Creation of The Eastern Bloc
During World War II, the Soviet Union annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Most of those territories had been ceded to it by the secret agreement portion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. These later annexed territories include Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (became part of the Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR).
Several of the other countries it occupied that were not directly annexed into the USSR became Soviet satellite states. In East Germany after local election losses, a forced merger of political parties in the Socialist Unity Party ("SED"), followed by elections in 1946 where political opponents were oppressed. In the non-USSR annexed portion of Poland, less than a third of Poland's population voted in favor of massive communist land reforms and industry nationalizations in a policies referendum known as "3 times YES" (3 razy TAK; 3xTAK), whereupon a second vote rigged election was held to get the desired result. Fraudulent Polish elections held in January 1947 resulted in Poland's official transformation to the People's Republic of Poland.
In Hungary, when the Soviets installed a communist government, Mátyás Rákosi was appointed General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, which began one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe under the People's Republic of Hungary. In Bulgaria, toward the end of World War II, the Soviet Union crossed the border and created the conditions for a communist coup d'état on the following night. The Soviet military commander in Sofia assumed supreme authority, and the communists whom he instructed, including Kimon Georgiev (who was not a communist himself, but a member of the elitarian political organization "Zveno", working together with the communists), took full control of domestic politics in the People's Republic of Bulgaria.
With Soviet backing, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia in the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, ushering in a dictatorship. In the Romanian general election elections of 1946, the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) employed widespread intimidation tactics and electoral fraud to obtain 80 percent of the vote and, thereafter, eliminated the role of the centrist parties and forced mergers, the result of which was that, by 1948, most non-Communist politicians were either executed, in exile or in prison. In the December 1945 Albanian election, the only effective ballot choices were those of the communist Democratic Front (Albania), led by Enver Hoxha. In 1946, Albania was declared the People's Republic of Albania.
Initially, Stalin directed systems in the Eastern Bloc countries that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state. They were economically communist and depended upon the Soviet Union for significant amounts of materials. While in the first five years following World War II, massive emigration from these states to the West occurred, restrictions implemented thereafter stopped most East-West migration, except that under limited bilateral and other agreements.
Read more about this topic: Cold War (1947–1953)
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