Why was the soviet union intent on creating pro-soviet governments in countries near it

Question

Has to be about the cold war

Answer 1

The U.S.S.R.'s own official explanation would have undoubtedly been something like "to spread the socialist revolution begun in Russia in 1917 in order to free the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe," but territorial expansionism had been a characteristic of Russian régimes for several centuries. Indeed, a more cynical explanation would be that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin simply wanted to expand the reach of his own power by installing puppet governments in the countries that the Red Army had "liberated" at the end of World War II.

 

But the Soviet Union's actions especially during the earliest years of the Cold War have to be viewed in light of the monumental calamity that was "The Great Patriotic War," the term applied to the invasion of the U.S.S.R. by Nazi Germany and the subsequent expulsion, at great cost, of the invaders. Untold millions of Soviet peoples died in this conflict, and the invasion just exacerbated traditional Russian suspicions about the West and Germany in particular, thus it must be seen as natural that the Soviet Union wished to set up a ring of pro-Soviet governments in contiguous nations to serve as buffer zone between itself and the "hostile" U.S.-led NATO alliance.