'Soviet' is not a name, it is a political term, so I don't see why you cannot apply it to countries with USSR-like regimes, even if they don't carry S in their name.
Can you please define this political term and explain why it can be used in this context? Application of it to Yugoslavia seems very unusual to me. Its history normally does not include "Soviet Era".
Haven't heard of anything like that. Looks like it is some American pop culture definition that reduces the history of Europe to a few very broadly defined buckets to reduce the intellectual workload. It is often called ignorance. Do you think it makes sense to continue saying it is a valid use?
(Speaking of ignorance.) The parent knows what they're talking about. "The people's democracies" was indeed the term that was customarily used within the Soviet block to include countries that did not belong to said block but otherwise lived under similar regimes.
I have not heard of equivalence between „Soviet“ and „People’s democracy“ before. In fact those terms are mutually exclusive. Either your country has multi-party system, at least formally, or it is a Soviet republic.
"People's democracy" is actually the regime when there's a single ruling party system but it calls itself democratic because it is comprised of, you know, the people.
Well, yeah, but it's the same way on the other side of the Curtain: Such as, France had its own nuclear weapons and was in complicated relationship with NATO, but it gets totally conflated into the Western bloc with no reservations. Same with neutral Sweden and even Finland.
I don’t know really how things are in the new members of EU, but Russia is indeed a twin of USA in everything, including the ignorance and isolation of political discourse. It doesn’t mean that because Russia has it, it is a good thing.
"Soviet", in both English and Russian, very specifically refers to the USSR. I'm not aware of anyone (be it Westerners, Soviets or Yugoslavians themselves) calling Yugoslavia Soviet.
Yugoslavs also enjoyed much greater Freedoms, at one point having the strongest passport in the world - the only one that allowed for free travel to both the West and the East.
Yugoslavia was Soviet during the Cold War the same way Switzerland was Nazi during WW2 - not at all, just neutral.
True, but at least to me "Soviet era" is associated with the Soviet Union. As someone who grew up in Eastern Germany I would actually have expected that it is about a computer produced in the Soviet Union when reading "Soviet-era computer" (despite popular belief, not everything east of the iron curtain was part of the Soviet Union, countries had varying degrees of independence, even though the Soviet influence ran deep and depending on time and place was actually an occupation.
Within the group of European socialist countries, Yugoslavia was the most independent from the Soviet Union, and at times even an open opponent.
"The United States then began inching closer to Tito, supporting his regime rhetorically, economically and, finally, militarily, in order to ensure that Yugoslavia would remain out of the Soviet orbit. Throughout the Cold War, American officials saw in Tito a useful example of a communist leader who was not under the Kremlin’s thumb."
...
"With congressional assent, the United States and Yugoslavia signed a bilateral military agreement in November 1951 that tacitly incorporated Yugoslavia into NATO’s defensive web."