Question

During the post-war period, the USSR was able to control Poland and Hungary by?

Answer 1

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History of Poland

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Chronology

List of Polish monarchs

Prehistory and protohistory

Stone Age

Bronze and Iron Age

Antiquity

Polish tribes

Middle Ages

Early Middle Ages

Christianization

Piast period 10th century – 1385

Jagiellonian period 1385–1572

Early Modern

Early elective monarchy 1572–1648

Deluge and decline 1648–1764

Three partitions 1764–95

Modern

Partitioned Poland 1795–1918

World War I 1914–18

Second Republic 1918–39

World War II 1939–45

Communist Poland 1945–89

Contemporary

Third Republic 1989–present

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The history of Poland from 1945 to 1989 spans the period of Soviet dominance and communist rule imposed after the end of World War II over Poland, as reestablished within new borders. These years, while featuring general industrialization and urbanization and many improvements in the standard of living,[a1] were marred by social unrest, political strife and severe economic difficulties.

Near the end of World War II, the advancing Soviet Red Army pushed out the Nazi German forces from occupied Poland. In February 1945, the Yalta Conference sanctioned the formation of a provisional government of Poland from a compromise coalition, until postwar elections. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, manipulated the implementation of that ruling. A practically communist-controlled Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw by ignoring the Polish government-in-exile based in London since 1940.

During the subsequent Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, the three major allied powers ratified the colossal westerly shift of Polish borders and approved its new territory between the Oder–Neisse line and Curzon Line. Following the destruction of the Polish-Jewish population in the Holocaust, the flight and expulsion of Germans in the west, resettlement of Ukrainians in the east, and the repatriation of Poles from Kresy, Poland became for the first time in its history an ethnically homogeneous nation-state without prominent minorities. The new government solidified its political power over the next two years, while the communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) under Bolesław Bierut gained firm control over the country, which would become part of the postwar Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, a political "thaw" in the Soviet sphere allowed a more liberal faction of the Polish communists, led by Władysław Gomułka, to gain power. By the mid-1960s, Poland began experiencing increasing economic as well as political difficulties. They culminated in the 1968 Polish political crisis and the 1970 Polish protests, when a consumer price hike led to a wave of strikes. The government introduced a new economic program based on large-scale borrowing from the West, which resulted in a rise in living standards and expectations, but the program meant growing integration of Poland's economy with the world economy and it faltered after the 1973 oil crisis. In 1976, the government of Edward Gierek was forced to raise prices again and this led to the June 1976 protest

Answer 2

The answer is setting up puppet government there.