page_title: Eastern Europe
section_title: World War II and the onset of the Cold War
hierarchical_section_title: Eastern Europe / History / World War II and the onset of the Cold War
caption_attribution_description: English: Pre-1989 division between the "West" (grey) and "Eastern Bloc" (orange) superimposed on current borders: &#160;&#160; Russia (dark orange) &#160;&#160; other countries formerly part of the USSR (medium orange) &#160;&#160; members of the Warsaw Pact (light orange) &#160;&#160; other former Communist regimes not aligned with Moscow (lightest orange)
context_page_description: Eastern Europe is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consistent definition of the precise area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic connotations. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct".
  One definition describes Eastern Europe as a cultural entity: the region lying in Europe with the main characteristics consisting of Greek, Byzantine, Slavic, Eastern Orthodox, Russian, and some Ottoman cultural influences. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc. A similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Most historians and social scientists view such definitions as outdated or relegated, but they are still sometimes used for statistical purposes.
context_section_description: Russia ended its participation in the First World War in March 1918 and lost territory, as the Baltic countries and Poland became independent. The region was the main battlefield in the Second World War (1939–45), with German and Soviet armies sweeping back and forth, with millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, and millions of others killed by disease, starvation, and military action, or executed after being deemed as politically dangerous. During the final stages of World War II the future of Eastern Europe was decided by the overwhelming power of the Soviet Red Army, as it swept the Germans aside. It did not reach Yugoslavia and Albania, however. Finland was free but forced to be neutral in the upcoming Cold War.
  Throughout Eastern Europe, German-speaking populations living there since generations were expelled to within the reduced borders of Germany in what some consider as the largest scale of ethnic cleansing in history. Regions where Germans had formed the local population majority were re-settled with Polish- and Czech-speakers, forming new Slavic dialects.
  The region fell to Soviet control and Communist governments were imposed. Yugoslavia and Albania had their own Communist regimes. The Eastern Bloc with the onset of the Cold War in 1947 was mostly behind the Western European countries in economic rebuilding and progress. Winston Churchill, in his famous "Sinews of Peace" address of March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, stressed the geopolitical impact of the "iron curtain":
  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia.
caption: Pre-1989 division between the "West" (grey) and "Eastern Bloc" (orange) superimposed on current borders:   Russia (the former RSFSR)   Other countries formerly part of the USSR   Members of the Warsaw Pact   Other former Communist states not aligned with Moscow
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