Why did Stalin want to control eastern Europe after world war II?
There are three main reasons for Stalin wanting to control Eastern Europe: 1) Russia has historically had no secure border. There are no great rivers, no mountains, no deserts no seas that separate her from her potentially war-like neighbours. This fear of invasion, and the idea of buying time through land (Russia, when invaded has often allowed the enemy to invade, then, when their supply lines are overstretched, they counter-attack) is one of the reasons that Russia became so big. As former order towns become consolidated into the Russian political landscape, so does the need to push the border further away from the heartland. After the devastation faced in the Soviet Union in WWII the Soviets wanted to push the border as far away from Kiev, from Moscow & Minsk as they could. 2) They wanted to set up satellite countries because they could. The Red Army had conquered the territory at great expense and the Soviet leadership was unwilling to simply withdraw - allowing Western style governments to push right up to her borders. 3) The Yalta Agreement between FDR, Churchill & Stalin had laid out the spheres of influence that each of the Allied countries would have, and the satellite countries all fell under the Soviet sphere. Some further reasons: The Soviets had a different view of democracy to the one in the West. The Soviets argued that as the Communist party represented the people and was of the people, it was an inherently democratic form of government. There was also Marxist ideology behind it. Marx claimed that the Communist Revolution was inevitable - especially in highly industrialised and advanced Germany. The Soviets saw it as their mission to export the revolution to other countries - especially Germany. The Soviets saw what the Western Allies were doing in Western Europe as no different to what they were doing - establishing governments based on models of the victors' own governments. And one final reason was to prevent a unified Germany from being a threat to the Soviet Union ever again. See: The Captive Nations - Patrick Brogan (it's a simplistic overview of the histories of the countries under Communist domination in Europe after the war)
After World War II, Soviet domination of eastern Europe was most directly the result of the?
The Red Army feared no evil, because it was the meanest SOB in the valley! Also, after the war, neither the United States nor other Western nations wanted or could afford to maintain the force levels which a dictatorship can accomplish by decree, so instead we opted for smaller ground forces backed by nuclear weapons. The Soviets decided to counter this nuclear threat, and the result was the arms race and the Cold War. This continued until American dominance in electronics allowed us to spend the Soviet Union into the ground -- they could not duplicate cheaply what we could produce on a massive scale, which obliged them to commit ever more resources to the military, which eventually broke the bank.
Why was the Eastern Bloc created during the Cold War?
What was the purpose of the Eastern Bloc? I need help for my project I need to write like a 1-2 sentence summary of each vocabulary word but I'm stuck on Eastern Bloc.I've looked in my textbook and online and have found no helpful information.So far I have written:"The formation of the Eastern Bloc began in 1944 because..." please help?
Did communism collapse in Europe after the cold war?
It was the other way round....communism collapsed in East Europe 1989-1990...so the Cold War ended 1991...due to the collapse of communism in east Europe and Russia. Soviet communism in Russia and Soviet communist occupation of East Europe was what caused the 'Cold War' and what it was all about. As soon as communist occupation of East Europe and communism ended the Cold War could end. P.S. About the rest of the world...as soon as communism collapsed in East Europe and Russia (1989-1990) and there was no longer a Cold War between the US and Russia (1991) the worlds other communist countries threw in the towel and dropped/ or very much modified communism too except for goofy North Korea.