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Conflict and Tension Between East and West, 1945–1972

The Iron Curtain and the evolution of East-West rivalry

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1 section B

Overview

Churchill's iron curtain speech, the satellite states and how communists took power in eastern Europe, containment, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Cominform and Comecon, Tito's break with Stalin, and the Berlin Blockade and airlift that led to two German states and NATO.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

What is a satellite state?

Key term

By what method did communist governments take power across eastern Europe?

Numbers

Name four countries that had become one-party communist states by 1948.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Who popularised the phrase 'iron curtain', and where did he use it?

    Model answer

    Churchill, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, describing a dividing line drawn across the continent from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

  2. 2

    What is a satellite state?

    Model answer

    A country that is independent on paper but whose government takes its orders from a more powerful neighbour, as the eastern European states did from Moscow.

  3. 3

    By what method did communist governments take power across eastern Europe?

    Model answer

    Communists joined coalition governments under the protection of the Red Army, took the key ministries such as the interior, then rigged elections and removed rivals one slice at a time.

  4. 4

    Name four countries that had become one-party communist states by 1948.

    Model answer

    Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, joined by Czechoslovakia after the coup of February 1948.

  5. 5

    What is meant by containment?

    Model answer

    The American policy of not attacking communism where it already existed but stopping it spreading any further.

  6. 6

    What did Truman promise in his speech of March 1947?

    Model answer

    That the USA would give money, equipment and advice to any free people resisting an attempted takeover by an armed minority or an outside power.

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