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The Influence of the USSR during the Cold War

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“..all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow..” (Churchill 6-7), this is a lesser known quote from Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. This sentence, in reality, is the sentence that comes right after the famous “Iron Curtain has descended across the continent” quote, one that most Americans have heard in History Class. The Iron Curtain related to a period of the Cold War where the USSR controls most of the eastern half of Europe. History classes tell their students a lot about how America and the USSR were on the brink of war; nuclear weapons could have destroyed the world at any given moment, the Iron Curtain over Europe, that whole ordeal. The one thing that Social Studies classes never really covered was the effect that the USSR had on the countries it occupied, influenced, or controlled, and even in today’s world, Russia still impacts similar territory as it used to back during the Cold War. Back during the days of the USSR, the country had much control over Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, eastern Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and of course, Eastern Germany. Many of the further away countries of the controlled area were not as heavily influenced as some of the countries that actually became part of the USSR,

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