How did the Communists seize power in Eastern Europe?
How did the communists seize power in the countries of Eastern Europe? Why did they succeed in establishing and maintaining Communists dictatorships in these countries?
The Red Army drove the Germans out, and then didn’t leave. And short of starting another war, there was nothing Roosevelt or Churchill could have done about it. Yalta wasn’t about giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets as much as recognizing that they already had it.
FDR let them have it.
Churchill wanted an invasion of the Balkans through Greece while the invasion at Normandy was taking place but was overuled by FDR and Stalin(who no doubt knew what he was going to do in eastern europe after the war).
Clearly Churchill foresaw the "Iron Curtain" and wanted to curtail Stalin’s ambitions in Easter Europe by having the US and British have men there as well through his proposed invasion. FDR didnt take to it and doubted Churchill’s warnings about Stalin’s intentions after the war which turned into reality.
Ironically, FDR never lived to see the consequences of his blunder.
So basically by the end of the war, Stalin had troops occupying all of easter Europe, he rigged the elections, established communism in the countries which he occupied and that was that.
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True history
In February, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at what is called the Yalta Conference. The jest of the conference was to divide German into 3 occupational zones following the end of WWII. This was expanded to include France six months later during the Potsdam Conference attended by Truman. Churchill and Stalin. The Soviet Union wanted a free and independent Poland to serve as a buffer between them and their enemies. Roosevelt agreed to give them Poland and the rest of eastern europe in exchange for the Stalin’s promise to help the allies invade Japan. They really wanted those countries to protect them from the United States, not european enemies. Basically, the Americans and British didn’t trust the Soviet Union. They feared we would force them to give up their communistic utopia, so they kept control of the countries they were given at the Yalta Conference until the end of the Cold War in 1989. The Soviets maintained control over the countries they occupied by brute force. They used tanks to crush a rebellion in Hungary in 1955 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
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The Red Army drove the Germans out, and then didn’t leave. And short of starting another war, there was nothing Roosevelt or Churchill could have done about it. Yalta wasn’t about giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets as much as recognizing that they already had it.
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Capt Hammer is right. The Soviet invasion had created facts on the ground. Stalin installed Communist governments. They were maintained by Soviet support, As soon as it became clear in 1989 that Gorbachev was not going to ’send in the tanks’ again, Communist rule collapsed like a house of cards
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By killing people and putting fear into them. And they acted as saviors who got Nazism out of Europe. But Soviet crimes are million times worse than the Nazi ones
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