Communism had already spread to many of Greece’s neighbours and the Greek Communist Party was becoming ever more popular: there were concerns that Greece would fall to communism next. Previously, Britain had been influential in the area but was no longer in a financial position to support governments who would be pro-Western. In a nutshell, what Churchill meant by this was that the Allies had spent six years fighting for the freedom from Fascism in Europe, only to have half the continent now under Soviet dictatorship.Īmerican and British politicians were concerned about events in Greece and Turkey. In that speech he famously noted that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. On 5 March 1946, the by-now former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, condemned the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe in his famous Iron Curtain speech. The USA would commit to a policy of ' containment '. The USSR would attempt to dominate Eastern Europe and spread communism where possible. These two telegrams set the scene for the Cold War in Europe. As a result, the USSR needed to secure its buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
The Soviet response to The Long Telegram was The Novikov Telegram, in which the Soviet ambassador to the USA, Nikolai Novikov, warned that the USA had emerged from World War Two economically strong and bent on world domination. However, the USA was stronger than the USSR and so communism could be ‘contained’. It was determined to spread communism and therefore there could be no peaceful co-existence between the USSR and the USA. In much fewer than 8,000 words, what Kennan’s telegram said was that the USSR was heavily armed and feared the outside world.
His response became known as The Long Telegram because at 8,000 words, it was indeed long! In 1946, George Kennan, an official at the US Embassy in Moscow, was asked to provide a summary of what the Soviets were up to. Now it seemed that in many countries the hard-won freedom from Nazi dictatorship was being replaced by communist dictatorships. World War Two had been fought in the name of freedom. For the Western Allies the setting up of communist governments in Eastern Europe was a major concern.
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