The New Hungarian Quarterly Winter 1990 [antikvár]

Mihály Fülöp—Miklós Nagy—László Póti The Iron Curtain Years Eastern Europe since the war The liberation of Europe started with Stalingrad and the landing in Italy in the summer of 1943. The United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had not originally prepared the partition of Europe into spheres of interest. From the autumn of 1943 onwards, by establishing a European Advisory Committee (EAC) in London, by jointly formulating armistice terms, and by setting up Allied Control Commissions for Italy, then for Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland and Hungary, they made an attempt to agree on a common policy. In October 1944 the British recognized the military dominance of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, but in their view this did not imply the introduction of Soviet-type systems. The agreement between Churchill and Stalin on the division by percentage of war-time influence was an interim arrangement of a military character for participation in the Allied Control Commissions, a compromise which in practice was ended with the three-power conference at Yalta—although the parties abided by the bargain later as well. The aim defined in the declaration of the 11 th of February 1945 was not division into spheres of interest but political coordination among the three powers, the establishing of democratic institutions and the restoration of lost sovereignty, with a view to forming provisional governments comprising all democratic parties, to be followed by free elections and stable governments in harmony with the will of the people. The victorious powers considered three-power cooperation indispensable not only to the conduct of the war, but to a peace settlement and to the drafting of peace treaties as well. National governments implied coalitions uniting all antifascist forces in the East European countries. At the end of the war the Soviet Union believed that such democratic multi-party systems would survive for about ten to fifteen years. Soviet strategic dominance in Eastern Europe and the priority of Soviet security interests were recognized by the British in the autumn of 1944, by the Americans at the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow in December 1945, after the Soviets had conceded the priority of the Western allies in Italy in the spring of 1944, and in Japan by the autumn of 1945. Conflicts between the Great Powers arose from the fact that they were unable to map out The three authors are members of a team which produced the 1990, Nr. 2. issue of Külpolitika (Ivreign Policy), a periodical published by the Hungarian Institute of International Relations. This is the introductory article to the issue which is devoted to changes in Eastern Europe. The Iron Cwtain Years