page_title: Eastern Bloc
section_title: Social conditions
hierarchical_section_title: Eastern Bloc / Economies / Social conditions
caption_attribution_description: English: Vitosha, an early Bulgarian computer (1960s). Български: Български компютър "Витоша", 1960-те
context_page_description: The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, the Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia under the hegemony of the Soviet Union that existed during the Cold War in opposition to the capitalist Western Bloc. In Western Europe, the term Eastern Bloc generally referred to the USSR and its satellite states in the Comecon; in Asia, the Soviet Bloc comprised the Mongolian People's Republic, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of Kampuchea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the People's Republic of China. In the Americas, the Communist Bloc included the Caribbean Republic of Cuba since 1961 and Grenada.
  Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc was tested by the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état and the Tito–Stalin Split over the direction of the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and China's participation in the Korean War. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Korean War ceased with the 1954 Geneva Conference. In Europe, anti-Soviet sentiment provoked the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany.
context_section_description: As a consequence of the Germans and World War II in Eastern Europe, much of the region had been subjected to enormous destruction of industry, infrastructure and loss of civilian life. In Poland alone the policy of plunder and exploitation inflicted enormous material losses to Polish industry (62% of which was destroyed), agriculture, infrastructure and cultural landmarks, the cost of which has been estimated as approximately €525 billion or $640 billion in 2004 exchange values.
  Throughout the Eastern Bloc, both in the USSR and the rest of the Bloc, Russia was given prominence and referred to as the naiboleye vydayushchayasya natsiya (the most prominent nation) and the  rukovodyashchiy narod (the leading people). The Soviets promoted the reverence of Russian actions and characteristics, and the construction of Soviet structural hierarchies in the other countries of the Eastern Bloc.
  The defining characteristic of Stalinist totalitarianism was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres.  Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state.
  The Soviets mandated expropriation and  etatisation of private property. The Soviet-style "replica regimes" that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced the Soviet command economy, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet-style secret polices to suppress real and potential opposition.
  Stalinist regimes in the Eastern Bloc saw even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat because of the bases underlying Stalinist power therein. The suppression of dissent and opposition was a central prerequisite for the security of Stalinist power within the Eastern Bloc, though the degree of opposition and dissident suppression varied by country and time throughout the Eastern Bloc.
  In addition, media in the Eastern Bloc were organs of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the government of the USSR with radio and television organisations being state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organisations, mostly by the local party. While over 15 million Eastern Bloc residents migrated westward from 1945 to 1949, emigration was effectively halted in the early 1950s, with the Soviet approach to controlling national movement emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc.
caption: Vitosha computer produced in Bulgaria in the 1960s
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