ABSTRACT
After 1945, the Soviet Union used its military predominance to create undemocratic communist buffer states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and eastern Germany, linked with the USSR by economic and military alliances. Secret police suppressed the churches and opposition groups, though serious resistance sometimes occurred: Soviet tanks quelled uprisings in the GDR in 1953, a Hungarian rebellion in 1956, and Czechoslovak reformers attempts at communism with a human face in 1968. In Poland, martial law was introduced after 1980 to suppress the opposition trade union, Solidarity. Communist economics, based on inefficient state-owned enterprises and inflexible central planning, did not produce prosperity. As Soviet leader after 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced economic and political reforms which were intended to revitalise communism, but instead unravelled the whole system. Facing enormous difficulties at home, the USSR was no longer prepared to protect communist regimes in its eastern European empire, which duly collapsed during 1989.
