"Eastern Europe caused constant alarm in the Soviet supreme leadership. The suppression of the Hungarian Uprising had been traumatic for Khrushchëv. He had thought he was relaxing communist rule for everybody’s benefit but found that societies west of the Soviet Union hated their oppressors. The Prague Spring was less traumatic for Brezhnev, who had never promised reform in eastern Europe; his conscience, if he had one, was untroubled by his decision to send Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia in 1968. But military action dealt only with the symptoms. It offered no fundamental cure for the malaise of communism across the entire eastern half of the continent. From Stalin to Brezhnev the sickly phenomena persisted. The ‘colonies’ in eastern Europe had turned into a multinational drain on the Soviet budget. Nuclear missile bases had to be supplied if the threat of attack by NATO was to be faced down. The Soviet army also maintained garrisons which needed equipping and financing. These disgruntled troops were locally very unpopular and Moscow took the precaution of secluding its contingents well away from regular contact with the country’s civilian inhabitants. It was a most peculiar empire which resorted to such expedients. This was not all. Communised economies in eastern Europe were constructed on the Soviet model. It is true that Poland refrained from collectivising most of its peasantry; but industry, commerce, finance and transport copied the templates invented in the pre-war USSR. The result was permanent economic inadequacy. The countries of eastern Europe lacked the USSR’s abundance of natural resources. If Moscow wished to salvage the situation, it had to reconcile itself to the unceasing subsidisation of gas and oil exports."