Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Fulton, Missouri,

a quiet little town in the Midwest.

Not much has changed since 1946.

[ Projector running ]

Less than a year since the war had ended,

the flags were up to welcome Winston Churchill.

But he came to Fulton

bringing a somber message for the world.

CH U RCH I LL: From Stettin in the Baltic

to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals

of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe --

Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,

Vienna, Budapest,

Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.

All these famous cities

and the populations around them

lie in what I must call

the Soviet sphere.

The speech was not well received

in the United States.

It was thought to be too tough a speech

and the President was criticized by some

for having Churchill over.

Just goes to show how history changes.

Now it's one of the great speeches

that's ever been made,

because it helped warn the world

about the danger of the Soviet aggrandisement.

D ♪

BRANAGH: Back from overseas came the Americans.

For the second time in a century,

the United States had been pulled into a world war

far from its own shores.

[crowd cheering ]

[foghorn blows]

300,000 Americans never came home.

But the rest returned to a country

wealthier and happier than ever before.

MAN: I sort of eased back into contentment.

I said, "Gee, this is wonderful."

People seemed to have a little cushion

of money now, you know,

which, you know, back in the depression years,

no one had any money.

You just had about enough money

to put food on the table and a roof over your head

and keep your insurance policy in effect, you know.

Before the war we had 15%,

maybe sometimes more unemployed.

A very stagnant, unhappy economy

and the war -- war production --

production of munitions, production of armaments --

put enormous sums of money into the economy,

put millions of people to work

not only men, but women --

Rosie the Riveter --

and we emerged from the war

with virtual full employment.

[foghorn blows]

ARONSON: As soon as the war was over, the factories realized

"Hey, the Americans have been without a car

since before the war."

Let's get back into automobile production.

And of course the people were anxious for an automobile.

There was gasoline available.

Foodstuffs became available.

So the economy definitely was on the rise.

BRANAGH: War and the post-war rush to spend

put American capitalism back on its wheels.

BRANAGH: In the first summer of peace,

The Soviet soldiers rode home.

They were awed to find themselves still alive.

[ Reporter speaking Russian ]

In the crowds that welcomed them,

it was the lucky ones who found their sons or husbands.

Some 27 million Soviet civilians and soldiers

did not live to see this day.

[woman speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: We met the soldiers with flowers, bread,

anything we could get hold of.

We kissed complete strangers we were so happy.

Our spirits were rising.

We even dared hope that those who had gone missing

might still be alive.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: The whole of Russia had been destroyed.

Everything from the borders to Moscow

lay in ruins.

There were lots of people with no homes to go to.

BRANAGH: Where the Germans had passed,

nearly 70,000 villages had been destroyed.

Cities lay in rubble.

Stalin's pre-war achievements,

the factories and apartment blocks of the Five-Year Plans

had been wrecked by the invaders.

[ Gordeyeva speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: Things which before the war hadn't seemed too bad

were completely destroyed.

People were living in ruins.

It's impossible to describe the suffering.

You can only understand it if you've lived through it

and seen it with your own eyes.

BRANAGH: For Russians, the end of the fighting

brought an instant of pure joy.

[speaking Russian ]

BRANAGH: Berlin,

the final battlefield.

The capital of Hitler's Reich

had fallen to the Red Army.

Dazed Berliners waited to see

what the conquerors would do to them.

But there was no organized massacre

the survivors were allowed to live as best they could.

Stalin even ordered his troops to feed the Berliners.

But the soldiers looted homes,

and all over the city they hunted down women.

[Speaking German ]

INTERPRETER: More and more Russians came by.

They looked through the window,

then one of them suddenly came in.

I was baby-sitting.

He took the child from my lap

and gave it a toy and some cigarettes to play with.

That was the first time I was raped.

It was terrifying.

Afterwards I couldn't speak.

BRANAGH: Stalin's police chief Beria

and foreign minister Molotov tour Berlin.

Germany was divided into four occupation zones

and each of the Allies took a sector

of the German capital.

The allies had decided

that Germany should compensate them for war damage.

[speaking Russian ]

Marshall Zhukov said, "We have fought long and hard.

We've captured Berlin.

We have the moral and legal right to take out

as much as possible in reparations.

We don't know what the future holds."

BRANAGH: The German population was forced to help the Russians

seize industrial resources.

Not just machines,

thousands of craftsmen and scientists

were kidnapped and taken to the Soviet Union.

Central Europe was reverting to the Dark Ages.

This was a space without law, shelter, or mercy --

a continent of nomads.

Millions of people uprooted by the Nazis

were struggling home.

Now it was the turn of the Germans

to be the victims.

From the Mediterranean to the Baltic,

the victors were shaping Europe in their own image.

Poland, the invaders' route to Russia,

obsessed Stalin.

Eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviet Union.

As compensation,

the allies shifted the whole country westward,

giving Poland the eastern territories of Germany.

The Germans were expelled.

Poles, whose own homelands had been seized

by the Soviet Union,

now took over German farms and houses.

[Speaking German ]

INTERPRETERI In the fall of 1945,

a young Polish woman, 19 years old,

and an older man from the militia

entered our house.

The girl asked, "Who does this house belong to?"

And my mother said, "To us."

And Hanja, that was the Polish girls' name,

said "Now it's mine."

From then on it was Hanjafs house.

6:00 in the morning, the militia came

and banged the butts of their weapons

against the door,

"out!"

Even though I was only a child,

I knew this was it.

BRANAGH: From all over Europe,

some 12 million Germans were expelled

from lands they had lived in for centuries.

Today it's called "ethnic cleansing."

Then the allies called it "population transfer"

and the British helped to move the Germans out.

Victory in London.

From six years of war, Britian emerged happy,

but inwardly exhausted.

For the moment, people cheered for King and the empire

as if nothing had changed, or ever would.

The King's new Prime Minister was Clement Attlee.

The British voters had swung leftwards,

and Churchill was out.

In foreign policy, the new Labour government

held tightly to the American alliance.

Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary,

was a trade union veteran who mistrusted communists.

He had backed Churchill's intervention

in the Greek Civil War.

British interests were at stake here.

The concern was that the conflict might

threaten Britain's oil route

from the Middle East through the Mediterranean.

The strongest resistance movement,

the communists, reached for power.

But they didn't know that Stalin had told Churchill

that he had no interest in a communist Greece.

The British Army moved in.

The Civil War was long and cruel.

But Stalin kept his word,

and left the Greek communists to their fate.

The Soviet Union now dominated the nations

along its western border.

At first Stalin did not impose a Soviet system

on his new empire.

Instead, he built up

pro-Soviet coalition governments.

But the communists made sure

that the police and security were in their hands.

The Yalta Conference had given Russia

control of central Europe.

We knew perfectly well what the Russians

interpreted as democracy and all that,

but then we were allies fighting a war together.

We couldn't very well say to Stalin,

"Now we are going to write down

our interpretation of Western democracy

and you've got to sign up

and say this is your interpretation."

It wasn't possible.

We began to receive cables from American representatives

in the -- what we were all later to call

the satellite countries --

on the behaviour of Soviet troops

with respect to the people of Poland,

of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and so on.

So trouble was in the air.

What would happen is that such and such,

a prominent member of the Peasant Party of Bulgaria

would be kidnapped.

Simply, would disappear.

Or other figures who were not acceptable for inclusion

in the People's Democratic new regimes

would be disappeared.

BRANAGH: in Berlin, where the allies jointly supervised city life,

the communists were careful.

MAN: The ideas was at the beginning to cooperate,

and gradually, gradually, to build up the party,

making the best organized party,

the most militant party, the most active party,

and gradually increase the influence

on the other parties

and gradually take over the whole situation

but not at once.

We should already prepare for building up the police.

The man for personnel who changes personnel.

The man for education.

So we were flabbergasted --

we -- only three or four comrades

and everybody else the social democrats

and bourgeois democrats and so on.

So one of us asked and said,

"It must look democratic,

but we must have everything in our hands."

Many Germans perfectly well understood

that brown, the Nazi colors,

were becoming red overnight.

After all, the methods in some ways were the same,

or at any rate very similar,

of forcing people to do things against their will.

For me, my only comparison

was always the Soviet Union under Stalin.

And comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin

in 1935 to '45,

'45 to '46-'47 in Germany was wonderful.

It was much less terror than which I had witnessed

the 10 years before in the Soviet Union.

BRANAGH: Soviet Communism had stood the test of war.

The Red Army was the biggest on earth,

and General Eisenhower came to pay his respects

to the world's newest superpower.

But Stalin feared encirclement by the capitalist powers.

At home he watched for treachery.

Those who had been taken prisoner by the Germans

and seen a glimpse of the West,

might become disloyal.

They were being arrested in thousands.

The Americans knew what was going on.

WOMAN: We had a maid whose husband was a Prisoner of War.

When he finally was repatriated and came back,

it was a great reunion.

Life was wonderful again, the family was reunited.

Six months later he was arrested

because he had been a German Prisoner of War.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: Some were there because of a general decree by Stalin.

Some were deserters and thieves...

some White Russian Emigres...

some Poles from the Home Army.

I entered a whole new world.

Prison camps were my university.

BRANAGH: Poland --

in the wreckage of Warsaw,

the Poles began to clear the ruins.

The Poles had fought the Germans on every front,

East and West.

Now they worked together to rebuild their country.

Some loathed the new semi-communist government

tied to Moscow.

But others found reasons to accept it,

and live with it.

[man speaking Polish]

INTERPRETER: The most important thing for me

was for my mother and sister to come from Siberia,

and for us to begin rebuilding the country.

We also needed to secure our borders

which were seriously threatened.

Staying in the army gave me that chance.

BRANAGH: In Moscow, Poland's new puppet leaders

were taken to the opera.

The Poles agreed to a close alliance

with the Soviet Union.

Stalin promised to defend the new Polish frontiers

against any German attempt to win back

the lost territories.

Stalin was at the zenith of his power.

His colleagues felt terror in his presence.

The Russian diplomats, like all other

Russian officials or party members or whatever,

lived in terror of the great man,

and justifiably so,

because if they gave unpopular advice,

they might find themselves in a concentration camp

or with a bullet in the back of their heads.

It wasn't very easy to give good advice to Stalin

if it was unpalatable.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: Stalin was cheerful and in high spirits.

At his side were the main guest, the interpreter,

and Soviet guests, too.

The waiters came in with the main course.

I think it was turkey.

One of them, whilst he was pouring the sauce,

dropped some red liquid

on Stalin's sand-colored jacket.

Everybody stopped eating.

They were in a state of shock about what would happen

because the stains looked like drops of blood.

But Stalin didn't react.

He continued to talk with his neighbor.

Then another waiter came up to him with some water

and offered to sponge it out,

but Stalin said, "No, no."

And he was absolutely calm.

People saw that things seemed to be okay.

Everyone began eating again

and the routine continued.

BRANAGH: To mark the Soviet elections,

Stalin made a grand appearance.

[thunderous cheers and applause]

To his exhausted people,

he promised no rewards, but only more effort,

more Five-Year Plans for heavy industry.

Then, in cloudy words,

he warned that capitalism and imperialism

made future wars inevitable.

Did this mean war

between the Soviet Union and the West?

Abroad, alarm bells rang.

I read the speech with care

and interpreted it as being

a delayed declaraion of war

against the United States.

There wasrft any doubt about it --

if you read the text carefully,

what he was talking about.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: The speech was interpreted in the West

as no less than a prediction of World War Ill.

I don't think this was right though.

Stalin didn't say anything new

or different in that speech.

He said what he had always believed --

that with imperialism and capitalism,

war was inevitable.

What the Russians were thinking in terms of was that --

and I think Stalin thought in these terms --

was that communism was one day going to rule,

be the dominant ideology in the world

and all countries gradually were going to become communist.

And in the meantime you didn't --

in Stalin's idea --

start dangerous wars which you might lose,

but if you had a good chance of pushing the cause along

you always pushed it along.

BRANAGH: Stalin had relaxed his dictatorship

during the war,

but now he was tightening it once more.

The Soviet Union's obvious suspicion of the West

disturbed Washington.

An American diplomat in Moscow,

George Kennan was asked what he thought was going on.

When they finally sent me a telegram

expressing their astonishment and concern

because the Russians were dragging their feet

about joining the International Bank,

I thought, "Well, for goodness sake,

I can't answer that in one question.

They're going to have to give me space."

And I sat down and tried to give

a picture of this government as it emerged from the War.

TUCKER: One of the strengths of Kennan was his awareness

that the Russia in which we were living,

Stalin's Soviet Russia,

Communism, people called it,

actually drew in very many ways upon the Russian past.

I had to go right back to page one

and to try to tell them things that I felt

they'd forgotten during the war.

This all hangs together with this whole question

that this was the same group of people

who had dealt with Hitler,

had tried to deal with Hitler at our expense

and never had changed their views about us.

BRANAGH: Kennarfs Moscow Embassy cable became history --

and 8,000-word prophecy

that the Soviet Union was in the mood

to expand across the world,

and must be contained.

The day that telegram was drafted,

I, unfortunately or fortunately,

had the night duty in the code room

and was rather perturbed about it

because I happened to have a very heavy date that night.

There was a dance at one of the other Embassies

and I wanted to get out as early as possible.

About 6:30 or 7:00, George comes walking in

with this six-part cable which he wants to send out

and I took a look at it and I said it was nice,

"But let's not send it out.

Let's wait until tomorrow."

And I tried to talk him into not sending it.

He said, "Washington wants it.

They're going to get it and you stay here and do it."

[ laughs ]

BRANAGH: Kennarfs telegram alarmed Washington.

Days later, its message was reinforced

when Churchill arrived in the United States

as President Truman's guest.

CLIFFORD: They began to get to know each other.

Mr. -- Our president said to Mr. Churchill,

"Now we'll be on this trip quite a while

and I would be glad if you would call me Harry."

Well, Mr. Churchill said,

"I'll be glad to if you will call me Winston."

Mr. Truman said, "I don't believe I can do that."

He said, "I consider you the First citizen in the world,

and I just don't believe I can call you Winston."

Winston Churchill said, "If you can't call me Winston,

then I can't call you Harry."

The President said, "On that basis, we'll do it."

So, it was Winston and Harry from that time on,

and they got on very well.

BRANAGH: Churchill was due to speak to a college audience

at Fultin in Truman's home state.

Privately, he showed Truman what he was going to say.

The President, not sure that the American public

was ready for an attack on its wartime Soviet ally,

let Churchill test the water.

Mr. Churchill is one of the great men of the age.

He's a great Englishman.

[ Applause ]

He's a great Englishman

but he's half-American.

[ laughter and applause]

From Stettin in the Baltic

to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals

of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe.

Except in the British Commonwealth

and in the United States,

where communism is in its infancy,

the communist parties, or fifth columns, constitute

a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.

Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts,

and facts they are,

this is certainly not the liberated Europe

we fought to build up.

Nor is it one which contains

the essentials of permanent peace.

Immediately after that, Stalin came out

with answers to a foreign correspondent's questions

in which he compared Churchill to Hitler.

And decried Churchill's speech

as a call --

a belligerent call to arms

against Soviet Russia.

BRANAGH: Since 1945,

America had been extending its influence

and power all over the world.

Stalin grew nervous.

He put pressure on Turkey to grant the Soviet Union

a military presence in the Dardanelles

and the Bosporus.

America and Britain feared a threat to the Suez Canal.

They were determined to keep Turkey free

of Soviet interference.

When the Turkish Ambassador in Washington died suddenly,

Truman used America's biggest battleship,

the USS Missouri, to deliver the body to Istanbul.

ELSEY: This was a symbol to Stalin,

"Don't push us, and don't push Turkey,

because if you push Turkey, we'll be there."

BRANAGH: Iran, like Turkey,

lay on the southern borders of the Soviet Union,

and for centuries had been hostile to Russia.

During the War,

Soviet and British troops had occupied Iran

to protect their oil supplies.

They even celebrated their partnership there.

The old Shah, thought to be pro-German,

was dethroned and replaced by his son,

Mohammad Reza Pahlevi.

There was an agreement that, once the War was over,

the British and Soviet troops would both pull out.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: When the occupation was due to end,

Stalin didn't want to leave.

He wanted to stay on.

This created problems.

There was lots of pressure put on us --

pressure from the British --

and, in fact, the Soviet Union had

no legal right to stay there.

BRANAGH: Iran presented the Security Council

of the newly founded United Nations

with its first crisis.

NARRATOR: That's Mr. Gromyko proposing to the Security Council

that the hearing of the Persian case

should be postponed.

BRANAGH: The Soviet Union tried to prevent further discussion.

They lost.

NARRATOR: Mr. Gromyko and the other Russians then walked out.

Their dramatic exit seems to have caused

no obvious reaction at the time,

though we can imagine what most of those present were thinking.

One good thing, however, emerges from this incident.

The Security Council had stood its ground.

BRANAGH: Six weeks later,

Stalin ceremonially withdrew his forces from Iran.

But Truman, shaken by his behavior,

suspected that Stalin was aiming at world domination.

He said, "I want to be in a position

to document our concern.

Go back over the recent agreements

and list one by one the violations

in which the Soviets have engaged.

I was then Mr. Clifford's assistant,

and he turned the task over to me.

We talked about it a bit,

and I said, "Well, it seems to me that --

that's only scratching the surface,

a list of agreements broken.

This is much more fund--

There are much more fundamental problems

in our relations with the USSR than that.

So let's go at it in a somewhat broader way."

We spent weeks on it then,

interviewed most of the top officials

in the United States.

There was absolute unanimity,

in all of the agencies concerned,

as to the nature of the problems we had,

and the kind of response we were going to have to make.

We ended up the report by saying

the policy of our country

should be set and clearly set.

The Soviet Union constitutes a real menace

to freedom in this world.

Freedom in Europe, freedom in the United States.

So we must prepare for it.

BRANAGH: The Clifford-Elsey report was kept secret.

The report concluded that "a war with the USSR

would be more total -- more horrible

than anything previously known."

The United States still had the monopoly

of atomic weapons.

At Bikini Atoll in the Pacific,

two atom bombs were detonated in July, 1946.

The warning to Stalin was plain.

From now on, all the big powers worked frantically

to develop their own atomic and biological weapons.

At the Paris Conference of Foreign Ministers,

Molotov was determined to maintain

joint allied control of Germany.

But his American counterpart, Secretary of State Byrnes

wanted Germany to pay no more reparations.

For Molotov, Byrnes was too concerned

with German opinion.

He was outraged.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: Molotov was nicknamed Mr. No,

but if he had been a Mr. Yes,

Stalin would not have kept him on.

Stalin needed a Mr. No,

someone capable of finding out the maximum information

about the other side's position.

Molotov would squeeze the other side

to its absolute limit.

When he had totally exhausted these methods,

it was Stalin's turn.

He would come back and resolve matters

with a friendly smile.

BRANAGH: It was at Paris

that the wartime alliance began finally to break up.

The Americans and the British were impatient to develop

stable economies in their zones of Germany,

without Soviet interference.

I“ [ fanfare ] I“

NARRATOR: Stuttgart, Germany.

Scene of an event that marks a new phase

in Europe's destiny.

Secretary of State James F. Byrnes is here

to set forth the policy of the United States on Germany.

A speech, widely interpreted as marking the end

of America's appeasement of Russia,

Byrnes tells the Germans and the world...

It is not in the interest of the German people,

or in the interests of world peace,

that Germany should become a pawn or a partner

in the military struggle for power

between the East and the West.

I listened to the Byrnes Stuttgart speech

with marked approval,

because in fact I had written most of it,

and I -- those of us who worked on it --

and Byrnes, were not thinking in anti-Soviet terms.

The American people want to return

the government of Germany to the people of Germany.

And the American people want to help the German people

to win their way back to an honorable place

among the free and peace-loving nations

of the world.

BRANAGH: In 1945, the Allies had approved

Poland's annexation of Germany's eastern provinces,

up to the Oder and Neisse rivers.

But now Byrnes suggested that the new frontier

was unfair to Germany, and might be changed.

[Speaking Polish]

INTERPRETER: It was a shocking statement.

It made us think that our western border

was being questioned by the Germans

and by other western countries.

It was one of the most important things

that strengthened our ties with the Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: More pictures have arrived from Moscow.

They show the everyday scene

in the Soviet capital's famous Red Square.

And what's in their shops?

Well, here's a glimpse of the sort of things

now on display.

These new fashions, our cameraman tells us,

are so expensive that they are quite beyond the means

of ordinary people in Russia today.

BRANAGH: Ordinary people were much worse off than the reels showed.

[speaking Russian ]

INTERPRETER: It was a very hard time.

I had a son who was one and a half years old.

He used to get a plate from the cupboard

and walk after me saying, "Give me. Give me."

But I had nothing to give him.

We used to go to the market and buy horse feed.

BRANAGH: On the collective farms,

war damage and the death

of so many workers at the front,

were deepening a grave food shortage.

MAUTNER: I took a trip down through the Ukraine

and it was the time of the '47 famine

that was going on down there

about which nothing was heard in the outside world.

The Soviets were talking about great grain harvests

and everything else.

We got down there.

On the train stops you would see

children with distended bellies begging for bread.

At the Odessa itself,

people lying out in the streets

outside the hospitals where they couldn't take them in,

starving to death.

There was malnutrition everywhere.

BRANAGH: In Germany too, hunger and disease were spreading.

The nightmare of the western allies was

that poverty would drive the Germans toward communism.

[woman speaking German ]

INTERPRETER: There was never enough food.

We were always hungry.

In those days, we went on scavenging trips.

We went to farmers and begged.

Sometimes we got something, other times nothing.

BRANAGH: America's General Lucius Clay reflected,

"There is no choice

between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day

and a believer in democracy on 1,000."

Aid to Germany cost Britain over a million dollars a day.

But British supplies were not enough

to save thousands of Germans,

who died that winter for lack of food and fuel.

Britain too was weakening.

The fierce winter of 1946-47

brought industry to a standstill.

The country's economy, undermined by six years of war,

began to seize up.

Coal ran out, electricity failed,

and food rationing grew even tighter.

You know, people forget again.

We never had bread rationing during the War.

We had bread rationing after it.

And that was because we were pouring wheat into Germany

to prevent mass starvation there.

That was a bad winter altogether.

It was cold and the crops were bad,

people were unhappy,

and the Communists were making strenuous gains

here, there, and the other place,

particularly in Italy and in France,

but also in Germany.

BRANAGH: The British could no longer afford

all their heavy commitments in the Mediterranean.

They told the Americans they intended to pull out.

CLIFFORD: The message came and it was flat.

It said, "Great Britain is withdrawing

from both economic aid and military aid

to Greece and Turkey.

This simply crystallized the opinions

in the executive branch

that the United States had to move

and move very, very quickly.

The prospect didn't look good at all for Europe

or for the United States, or for anybody.

BRANAGH: In Washington, President Truman went to Congress.

From now on, he announced,

the United States would contain the advance of communism

anywhere on the globe.

This, at last, was the official declaration

of the Cold War.