By the final weeks of the Second World War, Soviet troops had advanced westward, pushing the Nazi army back to Berlin. When the war ended, Soviet troops occupied several Central and Eastern European states, including the eastern part of Germany.
During the war, the USSR absorbed the three formerly independent Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as a piece of Romania, which it established as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the remaining Central and Eastern European states it occupied, the USSR helped establish hardline communist governments modeled after the Soviet system.
The USSR, along with the United States, Britain, and France, jointly occupied Germany and Austria. The victorious powers established Austria as an independent and neutral county but disagreed over the fate of Germany. The three Western powers established the market-based Federal Republic of Germany in the west, while the USSR established the hardline socialist state
of the German Democratic Republic in the east.
