Soviet occupation
Red Army control
Soviet occupation refers to the control of a territory by the Soviet Union, typically through military force following World War II.
The phrase most often describes the postwar presence in Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states, or the division of Germany.
Many families fled during the Soviet occupation.
The term carries connotations of imposed communist rule and suppressed national sovereignty.
- RussificationEnforced cultural assimilation
- Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact1939 German-Soviet nonaggression treaty
- gulagsSoviet penal colonies
- reeducation campsFacilities for coerced ideological transformation
- mass gravesShared burial for many
forced migration · Warsaw Pact · collectivization · bread lines · deportations · independence movements · Iron Curtain · party line · show trials · Cold War · communism · samizdat · Yalta Conference · censorship · satellite states · Prague Spring · barbed wire · border guards
- Soviet UnionKremlin, Lenin, Stalin, KGB, Sputnik
- Cold War OriginsIron Curtain, Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Berlin Blockade, Berlin Airlift
- Communist PolandCommunist era, People's Republic, Solidarity, Walesa, state surveillance
- East GermanyStasi, GDR, DDR, Berlin Wall, East Germany
- 1956 HungaryHungarian Revolution, 1956, freedom fighters, revolutionaries, uprising
- Baltic cultureLithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, folk costumes, national costumes
Soviet occupationliberation
Release from constraint
independence · national independence · national sovereignty · freedom · self-determination