Why did the Soviet Union want to have a buffer of countries between it and Western Europe?
The satellite nations were the countries of Eastern Europe that were liberated by the Soviets from the Nazis and then had communist governments imposed on them; Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. There are three main reasons for their establishment. 1) Russia has historically had no secure border. There are no great rivers, no mountains, no deserts no seas that separate her from her potentially war-like neighbours. This fear of invasion, and the idea of buying time through land (Russia, when invaded has often allowed the enemy to invade, then, when their supply lines are overstretched, they counter-attack) is one of the reasons that Russia became so big. As former order towns become consolidated into the Russian political landscape, so does the need to push the border further away from the heartland. After the devastation faced in the Soviet Union in WWII the Soviets wanted to push the border as far away from Kiev, from Moscow & Minsk as they could. 2) They wanted to
