ENG ELC 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Tony Judt, Western European Union, Iron Curtain
14 Oct 2020
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The coming of the cold war" pp. 129-153 and parts of chapter into the whirlwind"; pp. Wwii was not the first european war in which military outcomes determined social systems. (p. Examples: peace of augsburg; beginning of the napoleonic conquest. For the soviets, the war had been fought to defeat germany and restore russian power and security on its western frontiers the region separating german and russia could not be left in uncertainty (pp. Therefore, stalin wanted to establish governments that would never be a threat to russia in those countries of the region that were not part of the ussr. In order to do so, the political systems of the states had to be aligned with the one of the soviet union. It might have been easy to remove the old elites especially as the soviet occupiers were at first welcomed as liberators and harbingers of change and reform (p. 130).
