ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union joined Great Britain and the United States in the Grand Alliance against the Axis, even accepting in 1942 the Atlantic Charter worked out by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with its vague humanitarian and democratic war aims. In Eastern Europe the Soviet leaders decided that they did not want to run the risk of free elections’ bringing to power governments that were not fully aligned with the Soviet Union. From the Soviet point of view it was essential to the security of the post-war Soviet Union that “friendly” countries exist throughout the territory between itself and the Western capitalist powers. A major problem that Joseph V. Stalin failed to resolve before he died was how the Soviet Union should react to the American monopoly of nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s the Soviet Union embarked on a new phase of coexistence, usually called detente.
