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This article explores the Soviet development of a conceptual framework in the article referred to as a ‘mental map’ to describe the Communist-dominated and eventually Communist-ruled states of East Central Europe in the second half of the 1940s. It is based on the example of the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the end of World War II, there was no coherent language within the Soviet Union to describe the countries of East Central Europe. Eventually, a common political definition emerged, that of ‘Peoples’ Democracy’. The content of this definition was shaped by the political demands and constraints of late Stalinism. In particular, it was influenced by the need to delimit people’s democracies from both the West and the Soviet Union, and to justify Soviet political dominance in East Central Europe.