After World War II, Stalin said that the Soviet Union needed a "buffer zone" to protect it from attack. This resulted in the USSR expanding its control into Eastern Europe. This occurred in countries such as Poland, East Germany, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.
US president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, the leaders of the Allies in World War II, met at Yalta in February, 1945.
Churchill and Roosevelt pushed strongly for Stalin to allow free elections to take place in the nations of Europe after the war. At that time Stalin agreed, but there was a strong feeling by the other leaders that he might renege on that promise. The Soviets never did allow those free elections to occur. Later, Winston Churchill wrote, ""Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified." Stalin and the Soviets felt they needed the Eastern European nations as satellites to protect their own interests. A line of countries in Eastern Europe came into line with the USSR and communism. Churchill later would say an "iron curtain" had fallen between Western and Eastern Europe.
