Answer:
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union occupied Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland and eastern Germany. Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones to be administered by the four countries. The Soviet Union was determined to establish governments in Eastern Europe who were friendly to the Soviet Union. While the war was still taking place, Soviet occupation troops assisted local communists in putting Communist dictatorships in Romania and Bulgaria in power. Yugoslavia and Albania supported the rise of communist dictatorships in their countries; however, both of these countries remained outside of the Soviet sphere of influence. In 1949 the Communist German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet, German occupation zone. The East European satellite regimes depended on Soviet military power to maintain control of their communist governments. Over one million Red Army soldiers remained stationed in Eastern Europe. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri with President Harry S. Truman on the stage with him, summed up the situation in Europe with what is known as the “Iron Curtain” speech: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech may have been the first shot fired in the Cold War which would last until 1989.
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