Soviet empire. Soviet forces stayed in place well after the fighting had stopped.

  Coalition governments that included communist parties took power first in each country. Moscow then forced out the coalition members it opposed, installing Stalinist systems one country at a time. Stalinists took control of each country's existing government, police, press, and radio outlets.

  The People's Republic of Albania held that status from 1946 to 1961. The Polish People's Republic lasted from 1947 to 1989, and the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1990. Romania's version ran from 1947 to 1965.

  Czechoslovakia's socialist republic lasted from 1948 to 1989. East Germany's German Democratic Republic ran from 1949 to 1990, and Hungary's People's Republic from 1949 to 1989.

  Two of these countries, Albania and Romania, would soon find their own way out of Soviet orbit.

• 5. Breaking Away

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  Enver Hoxha led Albania out of Soviet orbit in 1961, breaking ties with Moscow in what became known as the Albanian-Soviet split. That split followed the Soviet Union's own process of de-Stalinization, a process Hoxha's government rejected outright.

  Romania's break took longer to complete. Its de-satellization process began in 1956 and was not finished until 1965. Serious economic disagreements with Moscow pushed the country toward a final rejection of Soviet hegemony in 1964.

  Both countries had broken away years before the revolutions of 1989 swept through the rest of the bloc.

• 6. Contested Ground

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  From 1945 to 1948, North Korea operated under a Soviet Civil Administration, the first stage on its path to statehood. Provisional governments followed, organized first as the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea. That gave way to the People's Committee of North Korea. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was finally established in 1948. One count of Cold War satellite states lists North Korea's satellite years as 1948 to 1956. Some scholars extend that window further, arguing it remained a Soviet satellite until the 1958 August Faction Incident.

  The East Turkestan Republic lasted only from 1944 to 1949 before being absorbed into the People's Republic of China. For those five years, it counted as a Soviet satellite too.

  Iran hosted two satellite states of its own between 1945 and the Iran crisis of 1946. They were the Azerbaijan People's Government and the Republic of Mahabad, both inside Soviet-occupied Iranian territory.

  Afghanistan's version came decades later. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan operated as a Soviet satellite regime from 1978 to 1991. Soviet troops also occupied the country directly between 1979 and 1989.

  None of these Cold War arguments ended when the Soviet Union did. The same accusation would soon be aimed in a completely different direction.

• 7. The Word Lives On

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  William Pfaff warned that a permanent American military presence in Iraq would "turn Iraq into an American satellite state." His warning reflected a broader concern among commentators about American military and diplomatic interventions in the Balkans and the Middle East. Some worried those interventions might already be producing American satellite states of their own.

  John Pilger accused former Australian Prime Minister John Howard of turning Australia into America's 51st state.

  South Korea, meanwhile, has regularly been described by North Korea as a "puppet state" of the United States. That's the same accusation William Pfaff raised about Iraq, aimed at a different country.