Churchill’s
Fulton Speech
In
February 1946, Stalin gave a speech for the Russian elections.
It contained the normal Communist attacks on capitalism, but included one
sentence in which Stalin claimed: 'world capitalism proceeds through
crisis and the catastrophes of war'. American politicians took
it as a threat.
The
American State Department asked the American Embassy in Moscow for an analysis of
Soviet policy. Their question was answered by George Kennan,
an Embassy official who had lived in Moscow since 1933, and who hated
Communism and the Soviet system. Kennan's 8,000-word reply -
nicknamed 'the Long Telegram' -
advised:
1.
The Russians are determined to destroy the American way of life and will
do everything they could to oppose America.
2.
This is the greatest threat the US has ever faced.
3.
The Soviets can be beaten.
4.
The Soviets must be stopped.
5.
This can be done without going to war.
6.
The way to do it is by educating the public against Communism, and by
making people wealthy, happy and free.
On
5 March 1946, on the invitation of President Truman, Winston Churchill
went to Fulton in America and gave a speech.
He
said ‘a shadow’ had fallen on eastern Europe, which was now cut off
from the free world by ‘
an iron
curtain’. Behind
that line, he said, the people of eastern Europe were ‘subject to Soviet
influence . . . totalitarian control [and] police governments’.
Source
A
Mr
Churchill has called for a war on the USSR.
Stalin,
writing in the Russian newspaper Pravda
in March 1946.
Source
B
The
Cold War set in. Churchill
had given his famous speech in Fulton urging the imperialistic forces of
the world to fight the Soviet Union.
Our relations with England, France and the USA were ruined.
Khrushchev,
writing in 1971. In
1946 he had been a member of the Soviet government.
