ABSTRACT
Eastern Europe (comprising the eight socialist countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany [German Democratic Republic], Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) achieved an even better economic performance than the west in the 1950s and 1960s. But this was accomplished under a different political and economic institutional framework. Whereas in the west, the mixed social market economy prevailed, in the eastern bloc the means of production were owned and operated by the state. After the war, the eastern countries followed the Soviet model, though with some variations, of economic and political control, and by the early 1950s, they had emerged as fully fledged socialist states, firmly embraced within the Soviet sphere of influence. The partial exception was Yugoslavia, which after 1948 distanced herself from the Soviet line.
