I know its not trendy, but its probably easier to think of the eastern bloc countries as colonies of the USSR, just as india, egypt, and the african nations were to the UK.
Sure, on paper they were sovereign, and they certianly had a government made up of people from that country. But they were a colony.
Might be splitting hairs, but I’d characterise them more as client states or even puppet states, rather than colonies. A colony would imply more direct governance.
It's not clear that the term colony implies direct governance. For example, the Brits applied almost no direct governance to their colonies in the Americas from 1650-1750.
One could also just say that the Russians occupied Eastern Europe for the half-century following World War 2.
I think that the American colonies were more like the Latin colinia, deriving from the Latin for cultivate. It implies a large population movement, and exploitation, not just a conquest.
It was more like the Saxon colonisation of the UK, which replaced the native Celtic population, rather than the Norman conquest, (or the colonisation of India) which just replaced the oligarchy.
What came quite a lot later in America , was the attempt to assert more direct Imperial rule over the colonies.
I know its not trendy, but its probably easier to think of the eastern bloc countries as colonies of the USSR, just as india, egypt, and the african nations were to the UK.
Sure, on paper they were sovereign, and they certianly had a government made up of people from that country. But they were a colony.