A Reassessment of the Burden of Eastern Europe on the USSR

A comprehensive accounting of the contributions and costs of East European satellite states to Soviet foreign and defence policy indicates that they were hardly ever a ‘burden’ to the USSR, even at their most costly in 1982, and therefore Gorbachev's decisions later in the decade to allow those regimes to distance themselves from Moscow must be interpreted as part of the Soviet leader's overall political strategy, not a result of material inability to maintain the status quo.