Ebook: From Warsaw to Sofia: A History of Eastern Europe

In the first few years after World War II, Eastern Europe became an easily defined entity. “Eastern European countries” was the prevalent ex¬ pression used to refer to the group of states directly or indirectly occupied by the Red Army during the last few months of the war. The states which subsequently became People’s or Popular Democracies were defined by Andrei Zdanov — a Soviet politician later killed during the Stalinist purges— during a meeting of the Comintern as: “states where the power belonged to the people, where major industries, transportation, and the banks belonged to the state, and where the working class was the governing authority.” Of course, Zdanov neglected to mention that the power held by the Communist parties was supported by the occupational Red Army. These states, which bordered the USSR, numbered eight and made up what was called the Soviet bloc or the Soviet satellite countries.
Defined and delimited this way, Eastern Europe essentially becomes a geopolitical concept: in Europe, but not belonging to the European community. The feeling that the West had little interest in liberating the peoples and nations of Eastern Europe became widespread. The Eastern European situation received publicity only when protests or revolutions broke out against the ruling Communist party or the occupying Soviet Army.
Eastern Europe, as we understand it throughout this work, bears little resemblance to what geographers traditionally call by that name. In fact, Eastern Europe is a political bloc which was created artificially by the superpowers at the Teheran and Yalta conferences. In his famous speech in Fulton in 1947, Winston Churchill was the first western statesman to call the boundary between the Western world and Eastern Europe the “Iron Curtain.” Although the expression is officially considered inappropriate by the governments of Western nations and has been banished from diplomatic language in the name of detente, the Iron Curtain still exists as a very real border with mine fields, watchtowers, guard dogs, and all the other paraphernalia of a police state. It covers over 1,000 miles, from East German Lubeck to Italian Trieste, from the Baltic to the Adriatic. It continues to divide two worlds in spite of increased trade and immigration—remaining a harsh reality which three million Berliners have the dubious privilege of observing every day.