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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Communism
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Ummm. They were invaded by the Third Reich and the first ever workers' revolutionary state in the history of humanity outdeveloped and outmaneuvered the world's most advanced military at that time. Doing so required them to march to Berlin, and that required occupying the countries they marched through in order to stop the fascist sympathizers groups from destroying their supply lines.
Once it was clear the Soviets were on the path to victory, the US needed to create a barrier against further expansion of the revolutionary workers' movement and protect the birthplace of imperialist racialized capitalism in Western Europe. Then, the US immediately established that the USSR was now their number 1 enemy AND that the USA was willing to nuke civilian cities to maintain their power in the world.
So, the USSR ended up in an over-extension trap - they had occupied all of this territory to win the war, but they did not have the political infrastructure to manage all of these states effectively, and if they backed out and created a power vacuum the fascists, who were appointed to officer positions in NATO, would fill that power vacuum immediately. It would take decades to develop the political infrastructure during good times, but this was reconstruction after the worst war the world have ever seen. Meanwhile the USA was executing Operation Paperclip and Operation Gladio ensuring that the Third Reich survived through the distribution of many of its officers, while also occupying Korea as part of a strategy to completely encircle the USSR.
So, were the Eastern European countries Soviet puppets? More or less, they were puppet regimes taking up power centers that would otherwise have fascists in them, either through occupation by the Third Reich or by reactionary revolution of the leave-behind fascist armies the US and NATO was building in those countries. In essence, the system-level forces at play guaranteed that Eastern Europe was going to be full of puppet states, and the only choice was which power would be in control. There was no option for autonomy.