Question

how and why did the Soviet Union maintain control over Eastern Europe?

Answer 1

• After World War Two a Cold War developed between the capitalist Western countries and the Communist countries of the Eastern Bloc. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.
• In 1944 and 1945 the Red Army drove across Eastern Europe in its fight against the Nazis. After the war, Stalin was determined that the USSR would control Eastern Europe. That way, Germany or any other state would not be able to use countries like Hungary or Poland as a staging post to invade. His policy was simple.
• Each Eastern European state had a Communist government loyal to the USSR.
• Each state's economy was tied to the economy of the USSR.
• If Communist control was threatened, each state could use its own army or secret police, or call on the Red Army for help.
• The Warsaw Pact of 1955 bound all of the Eastern European states closely to the USSR.
• In the countries that the Red Army 'liberated', communist-dominated governments took power. The Communists made sure that they controlled the army, set up a secret police force, and began to arrest their opponents. Non-Communists were gradually beaten, murdered, executed and terrified out of power. By 1949, all the governments of Eastern Europe, except Yugoslavia, were hard line Stalinist regimes.
• Countries that were not annexed by the Soviet Union, i.e. Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary were kept under control through different means:
• Military presence. The Soviet army did not pull out completely from these countries, but stationed troops at various locations in each country, this presence allowed the Soviet Union to take almost immediate action if that was required, e.g. in the 1956 Hungarian uprising,within 24 hours local Soviet tanks and soldiers occupied key points of the city of Budapest (parliament building, bridges, etc.) The Soviet troops were finally withdrawn after the end of the Cold War.
• One party states with Soviet-allied communist parties in the government. During the late 1940’s post-war multiparty coaltion governments were crushed and ousted from power by the local Communist party in each country. These parties were loyal to the Soviet leadership, most of the top party members had spent time in the Soviet Union, knew the Soviet leadership personally, were ideologically trained and indoctrinated and were eager to prove their loyalty to the Soviet Union all the time (although some countries, like Romania were able to break out of this, even if not for the better of the people of Romania).
• This political system ensured that these countries were in line with the Soviet geostrategy for the region, and local leadership changes were made if that was necessary.
• In 1968 the Warsaw pact countries provided help to the Soviet Union to crush the Prague Spring.
• Supply of resources and goods from the Soviet Union. Most of these countries were and are fairly small and lacked key resources to keep their economy running, e.g. oil, gas, equipment. These were supplied by the Soviet Union (e.g. Druzhba oil pipeline) which ensured that pressure could be exercised if necessary, cutting these resources could have brought down the economy of these countries very soon.
• The Soviets provided nuclear technology to most of the Eastern bloc countries, the whole technology, the expertise and fuel required for operation, so these countries pretty heavily depended on the Soviet Union in their energy policies.