Historical Events
Albania · Events 2
The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe
From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.
The Founding of the Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was a collective-defense alliance signed on May 14, 1955, in Warsaw by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European socialist states. The immediate trigger was the October 1954 Paris Agreements, which set West Germany on course for rearmament and NATO membership. The Soviet Union began preparing the alliance at the November 1954 Moscow Conference; the treaty was signed four days after West Germany entered NATO. The preamble identified a remilitarized West Germany in NATO as a threat to peace-loving states, and Article 4 committed signatories to render immediate assistance, including armed force, in the event of armed attack in Europe. Marshal Ivan Konev was named supreme commander, and a Political Consultative Committee was established. Yet the Warsaw Pact was more facade than substance: the USSR already controlled Eastern Europe through bilateral treaties and stationed troops, and Nikita Khrushchev conceived the new organization as a bargaining chip, to be traded for a pan-European collective security system that would also dissolve NATO.