Warsaw Pact neighbors were the narrow Eastern Bloc core
The Eastern Bloc was an informal coalition of communist states tied to Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe. Western usage usually meant the USSR plus Warsaw Pact members—East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania—though looser talk swept in China or non-aligned targets of suspicion.
Known variously as the Communist, Soviet, Socialist or Workers Bloc, this loose grouping of Moscow-aligned states lasted through the Cold War from 1947 to 1991 and reached well beyond Europe. In Asia it counted China, North Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea and South Yemen, while Cuba anchored it in the Americas. The broadest usage, overlapping with the phrase Second World, even took in brief wartime satellites such as the Second East Turkestan Republic, the People's Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. Western governments also tarred some Non-Aligned states with the label.
Membership was never tidy. Yugoslavia broke with Stalin in 1948, joined neither Comecon nor the Warsaw Pact, and helped found the Non-Aligned Movement. Albania stopped taking part in bloc activities in 1961, quit the pact in 1968 and left Comecon in 1987, and Romania kept its participation in the pact limited after 1964. The narrowest definition keeps only the pact states plus Mongolia, the satellites Moscow controlled most tightly, while Cuba stood out for resisting full Soviet direction.
The core was born in 1922, when Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Transcaucasian federation signed the treaty creating the USSR; Stalin cast it as a socialist island surrounded by capitalism. Under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a secret protocol carved eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres. Two weeks after Germany struck western Poland, Soviet troops occupied the east and dismantled the Polish state. In mid-June 1940 NKVD forces raided Baltic border posts, and single-candidate elections with fabricated results followed. A failed 1939 attack on Finland still won Moscow about a tenth of Finnish territory in Karelia.
Germany's invasion on 22 June 1941 placed the annexed lands under its Ostland administration until 1944, when Soviet offensives drove the Wehrmacht west and Finland again ceded the eastern territories. Allied conferences from 1943 to 1945 debated the postwar order in Central Europe, with Stalin seeking as many states under Soviet control as possible and Churchill favouring a different arrangement.
Source: Eastern Bloc
