“Eastern Europe” is a moving cultural border, not a mountain line
Eastern Europe is an ambiguous subregion whose east hits the Urals while its west shifts with politics, religion, and stereotype. Slavic traditions and Eastern Orthodox Christianity historically stamped much of the zone; critics call the label pejorative and prefer Central and Eastern Europe.
Narrow definitions, which treat Central and South-East Europe as separate, count only Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Broad ones add Moldova and Romania, the Baltic states, the Visegrád countries, the Caucasus and most of the Balkans apart from Greece and East Thrace. Either way Russia is the largest and most populous member. In the east the Urals, the Ural River and the Caucasus mark the edge of the continent, which is why the westernmost strip of Kazakhstan, beyond the Ural River, counts as European.
The western edge is a matter of history, religion and culture rather than landforms, and it has moved over time, which also makes the continent's midpoint hard to fix. One scholar joked that there are almost as many definitions as there are specialists, and a UN paper calls every regional identity a social and cultural construct. The idea of an Eastern Europe hardened mainly during the French Enlightenment.
Its cultural identity grew from Slavic traditions and Eastern Christianity as shaped by Byzantium and the Ottomans. After the schism of 1054, much of the region drew together around the Orthodox Church, Church Slavonic and the Cyrillic script, in opposition to Catholic lands further west. Alcuin of York's ninth-century notion of Europe as a cultural sphere covered only Western Christian territory, and many Orthodox lands were left out of that sense of European until the early nineteenth century.
The Cold War added another meaning: the communist states of the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc behind the Iron Curtain. Because the label can imply that the region is poorer or less developed than the West, some prefer the more neutral Central and Eastern Europe.
Source: Eastern Europe
