Early Developments in the Cold War, 1945-49 » Soviet Expansion and the Iron Curtain Speech
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Edexcel spec: Paper 1, Depth study 6, Key topic 2
- How Communist governments took control in Eastern Europe, 1945-48
- What happened in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia
- What Churchill said in his 'iron curtain' speech and how people reacted
- How to answer a 6-mark 'What impression?' question
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Unlock This CourseFrom occupation to control
Remember, in 1945 the Red Army stood across most of Eastern Europe. Over the next three years, occupation turned into control. One country after another ended up with a Communist government that took its lead from Moscow. By 1948 these countries had become Soviet satellite states.
It did not happen in one sudden move. The takeovers followed a similar pattern, step by step:
- Join a coalition. Local Communists, many of them trained in Moscow during the war, joined governments made up of several parties.
- Take the key jobs. They made sure they ran the ministry of the interior, which controlled the police. They could then arrest, threaten and spy on their rivals.
- Remove rivals one at a time. Opposition leaders were accused of being 'fascists' or plotters. Other parties were split, banned or forced to merge with the Communists.
- Hold a rigged election. With rivals gone or frightened, the Communists and their allies 'won' and set up a one-party state.
The Hungarian Communist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, called this salami tactics. Opponents were cut away slice by slice, never all at once, so there was no single moment when the West could step in.
Key terms:
- Satellite state: a country that is independent in name but is really controlled by a more powerful one.
- Coalition government: a government in which two or more parties share power.
- Rigged election: an election run unfairly so that one side is certain to win.
- Salami tactics: getting rid of opponents bit by bit, like cutting slices from a salami.
- Iron curtain: Churchill's name for the dividing line between Communist Eastern Europe and the democratic West.
Three takeovers
📊 Poland
From June 1945 Poland had a coalition government, but Communists backed by Moscow held most of the power. The election promised at Yalta was not held until January 1947, and it was rigged. Opposition candidates were struck off the lists and thousands of their supporters were arrested. The Communist-led group was given about 80 per cent of the vote. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the popular Polish Peasant Party, fled abroad in October 1947.
🔪 Hungary
In a free election in November 1945 the Smallholders' Party won 57 per cent of the vote. The Communists won only 17 per cent. Even so, Soviet officials insisted that Communists stayed in the coalition and ran the police. In February 1947 the Soviet army arrested Béla Kovács, a leading Smallholder. In May the prime minister, Ferenc Nagy, was forced to resign. After an unfair election in August 1947 the Communists were the largest party. By 1949 Hungary was a one-party state.
👮 Czechoslovakia
Here the Communists had real support. They won 38 per cent in a free election in 1946, and their leader, Klement Gottwald, became prime minister of a coalition. In February 1948 twelve non-Communist ministers resigned in protest at Communist control of the police. Gottwald answered with armed workers' militias and mass demonstrations. President Edvard Beneš, ill and fearing civil war, gave in on 25 February and accepted a Communist-led government. On 10 March the non-Communist foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was found dead beneath a window of the Foreign Ministry.
The same thing happened elsewhere. In Romania and Bulgaria, Communist-led governments won rigged elections in 1946, and Romania's King Michael was forced to give up his throne in December 1947.
Czechoslovakia shocked the West most. It had been a working democracy before the war, and there were no Soviet troops stationed there in 1948. Yet it still fell. To many in the West, this proved that Stalin wanted much more than safe borders.
Churchill's 'iron curtain' speech
On 5 March 1946 Winston Churchill gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in the USA. He was no longer prime minister, so he spoke for himself, not for the British government. But President Truman had travelled with him, introduced him and sat on the platform while he spoke.
Churchill told his audience: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.' Behind that line, he said, the old capital cities of Central and Eastern Europe were under growing control from Moscow.
He made three main points:
- Europe was now divided, and Communist parties in the East were seeking total control through police governments.
- The Soviet Union did not want war, but it did want 'the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines'.
- The Soviets admired strength and had no respect for weakness, so Britain and the USA should stand together in a 'special relationship'.
Reactions to the speech
😠 Stalin
Stalin was furious. In an interview in the Soviet newspaper Pravda a few days later, he called Churchill a warmonger and compared him to Hitler. He said the USSR had been invaded through Eastern Europe and only wanted loyal governments there for its own safety. To Stalin, the speech was a call for war against the Soviet Union.
📰 The USA
At first the reaction was mixed. Many Americans still thought of the USSR as a wartime ally, and several newspapers and politicians said Churchill was too warlike. Truman did not publicly back the speech. But over the next year, as the takeovers went on, more and more Americans decided that Churchill had been right.
💬 Britain
The Labour government of Clement Attlee did not officially support the speech, and some Labour MPs criticised Churchill for damaging relations with an ally. In private, though, British leaders shared many of his worries about Soviet aims.
Why did the speech matter? It did not start the Cold War, but it was a turning point in how people talked about it. A famous Western leader had said openly that the wartime alliance was over and that Europe was split in two. The phrase 'iron curtain' stuck. The speech also made things worse between the two sides. Stalin took it as proof that the West was hostile, which gave him one more reason to tighten his grip on Eastern Europe. That, in turn, made Churchill's warning look true.
Common mistakes
Don't say the Red Army simply conquered these countries and set up Communist rule in 1945. The takeovers took three years and used coalitions, control of the police and rigged elections. Don't say Churchill was prime minister in 1946: he had lost the 1945 election. And in 1946 the iron curtain was a phrase for a political divide, not a real fence or wall.
Exam-style question
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
The Communists did not win Eastern Europe; they stole it. Sheltered by the Red Army, they grabbed control of the police, bullied their rivals and sliced away the opposition parties one by one. Elections were a sham: in Poland in 1947 opponents were jailed and the count was fixed. Leaders who stood in their way fled abroad or were silenced. By 1948 the last free voices in the region had been crushed, and millions were trapped under governments they had not freely chosen.
What impression does the author give about the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
Model answer
The author gives the impression that the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe was dishonest and brutal, and was forced on people who did not want it. This is shown by the author's choice of words. The Communists 'stole' the region and 'grabbed' the police, which makes them sound like criminals, while 'bullied', 'silenced' and 'crushed' suggest violence and fear. Calling elections 'a sham' suggests the takeover had no fair or legal basis. The author has also chosen what to stress. The extract focuses on the rigged Polish election of 1947, jailed opponents and people left 'trapped'. It leaves out any sign of real support for the Communists, such as their strong result in the free election in Czechoslovakia in 1946. This selection makes the takeover seem wholly unwanted.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, backs it with short quotations, and explains how the author's language and choice of what to include and leave out create that impression.
Exam tip
Don't retell what the extract says about the takeover. Start with 'The author gives the impression that...', then pick out loaded words such as 'stole' and 'crushed' and say what each one suggests. Finish with one sentence on what the author has chosen to stress or leave out. You do not need facts of your own beyond that.