ABSTRACT
Eastern Europe became an area of indirect rule, or of Soviet neocolonialism. The communist party leaders were given some freedom of maneuver for the management of their parties, though the general lines were laid down in Moscow. In six other states (Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) they imposed a form of government closely modeled on their own, including same type of economic planning and same type of party purges. Romania was the country in which in the 1950s the process of destruction of national culture went furthest; the national hatred of Romanians against Russians was second only to that of Poles. The Bulgarian communist leaders continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s to behave as faithful satellites: theirs was the only East European country in which there was no major overt challenge to Soviet hegemony. Second only to Bulgaria in its devotion to the Soviet Union was the government at other end of the bloc, the East German.
