During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc, also called the Soviet bloc, communist bloc, eastern bloc, socialist bloc and socialist bloc, was the set of socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe led by the Soviet Union and facing the Western Bloc, composed mainly of the United States and Western Europe. It existed between the end of the Second World War (1945) and the end of the Cold War with the official dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, accepted by the Soviet Union, at the Prague meeting on July 1, 1991. Finally the Union itself Soviet ceased to exist as a country on December 25, 1991. The so-called socialist bloc comprised the countries of central and eastern Europe (hence the name 'Eastern Bloc'), east of the Iron Curtain (with the exception of Yugoslavia ), economically linked by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and militarily by the Warsaw Pact. When the countries of Eastern Europe saw themselves as satellite countries, some revolutionary movements emerged, such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the German Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.
Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, moved to put an end to the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviet Union abandoned its nine years of war in Afghanistan and began withdrawing its troops. In the 1980s, it withdrew military support to the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, resulting in the downfall of several communist governments. With the demolition of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the iron curtain fell apart. At the end of the 1980s, the republics that made up the Soviet Union legally incorporated movements towards the declaration of sovereignty over their territories, citing Article 72 of the Constitution of the USSR, which indicated that any republic of the Soviet Union was free of break away. On April 7, 1990, a law was approved by virtue of which a republic could leave the union if more than two thirds of its residents voted in favor of it in a referendum. Many republics held their first free elections in the Soviet era in order to create their own national legislatures around 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to elaborate legislation that contradicted the laws of the Union in what became known as "The War of Laws" .
The Rising was mounted by Irish Republicans with the aims of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing the Irish Republic at a time when the British Empire was heavily engaged in the First World War.
