During World War II, Eastern Europe was caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Several Eastern European countries–Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria–aligned themselves with the Nazis. Nazi troops overran most of the rest of Eastern Europe in the first years of the war. (Troops of Fascist Italy took over Albania.) Some Eastern Europeans joined resistance groups to fight the Nazis. The strongest forces emerged in Yugoslavia and Albania, led by communists. By the war’s end in 1945, the Soviet Union’s Red Army occupied all of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and Albania).

Shortly before Germany surrendered, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet communist dictator Joseph Stalin met at Yalta, a resort in the Soviet Union. The Allied leaders discussed terms for the German surrender and the future of Eastern Europe.

At Yalta, Stalin assured the other Allies that he would allow the people in the Soviet-occupied countries to hold free elections and choose democratic governments. With the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Churchill and Roosevelt had little choice except to take Stalin at his word. Within three years, however, well-organized and disciplined national communist parties, aided by Stalin, had taken control of Eastern Europe.

The Stalinization of Eastern Europe

At the end of the war, Eastern European countries had been devastated. Millions had been killed. Famine threatened the survivors. Unemployment and inflation demoralized the people. The Nazis and the Soviet Union had wiped out the pre-war democratic leadership. National communist parties moved quickly to fill the political vacuum.

The communists promised the people of Eastern Europe a new era of equality and economic plenty under a socialist system. Helped by Stalin, most East European communist parties made temporary alliances with non-communists until gaining control of government power centers like the national police.

The communists who had fought the Nazis in Yugoslavia and Albania were the only ones to use military force to seize power. By 1948, with the occupying Soviet Red Army always in the background, the communists had taken over the governments of eight Eastern European countries.

The communists swiftly established “People’s Democracies” in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Czechoslovakia. Eastern Germany was at first a Soviet military occupation zone, but soon became the German Democratic Republic under German communist party rule.

Stalin wanted Eastern Europe under his thumb both as a defense buffer to protect the Soviet motherland and to expand socialism, the communist economic system. He believed that “scientific laws” of history determined that the world would eventually become socialist. The Soviet Union had already developed a socialist system. Stalin, therefore, demanded that all the communist countries of Eastern Europe adopt the Soviet model.

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