ABSTRACT
As The year 1949 began, the Soviet leadership was confronted with one of those situations which it describes as a “shift in the relation of forces in the world.” The shift in this case was clearly and massively adverse in its immediate effect. Trends were in motion which would by midyear bring Soviet influence to its lowest ebb in the entire postwar period. A radical change had taken place in the atmosphere of the West since the end of the war, driven by the growing conviction that the Soviet Union possessed both the militant capacity to overrun Western Europe and perhaps the intention of doing so. Speaking on the last day of March 1949, Winston Churchill bluntly laid the responsibility for the changed Western outlook upon the Russians themselves. Three years before, Churchill observed after his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, “many people … were startled and even shocked, [but] today there is a very different climate of opinion.” 1 Thanks to the “harsh external pressure” of the Russians, he said, “unities and associations are being established by many nations throughout the free world with a speed and a reality which would not have been achieved perhaps for generations.” “Why,” he asked, “have they deliberately acted for three long years so as to unite the free world against them?”
