War isnot a chess game, but a vast social phenomenon with an infinitely greater and ever-expanding number of variables, some of which elude analysis.

David Galula¹

The Second World War killed tens of millions, devastated the world economy, forcibly moved millions across continents, and reconfigured Europe’s borders and national homelands, especially in East Central Europe.

With the destruction of Germany, the Soviet Union created a new regional order in Europe based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and on Russian national interests. Forged in the first few years after 1945, Soviet control of East Central Europe lasted until the revolutions of 1989. Even with the disintegration of the Marxist multinational federations of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia into smaller units after 1989, most of the boundaries the Allies established in the immediate post-war period remained until early 2014, when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin started to challenge the international post-war order.²

The war’s horrendous death toll, post-war border changes, and population transfers created a newer, more stable Europe, solidified by Cold War divisions. Its political architects imagined that the newly created equilibrium on the continent would reinforce their own political and social systems. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin lectured Milovan Djilas, a prominent Yugoslav communist, in 1945. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system... It cannot be otherwise.”³ Territorial acquisition and border rectifications would enhance Soviet security; the expansion of this shield would guarantee the survival of this new political and social order not only in East Central Europe, but also in the Soviet heartland.

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Source: Liber G.O.. Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954. University of Toronto Press,2016. — 453 p.. 2016

War isnot a chess game, but a vast social phenomenon with an infinitely greater and ever-expanding number of variables, some of which elude analysis.

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