Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Before World War II, no greater than 1%–2% of those countries' trade was with the Soviet Union. [174] By 1953, the share of such trade had jumped to 37%. [ 174 ] In 1947, Joseph Stalin had also denounced the Marshall Plan and forbade all Eastern Bloc countries from participating in it.
By the end of World War II, most of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union in particular, suffered vast destruction. [9] The Soviet Union had suffered a staggering 27 million deaths, and the destruction of significant industry and infrastructure, both by the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Soviet Union itself in a "scorched earth" policy to keep it from falling in Nazi hands as they advanced over 1,600 ...
For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed. [28] In the other countries of the Bloc, Stalin stated that the Eastern European version of democracy was a mere modification of western "bourgeois democracy."
The War Communism period (1918–1921) which saw the forming of the International, the Russian Civil War, a general revolutionary upheaval after the October Revolution resulting in the formation of the first communist parties across the world and the defeat of workers' revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary, Finland and Poland.
Faced with the threat of growing German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese Shōwa statism, and a world war, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union formed an alliance of necessity during World War II. [1] After the Axis powers were defeated, the two most powerful states in the world became the Soviet Union and the United States.
The aftermath of World War II saw the rise of two global superpowers, the United States (U.S.) and the Soviet Union (USSR). The aftermath of World War II was also defined by the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the creation and implementation of the United Nations as an intergovernmental organization, and the decolonization of Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa by European and East Asian ...
Now 30 years removed from 1989's "annus mirabilis" -- Central and Eastern Europe's year of miracles, when communist regimes seemingly toppled like dominoes -- it's easy to focus on the Western ...
Its popularity as a Cold War symbol is attributed to its use in a speech Winston Churchill gave on 5 March 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, soon after the end of World War II. [8] On the one hand, the Iron Curtain was a separating barrier between the power blocs and, on the other hand, natural biotopes were formed here, as the European Green Belt ...