Our Supreme Task

Our Supreme Task

Author: Philip White

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2012-03-06

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1610390601

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The year 1945 was a chaotic one, both for the world, of course, and for Winston Churchill. Communism was on the march and the people of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland all found themselves in the grip of the Soviets. The Red Army occupied a large German territory, and the Kremlin was manipulating post-war food shortages, labor disputes, and social unrest in Greece, France, and Italy. Having spent his "wilderness years" in the late 1930s warning of the dangers of diplomatic and military weakness and the growing menace of Nazism, in 1946 Churchill made a trip to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a speech entitled "The Sinews of Peace" -- now known as the Iron Curtain Speech -- which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism. This is the story of that pivotal speech and how it came to be given, and a portrait of the irrepressible man who delivered it.


Churchill's Cold War

Churchill's Cold War

Author: Philip White

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780715645772

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1945 was a chaotic year, both for the world and for Winston Churchill. Soon after the death of Roosevelt, Churchill arrived at the Potsdam Conference expecting to broker peace with Stalin and Truman, only to find himself unable to attend the final summit sessions following a notoriously lopsided General Election result. Having spent the late 1930s warning of Nazism, Churchill found himself again sounding the alarm about the Communist threat to the freedom that he and his Allies had won at such a cost.


The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain

Author: Fraser J. Harbutt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1988-10-13

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0195363779

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It was forty-two years ago that Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain." This speech, according to Fraser Harbutt, set forth the basic Western ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union. It provoked a response from Stalin that goes far to explain the advent of the Cold War a few weeks later. This book is at once a fascinating biography of Winston Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the Soviet Union and a penetrating re-examination of diplomatic relations between the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in the postwar years. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of this period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the European and American political arenas, appeared here as well. From the combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis to date, when the Truman administration in a systematic but carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.


Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain

Author: Anne Applebaum

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 803

ISBN-13: 0385536437

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In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.


Churchill's Cold War

Churchill's Cold War

Author: Klaus Larres

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 9780300094381

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En dybtgående, veldokumenteret analyse af britisk udenrigspolitik i gennem de første 10 efterkrigsår, herunder bl. a. den engelsk-amerikansk-franske manøvre for at afværge Sovjetunionens bestræbelser for at genforene Tyskland.


Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain

Author: Patrick Wright

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-10-29

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 0191622842

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'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . .' With these words Winston Churchill famously warned the world in a now legendary speech given in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Launched as an evocative metaphor, the 'Iron Curtain' quickly became a brutal reality in the Cold War between Capitalist West and Communist East. Not surprisingly, for many years, people on both sides of the division have assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain began with Churchill's 1946 speech. In this fascinating investigation, Patrick Wright shows that this was decidedly not the case. Starting with its original use to describe an anti-fire device fitted into theatres, Iron Curtain tells the story of how the term evolved into such a powerful metaphor and the myriad ways in which it shaped the world for decades before the onset of the Cold War. Along the way, it offers fascinating perspectives on a rich array of historical characters and developments, from the lofty aspirations and disappointed fate of early twentieth century internationalists, through the topsy-turvy experiences of the first travellers to Soviet Russia, to the theatricalization of modern politics and international relations. And, as Wright poignantly suggests, the term captures a particular way of thinking about the world that long pre-dates the Cold War - and did not disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall.


Churchill and the Anglo-American Special Relationship

Churchill and the Anglo-American Special Relationship

Author: Alan P. Dobson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1317283716

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This book examines Winston Churchill’s role in the creation and development of the Anglo–American special relationship. Drawing together world leading and emergent scholars, this volume offers a critical celebration of Churchill’s contribution to establishing the Anglo–American special relationship. Marking the seventieth anniversary of Churchill’s pronouncement in 1946 of that special relationship in his famous Iron Curtain speech, the book provides new insights into old debates by drawing upon approaches and disciplines that have hitherto been marginalised or neglected. The book foregrounds agency, culture, values, ideas and the construction and representation of special Anglo–American relations, past and present. The volume covers two main themes. Firstly, it identifies key influences upon Churchill as he developed his political career, especially processes and patterns of Anglo–American convergence prior to and during World War Two. Second, it provides insights into how Churchill sought to promote a post-war Anglo–American special relationship, how he discursively constructed it and how he has remained central to that narrative to the present day. From this analysis emerges new understanding of the raw material from which Churchill conjured special UK–US relations and of how his conceptualisation of that special relationship has been shaped and re-shaped in the decades after 1946. This book will be of much interest to students of Anglo–American relations, Cold War Studies, foreign policy, international history and IR in general.


Building a Common Past

Building a Common Past

Author: Corinne Geering

Publisher: V&R Unipress

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 3847009591

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How did a kremlin, a fortified monastery or a wooden church in Russia become part of the heritage of the entire world? Corinne Geering traces the development of international cooperation in conservation since the 1960s, highlighting the role of experts and sites from the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation in UNESCO and ICOMOS. Despite the ideological divide, the notion of world heritage gained momentum in the decades following World War II. Divergent interests at the local, national and international levels had to be negotiated when shaping the Soviet and Russian cultural heritage displayed to the world. The socialist discourse of world heritage was re-evaluated during perestroika and re-integrated as UNESCO World Heritage in a new state and international order in the 1990s.


Churchill's Legacy

Churchill's Legacy

Author: Alan Watson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1408880237

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Churchill's Legacy describes how Churchill wielded his influence in post-war politics to enable the restoration of Europe through two key speeches in 1946. Having first helped bring victory to the Allies in 1945, Churchill went on to preserve the freedom of the world by gaining the support of the United States in the restoration of Europe. In Fulton Missouri, Churchill alerted America to the reality of 'Uncle Joe' - a tyrant determined to dominate Europe at any cost. Churchill called for an Anglo-American alliance based on their shared values and the deterrent of America's possession of the atomic bomb. Churchill also urged the Americans to recognise the debt they owed Britain for opposing Hitler in 1940. In doing so, he contributed to the US thinking behind the need for the Marshall Plan. In Zurich, Churchill boldly proposed a partnership between France and Germany: a United States of Europe. The hatred stirred up by the war had to be replaced by partnership for Europe to recover its economic vitality and regain its moral stature. Together, the Anglo-American Alliance and a United States of Europe led by France and Germany would have the power to 'smite the crocodile' of Soviet ambition. To understand what Churchill intended with these two speeches requires perspective. The daring of his imagination and the scale of his architecture for a new Western Alliance was extraordinary. At the time, not many recognized the symmetry of what was proposed. At Churchill's funeral in 1965, commentators bemoaned the end of an era. In truth, Churchill was the catalyst of a new era-one built upon effective defence, economic revival, and European unity. His speeches have been added to UNESCO'S International Memory of the World Register.