Between 1945 and 1948, communist governments were established across Eastern Europe. (a) Describe how the Soviet Union gained control of two Eastern Europea...

(a) How the Soviet Union gained control of two Eastern European countries by 1948 [4 marks]

Poland: The Soviet-backed Lublin Committee took power as the Provisional Government in 1945. Despite the Yalta agreement to "broaden" the government and hold free elections, non-communist leaders were marginalised, harassed and forced out. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the leader of the Polish Peasant Party and a member of the London government-in-exile, returned to Poland but was subjected to intimidation and vote-rigging. In the rigged elections of January 1947, the communist-dominated bloc claimed 80% of the vote. Mikolajczyk fled Poland in October 1947, and Poland became a one-party communist state.

Czechoslovakia: Communists were part of a genuine coalition government from 1945, initially winning 38% of the vote in free elections in 1946 (the largest share). However, in February 1948, when non-communist ministers resigned in protest at communist infiltration of the police, the communists staged a coup with Soviet backing. President Edvard Benes was forced to accept a communist-dominated government. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a respected non-communist figure, was found dead below his office window in March 1948 in suspicious circumstances widely believed to have been murder. Czechoslovakia became a one-party communist state.

(b) Why Stalin wanted to establish a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe after 1945 [6 marks]

Security was Stalin's primary motivation. The Soviet Union had been invaded through Eastern Europe twice in the twentieth century: by Germany in 1914 (through Poland) and again in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), when the Nazi invasion caused catastrophic destruction and the deaths of approximately 27 million Soviet citizens. Stalin was determined to create a buffer zone of friendly states between the USSR and any future Western aggression. As he told the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas: "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system."

Communist ideology held that the socialist revolution should spread to liberate the working class internationally. Control over Eastern Europe represented the advance of communism and the creation of a socialist bloc. Economically, control over Eastern Europe gave the USSR access to industrial resources, food production and raw materials that were essential for post-war reconstruction, particularly as the USSR had suffered enormous wartime devastation. Stalin mistrusted the Western powers and feared the encirclement of the USSR by hostile capitalist states, particularly after the United States developed the atomic bomb in 1945. The Red Army's physical presence in Eastern Europe at the war's end gave Stalin the practical means to install loyal governments.

(c) How far was Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe the main cause of the Cold War? [10 marks]

Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe was a major cause of the Cold War. The systematic takeover of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948 directly contradicted the wartime agreements at Yalta about free elections, confirming Western fears about Stalin's intentions. Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 explicitly identified Soviet expansion as the central threat to peace. The Truman Doctrine of March 1947, pledging American support for peoples resisting communist subjugation, was a direct response to perceived Soviet expansionism, initially in Greece and Turkey. Western observers saw a deliberate pattern of communist aggression: each country taken over strengthened the case that Stalin aimed to dominate Europe.

However, the Cold War was not solely caused by Soviet actions. American economic power and military strength, including the monopoly on atomic weapons until 1949, were seen by the USSR as threatening. The Marshall Plan (1947), while presented as humanitarian economic aid, was interpreted by Stalin as a tool of American economic imperialism designed to draw Eastern European states into the Western orbit. The USA's refusal to share nuclear technology deepened Soviet insecurity and drove the USSR to develop its own atomic bomb. Revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams have argued that American capitalism needed open markets and that US economic expansion was as important in causing the Cold War as Soviet territorial expansion.

The Cold War may have resulted from mutual misperception rather than the deliberate aggression of either side. Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe were driven partly by genuine security fears after the devastating German invasions, while American fears of Soviet expansion were shaped by ideological hostility to communism and the analogy with Nazi aggression. Both sides interpreted the other's defensive measures as offensive threats.

On balance, Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe was a major cause of the Cold War, but the conflict resulted from actions and fears on both sides. The combination of ideological hostility, mutual suspicion, the power vacuum in post-war Europe, and the specific decisions of leaders on both sides produced the confrontation.