On 5 March 1946, in the small town of Fulton, Missouri, Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, spoke ominously about the new Europe that had emerged from the horrors of the Second World War. He warned: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,’ prophetically marking the line that would separate Eastern Europe from Western Europe for another 45 years. Behind this iron curtain, Churchill continued, lay countries that were now under the Soviet sphere of influence, where communism extinguished any f licker of democracy.
In many ways, Churchill was ahead of his time: within 3 years, all of Eastern Europe was controlled by Communist governments, many of which were directed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, now the greatest threat to Western democracy.
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