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Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944-1953
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Kramer, Mark |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. The clash of Soviet and Western objectives in Eastern Europe was submerged for a while after the war, but by March 1946 the former British prime minister Winston Churchill felt compelled to warn in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent” of Europe. At the time of Churchill’s remarks, the Soviet Union had not yet decisively pushed for the imposition of Communist rule in most of the East European countries. Although Communist officials were already on the ascendance throughout Eastern Europe, non-Communist politicians were still on the scene. By the spring of 1948, however, Communist regimes had gained sway throughout the region. Those regimes aligned themselves with the Soviet Union on all foreign policy matters and embarked on Stalinist transformations of their social, political, and economic systems. Even after a bitter rift emerged between Yugoslavia and the USSR, the other East European countries remained firmly within Moscow’s sphere. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, this essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried |
| Starting Page | 53 |
| Ending Page | 100 |
| Page Count | 48 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6186/Stalin_and_Eastern_Europe.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/evnts/media/Stalin_and_Eastern_Europe.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
