(USSR, known as the Soviet Union), and governed by communist parties,
from the late 1940s until the wave of anti-communist revolutions between
1989 and 1991 (seedemocratic transitions). It included for certain the
major Central and South-Eastern European countries of Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and what was the German Demo-
cratic Republic, or ‘East Germany’, until German reunification in 1990. It
could more loosely be used to cover Albania and Yugoslavia; however, Albania
in time became more of a Chinese satellite, particularly between 1960 and
1972, while Yugoslavia followed a very independent line under Tito; these two
countries were not guaranteed to side with the USSR on many issues, this
being the effective test of membership of the bloc. In particular Yugoslavia
played no role in the USSR’s war plans for theWarsaw Pact. An alternative
definition might be to take membership ofCOMECON(technically the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—CMEA), set up by Moscow in
1949 and which developed into the Soviet bloc’s version of theEuropean
Union. Such a definition would also place Cuba in the bloc which, though
geographically odd, makes quite good political sense. As COMECON was
originally intended byStalinto be used as a force to bring the over-
independent Yugoslavs to heel, this definition would exclude the most
autonomous of Soviet wartime acquisitions.
It was MikhailGorbachev’srenunciation of the Brezhnevdoctrine,
which had justified Soviet interventions in domestic politics to prop up
orthodox communist rule, such as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia
in 1968, that opened the first major cracks in the bloc. As the USSR was forced
to agree to major conventional force cuts in Europe for economic and
diplomatic reasons, the long-held hatred of the populations of these countries
boiled over into amazingly rapid, and largely non-violent,revolutionswhich
swept away all the trappings of communist rule in a period of little more than
two years.
Stalin
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was a
Georgian peasant by origin who rapidly rose to power in theBolshevik
movement before and after the Russian Revolution. By the early 1920s he
was close to the centre of power, then wielded byLenin, and benefited from
Lenin’s suspicion of other communist leaders, includingTrotsky, so that he
was able to use his 1922 appointment as general secretary of the communist
party to gradually take ultimate power after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin
ruled the Soviet Union, his power increasing all the time, from then until his
death in 1953. For the latter part of his reign, especially after the mid-1930s,
Stalin