Europe

Hi, I have an essay part of a test tomorrow and this is one of the questions. The question is what happened when the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe, and how did the U.S. get involved? If you know this answer, or part of the answer it would really be helpful, thank you very much!

The satellite nations were the countries of Eastern Europe that were liberated by the Soviets from the Nazis and then had communist governments imposed on them; Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

There are three main reasons for their establishment.
1) Russia has historically had no secure border. There are no great rivers, no mountains, no deserts no seas that separate her from her potentially war-like neighbours. This fear of invasion, and the idea of buying time through land (Russia, when invaded has often allowed the enemy to invade, then, when their supply lines are overstretched, they counter-attack) is one of the reasons that Russia became so big. As former order towns become consolidated into the Russian political landscape, so does the need to push the border further away from the heartland. After the devastation faced in the Soviet Union in WWII the Soviets wanted to push the border as far away from Kiev, from Moscow & Minsk as they could.
2) They wanted to set up satellite countries because they could. The Red Army had conquered the territory at great expense and the Soviet leadership was unwilling to simply withdraw – allowing Western style governments to push right up to her borders.
3) The Yalta Agreement between FDR, Churchill & Stalin had laid out the spheres of influence that each of the Allied countries would have, and the satellite countries all fell under the Soviet sphere.

Some further reasons:
The Soviets had a different view of democracy to the one in the West. The Soviets argued that as the Communist party represented the people and was of the people, it was an inherently democratic form of government.
There was also Marxist ideology behind it. Marx claimed that the Communist Revolution was inevitable – especially in highly industrialised and advanced Germany. The Soviets saw it as their mission to export the revolution to other countries – especially Germany.
The Soviets saw what the Western Allies were doing in Western Europe as no different to what they were doing – establishing governments based on models of the victors’ own governments.
And one final reason was to prevent a unified Germany from being a threat to the Soviet Union ever again.

The US got involved by providing propaganda radio stations – Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. They (and Britain) also tried to counter Soviet moves over Berlin, by providing the planes, material and organisation of the Berlin Airlift. Other than that, they said a lot, and did little.

See:
The Captive Nations – Patrick Brogan (it’s a simplistic overview of the histories of the countries under Communist domination in Europe after the war)