Atheneum NY 1987

On February 9, 1946, Joseph Stalin made his celebrated `election' speech. Less than a month later Winston Churchill delivered an equally famous speech at Fulton, Missouri. The uneasy period following the end of the Second World War had ended. The Iron Curtain had descended. The Cold War had begun. Containing vivid portraits of the main actors on this stage, Thomas presents an extraordinary picture of the world as the former Allies of WW2 broke asunder, and as the nuclear age dawned. He opens by describing Soviet Russia in 1945, drawing in upon herself and yet seeking to possess vast territories, He proceeds to discuss the political and sconomic situations in the disputed lands of Eastern Europe - Greece, Finland, Turkiye, Germany and Austria - and of the Far East; and the define the strength of Communism and anti-Communism in France, Italy and Spain. In the West, he analyses a new world, bereft of Roosevelt and Churchill, governed now by Truman and Attlee, a world in which the United States is dominent, and Britain, on the point of giving up an empire and economically bankrupt, a fading force. The book ends with the crisis in Persia in March, 1946 which nearly hurled the world into third, cataclysmic global conflict...