ABSTRACT
The Soviet-era totalitarian speculations about him were that it was Truman who started the Cold War by breaking the pattern of the harmonious American-Soviet relations that had existed under Roosevelt. George Kennan had thought that the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Bulgaria would eliminate the danger of a direct clash between the superpowers in the Balkans. The Bulgarian Agrarian Union had been banned, and its active members were sent to the prisons and concentration camps. Its inspirational leader, Nikola Petkov, was arrested and brutally tortured. The reaction to the end of WWII in the Middle East was completely different from the thoughts and emotions of the Europeans whose continent had been ravaged for years by the hurricane of death and destruction. The massive change of heart that took place within the hearts and minds of the residents of the Arab world was determined primarily by the outcome of the wars that ravaged the area in 1948, 1956, and 1967.
