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By 1946, the wartime alliance had collapsed. The Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, and the USA responded with a new policy of containment. This lesson covers the creation of Soviet satellite states, Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan — the key steps that formalised the division of Europe.
Between 1945 and 1948, Stalin established communist governments across Eastern Europe. These countries became known as satellite states — nominally independent but effectively controlled by Moscow.
| Country | Year Communist Government Established | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | 1947 | Rigged elections; non-communist leaders arrested |
| Romania | 1945–1947 | Communist coalition gradually took full control |
| Bulgaria | 1946 | Opposition leaders executed; single-party rule |
| Hungary | 1947 | Salami tactics — slicing away opposition piece by piece |
| Czechoslovakia | 1948 | Communist coup; Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died in suspicious circumstances |
| East Germany | 1949 | Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) |
Key Term: Salami tactics — the process by which communist parties gradually removed opposition groups one by one, like slicing a salami, until only the communists remained.
On 5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent."
The immediate trigger was a crisis in Greece and Turkey. Communist guerrillas threatened the Greek government, and the Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey for access to the Mediterranean. Britain could no longer afford to support these countries and asked the USA for help.
On 12 March 1947, President Truman addressed Congress and outlined what became known as the Truman Doctrine.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Date | 12 March 1947 |
| Context | Greek Civil War; Soviet pressure on Turkey |
| Core idea | USA would support countries resisting communism |
| Policy name | Containment |
| Significance | Marked the end of US isolationism; formalised the Cold War divide |
Exam Tip: The Truman Doctrine is one of the most important turning points in the Cold War. Be ready to explain both what it said and why it mattered — it committed the USA to an active role in opposing communism worldwide.
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program) was the economic arm of containment. US Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a programme of massive financial aid to help Europe rebuild.
| Marshall Plan Facts | Detail |
|---|---|
| Announced | June 1947 |
| Total aid | $12.7 billion (1948–1952) |
| Purpose | Economic recovery to prevent communism |
| Soviet response | Rejected it; created Cominform (1947) and Comecon (1949) as alternatives |
Stalin responded to the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan with two organisations designed to tighten Soviet control over Eastern Europe.
Exam Tip: Examiners often ask you to compare the Truman Doctrine/Marshall Plan with Cominform/Comecon. Show how each side's actions provoked a response from the other — this is known as the action-reaction cycle of the Cold War.
Recent scholarship has emphasised how the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan transformed not only American foreign policy but the emotional culture of international relations. Frank Costigliola's work on the "emotional Cold War" — drawing on his study of US diplomats' private correspondence — argues that Kennan's February 1946 Long Telegram and his 1947 "X Article" pathologised the Soviet Union in deliberately psychiatric language ("neurotic", "insecure"), so that containment became not a negotiating posture but a permanent diagnosis. This matters for GCSE analysis because it explains why Marshall Plan rhetoric could not be adjusted when Stalin refused participation at Paris in July 1947: the ideological script had already hardened. Odd Arne Westad (The Global Cold War, 2005) adds a decolonisation lens: the Truman Doctrine's universalist language — "support free peoples" — committed the USA to interventions far beyond Europe, and the doctrine's logic was soon applied to Korea, Vietnam and later Latin America. For Westad, 1947 is the moment the Cold War becomes global rather than European. A Grade 9 response can deploy these perspectives to show that the doctrine's significance lay not only in containing Soviet expansion but in creating an ideological framework that Americanised European reconstruction and globalised the conflict. This links back to origins of the Cold War: the action-reaction sequence of 1945–1947 is the moment ideology hardens into policy.
How convincing is the interpretation that the Marshall Plan was primarily a humanitarian programme? The interpretation is only partly convincing. The Marshall Plan delivered $13 billion in aid and industrial production recovered in 16 countries. Yet Costigliola's analysis of diplomatic rhetoric shows the programme was framed to contain communism, not merely to feed Europeans, and Westad's Global Cold War demonstrates that the aid was conditioned on liberalising European economies along American lines. Stalin's rejection at Paris in July 1947 and the subsequent Cominform indicate how strategically loaded the offer was. The Marshall Plan was therefore both humanitarian and geopolitical, but its primary driver was containment.
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