Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery). Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union.