ABSTRACT
At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies tentatively approved a new political shape for Central Europe under Soviet domination. The brief postwar period of uneasy cooperation between the Western Allies and the Kremlin swiftly came to an end with the 1948–1949 Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Subsequently, the western occupation zones of Germany were fashioned into West Germany, and the Soviet occupation zone into East Germany. By 1948 the process of installing pro-Soviet communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania had been complete. These countries were molded into a Soviet bloc, to which the communist, but not Soviet-dominated, Albania also pledged loyalty in the wake of the 1948 split between communist Yugoslavia and the Kremlin.
