Compare And Contrast Truman And Stalin

Despite the common goal during World War II of defeating the Germans, shortly before the end of the war and continuing afterwards, the Allies’ differences of opinion began to emerge. At the Yalta Conference in the U.S.S.R., Josef Stalin, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the leaders of three Allied Nations met to plan on how to deal with the post war aftermath. Poland, which the Germans had invaded earlier on, had been liberated by the U.S.S.R. as they were on their way to Germany. Stalin had encouraged the Poles to set up a Communist government due to the fact that he wanted to spread the idea of Communism and have a government that would allow Russia to use the land as a barrier against Germany, who had frequently

and the U.S.S.R became more strained. Truman and Stalin talked at the Potsdam Conference about the matter of war reparations. Stalin had already taken much of Germany’s industrial equipment to compensate for the reparations, which Stalin still felt were needed immediately. Like Roosevelt, Truman disagreed with Stalin’s tactic, and he believed that they should wait to take reparations until the economy and industry had recovered. Despite this disagreement, Truman allowed Stalin to take industrial items from the three non-Soviet zones. Stalin only accepted this deal because it was the only way he would be able to get more reparations from Germany. This leader of the U.S.S.R. began using his army to influence and control Eastern European countries having them create Communist governments. These countries were called the satellite nations because they were ‘pulled in’ by the ‘gravity’ of the Soviet as the satellite in space is to the Earth. Other Allied nations saw this as a violation of a previous agreement which allowed countries to choose their form of government, and therefore were not pleased with this. Winston Churchill described the separation of Eastern and Western Europe as if an iron curtain had fallen between the two halves. The Allies’ different ideas as how to handle the end of the war caused great stress among them, which, in turn, lead to the Cold War, an era of dislike and competition