Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Transition

Eastern Europe, in its post-1991 sense, comprises the former Soviet-bloc states of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and, further east, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and European Russia itself. The symbolic turning point for the region was the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, followed within two years by the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, which ended more than four decades of Communist Party rule and centrally planned economies imposed across the region after the Second World War and codified through institutions such as the Warsaw Pact, established in 1955, and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, dating to 1949.