While they certainly were dominated and dictated by USSR, neither belonged culturally. Neither was as stiff with sexuality for instance; they didn't have collectivization in the earnest and understandably there was no cult of war in DDR other than in token solidarity with occupying Soviet troops.
> While they certainly were dominated and dictated by USSR, neither belonged culturally.
Hmm... that seems more like a distinction without a difference.
Though dominated by Russians (mostly... Stalin was a Georgian), the USSR was made up of over 100 different nationalities with widely varying languages and cultures.
Yes and you couldn't use all those fine languages for anything else than attending a folk festival. It was Russian-language monoculture in every aspect of your living (source: lived there). Certainly not so in satellite states. Besides you waved off my examples and these already were enormous cultural distance.
No, not even close. Those were sovereign countries under communist single party rule and allied with the USSR. Ukraine, for exampke, was a sovereign Soviet Republic as part of the USSR, just as Russia was.
I know its not trendy, but its probably easier to think of the eastern bloc countries as colonies of the USSR, just as india, egypt, and the african nations were to the UK.
Sure, on paper they were sovereign, and they certianly had a government made up of people from that country. But they were a colony.
Might be splitting hairs, but I’d characterise them more as client states or even puppet states, rather than colonies. A colony would imply more direct governance.
It's not clear that the term colony implies direct governance. For example, the Brits applied almost no direct governance to their colonies in the Americas from 1650-1750.
One could also just say that the Russians occupied Eastern Europe for the half-century following World War 2.
I think that the American colonies were more like the Latin colinia, deriving from the Latin for cultivate. It implies a large population movement, and exploitation, not just a conquest.
It was more like the Saxon colonisation of the UK, which replaced the native Celtic population, rather than the Norman conquest, (or the colonisation of India) which just replaced the oligarchy.
What came quite a lot later in America , was the attempt to assert more direct Imperial rule over the colonies.
> Those were sovereign countries under communist single party rule and allied with the USSR.
They were countries conquered and occupied by USSR troops, with USSR military bases in them to guarantee obedience. There were local rulers, sure, but major decisions were consulted with Moscow. Many decisions just were out of question, because it was obvious that Moscow would not approve and it may end in a military intervention (as in happened in Hungary and Czech Republic). So no, I would not describe them as "sovereign countries". The proper term is something like "puppet state".
"Allied" in the sense of having a USSR-installed puppet government propped up by the massive presence of Soviet troops. This was a part of the concessions made by the West to Stalin, not an expression of the will of Polish or German people.
