Sunday, August 17, 2008

Describe the type of governments that Churchill believes are governing Eastern Europe?

The answer to this question can be found in Winston Churchill's famous "iron curtain" speech, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. By asserting that an "iron curtain" had fallen over Eastern Europe "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," Churchill was saying that communism was threatening to spread throughout the continent. The Soviet Union, which occupied almost all of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of Germany's destruction in World War II, sought, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, to establish friendly governments on its western border. This meant, to Stalin, setting up governments patterned after his own, which was a totalitarian communist state. First with Poland, and later in other nations including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany, Stalin oversaw the creation of what have been described as "satellite" states in these countries. (Yugoslavia developed a communist state independently of Soviet influence, as did Albania.) Churchill's speech described this development as Soviet aggression, which in his mind posed a threat comparable to that of Nazi Germany ten years earlier. 

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