ries. In part, Stalin also won this concession because he agreed to join the United States in its war against Japan and both Roosevelt and Churchill trusted the leader world leader would keep his commitment to allow free elections. However, Stalin saw the world as divided into two opposing forces. On the one side he viewed the enemies of Russia, any imperialist or capitalist state, and, on the other, Russia. Stalin shocked both of the other world leaders when he refused to allow free elections in Eastern bloc countries and by mandating they all institute Communist governments, including the undermining of any democratic efforts. Because of the immense struggles against Japan in the war, Roosevelt and the U.S. could do little because they did not want to lose a potentially needed ally and they knew Stalin had the military forces in Europe to back his efforts with ample power. However, even at this time Churchill warned of the impending danger of creating a Europe that was growing more and more divided ideologically (i.e., politically and militarily), “Disputes between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, particularly over the Soviet takeover of East European states, led Winston Churchill to warn in 1946 that an ‘iron curtain’ was descending through the middle of Europe” (Cold War 1).
The iron curtain was one whose ascension would not begin until well into the 1980s. In between that time the physical separation of Europe was a mirror of the ideological separation between the United States and Russia. While Stalin viewed the world as a battle between imperialists/capitalists against the U.S.S.R., future leaders of Russia would also come to view other nations that embodied different ideologies as just as much of a threat to Russia as Stalin did at the beginning of what would become known as the Cold War. In an original document of the Tsk KPSS in January of 1971, we read that the leaders of Russia still felt ...