ABSTRACT
The transformation of the societies of central and eastern Europe into Stalinist state socialism after the Second World War was made possible by the Soviet conquest of the Nazi puppet states of central and eastern Europe in the context of the Allied Powers’ military cooperation. The remolding into a Soviet-style state socialism and the imperial subordination of these societies to their Moscow center was hammered together by the joint forces of the great powers-through military alliance during the war and a grudging, but self-disciplined, global “Realpolitik.” The structural insertion of the socialist states of central and eastern Europe into the world economy and the interstate system was, thus, marked by the feature that their legitimacy was, initially, completely external. It resided in the status quo of the great-power politics of the cold war: issues of their internal legitimacy were, at first, quite unimportant. The state developed as a local tool of this arrangement can be summed up as a “comprador state.”3 Its relation to its imperial center was analogous to the servitude that links the comprador bourgeoisies of the peripheries of the capitalist world economy to their respective centers of metropolitan capital. The central and east European socialist states were a structure of public authority severely deprived of their sovereignty by the imperial arrangement to which they were subjected.
