w. 37

OBS!
I will continue adding to this post, so you should return to it to see if new information has been added.


I showed a video where we looked at the liberation of Europe from the east by the Soviets and from the south and west by the British and Americans. We looked at 1943 through the end of the war in Europe in May 1945.

We discused reasons why the United States and the Soviet Union didn't see eye to eye at the end of WWII. Some key issues were in one of the slides I showed Tuesday, Sept. 11:

United States and its allies
- supported the establishment of liberal democratic governments in postwar Europe
- supported the development of capitalist economies in postwar Europe
- supported free trade
- encouraged countries to have few trade barriers 

Soviet Union
- supported the spread of communism
- forced communism (and prevented democratic political development) in the countries it liberated at the end of WWII. (This was not particularly difficult since eastern Europe had no strong democratic or liberal traditions.)
- feared a strong Germany


I showed you this clip of Winston Churchill fro 1946, where he introduced the term "Iron Curtain"

And here's the text of what he said:



"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow."


RUSSIA
When we spoke about the Russian Revolution a few weeks ago, I noted some things that separate Russia from other parts of Europe. These include:
Never experienced
- Roman law tradition
- the Protestant Reformation
- the Catholic Counter-Reformation 
- the Franciscans and Jesuits (Catholic orders -- monks and nuns)
- the full force of the Renaissance
- the interaction with many different cultures on different continents

Also
- the Russian language is written in Cyrillic, not in Latin letters (as are most all other European languages).
-is geographically separate from western Europe
- has a Byzantine heritage in religion and culture
-was dominated by Mongols from 1240s to 1450 (thus influenced by Asian traditions, customs, policies . . . )