The Soviet bloc is a shorthand for those Eastern European states which were under the more or less firm control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, known as the Soviet Union), and governed by communist parties, from the late 1940s until...

During the Cold War, the term Eastern Bloc (or Soviet Bloc) was used to refer to the Soviet Union and countries it either controlled or that were its allies in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania,...