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In the closing months of World War II and the latter half of 1940s, the Soviet Union oversaw the establishment of Communist regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Over the next four decades, these regimes constituted the so-called Soviet bloc. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe is often referred to as The Iron Curtain - a name given by Winston Churchill in 1946. Although from 1947 to 1951, Marshal Plan injected billions of US dollars into European nations for post-war rebuilding, these loans came with strict conditions, such as the adoption of liberal, democratic and capitalist policies. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet regime forbade access to the financial aid, which enabled the reconstruction of Western Capitalist Europe, while advancing American commercial and foreign policy interests. In the context of the Cold War, the Marshall Plan helped weak and war-ravaged governments and economies to recover, without falling prey to communist infiltration and being swallowed by the Soviet bloc.
====The initial entrenchment and spread of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe====
The emergence and consolidation of Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe proceeded at varying rates but at somewhat rather fast pace. In Yugoslavia and Albania the indigenous Communist parties led by Josip Tito, Enver Hoxha had obtained a good deal of political advantage and military strength through their participation in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. Tito’s and Hoxha’s partisan armies had also fought against their domestic rivals throughout the war and were able to gain control of their countries as the fighting and fire ceased. In Romania Nicolae Ceaushescu was also a passionate follower of the Communist regime and forcedly induced King Michael to abdicate. Once in power, they quickly acted to establish Stalinist regimes and declare “People’s Republics” that closely mirrored the Soviet system turning them into Soviet satellites.<ref>The Iron Curtain: License to plunder -http://alphahistory.com/coldwar/iron-curtain/#sthash.uaBWkuOL.dpuf</ref>
In the eastern zone of Germany, the Soviet occupation forces and administrators did not move immediately after the war to establish a Communist system. From the beginning, however, the Soviet occupation authorities took a number of steps that ensured they would eventually gain preeminent power. Soviet forces also methodically continued to dismantle industrial facilities and transfer them to the USSR. By the time the Soviet rule formally established the East German State in October 1949, also known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a Soviet-style politburo was firmly entrenched in East Berlin. Stalin by that point had largely abandoned any further hope of creating a unified German polity and had overcome his ambivalence about the desirability of setting up a Communist system in GDR.
Elsewhere in the region – in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – events followed a more gradual pattern. Local communists who had spent many years in the Soviet Union returned to their native countries after World War II and worked jointly with fellow communists who had stayed at home during the war and had taken part in the anti-Nazi German resistance. In all three countries, the resurgent Communist parties played a leading role in the formation of what initially were broad coalition governments that carried out extensive land redistribution and other long overdue economic and political reforms. However, the Soviet system kept the reform process under tight Communist control. Unsurprisingly, the ruling regimes did exclusively granted all of the higher key positions in the ministry of internal affairs to various Communist party members only. From those posts, they could oversee the purging of the local police forces and armies, the execution of alleged “collaborators”, the control and censorship of the mass media, and the intimidation and ouster of non-Communist ministers and legislators. <ref>Mark Kramer, Stanford Edu, Stalin, Soviet policy, and the consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe: http://fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/evnts/media/Stalin_and_Eastern_Europe.pdf</ref>
Moscow decisively secured and strengthened its role in the Communization of the region in September 1947 by the establishment of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), a body responsible for biding together the East European Communist parties under the exclusive leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Stalin himself inspired the establishment of the Cominform driven and motivated by his growing conviction that the East European states must conform to his own harsh methods of dictatorial rule. Stalin’s determination to prevent any further “contamination” from the West in the USSR necessitated the Stalinization of Eastern Europe.
The final step in the establishment of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe came with the seizure of power by the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. From that point on, “People’s Democracies” allied with the Soviet Union were in place all over Eastern Europe. The Soviet power in the region was now firmly entrenched.
==Further changes introduced: transformations billed as reforms==
