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Did The Red Army Really Liberate Any Country From Nazi Control

Why did the soviets try to control other european countries?

The satellite nations were the countries of Eastern Europe that were liberated by the Soviets from the Nazis and then had communist governments imposed on them; Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

There are three main reasons for their establishment.
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 border 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)

What nations did the Soviet Union gain political control of after the Red Army freed them from the Nazi's?

The area known as the soviet bloc. This includes almost all the land between modern russia and the current german government but also including large areas until the 1989 these countries include Poland,Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania Albania and Yugoslavia.These are the most non-ethnically russian areas that the Soviet union liberated that were later taken over

After World War II, why did the Soviet leaders argue that their country should have political and economic control over Eastern Europe?

They didn’t argue. They mostly acted. Almost every big enough power – and even small countries – wants to grow. And so did the Soviet Union.The question is whether it was able to achieve that outcome. And it was. It was able because it liberated most of the Central and Eastern Europe from the Nazis. So the Red Army really occupied them for a while – while being welcome by most of the population – which gave Moscow some tools to affect the territories.The liberation also gave them the political capital. That’s why the transition of the other soon-to-be-communist countries to communism was mostly “voluntary”. Huge fractions of voters loved the Soviet Union for its role in the war, lots of workers and others got enthusiastic about communism at that time.So the communism was mostly a system of “domestic production”. The USSR mainly had the influence because it was the largest communist country. But all the countries were comparably communist and the processes that established communism in all the countries were similar to each other and to the coup in Russia. They were not just “import” from the Soviet Union.Soviet agents could have helped here or there but most of the job was done by very specific communists in the smaller nations who had existed for decades before 1945 and they just had a better opportunity to achieve their old goals in 1945 – and later: the creation of the Soviet bloc was only completed in 1948 and 1949 when Czechoslovakia and East Germany became totalitarian communist countries.To summarize, it’s not really true that the expanding influence of the Soviet Union was guaranteed by arguments – more brute force weapons are usually being used when history is being changed. And it’s not really true that the transformation was masterminded in Moscow – it was mostly made by each nation separately.

Were the Poles happy when the Russians liberated them?

Tl;dr: No. The Poles were definitely NOT happy when they were re-occupied by the Soviets in 1945. But they were VERY happy to liberate themselves in 1990.Wikipedia:“The anti-communist resistance in Poland, also referred to as the Polish anti-Communist insurrection fought between 1944 and 1946 (and up until 1953), was an armed struggle by the Polish Underground against the Soviet takeover of Poland at the end of World War II in Europe. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the resistance movement formed during the war, included an array of military attacks launched against Communist prisons, state security offices, detention facilities for political prisoners, and prison camps set up across the country by the Stalinist authorities.In January 1945, the pro-Soviet government installed in Poland by the advancing Red Armydeclared as "illegal" the Polish anti-Nazi resistance movement, principally the Home Army or the Armia Krajowa, and ordered its surviving members to come out into the open while guaranteeing them freedom and safety. Many underground fighters decided to lay down their arms and register, but after doing so, most of them were arrested and thrown in prison. Thousands of them were tortured and later deported into the Soviet Gulag camp system, or tried by Kangaroo courts and murdered out of sight after extreme beatings (see, the Uroczysko Baran killing fields among similar others).As a result of repression, Armia Krajowa (AK) members quickly stopped trusting the new government, and some of them regrouped in a clandestine manner in order to oppose the new Soviet occupiers. They formed various post-AK resistance organisations, such as Wolność i Niezawisłość ("Freedom and Sovereignty"), and liberated hundreds of political prisoners. They became known as the "Cursed soldiers" of the Polish underground, and most were eventually captured or killed by the security services and special assassination squads”The Poles rose in revolt again in 1956, starting with the Poznan Riots in June. These were violently suppressed by Soviet Army tanks.

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