The Iron Curtain Descends

The division did not happen at once. The Red Army already occupied most of eastern Europe by 1945, and Stalin wanted friendly governments there as a buffer against future invasion. At first most countries got coalition governments: communists shared power with socialists, peasant parties, and liberals. But communist parties grabbed the interior and police ministries first. That gave them secret police, the power to arrest rivals, control over who could run for office, and the ability to count the votes. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia all followed roughly this path between 1945 and 1948, each one losing its non-communist parties to intimidation, forced mergers, or rigged elections until only the communist party remained.

The West read this pattern as proof that Soviet promises of free elections, made vaguely at Yalta in February 1945, were being broken. The United States responded with a strategy, not a single policy. Containment was the general goal: stop communism from spreading further without starting a war. The Truman Doctrine in 1947 committed the United States to supporting any country resisting communist takeover, starting with Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan, also 1947, backed that up with money, rebuilding Western European economies so they would be too prosperous and stable to tip communist. Stalin forbade Eastern European states from accepting Marshall Plan aid, which hardened the economic line into a political and military one.

By 1949 the split was institutional: NATO in the West, and soon the Warsaw Pact in the East, with Germany itself divided. That settled geography is what the rest of the unit builds on, from the Berlin Blockade to decades of standoff.