USSR swallows up Eastern Europe after WW2

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Well for a start the USSR only really had near-control over five nations in the Eastern Block: DDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary & Bulgaria. The situation in Romania, Yugoslavia (where for a communist country the country's economy was ridiculously dependant on the US) and Albania was different.

The second is that the boundaries of the CCCP and the Russian Empire were near identical - this though is somewhat by accident - the boundaries of the revolution happened to end there but that wasn't Lenin planned - he wanted to invade Romania in 1919 (to save Bela Kun among other things...) but Ukranian Peasant uprisings against his policies got in the way, he did invade Poland in 1920. He actually happened to expand the terriority of the old Russian Empire in Central Asia to a small extent. But there was no chance of expansion after the civil war so....

Also as Al pointed out in the case of Georgia the left tended to be anti-bolshevik; similiar story in many of the minority regions in the old Russian Empire. There wasn't really a bolshevik tradition (no, that's the wrong word, but it will have to do) in most of the future Soviet republics. Remember before WWI the Bolsheviks had been a tiny party with all of its major leaders in exile; an irrelevance compared to the SRs - and what bolsheviks there were tended mostly to be Russian. Of course by 1945 the same lack of tradition or support could not be said for Eastern Europe (and even then Stalin had to purge the Eastern European communist parties after 1945 to make sure they were 'compliant').