The twentieth-century world, Year 10: Yalta, Potsdam and the Iron Curtain (East and West (Cold War) option)

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin

提示They led the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union.

为什么Yalta was a Black Sea resort in the Crimea, then part of the Soviet Union. The conference dealt with how Germany would be treated and how Europe would be run once the fighting stopped.

That they would hold free elections

提示Think about how citizens pick their rulers.

为什么Stalin did not keep the promise. Over the next few years the USSR, helped by rigged elections among other methods, turned most of Eastern Europe into Soviet satellite states.

France

提示The country on Germany's western border.

为什么Berlin lay far inside the Soviet zone but was also divided between the four powers. This arrangement later led to the Berlin crisis of 1948-49.

Clement Attlee

提示His party won the general election of 1945.

为什么Churchill's party lost the 1945 election while the conference was under way. Roosevelt had also died in April 1945, so Truman was now the American president.

An atomic bomb

提示The test took place about a week earlier.

为什么Truman only mentioned a particularly destructive weapon and gave no details. Stalin was already well informed about the American nuclear programme through the Soviet intelligence network.

1949

提示Four years after Hiroshima.

为什么The Soviet bomb meant the USA no longer had a nuclear monopoly. The development of the atomic bomb triggered a nuclear arms race between the superpowers.

Fulton, Missouri

提示He spoke at a small college there.

为什么Churchill was no longer prime minister, as his party had lost the 1945 election. President Truman, who came from Missouri, was present. In the speech Churchill described the dividing line as running from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.

Trieste

提示An Italian port at the head of the Adriatic Sea.

为什么Behind that line, Churchill said, lay the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe, including Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Sofia. He gave the speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946.

Satellite state

提示Think of something that orbits a larger body.

为什么Between 1945 and 1948 the USSR used similar methods to turn most of Eastern Europe into satellite states. Stalin believed that Soviet control there would protect the USSR from any future invasion.

Comecon

提示It was set up in response to American economic aid for Western Europe.

为什么Comecon was founded in 1949 by the Soviet Union together with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Stalin set it up, along with the Cominform, in response to the Marshall Plan.

Tito

提示He had led the Partisan resistance during the war.

为什么Yugoslavia was criticised in a Cominform resolution in 1948 and the split became public. Yugoslavia stayed communist but was never a member of the Warsaw Pact.